The first amendment does not trump all. It does not give you the right to freely write down an exact copy of someone else's work and sell it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are special rules about currency; certainly in the US the secret service can really ruin your day if they don't like how you're using currency, and I bet they have the force of law.
But even if there weren't special laws, it seems like all you'd have to do is for the government to claim artistic copyright on a bill and then issue a blanket license for everyone in the world to use it only for the purposes of monetary transaction, but not for reproduction in any form.
You charge what people are willing to pay. People DO pay that for it. Therefore they charge that much for it. Why would they not? If someone wins an auction of yours for something on eBay and you thought they bid too high, would you say "No, $100 is too much, just pay me $50."
There is an argument that you can price yourself out of the market. However, they have a version of photoshop that has pretty much all that a casual user would ever need that they sell for $100 (Photoshop Elements). It gets shipped free with some cameras and scanners. It's really pretty capable.
OTOH, if you really need to be able to create gaussian blur alpha masks, sharpening layers and workflow scripts, then you apparently are either a pro or a really serious amateur, and can really afford to pay $600 for full Photoshop, and there's no good alternative.
If you have a product to sell to the masses at a price that people will pay, and a better product to sell to the pros at a price THEY will pay, then you're doing it exactly right.
I don't know what the deal is, but Spambayes starts out working very well, but after a month or two, it starts getting less and less accurate, and if I let it go long enough, it's pretty much worthless. I've tried both the Outlook plugin and the standalone feeding into Agent. Now I'm using Popfile, and it's working great. It did take noticeably longer to get accurate than Spambayes did, but it's still working after 4 months. FWIW, I've been getting the random word stuff for a while and popfile has been doing pretty well, I'd say 98% correct positive, false negatives only coming from one guy, I haven't bothered trying to figure out why but I wouldn't be suprised if his place of employment is running an open relay...
Anybody doing anything nontrival should be using metric. My least favorite part of physics class was when the prof would make us do stuff in imperial units. God, what a pain in the ass.
More steps, arcane conversion factors to remember, lots more chances to screw up.
How many cubic inches in a gallon? Shit, I don't know. How many cubic centimeters in a litre? 1000. Everything's a power of 10. Doesn't get any easier than that.
It gets worse when you're outside of familiar measurement units. When you start talking about slugs, even a farm-raised midwest american boy like me thinks "OK, that's a unit of mass, not weight, so it's converted to grams."
I am immersed in imperial measurements, and don't have an intuitive feel for metric, but I know that if the US switched and it was full immersion, within a year I'd be thinking in metric. The problem is, you can't do full immersion, because people will always speak in the language that they know. The problem is, even future generations will not switch, because the US is big enough that they never have to deal with metric except as a curiosity in school.
You can't educate someone who doesn't want to be educated.
Remember when Cassini went up, with a little thermal nuclear battery? It would have taken something like a direct DU antitank round to split that casing; a crash never would have done it.
NASA pointed this out, repeatedly, and stated the very safe history of these devices. Nevertheless, there were swarms of people protesting at NASA. They showed footage of families with children crying; the parents had told them that the rocket was going to crash and the radiation would kill them all.
You can't reason with these people any more than you can reason with conspiracy theorists. They know what they "know" and if you tell them different, you're a god-damn liar.
This is the same reason that NMR is now called MRI. Nuclear bad, magnets good! If they put that magnet inside a pyramid, people would pay to sit inside it for no reason.
Because they're INCREDIBLY BUSY and have been for a couple of years. One of them asked around a mailing list I'm on to see if any of us had a quick solution. Several "do it yourself" methods were suggested, but they were discarded because they don't have time to screw with that.
They DO have a java app that shows mars time on their computers, but nothing portable.
Good, glad to hear it. I paid $450 for 4 years worth on my Dell. As I said, I had a very bad experience with the Compaq I had before this, with a replacement part's cost exceeding the replacement cost of the unit, so it was worth it to me to know I wouldn't have to worry about that again for a long time.
Not really. Perhaps the last time you had a laptop open was 10-15 years ago; Yes, I worked repair and at the time, we worked on 286 laptops and they were a screaming nightmare to get back together again properly; it was nearly impossible, even with the manual and a lot of care.
My old Compaq was a little tricky but not bad. My current Dell is a complete breeze; it comes apart with a small screwdriver, parts are nearly standardized inside and can be easily interchanged, and it's trivial to put back together.
Was this with the CompleteCare warranty? It's different and costs significantly more than the normal warranty. I got it for my new Dell after my previous laptop, a Compaq, fried a mainboard, and they wanted $1500 to replace. It had cost $2500 new 2 years before; it was now $1200 for the same model but with a faster CPU.
So in that case, the cheapest way to replace the mainboard was to buy one new replacement part, which was called "a new laptop".
Robert Heinlein wrote a short story about a guy who built a machine that would tell you exactly when you would die. Insurance companies almost immediately went bankrupt as people cancelled their life insurance, then took out $100 million policies the day before they snuffed it.
Something to think about if we start getting really good at predicting disasters. The insurance industry would have to be allowed to react to the prediction in some way, as stated by the parent, or they'd just go out of business.
Be sure to pack away an old PC running Win9x then. According to what I've read, Mindstorms don't work under modern Windows, they never upgraded the software.
$10 would be a huge individual payout from a class-action. I often hear of people getting checks for a couple of bucks after years of legal rangling. I got a check the other day for 5 cents; that was my share of a suit (that honestly, I'd forgotten about). It's fun to put it on the wall as a conversation piece.
Every Hubble image I've seen of deep-sky objects not only says that the image is false-color, they will say in the caption somewhere what colors represent what. Sometimes, blue will represent IR, or maybe green represents oxygen and red hydrogen, etc.
Just because people aren't reading the caption doesn't mean the info is not disclosed. I suppose NASA could put big block letters across the image saying THESE COLORS ARE A FAKE!!!! but that's not likely.
Also, unfortunately the image standards of the world don't tend to have the colorspace to properly cause your monitor to emit high resolution ultraviolet or x-ray images, so a little false coloring is necessary to impart the information.
I'm not talking about square feet of floor space, I'm talking about mindspace. It's a LIVING room, not a tv-watching zombie room. I will probably have a big screen TV some day, when I finish a room in the basement to devote to it. But I won't have a room that is completely dominated by a huge TV. Many of my friends have them, and IMHO they make a room look horrible.
There's already a solution posted. There's been an updated version of the root certificate available from Verisign for quite a while, it's just that many admins didn't bother to install it.
I'm interested in one as well, but I have a 27" cheapo TV. I'm not really interested in having a TV that ownz my living room, but I'd kind of like to be able to watch some DivX's from there. This'll be sweet for that. It'd be silly for me to hook a computer up with a 320x240 res 27" TV as its only output. So this player hits a real need for me.
It'll play ogg just fine, same way that the slimp3 from slimdevices.com does; just stream the ogg through an mp3 encoder on the PC; you can run the bitrate as high as you need to in order to preserve your sound quality.
From the article: SCO also announced its first full year of profitability today, reporting $5.3m in net income for its 2003 financial year
The company would have reported net income of $14.3m for the year had it not reported a charge of nearly $9m to pay law firms involved in the lawsuit and related efforts to "enforce its intellectual property rights", SCO officials said.
So, any bets on how long after all the SCO claims are thrown out as frivilous until the shareholders sue the officers for throwing money away on lawyers instead of paying dividends?
The officers are legally required to maximize shareholder value. Spewing frivilous lawsuits like a leaky hose doesn't qualify.
Simple as that. There have been calls to make emails legal documents, but it may be a while.
Also I think you need to read up on faxes. They do not "send uncompressed TIFFs at 14.4kbps; they send CCITT compressed monochrome images at some pretty low speed, depending on the fax machine, as low as 300 baud (there are still many very slow machines out there).
The fact is that a fax machine requires no infrastructure and works as long as the phone system works. Like it or not, your "cheap email to paper gateway" still relies on a hell of a lot of infrastructure (dialup servers, internet connections at the server end, storage space, pop email) that isn't needed for a fax machine.
Also anytime this stuff gets stored, there's a chance for it to be lost or stolen. One of the attractive features of faxes is that they move immediately from sender to recipient across a closed and protected-by-federal-law network.
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
I suggest you read some cosmology books. If you did you'd know the answers to your questions (as to whether we should think of things in these ways). Most of the things you ask about are covered in way, way more depth than you have mentioned here. A good cosmology book will really give your mind a workout.
As for your last question, as I said before, there are multiple theories that are still not ruled out that allow the universe to be bigger than it is (apparently) old. In fact, the expansionist theory that I mentioned provides one good explanation for why the universe is perfectly flat, not open or closed.
Obviously without FTL, we can't have any knowledge of things outside the time horizon. But that's not to say that we should exclude them from consideration. As I said, there are cosmological theories that do take into account distances beyond which we cannot see, and dimensions into which we cannot go.
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
You didn't state a question. You presented a deux ex machina. This is not a useful line of speculation.
Sure, there are many theories, from expansionist to string theory, that posit that what we can see is only a small portion of the full extent of the universe/multiverse. Read some cosmology books and you'll find that many very smart people have come up with all kinds of theories like this.
Slashdot Mirror
The first amendment does not trump all. It does not give you the right to freely write down an exact copy of someone else's work and sell it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are special rules about currency; certainly in the US the secret service can really ruin your day if they don't like how you're using currency, and I bet they have the force of law.
But even if there weren't special laws, it seems like all you'd have to do is for the government to claim artistic copyright on a bill and then issue a blanket license for everyone in the world to use it only for the purposes of monetary transaction, but not for reproduction in any form.
You charge what people are willing to pay. People DO pay that for it. Therefore they charge that much for it. Why would they not? If someone wins an auction of yours for something on eBay and you thought they bid too high, would you say "No, $100 is too much, just pay me $50."
There is an argument that you can price yourself out of the market. However, they have a version of photoshop that has pretty much all that a casual user would ever need that they sell for $100 (Photoshop Elements). It gets shipped free with some cameras and scanners. It's really pretty capable.
OTOH, if you really need to be able to create gaussian blur alpha masks, sharpening layers and workflow scripts, then you apparently are either a pro or a really serious amateur, and can really afford to pay $600 for full Photoshop, and there's no good alternative.
If you have a product to sell to the masses at a price that people will pay, and a better product to sell to the pros at a price THEY will pay, then you're doing it exactly right.
I don't know what the deal is, but Spambayes starts out working very well, but after a month or two, it starts getting less and less accurate, and if I let it go long enough, it's pretty much worthless.
I've tried both the Outlook plugin and the standalone feeding into Agent.
Now I'm using Popfile, and it's working great. It did take noticeably longer to get accurate than Spambayes did, but it's still working after 4 months.
FWIW, I've been getting the random word stuff for a while and popfile has been doing pretty well, I'd say 98% correct positive, false negatives only coming from one guy, I haven't bothered trying to figure out why but I wouldn't be suprised if his place of employment is running an open relay...
Anybody doing anything nontrival should be using metric. My least favorite part of physics class was when the prof would make us do stuff in imperial units. God, what a pain in the ass.
More steps, arcane conversion factors to remember, lots more chances to screw up.
How many cubic inches in a gallon? Shit, I don't know. How many cubic centimeters in a litre? 1000. Everything's a power of 10. Doesn't get any easier than that.
It gets worse when you're outside of familiar measurement units. When you start talking about slugs, even a farm-raised midwest american boy like me thinks "OK, that's a unit of mass, not weight, so it's converted to grams."
I am immersed in imperial measurements, and don't have an intuitive feel for metric, but I know that if the US switched and it was full immersion, within a year I'd be thinking in metric. The problem is, you can't do full immersion, because people will always speak in the language that they know. The problem is, even future generations will not switch, because the US is big enough that they never have to deal with metric except as a curiosity in school.
Meteors come in at hundreds to thousands of miles per second. Failed launches would be falling at escape velocity; a couple hundred miles an hour.
You can't educate someone who doesn't want to be educated.
Remember when Cassini went up, with a little thermal nuclear battery? It would have taken something like a direct DU antitank round to split that casing; a crash never would have done it.
NASA pointed this out, repeatedly, and stated the very safe history of these devices. Nevertheless, there were swarms of people protesting at NASA. They showed footage of families with children crying; the parents had told them that the rocket was going to crash and the radiation would kill them all.
You can't reason with these people any more than you can reason with conspiracy theorists. They know what they "know" and if you tell them different, you're a god-damn liar.
This is the same reason that NMR is now called MRI. Nuclear bad, magnets good! If they put that magnet inside a pyramid, people would pay to sit inside it for no reason.
Because they're INCREDIBLY BUSY and have been for a couple of years. One of them asked around a mailing list I'm on to see if any of us had a quick solution. Several "do it yourself" methods were suggested, but they were discarded because they don't have time to screw with that.
They DO have a java app that shows mars time on their computers, but nothing portable.
Good, glad to hear it. I paid $450 for 4 years worth on my Dell. As I said, I had a very bad experience with the Compaq I had before this, with a replacement part's cost exceeding the replacement cost of the unit, so it was worth it to me to know I wouldn't have to worry about that again for a long time.
Not really. Perhaps the last time you had a laptop open was 10-15 years ago; Yes, I worked repair and at the time, we worked on 286 laptops and they were a screaming nightmare to get back together again properly; it was nearly impossible, even with the manual and a lot of care.
My old Compaq was a little tricky but not bad. My current Dell is a complete breeze; it comes apart with a small screwdriver, parts are nearly standardized inside and can be easily interchanged, and it's trivial to put back together.
Was this with the CompleteCare warranty? It's different and costs significantly more than the normal warranty. I got it for my new Dell after my previous laptop, a Compaq, fried a mainboard, and they wanted $1500 to replace. It had cost $2500 new 2 years before; it was now $1200 for the same model but with a faster CPU.
So in that case, the cheapest way to replace the mainboard was to buy one new replacement part, which was called "a new laptop".
Robert Heinlein wrote a short story about a guy who built a machine that would tell you exactly when you would die. Insurance companies almost immediately went bankrupt as people cancelled their life insurance, then took out $100 million policies the day before they snuffed it.
Something to think about if we start getting really good at predicting disasters. The insurance industry would have to be allowed to react to the prediction in some way, as stated by the parent, or they'd just go out of business.
Be sure to pack away an old PC running Win9x then. According to what I've read, Mindstorms don't work under modern Windows, they never upgraded the software.
$10 would be a huge individual payout from a class-action. I often hear of people getting checks for a couple of bucks after years of legal rangling. I got a check the other day for 5 cents; that was my share of a suit (that honestly, I'd forgotten about). It's fun to put it on the wall as a conversation piece.
Every Hubble image I've seen of deep-sky objects not only says that the image is false-color, they will say in the caption somewhere what colors represent what. Sometimes, blue will represent IR, or maybe green represents oxygen and red hydrogen, etc.
Just because people aren't reading the caption doesn't mean the info is not disclosed. I suppose NASA could put big block letters across the image saying THESE COLORS ARE A FAKE!!!! but that's not likely.
Also, unfortunately the image standards of the world don't tend to have the colorspace to properly cause your monitor to emit high resolution ultraviolet or x-ray images, so a little false coloring is necessary to impart the information.
Yes, I almost certainly will get a projector. Some of the new DLP units are very impressive.
OK, maybe. When they get under $500 I'll think about it, but I want to be able to expect it to last 10 years, like my previous TVs have.
I'm not talking about square feet of floor space, I'm talking about mindspace. It's a LIVING room, not a tv-watching zombie room. I will probably have a big screen TV some day, when I finish a room in the basement to devote to it. But I won't have a room that is completely dominated by a huge TV. Many of my friends have them, and IMHO they make a room look horrible.
There's already a solution posted. There's been an updated version of the root certificate available from Verisign for quite a while, it's just that many admins didn't bother to install it.
I'm interested in one as well, but I have a 27" cheapo TV. I'm not really interested in having a TV that ownz my living room, but I'd kind of like to be able to watch some DivX's from there. This'll be sweet for that.
It'd be silly for me to hook a computer up with a 320x240 res 27" TV as its only output. So this player hits a real need for me.
It'll play ogg just fine, same way that the slimp3 from slimdevices.com does; just stream the ogg through an mp3 encoder on the PC; you can run the bitrate as high as you need to in order to preserve your sound quality.
Do you have a point?
SCO also announced its first full year of profitability today, reporting $5.3m in net income for its 2003 financial year
The company would have reported net income of $14.3m for the year had it not reported a charge of nearly $9m to pay law firms involved in the lawsuit and related efforts to "enforce its intellectual property rights", SCO officials said.
So, any bets on how long after all the SCO claims are thrown out as frivilous until the shareholders sue the officers for throwing money away on lawyers instead of paying dividends?
The officers are legally required to maximize shareholder value. Spewing frivilous lawsuits like a leaky hose doesn't qualify.
Simple as that. There have been calls to make emails legal documents, but it may be a while.
Also I think you need to read up on faxes. They do not "send uncompressed TIFFs at 14.4kbps; they send CCITT compressed monochrome images at some pretty low speed, depending on the fax machine, as low as 300 baud (there are still many very slow machines out there).
The fact is that a fax machine requires no infrastructure and works as long as the phone system works. Like it or not, your "cheap email to paper gateway" still relies on a hell of a lot of infrastructure (dialup servers, internet connections at the server end, storage space, pop email) that isn't needed for a fax machine.
Also anytime this stuff gets stored, there's a chance for it to be lost or stolen. One of the attractive features of faxes is that they move immediately from sender to recipient across a closed and protected-by-federal-law network.
I suggest you read some cosmology books. If you did you'd know the answers to your questions (as to whether we should think of things in these ways). Most of the things you ask about are covered in way, way more depth than you have mentioned here. A good cosmology book will really give your mind a workout.
As for your last question, as I said before, there are multiple theories that are still not ruled out that allow the universe to be bigger than it is (apparently) old. In fact, the expansionist theory that I mentioned provides one good explanation for why the universe is perfectly flat, not open or closed.
Obviously without FTL, we can't have any knowledge of things outside the time horizon. But that's not to say that we should exclude them from consideration. As I said, there are cosmological theories that do take into account distances beyond which we cannot see, and dimensions into which we cannot go.
You didn't state a question. You presented a deux ex machina. This is not a useful line of speculation.
Sure, there are many theories, from expansionist to string theory, that posit that what we can see is only a small portion of the full extent of the universe/multiverse. Read some cosmology books and you'll find that many very smart people have come up with all kinds of theories like this.