I know that this case hasn't reached the check-has-been-written stage, but I have got to wonder: is that check considered taxable income by the IRS? I see it as a reimbursement for expenses already paid by the recipient, but the IRS might decide to take their cut of this "new income." How does that usually work?
'Contempt of Court' is a charge that comes from the Judge, not the parties. You can't file to hold the other litigants in CoC. An annoyed Judge might listen appreciatively to the complaint, but usually they don't even want to hear either party make the suggestion.
I've never had any real legal reason to be interested in copyright, but I could probably guess my interest in the issues of C P T S (Copyright, Patent, Trademark, Secret) or "IP" law and ethics to about 1974 also. I was a little kid, wondering what the stamp of 'PAT PEND.' meant when I saw it inside every little Lego(tm) brick I touched, why Megablox never quite fit with Lego even though they were supposedly "compatible", or why the Lego pamphlets implored regular consumers to call them Lego(tm) bricks instead of Legos.:)
Google/YouTube hides under the fact that US copyright law puts the responsibility of reporting violation on the copyright holders. The problem is that a copyright holder should not be reasonably expected to scrape all of YouTube and all other similar sites every day/hour to look for violations just to have somebody else repost the video after it is taken down.
In the past, the big publisher could/would only prosecute the violator if they were able to find out about the violations; in essence, if the violations were big enough and actually cost the publisher some honest-to-capitalism bottom line, then they would get stomped with hefty fines. ObDisney: A brick and mortar storefront in Queens selling thousands of VHS tapes of Bambi for a buck a pop would get prosecuted quickly, while it would be very rare for a daycare with a painting of Mickey on its walls to get prosecuted.
In today's world, the big publisher has MORE opportunity to find SMALLER infringements, and wants to continue wielding the big prosecution stick for EVERY one of those piddly-ass violations. Yet they still want third-parties to help them police the world for THEIR property. ObDisney: Not only do daycares that made Mickey murals get shut down under massive legal and financial threats, but so do otherwise perfectly normal teens who post personal lipsync-Beauty-and-the-Beast-songs videos onto community pages.
The huge fines were designed from a time when it was expected that only 0.0000001% of the actual piracy would ever get found to be prosecuted, and found only because it was a real and egregious dent in real sales. Now that the web exposes so much of the casual ways that trivial amounts of copyrighted material becomes woven into the experience that is culture, corporations are all drooling at the chance to win huge fines from thousands or millions of little sources, regardless of actual damages inflicted.
Thats a magic trick in and of itself, getting people to pay to hate themselves, to be fed tailored insecurities.
Look at what the sheeple vote for, look at what the administration and the corporations lobby for, look at what the representatives fast-track into law.
Maybe it's good riddance for ellipses, and exclamation points too. These types of punctuation are used far too often in today's lax verbal-style form of written communications. Several of my English teachers set quotas to drive the point home: one exclamation, one semicolon, one use of ellipses, one parenthetical or emdash phrase per essay, regardless of length.
I've known... several... people who like to use--overuse, really--points of ellipses... as if to... think aloud... while typing; it drives me bugfuck!!!!!1! to see these devices sprinkled (like salt on potato chips!) These are like those grocery signs that use "quotes" for "emphasis;" who taught them--as I assume they learned it somewhere--that this was the way it should be? It's overdone beyond excess and into OCD territory; just TYPE! YOUR! (F'ING!) SENTENCE already!
I missed a step in the constant stream of iPhone-hacking stories. I caught the "interactive forth-like PROM shell" and the "Hello World" stories, but I missed hearing any "interactive bash shell via wifi" announcement.
The fact that you can run vim is neat, but can you save files to the filesystem? What's the filesystem like? More like HFS or more like ext3? Can you get ssh/wifi going so you don't have to tappity through a soldered cable anymore?
If all the spam were really targeted that well, I doubt there'd be so much animosity to the problem (except from credit service companies and psychologists who treat addicted gamblers).
What gets me is that after twenty years of using email, and 15 years of getting spam email, and 10 years with the same email address, I am currently getting a breakdown of spams like this (numbers guessed but not unrealistically):
600/wk prescription or herbal drug offers
400/wk money transfer scams
300/wk stock pump-n-dump tips (usually gif)
300/wk foreign language (hebrew and russian are big this month)
200/wk long-lost-friend contacting you
200/wk bayes bombs with no discernable ad
150/wk fishing scams
After not responding to any of this, it's not like I'm a good target for any of these, but they still come at me as fast as the MX responds.
This month has had a brutal surge, a lot of new russian and long-lost-friend stuff is getting around my current spam filtering solutions.
How? It has moderation, karma, threads, no client requirements, no abusive bots, and is presented in a form more conductive to essays than to 1-liner chats. Need I go on?
My GP seems to be modded down as a troll even though I thought it was a reasonable observation and talking point, so I don't really see how moderation is helping.
Karma is for the dogs, since it's capped and non-numeric and totally gamed by those who want to.
Threads are the one thing I did mention, so thanks for reading and responding on it... oh, wait.
Since it's heavily dependent on modern web browsers' dynamic features, I fail to see how there are no client requirements.
If you think there are no bots that post to Slashdot, you have got to be joking. Have you read the cesspool of -1?
If it's presented in a form more conducive to essays than to one-liners, why did you reply to my paragraph with a one-line answer?
My initial mental image is that this would simply turn Slashdot a threaded IRC chat vehicle. We all know the quality of discussion online: as it gets faster, it gets worse. Instead of "+1 Insightful", we will need "+1 Merely On Topic." Will moderation changes also be instantly reflected, bringing items in and out of view in real time? How long before you do "fwoop" animations and live character-by-character ajax updates? Imagine the new games the trolls can play.
Not to invoke Godwin's Law here, but I thought that eBay refused auctions of WWII Nazi German wartime memorabilia? Is it just those items that bear the symbol of the Third Reich? It's a cool object to geek sensibilities. I would say that today, it symbolizes a particularly crafty bit of code-busting on the part of the Allies against Nazi Germany, even moreso than the crafty bit of code-creating clock-engineering work on the part of the Germans. But it's still Nazi memorabilia on some level, which I thought was against eBay rules.
You can have robotic industrial machines that just repeat the same motions in response to specific input switches. I don't know of any robots that have autonomy to do anything that they're not specifically built to do.
Well, that is autonomy. No human is telling the robot to weld the next bumper. All conditions look good for welding, according to its own senses and logic, so it executes a weld. If the welding consumables are low, it executes a reload from a part bin. It makes the decisions. Autonomy does not imply an ability to exceed its task or invent methods, just to make its own decisions without further guidance.
"Pound avoirdupois"? That sounds like Frenchy talk. I say we start using "Freedom Pounds!"
Re:Wright brothers are another good example
on
Patents Don't Pay
·
· Score: 1
This story of Wright vs Curtis can be shown as a *positive* example of what how the exclusivity of the patent was *intended* to "promote the useful sciences" instead of merely letting everyone adopt the first nonoptimal solution. If everyone could go with dynamic airfoils because it wasn't "protected", then nobody would bother trying to come up with something even more clever (and often more optimal) to circumvent the protected method.
I'm no fan of modern IP/USPTO politics or policies, but at least I see why patents can be a good thing in theory.
I dunno about that. In the city, I've never seen a rusting Chevy left to rot and leak oil in the yard for a decade. In the city, I've never seen people burning their own garbage out behind the shed, permits or not. In the city, I've never seen a barn that is just left to rot and collapse for a few winters, leaving a fire hazard that's filled with tetanus-risky nails and whatever else was in there.
I understand what you're saying, and the city definitely has its own issues that aren't ideal, but saying that the folks in the countryside are all pure and proactive about saving the environment is not realistic.
That's funny, because I have always seen the "sign your life away" provisions to be the worst part of the FSF and the GPL. Sure, they say they're doing it "for your own good", but that's like your family asking you to sign the committal papers. There's no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship; I will keep my rights to my works, even if there's more trouble involved in the face of a dispute, thank you very much.
I have never been what people would call "hardcore" about games, but for the right content, I'll work on a game long enough to finish it, and found a couple things about playing non-casual games as a casual gamer.
I don't like having a clock against finishing every level. MAYBE on one part of one level, a short time limit to achieve a small, obvious goal. If I'm under the gun to finish every level, I just get turned off. Yet, the opposite is true too: I don't want to play if I can't save for the next hour. Lego Star Wars II has unlockable bonus rounds where you play through a whole episode, with a par time of one hour. I could hit Pause and turn off the TV, but for these bonus rounds, I can't save to turn off the game machine and resume later.
I don't like having no clue about what the objective is. If I can't even figure out what the weak spot on a boss IS, nevermind how to hurt it, without googling for a walkthrough guide, it's a big turnoff. I know it's very formulaic to find out "oh, this game requires collecting the 8 scattered dinguses, one in each world, and then beating the big boss," but it's even worse for games that just add on more and more quests without an obvious end in mind.
I really hate it when there's no way to get through an area without dying many times, or when the controls are taken away from you every three seconds. I don't want the game to be trivial or easy, but I want it to be survivable if I am doing the right thing. Some of the bosses in Zelda were not just difficult for me, they were extremely frustrating to the point it was souring me on the game. Every few seconds, the boss would pick me up or lock me down or shock/burn me out so I can't see a thing or move a muscle. In the brief intervals, I'd have to aim a crosshairs using a cruddy dpad or stick to hit some tiny little target, and of course I'd have to do this a dozen times. In one Lego scene, you walk into stormtrooper headquarters, and no matter your technique, you were going to explode and lose points at least ten times. I have to turn off the machine and wait until later, lest I teach my daughter how to ruin expensive electronics in a fit of pique.
Make it fun, make it possible to succeed, make it clear how to succeed, make it so there's some challenge but not overwhelming, make it so I can save every 15min at worst, and I'll probably play all the way through. Otherwise, I have better things to do with my time.
I know enough about process scheduling to fill a ketchup cup at the nearest burger joint, but it struck me that this sounds like the debate about "network neutrality" vs "tiered service." The O(1) was supposed to be a very generic decision-making system that made a decision in a very agnostic way (to simplify the work down to a predictable consistent order of work). This CFS strikes me as a system which will have a much higher level of complexity and context awareness, which sounds like some processes will get more than others. The intention is to make it fair in the real world but not necessarily balanced, since not all processes are alike in their needs or expectations of task switching.
This is just rambling on, and admittedly it may be straining a metaphor too far, so don't go crazy biting my head off for not knowing all things about the kernel. See 'ketchup cup' above.
I just got back from seeing Live Free or Die Hard. That Mac Guy from the advertisements can hack into the electric grid of the entire eastern United States in a matter of minutes (all while distracted by that sexy new Japanese camera model that speaks his language, hajimemashite, say no more, say no more), using nothing but a little rollup USB keyboard and a stolen Verizon mobile. What the hell is taking YOU guys so long to hack into this iPhone thing? Think Different!;)
I don't think the guy is trying to transform the energy debate, he just thought it would be fun. It reminded me of the bicycle in Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky" (aka Laputa). And by the way, that's "Wile E. Coyote".
I'm wondering whatever happened to the NON-spandex type of comic book for kids? I know about the old days of moralistic censorship, and enjoyed "Understanding Comics" by McCloud, but I'm not seeing ANY kind of modern comic that doesn't involve stretchy or musclebound heroics. The only thing you find in the bookstores are strip-compendiums, like Garfield/Peanuts (too simple for my kid), or Calvin&Hobbes (some humor too esoteric). The rest are very expensive translations of Manga, a fair bit of which is not really pre-teen suitable. As bad as I think Disney can be for rotting your brain, I grew up with all the Scrooge McDuck titles and it at least gave me an early appreciation for the sequential-art mode of storytelling.
Slashdot Mirror
The human mind congeals around age 30.
So mind's younger than that are still at a pudding-like consistency?
If that's true, can you please learn how to use apostrophes properly before you turn thirty? Thanks.
I know that this case hasn't reached the check-has-been-written stage, but I have got to wonder: is that check considered taxable income by the IRS? I see it as a reimbursement for expenses already paid by the recipient, but the IRS might decide to take their cut of this "new income." How does that usually work?
'Contempt of Court' is a charge that comes from the Judge, not the parties. You can't file to hold the other litigants in CoC. An annoyed Judge might listen appreciatively to the complaint, but usually they don't even want to hear either party make the suggestion.
I'm gratified by your reply, Mr. Beckerman.
I've never had any real legal reason to be interested in copyright, but I could probably guess my interest in the issues of C P T S (Copyright, Patent, Trademark, Secret) or "IP" law and ethics to about 1974 also. I was a little kid, wondering what the stamp of 'PAT PEND.' meant when I saw it inside every little Lego(tm) brick I touched, why Megablox never quite fit with Lego even though they were supposedly "compatible", or why the Lego pamphlets implored regular consumers to call them Lego(tm) bricks instead of Legos. :)
In the past, the big publisher could/would only prosecute the violator if they were able to find out about the violations; in essence, if the violations were big enough and actually cost the publisher some honest-to-capitalism bottom line, then they would get stomped with hefty fines. ObDisney: A brick and mortar storefront in Queens selling thousands of VHS tapes of Bambi for a buck a pop would get prosecuted quickly, while it would be very rare for a daycare with a painting of Mickey on its walls to get prosecuted.
In today's world, the big publisher has MORE opportunity to find SMALLER infringements, and wants to continue wielding the big prosecution stick for EVERY one of those piddly-ass violations. Yet they still want third-parties to help them police the world for THEIR property. ObDisney: Not only do daycares that made Mickey murals get shut down under massive legal and financial threats, but so do otherwise perfectly normal teens who post personal lipsync-Beauty-and-the-Beast-songs videos onto community pages.
The huge fines were designed from a time when it was expected that only 0.0000001% of the actual piracy would ever get found to be prosecuted, and found only because it was a real and egregious dent in real sales. Now that the web exposes so much of the casual ways that trivial amounts of copyrighted material becomes woven into the experience that is culture, corporations are all drooling at the chance to win huge fines from thousands or millions of little sources, regardless of actual damages inflicted.
Just a reminder that it is NOT a crime to yell "Fire" in a crowded movie theater if there actually IS a fire in a crowded movie theater. :)
Not to politicize the thread or anything, but
Thats a magic trick in and of itself, getting people to pay to hate themselves, to be fed tailored insecurities.Look at what the sheeple vote for, look at what the administration and the corporations lobby for, look at what the representatives fast-track into law.
Maybe it's good riddance for ellipses, and exclamation points too. These types of punctuation are used far too often in today's lax verbal-style form of written communications. Several of my English teachers set quotas to drive the point home: one exclamation, one semicolon, one use of ellipses, one parenthetical or emdash phrase per essay, regardless of length.
I've known... several... people who like to use--overuse, really--points of ellipses... as if to... think aloud... while typing; it drives me bugfuck!!!!!1! to see these devices sprinkled (like salt on potato chips!) These are like those grocery signs that use "quotes" for "emphasis;" who taught them--as I assume they learned it somewhere--that this was the way it should be? It's overdone beyond excess and into OCD territory; just TYPE! YOUR! (F'ING!) SENTENCE already!
I missed a step in the constant stream of iPhone-hacking stories. I caught the "interactive forth-like PROM shell" and the "Hello World" stories, but I missed hearing any "interactive bash shell via wifi" announcement.
The fact that you can run vim is neat, but can you save files to the filesystem? What's the filesystem like? More like HFS or more like ext3? Can you get ssh/wifi going so you don't have to tappity through a soldered cable anymore?
If all the spam were really targeted that well, I doubt there'd be so much animosity to the problem (except from credit service companies and psychologists who treat addicted gamblers).
What gets me is that after twenty years of using email, and 15 years of getting spam email, and 10 years with the same email address, I am currently getting a breakdown of spams like this (numbers guessed but not unrealistically):
After not responding to any of this, it's not like I'm a good target for any of these, but they still come at me as fast as the MX responds.
This month has had a brutal surge, a lot of new russian and long-lost-friend stuff is getting around my current spam filtering solutions.
My initial mental image is that this would simply turn Slashdot a threaded IRC chat vehicle. We all know the quality of discussion online: as it gets faster, it gets worse. Instead of "+1 Insightful", we will need "+1 Merely On Topic." Will moderation changes also be instantly reflected, bringing items in and out of view in real time? How long before you do "fwoop" animations and live character-by-character ajax updates? Imagine the new games the trolls can play.
If the bidders are aware of the procedure, and thus understand the risk of bidding too high, well, they won't bid too high.
Not to invoke Godwin's Law here, but I thought that eBay refused auctions of WWII Nazi German wartime memorabilia? Is it just those items that bear the symbol of the Third Reich? It's a cool object to geek sensibilities. I would say that today, it symbolizes a particularly crafty bit of code-busting on the part of the Allies against Nazi Germany, even moreso than the crafty bit of code-creating clock-engineering work on the part of the Germans. But it's still Nazi memorabilia on some level, which I thought was against eBay rules.
When 'effect' is used as a verb, it means 'to create.' The article writeup has the same primary-school error. It's not that hard, people.
Well, that is autonomy. No human is telling the robot to weld the next bumper. All conditions look good for welding, according to its own senses and logic, so it executes a weld. If the welding consumables are low, it executes a reload from a part bin. It makes the decisions. Autonomy does not imply an ability to exceed its task or invent methods, just to make its own decisions without further guidance.
"Pound avoirdupois"? That sounds like Frenchy talk. I say we start using "Freedom Pounds!"
This story of Wright vs Curtis can be shown as a *positive* example of what how the exclusivity of the patent was *intended* to "promote the useful sciences" instead of merely letting everyone adopt the first nonoptimal solution. If everyone could go with dynamic airfoils because it wasn't "protected", then nobody would bother trying to come up with something even more clever (and often more optimal) to circumvent the protected method.
I'm no fan of modern IP/USPTO politics or policies, but at least I see why patents can be a good thing in theory.
I dunno about that. In the city, I've never seen a rusting Chevy left to rot and leak oil in the yard for a decade. In the city, I've never seen people burning their own garbage out behind the shed, permits or not. In the city, I've never seen a barn that is just left to rot and collapse for a few winters, leaving a fire hazard that's filled with tetanus-risky nails and whatever else was in there.
I understand what you're saying, and the city definitely has its own issues that aren't ideal, but saying that the folks in the countryside are all pure and proactive about saving the environment is not realistic.
That's funny, because I have always seen the "sign your life away" provisions to be the worst part of the FSF and the GPL. Sure, they say they're doing it "for your own good", but that's like your family asking you to sign the committal papers. There's no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship; I will keep my rights to my works, even if there's more trouble involved in the face of a dispute, thank you very much.
I have never been what people would call "hardcore" about games, but for the right content, I'll work on a game long enough to finish it, and found a couple things about playing non-casual games as a casual gamer.
I don't like having a clock against finishing every level. MAYBE on one part of one level, a short time limit to achieve a small, obvious goal. If I'm under the gun to finish every level, I just get turned off. Yet, the opposite is true too: I don't want to play if I can't save for the next hour. Lego Star Wars II has unlockable bonus rounds where you play through a whole episode, with a par time of one hour. I could hit Pause and turn off the TV, but for these bonus rounds, I can't save to turn off the game machine and resume later.
I don't like having no clue about what the objective is. If I can't even figure out what the weak spot on a boss IS, nevermind how to hurt it, without googling for a walkthrough guide, it's a big turnoff. I know it's very formulaic to find out "oh, this game requires collecting the 8 scattered dinguses, one in each world, and then beating the big boss," but it's even worse for games that just add on more and more quests without an obvious end in mind.
I really hate it when there's no way to get through an area without dying many times, or when the controls are taken away from you every three seconds. I don't want the game to be trivial or easy, but I want it to be survivable if I am doing the right thing. Some of the bosses in Zelda were not just difficult for me, they were extremely frustrating to the point it was souring me on the game. Every few seconds, the boss would pick me up or lock me down or shock/burn me out so I can't see a thing or move a muscle. In the brief intervals, I'd have to aim a crosshairs using a cruddy dpad or stick to hit some tiny little target, and of course I'd have to do this a dozen times. In one Lego scene, you walk into stormtrooper headquarters, and no matter your technique, you were going to explode and lose points at least ten times. I have to turn off the machine and wait until later, lest I teach my daughter how to ruin expensive electronics in a fit of pique.
Make it fun, make it possible to succeed, make it clear how to succeed, make it so there's some challenge but not overwhelming, make it so I can save every 15min at worst, and I'll probably play all the way through. Otherwise, I have better things to do with my time.
I know enough about process scheduling to fill a ketchup cup at the nearest burger joint, but it struck me that this sounds like the debate about "network neutrality" vs "tiered service." The O(1) was supposed to be a very generic decision-making system that made a decision in a very agnostic way (to simplify the work down to a predictable consistent order of work). This CFS strikes me as a system which will have a much higher level of complexity and context awareness, which sounds like some processes will get more than others. The intention is to make it fair in the real world but not necessarily balanced, since not all processes are alike in their needs or expectations of task switching.
This is just rambling on, and admittedly it may be straining a metaphor too far, so don't go crazy biting my head off for not knowing all things about the kernel. See 'ketchup cup' above.
I just got back from seeing Live Free or Die Hard. That Mac Guy from the advertisements can hack into the electric grid of the entire eastern United States in a matter of minutes (all while distracted by that sexy new Japanese camera model that speaks his language, hajimemashite, say no more, say no more), using nothing but a little rollup USB keyboard and a stolen Verizon mobile. What the hell is taking YOU guys so long to hack into this iPhone thing? Think Different! ;)
I don't think the guy is trying to transform the energy debate, he just thought it would be fun. It reminded me of the bicycle in Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky" (aka Laputa). And by the way, that's "Wile E. Coyote".
I'm wondering whatever happened to the NON-spandex type of comic book for kids? I know about the old days of moralistic censorship, and enjoyed "Understanding Comics" by McCloud, but I'm not seeing ANY kind of modern comic that doesn't involve stretchy or musclebound heroics. The only thing you find in the bookstores are strip-compendiums, like Garfield/Peanuts (too simple for my kid), or Calvin&Hobbes (some humor too esoteric). The rest are very expensive translations of Manga, a fair bit of which is not really pre-teen suitable. As bad as I think Disney can be for rotting your brain, I grew up with all the Scrooge McDuck titles and it at least gave me an early appreciation for the sequential-art mode of storytelling.