"In the eyes of the Law, this constiutes Willfull Fraud, and more than a few other items in the United States Legal Code. Spelled out, means JAILTIME!"
If you can identify the perpetrator, if you can persuade a prosecutor to pursue, and if the perpetrator sets foot within the not-so-long arm of the US law... those are a lot of "if's".
>Also, the MPAA itself only has jurisiction in the US
They don't actually have any Jurisdiction, as it were, because they are not a law enforcement agency or part of the judicial system. As an organization they have the rights of any other organization, which means they may have standing to sue or to ask a court to prosecute a crime. As a group of individuals, they have the exact same rights, no more or less, as any other group of individuals would have. If you have any rights at home or abroad, so do the members of the MPAA.
"You're saying that they have absolute power now because it is in someone else's power to grant it to them in the future, which they've never done, nor show any likelihood of doing, and which is dubious anyway."
Congress has amended the Constitution 17 times before. They most certainly can change, and have changed, the fundamental law of the land.
Also don't forget the power of treaties. Consider the dramatic influence of the Berne Convention on copyright law, both in the US and elsewhere.
The Constitution itself is subject to amendment, which is checked by the States. Or, the never yet used process, where 2/3 of the state legislatures call for a Constitutional Convention.
So, Congress has absolute power to the extent that it can persuade the legislatures of 3/4 of the states to grant it.
"Congress is entirely capable of abolishing copyright thoroughly within the US."
ONLY Congress. But the authority of Congress is absolute, except for certain extremely narrowly defined limitations! Congress can do ANYTHING except those things that are expressly forbidden by "Congress shall make no law..."
Persuading them to take any given action, on the other hand, is a long row to hoe. It's tough, even when most of the members of Congress agree with you!
I got sick of Opera charging for updates. I just threw up a little when I tried to use my Opera6 regcode on the current version. Early adopter, left in the dust. Ungrateful pigs.
"that certainly would be pulling the rug out from underneath alot of companies feet."
More specifically, it would be an attempt to deprive them of certain rights, which cannot be done without due process of law, which means that each and every individual affected party would have the right to defend his copyright in the face of anyone who questions it.
All this guy can even hope for, is a court judgement that affirms his right to challenge the ownership of certian kinds of property, a right he already has, and of course, there is no basis to deprive others of their rights or property, or their right to due process of law.
Compared to copyright, which is an individual *right*, and automatically conferred on any authored work, patents are entirely more difficult to obtain.
The fatal flaw in the case of the article, of course, is he is seeking to abridge an individual right reserved to the people. In order to succeed, he would have to pursue litigation against each and every one of them.
Any blanket weakening of copyright is going to have collateral damage across several industries. Any legal language that finds "the GPL" invalid, which is often repeated whenever this topic comes up, would almost certainly be the precedent that would destroy the business model of the whole entertainment industry.
"Certain windows are located on top of or in front of other windows."
Yes, and I have wished for idioms like the diner order line, the clothesline in the z-axis, the electric tierack, the theatre-in-the-round desktop, etc., that would work in 3-space.
Yes, it will of course be projected onto a 2-space view aspect, but that does not mean good representations of the z-axis are not possible, or couldn't be extremely useful.
"...with 3D interfaces is that they're not really 3D. They're effectively 2D because they're still -- for just about everyone, anyway -- displayed on a monitor."
That sort of goes without saying. There is still potential for representing the view on the monitor as having a Z-axis, and properly implementing controls in the idiom of 3-space.
You get pretty quickly to a point where technology takes over the mechanics, and the hard part is setting up problems. And there is a plateau, where hardly anything that needs to be solved on a machine, can't be done on a TI-89. And you stay at that plateau for quite a while. Most undergrads stop at Vector Calc, only math majors go much further. And you spend a lot of time dealing with things like vector fields and potential functions on surfaces in 3-space, where a graphics program isn't going to help you visualize anything. And in that stuff, you end up with problems where you get to a point that Stokes/Greens' theorom gives you a double or triple integral and, voila, technology takes over, needing nothing more than your TI-89... And more likely than not, the answer you're supposed to put on the exam is the setup of the integral, not the solution.
It's nice to have Maple or Mathematica, especially for checking your work when you're learning integration, or for visualizing surfaces, working out parameterizations, etc. But then you get to a plateau where that stuff won't help you, and the main tool you need is a box of 5x8 index cards and caffeiene.
"Hell I better get rid of my slide-rule while I'm at it."
You're joking, but people had a shorter path to understanding logarithmic problems in the slide rule days. They had to learn to deal with logs, in order to multiply and divide on their slide rules. Calculators do not give you a continuous, tactile connection between log and unit scales, so it doesn't get internalized either as a useful tool, or as a natural phenomenon.
A connection to certain transcendental properties of numbers was lost when we went from slide rules to electronic calculators. And when I say "we", I am speaking from experience.
Unfortunately, the book they teach from is horrible. I've gotten some professors to admit this, others have been more reserved. The good points of the book are that it has few mistakes (because it has limited content). The primary authors are UofA profs though, evidently with the pull needed to keep their own books in the curriculum. Absolutely horrible compared to either Anton or Stewart. Oh, sure, the *problems* are good, largely taken from optics and electromagnetism areas of physics. But the textbook itself does absolutely nothing to get you to the point where you can solve these problems. And that stinks.
If you take calc at UofA, it would be wise to invest in the James Stewart book, and other resources by the time you get to Vector. Unless you already know the material (say, because you've taken a lot of physics, or because you've learned it from some other source), I don't see how you could ever solve the problems in the Hughes-Hallett books with only the information presented in the book. At best, the text looks like it was taken from lecture notes where they covered some aspect of the material in depth, but there is usually just a single example of a concept, and painfully often, problems in the homework section that do not follow at all from the explanation given. And the instructors for Calc are grad students who rarely go any further in a lecture than merely working the exercises from the book, as if that helps.
Meanwhile, Pima Community College has calc all the way to diffeq, taught by actual professors, using James Stewart's book. If you're at UofA, and you can take your math at Pima without risking your fulltime status or whatever, by all means, consider it.
I cannot stand them. Chalkboards seem to have completely disappeared. And now all these stupid empty Expo markers are going to landfills. There was nothing, NOTHING wrong with chalk, except that it was cheaper, and that the Sanford corp wasn't getting money for it.
Whiteboards made sense in some environments, such as where it was absolutely crucial not to have chalk dust (but in those environments, you should not use alcohol pens either; they also make dust).
I hate whiteboards. I also hate the fact that I'm basically forced to have white backgrounds on my os windows, since there is invariably some app, and *many* websites, which hardcode the textcolor to black, but assume you have a light background. grr.
Blackboards are absorptive and whiteboards are reflective. Black windows on a computer screen are neutral, white windows radiate.
>Plan to take outdoor pictures or pictures at a >distance of objects 20 ft or greater?
The continuity, in all domains, provided by a film with good grain, allows good latitude in the darkroom for enlarging subjects in this kind of situation.
Pixelation, even in very high-end cameras, breaks down rapidly when you try to enlarge things. But when film resolution deteriorates, it does so in a very pleasant, analogue fashion. I don't think there is any digital substitute for a medium format camera with a very good lens.
A 6x6 Hasselblad is still going to cost thousands, but I do not believe there is any digital camera for any price that can touch it.
And hey, if you are talking stealth, a waist-level reflex lets you go point-blanc in a crowd, and nobody knows you're taking pictures because you don't lift the camera up to your eye! Yeah, this niche is filled by movie cameras nowadays, I guess.
" If you need a digital SLR you KNOW you need one from the start. DSLR's are simly for pro's/ experienced (and rich) amatures "
No, I'm not buying this at all.
There have always been people who were happy with a Kodak 126, and those who wanted an SLR. I don't remember how much I paid for my F2, in 1977, but it must have been $600 for the body. And that was for just about the best 35mm camera available. I could not afford medium format.
There are $50-100 cameras to fill the same niche today, as the $50-100 snapshot 110 cameras of those days. There are $200 to $500 cameras, just like there were back then also. Then there are the SLRs, more or less in the same price ranges as in 1980. Pretty much in 1980 dollars. Without film and processing costs. With a color darkroom replaced by a midrange PC and Photoshop. (Compare the cost of Photoshop with adding a room to your house, with plumbing, with a separate, filtered air ventilation system, with temperature control...)
So, while you have a point, that the SLR's are marketed to a higher-end consumer, I don't see how they are necessarily aimed at rich amateurs or pros. They are aimed at precisely the same niche that SLRs were in the 1970s, and selling for approximately the same prices as then -- which makes them *cheap*.
"[I]t takes anywhere from 1 to 3 seconds to "power up" the camera, even from standby, and typically anywhere from a 1/2 to 1 second to take a picture *after* you push the shutter button."
I've had it take *seconds*. Terrible latency between deciding to take a picture and the realization of the image. Totally useless, even in daylight. This, with a nearly $400 HP.
>I have not used many digital cameras, but the (low >budget) ones I have used are terrible at both of >these.
Even for the higher "low budgets" this is a problem. I've bought several HPs and Sonys, and ended up kicking them down to relatives. And I prefer the output of disposable cameras (!) to the digitals I've tried so far. So, I'm thinking about the Nikon D70. It appears to win on the speed and latency issues.
Too bad it won't take the lenses from my F. (Or will it?)
Slashdot Mirror
"In the eyes of the Law, this constiutes Willfull Fraud, and more than a few other items in the United States Legal Code. Spelled out, means JAILTIME!"
If you can identify the perpetrator, if you can persuade a prosecutor to pursue, and if the perpetrator sets foot within the not-so-long arm of the US law... those are a lot of "if's".
"What's this new fangled "plastic" stuff anyway. Wood! that's the way to go."
Do you know the tragic early history of the Lego company?
There is a good reason they were driven to innovate plastic toys.
>I count 27 amendments
There were already 10 from the inception.
"Is there some way of finding out, online, which theatres include ads?"
Call the manager and ask? And if they refuse to talk to you, you already have enough reason to boycott, regardless of their ad situation.
>Also, the MPAA itself only has jurisiction in the US
They don't actually have any Jurisdiction, as it were, because they are not a law enforcement agency or part of the judicial system. As an organization they have the rights of any other organization, which means they may have standing to sue or to ask a court to prosecute a crime. As a group of individuals, they have the exact same rights, no more or less, as any other group of individuals would have. If you have any rights at home or abroad, so do the members of the MPAA.
"You're saying that they have absolute power now because it is in someone else's power to grant it to them in the future, which they've never done, nor show any likelihood of doing, and which is dubious anyway."
Congress has amended the Constitution 17 times before. They most certainly can change, and have changed, the fundamental law of the land.
Also don't forget the power of treaties.
Consider the dramatic influence of the Berne Convention on copyright law, both in the US and elsewhere.
The Constitution itself is subject to amendment, which is checked by the States. Or, the never yet used process, where 2/3 of the state legislatures call for a Constitutional Convention.
So, Congress has absolute power to the extent that it can persuade the legislatures of 3/4 of the states to grant it.
Good luck with that.
"Congress is entirely capable of abolishing copyright thoroughly within the US."
ONLY Congress. But the authority of Congress is absolute, except for certain extremely narrowly defined limitations! Congress can do ANYTHING except those things that are expressly forbidden by "Congress shall make no law..."
Persuading them to take any given action, on the other hand, is a long row to hoe. It's tough, even when most of the members of Congress agree with you!
I got sick of Opera charging for updates.
I just threw up a little when I tried to use my
Opera6 regcode on the current version. Early adopter, left in the dust. Ungrateful pigs.
"that certainly would be pulling the rug out from underneath alot of companies feet."
More specifically, it would be an attempt to deprive them of certain rights, which cannot be done without due process of law, which means that each and every individual affected party would have the right to defend his copyright in the face of anyone who questions it.
All this guy can even hope for, is a court judgement that affirms his right to challenge the ownership of certian kinds of property, a right he already has, and of course, there is no basis to deprive others of their rights or property, or their right to due process of law.
>patents are difficult to obtain?
Compared to copyright, which is an individual *right*, and automatically conferred on any authored work, patents are entirely more difficult to obtain.
The fatal flaw in the case of the article, of course, is he is seeking to abridge an individual right reserved to the people. In order to succeed, he would have to pursue litigation against each and every one of them.
Any blanket weakening of copyright is going to have collateral damage across several industries. Any legal language that finds "the GPL" invalid, which is often repeated whenever this topic comes up, would almost certainly be the precedent that would destroy the business model of the whole entertainment industry.
An Act of Congress could change this.
Good luck with that.
"Certain windows are located on top of or in front of other windows."
Yes, and I have wished for idioms like the diner order line, the clothesline in the z-axis, the electric tierack, the theatre-in-the-round desktop, etc., that would work in 3-space.
Yes, it will of course be projected onto a 2-space view aspect, but that does not mean good representations of the z-axis are not possible, or couldn't be extremely useful.
"...with 3D interfaces is that they're not really 3D. They're effectively 2D because they're still -- for just about everyone, anyway -- displayed on a monitor."
That sort of goes without saying. There is still potential for representing the view on the monitor as having a Z-axis, and properly implementing controls in the idiom of 3-space.
You get pretty quickly to a point where technology takes over the mechanics, and the hard part is setting up problems. And there is a plateau, where hardly anything that needs to be solved on a machine, can't be done on a TI-89. And you stay at that plateau for quite a while. Most undergrads stop at Vector Calc, only math majors go much further. And you spend a lot of time dealing with things like vector fields and potential functions on surfaces in 3-space, where a graphics program isn't going to help you visualize anything. And in that stuff, you end up with problems where you get to a point that Stokes/Greens' theorom gives you a double or triple integral and, voila, technology takes over, needing nothing more than your TI-89... And more likely than not, the answer you're supposed to put on the exam is the setup of the integral, not the solution.
It's nice to have Maple or Mathematica, especially for checking your work when you're learning integration, or for visualizing surfaces, working out parameterizations, etc. But then you get to a plateau where that stuff won't help you, and the main tool you need is a box of 5x8 index cards and caffeiene.
"Hell I better get rid of my slide-rule while I'm at it."
You're joking, but people had a shorter path to understanding logarithmic problems in the slide rule days. They had to learn to deal with logs, in order to multiply and divide on their slide rules. Calculators do not give you a continuous, tactile connection between log and unit scales, so it doesn't get internalized either as a useful tool, or as a natural phenomenon.
A connection to certain transcendental properties of numbers was lost when we went from slide rules to electronic calculators. And when I say "we", I am speaking from experience.
> The UofA has some great titles
Unfortunately, the book they teach from is horrible. I've gotten some professors to admit this, others have been more reserved. The good points of the book are that it has few mistakes (because it has limited content). The primary authors are UofA profs though, evidently with the pull needed to keep their own books in the curriculum. Absolutely horrible compared to either Anton or Stewart. Oh, sure, the *problems* are good, largely taken from optics and electromagnetism areas of physics. But the textbook itself does absolutely nothing to get you to the point where you can solve these problems. And that stinks.
If you take calc at UofA, it would be wise to invest in the James Stewart book, and other resources by the time you get to Vector. Unless you already know the material (say, because you've taken a lot of physics, or because you've learned it from some other source), I don't see how you could ever solve the problems in the Hughes-Hallett books with only the information presented in the book. At best, the text looks like it was taken from lecture notes where they covered some aspect of the material in depth, but there is usually just a single example of a concept, and painfully often, problems in the homework section that do not follow at all from the explanation given. And the instructors for Calc are grad students who rarely go any further in a lecture than merely working the exercises from the book, as if that helps.
Meanwhile, Pima Community College has calc all the way to diffeq, taught by actual professors, using James Stewart's book. If you're at UofA, and you can take your math at Pima without risking your fulltime status or whatever, by all means, consider it.
[whiteboard]
I cannot stand them. Chalkboards seem to have completely disappeared. And now all these stupid empty Expo markers are going to landfills. There was nothing, NOTHING wrong with chalk, except that it was cheaper, and that the Sanford corp wasn't getting money for it.
Whiteboards made sense in some environments, such as where it was absolutely crucial not to have chalk dust (but in those environments, you should not use alcohol pens either; they also make dust).
I hate whiteboards. I also hate the fact that I'm basically forced to have white backgrounds on my os windows, since there is invariably some app, and *many* websites, which hardcode the textcolor to black, but assume you have a light background. grr.
Blackboards are absorptive and whiteboards are reflective. Black windows on a computer screen are neutral, white windows radiate.
>Plan to take outdoor pictures or pictures at a
>distance of objects 20 ft or greater?
The continuity, in all domains, provided by a film with good grain, allows good latitude in the darkroom for enlarging subjects in this kind of situation.
Pixelation, even in very high-end cameras, breaks down rapidly when you try to enlarge things. But when film resolution deteriorates, it does so in a very pleasant, analogue fashion. I don't think there is any digital substitute for a medium format camera with a very good lens.
A 6x6 Hasselblad is still going to cost thousands, but I do not believe there is any digital camera for any price that can touch it.
And hey, if you are talking stealth, a waist-level reflex lets you go point-blanc in a crowd, and nobody knows you're taking pictures because you don't lift the camera up to your eye! Yeah, this niche is filled by movie cameras nowadays, I guess.
" If you need a digital SLR you KNOW you need one from the start. DSLR's are simly for pro's/ experienced (and rich) amatures "
No, I'm not buying this at all.
There have always been people who were happy with a Kodak 126, and those who wanted an SLR. I don't remember how much I paid for my F2, in 1977, but it must have been $600 for the body. And that was for just about the best 35mm camera available. I could not afford medium format.
There are $50-100 cameras to fill the same niche today, as the $50-100 snapshot 110 cameras of those days. There are $200 to $500 cameras, just like there were back then also. Then there are the SLRs, more or less in the same price ranges as in 1980. Pretty much in 1980 dollars. Without film and processing costs. With a color darkroom replaced by a midrange PC and Photoshop. (Compare the cost of Photoshop with adding a room to your house, with plumbing, with a separate, filtered air ventilation system, with temperature control...)
So, while you have a point, that the SLR's are marketed to a higher-end consumer, I don't see how they are necessarily aimed at rich amateurs or pros. They are aimed at precisely the same niche that SLRs were in the 1970s, and selling for approximately the same prices as then -- which makes them *cheap*.
"[I]t takes anywhere from 1 to 3 seconds to "power up" the camera, even from standby, and typically anywhere from a 1/2 to 1 second to take a picture *after* you push the shutter button."
This is the main selling point of the Nikon D70.
>... time them in ms.
I've had it take *seconds*. Terrible latency between deciding to take a picture and the realization of the image. Totally useless, even in daylight. This, with a nearly $400 HP.
>I have not used many digital cameras, but the (low
>budget) ones I have used are terrible at both of
>these.
Even for the higher "low budgets" this is a problem.
I've bought several HPs and Sonys, and ended up kicking them down to relatives. And I prefer the output of disposable cameras (!) to the digitals I've tried so far. So, I'm thinking about the Nikon D70.
It appears to win on the speed and latency issues.
Too bad it won't take the lenses from my F. (Or will it?)
>Some photographers will continue to insist on a
>viewfinder that is held close to the eye
I wish for the form factor of the medium format reflex cameras - with a top-mounted viewfinder.
>In order to increase the size of the print by 2,
>you'll have to increase the megapixel count by 4 in
>order to maintain the same image quality.
Wait -- don't you have to square it?
I have a film Nikon also, and I've been looking at the D70 for many months also.
There are times I wish I could go back to the exclusively low-natural-light, Tri-X-Pan, push process, that I used to do.
>Dust on sensors is pain in the rear.
Not sure what you mean by this. Could you explain?
"What about lost productivity when users have to start using unfriendly linux applications?"
What unfriendly applications do you mean?
You can't mean Firefox, OpenOffice, or Vim.
Some of the administrative stuff can be ugly, but not especially ugly compared to Windows.