For patents, you get a composition book, and write up the progress of your invention every day you work on it. At the end of the day, you date and sign the entry, and have someone else -- your partner, boss, or whatever, to countersign. That's your evidence that you developed the idea, and the exact time frame of when you developed the idea.
Digitally signed timestamps might be better in theory, but I wouldn't bank on a judge or jury understanding why they're meaningful. So until there's a precedent establishing their validity, you should probably at least do the above.
Look, you either have an object, which is patentable, a work, which can be copyrighted, a symbol, which can be trademarked... or you have an idea, which is only protected until you tell somebody else. If you don't want to share, don't.
The concept of Intellectual Property - i.e. the idea that an abstract construct can have the same properties as a physical construct - is self-contradictory: If it's intellectual, it's not property. The idea has no basis in law, philosophy or history. I've written about this elsewhere, so I won't waste my breath repeating myself here.
This is false as far as patents go. You don't patent a particular object, you patent the design of the object, or you patent a method of doing something. Patents, in the vast majority of cases do not and have not required working prototypes to be built. It is the idea for the design or method being patented.
...I may be married to Jessica Alba within 10 years....in addition to my current wife....and my current wife may be fine with the arrangement. Yup, 3 to 10 years, I'm tellin ya.
I hear that argument a lot, that just because we could understand the entirety of human biology that we somehow wouldn't understand what makes us human, usually the view is that something supernatural governs the soul; although that fails to take into account environmental factors- tumors and brain damage for example can permanently alter personality, there are cases for example like phineas gage where permanent alterations in who he was occured. the man was never the same after that accident, you could say his soul was never the same. damage to the amygdala can cause alterations to emotional states, drugs can permanently alter emotional states as well.
It's obvious that our brains and our senses impact our mental states, but that does not imply that life doesn't come from the soul. In order to test the effect of tumors or chemical imbalances on the actual person, we'd have to compare their mental state when inhabiting their body and brain and while not doing so. It's not something that most people can do at will, but many, many people over the millennia have claimed to have done it. Off hand, I can't think of any with brain tumors. But people with near-death experiences often claim to have had clearer thought and sharper senses when not in the body.
"I got a cow, now how do I make a bioweapon out of it"
You usually wait until it starts decomposing, and then place it in a large catapult.
People like that just don't do that though.... they don't act rationally and longterm make up plans, they're the kind that build up and snap. In short, those sane enough to be capable aren't insane enough to actually want to kill *everyone*.
The unibomber did. He not only had long-term plans, but wrote manifestos on them and whatnot. Granted he didn't want to kill everyone just people who improve technology, but a little tweaking of his psychosis here and there would change that easily enough. The kind of person who will want to kill *everyone* wouldn't be a religious or political psycho; they'd have to be an environmentalist psycho, which the unibomber partially was.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
hmmm.... let me see here, VH1 airs a show that is entirely so that they can generate money from advertising... While they also used it to comment on the clip, they did air the entire show, in a for-profit work. Now the original author of the segment, takes a small clip of the entire VH1 show, comments on it in the blog, and posts the clip. In other words, neither side really has much of a case against either one for the copyright infringement. However, the original author does have a case against VH1/Viacom for their illegal takedown notice using the DMCA if he cares to pursue the issue.
If factor #1 comprised the entire law, you would have a point. But it does not, and you don't. VH1 is not claiming to be a non-profit research institution. They are claiming to have a segment that did a commentary on an ad. The ad was not shown in its entirety, but used in a classic "fair use" commentary manner. Besides this, factors #2 and #4 make such issues moot. This was not a commercial piece but a campaign ad. Publicizing it further would not have a negative effect on the value of the work, but a positive one. There are no possible damages to sue for.
Viacom's claim against the use of its segment OTOH is legitimate. Sure, it should be taken into consideration that it was only a segment, and not an entire copyrighted work. However, by any measure, an entire segment of such a show has substantial value in itself. Watching such segments on youtube reduces the likelihood that someone would watch them again on VH1 with the ads. There is no case here.
Regardless of any side-commentary, if he reproduces the entire segment unaltered, he's not going to be able to successfully claim fair use. Even though it's not an entire episode, it is enough to stand alone as a work.
You have it backwards. Reproducing limited portions of a work for the purposes of commentary is one of the defining examples of "fair use." NO ONE has copyright protection against their works being used in this way. This is what Viacom did.
Reproducing in its entirety that commentary produced by Viacom without permission is a copyright violation. It falls into none of the "fair use" categories. The fact that he owns the rights to his original work doesn't enter into it at all.
1. a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, esp. for better or for worse, is determined; turning point. 2. a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change.
I took it to be at least half serious. It's not much worse than other serious suggestions I've read here, like organizing a group to demonstrate and chant slogans during his speech.
Well, yeah--the position taken by the commenters who you're disparaging is that they should be viewed as historically interesting, but certainly not some sort of special knowledge which has a magical claim on truth.
Yeah, so why not try to defend their position. If it's a reasonable position, why should that be hard to do? Are these "commenters" so mentally incompetent that they can only resort to mocking?
Limitless enlightenment, eh? I suppose we could, but it's not that interesting a question--tradition and authority carry a lot of weight, and people essentially inherit their religion most of the time.
Ah, one of the central mythologies of atheism: Religious people essentially inherit their religion, and those who don't... well, it's best to pretend they don't exist.
If you'd like to attempt discussion, there are plenty of other threads in this discussion that are focusing on the merits. You seem to be content to focus on the mockery in order to complain about it.
No, actually, there are not. That's my point. There is virtually nothing on the subject except childishness. I'm writing to advocate for reasoned discourse, as well as for a modicum of civility.
Ah, the "I was kidding" defense, always a good fallback position when you're shown to be talking nonsense.
Are you serious? I say that these people "seem to be capable of thinking about nothing else," and you believe yourself to have "shown that I was talking nonsense," by pointing out that they do at times think of other things? Really? Maybe English is your second language, in which case you might want to read up on usage and rhetorical style most common to the language. You might find idiom, figure of speech, metaphor, and hyperbole of interest.
If you want to use the space shuttle payload to get people excited about space again, instead of sending up an ancient movie prop, offer to the general public the discounted service of putting small hobby satellites into orbit for $500 a piece.
It has also been determined that rural residents don't have the same kind of access to prostitution services as those who live in urban areas. The obvious solution is a federal government mandate that all rural women must contribute 10 hours per week of "community service."
Alternatively, rural hard-up losers could just drive to town to go a-whoring, those not living in range of any regular ISPs can just get satellite Internet access. The real tragedy, if some a-hole tries to fix this with legislation, is that if left to the market, it will result in someone figuring out a cost-effective and profitable way of getting broadband to sparsely populated areas.
Unless you can get the school to organize an official debate on intellectual property, that's all you can do.
Come to the event with a big sign illustrating your message and objections to his status as a distinguished alum. Have a group of students do the same as well as boo and chant before/during/after the event. Engage in civil disobedience by bringing a notebook and helping friends make backups of their own DVDs in his plain sight.
Are you serious? Why? How is making yourselves look like obnoxious and inconsiderate buffoons going to help your cause? Those are not the actions of someone possessing reason, or a reasoned argument. Congratulate him on his award and challenge him to a public debate. I'll bet he would take you up on it.
Sort of brings home the point that we have limits on power because the person wielding that power is not always on your side of the issues.
It's too bad the Democrats can't extend this logic to the Supreme Court. Democratic Senators in confirmation hearings can be hear actually supporting unchecked and unlimited power for the court, because of "all the good" that can be done with such power. The stupidity is staggering.
But the next president will almost certainly be a dem.
Haha. If you're serious, you're delusional. It's become obvious that America has seen enough of the Democrats in the last year and a half to remind them of why they don't like voting for Democrat so much. Add to that the fact that 1) Hillary Clinton is going to win the nomination, and 2) Ross Perot is not running this year, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell.
If so, they need to not pardon and allow justice to prevail. Otherwise, we will see that each republican will continue to screw US at will.
The flaw in your reasoning is that Bush is going to go ahead and veto that law that makes membership in the Republican party a crime.
Saying that it's an argument from ignorance isn't saying that the people making the argument are ignorant. The argument from ignorance goes, "we don't know how it happened, therefore it didn't"; it's a logical fallacy, and a more generalized form of the argument from personal incredulity.
Ah, sorry. Still, I don't see how that applies. ID claims that evolution by the neodarwinian mechanism couldn't have happened in specific cases, because past a certain point, no simplified forms of the structures in question could still be functional.
There's plenty of evidence that it's possible for complex organs to evolve. See CB300; the eye is a particularly well-explored example of this. So what else do you think is impossible? (You might want to consult the Index to Creationist Claims first; I get the impression that you're unfamilar with it.)
You're saying the paper in the CB300 link is supposed to be evidence that it's possible for complex organs to evolve??? They made a trail of increasing rewards for increasingly complex logical operations, each within a couple of mutations of each other. OF COURSE the program is going to follow the trail to the selected function. Saying that this is evidence of the possibility of complex organs evolving this way in actual organisms is circular logic or a straw man; as no one is denying that such evolutionary mechanism would work IF you had the breadcrumb trail in place, leading the way. Evidence that actual organs could possibly evolve by a given mechanism would first require modeling DNA to morphology, something that, AFAIK hasn't even been done yet in any meaningful way.
Haven't you been paying attention? Science isn't in the business of proving anything. If you think that anything's been proven, you're not paying enough attention.
Of course there's scientific proof. It can never rise to the level of mathematic proof, of course, but it's still called proof. If you molecularly model a simple bacterium on a supercomputer and let it evolve by random mutation and natural selection, and it spontaneously develops photosynthesis or turns multicellular, then you have proof that it's possible, and extraordinarily strong evidence that it probably did happen that way.
That assumes god isn't evolving. Could be a dangerous assumption.
God is by definition unchanging. He transcends time. If you're talking about something other than that, it shouldn't be called God. This is true of the understanding of the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, as well as the logic of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Religious leaders often totally side step the fact that their documents were written for people with a limited communications ability and limited understanding of the universe. Given a scholar or monk fully trained up in literacy and languages may have had a vocabulary of only 3000-4000 words! And your average person had less, and most often could not write or read proficiently.
The "documents" weren't written for scribes or monks. If I document has God as its source, then it was written for everyone. This is nowhere clearer than the New Testament. Jesus gave parables which spoke on different levels to different people, and hid the information entirely from those who would only abuse it. All sacred scripture is of the same nature. I don't know what you mean about the 3000-4000 words. There are far more Hebrew words than that in the Old Testament.
Take the common "Seven Days of Creation". Could you explain to people thousands of years ago that time for God may not be the same as time for mankind? What if I said one year to God is 1 billion years to us and evolution was not explained because people at the time would not understand it?
You honestly think the people who built the pyramids and invented agriculture would have difficulty understanding that? The real question is whether we are sophisticated enough to understand it. I can tell you right now, that "time for God is different from time for man" is not sophisticated enough. If you want to get on the right track, read Arcana Celestia by Swedenborg. It takes work to understand. Swedenborg is estimated to have had an IQ of over 200. Did all the ancients have a similarly sophisticated understanding of Genesis? No. But before man's understanding became external and the internal intellect became corrupted, he did. I think it's highly likely that all extant religion can trace their roots back to the religion(s) of the Neanderthals. The physiological reality is that we don't have the brain capacity that they did. So if we are going to understand as they did, it's definitely going to take some effort on our part.
even threatening to shutdown operations because the employees unionize is illegal. actually doing so, when the purpose it only thwart unionization, is definitely illegal.
as I said before, some unions have unreasonable expectations. and i can imagine a scenario where a union forms and demands wages and benefits that would make it impossible for the business to operate. and that business would be within its rights to shut down.
but that's not what wal-mart is doing. they pull every trick in the book to prevent unionization, legal or otherwise. and shutting down a location to break a union is illegal. NRLA is pretty clear on this.
More power to Wal-mart. Given many states' union laws that would prevent Wal-mart from hiring replacement workers if the employees unionized and then decided to strike, Wal-mart's fundamental constitutional right to association should give them the power to disregard the NRLA. The NRLA may not be unconstitutional on its face, but I think it should be considered unconstitutional as applied in any state with pro-union laws.
OTOH, following your theory, MySpace users are more likely to have an underpaid job at Wal-Mart, giving them even more reasons to complain.
Yes, but even presuming that Walmart employees are all disgruntled (they ain't running a daisy farm </obscure reference>), they have orders of magnitude more customers than employees.
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For patents, you get a composition book, and write up the progress of your invention every day you work on it. At the end of the day, you date and sign the entry, and have someone else -- your partner, boss, or whatever, to countersign. That's your evidence that you developed the idea, and the exact time frame of when you developed the idea.
Digitally signed timestamps might be better in theory, but I wouldn't bank on a judge or jury understanding why they're meaningful. So until there's a precedent establishing their validity, you should probably at least do the above.
This is false as far as patents go. You don't patent a particular object, you patent the design of the object, or you patent a method of doing something. Patents, in the vast majority of cases do not and have not required working prototypes to be built. It is the idea for the design or method being patented.
...I may be married to Jessica Alba within 10 years. ...in addition to my current wife. ...and my current wife may be fine with the arrangement. Yup, 3 to 10 years, I'm tellin ya.
It's obvious that our brains and our senses impact our mental states, but that does not imply that life doesn't come from the soul. In order to test the effect of tumors or chemical imbalances on the actual person, we'd have to compare their mental state when inhabiting their body and brain and while not doing so. It's not something that most people can do at will, but many, many people over the millennia have claimed to have done it. Off hand, I can't think of any with brain tumors. But people with near-death experiences often claim to have had clearer thought and sharper senses when not in the body.
You usually wait until it starts decomposing, and then place it in a large catapult.
The unibomber did. He not only had long-term plans, but wrote manifestos on them and whatnot. Granted he didn't want to kill everyone just people who improve technology, but a little tweaking of his psychosis here and there would change that easily enough. The kind of person who will want to kill *everyone* wouldn't be a religious or political psycho; they'd have to be an environmentalist psycho, which the unibomber partially was.
Dude. This one has hot college geek girls... with a phone number, no less.i deos=&id=14517
http://ithccam.umecit.maine.edu/view/view.shtml?v
If factor #1 comprised the entire law, you would have a point. But it does not, and you don't. VH1 is not claiming to be a non-profit research institution. They are claiming to have a segment that did a commentary on an ad. The ad was not shown in its entirety, but used in a classic "fair use" commentary manner. Besides this, factors #2 and #4 make such issues moot. This was not a commercial piece but a campaign ad. Publicizing it further would not have a negative effect on the value of the work, but a positive one. There are no possible damages to sue for.
Viacom's claim against the use of its segment OTOH is legitimate. Sure, it should be taken into consideration that it was only a segment, and not an entire copyrighted work. However, by any measure, an entire segment of such a show has substantial value in itself. Watching such segments on youtube reduces the likelihood that someone would watch them again on VH1 with the ads. There is no case here.
Regardless of any side-commentary, if he reproduces the entire segment unaltered, he's not going to be able to successfully claim fair use. Even though it's not an entire episode, it is enough to stand alone as a work.
You have it backwards. Reproducing limited portions of a work for the purposes of commentary is one of the defining examples of "fair use." NO ONE has copyright protection against their works being used in this way. This is what Viacom did.
Reproducing in its entirety that commentary produced by Viacom without permission is a copyright violation. It falls into none of the "fair use" categories. The fact that he owns the rights to his original work doesn't enter into it at all.
...looking to see what they're all pointing at?
1. a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, esp. for better or for worse, is determined; turning point.
2. a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change.
I took it to be at least half serious. It's not much worse than other serious suggestions I've read here, like organizing a group to demonstrate and chant slogans during his speech.
Yeah, so why not try to defend their position. If it's a reasonable position, why should that be hard to do? Are these "commenters" so mentally incompetent that they can only resort to mocking?
Ah, one of the central mythologies of atheism: Religious people essentially inherit their religion, and those who don't... well, it's best to pretend they don't exist.
No, actually, there are not. That's my point. There is virtually nothing on the subject except childishness. I'm writing to advocate for reasoned discourse, as well as for a modicum of civility.
Are you serious? I say that these people "seem to be capable of thinking about nothing else," and you believe yourself to have "shown that I was talking nonsense," by pointing out that they do at times think of other things? Really? Maybe English is your second language, in which case you might want to read up on usage and rhetorical style most common to the language. You might find idiom, figure of speech, metaphor, and hyperbole of interest.
Oh yeah, and what are we going to do about the Urban Corn-Growing Crisis?
If you want to use the space shuttle payload to get people excited about space again, instead of sending up an ancient movie prop, offer to the general public the discounted service of putting small hobby satellites into orbit for $500 a piece.
It has also been determined that rural residents don't have the same kind of access to prostitution services as those who live in urban areas. The obvious solution is a federal government mandate that all rural women must contribute 10 hours per week of "community service."
Alternatively, rural hard-up losers could just drive to town to go a-whoring, those not living in range of any regular ISPs can just get satellite Internet access. The real tragedy, if some a-hole tries to fix this with legislation, is that if left to the market, it will result in someone figuring out a cost-effective and profitable way of getting broadband to sparsely populated areas.
Are you serious? Why? How is making yourselves look like obnoxious and inconsiderate buffoons going to help your cause? Those are not the actions of someone possessing reason, or a reasoned argument. Congratulate him on his award and challenge him to a public debate. I'll bet he would take you up on it.
If I ever saw someone behave in that manner, I would have to assume that whatever their point was, they couldn't possibly be right.
See if he's game for a public formal debate following the award ceremony.
It's too bad the Democrats can't extend this logic to the Supreme Court. Democratic Senators in confirmation hearings can be hear actually supporting unchecked and unlimited power for the court, because of "all the good" that can be done with such power. The stupidity is staggering.
Haha. If you're serious, you're delusional. It's become obvious that America has seen enough of the Democrats in the last year and a half to remind them of why they don't like voting for Democrat so much. Add to that the fact that 1) Hillary Clinton is going to win the nomination, and 2) Ross Perot is not running this year, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell.
The flaw in your reasoning is that Bush is going to go ahead and veto that law that makes membership in the Republican party a crime.
Ah, sorry. Still, I don't see how that applies. ID claims that evolution by the neodarwinian mechanism couldn't have happened in specific cases, because past a certain point, no simplified forms of the structures in question could still be functional.
You're saying the paper in the CB300 link is supposed to be evidence that it's possible for complex organs to evolve??? They made a trail of increasing rewards for increasingly complex logical operations, each within a couple of mutations of each other. OF COURSE the program is going to follow the trail to the selected function. Saying that this is evidence of the possibility of complex organs evolving this way in actual organisms is circular logic or a straw man; as no one is denying that such evolutionary mechanism would work IF you had the breadcrumb trail in place, leading the way. Evidence that actual organs could possibly evolve by a given mechanism would first require modeling DNA to morphology, something that, AFAIK hasn't even been done yet in any meaningful way.
Of course there's scientific proof. It can never rise to the level of mathematic proof, of course, but it's still called proof. If you molecularly model a simple bacterium on a supercomputer and let it evolve by random mutation and natural selection, and it spontaneously develops photosynthesis or turns multicellular, then you have proof that it's possible, and extraordinarily strong evidence that it probably did happen that way.
God is by definition unchanging. He transcends time. If you're talking about something other than that, it shouldn't be called God. This is true of the understanding of the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, as well as the logic of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
The "documents" weren't written for scribes or monks. If I document has God as its source, then it was written for everyone. This is nowhere clearer than the New Testament. Jesus gave parables which spoke on different levels to different people, and hid the information entirely from those who would only abuse it. All sacred scripture is of the same nature. I don't know what you mean about the 3000-4000 words. There are far more Hebrew words than that in the Old Testament.
You honestly think the people who built the pyramids and invented agriculture would have difficulty understanding that? The real question is whether we are sophisticated enough to understand it. I can tell you right now, that "time for God is different from time for man" is not sophisticated enough. If you want to get on the right track, read Arcana Celestia by Swedenborg. It takes work to understand. Swedenborg is estimated to have had an IQ of over 200. Did all the ancients have a similarly sophisticated understanding of Genesis? No. But before man's understanding became external and the internal intellect became corrupted, he did. I think it's highly likely that all extant religion can trace their roots back to the religion(s) of the Neanderthals. The physiological reality is that we don't have the brain capacity that they did. So if we are going to understand as they did, it's definitely going to take some effort on our part.
More power to Wal-mart. Given many states' union laws that would prevent Wal-mart from hiring replacement workers if the employees unionized and then decided to strike, Wal-mart's fundamental constitutional right to association should give them the power to disregard the NRLA. The NRLA may not be unconstitutional on its face, but I think it should be considered unconstitutional as applied in any state with pro-union laws.
Yes, but even presuming that Walmart employees are all disgruntled (they ain't running a daisy farm </obscure reference>), they have orders of magnitude more customers than employees.