Pricing is a raise to break-even. It's inescapable, without the influence of government.
And with the customer having perfect knowledge, and with all possible suppliers having equal access to capitol and no artificial barriers to entry into the market.
Of course with any finite system, without some form of regulation to prevent it, the entity with the control of the largest amount of capitol always "wins" in any multi-round commerce game. Once a monopoly grows, they can almost always maintain and expand it into other areas. If nobody else can raise enough money to build the towers, you cannot start a new cell phone company. And how can you convince a lender to lend to you if you plan on competing based on price against an already established player who can easily drop their prices until you go bankrupt? Yes, someone else could come along again to try to compete on price but they will have a tougher time finding a lender (the last lender lost their shirt remember?) and meanwhile the established player has more money than last time in order to temporarily "compete" with the newcomer.
Don't get me wrong - "artificial" intervention is very often harmful, but in my opinion is also very often necessary to provide the type of ecconomic environment we want to live in.
I don't know, but could certainly be persuaded otherwise. If $5k is good total revenue, then spending $1k for the 10th non-free year doesn't make much sense, but I suspect that in that case, there is probably not going to be much money in that 10th year anyway. Additionally, if there isn't much money in it for you, there probably isn't much incentive for the "pirate publisher" to swoop in and start printing copies in competition to you anyway, so copyright protection probably does not matter much.
The real question is if we changed the copyright length would we end up with significantly fewer authors? I suspect that most money for most works is made well within the first 10 years of publication, certainly within the first 20, and so the incentive to create new works is pretty much unchanged if we drop back the length to something more sane - having some sort of sliding registration/tax system for longer terms addresses anyone who thinks they are going to create a timeless classic. I don't know how significant the existence of works that do not START to have significant value long after initial publication. If a series author's early work gains value as their later work gains recognition, perhaps these schemes would have some of that early work enter the public domain while there was still money to be made from them - but I think the overall gain to society outweighs these relatively small "edge cases".
Well ten years of doubling is still only a $1000 per year, or $2000 or total payments, so an initial free period of 10 years would give a pretty reasonable price for 20 years of protection.
Anyhow, another advantage of this type of system is that there is a central registry to figure out what is and is not protected by copyright, and the vast majority of works would be available in quite a reasonable amount of time.
Combined with a reasonable initial "free" few years of copyright protection (maybe 10?), this sounds like a nifty way of running things.
Alternatively, I also favour a "doubling" system of registration fee. A few "free" years, then $1 for the next year, $2 for the next, $4 for the next, etc. Eventually, and really in not that long, even Disney can't afford the registration fee.
One other option is to work to marginalize the groups to reduce their support base. Working to NOT piss-off the reasonable majority in "foreign policy" situations would go a long way to keeping the extremists out of power. There is a balance to be struck between appeasement and full-blown-invasion, but going too far in one direction is not always the best policy.
If video is all that is holding "them" back, I am sure someone could figure out how to record the event. A couple of folk a good distance back with some telephoto lenses shouldn't be hard to do. Upload it to youtube or send it to a few news stations and there you have it.
I recently saw the very good documentary on the Apollo missions that had extensive interviews with a lot of the astronauts. I think it was "In the Shadow of the Moon"
In any case, I came away from it with a whole bunch of respect for Michael Collins (they guy who stayed in the command module while Neil and Buzz when down to land). He really comes across as a great guy.
How about I just read the first paragraph of the linked article, or just look at the picture, and ignore the rest? Do you think that will give people enough to work with?
Well, if you had read the article or followed the links, you'd see that the article in question isn't just a recipe. It's a researched article about the history of apple pie, including two medieval recipes, with commentary and a bibliography. No question that it's more than a list of ingredients with instructions.
Now I'm supposed to actually read the article without just spouting off my half-assed opinion? What have we come to?
Um, yeah. Did you? The part about "substantial literary expression" perhaps? A list of ingredients and instructions for using them, just like rules for games or instructions for building a bird house do not generally qualify as "substantial literary expression" and generally are not completely "original works of authorship", and thus enjoy significantly decreased copyright protection.
Gather them together as a collected work, and the total work enjoys much more copyright protection, but the individual recipes, not so much.
"Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.
Only original works of authorship are protected by copyright. “Original” means that an author produced a work by his or her own intellectual effort instead of copying it from an existing work."
Thus, it is probably pretty difficult to wield copyright law (in the USA) to prevent someone from republishing your recipe. At the very least you will need to show it contains "substantial literary expression" and was developed without building on an existing work. Rules for games and instructions for processes are also not easily protected by copyright laws.
"Considering" is a bit different than "intending".
Hopefully in order to get a solid conviction "the man" needs to provide a bit more evidence of intent than "a few folk sitting around and talking", but in principle I would rather that the police are provided with a few tools to help them prevent crimes rather than just being able to act after the fact.
Actually probably not on a switched network, the reason you can see all the open shares on a network is because those packets are generally broadcast to every client on the network by way of the broadcast IP x.x.x.255 for that subnet. any other traffic going directly from client to website or 2 other clients will be unsniffable without exploiting the switch itself to make it fall back into a broadcast (hub) mode, if that is even still possible these days.
Try it, on your standard home network config, ping 192.168.1.255, you should get random responses back from all the active IPs on the network. Same way file sharing clients work on a network like that they throw their announce packets "hey ive got these shares open" to the 192.168.1.255 ip, and the switch knows to throw that packet out to every port on the switch, and all the clients know its a packet for them to listen to other than their own set IP address
A very good point - I still think of ethernet in terms of "dumb" hubs rather than "intelligent" switches. A quick test of our wired gig-Ethernet network and our wireless-n WPA2 network seems to show that firesheep does not pick up anything.
In any case, I've downloaded HTTPS-Everywhere and Force-TLS to try them out - I think I'll keep one of them running most of the time.
I'm too old. I still think of ethernet networks as being largely made up of 10baseT into "dumb" hubs or even (gasp!) 10base2 thinnet coaxial cable. With most modern switches, Monkeedude1212 is correct that this sort of traffic does not pass by every client on the network. I just tried out Firesheep on some machines in our home, and it was not able to pick up anything on our WPA encrypted wireless-n network, or on our switched gig-ethernet wired network. I did not dig one of our "dumb" hubs out of the attic to see if it works in any situation.
The worry of course is that you cannot guarantee the network layout of every network between you and your destination, and Firesheep or its equivalent is pretty easy to employ at any stage along the path.
Actually, it grabs cookies, so even if you do not transmit your signon stuff in the clear, the attacker can still use your session. Read the linked article for more details.
The tool works in any network situation (wired or wireless) where intra-client communication happens - so if you can see other computers' shared folders and bonjour services and stuff like that, then potentially this tool could pick up cookies to do its work. Some (all?) WiFi encryption methods do use the same encryption for each client, so they can be vulnerable, and certainly if an attacker is "upstream" from the wireless router (perhaps on the wired network the wireless router is attached before going out the establishment's cable modem for example), all that traffic is completely unencrypted.
I can't spell to save my life, I am a computer programmer.
Good thing that doesn't require persnickety attention to detail, eh?
I feel for you - my spelling is atrocious - if it were not for Firefox's built in spell checking I would look even more like a moron than I do now. Interestingly, over the past year or so, my typing errors have started to increase, and homonyms seem to be turning up in those errors. Maybe I have early onset Alzheimer's or a small brain tumor. If I'm lucky (for some value of "lucky") I'll be like John Travolta in "Phenomenon".
Good analysis. Would be stronger if you use "their" for the possessive rather than "there" (which is the place) (in 5 and 7).
Oh, and "its" is the possessive while "it's" is the contraction for "it is"- that's one I always have trouble with (in 6).
I don't think settling actually creates any legal precedent - that requires at least a court ruling. I does start to create a psychological and social "precedent" however.
"Regardless of memory"? If George doesn't remember what some guy he knew for a week thirty years in the past looked like, it would never occur to him that Marty looked familiar.
Find someone in their 40s or 50s and ask them if they would recognize anyone they met in high school for a week as being familiar. Heck, I know I met some people in high school for a week (I went to a number of camps and programs and seminars) and I can hardly recall the events let alone the participants. Maybe my memory is below average, but if my kids turn out in a few years to look like any of those people, it will not be me recognizing it.
Now if you really wanted to force a sequel to go that way, we could make sure "Calvin" was in a bunch of photos from his week "back-then" - maybe the school newspaper had great coverage of the events or something like that. Then have "mom" clip those photos into some sort of a scrapbook that George finds in the attic one day. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to make a film like that. However, I just don't think that the parents not recognizing "Calvin" as Marty in the present is any way a plot hole.
You misunderstood (and I explained poorly). When I look in my HS yearbook - I have a hard time putting the photos together with the names. I should not have even mentioned the reunion, it just happens that is why I dragged out the yearbook in the first place.
Maybe I am atypical, and maybe the McFly family has better memory over 30 years than I do over 25, but if I cannot easily recall the faces of fellow students that I went to classes with for years how likely would they recall the look of someone they saw for only a week or so?
I doubt there would ever be such a first time. Can you recall anything about someone you met for a week fifteen or twenty years ago? Enough to make you think a baby or young child looks like that person?
Babies are invariably compared to their parents and grandparents, especially to pictures of them as children, and presuming that Marty is actually a true McFly, there will be some resemblance to his father's side of the family. The issue just is not going to come up.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, good think we would never elect nincompoops to public office, eh?
Yeah, I meant that. Really. OK, no.
Pricing is a raise to break-even. It's inescapable, without the influence of government.
And with the customer having perfect knowledge, and with all possible suppliers having equal access to capitol and no artificial barriers to entry into the market.
Of course with any finite system, without some form of regulation to prevent it, the entity with the control of the largest amount of capitol always "wins" in any multi-round commerce game. Once a monopoly grows, they can almost always maintain and expand it into other areas. If nobody else can raise enough money to build the towers, you cannot start a new cell phone company. And how can you convince a lender to lend to you if you plan on competing based on price against an already established player who can easily drop their prices until you go bankrupt? Yes, someone else could come along again to try to compete on price but they will have a tougher time finding a lender (the last lender lost their shirt remember?) and meanwhile the established player has more money than last time in order to temporarily "compete" with the newcomer.
Don't get me wrong - "artificial" intervention is very often harmful, but in my opinion is also very often necessary to provide the type of ecconomic environment we want to live in.
I don't know, but could certainly be persuaded otherwise. If $5k is good total revenue, then spending $1k for the 10th non-free year doesn't make much sense, but I suspect that in that case, there is probably not going to be much money in that 10th year anyway. Additionally, if there isn't much money in it for you, there probably isn't much incentive for the "pirate publisher" to swoop in and start printing copies in competition to you anyway, so copyright protection probably does not matter much.
The real question is if we changed the copyright length would we end up with significantly fewer authors? I suspect that most money for most works is made well within the first 10 years of publication, certainly within the first 20, and so the incentive to create new works is pretty much unchanged if we drop back the length to something more sane - having some sort of sliding registration/tax system for longer terms addresses anyone who thinks they are going to create a timeless classic. I don't know how significant the existence of works that do not START to have significant value long after initial publication. If a series author's early work gains value as their later work gains recognition, perhaps these schemes would have some of that early work enter the public domain while there was still money to be made from them - but I think the overall gain to society outweighs these relatively small "edge cases".
Well ten years of doubling is still only a $1000 per year, or $2000 or total payments, so an initial free period of 10 years would give a pretty reasonable price for 20 years of protection.
Anyhow, another advantage of this type of system is that there is a central registry to figure out what is and is not protected by copyright, and the vast majority of works would be available in quite a reasonable amount of time.
Combined with a reasonable initial "free" few years of copyright protection (maybe 10?), this sounds like a nifty way of running things.
Alternatively, I also favour a "doubling" system of registration fee. A few "free" years, then $1 for the next year, $2 for the next, $4 for the next, etc. Eventually, and really in not that long, even Disney can't afford the registration fee.
It looks like they have a separate division for all sorts of stuff: http://www.fedex.com/us/services/customcritical/specialty/hazardous/index.html
One other option is to work to marginalize the groups to reduce their support base. Working to NOT piss-off the reasonable majority in "foreign policy" situations would go a long way to keeping the extremists out of power. There is a balance to be struck between appeasement and full-blown-invasion, but going too far in one direction is not always the best policy.
If video is all that is holding "them" back, I am sure someone could figure out how to record the event. A couple of folk a good distance back with some telephoto lenses shouldn't be hard to do. Upload it to youtube or send it to a few news stations and there you have it.
Maybe going through the line dressed in just a tight bathing suit would make it all quicker? Or just a kilt that you can easily lift?
I recently saw the very good documentary on the Apollo missions that had extensive interviews with a lot of the astronauts. I think it was "In the Shadow of the Moon"
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_the_Moon
In any case, I came away from it with a whole bunch of respect for Michael Collins (they guy who stayed in the command module while Neil and Buzz when down to land). He really comes across as a great guy.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Michael_Collins_(astronaut)
Only if they can figure out after the plane comes down, exactly how the explosives got on board.
We seem to be concentrating on the threats that failed.
I feel for you, really I do.
How about I just read the first paragraph of the linked article, or just look at the picture, and ignore the rest? Do you think that will give people enough to work with?
Well, if you had read the article or followed the links, you'd see that the article in question isn't just a recipe. It's a researched article about the history of apple pie, including two medieval recipes, with commentary and a bibliography. No question that it's more than a list of ingredients with instructions.
Now I'm supposed to actually read the article without just spouting off my half-assed opinion? What have we come to?
Um, yeah. Did you? The part about "substantial literary expression" perhaps? A list of ingredients and instructions for using them, just like rules for games or instructions for building a bird house do not generally qualify as "substantial literary expression" and generally are not completely "original works of authorship", and thus enjoy significantly decreased copyright protection.
Gather them together as a collected work, and the total work enjoys much more copyright protection, but the individual recipes, not so much.
Not having read the article at all, I will weigh in anyway.
From http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
"Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.
Only original works of authorship are protected by copyright. “Original” means that an author produced a work by his or her own intellectual effort instead of copying it from an existing work."
Thus, it is probably pretty difficult to wield copyright law (in the USA) to prevent someone from republishing your recipe. At the very least you will need to show it contains "substantial literary expression" and was developed without building on an existing work. Rules for games and instructions for processes are also not easily protected by copyright laws.
"Considering" is a bit different than "intending".
Hopefully in order to get a solid conviction "the man" needs to provide a bit more evidence of intent than "a few folk sitting around and talking", but in principle I would rather that the police are provided with a few tools to help them prevent crimes rather than just being able to act after the fact.
Actually probably not on a switched network, the reason you can see all the open shares on a network is because those packets are generally broadcast to every client on the network by way of the broadcast IP x.x.x.255 for that subnet. any other traffic going directly from client to website or 2 other clients will be unsniffable without exploiting the switch itself to make it fall back into a broadcast (hub) mode, if that is even still possible these days.
Try it, on your standard home network config, ping 192.168.1.255, you should get random responses back from all the active IPs on the network. Same way file sharing clients work on a network like that they throw their announce packets "hey ive got these shares open" to the 192.168.1.255 ip, and the switch knows to throw that packet out to every port on the switch, and all the clients know its a packet for them to listen to other than their own set IP address
A very good point - I still think of ethernet in terms of "dumb" hubs rather than "intelligent" switches. A quick test of our wired gig-Ethernet network and our wireless-n WPA2 network seems to show that firesheep does not pick up anything.
In any case, I've downloaded HTTPS-Everywhere and Force-TLS to try them out - I think I'll keep one of them running most of the time.
I'm too old. I still think of ethernet networks as being largely made up of 10baseT into "dumb" hubs or even (gasp!) 10base2 thinnet coaxial cable. With most modern switches, Monkeedude1212 is correct that this sort of traffic does not pass by every client on the network. I just tried out Firesheep on some machines in our home, and it was not able to pick up anything on our WPA encrypted wireless-n network, or on our switched gig-ethernet wired network. I did not dig one of our "dumb" hubs out of the attic to see if it works in any situation.
The worry of course is that you cannot guarantee the network layout of every network between you and your destination, and Firesheep or its equivalent is pretty easy to employ at any stage along the path.
Actually, it grabs cookies, so even if you do not transmit your signon stuff in the clear, the attacker can still use your session. Read the linked article for more details.
The tool works in any network situation (wired or wireless) where intra-client communication happens - so if you can see other computers' shared folders and bonjour services and stuff like that, then potentially this tool could pick up cookies to do its work. Some (all?) WiFi encryption methods do use the same encryption for each client, so they can be vulnerable, and certainly if an attacker is "upstream" from the wireless router (perhaps on the wired network the wireless router is attached before going out the establishment's cable modem for example), all that traffic is completely unencrypted.
I can't spell to save my life, I am a computer programmer.
Good thing that doesn't require persnickety attention to detail, eh?
I feel for you - my spelling is atrocious - if it were not for Firefox's built in spell checking I would look even more like a moron than I do now. Interestingly, over the past year or so, my typing errors have started to increase, and homonyms seem to be turning up in those errors. Maybe I have early onset Alzheimer's or a small brain tumor. If I'm lucky (for some value of "lucky") I'll be like John Travolta in "Phenomenon".
Good analysis. Would be stronger if you use "their" for the possessive rather than "there" (which is the place) (in 5 and 7).
Oh, and "its" is the possessive while "it's" is the contraction for "it is"- that's one I always have trouble with (in 6).
I don't think settling actually creates any legal precedent - that requires at least a court ruling. I does start to create a psychological and social "precedent" however.
"Regardless of memory"? If George doesn't remember what some guy he knew for a week thirty years in the past looked like, it would never occur to him that Marty looked familiar.
Find someone in their 40s or 50s and ask them if they would recognize anyone they met in high school for a week as being familiar. Heck, I know I met some people in high school for a week (I went to a number of camps and programs and seminars) and I can hardly recall the events let alone the participants. Maybe my memory is below average, but if my kids turn out in a few years to look like any of those people, it will not be me recognizing it.
Now if you really wanted to force a sequel to go that way, we could make sure "Calvin" was in a bunch of photos from his week "back-then" - maybe the school newspaper had great coverage of the events or something like that. Then have "mom" clip those photos into some sort of a scrapbook that George finds in the attic one day. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to make a film like that. However, I just don't think that the parents not recognizing "Calvin" as Marty in the present is any way a plot hole.
You misunderstood (and I explained poorly). When I look in my HS yearbook - I have a hard time putting the photos together with the names. I should not have even mentioned the reunion, it just happens that is why I dragged out the yearbook in the first place.
Maybe I am atypical, and maybe the McFly family has better memory over 30 years than I do over 25, but if I cannot easily recall the faces of fellow students that I went to classes with for years how likely would they recall the look of someone they saw for only a week or so?
I doubt there would ever be such a first time. Can you recall anything about someone you met for a week fifteen or twenty years ago? Enough to make you think a baby or young child looks like that person?
Babies are invariably compared to their parents and grandparents, especially to pictures of them as children, and presuming that Marty is actually a true McFly, there will be some resemblance to his father's side of the family. The issue just is not going to come up.