No system (that actually does anything can be 100% efficient, but a part of a system can be. For example to get a hypothetical spintronics microprocessor to run at an appreciable rate, there would have to be energy dissipation at some point. But that doesn't mean that the "wires" in the device couldn't be 100% efficient.
No, entropy doesn't have to increase. However, for anything to change there must be entropy production at some point. Processes where there is no entropy generation have no directionality, so they either oscillate or move infinitely slow. So you can have a superconducting wire that transports current without resistance (i.e. without generating entropy), but to actually get current flowing through it at a significant rate, you need to generate entropy at one end.
Collecting has made comics too expensive for kids.
I don't think that collecting has much to do with the price of new comics; it has more to do with rising costs of production and distribution and declining circulation.
but comics are often less about "reading" and more about "collecting".
But one reason they are collected is their ephemeral nature. You can't go to the library and check out issue number 31 of Spiderman. There will be some people who will collect any physical item, but there are many people who buy collectible comics just to read them. Without these purchasers, demand and price of old comics is likely to fall.
I disagree that the supreme court is stuck. the community standards issue is only 1/3 of the test required to find something obscene.
Prurient interest is pretty much a gimme. We're talking tentacle-rape manga here.
That leaves "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." This is perhaps arguable--but it was argued and the jury made a judgement. The Supreme Court is just not in the business of second-guessing juries.
We all know that smoking is highly addictive and if second hand smoke is so prevalent, why aren't there millions of people addicted to second hand smoke?
That's a pretty foolish argument. The addictive effects of smoking are due to nicotine, and require a relatively high dose. The harmful effects of smoke are (mostly) due to other components of smoke, many of which are more potent.
I followed the links, but got no information re what the local obscenity laws are in Dallas. Did the comic sold violate them? If so, then what's the issue...?
Yes, local determination of obscenity is on the whole, a good thing. But I have no doubt that you could walk into any porn store in Dallas and pick up nastier porn--with photos of real people, not drawings--than anything in the comic. Castillo is simply the victim of prejudice: Comics are for kids, so anybody drawing pornographic pictures for comic books is giving porn to kids, and that's obscene.
Probably, Castillo was just unlucky in the jury selection, or the prosecutor was better than Castillo's lawyer, and was able to exclude from the jury anybody smart enough to understand that comics aren't necessarily for kids.
How refreshing that the Supreme Court is repsecting state statute on this one.
Actually, what they're respecting is their own precedents, which hold that the determination of what is and is not obscene is a matter of community standards.
The First Amendment is not a "Federal law", nor is it a law at all. It defines rights guaranteed to citizens which cannot be abrogated by the federal government, nor the states, nor local governments
However, it is already well established from previous Supreme Court rulings obscenity is not protected under the First Amendment, and that the determination of what is and is not obscene is made according to local standards. So all the Supreme Court is doing is declining to overrule their own previous decisions--something that the Supreme Court is understandably reluctant to do.
Yes, the Supreme Court is kind of stuck here, no matter what they might think of the merits of this particular case, unless they are prepared to throw out their long-standing community standards precedent. After all, there is no way that the Supreme Court is capable of ruling on whether particular material that is at least arguably obscene (i.e. it isn't a political tract) is in violation of the standards of a particular community. That's a matter for local juries. And if the jury makes an unfair decision, well, them's the breaks of the jury system.
Yes, I recently saw a Panther beta. $129 seems a quite reasonable price for the enhancements, which clearly go quite a ways beyond merely fixing things that should have worked right in the first place.
except a good number of people are in love with the idea of intellectual property ownership because they're quite simply control freaks, and not because they just need to make a living
Actually, I think that it boils down to the fact that "intellectual property" is rapidly becoming the most valuable US export. This is an area where government and big business are incomplete accord--they want foreigners to pay for our movies, music, and software. But it is very hard to convince other governments that they should enforce our copyrights and patents when US consumers themselves ignore them.
In reading the article, I kept wondering, "Is there any actual mathematics behind this, or is it just philosophy and semantics?" The article makes it sound like the latter.
This is a case where the letter of the law deviates so far from the popular understanding of morality that it is simply being ignored. Frankly, I doubt whether the public will ever accept the notion that copyright or patent law applies to noncommercial sharing, or that there is anything immoral about it. I think that the continued effort to use technology and ever-more draconian legal tactics to cram such restrictions down the public's throat will ultimately cost content producers more in the ill will that it creates than they make in sales. I believe that we are moving into an era in which people pay for convenience, presentation, and out of general goodwill (e.g. shareware fees) rather than for the content itself.
But the problem is that something like 3/4 BIA employees are Native Americans, which presents a HUGE conflict of interest in this lawsuit. So basically the people suing for negligence and mishandling of funds are the people responsible for handling those funds.
By that reasoning, it's a conflict of interest that we elect the people people responsible for handling our tax funds.
Voting takes place once every two years in the US (different for other countries). And it only takes place on one day. Security through obscurity can hold that long.
So you are presuming that a completely new obscure system will be developed every two years? And that nobody with evil intentions will get access to the system in the time interval between completion of development and voting day?
What if EFF and all the other anti-RIAA organisations arranged a massive world-wide share-n-download-it-all campaign where billions of people shared gazillion of files all over the place?
An organization that publicly advocates an illegal action puts itself in a very vulnerable position. Any effort to organize such an action would be shut down in a hurry by legal injunctions, probably before it actually got underway. The organizations behind it would all be sued out of existence, very probably under the racketeering (RICO) law, which provides for triple damages. That would leave the RIAA with even more assets to with which to pursue copyright infringement, while taking their major opposition out of the picture.
The use of the term "theft" to encompass the taking of nonphysical items of value, where the victim is deprived, not of the item itself, but of his exclusive control over its disposition, has long been well accepted in our culture (e.g. theft of services, information theft).
Yes, it is still theft, although on a moral level it ranks about on the level of stealing from the Mafia (although probably still a bit less risky). The monolithic recording industry has been ripping off recording artists for years, using their near-monopoly status to force artists to accept unfavorable and unfair terms. This is why the RIAA has only limited support from recording artists. They've been ripped off for years. They'd undoubtedly rather have the money, but if they're going to be robbed, they'd rather see the benefit go to their fans than to recording industry fat cats. About the only recording artists supporting the RIAA are the few mega stars who are successful enough to force their labels to cough up a share of the profits (or even better, own their own label). Ultimately, music sharing is going to destroy the recording industry as we know it. It will be replaced by far less profitable distribution systems in which customers pay for convenience rather than for music. The average artist might well end up doing a bit better, but will probably still make more money from concerts than recordings, just like now.
The only way I can explain this is that the Mac users aren't the ones griping in regard to most DRM issues, they're actually supportive of "soft" DRM.
Or perhaps a lot of Mac users actually knew exactly what they were and were not getting for their money when they bought tunes from the iTunes store, and considered the price reasonable.
Personally, I think the price is still a bit high, given the restrictions, so I'm not buying tunes from the iTunes Store. After all, I can buy used CDs for nearly the same price and I get a physical CD for backup, somewhat better quality, and I don't have to authorize my computer to listen to the songs, . But there is certainly a price point at which I would be willing to accept Apple's restrictions. Each user has to make that determination for himself
Thats not what I meant... What I mean is render the HTML offscreen (imagine a hidden IE window for example). Then do the equivalent of "File.. Save As... *.txt" and convert it to a.txt document. No images, no fonts. Then run the filter on this text. Bingo!!! Any images will be (and should be) ignored.
A program can certainly analyze the HTML code (which actually is text, so no rendering is required). This will work for some of the HTML obfuscation tricks. But this won't do much for the most common spam I am currently receiving, in which the spam elements of the message are entirely contained within a graphic.
Why not have your spam filter render the HTML in an offscreen buffer (using existing browser/plugin API's), than pull the straight text out of the rendered document and run the filter on that?
Much harder than it sounds. Humans are much better at recognizing text than any program, so fooling recognition of rendered text would be even easier than fooling a Baysian filter. It would be trivial to develop a font that could be read by a human but not even seen as text by a recognition algorithm.
More like, "how long will the schools be able to justify spending thousands of dollars to protect the identities of students breaking the law."
Let's not forget "innocent until proved guilty." It's not like the RIAA hasn't occasionally been overzealous in their efforts to pursue copyright violators. The schools are merely fulfilling their legal and ethical obligations to their students by requiring that the RIAA have its legal ducks in a row if it wants the schools to turn over personal info about students accused of breaking the law.
I imagine a great deal of parents will use these as house-arrest devices, tracking every movement of thier kids all the way through 18 years of age.
How insidious. This will have a terrible impact upon the personal freedom of teenagers who are too stupid to leave the thing behind when going somewhere they don't want their parents to know about.
Slashdot Mirror
No system (that actually does anything can be 100% efficient, but a part of a system can be. For example to get a hypothetical spintronics microprocessor to run at an appreciable rate, there would have to be energy dissipation at some point. But that doesn't mean that the "wires" in the device couldn't be 100% efficient.
No, entropy doesn't have to increase. However, for anything to change there must be entropy production at some point. Processes where there is no entropy generation have no directionality, so they either oscillate or move infinitely slow. So you can have a superconducting wire that transports current without resistance (i.e. without generating entropy), but to actually get current flowing through it at a significant rate, you need to generate entropy at one end.
I don't think that collecting has much to do with the price of new comics; it has more to do with rising costs of production and distribution and declining circulation.
But one reason they are collected is their ephemeral nature. You can't go to the library and check out issue number 31 of Spiderman. There will be some people who will collect any physical item, but there are many people who buy collectible comics just to read them. Without these purchasers, demand and price of old comics is likely to fall.
Prurient interest is pretty much a gimme. We're talking tentacle-rape manga here.
That leaves "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." This is perhaps arguable--but it was argued and the jury made a judgement. The Supreme Court is just not in the business of second-guessing juries.
That's a pretty foolish argument. The addictive effects of smoking are due to nicotine, and require a relatively high dose. The harmful effects of smoke are (mostly) due to other components of smoke, many of which are more potent.
Yes, local determination of obscenity is on the whole, a good thing. But I have no doubt that you could walk into any porn store in Dallas and pick up nastier porn--with photos of real people, not drawings--than anything in the comic. Castillo is simply the victim of prejudice: Comics are for kids, so anybody drawing pornographic pictures for comic books is giving porn to kids, and that's obscene.
Probably, Castillo was just unlucky in the jury selection, or the prosecutor was better than Castillo's lawyer, and was able to exclude from the jury anybody smart enough to understand that comics aren't necessarily for kids.
How refreshing that the Supreme Court is repsecting state statute on this one.
Actually, what they're respecting is their own precedents, which hold that the determination of what is and is not obscene is a matter of community standards.
However, it is already well established from previous Supreme Court rulings obscenity is not protected under the First Amendment, and that the determination of what is and is not obscene is made according to local standards. So all the Supreme Court is doing is declining to overrule their own previous decisions--something that the Supreme Court is understandably reluctant to do.
Yes, the Supreme Court is kind of stuck here, no matter what they might think of the merits of this particular case, unless they are prepared to throw out their long-standing community standards precedent. After all, there is no way that the Supreme Court is capable of ruling on whether particular material that is at least arguably obscene (i.e. it isn't a political tract) is in violation of the standards of a particular community. That's a matter for local juries. And if the jury makes an unfair decision, well, them's the breaks of the jury system.
Yes, I recently saw a Panther beta. $129 seems a quite reasonable price for the enhancements, which clearly go quite a ways beyond merely fixing things that should have worked right in the first place.
In reading the article, I kept wondering, "Is there any actual mathematics behind this, or is it just philosophy and semantics?" The article makes it sound like the latter.
This is a case where the letter of the law deviates so far from the popular understanding of morality that it is simply being ignored. Frankly, I doubt whether the public will ever accept the notion that copyright or patent law applies to noncommercial sharing, or that there is anything immoral about it. I think that the continued effort to use technology and ever-more draconian legal tactics to cram such restrictions down the public's throat will ultimately cost content producers more in the ill will that it creates than they make in sales. I believe that we are moving into an era in which people pay for convenience, presentation, and out of general goodwill (e.g. shareware fees) rather than for the content itself.
So you are presuming that a completely new obscure system will be developed every two years? And that nobody with evil intentions will get access to the system in the time interval between completion of development and voting day?
An organization that publicly advocates an illegal action puts itself in a very vulnerable position. Any effort to organize such an action would be shut down in a hurry by legal injunctions, probably before it actually got underway. The organizations behind it would all be sued out of existence, very probably under the racketeering (RICO) law, which provides for triple damages. That would leave the RIAA with even more assets to with which to pursue copyright infringement, while taking their major opposition out of the picture.
Nonsense. The word "sharing" has no connotations of legality or illegality. Bank robbers generally share the stolen money.
They are. See for example this and this
The use of the term "theft" to encompass the taking of nonphysical items of value, where the victim is deprived, not of the item itself, but of his exclusive control over its disposition, has long been well accepted in our culture (e.g. theft of services, information theft).
Yes, it is still theft, although on a moral level it ranks about on the level of stealing from the Mafia (although probably still a bit less risky). The monolithic recording industry has been ripping off recording artists for years, using their near-monopoly status to force artists to accept unfavorable and unfair terms. This is why the RIAA has only limited support from recording artists. They've been ripped off for years. They'd undoubtedly rather have the money, but if they're going to be robbed, they'd rather see the benefit go to their fans than to recording industry fat cats. About the only recording artists supporting the RIAA are the few mega stars who are successful enough to force their labels to cough up a share of the profits (or even better, own their own label). Ultimately, music sharing is going to destroy the recording industry as we know it. It will be replaced by far less profitable distribution systems in which customers pay for convenience rather than for music. The average artist might well end up doing a bit better, but will probably still make more money from concerts than recordings, just like now.
Or perhaps a lot of Mac users actually knew exactly what they were and were not getting for their money when they bought tunes from the iTunes store, and considered the price reasonable.
Personally, I think the price is still a bit high, given the restrictions, so I'm not buying tunes from the iTunes Store. After all, I can buy used CDs for nearly the same price and I get a physical CD for backup, somewhat better quality, and I don't have to authorize my computer to listen to the songs, . But there is certainly a price point at which I would be willing to accept Apple's restrictions. Each user has to make that determination for himself
Let's not forget "innocent until proved guilty." It's not like the RIAA hasn't occasionally been overzealous in their efforts to pursue copyright violators. The schools are merely fulfilling their legal and ethical obligations to their students by requiring that the RIAA have its legal ducks in a row if it wants the schools to turn over personal info about students accused of breaking the law.