I would say the best definition of free will and fate would be:
Free Will: The ability to alter events by conscious decision or chose. To not be subject to a pre-determined fate.
Fate: A event, chain of events, or state of existence which cannot be altered by any knowledge, decision, or action.
So the downside is fate/free will questions the nature of the universe itself. And without an objective viewpoint it would be very hard to determine.
The only method for testing I could think of is testing the non-existence of fate. To do so one would have to know a future event to an absolute level of certainty with enough time that one could still alter that state of events. Given that pre-knowledge if one is unable to alter events so that that state no longer comes into existence then one cannot be a subject of fate.
This of course assumes that you can tell the future without influencing its state, and with absolute certainty. As if the universe is one of fate you may encounter a scenario were observing the future with depict false pre-knowledge with the exact information needed to cause the events of a true future event. (e.g. I tell you if you move from this spot you will get hit by a bus, but the 'true future' is that you get hit by the bus because you stayed in one place. The 'false pre-knowledge' was created to bring about the fated response).
I was once told by a long time telecom company director (with a work experience history from the monopoly days up to the verizon/MCI deal). That the greatest business decision AT&T ever made was how to structure their billing data collection system.
They decided that it was important base all costs on distance switched, and length of call. And while many people argue such a system would ruin the open & global ability of the internet, its important to remember one thing; you don't need to expose such costs directly to the consumer.
If you deal with any modern telecommunications rate plans you'll find that companies really put that payment methodology to the consumer. On some projects I negotiate long distance in flat monthly fees, on others it makes sense to go for usage, and on some it makes more sense to have a static rate for national service vs distance based tiering.
ISPs should do what is best for them and base their services on their usage rates. When you see a shift in consumer use, restructure your pricing plans. I would happily switch my parents to a web/email plan if it would lower their bottom line but would mean they get slower p2p rates, and poor large transfers (why? because they've never needed to do so). But myself I pay a premium for open access, reliability, and guaranteed speed.
What you should find in the marketplace is some ISPs that offer flat prices, some that offer usage fees, other with tiered pricing, and more that cater to specific markets (hosting, gaming, SOHO, etc). The real force behind unregulated healthy competition with low barriers to entry is niche markets.
The problem is really that 1) the communications and media industries are not healthy markets 2) the current laws allow companies to keep barrier to entry prices for business high (this is why telecom line sharing was created).
So the issue comes down to do we smack comcast on the nose and say 'bad company', and then go on fixing symptoms. Or do you force the industry to change to a competitive market.
I think a lot of government would rather see the latter happen, but really has no legal right to do so unless the current corporations become commit 'really bad' violations (and they are to crafty to do so). Its now a complex catch-22, you need the laws to fix the business, but to change the laws you need a healthy business environment; and the whole time both sides are tossing money at each other to get around having to fix anything.
There is a history of Google vans taking pictures of private parking lots, or restaurants while they are apparently turning around or stopping for food. Over in Oakbrook IL, if you continue south down one road you used to enter a office building parkinglot (which is not actually south) and see the car stop and park in a parking space.
In most areas Comcast has an exclusive franchise agreement with the city/township. If you are in a major metropolitan area you have a good chance of being served by several cable companies, but many times it still matters on exactly what street/building you are on.
The franchise setup is not considered a monopoly by the government because:
a) it was accepted by the local government (and supposedly by the people). The down side is many of these contracts are long term and were originally with smaller companies that comcast has now purchased.
b) There are other cable providers in the business and the government does not consider internet access a regulated industry, so satellite and OTA are considered competitors to comcast.
c) The 1996 telecommunications act allows any one cable company to serve up to 30 of the US without being anti-competitive (which BTW comcast is lobbying to up that percentage)
The problem is that as comcast is not regulated the way the phone companies are, they don't have to play nice with anyone else or guarantee any level of service. And if the government steps in they will probably have to regulate all cable media, meaning federal taxes, maintenance charges, etc in excess of what comcast is now stealing from their customers.
Or even better, just publish some specs on your hardware and chipsets and say 'developers are welcome to implement their own unofficial drivers/software a) just don't expect creative labs support b) don't mod our intellectual property just go develop your own'
Don't you get banned from eBay for doing that? Government Auction vs eBay. On eBay lying, cheating , and manipulation of the system are banned to protect the consumer. In government auctions they don't give a damn about the consumer; so lying, cheating, and manipulation are the norm.
This post is to advise all citizens that the following terms are now synonymous with Terrorism:
Open Source Free Software Piracy Science Global Warming Civil Rights Crime Theft Freedom (Study of) Words ending in -ology
Thinking about or using these terms without referencing their link to terrorism is considered a Thoughtcrime
This post is to advise all citizens that the following terms are now synonymous with being Patriotic: Lawsuit Intellectual Property Patents Commercial Censorship
Thinking about or using these terms without referencing their link to the positive effect on our society is concidered a Thoughtcrime.
Please note the concept of the 'Land of the Free' and the 'Home Of the Brave' are restricted intellectual property of the United States Government, and by not properly licensing these terms you are helping the terrorists.
Looking for change? The US Government is looking for future leaders willing to plan their country's next revolution. Sign up now for free arms, training, and financing.*
*Financing contingent on the United States labeling of you as a terrorist after 20-30 year training period.
Everything that's illegal and/or generally not approved of by the US government "supports the terrorists". Pssst... The US Government supports the terrorists too.
They overstate everything's link to terrorism. Everything can be linked to terrorism!!!??? From this point on I'm doing my patriotic duty as a US Citizen to do absolutely nothing.
See its people like this the Military's Cyber Command should be hunting down... Huh?! What do you mean we sent it in the first place? Who should we attack then?
AP: US Cyber Command commences new attack policy, retaliates against North Korean Cyber Terrorists for Army Spam.
OTOH there is some amount of flexibility in that as well. Paining the siding on your garage UPS brown in some suburb would be a pretty hard sell on how that dilutes the UPS trademark. I'd love to see the face on the judge when he reads the argument for that case.
BTW I do think someone on my block has a garage thats UPS Brown...kinda mid/late-70's but...
I still do not understand why everything is left/right. Reality tends to be complicated and every story has a lot more aspects than left/right (even if you manage to define those two terms). I take it by the way you phrase this that you are probably not from the United States (I wouldn't use American's per se as Canada is a bit better and some south American countries are not quite 'infected 'with the American media as well.)
But I guess to explain this you really need to know where these news stories come from and where the people behind them come from.
-- History -- The modern News industry in the United States was not really a government required/regulated thing. Basically when radio & television came on the scene the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required that companies that broadcast entertainment must also allocate some percentage of their airwaves to distributing news and emergency broadcasts (thus the emergency broadcast system, and why cities still have 'local' news stations) as a community service.
Now you have to realize that companies that made money on corporate sponsorships of entertainment were not thrilled with having this non-sponsored news eating up their time. So news used to be pretty dull in the US (basically being the minimum needed). But as large corporations started buying and consolidating more and more of these broadcasters, they started to realize something...they could sell the news. As such these companies also purchased newspapers, magazines, etc. (Note Newspapers were not immune to the entertainment-news too...read up on William Randolph Hearst and how he invented a war sometime).
Well as these entertainment companies made their way into the news space, they found (really around the Korean war, or maybe Vietnam) that big news 'sold' better then the local news. So as an entertainment company what do you do to maximize sponsorships....you make more 'big news'. In the cold war this was pretty easy...you had a enemy and well you just made had them always be the Bad people, and the US be heroes. But as the 'enemies' dwindled we needed new entertainment-news villains....enter the pendant.
--Political News-- By creating an atmosphere where some Americans ideas were left, and others were right you had a good vs bad. But the great thing was, half the people thought one was bad, and half the people thought the other was. Infinite source of debate. And with heated debate we could cause infighting and more news.
Now many will point out there is more two it than that. There is a two party political system to blame, and that corporations were not some mastermind. True, there are a lot of dichotomies in the United States that helped create and enforce this view. Yes, with a few exceptions people were not masterminding the corruption of US news services. But if you look at the environment, and the times its pretty easy to see that it evolved that way. However as much as its denied by the agencies themselves, do you really think that the fact that most people reporting the news in the US are owned by entertainment companies; who have slowly started to make more money from news shows then movies and TV a pure coincidence with the rise of the left/right divide?
Seriously this just depicts how the Military/Cyber command doesn't understand operating inside domestic world. As some of the smartest commanders have advised politicians before: you basically don't want our military policing things; as they go in with the mentality of destroy/conquer/dominate.
If your saying IT staff should actively attack those who seek to do wrong to their infrastructure, how do you address the fact that most activities of those individuals are completely legal until they actually do the attack. What of root-kits and exploits used for commercial purposes? Should we attack them too? People who do operations within the legal confines of their governing body, but can potentially impact others who's government classifies it as illegal...attack them too? Or what about someone who actively goes out and fetches something not intended for them, but also causes harm...attack the person who made it available? What about legitimate patches that break IT infrastructure if applied...Should we go destroy IBM, Microsoft, or Cisco because they distributed something harmful? Or even more broad...what if one of these companies indirectly helps the 'enemy'...are they open to attack too? What a tangled web we weave.
Sorry but Attack mentalities are dangerous 'domestically', and require real tight constraints. Such an organization should have an understanding on how information travels and how IT works; and should therefor be very careful with what it says publicly. But in the go destroy/take-down/remove world of the military you just go attack the 'bad people' right?
Your absolutely right most things are neither left nor right. As most people with an understanding of political science (and no I am not a poli-sci geek, but I have been known to read things from time to time) will say is that traditionally most things are actually plotted on a two dimensional scale of political vs economical bias (and if your really into things you can show how you actually need a 3rd dimension on your chart to really cover things too).
From the one-dimensional media world, this has the odd effect of things that become too liberal can become conservative ideas...and things that are too conservative can then become liberal again.
Its also an interesting problem that both the center of the graph, and the conditions on when things change 'quadrants' or 'sides' vary both based on the person, and the comparison of that person to the norm. One may have a left idea relative to a right administration, but in terms of the populace (or even to a particular organization/audience) that left idea may still be classified as right.
This presents problems to those who are classified as extremists, who will find every moderate article to the one of the two sides.
Then you also have the issue of people who have a more narrow/broad 'view' (where narrow and broad do not really denote intelligence or education as more of a preference), as a narrow individual will perceive a left-right wrapping effect faster than a broad view.
Of course even if you do not 'subscribe' to a multi-dimensional view of issues, you center of any left-right line is still variable.
But yes I guess given a large enough profile of users and their individual opinions, one could probably use some relative network of topics and to model a general depiction of where one would classify left, right, and center. But it would really be per individual, and the range in topics used to classify things would be have to be pretty large because most people also vary where they stand based on what you are taking about (e.g. a politically liberal, economically conservative, with liberal environmental bias, but moderately-conservative views on foreign policy, with strong anti-authoritarian sentiment).
Even if they do own a trademark on Pullman Brown, Trademark is not copyright. The prosecution of a trademark infringement is supposed to have to show customer confusion or loss/harm involved in the others business.
So if you paint your business car Pullman Brown but don't happen to deliver packages, haul freight, offer business supply services there isn't any reasonable harm to UPS. Now if you opened a store that was called the Unified Parchment Sales, and used a brown and tan logo saying 'UPS Store' on the front, you would probably be guilty of causing customer confusion. Most of the areas where UPS is hopefully in people using brown in similar packaging businesses.
Now of course these days people prefer the threaten, hassle, and hustle methodology of convincing smaller companies to give up defending themselves.
Yep your right, people develop free stuff for knowledge, experience, marketing, recognition, entertainment, pride, associated-revenue streams, etc. None of those are totally 'free' in the broader sense of cost.
Of course Microsoft has to stick with its free can't cost less money than commercial development argument. And overall many of MS's business folks can't grasp doing something for pride, fun, or education (unless the company is paying money you to be happy, full of pride, and smart).
I'd guess the recording industry does Civic-style negotiation. In a lot of government works you see that instead of getting bulk discounts and competitive pressure to beat timelines and such, you get bulk premiums and extended grace periods for work. Basically instead of saying 'Hey if I give you 50k units at $.30 per unit, for all the trouble of having to be successful at business I'll pay you $.80 per unit when I order 500k'. Either because of corruption, or sheer stupidity (probably both).
The only other reasons I'd could guess they pay so much, is 'difficult client tax'. In many contracts I've seen, if the company ordering services is needy, finicky, disorganized, known for changing things at the last min, or generally a burden to deal with in every endeavor they will get changed extra. In which case the recording industry is hard-up to find anyone to work with them, and thus pays a premium.
Its clearly the impression of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. See for yourself the picture and indentations match perfectly.
After creating the universe he surely had to stop somewhere for a brief rest. And we all know that since the 1800 there has been an increase in discovering impact craters, colliding galaxies, planets, black holes, cosmic ray bursts, etc. These number of these events are also in inverse correlation to the amount of pirates remaining on earth. Thus this is proof that the 'pirate effect' is clearly not isolated to our planet.
Looking at other IP court cases can lead one to believe that SCO was treated differently from other companies. If SCO sued Average Little Company Technologies Inc they may have been able to put on a good show and have a decent chance of winning. But SCO didn't sue a small company, they sued IBM, RedHat, Novell, etc and when you take a large corporation to court and provide no evidence, and use extortion style tactics on those corporation's customers, the corporation is going to fight back.
Did SCO get a black eye from the fight? Yes
Might SCO have got away clean if it was a smaller company? Yes
Is it right that this same dance in a courtroom could have defeated a smaller company? No
Should you expect to get hurt when you wage war with large amounts of people and companies? Yes
Was SCO Treated unfairly? No! If you present no evidence, and base most of your case on false assumptions the law is quite clear that you should loose. And when you base all your financials on something you should loose, you go bust.
If it is not registered, you can not sue for money. Therefore, it shouldn't have been included in his violation/$ total.
No you can sue for monetary damages on any copyright infringement, registered or not. All works are protected under copyrighted laws, and all copyright laws/violations have the same rights/damage assessments in a court of law. (and for those saying 'what about the GPL/BSD/CC/etc or public domain?' those are licenses and copyright rights granted to authors and people under copyright law)
Now in a court case you may have to prove your copyright claim is valid. By registering with the US you have a 'trusted entity' confirm your claim to ownership at a specific time. The registration does not guarantee it is a original work, so the copyright can still be disputed, but a government backed copyright claim is harder to refute.
So basically registered copyrights are a government record saying 'At X time on Y date, Z person has claimed to this to be their original work'. The important word is claimed....all claims can be disproved with the adequate evidence.
I'm sure Paul Allen could use a giant radio telescope to supplement his array. Just use a little e-VBLI, and you got a pretty nice addition. And if you don't want it full time, I bet many a hobbyist/small research institution would having the option to get radio telescope time instead of the typical optical rent-a-internet-telescope business.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say the best definition of free will and fate would be:
Free Will: The ability to alter events by conscious decision or chose. To not be subject to a pre-determined fate.
Fate: A event, chain of events, or state of existence which cannot be altered by any knowledge, decision, or action.
So the downside is fate/free will questions the nature of the universe itself. And without an objective viewpoint it would be very hard to determine.
The only method for testing I could think of is testing the non-existence of fate. To do so one would have to know a future event to an absolute level of certainty with enough time that one could still alter that state of events. Given that pre-knowledge if one is unable to alter events so that that state no longer comes into existence then one cannot be a subject of fate.
This of course assumes that you can tell the future without influencing its state, and with absolute certainty. As if the universe is one of fate you may encounter a scenario were observing the future with depict false pre-knowledge with the exact information needed to cause the events of a true future event. (e.g. I tell you if you move from this spot you will get hit by a bus, but the 'true future' is that you get hit by the bus because you stayed in one place. The 'false pre-knowledge' was created to bring about the fated response).
I was once told by a long time telecom company director (with a work experience history from the monopoly days up to the verizon/MCI deal). That the greatest business decision AT&T ever made was how to structure their billing data collection system.
They decided that it was important base all costs on distance switched, and length of call. And while many people argue such a system would ruin the open & global ability of the internet, its important to remember one thing; you don't need to expose such costs directly to the consumer.
If you deal with any modern telecommunications rate plans you'll find that companies really put that payment methodology to the consumer. On some projects I negotiate long distance in flat monthly fees, on others it makes sense to go for usage, and on some it makes more sense to have a static rate for national service vs distance based tiering.
ISPs should do what is best for them and base their services on their usage rates. When you see a shift in consumer use, restructure your pricing plans. I would happily switch my parents to a web/email plan if it would lower their bottom line but would mean they get slower p2p rates, and poor large transfers (why? because they've never needed to do so). But myself I pay a premium for open access, reliability, and guaranteed speed.
What you should find in the marketplace is some ISPs that offer flat prices, some that offer usage fees, other with tiered pricing, and more that cater to specific markets (hosting, gaming, SOHO, etc). The real force behind unregulated healthy competition with low barriers to entry is niche markets.
The problem is really that 1) the communications and media industries are not healthy markets 2) the current laws allow companies to keep barrier to entry prices for business high (this is why telecom line sharing was created).
So the issue comes down to do we smack comcast on the nose and say 'bad company', and then go on fixing symptoms. Or do you force the industry to change to a competitive market.
I think a lot of government would rather see the latter happen, but really has no legal right to do so unless the current corporations become commit 'really bad' violations (and they are to crafty to do so). Its now a complex catch-22, you need the laws to fix the business, but to change the laws you need a healthy business environment; and the whole time both sides are tossing money at each other to get around having to fix anything.
Welcome to the world of dysfunctional capitalism.
The interesting thing is the LHC is actually getting cooler as every day goes by.
There is a history of Google vans taking pictures of private parking lots, or restaurants while they are apparently turning around or stopping for food. Over in Oakbrook IL, if you continue south down one road you used to enter a office building parkinglot (which is not actually south) and see the car stop and park in a parking space.
In most areas Comcast has an exclusive franchise agreement with the city/township. If you are in a major metropolitan area you have a good chance of being served by several cable companies, but many times it still matters on exactly what street/building you are on.
The franchise setup is not considered a monopoly by the government because:
a) it was accepted by the local government (and supposedly by the people). The down side is many of these contracts are long term and were originally with smaller companies that comcast has now purchased.
b) There are other cable providers in the business and the government does not consider internet access a regulated industry, so satellite and OTA are considered competitors to comcast.
c) The 1996 telecommunications act allows any one cable company to serve up to 30 of the US without being anti-competitive (which BTW comcast is lobbying to up that percentage)
The problem is that as comcast is not regulated the way the phone companies are, they don't have to play nice with anyone else or guarantee any level of service. And if the government steps in they will probably have to regulate all cable media, meaning federal taxes, maintenance charges, etc in excess of what comcast is now stealing from their customers.
Or even better, just publish some specs on your hardware and chipsets and say 'developers are welcome to implement their own unofficial drivers/software a) just don't expect creative labs support b) don't mod our intellectual property just go develop your own'
This post is to advise all citizens that the following terms are now synonymous with Terrorism:
Open Source
Free Software
Piracy
Science
Global Warming
Civil Rights
Crime
Theft
Freedom
(Study of) Words ending in -ology
Thinking about or using these terms without referencing their link to terrorism is considered a Thoughtcrime
This post is to advise all citizens that the following terms are now synonymous with being Patriotic:
Lawsuit
Intellectual Property
Patents
Commercial
Censorship
Thinking about or using these terms without referencing their link to the positive effect on our society is concidered a Thoughtcrime.
Thank you have a nice day.
Please note the concept of the 'Land of the Free' and the 'Home Of the Brave' are restricted intellectual property of the United States Government, and by not properly licensing these terms you are helping the terrorists.
Looking for change? The US Government is looking for future leaders willing to plan their country's next revolution. Sign up now for free arms, training, and financing.*
*Financing contingent on the United States labeling of you as a terrorist after 20-30 year training period.
See its people like this the Military's Cyber Command should be hunting down... Huh?! What do you mean we sent it in the first place? Who should we attack then?
AP: US Cyber Command commences new attack policy, retaliates against North Korean Cyber Terrorists for Army Spam.
Of course here is a book many people would find much more useful.
I'm just waiting for Prentice Hall to publish 'A Practical Guide To Practical Guides'.
I wonder if they give their writers a Practical Guide To Writing Practical Guides
OTOH there is some amount of flexibility in that as well. Paining the siding on your garage UPS brown in some suburb would be a pretty hard sell on how that dilutes the UPS trademark. I'd love to see the face on the judge when he reads the argument for that case.
BTW I do think someone on my block has a garage thats UPS Brown...kinda mid/late-70's but...
But I guess to explain this you really need to know where these news stories come from and where the people behind them come from.
-- History --
The modern News industry in the United States was not really a government required/regulated thing. Basically when radio & television came on the scene the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required that companies that broadcast entertainment must also allocate some percentage of their airwaves to distributing news and emergency broadcasts (thus the emergency broadcast system, and why cities still have 'local' news stations) as a community service.
Now you have to realize that companies that made money on corporate sponsorships of entertainment were not thrilled with having this non-sponsored news eating up their time. So news used to be pretty dull in the US (basically being the minimum needed). But as large corporations started buying and consolidating more and more of these broadcasters, they started to realize something...they could sell the news. As such these companies also purchased newspapers, magazines, etc. (Note Newspapers were not immune to the entertainment-news too...read up on William Randolph Hearst and how he invented a war sometime).
Well as these entertainment companies made their way into the news space, they found (really around the Korean war, or maybe Vietnam) that big news 'sold' better then the local news. So as an entertainment company what do you do to maximize sponsorships....you make more 'big news'. In the cold war this was pretty easy...you had a enemy and well you just made had them always be the Bad people, and the US be heroes. But as the 'enemies' dwindled we needed new entertainment-news villains....enter the pendant.
--Political News--
By creating an atmosphere where some Americans ideas were left, and others were right you had a good vs bad. But the great thing was, half the people thought one was bad, and half the people thought the other was. Infinite source of debate. And with heated debate we could cause infighting and more news.
Now many will point out there is more two it than that. There is a two party political system to blame, and that corporations were not some mastermind. True, there are a lot of dichotomies in the United States that helped create and enforce this view. Yes, with a few exceptions people were not masterminding the corruption of US news services. But if you look at the environment, and the times its pretty easy to see that it evolved that way. However as much as its denied by the agencies themselves, do you really think that the fact that most people reporting the news in the US are owned by entertainment companies; who have slowly started to make more money from news shows then movies and TV a pure coincidence with the rise of the left/right divide?
Nik!
Seriously this just depicts how the Military/Cyber command doesn't understand operating inside domestic world. As some of the smartest commanders have advised politicians before: you basically don't want our military policing things; as they go in with the mentality of destroy/conquer/dominate.
If your saying IT staff should actively attack those who seek to do wrong to their infrastructure, how do you address the fact that most activities of those individuals are completely legal until they actually do the attack. What of root-kits and exploits used for commercial purposes? Should we attack them too? People who do operations within the legal confines of their governing body, but can potentially impact others who's government classifies it as illegal...attack them too? Or what about someone who actively goes out and fetches something not intended for them, but also causes harm...attack the person who made it available? What about legitimate patches that break IT infrastructure if applied...Should we go destroy IBM, Microsoft, or Cisco because they distributed something harmful? Or even more broad...what if one of these companies indirectly helps the 'enemy'...are they open to attack too? What a tangled web we weave.
Sorry but Attack mentalities are dangerous 'domestically', and require real tight constraints. Such an organization should have an understanding on how information travels and how IT works; and should therefor be very careful with what it says publicly. But in the go destroy/take-down/remove world of the military you just go attack the 'bad people' right?
Your absolutely right most things are neither left nor right. As most people with an understanding of political science (and no I am not a poli-sci geek, but I have been known to read things from time to time) will say is that traditionally most things are actually plotted on a two dimensional scale of political vs economical bias (and if your really into things you can show how you actually need a 3rd dimension on your chart to really cover things too).
From the one-dimensional media world, this has the odd effect of things that become too liberal can become conservative ideas...and things that are too conservative can then become liberal again.
Its also an interesting problem that both the center of the graph, and the conditions on when things change 'quadrants' or 'sides' vary both based on the person, and the comparison of that person to the norm. One may have a left idea relative to a right administration, but in terms of the populace (or even to a particular organization/audience) that left idea may still be classified as right.
This presents problems to those who are classified as extremists, who will find every moderate article to the one of the two sides.
Then you also have the issue of people who have a more narrow/broad 'view' (where narrow and broad do not really denote intelligence or education as more of a preference), as a narrow individual will perceive a left-right wrapping effect faster than a broad view.
Of course even if you do not 'subscribe' to a multi-dimensional view of issues, you center of any left-right line is still variable.
But yes I guess given a large enough profile of users and their individual opinions, one could probably use some relative network of topics and to model a general depiction of where one would classify left, right, and center. But it would really be per individual, and the range in topics used to classify things would be have to be pretty large because most people also vary where they stand based on what you are taking about (e.g. a politically liberal, economically conservative, with liberal environmental bias, but moderately-conservative views on foreign policy, with strong anti-authoritarian sentiment).
Even if they do own a trademark on Pullman Brown, Trademark is not copyright. The prosecution of a trademark infringement is supposed to have to show customer confusion or loss/harm involved in the others business.
So if you paint your business car Pullman Brown but don't happen to deliver packages, haul freight, offer business supply services there isn't any reasonable harm to UPS. Now if you opened a store that was called the Unified Parchment Sales, and used a brown and tan logo saying 'UPS Store' on the front, you would probably be guilty of causing customer confusion. Most of the areas where UPS is hopefully in people using brown in similar packaging businesses.
Now of course these days people prefer the threaten, hassle, and hustle methodology of convincing smaller companies to give up defending themselves.
Yep your right, people develop free stuff for knowledge, experience, marketing, recognition, entertainment, pride, associated-revenue streams, etc. None of those are totally 'free' in the broader sense of cost.
Of course Microsoft has to stick with its free can't cost less money than commercial development argument. And overall many of MS's business folks can't grasp doing something for pride, fun, or education (unless the company is paying money you to be happy, full of pride, and smart).
I'd guess the recording industry does Civic-style negotiation. In a lot of government works you see that instead of getting bulk discounts and competitive pressure to beat timelines and such, you get bulk premiums and extended grace periods for work. Basically instead of saying 'Hey if I give you 50k units at $.30 per unit, for all the trouble of having to be successful at business I'll pay you $.80 per unit when I order 500k'. Either because of corruption, or sheer stupidity (probably both).
The only other reasons I'd could guess they pay so much, is 'difficult client tax'. In many contracts I've seen, if the company ordering services is needy, finicky, disorganized, known for changing things at the last min, or generally a burden to deal with in every endeavor they will get changed extra. In which case the recording industry is hard-up to find anyone to work with them, and thus pays a premium.
Its clearly the impression of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. See for yourself the picture and indentations match perfectly.
After creating the universe he surely had to stop somewhere for a brief rest. And we all know that since the 1800 there has been an increase in discovering impact craters, colliding galaxies, planets, black holes, cosmic ray bursts, etc. These number of these events are also in inverse correlation to the amount of pirates remaining on earth. Thus this is proof that the 'pirate effect' is clearly not isolated to our planet.
Looking at other IP court cases can lead one to believe that SCO was treated differently from other companies. If SCO sued Average Little Company Technologies Inc they may have been able to put on a good show and have a decent chance of winning. But SCO didn't sue a small company, they sued IBM, RedHat, Novell, etc and when you take a large corporation to court and provide no evidence, and use extortion style tactics on those corporation's customers, the corporation is going to fight back.
Did SCO get a black eye from the fight? Yes
Might SCO have got away clean if it was a smaller company? Yes
Is it right that this same dance in a courtroom could have defeated a smaller company? No
Should you expect to get hurt when you wage war with large amounts of people and companies? Yes
Was SCO Treated unfairly? No! If you present no evidence, and base most of your case on false assumptions the law is quite clear that you should loose. And when you base all your financials on something you should loose, you go bust.
No you can sue for monetary damages on any copyright infringement, registered or not. All works are protected under copyrighted laws, and all copyright laws/violations have the same rights/damage assessments in a court of law. (and for those saying 'what about the GPL/BSD/CC/etc or public domain?' those are licenses and copyright rights granted to authors and people under copyright law)
Now in a court case you may have to prove your copyright claim is valid. By registering with the US you have a 'trusted entity' confirm your claim to ownership at a specific time. The registration does not guarantee it is a original work, so the copyright can still be disputed, but a government backed copyright claim is harder to refute.
So basically registered copyrights are a government record saying 'At X time on Y date, Z person has claimed to this to be their original work'. The important word is claimed....all claims can be disproved with the adequate evidence.
Just sell the sucker for pennies on the dollar.
I'm sure Paul Allen could use a giant radio telescope to supplement his array. Just use a little e-VBLI, and you got a pretty nice addition. And if you don't want it full time, I bet many a hobbyist/small research institution would having the option to get radio telescope time instead of the typical optical rent-a-internet-telescope business.