Sigh... Yet again you've missed the detail that I'm not claiming the U.S. isn't a republic. It is, and at no point did I claim it isn't.
You've also ignored or forgotten my original response to you noting that the definition of democracy is flexible, and encompasses far more than the ancient idea of mob rule. If you want to resort to that definition, fine, but you should realize that's no longer the accepted definition of the word.
On the other hand, you're contending that it's not a democracy at the same time you're contending that it's democratic. Democratic, but not a democracy?
So TFS appears to think that "academic writing" excludes the humanities and other disciplines that don't often find the need to include equations in their writing.
In any case, is LaTeX worth the learning curve for these disciplines? I recently wrote a 40 pg. paper in Word, using a good template and styles, I didn't run into any formatting issues, and when converted to PDF it looks nice. I liked being able to create the table of contents automatically.
Facing the prospect of only having longish things to write from this point on, I'm wondering if I should take the time to learn LaTeX now. On the other hand, if I do that, am I giving up being able to easily send drafts to other people for review? What about reference management with stuff like Zotero?
"Tyranny of the majority" is exactly what democracy is. That's why the USA is a republic instead.
Please. Quit being pedantic and using a definition of democracy that dates back to Aristotle.
Actually, it's not even pedantry, it's just plain wrong. The definition of "democracy" is simply not "rule by the majority without any checks and balances" as everyone with the chorus "The U.S. is a republic not a democracy" seems to think.
Just in case the "tyranny of the majority" that is the English language doesn't convince you, I'll provide an appeal to authority for you. "Democracy" defined by the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
Forcing the legality of gay marriage in Massachusetts (Mass. supreme court vs. majority of the state's voters, I believe.)
Possibly Prop 8 in California, depending on how that state's supreme court rules.
So, let me get this straight. Your take on democracy has no ability to counter a tyranny of the majority?
Here's a hint - just because a bunch of people vote for something doesn't mean they should get it. Otherwise we could probably just do away with the court system and have people vote on everything, instead.
Our founding fathers would cry if they were alive today to see how far we've fallen from the path of justice and equality.
Oh, you are just too funny.
Granted, the founding fathers have much to their credit, but "justice and equality" was somewhat lacking. I seem to remember something relevant in the Constitution:
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
I'll give you one guess at who "all other Persons" refers to.
Oh, and your version of "equality" seems to have left out the whole women's suffrage movement... so... yeah. I'm not saying that everything's all fine and dandy now, but to say that the founding fathers would cry over justice and equality is pretty much ludicrous.
First of all, as others pointed out, you must have meant the Equal Rights Amendment.
Second, I'm fairly certain that NOW was one of the main forces behind the ERA, and that it was conservative forces raising fears that the ERA would lead to mixed-sex public restrooms and public funding for abortions which managed to shoot it down.
In fact, now that I look, NOW's website appears to support the ERA, so I have no idea where you're coming up with this stuff.
I love that link, I mean talk about subtle paranoia.
The case involves a shipment being accidental stopped for counterfeit drugs, to WHO is hiding something.
What's paranoid about getting upset when this happens:
"Such a seizure occurred last month, when authorities in the port of Rotterdam blocked a consignment of Losartan, a treatment for high blood pressure, that was being shipped from India to Brazil. Although Losartan is a legal generic drug, the seizure took place after an unnamed company claimed to hold the patent for it in the Netherlands."
So, generic drug legally produced in India, on its way for legal distribution in Brazil, gets stopped in the Netherlands because someone asserts that they have a patent on it in a country through which it's merely passing.
As the saying goes, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.
I also find it pretty amusing that/. will get its panties in a twist over DRM conspiracies, but not medicines. I mean, really, how important could medicines be?
FYI, ACTA is much more than a "Copyright" treaty. I wish that's all it were about, but the "C" in ACTA stands for "Counterfeiting". There's been a recent rash of seizures of legitimately produced generic drugs in the Netherlands, all on concerns about "counterfeiting." The pushing through of ACTA is likely only to make this sort of nonsense worse, and the effect on people's lives is real.
Your analogy to cell phones doesn't work, though, because Kindle users don't (as far as I know) sign any sort of contract with Amazon.
It would be one thing if you signed a two-year contract with Amazon that guaranteed you the free wireless access so long as you did not purchase books elsewhere. That's not what's happening. Rather, they've tried to use a technical measure to control a related aftermarket, much like Lexmark did with toner cartridges. They're free to do that, but invoking the DMCA to protect the practice shouldn't be allowed, because the issue isn't fundamentally one of copyright.
Additionally, I still don't understand why U.S. phones are locked and come with a two-year contract. If you've signed the contract and you break it, you have to pay a hefty fee, so why should it matter if you've signed it and decide to use the phone with a different service? Either way, the original company that subsidized the phone gets their money. Is it just to prevent people from fraudulently signing a contract, getting, say, an iPhone, and then disappearing without paying their early termination fee?
It may be an industry-wide practice, but that doesn't mean the courts like it.
Lexmark tried to do this with its ink cartridges, but it's a terrible argument, and the courts recognized that, ruling that their access-control mechanism wasn't actually controlling access to a copyrighted work.
This sort of practice really has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with trying to exert control over aftermarket products. Unfortunately, it would be so expensive to go and litigate this, and the outcome is never certain, so they were probably smart to give up.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
By turning clips of a fair amount of single tracks together, it should not be hard to argue that the nature of each one is substantially changed.
FYI, the "nature of the copyrighted work" doesn't refer to transformation; it refers to whether the original work was more "creative" vs. "factual"; i.e., there is more leeway granted for fair use in the case of factual material (copying journal articles) v. creative material like works of fiction (the idea being that there is less reason to need to rely on a work of fiction than a factual work).
I thought if one is using 10secs (I'm unsure if there is a real number or duration) of any video, song, or literature it is not 'reproducing' or distributing IP or copyright, but Fair Use, and therefore not against a civil or criminal law.
You thought wrong. This is commonly thrown around/. as if it's gospel, but the fact is there's no magic number that qualifies something as fair use.
Traditionally, the fair use defense is based on four factors, one of which is the "amount" or "substantiality" of the work that's infringed. That language is as murky as it sounds. The movie 12 Monkeys got in trouble for showing less than a minute of a weird looking chair, and if things hadn't been worked out, it could have been enjoined from distribution. If you're unlucky enough to have infringed the "heart" of the work, even if it's only 5% overall, you might not have a fair use defense.
There are a number of cases that involve sampling, and the way things have gone, it seems that the current consensus is "license it, or don't sample." Hell, even if you do license, you might not be off the hook - remember the whole "Bittersweet Symphony" debacle?
It's unfortunate, but this is the current state of things.
The point of copyright isn't to "protect the little guy", it is to encourage people to produce so we get lots of stuff - right now it is doing lots of encouraging, but we're not getting much stuff.
Believe me, I know what the point of copyright is. The simply fact that people seem to be missing is that when you shorten the length of copyright, you decrease its value. There is a tipping point - when the value decreases below a certain amount, it will no longer provide enough incentive to create. (That said, if you read copyright case law, you will also encounter lots of instances where the issues seem closer to torts, and the application of the law has been to protect people from injury.)
Nobody knows exactly what that magic amount is, but obviously it's way too high right now. On the other hand, I think it's silly to assume that all the works that fall under copyright should be entitled to the same protection. This is where my original point comes in.
Books sometimes take many years to write, and for lots of books, the sale pattern isn't as lopsided as movies. It would make a lot more sense for books to have a longer copyright term than movies, most of which seem to make the bulk of their profit in the first few years.
"Actual value to the author"? The rights are worth exactly what he can get for them.
No, the value to the author of the movie rights ends up being a tiny fraction of the total value of the movie rights. In other words, the movie might make $30 million in profits, but the five year copyright only captures $25,000 of that for the author.
So what?
So, if we are redesigning the copyright system, I'd like to end up with one which leaves the little guy getting screwed less, not more. Why should studios be able to snap up the hard work of others for pennies, then turn around and produce a blockbuster?
They created a derivative work (an exclusive right of the copyright owner) during the term of the copyright and so infringed.
I'm not sure that the mere creation of a derivative work is enough to infringe. The actual language is that of "preparation", and I'm sure there is case law, but I'm not familiar with it. In any case, there are lots of things that qualify as creating a derivative work, but don't constitute infringement because there is no distribution.
Furthermore, if the author isn't aware that the movie is being produced, and it's only released after the copyright expires, they will have to jump to ask for an injunction which they may or may not receive.
The movie that becomes a blockbuster is not that of studio X but that of studio Y which did come to an agreement with the author and so was able to bring its movie out six months before the copyright expired.
The point of the scenario is that because the copyright is so short, any studio is able to use that fact as a bargaining chip in the price of obtaining rights to derivative works. The result is that movie rights, which are potentially very valuable and currently factor into the incentives that go into writing a book (this is where the whole idea of derivative works originates from), end up being only worth a fraction of their actual value to the author.
Both options could leave authors worse off than the current system. In the one case, studios could simply wait until copyrights expired before producing films, ensuring no compensation to authors; in the other case, they can leverage the threat of waiting to ensure that authors settle for low prices.
I'm no fan of the current system, but reforms need to be well thought out in order to avoid situations where you end up screwing people who actually do create things.
I'm not sure getting rid of either entirely would be the best option but I don't see much use of limits being longer than five years.
Here's a scenario for you and the rest of/.:
1. Individual author writes a very good, but not widely recognized book. Sales are mediocre, but this is mostly due to publicity issues.
2. Movie studio X bets that they can produce a blockbuster film based on this book. They go to the author to try and negotiate movie rights, but since copyright is only five years, they never offer more than a pittance. Negotiations fall through.
3. Movie studio X actually begins production of the film 3 years into the copyright of the book, and finishes just as the 5 year copyright is expiring. The movie becomes a blockbuster, and studio X sucks up all the profits, while not handing a penny to the author.
Your original "statment" was that all of the greats of the world, past, present, and future, were not well rounded. Your current comment contradicts this, because you qualify that statement by limiting it to modern times. In other words, you don't stand by your original statement.
All of your examples are form primitive man - anyone with a half decent brain and the means could have been a "Renaissance man" during the times you mentioned - cannot happen today
Sigh... first of all, I didn't give examples, but I will now. You're entitled to your opinion that Aristotle, Averroes, Leonardo, Newton and Jefferson were all "primitive" men.
I freely admit that the depth and breadth of various disciplines today preclude the same sort of "Renaissance men" or polymaths of the past. On the other hand, there are moderns who excel in multiple disciplines. Off the top of my head, I can think of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Polkinghorne.
My only point was that your claim that all the greats in the world were not well-rounded is a load of horse shit. Up until a few centuries ago, pretty much all of the greats in the world were only well-rounded.
Additionally, I think there is value in at least having a passing familiarity with more than one discipline or field of study.
ALL of the greats in the World; Past Present and Future, were NOT well rounded! They specialized in ONE thing and did it extremely well. Trying to be "well rounded" is a path to mediocrity - which explains much of our state today.
Heh, apparently the ONE thing you decided to do well wasn't history. Ever heard of a Renaissance man?
I have had the same good experiences with Amazon's customer service. I ordered a USB Wifi dongle from them, and though the tracking said it was delivered, I never got the package. Had them call me through the website, and they just put in a second order, and told me if I ever got the original, to just print out a mailing label and send it back.
A few months later, I ordered a DVD set, and one of the DVDs was defective. Again, had them call me, and they sent a new set - only after I got it did I have to return the original, using a pre-paid mailing label from their site.
On the other hand, possibly one of the best-designed cases I've ever had the pleasure of working with was on the Power Macintosh 7500. Pop off the top, flip up the drives to reveal the motherboard completely exposed. No screws, the whole process takes less than 10 seconds.
Meanwhile, PCs from that era were still in the hand-gashing followed by cursing sharp sheet metal stage.
While I am sympathetic to the plight of countries that cannot afford modern technology for their entire population, and the massive infrastructure required to support it, I do keep in mind that we are talking about a gap of only a few generations - not centuries or millenia.
Is your proposal that we wait a few generations and see if they've caught up?
While I understand where you're coming from, I don't think the fact that we're not far removed from "primitive" technology is a good reason to not worry about the state of the developing world.
It's striking to compare photos from the Great Depression to the conditions of some modern day countries, but the reason some places haven't caught up isn't simply because we had a head start. The history of colonialism, as well as current foreign and trade policy have a lot to do with keeping things the way they are.
I think that in the U.S. copyright law, the only moral rights that have been codified are for certain visual works. Moral rights are a much more European idea, and never gained much traction here.
Not really. That would be an "ephemeral copy", which is just the sort of thing the "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" is supposed to eliminate. My IP textbook notes that "fixed" excludes "transient reproductions... captured momentarily in the 'memory' of a computer."
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh... Yet again you've missed the detail that I'm not claiming the U.S. isn't a republic. It is, and at no point did I claim it isn't.
You've also ignored or forgotten my original response to you noting that the definition of democracy is flexible, and encompasses far more than the ancient idea of mob rule. If you want to resort to that definition, fine, but you should realize that's no longer the accepted definition of the word.
On the other hand, you're contending that it's not a democracy at the same time you're contending that it's democratic. Democratic, but not a democracy?
Good day to you.
The fact that it's a democratic republic doesn't stop it from being a republic.
Remind me where I said it wasn't a republic?
I take it by this comment that you're retracting your original statement that the U.S. "is a republic instead [of a democracy]."
So TFS appears to think that "academic writing" excludes the humanities and other disciplines that don't often find the need to include equations in their writing.
In any case, is LaTeX worth the learning curve for these disciplines? I recently wrote a 40 pg. paper in Word, using a good template and styles, I didn't run into any formatting issues, and when converted to PDF it looks nice. I liked being able to create the table of contents automatically.
Facing the prospect of only having longish things to write from this point on, I'm wondering if I should take the time to learn LaTeX now. On the other hand, if I do that, am I giving up being able to easily send drafts to other people for review? What about reference management with stuff like Zotero?
"Tyranny of the majority" is exactly what democracy is. That's why the USA is a republic instead.
Please. Quit being pedantic and using a definition of democracy that dates back to Aristotle.
Actually, it's not even pedantry, it's just plain wrong. The definition of "democracy" is simply not "rule by the majority without any checks and balances" as everyone with the chorus "The U.S. is a republic not a democracy" seems to think.
Just in case the "tyranny of the majority" that is the English language doesn't convince you, I'll provide an appeal to authority for you. "Democracy" defined by the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
Forcing the legality of gay marriage in Massachusetts (Mass. supreme court vs. majority of the state's voters, I believe.)
Possibly Prop 8 in California, depending on how that state's supreme court rules.
So, let me get this straight. Your take on democracy has no ability to counter a tyranny of the majority?
Here's a hint - just because a bunch of people vote for something doesn't mean they should get it. Otherwise we could probably just do away with the court system and have people vote on everything, instead.
Our founding fathers would cry if they were alive today to see how far we've fallen from the path of justice and equality.
Oh, you are just too funny.
Granted, the founding fathers have much to their credit, but "justice and equality" was somewhat lacking. I seem to remember something relevant in the Constitution:
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
I'll give you one guess at who "all other Persons" refers to.
Oh, and your version of "equality" seems to have left out the whole women's suffrage movement... so... yeah. I'm not saying that everything's all fine and dandy now, but to say that the founding fathers would cry over justice and equality is pretty much ludicrous.
First of all, as others pointed out, you must have meant the Equal Rights Amendment.
Second, I'm fairly certain that NOW was one of the main forces behind the ERA, and that it was conservative forces raising fears that the ERA would lead to mixed-sex public restrooms and public funding for abortions which managed to shoot it down.
In fact, now that I look, NOW's website appears to support the ERA, so I have no idea where you're coming up with this stuff.
I love that link, I mean talk about subtle paranoia. The case involves a shipment being accidental stopped for counterfeit drugs, to WHO is hiding something.
What's paranoid about getting upset when this happens:
"Such a seizure occurred last month, when authorities in the port of Rotterdam blocked a consignment of Losartan, a treatment for high blood pressure, that was being shipped from India to Brazil. Although Losartan is a legal generic drug, the seizure took place after an unnamed company claimed to hold the patent for it in the Netherlands."
So, generic drug legally produced in India, on its way for legal distribution in Brazil, gets stopped in the Netherlands because someone asserts that they have a patent on it in a country through which it's merely passing.
That instance occurred in January; since then, HIV medicines have been seized as well.
As the saying goes, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.
I also find it pretty amusing that /. will get its panties in a twist over DRM conspiracies, but not medicines. I mean, really, how important could medicines be?
FYI, ACTA is much more than a "Copyright" treaty. I wish that's all it were about, but the "C" in ACTA stands for "Counterfeiting". There's been a recent rash of seizures of legitimately produced generic drugs in the Netherlands, all on concerns about "counterfeiting." The pushing through of ACTA is likely only to make this sort of nonsense worse, and the effect on people's lives is real.
Your analogy to cell phones doesn't work, though, because Kindle users don't (as far as I know) sign any sort of contract with Amazon.
It would be one thing if you signed a two-year contract with Amazon that guaranteed you the free wireless access so long as you did not purchase books elsewhere. That's not what's happening. Rather, they've tried to use a technical measure to control a related aftermarket, much like Lexmark did with toner cartridges. They're free to do that, but invoking the DMCA to protect the practice shouldn't be allowed, because the issue isn't fundamentally one of copyright.
Additionally, I still don't understand why U.S. phones are locked and come with a two-year contract. If you've signed the contract and you break it, you have to pay a hefty fee, so why should it matter if you've signed it and decide to use the phone with a different service? Either way, the original company that subsidized the phone gets their money. Is it just to prevent people from fraudulently signing a contract, getting, say, an iPhone, and then disappearing without paying their early termination fee?
It may be an industry-wide practice, but that doesn't mean the courts like it.
Lexmark tried to do this with its ink cartridges, but it's a terrible argument, and the courts recognized that, ruling that their access-control mechanism wasn't actually controlling access to a copyrighted work.
This sort of practice really has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with trying to exert control over aftermarket products. Unfortunately, it would be so expensive to go and litigate this, and the outcome is never certain, so they were probably smart to give up.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
By turning clips of a fair amount of single tracks together, it should not be hard to argue that the nature of each one is substantially changed.
FYI, the "nature of the copyrighted work" doesn't refer to transformation; it refers to whether the original work was more "creative" vs. "factual"; i.e., there is more leeway granted for fair use in the case of factual material (copying journal articles) v. creative material like works of fiction (the idea being that there is less reason to need to rely on a work of fiction than a factual work).
I thought if one is using 10secs (I'm unsure if there is a real number or duration) of any video, song, or literature it is not 'reproducing' or distributing IP or copyright, but Fair Use, and therefore not against a civil or criminal law.
You thought wrong. This is commonly thrown around /. as if it's gospel, but the fact is there's no magic number that qualifies something as fair use.
Traditionally, the fair use defense is based on four factors, one of which is the "amount" or "substantiality" of the work that's infringed. That language is as murky as it sounds. The movie 12 Monkeys got in trouble for showing less than a minute of a weird looking chair, and if things hadn't been worked out, it could have been enjoined from distribution. If you're unlucky enough to have infringed the "heart" of the work, even if it's only 5% overall, you might not have a fair use defense.
There are a number of cases that involve sampling, and the way things have gone, it seems that the current consensus is "license it, or don't sample." Hell, even if you do license, you might not be off the hook - remember the whole "Bittersweet Symphony" debacle?
It's unfortunate, but this is the current state of things.
The point of copyright isn't to "protect the little guy", it is to encourage people to produce so we get lots of stuff - right now it is doing lots of encouraging, but we're not getting much stuff.
Believe me, I know what the point of copyright is. The simply fact that people seem to be missing is that when you shorten the length of copyright, you decrease its value. There is a tipping point - when the value decreases below a certain amount, it will no longer provide enough incentive to create. (That said, if you read copyright case law, you will also encounter lots of instances where the issues seem closer to torts, and the application of the law has been to protect people from injury.)
Nobody knows exactly what that magic amount is, but obviously it's way too high right now. On the other hand, I think it's silly to assume that all the works that fall under copyright should be entitled to the same protection. This is where my original point comes in.
Books sometimes take many years to write, and for lots of books, the sale pattern isn't as lopsided as movies. It would make a lot more sense for books to have a longer copyright term than movies, most of which seem to make the bulk of their profit in the first few years.
"Actual value to the author"? The rights are worth exactly what he can get for them.
No, the value to the author of the movie rights ends up being a tiny fraction of the total value of the movie rights. In other words, the movie might make $30 million in profits, but the five year copyright only captures $25,000 of that for the author.
So what?
So, if we are redesigning the copyright system, I'd like to end up with one which leaves the little guy getting screwed less, not more. Why should studios be able to snap up the hard work of others for pennies, then turn around and produce a blockbuster?
They created a derivative work (an exclusive right of the copyright owner) during the term of the copyright and so infringed.
I'm not sure that the mere creation of a derivative work is enough to infringe. The actual language is that of "preparation", and I'm sure there is case law, but I'm not familiar with it. In any case, there are lots of things that qualify as creating a derivative work, but don't constitute infringement because there is no distribution.
Furthermore, if the author isn't aware that the movie is being produced, and it's only released after the copyright expires, they will have to jump to ask for an injunction which they may or may not receive.
The movie that becomes a blockbuster is not that of studio X but that of studio Y which did come to an agreement with the author and so was able to bring its movie out six months before the copyright expired.
The point of the scenario is that because the copyright is so short, any studio is able to use that fact as a bargaining chip in the price of obtaining rights to derivative works. The result is that movie rights, which are potentially very valuable and currently factor into the incentives that go into writing a book (this is where the whole idea of derivative works originates from), end up being only worth a fraction of their actual value to the author.
Both options could leave authors worse off than the current system. In the one case, studios could simply wait until copyrights expired before producing films, ensuring no compensation to authors; in the other case, they can leverage the threat of waiting to ensure that authors settle for low prices.
I'm no fan of the current system, but reforms need to be well thought out in order to avoid situations where you end up screwing people who actually do create things.
I'm not sure getting rid of either entirely would be the best option but I don't see much use of limits being longer than five years.
Here's a scenario for you and the rest of /.:
1. Individual author writes a very good, but not widely recognized book. Sales are mediocre, but this is mostly due to publicity issues.
2. Movie studio X bets that they can produce a blockbuster film based on this book. They go to the author to try and negotiate movie rights, but since copyright is only five years, they never offer more than a pittance. Negotiations fall through.
3. Movie studio X actually begins production of the film 3 years into the copyright of the book, and finishes just as the 5 year copyright is expiring. The movie becomes a blockbuster, and studio X sucks up all the profits, while not handing a penny to the author.
This is just something to think about.
I stand by my original statment.
Your original "statment" was that all of the greats of the world, past, present, and future, were not well rounded. Your current comment contradicts this, because you qualify that statement by limiting it to modern times. In other words, you don't stand by your original statement.
All of your examples are form primitive man - anyone with a half decent brain and the means could have been a "Renaissance man" during the times you mentioned - cannot happen today
Sigh... first of all, I didn't give examples, but I will now. You're entitled to your opinion that Aristotle, Averroes, Leonardo, Newton and Jefferson were all "primitive" men.
I freely admit that the depth and breadth of various disciplines today preclude the same sort of "Renaissance men" or polymaths of the past. On the other hand, there are moderns who excel in multiple disciplines. Off the top of my head, I can think of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Polkinghorne.
My only point was that your claim that all the greats in the world were not well-rounded is a load of horse shit. Up until a few centuries ago, pretty much all of the greats in the world were only well-rounded.
Additionally, I think there is value in at least having a passing familiarity with more than one discipline or field of study.
ALL of the greats in the World; Past Present and Future, were NOT well rounded! They specialized in ONE thing and did it extremely well. Trying to be "well rounded" is a path to mediocrity - which explains much of our state today.
Heh, apparently the ONE thing you decided to do well wasn't history. Ever heard of a Renaissance man?
I have had the same good experiences with Amazon's customer service. I ordered a USB Wifi dongle from them, and though the tracking said it was delivered, I never got the package. Had them call me through the website, and they just put in a second order, and told me if I ever got the original, to just print out a mailing label and send it back.
A few months later, I ordered a DVD set, and one of the DVDs was defective. Again, had them call me, and they sent a new set - only after I got it did I have to return the original, using a pre-paid mailing label from their site.
On the other hand, possibly one of the best-designed cases I've ever had the pleasure of working with was on the Power Macintosh 7500. Pop off the top, flip up the drives to reveal the motherboard completely exposed. No screws, the whole process takes less than 10 seconds.
Meanwhile, PCs from that era were still in the hand-gashing followed by cursing sharp sheet metal stage.
While I am sympathetic to the plight of countries that cannot afford modern technology for their entire population, and the massive infrastructure required to support it, I do keep in mind that we are talking about a gap of only a few generations - not centuries or millenia.
Is your proposal that we wait a few generations and see if they've caught up?
While I understand where you're coming from, I don't think the fact that we're not far removed from "primitive" technology is a good reason to not worry about the state of the developing world.
It's striking to compare photos from the Great Depression to the conditions of some modern day countries, but the reason some places haven't caught up isn't simply because we had a head start. The history of colonialism, as well as current foreign and trade policy have a lot to do with keeping things the way they are.
I think that in the U.S. copyright law, the only moral rights that have been codified are for certain visual works. Moral rights are a much more European idea, and never gained much traction here.
It happens to all of us, no hard feelings. BTW, I accidentally replied as an AC to your previous post - if you want to read my reply, it's here.
Not really. That would be an "ephemeral copy", which is just the sort of thing the "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" is supposed to eliminate. My IP textbook notes that "fixed" excludes "transient reproductions... captured momentarily in the 'memory' of a computer."