The car should slow down significantly if it sees a soccer ball in the middle of the road -- some kid might be about to come running after it.
But it would be pretty damn annoying if the car comes to a complete stop every single time it sees a plastic bag drifting across the lanes.
For that matter, can the car even tell the difference between a plastic bag (which it can probably run right over) and a bowling ball (which it probably shouldn't)? Computer vision isn't going to be able to determine density. Even humans are pretty awful at that.
I believe these are the kinds of situations the GP was referring to.
"I want EVERYBODY ELSE to have this feature. But not me. Because unlike them, I'm a *good* driver!"
I mean I know how you feel...but as long as they can be overridden when they're wrong, I see no problem. Good drivers won't even notice them, because they won't trigger them. Shitty drivers will be prevented from harming everybody else. You car will get marginally more expensive, but that's gonna happen anyway.
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
...and even if it was public domain, they would still do this. The only thing that would be available for free are ROMs online -- and guess what, those have been available for years. Sure those almost certainly aren't legal, but nobody cares to prosecute.
They're not still selling the original. They're selling ports. So, first, those ports are derivative works and should get all the same protections...meaning new copyright terms. You can do your own port (from the raw machine code; nothing says they have to release source), but you can't freely distribute Nintendo's. But...you also CAN'T actually do your own port, because Nintendo retains exclusive control over distribution for Nintendo consoles.
So your best option there would be to try to sell an emulator and give away the ROMs as that's gonna be far less work than trying to reverse-engineer and port the ROMs...which it turns out is *exactly* what's going on today. Except nobody really sells emulators because there's not enough of a market and because the console makers probably won't let them.
That's because those stories were already public domain LONG before Disney got to them. Most of Disney's fairytales were originally written by The Brothers Grimm in the 1800s. Alice in Wonderland is Lewis Carroll.
b) However the rights over derivative works (book to movie, etc) and commercial re-purposing (e.g. advertising etc) are "75 years or life of the author + 5 years*, whichever is longer" or something, and requires active renewal for a nominal fee. (So that abandoned works automatically roll into the public domain quickly.)
..so it will probably be illegal to publish Harry Potter fanfiction until sometime after the year 2100?
Screw that. There's also a hidden benefit to short terms. If Hollywood takes some moderately successful (at the time -- ~100 years ago) book that just hit the public domain, nobody today will have a clue, and most people will think it's an entirely original work. If they do it with some moderately successful book from 20 years ago, people will know it's a ripoff.
Personally though, I've always thought (as some other commenters here have) that it should include some factor regarding the availability of the work. If you're still publishing and selling new copies in fifty years, then sure, you should still be able to profit from those. If your work is a flop and goes out of print in 5, then there's no way you should get to keep exclusive rights to it for another fifty. So maybe if you sell less than 10,000 copies (to prevent "we re-published as an ebook and sold one copy...to the author") in the last ten years then your work becomes public domain. As soon as people no longer want the original, it becomes free for others to build something people WILL want from it.
There are a number of websites selling openoffice/libreoffice (and other open source software; this is legal under the GPL). Some morons get duped, the rest keep looking and find a free copy. Not really a big deal. If it's popular, it will be freely available somewhere. If not, I think it's fair for whoever is keeping it available to be able to charge a fee for that service.
2. Someone else remixing the crap out of it to make something shitty that's still associated with my name.
Yes, because everyone assumes The Brothers Grimm are directly responsible for Disney's version of Snow White, right? The entire point of public domain is that they don't need to cite you on the new work. They would place only their own name as the author. If they somehow imply or directly state that you were involved when you weren't then that's not copyright infringement, it's somewhere between defamation and identity theft, and there are plenty of laws to deal with it.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage artists to create new works. Stan Lee created Spiderman. If Stan Lee drops dead tomorrow, why should Marvel get to continue milking SOMEONE ELSE'S creation for decades to come? Which will encourage the creation of more works -- only one company having access to that, or opening it up for competition? Perhaps the copyrights expiring would encourage Marvel to create *better* Spiderman stories because they'd have to rise above the competition. Perhaps it would encourage Marvel to hire more artists and create more characters they could own, and others would pick up continuing the Spiderman story. Or perhaps Spiderman would die off in favor of other superheros that people liked better.
The purpose of copyright is not to lock up valuable content. The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation and distribution of NEW content. I fail to see any way that extending copyright terms over individual characters will accomplish anything but the OPPOSITE of that goal.
I never claimed that it did; I was merely pointing out that our society generally does not consider 'just following orders' to be a valid excuse when it comes to illegal activity.
Isn't it nice then that the taxpayer is funding the startup costs for the entrepreneur who needs to make his prototypes. Now he can go to the public library and make them.
How is this any different than the hundreds of 'entrepreneurship' books they keep on the shelves (which probably cost more in total than the 3D printer)? At least the 3D printer may be useful to other people too...
I just get perturbed, here and other places (ahem... Reddit!), where people act like the US is the singular most evil and oppressive country in the world, when the fact of the matter is that that we can even say such things without worry of reprisal means that we have it far, far better than huge swaths of humanity.
Depends on your perspective. Internally, yes, we're bad but not THAT bad. Externally though we're pretty awful. How many countries go around slaughtering toddlers in other countries, which they are not at war with, and won't even provide a reason why they do so?
Meritocracy means that you can be born poor and become rich or a member of what currently passes for the aristocracy.
If I put in just as much work as you do, and you get rich while I don't, that is not a true meritocracy. The USA is *EXTREMELY* far from anything even remotely resembling meritocracy.
You must have no idea what the n900 was if you think that's a valid solution. Such outlets would never even consider carrying something like what he wants these days.
Odds are his best solution will be a mix of both what phone to buy and which hacks to apply to it. Which seems a pretty decent thing to ask Slashdot about, since it's numerous steps each with numerous options and numerous incompatibilities and oddities.
There's also the fact that Android is starting to look like one massive bait-and-switch. Google has spent a few years now slowly killing their support for open-source components and replacing them with proprietary ones. Personally, I don't really mind yet, and you can always go with Cyanogenmod or something based on true AOSP, but I can certainly understand someone wanting to avoid Android entirely because of it.
It would be better if batteries had double markings for a while so that we can migrate to a power*time-notation and mark battery driven tools with power consumption rather than current consumption.
...why? Device power consumption is generally marked as amp-hours at a specific voltage. Batteries are also marked as amp-hours at a specific voltage. Since you'll need to match the voltage no matter what, labeling in watt-hours or something equivalent would seem rather redundant unless they start producing and labeling products to use a wide range of voltages...with a corresponding wide range of battery ports, which would seem too bulky to ever happen.
Of course it matters here since we don't know the voltage, but for labeling consumer products if that's an issue then you've got bigger problems...
Do you fail at Christianity by dismissing the concept of eternity, or at physics by dismissing the second law of thermodynamics?
Not the OP, but you are seriously lacking in imagination if you can't conceive of any way to reconcile those two concepts.
Here's one: God exists outside of our universe. We're a virtual machine and God is the hypervisor. When we die our process is copied from one virtual machine to another which may have a radically different architecture.
$1.8 billion for development and investigations. This would probably not increase significantly.
$0.7 billion for launch and operations. This will.
So, one rover is $2.5 billion; ten rovers at once are a minimum of $8.8 billion.
Basically even if they're using a bunch of identical rovers, each additional rover is probably gonna add nearly a billion in costs. Getting stuff all the way to Mars is *expensive*!
Should we ever get some kind of space elevator or something that should change the numbers significantly though...
B) Just because you don't have traffic lights doesn't mean you can't have walk signals. Those will just broadcast to oncoming traffic directly instead of changing a traffic light.
How would you ride a bike in such an environment without being killed?
Presumably the cars won't be programmed to attack cyclists. C'mon man, this isn't 1920, we're not theorizing cars driving blindly on a system of rails or something. They'll have a number of sensors to avoid such things. You won't need to avoid cars; cars will avoid you. But I'm sure there will still be bike lanes, there will still be bike signals just like we'll still have walk signals. At least until we get self-driving bikes...;)
You seem to think you're disagreeing with him, when you're both actually making the exact same point.
Divorce rates have gone up, which is an indicator that marriage is no guarantee of a stable relationship, despite the constant insistence by "religious nuts" that marriage is essentially the *only* guarantee of one.
Divorce isn't necessarily an indicator of dysfunction though either -- a wife who stays married to her abusive husband is more dysfunctional than if she divorced him. Easier to do that today than it ever has been. Not that I'm suggesting that such cases are the sole or majority cause of the divorce rate increasing; merely that you can't possibly assert that divorce rates alone are a solid indicator of dysfunctional relationships.
The only issues they disagree on are issues which don't affect their power. Both parties agree on anything that will increase the power of the federal government and "ruling class" in general, which is why such issues are rarely debated or questioned. Instead they debate things like gay marriage. Which, sure, is very important to a lot of people, but do you *really* think someone like Rick Santorum gives a shit? Will his millions, I don't think it really matters. It's not about *what* they disagree on, it's about *why*. A conspiracy theorist would say they're trying to distract you; a more skeptical person might call it the 'inertia of power' -- each administration increasing their power above the previous, because they sure as hell aren't going to decrease it...but either way the end result is the same. While we're arguing about Adam and Steve getting married, they start monitoring nearly all global communications and launch military action in over a *seventy* sovereign nations...
Oh, and if the Dems really cared about food stamps and unemployment benefits, they could have put up a much bigger fight. For every dollar they fork over to their top 0.1%, they give a penny to these programs that serve hundreds of millions of Americans. And even that fractional percentage of a fractional percentage is apparently more than the number of shits they give about the average American.
Say 10% of the electorate (exaggerated numbers to make a point) votes Libertarian next election. Now, further suppose that everyone who voted Libertarian would have the Republicans as their second choice, and suppose the dems win by under 10%. This means that, had they voted for their second choice, it would have won instead.
HOWEVER, you also have to look at the long-term impacts and at how wide the gap is between choices. The Republicans would probably see this 10% going Libertarian and start adopting more Libertarian policies going forward to try to win this extra 10%. If the Libertarians agreed with 0% of Democrat policies, 10% of Republican policies, and 100% of Libertarian policies (again, exaggerated numbers...) and as a result of the changes they now agree with 30% of Republican policies, then they probably came out ahead by voting third party. Even though it cost them in the short term, the next election there will be a significantly greater number of their issues represented.
For a more real-world example: Both the Dems and the GOP are very ardently pro-war. So the only *electoral* option to try to get more anti-war policies to be adopted is to vote third party. You can't possibly choose the party that represents you best if neither party represents you at all. In which case, you should at least register your discontent, lest they think you're just too busy watching American Idol....
Actually, 'administrator' would imply more power than 'president'...IIRC, the first usage of that term for a head of state was the USA, for that very reason -- previously it had just meant a person leading some sort of meeting.
So the people abusing that term aren't the ones insisting he has no power -- they're the ones insisting he *does*.
A) Democrats and Republicans were both "third parties" at one point in time. It will always stabilize to two, but *which* two is still open to change
B) Even the existing parties flip alignments every few decades. The system is set up such that both major parties are always hovering within a few percentage points of a majority. So if a third party gets even a small number of votes it may be enough to push one of the major parties over the top if they can win those voters without sacrificing their existing base. Even if it doesn't win, the message that a number of people voting third party would send could still significantly alter the political landscape. And since the most agreeable party to you will undoubtedly be back in power within a few years, it can be worth sacrificing one election to win long-term.
There are VERY few mechanisms for altering the behavior of a major party. Voting third party isn't a great one, but it's still one of only a handful, so it's worth a shot...
If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, that's all you'll ever get.
You are confusing opposing *luxury* versions of products with opposing all versions of those products.
The problem isn't the building of new condos; the problem is they're building condos the people already living there won't be able to afford. The problem isn't that Google and others have buses, the problem is that they're using exclusive private luxury buses that aren't available to anybody else, which again helps push out the people already living there.
Their problem isn't new people moving in; their problem is new people *forcing the existing residents out.*
Slashdot Mirror
...the ones that come OEM on damn Mercedes cars seem to be perfectly legal despite the fact that they'll blind you from fifty feet away....ugh.
The car should slow down significantly if it sees a soccer ball in the middle of the road -- some kid might be about to come running after it.
But it would be pretty damn annoying if the car comes to a complete stop every single time it sees a plastic bag drifting across the lanes.
For that matter, can the car even tell the difference between a plastic bag (which it can probably run right over) and a bowling ball (which it probably shouldn't)? Computer vision isn't going to be able to determine density. Even humans are pretty awful at that.
I believe these are the kinds of situations the GP was referring to.
"I want EVERYBODY ELSE to have this feature. But not me. Because unlike them, I'm a *good* driver!"
I mean I know how you feel...but as long as they can be overridden when they're wrong, I see no problem. Good drivers won't even notice them, because they won't trigger them. Shitty drivers will be prevented from harming everybody else. You car will get marginally more expensive, but that's gonna happen anyway.
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
...and even if it was public domain, they would still do this. The only thing that would be available for free are ROMs online -- and guess what, those have been available for years. Sure those almost certainly aren't legal, but nobody cares to prosecute.
They're not still selling the original. They're selling ports. So, first, those ports are derivative works and should get all the same protections...meaning new copyright terms. You can do your own port (from the raw machine code; nothing says they have to release source), but you can't freely distribute Nintendo's. But...you also CAN'T actually do your own port, because Nintendo retains exclusive control over distribution for Nintendo consoles.
So your best option there would be to try to sell an emulator and give away the ROMs as that's gonna be far less work than trying to reverse-engineer and port the ROMs...which it turns out is *exactly* what's going on today. Except nobody really sells emulators because there's not enough of a market and because the console makers probably won't let them.
That's because those stories were already public domain LONG before Disney got to them. Most of Disney's fairytales were originally written by The Brothers Grimm in the 1800s. Alice in Wonderland is Lewis Carroll.
b) However the rights over derivative works (book to movie, etc) and commercial re-purposing (e.g. advertising etc) are "75 years or life of the author + 5 years*, whichever is longer" or something, and requires active renewal for a nominal fee. (So that abandoned works automatically roll into the public domain quickly.)
..so it will probably be illegal to publish Harry Potter fanfiction until sometime after the year 2100?
Screw that. There's also a hidden benefit to short terms. If Hollywood takes some moderately successful (at the time -- ~100 years ago) book that just hit the public domain, nobody today will have a clue, and most people will think it's an entirely original work. If they do it with some moderately successful book from 20 years ago, people will know it's a ripoff.
Personally though, I've always thought (as some other commenters here have) that it should include some factor regarding the availability of the work. If you're still publishing and selling new copies in fifty years, then sure, you should still be able to profit from those. If your work is a flop and goes out of print in 5, then there's no way you should get to keep exclusive rights to it for another fifty. So maybe if you sell less than 10,000 copies (to prevent "we re-published as an ebook and sold one copy...to the author") in the last ten years then your work becomes public domain. As soon as people no longer want the original, it becomes free for others to build something people WILL want from it.
1. Someone else charging you for a copy.
There are a number of websites selling openoffice/libreoffice (and other open source software; this is legal under the GPL). Some morons get duped, the rest keep looking and find a free copy. Not really a big deal. If it's popular, it will be freely available somewhere. If not, I think it's fair for whoever is keeping it available to be able to charge a fee for that service.
2. Someone else remixing the crap out of it to make something shitty that's still associated with my name.
Yes, because everyone assumes The Brothers Grimm are directly responsible for Disney's version of Snow White, right? The entire point of public domain is that they don't need to cite you on the new work. They would place only their own name as the author. If they somehow imply or directly state that you were involved when you weren't then that's not copyright infringement, it's somewhere between defamation and identity theft, and there are plenty of laws to deal with it.
Why?
The purpose of copyright is to encourage artists to create new works. Stan Lee created Spiderman. If Stan Lee drops dead tomorrow, why should Marvel get to continue milking SOMEONE ELSE'S creation for decades to come? Which will encourage the creation of more works -- only one company having access to that, or opening it up for competition? Perhaps the copyrights expiring would encourage Marvel to create *better* Spiderman stories because they'd have to rise above the competition. Perhaps it would encourage Marvel to hire more artists and create more characters they could own, and others would pick up continuing the Spiderman story. Or perhaps Spiderman would die off in favor of other superheros that people liked better.
The purpose of copyright is not to lock up valuable content. The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation and distribution of NEW content. I fail to see any way that extending copyright terms over individual characters will accomplish anything but the OPPOSITE of that goal.
I never claimed that it did; I was merely pointing out that our society generally does not consider 'just following orders' to be a valid excuse when it comes to illegal activity.
it would be wrong to fire the guy for following orders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Isn't it nice then that the taxpayer is funding the startup costs for the entrepreneur who needs to make his prototypes. Now he can go to the public library and make them.
How is this any different than the hundreds of 'entrepreneurship' books they keep on the shelves (which probably cost more in total than the 3D printer)? At least the 3D printer may be useful to other people too...
I just get perturbed, here and other places (ahem... Reddit!), where people act like the US is the singular most evil and oppressive country in the world, when the fact of the matter is that that we can even say such things without worry of reprisal means that we have it far, far better than huge swaths of humanity.
Depends on your perspective. Internally, yes, we're bad but not THAT bad. Externally though we're pretty awful. How many countries go around slaughtering toddlers in other countries, which they are not at war with, and won't even provide a reason why they do so?
Meritocracy means that you can be born poor and become rich or a member of what currently passes for the aristocracy.
If I put in just as much work as you do, and you get rich while I don't, that is not a true meritocracy. The USA is *EXTREMELY* far from anything even remotely resembling meritocracy.
You must have no idea what the n900 was if you think that's a valid solution. Such outlets would never even consider carrying something like what he wants these days.
Odds are his best solution will be a mix of both what phone to buy and which hacks to apply to it. Which seems a pretty decent thing to ask Slashdot about, since it's numerous steps each with numerous options and numerous incompatibilities and oddities.
There's also the fact that Android is starting to look like one massive bait-and-switch. Google has spent a few years now slowly killing their support for open-source components and replacing them with proprietary ones. Personally, I don't really mind yet, and you can always go with Cyanogenmod or something based on true AOSP, but I can certainly understand someone wanting to avoid Android entirely because of it.
See: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
It would be better if batteries had double markings for a while so that we can migrate to a power*time-notation and mark battery driven tools with power consumption rather than current consumption.
...why? Device power consumption is generally marked as amp-hours at a specific voltage. Batteries are also marked as amp-hours at a specific voltage. Since you'll need to match the voltage no matter what, labeling in watt-hours or something equivalent would seem rather redundant unless they start producing and labeling products to use a wide range of voltages...with a corresponding wide range of battery ports, which would seem too bulky to ever happen.
Of course it matters here since we don't know the voltage, but for labeling consumer products if that's an issue then you've got bigger problems...
Do you fail at Christianity by dismissing the concept of eternity, or at physics by dismissing the second law of thermodynamics?
Not the OP, but you are seriously lacking in imagination if you can't conceive of any way to reconcile those two concepts.
Here's one: God exists outside of our universe. We're a virtual machine and God is the hypervisor. When we die our process is copied from one virtual machine to another which may have a radically different architecture.
Making 10 of them is probably hardly more expensive than just making one anyway.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/mi...
$1.8 billion for development and investigations. This would probably not increase significantly.
$0.7 billion for launch and operations. This will.
So, one rover is $2.5 billion; ten rovers at once are a minimum of $8.8 billion.
Basically even if they're using a bunch of identical rovers, each additional rover is probably gonna add nearly a billion in costs. Getting stuff all the way to Mars is *expensive*!
Should we ever get some kind of space elevator or something that should change the numbers significantly though...
How would a pedestrian cross the road?
A) They'll look for a gap in traffic and cross
B) Just because you don't have traffic lights doesn't mean you can't have walk signals. Those will just broadcast to oncoming traffic directly instead of changing a traffic light.
How would you ride a bike in such an environment without being killed?
Presumably the cars won't be programmed to attack cyclists. C'mon man, this isn't 1920, we're not theorizing cars driving blindly on a system of rails or something. They'll have a number of sensors to avoid such things. You won't need to avoid cars; cars will avoid you. But I'm sure there will still be bike lanes, there will still be bike signals just like we'll still have walk signals. At least until we get self-driving bikes... ;)
You seem to think you're disagreeing with him, when you're both actually making the exact same point.
Divorce rates have gone up, which is an indicator that marriage is no guarantee of a stable relationship, despite the constant insistence by "religious nuts" that marriage is essentially the *only* guarantee of one.
Divorce isn't necessarily an indicator of dysfunction though either -- a wife who stays married to her abusive husband is more dysfunctional than if she divorced him. Easier to do that today than it ever has been. Not that I'm suggesting that such cases are the sole or majority cause of the divorce rate increasing; merely that you can't possibly assert that divorce rates alone are a solid indicator of dysfunctional relationships.
The only issues they disagree on are issues which don't affect their power. Both parties agree on anything that will increase the power of the federal government and "ruling class" in general, which is why such issues are rarely debated or questioned. Instead they debate things like gay marriage. Which, sure, is very important to a lot of people, but do you *really* think someone like Rick Santorum gives a shit? Will his millions, I don't think it really matters. It's not about *what* they disagree on, it's about *why*. A conspiracy theorist would say they're trying to distract you; a more skeptical person might call it the 'inertia of power' -- each administration increasing their power above the previous, because they sure as hell aren't going to decrease it...but either way the end result is the same. While we're arguing about Adam and Steve getting married, they start monitoring nearly all global communications and launch military action in over a *seventy* sovereign nations...
Oh, and if the Dems really cared about food stamps and unemployment benefits, they could have put up a much bigger fight. For every dollar they fork over to their top 0.1%, they give a penny to these programs that serve hundreds of millions of Americans. And even that fractional percentage of a fractional percentage is apparently more than the number of shits they give about the average American.
That is better, but still overly simplistic.
Say 10% of the electorate (exaggerated numbers to make a point) votes Libertarian next election. Now, further suppose that everyone who voted Libertarian would have the Republicans as their second choice, and suppose the dems win by under 10%. This means that, had they voted for their second choice, it would have won instead.
HOWEVER, you also have to look at the long-term impacts and at how wide the gap is between choices. The Republicans would probably see this 10% going Libertarian and start adopting more Libertarian policies going forward to try to win this extra 10%. If the Libertarians agreed with 0% of Democrat policies, 10% of Republican policies, and 100% of Libertarian policies (again, exaggerated numbers...) and as a result of the changes they now agree with 30% of Republican policies, then they probably came out ahead by voting third party. Even though it cost them in the short term, the next election there will be a significantly greater number of their issues represented.
For a more real-world example: Both the Dems and the GOP are very ardently pro-war. So the only *electoral* option to try to get more anti-war policies to be adopted is to vote third party. You can't possibly choose the party that represents you best if neither party represents you at all. In which case, you should at least register your discontent, lest they think you're just too busy watching American Idol....
Actually, 'administrator' would imply more power than 'president'...IIRC, the first usage of that term for a head of state was the USA, for that very reason -- previously it had just meant a person leading some sort of meeting.
So the people abusing that term aren't the ones insisting he has no power -- they're the ones insisting he *does*.
A) Democrats and Republicans were both "third parties" at one point in time. It will always stabilize to two, but *which* two is still open to change
B) Even the existing parties flip alignments every few decades. The system is set up such that both major parties are always hovering within a few percentage points of a majority. So if a third party gets even a small number of votes it may be enough to push one of the major parties over the top if they can win those voters without sacrificing their existing base. Even if it doesn't win, the message that a number of people voting third party would send could still significantly alter the political landscape. And since the most agreeable party to you will undoubtedly be back in power within a few years, it can be worth sacrificing one election to win long-term.
There are VERY few mechanisms for altering the behavior of a major party. Voting third party isn't a great one, but it's still one of only a handful, so it's worth a shot...
If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, that's all you'll ever get.
You are confusing opposing *luxury* versions of products with opposing all versions of those products.
The problem isn't the building of new condos; the problem is they're building condos the people already living there won't be able to afford. The problem isn't that Google and others have buses, the problem is that they're using exclusive private luxury buses that aren't available to anybody else, which again helps push out the people already living there.
Their problem isn't new people moving in; their problem is new people *forcing the existing residents out.*