Trying to pretend they're comparable is insane. What next, "balancing" the rights of people who like to shoot others and people who don't like to be shot?
Much as your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, your right to smoke ends where my lungs begin. If you don't like that, figure out how to make smokeless cigarettes.
These facts are easily discovered by people who don't mind having their opinions contaminated by reality.
Anyone who wants to seriously debate this issue should go look up exactly the facts you've laid out, confirm them for themselves, and then think about what they mean. This case isn't about hate speech; it's about overly-touchy people and an arguably-over-zealous tribunal system.
Most of the complaints I've read about the guy's Harpers article centred on "breeding like mosquitoes"-type snippets which were - as you say - verbatim quotes from an outspoken Muslim in Scandanavia. The words were presented as the guy's own, though, which suggests that the complainers were either ignorant or intentionally misleading.
In my opinion, it's good that a human rights tribunal exists in BC; that such a meritless case as this can be taken before it, though, suggests that it may not be set up appropriately. I'm hopeful that this will highlight some of the deficiencies in the system for future fixing.
the problem is people who are unable to think for themselves sufficiently to ignore obvious bullshit. Heck, if you're so weakminded that you can be induced to commit a crime because you read a book, well, you probably need psychiatric care.
You're right, but not how you think.
Hate speech laws aren't to protect the "weakminded" from being influenced by "obvious bullshit", they're to protect innocent third parties from those "weakminded" people who would have been influenced.
It's just like how it's illegal to (in bad faith) shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre - the harm to society of the law against it (restriction on free speech) is deemed to be much less than the harm to society of no such law (high probability of serious physical injuries to innocent people), so the law is deemed a net benefit to society. In just the same way, the harm to society of a law against hate speech (restriction on free speech) is deemed to be less than the harm to society of no such law (high probability of serious physical injuries to innocent people, due to "weakminded" folk being influenced to do so), and so the law is deemed a net benefit to society.
Deemed by who? Are they right? Have they fully accounted for the harm restricting free speech does? All good questions, and ones that should be vigorously debated. But the fundamental idea - that very occasionally some speech is outright dangerous, and should be restricted for the good of society - is identical between the two types of laws, and is pretty reasonable. Most people are pretty happy with the theatre law, and the principle behind the two is identical; all that's different is the tradeoffs.
Everything - everything - involves tradeoffs, and making our society the best it can be involves realizing that and fully evaluating what those tradeoffs are and what our priorities are. Childish all-or-nothing thinking is very appealing, but that kind of simplification almost never leads to the optimal result.
All the good intentions in the world won't prevent a powerful government from becoming at best bloated, inefficient, and uncaring, and at worst, tyrannical.
Where would you put Sweden on that spectrum? Or most of Europe, for all that?
This insistence that "big government is bad government" is largely an American fixation, but it's misguided. The simple fact of the matter is that there are things governments do better than the private sector, with the canonical example being healthcare (the US offers care that study after study says is at best equal to European care, but it does so for 50% more money and to only 80% of its population).
Government is not - in most places - the enemy of its people, and it's foolish and inefficient to treat it as such.
I'm always astounded at those individuals who, while at the same time espousing fear of government censorship, are all too eager to cede so much power to the government in various guises: social programs, education, health care
The problem isn't power; the problem is what's done with that power.
I have no problem with government spending money to address social ills, to help people find jobs, to ensure every child gets a good education, to ensure everyone has access to quality medical care - these are things that benefit society. What I do have a problem with is the government doing things that harm society, and censorship is one of those things.
Power can be used in good or bad ways, and it's up to the citizens of a country to make sure their government doesn't abuse the power they give it. Stopping abuses by not giving the government any power also means stopping the beneficial things the government does, and is an incredibly knee-jerk reaction that just throws the baby out with the bathwater.
They are basically water powered generators utilizing a large storage lake
In English, that's known as pumped storage, and it's used pretty widely as you explain.
FWIW, it costs around $100/kWh to build, based on recent projects like this one, and is IMHO the most likely candidate for allowing large-scale integration of intermittent sources like wind and solar.
Most states have substantial (to the tune of $500 or more) additional yearly registration or excise taxes which have to be payed on pluggable EVs.
Do you have a cite for that?
It seems strange that there would be tax incentives from the federal government as well as state tax incentives from Oregon , among others, if they were then going to go levy special additional taxes.
You may be right, but it sounds a little bit like an urban legend.
I pay about $2500 a year on gas. Yet if I had an electric car, I don't think it would really save me all that much because my local Electric company has the nerve to charge me for the electricity I use.
Let's do the math:
* $2500/yr / $3.50/gal gas = ~700 gal gas
* 700 gal/yr * 22 mpg = ~15,500 miles/year
* 15,500 miles/yr * 0.35kWh/mile = ~5,500 kWh/yr
* 5,500 kWh/yr * $0.10/kWh = $550/year
That's assuming (a) you're in the US, (b) you're driving a car that gets US-fleet-average mileage, and (c) you're paying US-average electricity rates. If you're getting different-from-average mileage, that'll likely change your mpg and mpkWh at roughly the same rate, so you'll still see the same ~80% savings (plus lower maintenance costs due to the vastly simpler mechanism; shouldn't need oil, for example).
FWIW, there are two main reasons for the massive operational savings:
* Electric cars are much more efficient than internal combustion cars; burn a gallon of gasoline in a power plant instead of a car and you'll go twice as many miles.
* Electricity is the ultimate flex-fuel, and can be made from cheaper sources like coal (or, if you're interested, cleaner sources).
In 99% of the cases, professors do not teach anything original or new in the class.
You miss the point of lectures.
People don't go to lectures because that's the only way to learn information; people go to lectures because that's a more effective way to learn information, at least for most people. Most people learn faster and better from having the material presented in a well-thought-out, structured, and consistent manner than they do from reading about it "when they get time" from a book that can't see when they're not getting something and can't respond to questions.
Social pressure isn't the only reason people go to lectures, you know.
There certainly are some people who can learn just as much from textbooks on their own as they can from lectures. Such people are a minority, though, so pushing solutions that work for them isn't going to be helpful to the average student.
By accepting his salary, the professor already has given up his rights to his lessons, since the institution has effectively "bought" his lessons/teaching by employing him and paying him for his work.
Only if his contract states that. Guess what? It states the opposite.
If you ask me, allowing professors to force students to shell out more cash so they can complete the course by buying materiels produced by the professor
RTFA. Students can go to class and take notes all they like, with no obligation to buy anything.
But, if I sit in a class that I have already PAID for, then each student has the legal right to be in the class, the rights to the lecture, and the rights to copy the content for their own uses.
RTFA. None of that is being challenged.
5) Since students have paid for the lesson, they have the right to now do as they please with the lesson's content.
Of course; copyright doesn't cover the informational content of the lecture, just its particular expression.
2) Professor sells rights to University.
He doesn't. Most professor's contracts are quite clear in leaving IP with him/her.
take money from students just so they can PASS the class
Nothing's stopping a student from going to class and taking notes. Nothing's even stopping that student from copying the notes from a friend.
You're fantasizing all kinds of things to rail against that aren't true and haven't happened. RTFA.
Conveniently two lines above the part that demolishes your first argument.
So, if you think your argument "wins", please demonstrate that "the high points of the lecture" are (a) nothing but facts, and (b) that a selected ordering and presentation of facts is not copyrightable.
Given that notes are brief statements of fact by definition I can not see how the notes can be considered derivative as they are nothing more than statements of fact in most cases.
If lecture notes are nothing more than statements of fact, they're either bad notes or from a bad lecture.
More effort and creativity goes into preparing (good) lectures and handouts than you seem to believe. If it was all mechanical and prescribed by the material, why do most people find lectures more illuminating than textbooks? Why are some textbooks bad and others good?
The situation is not as simplistic as you suggest.
My favorite quote from TFA is
The lawsuit seeks to dissuade lawbreakers by taking (allegedly-)illegally-gained profit away; how is this surprising or shady?
Professors teaching a doctorate, or sometimes even masters, level course most definitely teach based on their own original research.
In a classroom setting, this doesn't happen and is irresponsible at the very least. The research needs to be peer reviewed before its taught in a classroom.
Nobody in my field agrees with you.
In upper-level classes, it's expected that profs will talk about their own research to a certain extent, both to attract students who are interested in working on it and to excite students with knowledge and ideas that are cutting edge. Accordingly, they'll talk about their current research projects, which typically will include a mix of published and unpublished work.
If the work is good - and it's not that hard to tell that about your own work - it doesn't really matter if you talk about it before it's peer-reviewed to students in a seminar-style course. They're there to get a taste for the field, learn some cool things, and get their hands dirty in cutting-edge projects of their own. Giving them a peek at research that's taking shape isn't "irresponsible", it's a valuable piece of moving students from thinking about assignments to thinking about research.
If a student took my notes, polished them up to the point that they could be sold, sold them for a profit, and proved to me that she did it, I'd bump her final grade up a letter if she didn't already have an A.
That's your choice to make; don't presume you have the right to make it for anyone else.
The professor does not own any sort of copyright to Gauss's law, so the students' notes are *their* understanding of what the professor explains to them about Gauss's law. In other words, the students' notes are *their* distillation of the knowledge presented to them through lecture, reading, et cetera, and are thus the students' copyrights.
Unless the students are copying down the professor's words verbatim, which is what TFA was about.
The question at hand is whether the particular set of words and images used in a lecture can be copyrighted, and whether selling a verbatim copy of those words and images constitutes copyright infringement.
Personally, I don't see why not. I also don't see what the issue with that is, other than perhaps a certain amount of knee-jerk reactionism on the part of Slashdot to anything with the words "copyright" or "intellectual property" in it. It's not like he's preventing students from taking notes; he's just preventing a company from profiting off verbatim copies of his lectures.
There a limits to a company's right to copy and sell other people's work; I'm surprised to find Slashdot arguing against that idea.
disseminate knowledge (i.e. educating). TFA refers to the latter. The knowledge a university disseminates is not (should not be) intellectual property.
You appear to be confused.
TFA is not suggesting the knowledge is IP; TFA is suggesting the method of teaching that knowledge is IP. Much like basic calculus is not IP but a textbook teaching basic calculus is IP (in particular, copyrighted).
By arguing that no knowledge a university disseminates should be IP, you're arguing that no prof should ever write a non-free textbook.
Given how much work it takes to write a textbook, and how little money from them authors actually see as compared to the time they spend writing it, you're arguing that there should be a lot more use of out-dated or hastily-written textbooks. Thanks, but no thanks - I've used a few of those, and preferred the over-priced but up-to-date-and-proofread ones.
Unless you're willing to argue that a textbook and a lecture are qualitatively different? What about a textbook that's just lecture notes? The situation here is not as simple as you suggest.
I'm paying $30k+ a year you bet your ass that I'm gonna get the service I pay for. Research grants only show up if you have students to provide free labor
Undergrads pay, but produce little or no research.
PhD students produce research, but don't pay - they get a salary.
Masters students usually fall into one of those two categories, although some few produce research and pay.
Unless your whole rant is about those few masters students - maybe 3-5% of the student body - you simply have no idea what you're talking about.
Research grants only show up if you have students to provide free labor
I've known plenty of professors who got plenty of research grants based on work they did themselves. Indeed, fewer students = more time to do research personally. Since most professors are talented researchers (otherwise they wouldn't have been hired), it can actually be more efficient for them to spend their time researching directly rather than advising students who research for them, depending on the quality and seniority of the students.
Besides, if you think it's "free labour", you've never seen the budget part of a grant. Each grad student will typically cost $40-80k for their advisor, even though the student only sees $20k of that.
it's much easier for students to transfer schools than for professors or campus presidents to find new jobs
And it's easier yet for professors to find new students who won't throw a hissy fit and quit halfway through.
There is no one with a more flexible mobile life than an average student: no mortgage, no spouse, no years invested in a company
At least years "invested" in a company will usually get you a better job if you move to a new company; years invested in a thesis don't transfer as well to a new advisor at a new university. For any grad student past their first couple years, moving to a new advisor at a new university is very rare.
The same understanding holds true later on in the work force: if you are truly good at what you do a small to medium sized business needs your labor more than you need their job.
Solutions that work only for people who are better than average won't work for most people, by definition.
Maybe you're a l33t uber-hacker who can order companies around, in which case that's very handy for you. Most people aren't, and can't. That doesn't mean they should take whatever they're given, but it does mean that their situations may be a little more complex than the simplistic answers you're pushing.
Mutual respect makes for a very pleasant environment for work or school
Indeed true, but what does that have to do with TFA?
The prof isn't being an ogre or beating his students; he's just saying "you aren't allowed to sell my lectures". How is that so different from selling bootlegs of a concert?
(It's all a little silly in my opinion anyway; the trend I've seen in the universities I've been at has been for the lectures to be made more and more available, to the extent that a number of places are videotaping them and putting them online. Given the general attitudes of the profs I've known, this trend is likely to spread fairly rapidly, at least among tech faculties.)
Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.
You have a very strange idea of the "average US city", since the current high school completion rate is 86%.
That number includes GEDs; since the military number does as well, it's deceptive to do otherwise. If you want to exclude GEDs, you get 71% for civilians and 71% for the latest batch of army recruits.
Perhaps you got your 50% figure here, which was talking about rates in a minority of cities, excluding GED. Cherry-picking that minority of cities and comparing that to GED-inclusive rates is, obviously, rather disengenuous.
The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population.
You seem terribly certain of a claim you have no evidence for. Let's look for some, shall we?
The average IQ of an enlisted man in 1998 was apparently 105, based on comparison to a 1980 test. Thanks to the Flynn Effect, IQ in 1998 should average 105 on a 1980 test, meaning the IQ of US military recruits appears to be totally average.
I'm sorry if that interferes with your self-aggrandizing, pro-military chest-thumping, or with the self-aggrandizing, anti-military chest-thumping of the people you're getting irritated by, but the simple fact of the matter is that evidence suggests military folk and civilian folk are just as smart as each other. Rather than "dumb grunts" or "dumb civvies", the only lack of intelligence here appears to be on the part of those making the ill-informed stereotypes.
And so I think there's a place for those Subjective Gatekeepers in the world. (just as soon as they can give up the financial reins, and figure out what value it is they *actually* provide).
I think you've hit on perhaps the key point in all this.
The big labels became what they were because of the "rules" of the music business - it took corporate money and muscle to create and distribute high-end music. They grew to fill a need, and became rich doing so.
Thanks to modern information technology, though, the rules have changed - it's much, much easier to create and distribute music now than it was 30 years ago. They got rich under the old rules, so obviously they don't want them to change. They were comfortable. But they have no choice.
IBM didn't want the rules to change, but they did, so - eventually - IBM changed to survive, but lost much of its power to a more agile competitor (MS). Same here - the labels cannot enforce the old rules, and while they will eventually adapt, there's no guarantee they'll have the commanding position they enjoyed before.
They don't like that, obviously, so they're fighting it, but it's not a battle they can win. Not because "information wants to be free" or anything like that, but simply because the rules of their business have changed, and the market won't let an inefficient company live for long.
Which raises the question, of course, of what are the new rules? Are the new gatekeepers sorters, like Armin, Google, and Bob-on-Myspace? How concentrated - or dilute - will power be when the market adjusts to these new rules?
I'd be shocked if Walmart can't find a way of shrinking that retail overhead from there to something lower.
It can, and that's why it can kill small music stores. They're the ones with higher overhead costs.
Moreover, overhead is constant, but it's not constant per disc, meaning that one solution is to move a lot of units. Which means stocking only units that sell rapidly. Which means stocking only big hits.
Sure, that'd lead to lower prices, but quite honestly I'm willing to pay for a music store to have a reasonable catalogue so they'll have something I'm interested in. I'd rather shop at a place with a good selection at $15 than a place with no selection at $10.
The problem is that it's hard to have both - if there's a store selling Hit du Jour for $10, nowhere else can really sell it for $15. And if everywhere's selling HdJ for $10, they'll have a hard time justifying charging $20 for a CD that'll take much longer to sell, leading cranky shoppers to go somewhere else. Net result is that they charge $15 for both, and the swarms of hit-buyers subsidize the people with more unusual tastes.
Should stores charge more for less-popular music, since it does actually cost them more? Probably, and I'm sure some do to some extent. Just be clear on how "overhead" works, and what lowering it means.
$2.40 for marketing and promotion wouldn't be important if the music wasn't mixed in with so much garbage....Wading through all the crap to get to the stuff with actual artistry involved is far more difficult than it should be.
I'm sure many people agree with you, except regarding which music has "actual artistry".
There's lots of music, which means there's little way to get anyone to find out about your music other than by marketing. Cutting down marketing means cutting down the amount of information listeners get means you find out about less music with what you consider "actual artistry".
Is that a tradeoff you want to make? Maybe, but it's apparently not an economically sensible tradeoff for the sellers. If cutting their marketing in half so they could lower the price by 8% generated more sales than the current approach, don't you think they'd be doing that? We may not like the major labels, but you've got to admit they're pretty well-informed about the business of brick-and-mortar selling of albums, and that's exactly what this is.
Expecting me to pay $2.40 per album for the labels to artificially restrict what I have access is silly at best.
How do they restrict your access? By monopolizing a radio station that you're not paying for and not obliged to listen to?
Word of mouth is free, and routinely provides better results anyways.
If you think it's free, you've obviously never paid an advertising company to try generating word-of-mouth buzz. They have, with methods ranging from on-street astroturfing to getting mindshare via radio saturation.
Do you really think you know how to advertise better than huge advertising companies full of well-trained, highly-experienced advertising consultants?
Ob: big labels are bad, blah blah. If you think you could make a few simple changes that'd make the CD down at your HMV profitable at $5, though - and it seems like a lot of people here think that - you've got to realize that you're deluding yourself. Don't you think these people are pretty well-informed about how brick-and-mortar sales work?
The world isn't as simple and clear-cut as a lot of people seem to think it is. Lowering any of the costs TFA lists (go read it) involves tradeoffs, and most of the proposed changes I'm seeing here are utterly ignoring the downsides of those tradeoffs. Yeah, the problem looks simple when you ignore most of it - big surprise.
"In business, overhead, overhead cost or overhead expense refers to an ongoing expense of operating a business. The term overhead is usually used to group expenses that are necessary to the continued functioning of the business but that do not directly generate profits.
Overhead expenses are all costs on the income statement except for direct labor and direct materials. Overhead expenses include accounting, advertising, depreciation, indirect labor, insurance, interest, legal fees, rent, repairs, supplies, taxes, telephone, travel and utilities.[1]"
Advertising has been broken out separately in the list and labor is added, but otherwise those costs and any like them are all part of the "overhead" category.
Talent scouts? Overhead. Recording studios? Overhead. Taxes? Overhead. Accountants, secretaries, and buildings? Overhead. Remastering, tour buses, venue liasons, band managers, and bunch of other things labels do that I don't even know about and that aren't covered under packaging, distribution, or marketing/promo? Overhead.
Could they do that more cheaply? Probably. I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of costs rolled up into that one term, and many of those costs are for key parts of the process.
given that we've already accounted for profit, marketing, distribution, and manufacturing, why is the label overhead so gosh darned high?
Because it covers every single other cost the labels incur.
Your question is a little like "given that we've accounted for profit, food prices, and chef's salaries, why is restaurant food so expensive?" Because, well, it's in a restaurant, and there're a lot of costs that come with that (heat, light, gas, rent, tax, furniture, repairs, insurance,...).
That you don't know what those costs are doesn't mean they don't have to be paid.
(Ob: no, I'm not a fan of the major labels, and yes, I'd like to see cheaper music. I'm just pointing out that "I don't know about it so it must not exist!1!" is a very poor - and all-too-common - argument.)
"The CPIs are based on prices of food, clothing, shelter, and fuels,
transportation fares, charges for doctors' and dentists' services, drugs,
and other goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living."
You may be getting confused by the "core CPI" measure, which does indeed exclude food and energy. CPI, though, includes every type of energy you'd typically use, explicitly including electricity, heating oil, (natural) gas, propane, kerosene, firewood, gasoline, and non-gas motor fuel.
All tolled, energy accounts for about 10% of CPI in the US.
A CANDU reactor still has a large steel Calandria surrounding the pressure tubes....the reason why the CANDU was designed was because it runs on natural, unenriched uranium. It had nothing to do with the design of the pressure vessel.
At the time of its design, Canada lacked the heavy industry to cast and machine the large, heavy steel pressure vessel used in most light water reactors. Instead, the pressure is contained in much smaller tubes, 10 cm diameter, that contain the fuel bundles. These smaller tubes are easier to fabricate than a large pressure vessel. In order to allow the neutrons to flow freely between the bundles, the tubes are made of zircaloy, which is highly transparent to neutrons. The zircaloy tubes are surrounded by a much larger low-pressure tank known as a "calandria", which contains the majority of the moderator.
So posters are quite right that plenty of reactor designs are unaffected by the capacity problems at this steel plant. Indeed, the only effect on CANDU reactors is likely to be a potential increase in customers.
Also:
When the first CANDU's were being built, the US was still manufacturing PWR pressure vessels and there was no problem in that area.
The CANDU design had started by 1958, and the first commercial PWR in the US was opened in 1957 - and was just 60MW - making it somewhat unlikely that Canada could have simply purchased PWRs even if it had chosen to. Work started on the first CANDU in 1960, the same year the US started operating only its third nuclear power plant. It appears unlikely that US-built nuclear plants would have been highly available outside the US at that point.
Even scientific articles are "fact-checked" this way: throw it out there. Typically the reviewers are peers, and quite knowledgeable. This works better than with trade publishers because the reviewers have specific knowledge about that particular field. But does the publisher fact-check themselves? No! I should add that the pay scale for reviewers goes up depending on the relative reliability of the reviewers. Reviewers for scientific reviewers are often paid in the several hundreds range.
You clearly have no idea how reviews of actual science are done.
I have, at this moment, four papers to review for the top conference in my field. I will get paid nothing, and neither will the reviewers of my paper. No reputable conference or journal that I'm familiar with pays reviewers; it's an expected part of being a scientist.
The articles are also by no means "thrown out there"; they're given to a primary reviewer who's a recognized expert in that area, and he or she selects several additional reviewers who he knows to be sufficiently knowledgeable in that area that they'll be able to understand and effectively evaluate the work. This is, effectively, selection of experts by experts, and it's utterly crucial to the peer review process. Simply "throwing it out there" would be a mess.
Unless by "scientific articles" and "review by peers" you're talking about pop-sci magazine articles or something. Calling a piece in Wired a "scientific article" is an enormous stretch, and an actual scientific article goes through a very, very different review process than the one you suggest. One which - not coincidentally - relies heavily on authenticated experts.
Imagining that democracy can replace expertise fits the currently-trendy memes very well, but it's a fantasy. A million monkeys on a million typewriters might crank out Hamlet, but no number of monkeys is going to recognize and select Hamlet, or any other worthwhile piece of writing. Leveraging the work of non-expert crowds is very powerful, but it's not a magic bullet that can solve everything, and it's sheer populist fantasy to imagine that it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Either BMI is nonsense, or being a little overweight isn't all that unhealthy. Probably both.
Trying to pretend they're comparable is insane. What next, "balancing" the rights of people who like to shoot others and people who don't like to be shot?
Much as your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, your right to smoke ends where my lungs begin. If you don't like that, figure out how to make smokeless cigarettes.
Most of the complaints I've read about the guy's Harpers article centred on "breeding like mosquitoes"-type snippets which were - as you say - verbatim quotes from an outspoken Muslim in Scandanavia. The words were presented as the guy's own, though, which suggests that the complainers were either ignorant or intentionally misleading.
In my opinion, it's good that a human rights tribunal exists in BC; that such a meritless case as this can be taken before it, though, suggests that it may not be set up appropriately. I'm hopeful that this will highlight some of the deficiencies in the system for future fixing.
Hate speech laws aren't to protect the "weakminded" from being influenced by "obvious bullshit", they're to protect innocent third parties from those "weakminded" people who would have been influenced.
It's just like how it's illegal to (in bad faith) shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre - the harm to society of the law against it (restriction on free speech) is deemed to be much less than the harm to society of no such law (high probability of serious physical injuries to innocent people), so the law is deemed a net benefit to society. In just the same way, the harm to society of a law against hate speech (restriction on free speech) is deemed to be less than the harm to society of no such law (high probability of serious physical injuries to innocent people, due to "weakminded" folk being influenced to do so), and so the law is deemed a net benefit to society.
Deemed by who? Are they right? Have they fully accounted for the harm restricting free speech does? All good questions, and ones that should be vigorously debated. But the fundamental idea - that very occasionally some speech is outright dangerous, and should be restricted for the good of society - is identical between the two types of laws, and is pretty reasonable. Most people are pretty happy with the theatre law, and the principle behind the two is identical; all that's different is the tradeoffs.
Everything - everything - involves tradeoffs, and making our society the best it can be involves realizing that and fully evaluating what those tradeoffs are and what our priorities are. Childish all-or-nothing thinking is very appealing, but that kind of simplification almost never leads to the optimal result.
This insistence that "big government is bad government" is largely an American fixation, but it's misguided. The simple fact of the matter is that there are things governments do better than the private sector, with the canonical example being healthcare (the US offers care that study after study says is at best equal to European care, but it does so for 50% more money and to only 80% of its population).
Government is not - in most places - the enemy of its people, and it's foolish and inefficient to treat it as such. The problem isn't power; the problem is what's done with that power.
I have no problem with government spending money to address social ills, to help people find jobs, to ensure every child gets a good education, to ensure everyone has access to quality medical care - these are things that benefit society. What I do have a problem with is the government doing things that harm society, and censorship is one of those things.
Power can be used in good or bad ways, and it's up to the citizens of a country to make sure their government doesn't abuse the power they give it. Stopping abuses by not giving the government any power also means stopping the beneficial things the government does, and is an incredibly knee-jerk reaction that just throws the baby out with the bathwater.
In English, that's known as pumped storage, and it's used pretty widely as you explain.
FWIW, it costs around $100/kWh to build, based on recent projects like this one, and is IMHO the most likely candidate for allowing large-scale integration of intermittent sources like wind and solar.
It seems strange that there would be tax incentives from the federal government as well as state tax incentives from Oregon , among others, if they were then going to go levy special additional taxes.
You may be right, but it sounds a little bit like an urban legend.
- * $2500/yr / $3.50/gal gas = ~700 gal gas
- * 700 gal/yr * 22 mpg = ~15,500 miles/year
- * 15,500 miles/yr * 0.35kWh/mile = ~5,500 kWh/yr
- * 5,500 kWh/yr * $0.10/kWh = $550/year
That's assuming (a) you're in the US, (b) you're driving a car that gets US-fleet-average mileage, and (c) you're paying US-average electricity rates. If you're getting different-from-average mileage, that'll likely change your mpg and mpkWh at roughly the same rate, so you'll still see the same ~80% savings (plus lower maintenance costs due to the vastly simpler mechanism; shouldn't need oil, for example). FWIW, there are two main reasons for the massive operational savings:So about 95%...
People don't go to lectures because that's the only way to learn information; people go to lectures because that's a more effective way to learn information, at least for most people. Most people learn faster and better from having the material presented in a well-thought-out, structured, and consistent manner than they do from reading about it "when they get time" from a book that can't see when they're not getting something and can't respond to questions.
Social pressure isn't the only reason people go to lectures, you know.
There certainly are some people who can learn just as much from textbooks on their own as they can from lectures. Such people are a minority, though, so pushing solutions that work for them isn't going to be helpful to the average student.
If you'd RTFA, you'd have seen that "Moulton has registered his copyrights, cleared them with the university and recorded his lectures." RTFA. Students can go to class and take notes all they like, with no obligation to buy anything. RTFA. None of that is being challenged. Of course; copyright doesn't cover the informational content of the lecture, just its particular expression. He doesn't. Most professor's contracts are quite clear in leaving IP with him/her. Nothing's stopping a student from going to class and taking notes. Nothing's even stopping that student from copying the notes from a friend.
You're fantasizing all kinds of things to rail against that aren't true and haven't happened. RTFA.
Conveniently two lines above the part that demolishes your first argument.
So, if you think your argument "wins", please demonstrate that "the high points of the lecture" are (a) nothing but facts, and (b) that a selected ordering and presentation of facts is not copyrightable.
I'll give you a couple hints:
(a) Only if he's a terrible lecturer.
(b) "Compilations of facts or data may also be copyrighted"
More effort and creativity goes into preparing (good) lectures and handouts than you seem to believe. If it was all mechanical and prescribed by the material, why do most people find lectures more illuminating than textbooks? Why are some textbooks bad and others good?
The situation is not as simplistic as you suggest. The lawsuit seeks to dissuade lawbreakers by taking (allegedly-)illegally-gained profit away; how is this surprising or shady?
In upper-level classes, it's expected that profs will talk about their own research to a certain extent, both to attract students who are interested in working on it and to excite students with knowledge and ideas that are cutting edge. Accordingly, they'll talk about their current research projects, which typically will include a mix of published and unpublished work.
If the work is good - and it's not that hard to tell that about your own work - it doesn't really matter if you talk about it before it's peer-reviewed to students in a seminar-style course. They're there to get a taste for the field, learn some cool things, and get their hands dirty in cutting-edge projects of their own. Giving them a peek at research that's taking shape isn't "irresponsible", it's a valuable piece of moving students from thinking about assignments to thinking about research. That's your choice to make; don't presume you have the right to make it for anyone else.
Unless the students are copying down the professor's words verbatim, which is what TFA was about.
You appear to be confused about what copyright is for. There's no way to get a "copyright to Gauss's law", since "[c]opyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed." You can, however, get a copyright to a particular set of words and images used to teach Gauss's law, such as a section of a physics textbook.
The question at hand is whether the particular set of words and images used in a lecture can be copyrighted, and whether selling a verbatim copy of those words and images constitutes copyright infringement.
Personally, I don't see why not. I also don't see what the issue with that is, other than perhaps a certain amount of knee-jerk reactionism on the part of Slashdot to anything with the words "copyright" or "intellectual property" in it. It's not like he's preventing students from taking notes; he's just preventing a company from profiting off verbatim copies of his lectures.
There a limits to a company's right to copy and sell other people's work; I'm surprised to find Slashdot arguing against that idea.
You appear to be confused.
TFA is not suggesting the knowledge is IP; TFA is suggesting the method of teaching that knowledge is IP. Much like basic calculus is not IP but a textbook teaching basic calculus is IP (in particular, copyrighted).
By arguing that no knowledge a university disseminates should be IP, you're arguing that no prof should ever write a non-free textbook.
Given how much work it takes to write a textbook, and how little money from them authors actually see as compared to the time they spend writing it, you're arguing that there should be a lot more use of out-dated or hastily-written textbooks. Thanks, but no thanks - I've used a few of those, and preferred the over-priced but up-to-date-and-proofread ones.
Unless you're willing to argue that a textbook and a lecture are qualitatively different? What about a textbook that's just lecture notes? The situation here is not as simple as you suggest.
Unless your whole rant is about those few masters students - maybe 3-5% of the student body - you simply have no idea what you're talking about.
I've known plenty of professors who got plenty of research grants based on work they did themselves. Indeed, fewer students = more time to do research personally. Since most professors are talented researchers (otherwise they wouldn't have been hired), it can actually be more efficient for them to spend their time researching directly rather than advising students who research for them, depending on the quality and seniority of the students.
Besides, if you think it's "free labour", you've never seen the budget part of a grant. Each grad student will typically cost $40-80k for their advisor, even though the student only sees $20k of that.
And it's easier yet for professors to find new students who won't throw a hissy fit and quit halfway through.
At least years "invested" in a company will usually get you a better job if you move to a new company; years invested in a thesis don't transfer as well to a new advisor at a new university. For any grad student past their first couple years, moving to a new advisor at a new university is very rare.
Solutions that work only for people who are better than average won't work for most people, by definition.
Maybe you're a l33t uber-hacker who can order companies around, in which case that's very handy for you. Most people aren't, and can't. That doesn't mean they should take whatever they're given, but it does mean that their situations may be a little more complex than the simplistic answers you're pushing.
Indeed true, but what does that have to do with TFA?
The prof isn't being an ogre or beating his students; he's just saying "you aren't allowed to sell my lectures". How is that so different from selling bootlegs of a concert?
(It's all a little silly in my opinion anyway; the trend I've seen in the universities I've been at has been for the lectures to be made more and more available, to the extent that a number of places are videotaping them and putting them online. Given the general attitudes of the profs I've known, this trend is likely to spread fairly rapidly, at least among tech faculties.)
You have a very strange idea of the "average US city", since the current high school completion rate is 86%.
That number includes GEDs; since the military number does as well, it's deceptive to do otherwise. If you want to exclude GEDs, you get 71% for civilians and 71% for the latest batch of army recruits.
Perhaps you got your 50% figure here, which was talking about rates in a minority of cities, excluding GED. Cherry-picking that minority of cities and comparing that to GED-inclusive rates is, obviously, rather disengenuous.
You seem terribly certain of a claim you have no evidence for. Let's look for some, shall we?
The average IQ of an enlisted man in 1998 was apparently 105, based on comparison to a 1980 test. Thanks to the Flynn Effect, IQ in 1998 should average 105 on a 1980 test, meaning the IQ of US military recruits appears to be totally average.
I'm sorry if that interferes with your self-aggrandizing, pro-military chest-thumping, or with the self-aggrandizing, anti-military chest-thumping of the people you're getting irritated by, but the simple fact of the matter is that evidence suggests military folk and civilian folk are just as smart as each other. Rather than "dumb grunts" or "dumb civvies", the only lack of intelligence here appears to be on the part of those making the ill-informed stereotypes.
I think you've hit on perhaps the key point in all this.
The big labels became what they were because of the "rules" of the music business - it took corporate money and muscle to create and distribute high-end music. They grew to fill a need, and became rich doing so.
Thanks to modern information technology, though, the rules have changed - it's much, much easier to create and distribute music now than it was 30 years ago. They got rich under the old rules, so obviously they don't want them to change. They were comfortable. But they have no choice.
IBM didn't want the rules to change, but they did, so - eventually - IBM changed to survive, but lost much of its power to a more agile competitor (MS). Same here - the labels cannot enforce the old rules, and while they will eventually adapt, there's no guarantee they'll have the commanding position they enjoyed before.
They don't like that, obviously, so they're fighting it, but it's not a battle they can win. Not because "information wants to be free" or anything like that, but simply because the rules of their business have changed, and the market won't let an inefficient company live for long.
Which raises the question, of course, of what are the new rules? Are the new gatekeepers sorters, like Armin, Google, and Bob-on-Myspace? How concentrated - or dilute - will power be when the market adjusts to these new rules?
Should be interesting.
It can, and that's why it can kill small music stores. They're the ones with higher overhead costs.
Moreover, overhead is constant, but it's not constant per disc, meaning that one solution is to move a lot of units. Which means stocking only units that sell rapidly. Which means stocking only big hits.
Sure, that'd lead to lower prices, but quite honestly I'm willing to pay for a music store to have a reasonable catalogue so they'll have something I'm interested in. I'd rather shop at a place with a good selection at $15 than a place with no selection at $10.
The problem is that it's hard to have both - if there's a store selling Hit du Jour for $10, nowhere else can really sell it for $15. And if everywhere's selling HdJ for $10, they'll have a hard time justifying charging $20 for a CD that'll take much longer to sell, leading cranky shoppers to go somewhere else. Net result is that they charge $15 for both, and the swarms of hit-buyers subsidize the people with more unusual tastes.
Should stores charge more for less-popular music, since it does actually cost them more? Probably, and I'm sure some do to some extent. Just be clear on how "overhead" works, and what lowering it means.
I'm sure many people agree with you, except regarding which music has "actual artistry".
There's lots of music, which means there's little way to get anyone to find out about your music other than by marketing. Cutting down marketing means cutting down the amount of information listeners get means you find out about less music with what you consider "actual artistry".
Is that a tradeoff you want to make? Maybe, but it's apparently not an economically sensible tradeoff for the sellers. If cutting their marketing in half so they could lower the price by 8% generated more sales than the current approach, don't you think they'd be doing that? We may not like the major labels, but you've got to admit they're pretty well-informed about the business of brick-and-mortar selling of albums, and that's exactly what this is.
How do they restrict your access? By monopolizing a radio station that you're not paying for and not obliged to listen to?
If you think it's free, you've obviously never paid an advertising company to try generating word-of-mouth buzz. They have, with methods ranging from on-street astroturfing to getting mindshare via radio saturation.
Do you really think you know how to advertise better than huge advertising companies full of well-trained, highly-experienced advertising consultants?
Ob: big labels are bad, blah blah. If you think you could make a few simple changes that'd make the CD down at your HMV profitable at $5, though - and it seems like a lot of people here think that - you've got to realize that you're deluding yourself. Don't you think these people are pretty well-informed about how brick-and-mortar sales work?
The world isn't as simple and clear-cut as a lot of people seem to think it is. Lowering any of the costs TFA lists (go read it) involves tradeoffs, and most of the proposed changes I'm seeing here are utterly ignoring the downsides of those tradeoffs. Yeah, the problem looks simple when you ignore most of it - big surprise.
"In business, overhead, overhead cost or overhead expense refers to an ongoing expense of operating a business. The term overhead is usually used to group expenses that are necessary to the continued functioning of the business but that do not directly generate profits.
Overhead expenses are all costs on the income statement except for direct labor and direct materials. Overhead expenses include accounting, advertising, depreciation, indirect labor, insurance, interest, legal fees, rent, repairs, supplies, taxes, telephone, travel and utilities.[1]"
Advertising has been broken out separately in the list and labor is added, but otherwise those costs and any like them are all part of the "overhead" category.
Talent scouts? Overhead.
Recording studios? Overhead.
Taxes? Overhead.
Accountants, secretaries, and buildings? Overhead.
Remastering, tour buses, venue liasons, band managers, and bunch of other things labels do that I don't even know about and that aren't covered under packaging, distribution, or marketing/promo? Overhead.
Could they do that more cheaply? Probably. I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of costs rolled up into that one term, and many of those costs are for key parts of the process.
Because it covers every single other cost the labels incur.
Your question is a little like "given that we've accounted for profit, food prices, and chef's salaries, why is restaurant food so expensive?" Because, well, it's in a restaurant, and there're a lot of costs that come with that (heat, light, gas, rent, tax, furniture, repairs, insurance,
That you don't know what those costs are doesn't mean they don't have to be paid.
(Ob: no, I'm not a fan of the major labels, and yes, I'd like to see cheaper music. I'm just pointing out that "I don't know about it so it must not exist!1!" is a very poor - and all-too-common - argument.)
CPI includes energy:
"The CPIs are based on prices of food, clothing, shelter, and fuels,
transportation fares, charges for doctors' and dentists' services, drugs,
and other goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living."
You may be getting confused by the "core CPI" measure, which does indeed exclude food and energy. CPI, though, includes every type of energy you'd typically use, explicitly including electricity, heating oil, (natural) gas, propane, kerosene, firewood, gasoline, and non-gas motor fuel.
All tolled, energy accounts for about 10% of CPI in the US.
From the Wikipedia article on CANDUs:
So posters are quite right that plenty of reactor designs are unaffected by the capacity problems at this steel plant. Indeed, the only effect on CANDU reactors is likely to be a potential increase in customers.
Also:
The CANDU design had started by 1958, and the first commercial PWR in the US was opened in 1957 - and was just 60MW - making it somewhat unlikely that Canada could have simply purchased PWRs even if it had chosen to. Work started on the first CANDU in 1960, the same year the US started operating only its third nuclear power plant. It appears unlikely that US-built nuclear plants would have been highly available outside the US at that point.
You clearly have no idea how reviews of actual science are done.
I have, at this moment, four papers to review for the top conference in my field. I will get paid nothing, and neither will the reviewers of my paper. No reputable conference or journal that I'm familiar with pays reviewers; it's an expected part of being a scientist.
The articles are also by no means "thrown out there"; they're given to a primary reviewer who's a recognized expert in that area, and he or she selects several additional reviewers who he knows to be sufficiently knowledgeable in that area that they'll be able to understand and effectively evaluate the work. This is, effectively, selection of experts by experts, and it's utterly crucial to the peer review process. Simply "throwing it out there" would be a mess.
Unless by "scientific articles" and "review by peers" you're talking about pop-sci magazine articles or something. Calling a piece in Wired a "scientific article" is an enormous stretch, and an actual scientific article goes through a very, very different review process than the one you suggest. One which - not coincidentally - relies heavily on authenticated experts.
Imagining that democracy can replace expertise fits the currently-trendy memes very well, but it's a fantasy. A million monkeys on a million typewriters might crank out Hamlet, but no number of monkeys is going to recognize and select Hamlet, or any other worthwhile piece of writing. Leveraging the work of non-expert crowds is very powerful, but it's not a magic bullet that can solve everything, and it's sheer populist fantasy to imagine that it is.