Because RTFA is too much...
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Taube's article is pretty long. It's still much faster to read it than to watch Lustig's whole presentation. If you can, do both, of course. If you can't or won't WTFV, then RTFA. If you can't or won't RTFA, then here's a summary.
Yes, too much of anything is toxic. Duh. That's not what Lustig or Taube are talking about. They're also not talking about "empty calories" -- the consumption of lots of sugar without other nutrients, meaning your overall calorie intake is higher, so you get fat and have obesity-related problems.
What they're talking about is the question of whether fructose directly causes health problems of its own accord -- namely, things like fatty liver and insulin resistance, things which may in turn raise the risk of diabetes and cancer independent of whether you get fat.
What Taube will tell you, that Lustig won't, is that the research is not conclusive. It all shows very strong correlation, but that of course isn't causation. And that's caused all these disputes of what the real problem is, particularly whether it's fat or sugar that's responsible.
Taube says that we should be considering the possibility that it's both; or at least, abandoning the idea that it must be either-or. Similarly, on the question of whether it's sucrose or HFCS that's worse, he suggests that they're so similar (both are glucose-fructose mixtures in nearly equal proportions) that they're probably both just as bad as each other.
Too much of anything is toxic; but (Taube says) because the research is inconclusive, nobody can say how much fructose is "too much". It's an established fact that short-term, high-dose fructose intake causes these problems (fatty liver et al.), but it's not known what long-term intake at the levels currently typical in the US will do.
The circumstantial evidence suggests that it will cause the same problems, eventually. And of course various people (like Lustig) have seized on this circumstantial stuff as damning evidence. But just because they're overstating the case, doesn't mean they're wrong, says Taube.
Yes, this is basically just a big MS bash-fest for the Slashdot crowds. Yes, Cansdale is not an open source hero, nor are his hands completely clean in all of this (whatever the legal truths, and whatever the hypocrisy of Microsoft pointing this out, it does look like he's acted in bad faith on some points). But that doesn't change a few basic things. Like why people here are bashing MS. Anything Cansdale might have done won't diminish the inherent flaws in MS's position, particularly how the sole EULA clause 'forbidding' his work probably doesn't apply, since it appears the Express edition is not 'technically limited' from loading add-ins after all.
And please don't make Cansdale's position sound worse than it is. You've already 'fessed up to misreading MS's form response for something Cansdale wrote himself, so thank you for that. But just how exactly do you find those two EULA clauses to be 'pretty much exactly the same'?
You may not work around any technical limitations in the software.
Vague. You can't do anything that's been 'technically limited' by the software. What constitutes a technical limitation, and what is simply beyond the scope of the product? Taken to the extreme... Express is not a 3D action game, so you may not work around this by installing any 3D action games on your computer. Basically, this means, 'We don't want people to do certain things with Express. We define what those are. No, we're not giving you a list, otherwise we won't be able to change our minds later.'
[You may not] use the Software in any manner not expressly authorised by this Agreement.
Very specific (albeit contingent on how specific the rest of the EULA is). 'If we don't specifically list it, you can't do it.' This lays everything out in the licence. No changing one's mind later.
...somewhat ironic for a company in the middle of a 'war on drugs.'
My first reaction was to mentally correct 'company' to 'country', but then the irony hit. I still don't know if it was deliberate, but well played, sir or ma'am.
(Incidentally, and I've said this before to many of my Australian compatriots about my time in the States, but what struck me most about day-to-day American life was the advertising: diets, drugs and lawyers. Often more than one in the same ad—like telling you to sue Merck, through the services of law firm X of course. They 'know how to make companies like Merck pay!')
...but that's because I'm Australian. Here, the ratings are enforceable in law. Specifically, we have two ratings, MA 15+ and R 18+, that are legally restricted to persons over 15 or 18, respectively, unless accompanied by a parent or guardian blah blah etc. (Actually, we also have an X rating, which can't legally be sold in any state, and a 'refused classification', which is just plain illegal.)
The problem? R ratings only exist on movies, not games. If a game would merit an R rating, it cannot be sold in Australia. Now, part of this is because the politicians are stupid -- I read a report on a get-together of the state attorneys-general, where the South Australian AG literally said they had to think of the children -- but it's also partly because they realise that retailers generally ignore the legalities of the MA rating.
If retailers started being told to toe the line and check ages when selling MA games, we'd be one step closer, paradoxically, to a less regulated video games retail industry in Australia.
Re:If only the UK goverment realised this.
on
DRM Causes Piracy
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· Score: 1
Just a quick stab at one point in all that mind-numbing garbage:
...it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.
'Unprecedented', because before now, you damn well didn't have the power or the right to make them choose, and charge them for it! You still don't have the right, or wouldn't if government wasn't handing it to you; you've just discovered that this DRM thing could give you the power, so you think you have the right.
Thus, translation:
...it also affords companies the unprecedented ability to make consumers choose how they want to access 'content' [means 'stuff'], and thus attach varying artificial costs to these choices [when before, the companies couldn't control them, and still somehow did fine anyway with a one-price-fits-all model].
Well, that is a problem, but overall I'm more concerned with whether they've addressed Debian's criticisms. The GNU criticisms are basically, 'People refer to them vaguely, and you can't use them with our licenses.' The latter is a considerable practical problem, given the mass of GPL material out there. But the issues raised in the Debian criticism are much more serious, as far as I'm concerned. They deal in detail with its vaguenesses, its difficult points, and essentially with how well it can really be used and how free it truly is.
I'm not really sure whether the changes amount to addressing all these issues (where 'addressing' may just mean 'objection noted, but no change'). A diff would be helpful...
It's the difference between protection and recovery. drDugan's callhome (and TFA's use of SETI@home, of course) provides a chance of recovery but reduces protection (they can boot it). Locking down the boot sequence provides pretty solid protection, but your chances of getting it back move closer to nil.
Absolutely right. That one line is the most telling part of the whole letter.
Similarly, consumers who want to consume content on only a single device can pay less than those who want to use it across all of their entertainment areas.
Meaning: We can set our prices so that they pay less.
Meaning: We can set our prices so that the other consumers pay more.
Meaning: We think we have the right to charge for the ability to play media on more than one device. (But we need DRM to do that.)
It would have been better translated, "Consumers who want to use media on more than one device can be forced to pay more -- if we have DRM!"
Companies are coming to believe they have that right. The logic goes like this. "We've got the copyrights to this work. Copyright says we're the only ones permitted to commercially exploit the work. Only we are allowed to make money off the commercial distribution of the work. [LOGIC GAP] We have the right to make money off the commercial distribution of the work. We can take measures to stop people who damage our ability to make money off commercially distributing the work. [LOGIC GAP] We can take measures to stop people who reduce any possible means by which we could make money off the work."
And then there's this. "There are things that some people like to do with this work. They find value in this. If they needed someone's help to do this, that person could charge money. [REFER PREVIOUS LOGIC] Only we can make money off this work. So we could charge them money for this. If they don't need us, they are reducing the money we could make off this work. [REFER PREVIOUS LOGIC] We can take measures to force people to need us, and pay us, if they are to do valuable things with this work."
"There is an excuse"? Would people stop saying this? Every "excuse" you're coming up with is not an excuse but a reason.
By "there is no excuse", TFA would appear to be saying, "P2P is not to blame, nor is any other scapegoat 'stealing sales'", rather than saying, "Wow, there's, umm, all these CDs... and there's no reason at all why they're not selling."
There are many good reasons that may explain why sales are down, including poor quality and inflated prices. This study purports to blow apart an excuse.
Amen, Mr Lethem. When I finally get around to writing my essay on this subject, I'll be sure to respectfully reuse your ideas.
(I was prompted to write one by a discussion with [fantasy fiction-reading] friends on the merits or otherwise of fanfiction. They've loudly defended the author's absolute, unassailable right to control of their own creation, drawing a definite [if fuzzy-edged] distinction between things in the 'public consciousness' [for which read, old 'folklore' and such stories] and things traceable to a modern author. Me, I plan to write about how people can have the perfectly good and natural desire to take something they read and retell, expand, or otherwise build upon a work. Basically, modern copyright is killing off the ancient art of the storyteller [one who retells, interprets, and sometimes performs another's story, rather than composing their own 'original']... and fanfiction is, to a degree, the somewhat ignominious remnant of this art.
Why is everyone acting like this is (a) just some 'America meets the third world' issue, and (b) all to do with money and big pharmaceutical companies and how, oh, but they need that money to develop it?
Okay, yes, on the one hand this is Slashdot, most of you are American. But on the other hand, this is Slashdot, most of you are aware of the world beyond your borders, or so it usually seems.
Here's a story a week earlier from the (Australian) ABC on Indonesia criticising an Australian pharmaceutical company for developing a vaccine with "their" IP. The company says that they won't and in fact can't profiteer out of this vaccine, that it's been developed for a fixed sum. This is of course only what the company themselves say about themselves, but in context I'm more likely to take them at their word, given the Indonesian government's position.
Most software under the GPL allows 'any later version'. (The FSF's default GPL boilerplate certainly does.) Anyone distributing this software can change the licence used from GPLv2 to GPLv3(,4,5...) just by editing their files to have a '3' instead of a '2'.
So if kernel.org did this, voila, Linux is GPLv3, just like that. (Another poster states that some parts of the kernel specify GPLv2 only. But then they'd be distributing parts under GPLv2, parts under GPLv3, and the net effect is that anyone distributing the whole kernel has to comply with the GPLv3 anyway.)
As an Australian who lived in the US for half of 2005, I was amazed (appalled?) at how much TV advertising was given over to three things: drugs, diets, and lawyers.
Almost the only drug advertising you see here is for common things like headache pills, so the very problem TFA is on about is pretty alien to Australians. I think it's a safe bet that less drug advertising will do you no harm.
(I was also nervously amused by the long listing of side effects by the voiceover. Our headache pill ads just say, 'If pain persists, see a doctor.' A very few more specialised drugs are advertised once in a while, and they usually say something like, 'Ask your pharmacist about possible side effects'. Don't get me wrong, I do think it's good that they tell you, 'May cause rash, vomiting, incontinence, death, growth spurts, Presidential nomination, or severe brain damage.' It's just another alien thing about it.)
As for the diets—with 'diets' I include food ads that boast about how they suit Current Fad Diet X, or just spout buzzwords like 'Low carbs!'. And of course we have a little of that here, but generally our buzzwords haven't advanced past '97% fat free!'. And lawyers? Well, half the lawyer ads were telling people to sue drug companies, so fix one problem and the other might go away...
I can play PS3 games and Xbox 360 games, and Wii games for that matter. I'm a hybrid player! Will I end the format war?
No, seriously, there's a metaphor here. The companies involved will just keep pushing out their respective formats to compete for time from the multi-format players. This isn't ending the format war, just preserving it, taking away most of the pressure to end it. Format wars 'end' when someone LOSES.
So I browsed from TFA to the Microsoft website's piracy section. Yeah, all the misinformation about how piracy is hurting our culture, EULAs are necessary, and FOSS is bad ("Imagine if anything you thought, made, or distributed could be legally reproduced and freely given away by others") is amusing, in a worrying-that-people-will-believe-this way. But my favourite part is this: Worldwide Piracy Sites.
Microsoft posting links to "worldwide piracy sites"? Who the hell came up with the title for this page? Hilarious.
Actually, now that I browse deeper, this kind of ambiguity is rampant. Piracy basics. Software Piracy resources. Maybe they're trying to get Google hits — when someone searches for information on how to pirate things, they instead get Microsoft's 'don't do it!' spiel and decide not to!
Ah, yes. So, Osama, if caught, will be tried in an "international court", right?
I didn't say that. However, if he's caught by some country other than the US, the fact that he's allegedly committed crimes against international law will carry much more weight than the specifically American offences.
All of these crimes are by definition being conducted on US soil. Maybe you disagree with that definition, but that's just too damn bad.
Funny, I thought I specifically pointed that out in my own post. I certainly don't disagree with it. The question is not whether crimes have been committed that are prosecutable under US law, but whether there is any reasonable cause to believe that the two men arrested participated in those crimes—in any way that doesn't make a mockery of the legal system in how it defines 'participating' in a crime.
Let's look at what the US is actually after Osama bin Laden for: 1. Bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Embassies are, AFAIK, considered to be enclaves of the represented country; thus, US soil. 2. The 9/11 attacks. Definitely on US soil.
And alleged involvement in assorted other terrorist acts, which may not be against the US. But all of the above are also against INTERNATIONAL law. So, Osama bin Laden is wanted in the US for conspiring to commit US-law crimes on US soil, and international-law crimes internationally. Your qualification that he hasn't done anything while HIMSELF on US soil is irrelevant, a straw man.
There is no international law against anything these men have done. The most that the US could really be after them for, and the limit of any (still thinly stretched) comparison to Osama bin Laden, is conspiring in the breach of US anti-gambling laws.
IANAL, but I do have some idea of what 'faulty logic' really looks like.
Actually I seem to recall reading something from GNU about how you're quite entitled to not accept the GPL, in which case you only have your default rights under copyright law (i.e. you may obtain a copy from a legitimate distributor, which is 'anyone who did agree to the GPL' in this case, and you may use it personally... the exact bounds of your rights to 'use' will vary and IANAL).
True, doing so doesn't make much sense unless you're trying to make some ideological statement about the GPL. But it's still an agreement, because (again, IANAL, but) no private party has the right to make a one-sided declaration of what someone else can or cannot do. Either the law already says they can or cannot, and you're just asserting your legal rights, or you're going beyond what the law says (either more or less permissive), in which case the other party must agree (even implicitly) to your terms.
It exists and I live there... but of course, 'we' would say that, wouldn't we?
But seriously. The problem with your argument is this: If Western Australia doesn't exist, what the hell is keeping the rest of the country's economy afloat?;-)
We're kind of like California, our economy is stronger than many sovereign countries'. If our 'nonexistent' state and its very real income finally got around to seceding, the rest of the country would be right up the creek... The best part is, this solar car thing is just our ruse to steal technology before we break away! Take that, Eastern States!
Heck, this whole discussion has gotten off to a bad start. Maybe it's the video that did it; too many people are seeing this as a gimmick or even a fake, just because 'it doesn't look right'. The ABC's coverage does a better job than the SMH, methinks, and of course there's the CSIRO's own release.
This shirt is real. The idea is to get people interested in the idea of this sort of wearable technology. There are more practical applications being put forward by the team behind it. That's not to say they're not going to try and market this one, though.
And actually, Turnitin can preserve the very copyright protection the students are claiming is being violated. Their service actually provides "prior art" to all students' submissions.
You're confusing copyright with patents. (Sadly, lumping them under the term "intellectual property" will do that.)
Copyright exists on creative works; if you come up with it on your own, it's yours, regardless of whether anyone previously came up with anything similar. That is, copyrights allow for independent invention (although there may be a need to prove that you really did independently invent it, and didn't plagiarise anyone). "Prior art" is irrelevant.
Patents exist for inventions; if you come up with something first, you can get the patent on it. Independent invention is no help, and prior art is everything.
Thus: Turnitin isn't protecting any copyrights by showing "prior art". At best, you could say they're providing a service that records the date and author of a work, a copyright registration scheme. But on the other hand, flagging similarities as 'OMG plagariasm!!' stifles independent invention.
Slashdot Mirror
Taube's article is pretty long. It's still much faster to read it than to watch Lustig's whole presentation. If you can, do both, of course. If you can't or won't WTFV, then RTFA. If you can't or won't RTFA, then here's a summary.
Yes, too much of anything is toxic. Duh. That's not what Lustig or Taube are talking about. They're also not talking about "empty calories" -- the consumption of lots of sugar without other nutrients, meaning your overall calorie intake is higher, so you get fat and have obesity-related problems.
What they're talking about is the question of whether fructose directly causes health problems of its own accord -- namely, things like fatty liver and insulin resistance, things which may in turn raise the risk of diabetes and cancer independent of whether you get fat.
What Taube will tell you, that Lustig won't, is that the research is not conclusive. It all shows very strong correlation, but that of course isn't causation. And that's caused all these disputes of what the real problem is, particularly whether it's fat or sugar that's responsible.
Taube says that we should be considering the possibility that it's both; or at least, abandoning the idea that it must be either-or. Similarly, on the question of whether it's sucrose or HFCS that's worse, he suggests that they're so similar (both are glucose-fructose mixtures in nearly equal proportions) that they're probably both just as bad as each other.
Too much of anything is toxic; but (Taube says) because the research is inconclusive, nobody can say how much fructose is "too much". It's an established fact that short-term, high-dose fructose intake causes these problems (fatty liver et al.), but it's not known what long-term intake at the levels currently typical in the US will do.
The circumstantial evidence suggests that it will cause the same problems, eventually. And of course various people (like Lustig) have seized on this circumstantial stuff as damning evidence. But just because they're overstating the case, doesn't mean they're wrong, says Taube.
Yes, this is basically just a big MS bash-fest for the Slashdot crowds. Yes, Cansdale is not an open source hero, nor are his hands completely clean in all of this (whatever the legal truths, and whatever the hypocrisy of Microsoft pointing this out, it does look like he's acted in bad faith on some points). But that doesn't change a few basic things. Like why people here are bashing MS. Anything Cansdale might have done won't diminish the inherent flaws in MS's position, particularly how the sole EULA clause 'forbidding' his work probably doesn't apply, since it appears the Express edition is not 'technically limited' from loading add-ins after all.
And please don't make Cansdale's position sound worse than it is. You've already 'fessed up to misreading MS's form response for something Cansdale wrote himself, so thank you for that. But just how exactly do you find those two EULA clauses to be 'pretty much exactly the same'?
Vague. You can't do anything that's been 'technically limited' by the software. What constitutes a technical limitation, and what is simply beyond the scope of the product? Taken to the extreme... Express is not a 3D action game, so you may not work around this by installing any 3D action games on your computer. Basically, this means, 'We don't want people to do certain things with Express. We define what those are. No, we're not giving you a list, otherwise we won't be able to change our minds later.'
Very specific (albeit contingent on how specific the rest of the EULA is). 'If we don't specifically list it, you can't do it.' This lays everything out in the licence. No changing one's mind later.
You are on the way to no public domain.
What you say!!
You have no chance to disclaim make your freedom.
My first reaction was to mentally correct 'company' to 'country', but then the irony hit. I still don't know if it was deliberate, but well played, sir or ma'am.
(Incidentally, and I've said this before to many of my Australian compatriots about my time in the States, but what struck me most about day-to-day American life was the advertising: diets, drugs and lawyers. Often more than one in the same ad—like telling you to sue Merck, through the services of law firm X of course. They 'know how to make companies like Merck pay!')
...but that's because I'm Australian. Here, the ratings are enforceable in law. Specifically, we have two ratings, MA 15+ and R 18+, that are legally restricted to persons over 15 or 18, respectively, unless accompanied by a parent or guardian blah blah etc. (Actually, we also have an X rating, which can't legally be sold in any state, and a 'refused classification', which is just plain illegal.)
The problem? R ratings only exist on movies, not games. If a game would merit an R rating, it cannot be sold in Australia. Now, part of this is because the politicians are stupid -- I read a report on a get-together of the state attorneys-general, where the South Australian AG literally said they had to think of the children -- but it's also partly because they realise that retailers generally ignore the legalities of the MA rating.
If retailers started being told to toe the line and check ages when selling MA games, we'd be one step closer, paradoxically, to a less regulated video games retail industry in Australia.
Just a quick stab at one point in all that mind-numbing garbage:
'Unprecedented', because before now, you damn well didn't have the power or the right to make them choose, and charge them for it! You still don't have the right, or wouldn't if government wasn't handing it to you; you've just discovered that this DRM thing could give you the power, so you think you have the right.
Thus, translation:
Well, that is a problem, but overall I'm more concerned with whether they've addressed Debian's criticisms. The GNU criticisms are basically, 'People refer to them vaguely, and you can't use them with our licenses.' The latter is a considerable practical problem, given the mass of GPL material out there. But the issues raised in the Debian criticism are much more serious, as far as I'm concerned. They deal in detail with its vaguenesses, its difficult points, and essentially with how well it can really be used and how free it truly is.
I'm not really sure whether the changes amount to addressing all these issues (where 'addressing' may just mean 'objection noted, but no change'). A diff would be helpful...
It's the difference between protection and recovery. drDugan's callhome (and TFA's use of SETI@home, of course) provides a chance of recovery but reduces protection (they can boot it). Locking down the boot sequence provides pretty solid protection, but your chances of getting it back move closer to nil.
Absolutely right. That one line is the most telling part of the whole letter.
Meaning: We can set our prices so that they pay less.
Meaning: We can set our prices so that the other consumers pay more.
Meaning: We think we have the right to charge for the ability to play media on more than one device. (But we need DRM to do that.)
It would have been better translated, "Consumers who want to use media on more than one device can be forced to pay more -- if we have DRM!"
Companies are coming to believe they have that right. The logic goes like this. "We've got the copyrights to this work. Copyright says we're the only ones permitted to commercially exploit the work. Only we are allowed to make money off the commercial distribution of the work. [LOGIC GAP] We have the right to make money off the commercial distribution of the work. We can take measures to stop people who damage our ability to make money off commercially distributing the work. [LOGIC GAP] We can take measures to stop people who reduce any possible means by which we could make money off the work."
And then there's this. "There are things that some people like to do with this work. They find value in this. If they needed someone's help to do this, that person could charge money. [REFER PREVIOUS LOGIC] Only we can make money off this work. So we could charge them money for this. If they don't need us, they are reducing the money we could make off this work. [REFER PREVIOUS LOGIC] We can take measures to force people to need us, and pay us, if they are to do valuable things with this work."
Thus, DRM.
"There is an excuse"? Would people stop saying this? Every "excuse" you're coming up with is not an excuse but a reason.
By "there is no excuse", TFA would appear to be saying, "P2P is not to blame, nor is any other scapegoat 'stealing sales'", rather than saying, "Wow, there's, umm, all these CDs... and there's no reason at all why they're not selling."
There are many good reasons that may explain why sales are down, including poor quality and inflated prices. This study purports to blow apart an excuse.
Amen, Mr Lethem. When I finally get around to writing my essay on this subject, I'll be sure to respectfully reuse your ideas.
(I was prompted to write one by a discussion with [fantasy fiction-reading] friends on the merits or otherwise of fanfiction. They've loudly defended the author's absolute, unassailable right to control of their own creation, drawing a definite [if fuzzy-edged] distinction between things in the 'public consciousness' [for which read, old 'folklore' and such stories] and things traceable to a modern author. Me, I plan to write about how people can have the perfectly good and natural desire to take something they read and retell, expand, or otherwise build upon a work. Basically, modern copyright is killing off the ancient art of the storyteller [one who retells, interprets, and sometimes performs another's story, rather than composing their own 'original']... and fanfiction is, to a degree, the somewhat ignominious remnant of this art.
Why is everyone acting like this is (a) just some 'America meets the third world' issue, and (b) all to do with money and big pharmaceutical companies and how, oh, but they need that money to develop it?
Okay, yes, on the one hand this is Slashdot, most of you are American. But on the other hand, this is Slashdot, most of you are aware of the world beyond your borders, or so it usually seems.
Here's a story a week earlier from the (Australian) ABC on Indonesia criticising an Australian pharmaceutical company for developing a vaccine with "their" IP. The company says that they won't and in fact can't profiteer out of this vaccine, that it's been developed for a fixed sum. This is of course only what the company themselves say about themselves, but in context I'm more likely to take them at their word, given the Indonesian government's position.
Most software under the GPL allows 'any later version'. (The FSF's default GPL boilerplate certainly does.) Anyone distributing this software can change the licence used from GPLv2 to GPLv3(,4,5...) just by editing their files to have a '3' instead of a '2'.
So if kernel.org did this, voila, Linux is GPLv3, just like that. (Another poster states that some parts of the kernel specify GPLv2 only. But then they'd be distributing parts under GPLv2, parts under GPLv3, and the net effect is that anyone distributing the whole kernel has to comply with the GPLv3 anyway.)
As an Australian who lived in the US for half of 2005, I was amazed (appalled?) at how much TV advertising was given over to three things: drugs, diets, and lawyers.
Almost the only drug advertising you see here is for common things like headache pills, so the very problem TFA is on about is pretty alien to Australians. I think it's a safe bet that less drug advertising will do you no harm.
(I was also nervously amused by the long listing of side effects by the voiceover. Our headache pill ads just say, 'If pain persists, see a doctor.' A very few more specialised drugs are advertised once in a while, and they usually say something like, 'Ask your pharmacist about possible side effects'. Don't get me wrong, I do think it's good that they tell you, 'May cause rash, vomiting, incontinence, death, growth spurts, Presidential nomination, or severe brain damage.' It's just another alien thing about it.)
As for the diets—with 'diets' I include food ads that boast about how they suit Current Fad Diet X, or just spout buzzwords like 'Low carbs!'. And of course we have a little of that here, but generally our buzzwords haven't advanced past '97% fat free!'. And lawyers? Well, half the lawyer ads were telling people to sue drug companies, so fix one problem and the other might go away...
I can play PS3 games and Xbox 360 games, and Wii games for that matter. I'm a hybrid player! Will I end the format war?
No, seriously, there's a metaphor here. The companies involved will just keep pushing out their respective formats to compete for time from the multi-format players. This isn't ending the format war, just preserving it, taking away most of the pressure to end it. Format wars 'end' when someone LOSES.
If that were true, the war would have been won when they renamed it Freedom dressing.
So I browsed from TFA to the Microsoft website's piracy section. Yeah, all the misinformation about how piracy is hurting our culture, EULAs are necessary, and FOSS is bad ("Imagine if anything you thought, made, or distributed could be legally reproduced and freely given away by others") is amusing, in a worrying-that-people-will-believe-this way. But my favourite part is this: Worldwide Piracy Sites.
Microsoft posting links to "worldwide piracy sites"? Who the hell came up with the title for this page? Hilarious.
Actually, now that I browse deeper, this kind of ambiguity is rampant. Piracy basics. Software Piracy resources. Maybe they're trying to get Google hits — when someone searches for information on how to pirate things, they instead get Microsoft's 'don't do it!' spiel and decide not to!
I didn't say that. However, if he's caught by some country other than the US, the fact that he's allegedly committed crimes against international law will carry much more weight than the specifically American offences.
Funny, I thought I specifically pointed that out in my own post. I certainly don't disagree with it. The question is not whether crimes have been committed that are prosecutable under US law, but whether there is any reasonable cause to believe that the two men arrested participated in those crimes—in any way that doesn't make a mockery of the legal system in how it defines 'participating' in a crime.
Your point is what, exactly?
Let's look at what the US is actually after Osama bin Laden for:
1. Bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Embassies are, AFAIK, considered to be enclaves of the represented country; thus, US soil.
2. The 9/11 attacks. Definitely on US soil.
And alleged involvement in assorted other terrorist acts, which may not be against the US. But all of the above are also against INTERNATIONAL law. So, Osama bin Laden is wanted in the US for conspiring to commit US-law crimes on US soil, and international-law crimes internationally. Your qualification that he hasn't done anything while HIMSELF on US soil is irrelevant, a straw man.
There is no international law against anything these men have done. The most that the US could really be after them for, and the limit of any (still thinly stretched) comparison to Osama bin Laden, is conspiring in the breach of US anti-gambling laws.
IANAL, but I do have some idea of what 'faulty logic' really looks like.
Actually I seem to recall reading something from GNU about how you're quite entitled to not accept the GPL, in which case you only have your default rights under copyright law (i.e. you may obtain a copy from a legitimate distributor, which is 'anyone who did agree to the GPL' in this case, and you may use it personally... the exact bounds of your rights to 'use' will vary and IANAL).
True, doing so doesn't make much sense unless you're trying to make some ideological statement about the GPL. But it's still an agreement, because (again, IANAL, but) no private party has the right to make a one-sided declaration of what someone else can or cannot do. Either the law already says they can or cannot, and you're just asserting your legal rights, or you're going beyond what the law says (either more or less permissive), in which case the other party must agree (even implicitly) to your terms.
It exists and I live there... but of course, 'we' would say that, wouldn't we?
But seriously. The problem with your argument is this: If Western Australia doesn't exist, what the hell is keeping the rest of the country's economy afloat? ;-)
We're kind of like California, our economy is stronger than many sovereign countries'. If our 'nonexistent' state and its very real income finally got around to seceding, the rest of the country would be right up the creek... The best part is, this solar car thing is just our ruse to steal technology before we break away! Take that, Eastern States!
That got modded insightful?
Heck, this whole discussion has gotten off to a bad start. Maybe it's the video that did it; too many people are seeing this as a gimmick or even a fake, just because 'it doesn't look right'. The ABC's coverage does a better job than the SMH, methinks, and of course there's the CSIRO's own release.
This shirt is real. The idea is to get people interested in the idea of this sort of wearable technology. There are more practical applications being put forward by the team behind it. That's not to say they're not going to try and market this one, though.
And actually, Turnitin can preserve the very copyright protection the students are claiming is being violated. Their service actually provides "prior art" to all students' submissions.
You're confusing copyright with patents. (Sadly, lumping them under the term "intellectual property" will do that.)
Copyright exists on creative works; if you come up with it on your own, it's yours, regardless of whether anyone previously came up with anything similar. That is, copyrights allow for independent invention (although there may be a need to prove that you really did independently invent it, and didn't plagiarise anyone). "Prior art" is irrelevant.
Patents exist for inventions; if you come up with something first, you can get the patent on it. Independent invention is no help, and prior art is everything.
Thus: Turnitin isn't protecting any copyrights by showing "prior art". At best, you could say they're providing a service that records the date and author of a work, a copyright registration scheme. But on the other hand, flagging similarities as 'OMG plagariasm!!' stifles independent invention.
Eris - arse... seriously people!!!
Doesn't sound that way at all to me. (Australian, for the record.) "Erishole" sounds rather like "aerosol", more so if said with an American accent.
Ivan Arce
I've one too.