Just out of curiosity, how much of that $1 M budget was spent on the actual printing? I've often wondered just how much cheaper (or more expensive) a 100% on-line journal would be.
She may or may not have a case, and you may be right about curtains, but you're wrong about the public domain issue. If I paint a picture and set it in my window for all to see, I do not lose the copyright on that picture, and it does not enter the public domain. Consider many art dealers who do exactly that in their display windows.
The issue I find interesting is this: Let's say Google complied with the street photography statutes when they aquired the data for their service. If a person uses Google Street View, and by zooming around causes it to send them a copy of an image that is *not* acceptable under copyright, privacy, decency, national security, or other law - who's in trouble?
Doctor_Jest spake thus, in part: "Their back catalog of artists that were not exactly barn-burners is huge. What does it profit them to sit on the music and not let it be heard?"
The thinking is that it prevents the low-profit back catalog from competing with current releases.
The people who came to his office aren't the sort who would normally get to make that determination. They were security techs and campus police, and it's actually nice that they came directly to him before taking their case further up the chain - and chose to do so during his office hours, if you notice, so I think they were acting as reasonably as you could ask.
True, and I do pay quite a bit in taxes, but I still think libraries are one of the best values out there. I mean, don't you wish there were a little check box on your tax form sending a dollar to fund public libraries in some way instead of to the current president's re-election campaign?
I like the idea, but in addition to peer reviewed publication, academic results have to be reproduced at other institutions. In the context of patents, this would mean giving the public a period to try to duplicate your result. Start the application process with a preliminary app that gets published. If someone else can produce something consistent with some part of your description, it was obvious and unpatentable. If you can reproduce your result, but no one else can, then you get the patent. This would penalize broad patents as well, which seems like a good thing.
Getting a patent aught to be a significant thing - it means that the public gives up their rights to the thing you've patented in order to get you to publish how you did it. Seems like they aught to be consulted first.
OK. We just disagree then, but there have been quite a few studies. You can argue with the relative societal costs, but I don't think you can actually support the contention that there is no effect. If you can, I'd love to hear it.
As to paranoia, given our history, when faced with previous scarry things, the US let things get pretty far out of control before correcting course. Consider the Japanese internment camps, McCarthy hearings, etc... I'm concerned that the post-911 Bush administration might be following a similar pattern.
Of course if you believe there is no deterrent effect, then my contention that a deterrent is warranted is irrelevant.
"That's the fallacy of the american gun culture and government paranoia. Having guns and printing presses only helped when your guns were as big as the governments, and you had just as many."
Not true. The issue is not whether the citizens can stop the government in its tracks, but how much effort is required to enforce unpopular laws - at some point they become impractical to enforce if enough of the population would kill to resist them, and are capable of doing so. I would not totally discount the possibility of laws that bad from the Bush administration or its successors.
"Well, technically what happens is that the copyright holder gains an exclusive right. He doesn't get any more of a right to create the derivatives than he had before. After all, copyright doesn't grant rights to do things; it grants rights to stop others. This is why someone who makes child porn has a copyright on it but can still get in trouble for it. Nor does anyone really lose a right. He just can, within the confines of the copyright, prevent others from exercising their rights. The exclusivity is limited, and beyond that (e.g. fair use derivatives) people can still exercise their right. When the copyright runs out, no one regains rights, but instead no one can stop them from exercising the rights they've had all along."
Hmm. That didn't make much sense to me. How are you differentiating between a right lost and a right prevented?
To clarify my position: If I have a right to perform some action, others must perforce have a duty to allow me to do so - kind of the defining characteristic of a right as opposed to a privilage. If that duty is removed and replaced with a right to prevent me instead, I have by definition lost my right since there is no longer a corresponding duty. Thus I contend that copyright law strips 300 million people or so of the right to make derivative works, and in doing so reduces their freedom of speech, and in return, 1 person gets to litigate.
Mind you, I don't object to copyright in principle - the rights lost may in fact be a reasonable price to pay to make certain types of careers more profitable; but it seems like a poor euphemism to call this "creating a right".
"Until fairly late in the 19th century, US copyright law didn't include a derivative right. So, if you wrote a book, anyone else could translate that book into another language without needing permission or having to pay you, the original author. If we have this right, then that means more of the possible profit that can be made from a work is directed to the author."
Just a nit-pick here, but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we lost rather than gained derivative rights in the 19th century? Everyone had that right then, now only the rights holder has it. Pretty clearly a right lost, not gained, for the vast majority anyway.
As I understand it, this is kind of the point of free software - those folks believe that everyone *should* have derivative rights, and that it was a bad move in to deprive the public of that right.
Just a tanjential comment, but percieved time is not the same thing as physical time. Consider that a particle moving to the right while going 'forward' in time is identical in every way to a particle moving to the left while going 'backward' in time. For all you could prove, the particles that make up "you" are a mix of the two. Perceived time it seems to me has more to do with the progression of entropy driving chemical reactions in your brain. If the time through which the underlying particles moves has a geometry or not, I'm not sure it would have any bearing on your perceived time.
...A possiblity to switch all bindings from one app to another of your preference. You can now do it for WWW and email. It would be great to have it for text (gvim anyone?;), video (xine/mplayer), audio (xmms) instead of politically correct but unusable default applications....
On the off chance you actually don't know how to switch these defaults out yourself, check out ubuntuguide.org for instructions.
What concerns me about this is what happens when a company changes its mind. There have historically been no shortage of bad actors (ex: SCO, Rambus, MSFT, etc). I can envision a scenario where a company might join until their encumbered tech gets into the guts of Linux, then change hands/die off/spin off divisions/etc. so that the entity bound by the agreement is no longer the one holding the patent rights. Even IBM's affection for Linux is unlikely to be eternal - are they equipping themselves with a big 'off' switch to use later? This plan looks to have some nasty ethical & financial failure modes. Of course, I'm not a lawyer and haven't seen the details in any case, so my fears may be groundless.
My biophysics courses back in grad school did in fact cover evolution at the biochemical level. It's a student exercise to calculate the probabilities that an organism of a given complexity can arise under given assumptions. Essentially the organism has a DNA 'key' of a certain length, and you need to determine the time required for known evolutionary processes to break the key. Lots of assumptions needed, but once you state them, the calcuation is relatively straightforward (i.e. more than half of the PhD students can get it right in a few days). What I found interesting was that the outcome is typically that there has not been sufficient time since the Earth cooled for today's DNA to have arisen through random mutation. There were various hypotheses that can 'fix' the calculation: a) Life began off-earth (so it had more time elsewhere), or b) Life did more of its evolving in high-radiation and/or high temperature regimes than geologists allow for (more mutations per generation), or c) Lots of the DNA does not contribute to speciation (so there are lots of keys - you only have to generate one), or d) Intelligent design...
Don't you know you should never pet a peeve? I share your frustration with the number of folks who fail to recognize fantasy for what it is, but don't forget to keep an open mind and examine the assumptions you make yourself. A fundamental problem (ok, one of them) with 'time travel' is the fact that the whole concept is ill posed as it is usually discussed.
For example, consider a moving particle. At one time, you see it at point A, then later it's at point B. Now, how do you know if the particle is moving in the same direction through time as yourself? It could be going *forward* in time from point A to B, or *backwards* in time from B to A, and your observations would be identical. The physical properties would differ, yes, but we didn't say what particle it was, so that doesn't matter to the discussion. Now suppose that of the myriads of particles that make up yourself, some are moving forwards while others are going backwards. It makes absolutely no difference to you, because the whole ensemble is moving exactly as you expect. All this turns out to be independent of your own perception of time, which I presume is driven by entropy (I'm a physicist, not a biochemist, but that is my understanding). Entropy keeps on going in the same direction, regardless of the temporal direction of the particles it is being calculated on, since it depends on their trajectories rather than their temporal movement.
So, now lets say we want to reverse your direction in time. There are some particle interactions that could potentially do it for you, so we don't need any new physics. The problem is that while you might time-reverse the particles that make up your body, that doesn't reverse your *perception* of time; your body may indeed go back in time (and may already be doing so), but *you* won't.
You get the idea. I agree with you that you can't create paradoxes, but saying that time travel is simply not possible really doesn't reflect well on your own depth of understanding.
Years ago when I took physics, we had a lecture or two on an interpretation of anti-particles as time-reversed particles, and annihilation reactions and pair-production reactions as time reversals. (For those interested in the real physics, do a google search on the title of this post). Anyway, it was good for a couple of BS over beer discussions. It did appear to allow time travel, but it didn't let you leave the time line to do it. While traveling back in time, you interact with the universe as if you're made of antimatter, which pretty much meant any time machine had to be a spacecraft. The energy requirements were enormously huge ( greater than twice your rest mass at both ends of the trip). There is a real problem avoiding hitting yourself on the way back (which would be bad), but it looked like it actually did permit the travel.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of curiosity, how much of that $1 M budget was spent on the actual printing? I've often wondered just how much cheaper (or more expensive) a 100% on-line journal would be.
"You reject copyright?
Without copyright there would be no reason for anybody to be in the software business.
This is the Information Age, if I can't sell information that I own then I have nothing to sell."
Oh please...
Without copyright, you'd still be paid to produce software for people who want to use it. Same as now.
Even under current copyright law, you cannot own information - all you're selling is the promise not to
prosecute; i.e. a license.
In the absence of copyrights, you are paid to write software, but get free automatic worldwide distribution.
She may or may not have a case, and you may be right about curtains, but you're wrong about the public domain issue. If I paint a picture and set it in my window for all to see, I do not lose the copyright on that picture, and it does not enter the public domain. Consider many art dealers who do exactly that in their display windows.
The issue I find interesting is this: Let's say Google complied with the street photography statutes when they aquired the data for their service. If a person uses Google Street View, and by zooming around causes it to send them a copy of an image that is *not* acceptable under copyright, privacy, decency, national security, or other law - who's in trouble?
Doctor_Jest spake thus, in part: "Their back catalog of artists that were not exactly barn-burners is huge. What does it profit them to sit on the music and not let it be heard?"
The thinking is that it prevents the low-profit back catalog from competing with current releases.
The people who came to his office aren't the sort who would normally get to make that determination. They were security techs and campus police, and it's actually nice that they came directly to him before taking their case further up the chain - and chose to do so during his office hours, if you notice, so I think they were acting as reasonably as you could ask.
True, and I do pay quite a bit in taxes, but I still think libraries are one of the best values out there. I mean, don't you wish there were a little check box on your tax form sending a dollar to fund public libraries in some way instead of to the current president's re-election campaign?
You can always get a dual-WAN router.
I like the idea, but in addition to peer reviewed publication, academic results have to be reproduced at other institutions. In the context of patents, this would mean giving the public a period to try to duplicate your result. Start the application process with a preliminary app that gets published. If someone else can produce something consistent with some part of your description, it was obvious and unpatentable. If you can reproduce your result, but no one else can, then you get the patent. This would penalize broad patents as well, which seems like a good thing.
Getting a patent aught to be a significant thing - it means that the public gives up their rights to the thing you've patented in order to get you to publish how you did it. Seems like they aught to be consulted first.
OK. We just disagree then, but there have been quite a few studies. You can argue with the relative societal costs, but I don't think you can actually support the contention that there is no effect. If you can, I'd love to hear it.
As to paranoia, given our history, when faced with previous scarry things, the US let things get pretty far out of control before correcting course. Consider the Japanese internment camps, McCarthy hearings, etc... I'm concerned that the post-911 Bush administration might be following a similar pattern.
Of course if you believe there is no deterrent effect, then my contention that a deterrent is warranted is irrelevant.
"That's the fallacy of the american gun culture and government paranoia. Having guns and printing presses only helped when your guns were as big as the governments, and you had just as many."
Not true. The issue is not whether the citizens can stop the government in its tracks, but how much effort is required to enforce unpopular laws - at some point they become impractical to enforce if enough of the population would kill to resist them, and are capable of doing so. I would not totally discount the possibility of laws that bad from the Bush administration or its successors.
"Well, technically what happens is that the copyright holder gains an exclusive right. He doesn't get any more of a right to create the derivatives than he had before. After all, copyright doesn't grant rights to do things; it grants rights to stop others. This is why someone who makes child porn has a copyright on it but can still get in trouble for it. Nor does anyone really lose a right. He just can, within the confines of the copyright, prevent others from exercising their rights. The exclusivity is limited, and beyond that (e.g. fair use derivatives) people can still exercise their right. When the copyright runs out, no one regains rights, but instead no one can stop them from exercising the rights they've had all along."
Hmm. That didn't make much sense to me. How are you differentiating between a right lost and a right prevented?
To clarify my position: If I have a right to perform some action, others must perforce have a duty to allow me to do so - kind of the defining characteristic of a right as opposed to a privilage. If that duty is removed and replaced with a right to prevent me instead, I have by definition lost my right since there is no longer a corresponding duty. Thus I contend that copyright law strips 300 million people or so of the right to make derivative works, and in doing so reduces their freedom of speech, and in return, 1 person gets to litigate.
Mind you, I don't object to copyright in principle - the rights lost may in fact be a reasonable price to pay to make certain types of careers more profitable; but it seems like a poor euphemism to call this "creating a right".
"Until fairly late in the 19th century, US copyright law didn't include a derivative right. So, if you wrote a book, anyone else could translate that book into another language without needing permission or having to pay you, the original author. If we have this right, then that means more of the possible profit that can be made from a work is directed to the author."
Just a nit-pick here, but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we lost rather than gained derivative rights in the 19th century? Everyone had that right then, now only the rights holder has it. Pretty clearly a right lost, not gained, for the vast majority anyway.
As I understand it, this is kind of the point of free software - those folks believe that everyone *should* have derivative rights, and that it was a bad move in to deprive the public of that right.
Just a tanjential comment, but percieved time is not the same thing as physical time. Consider that a particle moving to the right while going 'forward' in time is identical in every way to a particle moving to the left while going 'backward' in time. For all you could prove, the particles that make up "you" are a mix of the two. Perceived time it seems to me has more to do with the progression of entropy driving chemical reactions in your brain. If the time through which the underlying particles moves has a geometry or not, I'm not sure it would have any bearing on your perceived time.
...A possiblity to switch all bindings from one app to another of your preference. You can now do it for WWW and email. It would be great to have it for text (gvim anyone? ;), video (xine/mplayer), audio (xmms) instead of politically correct but unusable default applications. ...
On the off chance you actually don't know how to switch these defaults out yourself, check out ubuntuguide.org for instructions.
What concerns me about this is what happens when a company changes its mind.
There have historically been no shortage of bad actors (ex: SCO, Rambus, MSFT, etc). I can envision a scenario where a company might join until their encumbered tech gets into the guts of Linux, then change hands/die off/spin off divisions/etc. so that the entity bound by the agreement is no longer the one holding the patent rights.
Even IBM's affection for Linux is unlikely to be eternal - are they equipping themselves with a big 'off' switch to use later?
This plan looks to have some nasty ethical & financial failure modes. Of course, I'm not a lawyer and haven't seen the details in any case, so my fears may be groundless.
My biophysics courses back in grad school did in fact cover evolution at the biochemical level. It's a student exercise to calculate the probabilities that an organism of a given complexity can arise under given assumptions. Essentially the organism has a DNA 'key' of a certain length, and you need to determine the time required for known evolutionary processes to break the key. Lots of assumptions needed, but once you state them, the calcuation is relatively straightforward (i.e. more than half of the PhD students can get it right in a few days). What I found interesting was that the outcome is typically that there has not been sufficient time since the Earth cooled for today's DNA to have arisen through random mutation. There were various hypotheses that can 'fix' the calculation: a) Life began off-earth (so it had more time elsewhere), or b) Life did more of its evolving in high-radiation and/or high temperature regimes than geologists allow for (more mutations per generation), or c) Lots of the DNA does not contribute to speciation (so there are lots of keys - you only have to generate one), or d) Intelligent design...
Don't you know you should never pet a peeve? I share your frustration with the number of folks who fail to recognize fantasy for what it is, but don't forget to keep an open mind and examine the assumptions you make yourself. A fundamental problem (ok, one of them) with 'time travel' is the fact that the whole concept is ill posed as it is usually discussed.
For example, consider a moving particle. At one time, you see it at point A, then later it's at point B. Now, how do you know if the particle is moving in the same direction through time as yourself? It could be going *forward* in time from point A to B, or *backwards* in time from B to A, and your observations would be identical. The physical properties would differ, yes, but we didn't say what particle it was, so that doesn't matter to the discussion. Now suppose that of the myriads of particles that make up yourself, some are moving forwards while others are going backwards. It makes absolutely no difference to you, because the whole ensemble is moving exactly as you expect. All this turns out to be independent of your own perception of time, which I presume is driven by entropy (I'm a physicist, not a biochemist, but that is my understanding). Entropy keeps on going in the same direction, regardless of the temporal direction of the particles it is being calculated on, since it depends on their trajectories rather than their temporal movement.
So, now lets say we want to reverse your direction in time. There are some particle interactions that could potentially do it for you, so we don't need any new physics. The problem is that while you might time-reverse the particles that make up your body, that doesn't reverse your *perception* of time; your body may indeed go back in time (and may already be doing so), but *you* won't.
You get the idea. I agree with you that you can't create paradoxes, but saying that time travel is simply not possible really doesn't reflect well on your own depth of understanding.
p.s. 2+2 *does* equal 4.
Years ago when I took physics, we had a lecture or two on an interpretation of anti-particles as time-reversed particles, and annihilation reactions and pair-production reactions as time reversals. (For those interested in the real physics, do a google search on the title of this post). Anyway, it was good for a couple of BS over beer discussions. It did appear to allow time travel, but it didn't let you leave the time line to do it. While traveling back in time, you interact with the universe as if you're made of antimatter, which pretty much meant any time machine had to be a spacecraft. The energy requirements were enormously huge ( greater than twice your rest mass at both ends of the trip). There is a real problem avoiding hitting yourself on the way back (which would be bad), but it looked like it actually did permit the travel.