I tend to scan my own books, grab classic books from Project Gutenberg and have acquired promotional freebies as well as for-sale books with DRM from a number of major publishers... my collection of interesting readable e-books is over 7,000.
If books are available in print, they're available in electronic format with a good scanner and good OCR software (note the "good"). Useful in case of fire/flood/etc. too, as I have almost my entire print library backed up; some books which I would likely never be able to replace with another hard copy.
There are a number of freely available e-books that I have never been exposed to in the print world; you might as easily say that if you've been only working with paper books for some time now, your exposure to literature is lacking.
I'm another one of those who has converted to reading via self-illuminated screen. It just fits with the times when I have opportunity to read (plus, I love being able to make my own annotations, bookmarks, etc. and do searches on text with ease).
Interesting... so he got off lighter than he would have had he been caught torrenting a few blockbuster movies or a few CDs of music?
What does it say when a country values the property of its corporations more than the rights of its citizens? If they were to apply the same punishment standards to this case as they do to copyright, the guy would be in jail for life with at least a $5million fine.
Maybe what people have to start doing is claim copyright on all their personal information and file class action suits when it is illegally copied by some entity.
OK, now imagine it stretched over titanium-frame or carbon-nanotube-frame body armor. The trick is to create some tension on the material and some distance between it and the body. You need a frame that can take the stresses of the material and the impacts, and combine that with the stopping power of the material.
Personally though, I'd rather see something like this used in car parts (bumpers, convertible roofs, tires, etc).
Locally mined coal will provide power for refrigeration units which will further cool the seeds to the internationally recommended standard 20 to 30 C."
Anyone who doesn't live in the USA knows that 20-23 C is room temperature -- 30 is a warm/hot day. Put another way, 20C = 68F; 30C = 86F. Why they'd need to COOL to these temperatures in a location that has permafrost is anyone's guess. Maybe they meant -20 to -30C (-4F to -22F)? Editors?
What about those of us who think that both UIs suck, but for different reasons?
Personally, I find the GIMP works quite well for web art. Photoshop works quite well generating for-print art. Both have UIs that get in your way and are counterintuitive unless you've been (self)trained in how to use them.
Again, perhaps I'm out in left field here, but why is clicking a window, as a user does with any other application, cause such strife when it's a fact of life for users who don't use focus follows mouse? Seems like you're damning a specific application because of a personal usability bias; which can be observed in every other application the user runs on that system. What am I missing?
As someone who uses a number of graphics design and retouching programs, I'll tell you:
First off, I rarely use the mouse, except as a selection/manipulation tool. All actual transformations and tool selections I do from the keyboard. With the Gimp, this is almost impossible, as your keybindings keep changing as your mouse focus changes.
Second, when working on polishing up a graphic, having a cluttered screen is an anathema. This is why people maximize windows to full screen: so they can concentrate on the image at hand. This doesn't mean they don't multitask; it's easy to use alt-tab, Expose (on Macs), virtual desktops, etc. to switch tasks/windows; this doesn't mean that all those little toolbars always have to be visible on the screen.
I rarely click windows when I multitask; it is all done from the keyboard, which is much faster and more efficient. I don't use focus follows mouse for one significant reason: usually when I'm moving the mouse, I'm moving it to get it out of the way of what I'm working on. If focus and keybindings changed because of this, this would be VERY frustrating. As a result, every time I've attempted to switch to FFM, I've turned it off after a couple of days of getting very frustrated with it.
Don't be a dick. Just give the people what they are paying for, even if it's an old version. Better to learn dated software than useless software.
Last I heard, taxpayers were paying to have their children educated in graphics design concepts, NOT how to run the latest software from Corporation X. Personally, I'd be furious if I learned that there were classes in my kids' schools where they were learning how to use specific commercial products instead of learning the basics of working in the field.
Give a man a fish, he's fed for a day. Give a man automated Acme Fish Catcher and teach him what buttons to press to catch fish, he's fed until the device breaks (he can't fix it). Teach a man how to fish, and he can probably make his own automated Fish Catcher after seeing one in action.
The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than possibly even all the "less civilised" countries too. Even if you consider some countries' reported figures dodgy - there's a huge gap between those and the US rates. At the very best for the US (i.e. wildly inaccurate figures for some "uncivilised" countries), the US is still going to be in the top few countries in the world for incarceration rates!
Nevermind that the US is also way up there in executing people.
...and these statistics don't include deportations of people to other countries for imprisonment and execution, nor do they include the "secret extraditions" of people to the CIA prisons in other nations. I'd be curious to see how THESE statistics stack up against other countries.
Palm must have done a bad job on their marketing if crap like this Kindle sells out. I wouldn't use the thing if they gave it for free.
Unfortunately, Palm has done a horrible job marketing the TX; they have rebranded themselves as a Smartphone company and have minimal support for their handheld units. I've never seen an ad for the TX anywhere.
On the up side, the TX has an excellent user community, and there has been a LOT of work put into fixing Palm's mistakes in hardware and software by TX users themselves. People have added a proper touch screen, internal microphone, internal vibrator (for alarms), IrDA extender and WiFi range extender, just to name a few things. There have also been a huge number of OS and support software patches written by end users, and the latest developer versions of TXLinux are actually at the usable stage.
Check here for some of the things people are doing with the TX. There. Now I've done some of the advertising Palm neglected to do. Too bad they still most likely won't do a new version of the TX -- nothing new on it in 2 years.
No, it uses a backlit LCD, which means you can read in low light situations. This is one of the things that made me switch from paperbacks. To me, eInk is a step backwards in everything except battery performance.
Can you get 88,000 books (commercial books, excluding gutenberg books) for the Pal[m] T|X?
Yes; and you can get them from a number of different suppliers, not just a single source.
There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc. See eReader, MobileRead, ISilo, etc.
I think the Palm's display is much smaller.
Yes, it is.
It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text.
Anyway, the Kindle has too many flaws for me to want it right now but I look forward to it coming down in price.
I look forward to someone figuring out how to install a PDA Linux distro on it. Of course, with limited interface (no touch screen), it'll be a worse PDA than the PSP. The free cellular data plan could come in handy though, if someone figures out how to escape Amazon's walled garden with it.
I've been using one for over 2 years as my eBook reader of choice, and almost never open a regular book now. Toss PalmFiction on it, and you have a top notch e-book reader that can read HTML, MS Word, RTF, Text, PalmDoc and a number of other DRM-unencumbered formats.
Want a more integrated experience? There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc.
Project Gutenberg encodes their documents in Plucker format, which has a native PalmOS reader.
The T|X has WiFi and Bluetooth support, and can connect to the internet via cellphone BT link, WiFi router, USB uplink with a computer, or even IrDA.
It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text. Text can be displayed at any size and be linked to dictionary lookup/wikipedia/etc. Plus, the device fits in my pocket, so I'm actually likely to have it when I want to read a book.
Apart from the eBook features, the device can link to common calendaring and address book apps, browse the web, etc., act as a VoIP phone if you install a microphone, be used to watch movies, listen to music, CREATE content and take advantage of the thousands of software applications written for the PalmOS platform.
Why not just get a spamgourmet account? You get unlimited redirected email addresses, about 25 domain names to choose from, expiring addresses, and more:) -and it's free.
Hey... slow down a bit... if you'd look at my other posts, you'd see that I more than agree with you for the most part; its just that our system is currently so broken that the lawmakers have chosen to avoid the "life" timeline. In an earlier post, I said I thought no copyright should be granted for more than 35 years.
Item 2 was not about killing people, item 1 was. Item two is separate -- the idea that people can make a profit off of PD works.
BTW: I notice you skipped the part where I pointed out that copyright infringement can currently carry heavier penalties than murder. You're treating this as a "Hey, I want that guy's copywritten works! I'm gonna go kill him!" scenario. I agree that that is (generally) absurd. However, the derivative works scenario I pointed out is less absurd, and situations where someone might not come to the aid of someone who is in trouble but has valuable IP is even more likely in our passive society.
There has to be a balance, and the current system is way off kilter. What I'm saying is that your suggestion of setting the term to the life of the holder isn't the best solution to our current problem.
Also, most commercialized copyrights are held by corporations.
* Copyright should be an opt-in, registered-the-work system, like patents.
This is the way it used to be; they found that only rich people and corporations registered copyrights, and everyone else was taken advantage of. So they changed it. Do you really want your Thanksgiving Dinner photos of your family plastered all over the place because some company saw them on MySpace and decided they'd work really well in their ads?
* Copyright terms should be tied to the popularity and profitability of the work so more popular works get out of copyright sooner.
Bad idea. Big Corps then ensure a work never becomes popular, and eventually the copyright holder sells them the rights out of desperation to make some money. It happened in the above system even without being tied to popularity.
* Copyright protection should expire on the death of the holder.
It should expire after no later than 35 years from date of creation. * Punishments for trying to circumvent term lengths should be severe - at the very least repayment of all customers, a fine double the reported revenue from the work and the immediate expiry of its copyright protection.
Make it TOO severe, and you're back to the "it's easier just to kill him" argument. Expire the derivative works' copyright, and suddenly it is public domain -- but wait -- this means portions of the original work are too. Bad idea. Better to have the copyright transfer to the original holder.
* Copyright should only protect works from commercial, for-profit copying.
Great. So if I take some family photos, I have to prove commercial for-profit copying in order to keep someone else from using them? How is commercial and for-profit defined? Use for direct monetary gain? Use to gain influence which results in monetary gain? Used by someone who also uses ads to generate monetary gain? The issues surrounding copyrights are very nebulous. However, I agree with your underlying intent. Information should be free. If you want to restrict it for profit, that profit should trickle back down the chain.
* Derivative works should generally not be considered an infringement of the original.
What I don't get is this: energy takes time to travel. If we're looking at it now, it was generated in the past. If we're observing it now, that means we're observing what happened in the past. Doesn't this mean that the universe would have ceased to exist prior to us observing it?...
Makes me lend some credence to the "infinite universes" theory. We actually destroyed some other universe, not our own.
Of course, it's more likely I'm just being dense and not understanding the theory involved here, and the universe is just set to collapse a few trillion years before it otherwise would have....
This assumes, of course, that human beings are the only objects in the universe observing such things. Will some other intelligence step up and accuse Humanity of universicide? Or will they observe similar things and bring our universe to a crashing halt?
But that's missing the point. Where is the logic behind this argument ? If copyright expires on the death of the creator, then killing them achieves nothing except making it impossible for anyone to profit from the work. Are you seriously suggesting murder is considered a lesser crime than copyright infringement ?
I think you're missing the point...
You have two arguments: 1. There is no incentive to commit a larger crime (murder) to avoid committing a smaller crime (copyright violation).
2. You can't profit from works in the public domain.
The problems with these arguments are:
1. The incentive is that someone might find it much easier to commit murder and not get caught than to violate copyright and not get caught. Added to this, if copyright terms were for life, the perp would run afoul of copyright for the entire span of the creator's life, for all works they had created to date. With murder, there is only one time of infringement to cover up. Added to this, it is not a case of "Do I murder a person or just steal their work?" Instead, it is a case of added windfall to killing a person. There is LESS incentive to kill them if their copyrights endure or have already expired than there is if you get that bonus of free access to all their work.
2. Talk to Disney about this one. They have a business model of taking public domain works, tweaking them and then selling their tweaked versions under indefinite copyright. This whole "life" argument isn't as much an issue about redistribution of the original works as it is an issue about the legality of DERIVATIVE works.
Imagine if you will, that some gangster hip-hop remixer is making millions off his mix discs. Unfortunately, some small indie guy's stuff was sampled, and the guy is now suing the remixer for use of his work. Now, the work is one of the remixer's best sellers, and already has wide distribution. In fact, it is one of the works that made him an international superstar. Now the indie artist that nobody's ever heard of is suing him for damages, jail time (since the infringement is large enough to make it a federal crime) and confiscation of equipment. The jail time could add up to more than 20 years, in fact.
Now if this artist dies, all his work goes into the public domain, the lawsuits go away, and the max damage to the remixer is 20 years in prison. No monetary damages, no confiscation of equipment, no loss of reputation (actually, a possible GAIN in reputation in some circles), and a possible shorter prison sentence. All this, and the money keeps rolling in while he does his time.
THIS (as well as the "don't dilute Mickey" reason) is one example why "life" is a bad copyright term. There are others, some of which were actually experienced back when life terms WERE set for created works.
"As long as you live" should be long enough for anybody.
Alas, you'd likely have a lot of content producers dying young if the law worked this way -- this is why they adopted "life plus" -- so that nobody could immediately benefit from the copyright owner's death.
Personally, I think that a fixed term (35 years tops?) makes much more sense.
Yep. Except the stem cells are created by adding genes to skin cells via a virus. I wonder if this breakthrough will be held back with bible-thumpers claiming God wants skin cells to remain skin cells and setting back the research for ANOTHER decade.
I would guess it more likely that the breakthrough will be held back by people who don't want their skin to turn to stem cells before their eyes because of some virus escaped from the research labs.
Then again, someone's probably already claimed movie rights on this and will sue anyone who voices this idea.
agree, but this isn't something the user can do. I can't register for a site and say, "I need to remember to use salt!" The site has to implement it and implement it correctly.
The guy posting was posting from the perspective of the user, not the author of the system. The conclusion from the summary is still accurate since you can't make the assumption that salt is always used. The next best defense is a crazy fucking password.
This is why my passwords are themselves salted hashes. The likelihood of someone else using my passwords is the same as a regular hash collision, I get to use a separate password for each place one is required, and the hashing mechanism and salt are simple enough for me to keep in my head. End result: infinite number of easily generatable and retrievable passwords that look just like a hashed password when decoded.
MSG, or monosodium glutemate, is a salt. What you are saying could hold true for ANY salt consumed in large enough quantities, especially by someone who doesn't sweat enough of it out of their system.
Salts naturally occur in the foods we eat in high enough quantities to fulfill our minimum nutritive requirements. Adding extra is going to put a strain on our system.
The big issue with MSG is that some people have difficulty processing it at all; it is more complex than, say, table salt (sodium chloride), as the byproducts need extra processing once the salt has been used by our bodies. In small amounts, MSG should be easy for the body to handle, however.
Just like with any other food/food additive, moderation is fine; overdosing leads to all sorts of health issues.
I think he left out the word "naturally". As in, fresh fruit and vegetables (which have replaced grains in the level of importance in diet recently) tend to have a lot of water and fibre mixed in with the carbs.
Once you start talking about ultra-refined man-made foods, all arguments are out the window. For some reason, most man-made foods don't integrate all that well with a balanced diet. Having them in supplemental moderation won't cause much of a change, but depending on them as a key source of water, carbs or fibre is a really bad idea unless you REALLY watch your intake and don't depend on your body's own signals to guide your eating habits.
This raises some interesting issues: We've brought up encryption already, and fragmented compressed video. How about this: would the system block "quoted" video clips? Spoofs? How about a video subscription or streaming TV site that the end user has paid to gain the rights to use (a la iTunes, movieflix, etc.)? I don't see how software can distinguish between infringing and legal video. Is AT&T going to block video on their own video transmission service when they release it?
Slashdot Mirror
?
I tend to scan my own books, grab classic books from Project Gutenberg and have acquired promotional freebies as well as for-sale books with DRM from a number of major publishers... my collection of interesting readable e-books is over 7,000.
If books are available in print, they're available in electronic format with a good scanner and good OCR software (note the "good"). Useful in case of fire/flood/etc. too, as I have almost my entire print library backed up; some books which I would likely never be able to replace with another hard copy.
There are a number of freely available e-books that I have never been exposed to in the print world; you might as easily say that if you've been only working with paper books for some time now, your exposure to literature is lacking.
I'm another one of those who has converted to reading via self-illuminated screen. It just fits with the times when I have opportunity to read (plus, I love being able to make my own annotations, bookmarks, etc. and do searches on text with ease).
Interesting... so he got off lighter than he would have had he been caught torrenting a few blockbuster movies or a few CDs of music?
What does it say when a country values the property of its corporations more than the rights of its citizens? If they were to apply the same punishment standards to this case as they do to copyright, the guy would be in jail for life with at least a $5million fine.
Maybe what people have to start doing is claim copyright on all their personal information and file class action suits when it is illegally copied by some entity.
OK, now imagine it stretched over titanium-frame or carbon-nanotube-frame body armor. The trick is to create some tension on the material and some distance between it and the body. You need a frame that can take the stresses of the material and the impacts, and combine that with the stopping power of the material.
Personally though, I'd rather see something like this used in car parts (bumpers, convertible roofs, tires, etc).
Anyone who doesn't live in the USA knows that 20-23 C is room temperature -- 30 is a warm/hot day.
Put another way, 20C = 68F; 30C = 86F.
Why they'd need to COOL to these temperatures in a location that has permafrost is anyone's guess.
Maybe they meant -20 to -30C (-4F to -22F)? Editors?
What about those of us who think that both UIs suck, but for different reasons? Personally, I find the GIMP works quite well for web art. Photoshop works quite well generating for-print art. Both have UIs that get in your way and are counterintuitive unless you've been (self)trained in how to use them.
As someone who uses a number of graphics design and retouching programs, I'll tell you:
First off, I rarely use the mouse, except as a selection/manipulation tool. All actual transformations and tool selections I do from the keyboard. With the Gimp, this is almost impossible, as your keybindings keep changing as your mouse focus changes.
Second, when working on polishing up a graphic, having a cluttered screen is an anathema. This is why people maximize windows to full screen: so they can concentrate on the image at hand. This doesn't mean they don't multitask; it's easy to use alt-tab, Expose (on Macs), virtual desktops, etc. to switch tasks/windows; this doesn't mean that all those little toolbars always have to be visible on the screen.
I rarely click windows when I multitask; it is all done from the keyboard, which is much faster and more efficient. I don't use focus follows mouse for one significant reason: usually when I'm moving the mouse, I'm moving it to get it out of the way of what I'm working on. If focus and keybindings changed because of this, this would be VERY frustrating. As a result, every time I've attempted to switch to FFM, I've turned it off after a couple of days of getting very frustrated with it.
Last I heard, taxpayers were paying to have their children educated in graphics design concepts, NOT how to run the latest software from Corporation X. Personally, I'd be furious if I learned that there were classes in my kids' schools where they were learning how to use specific commercial products instead of learning the basics of working in the field.
Give a man a fish, he's fed for a day.
Give a man automated Acme Fish Catcher and teach him what buttons to press to catch fish, he's fed until the device breaks (he can't fix it).
Teach a man how to fish, and he can probably make his own automated Fish Catcher after seeing one in action.
...no more than reading Slashdot at -1 unthreaded anyway :)
On the up side, the TX has an excellent user community, and there has been a LOT of work put into fixing Palm's mistakes in hardware and software by TX users themselves. People have added a proper touch screen, internal microphone, internal vibrator (for alarms), IrDA extender and WiFi range extender, just to name a few things. There have also been a huge number of OS and support software patches written by end users, and the latest developer versions of TXLinux are actually at the usable stage.
Check here for some of the things people are doing with the TX. There. Now I've done some of the advertising Palm neglected to do. Too bad they still most likely won't do a new version of the TX -- nothing new on it in 2 years.
There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc. See eReader, MobileRead, ISilo, etc.
Yes, it is.It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text.
I look forward to someone figuring out how to install a PDA Linux distro on it. Of course, with limited interface (no touch screen), it'll be a worse PDA than the PSP. The free cellular data plan could come in handy though, if someone figures out how to escape Amazon's walled garden with it.The Palm T|X sells for around $150 these days.
:)
I've been using one for over 2 years as my eBook reader of choice, and almost never open a regular book now. Toss PalmFiction on it, and you have a top notch e-book reader that can read HTML, MS Word, RTF, Text, PalmDoc and a number of other DRM-unencumbered formats.
Want a more integrated experience? There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc.
Project Gutenberg encodes their documents in Plucker format, which has a native PalmOS reader.
The T|X has WiFi and Bluetooth support, and can connect to the internet via cellphone BT link, WiFi router, USB uplink with a computer, or even IrDA.
It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text. Text can be displayed at any size and be linked to dictionary lookup/wikipedia/etc. Plus, the device fits in my pocket, so I'm actually likely to have it when I want to read a book.
Apart from the eBook features, the device can link to common calendaring and address book apps, browse the web, etc., act as a VoIP phone if you install a microphone, be used to watch movies, listen to music, CREATE content and take advantage of the thousands of software applications written for the PalmOS platform.
Oh, and it can run Linux too
That reminds me of the old "catastrophic failure" googlebombing a few years ago....
Why not just get a spamgourmet account? You get unlimited redirected email addresses, about 25 domain names to choose from, expiring addresses, and more :) -and it's free.
Item 2 was not about killing people, item 1 was. Item two is separate -- the idea that people can make a profit off of PD works.
BTW: I notice you skipped the part where I pointed out that copyright infringement can currently carry heavier penalties than murder. You're treating this as a "Hey, I want that guy's copywritten works! I'm gonna go kill him!" scenario. I agree that that is (generally) absurd. However, the derivative works scenario I pointed out is less absurd, and situations where someone might not come to the aid of someone who is in trouble but has valuable IP is even more likely in our passive society.
There has to be a balance, and the current system is way off kilter. What I'm saying is that your suggestion of setting the term to the life of the holder isn't the best solution to our current problem.
Also, most commercialized copyrights are held by corporations.
This is the way it used to be; they found that only rich people and corporations registered copyrights, and everyone else was taken advantage of. So they changed it. Do you really want your Thanksgiving Dinner photos of your family plastered all over the place because some company saw them on MySpace and decided they'd work really well in their ads?
Bad idea. Big Corps then ensure a work never becomes popular, and eventually the copyright holder sells them the rights out of desperation to make some money. It happened in the above system even without being tied to popularity.
Make it TOO severe, and you're back to the "it's easier just to kill him" argument. Expire the derivative works' copyright, and suddenly it is public domain -- but wait -- this means portions of the original work are too. Bad idea. Better to have the copyright transfer to the original holder.
Great. So if I take some family photos, I have to prove commercial for-profit copying in order to keep someone else from using them? How is commercial and for-profit defined? Use for direct monetary gain? Use to gain influence which results in monetary gain? Used by someone who also uses ads to generate monetary gain?
The issues surrounding copyrights are very nebulous. However, I agree with your underlying intent. Information should be free. If you want to restrict it for profit, that profit should trickle back down the chain.
What I don't get is this: energy takes time to travel. If we're looking at it now, it was generated in the past. If we're observing it now, that means we're observing what happened in the past. Doesn't this mean that the universe would have ceased to exist prior to us observing it? ...
...
Makes me lend some credence to the "infinite universes" theory. We actually destroyed some other universe, not our own.
Of course, it's more likely I'm just being dense and not understanding the theory involved here, and the universe is just set to collapse a few trillion years before it otherwise would have.
This assumes, of course, that human beings are the only objects in the universe observing such things. Will some other intelligence step up and accuse Humanity of universicide? Or will they observe similar things and bring our universe to a crashing halt?
I think you're missing the point...
You have two arguments:
1. There is no incentive to commit a larger crime (murder) to avoid committing a smaller crime (copyright violation).
2. You can't profit from works in the public domain.
The problems with these arguments are:
1. The incentive is that someone might find it much easier to commit murder and not get caught than to violate copyright and not get caught. Added to this, if copyright terms were for life, the perp would run afoul of copyright for the entire span of the creator's life, for all works they had created to date. With murder, there is only one time of infringement to cover up. Added to this, it is not a case of "Do I murder a person or just steal their work?" Instead, it is a case of added windfall to killing a person. There is LESS incentive to kill them if their copyrights endure or have already expired than there is if you get that bonus of free access to all their work.
2. Talk to Disney about this one. They have a business model of taking public domain works, tweaking them and then selling their tweaked versions under indefinite copyright. This whole "life" argument isn't as much an issue about redistribution of the original works as it is an issue about the legality of DERIVATIVE works.
Imagine if you will, that some gangster hip-hop remixer is making millions off his mix discs. Unfortunately, some small indie guy's stuff was sampled, and the guy is now suing the remixer for use of his work. Now, the work is one of the remixer's best sellers, and already has wide distribution. In fact, it is one of the works that made him an international superstar. Now the indie artist that nobody's ever heard of is suing him for damages, jail time (since the infringement is large enough to make it a federal crime) and confiscation of equipment. The jail time could add up to more than 20 years, in fact.
Now if this artist dies, all his work goes into the public domain, the lawsuits go away, and the max damage to the remixer is 20 years in prison. No monetary damages, no confiscation of equipment, no loss of reputation (actually, a possible GAIN in reputation in some circles), and a possible shorter prison sentence. All this, and the money keeps rolling in while he does his time.
THIS (as well as the "don't dilute Mickey" reason) is one example why "life" is a bad copyright term. There are others, some of which were actually experienced back when life terms WERE set for created works.
Alas, you'd likely have a lot of content producers dying young if the law worked this way -- this is why they adopted "life plus" -- so that nobody could immediately benefit from the copyright owner's death.
Personally, I think that a fixed term (35 years tops?) makes much more sense.
I would guess it more likely that the breakthrough will be held back by people who don't want their skin to turn to stem cells before their eyes because of some virus escaped from the research labs.
Then again, someone's probably already claimed movie rights on this and will sue anyone who voices this idea.
This is why my passwords are themselves salted hashes. The likelihood of someone else using my passwords is the same as a regular hash collision, I get to use a separate password for each place one is required, and the hashing mechanism and salt are simple enough for me to keep in my head. End result: infinite number of easily generatable and retrievable passwords that look just like a hashed password when decoded.
MSG, or monosodium glutemate, is a salt. What you are saying could hold true for ANY salt consumed in large enough quantities, especially by someone who doesn't sweat enough of it out of their system.
Salts naturally occur in the foods we eat in high enough quantities to fulfill our minimum nutritive requirements. Adding extra is going to put a strain on our system.
The big issue with MSG is that some people have difficulty processing it at all; it is more complex than, say, table salt (sodium chloride), as the byproducts need extra processing once the salt has been used by our bodies. In small amounts, MSG should be easy for the body to handle, however.
Just like with any other food/food additive, moderation is fine; overdosing leads to all sorts of health issues.
I think he left out the word "naturally". As in, fresh fruit and vegetables (which have replaced grains in the level of importance in diet recently) tend to have a lot of water and fibre mixed in with the carbs.
Once you start talking about ultra-refined man-made foods, all arguments are out the window. For some reason, most man-made foods don't integrate all that well with a balanced diet. Having them in supplemental moderation won't cause much of a change, but depending on them as a key source of water, carbs or fibre is a really bad idea unless you REALLY watch your intake and don't depend on your body's own signals to guide your eating habits.
This raises some interesting issues: We've brought up encryption already, and fragmented compressed video. How about this: would the system block "quoted" video clips? Spoofs? How about a video subscription or streaming TV site that the end user has paid to gain the rights to use (a la iTunes, movieflix, etc.)? I don't see how software can distinguish between infringing and legal video. Is AT&T going to block video on their own video transmission service when they release it?