And that N. Ireland thing really bugs me. Get out already.
You should understand that the majority of the residents of Northern Ireland do not favor independence. Telling them to "get out" would be akin to telling most Americans to get out and return this country to its rightful Amerind owners.
So artists are incapable of investing? My boss doesn't keep paying me for work I did last year. Most of an artist's profit for a work is going to come in a relatively short period of time, and if there's a revival, they can use the old stuff to promote the new, go on tour, etc.
Moreover, it's generally not the arists who are campaigning for immensely long copyrights, it's companies. Indeed, often the artists battle the companies who try to tie up their rights, like the company that sued John Fogarty for sounding too much like himself, Prince's battles with his record company, and so on. A lot of musicians also want to allow legal bootlegging, but are pressured by their record companies into restricting or prohibiting it.
iMacs came out in May, 1998, Windows 98 came out in June. There were probably as many or more PCs with USB ports being sold or being upgraded to 98 as there were iMacs being sold. You would be hard-pressed to prove that the iMac was more important than Windows 98 in promoting USB.
I might remind you that the iMac was the first PC to come with USB
You might try to remind me of that, but it's incorrect. I still have a Toshiba Infinia with USB ports that predates the earliest iMacs.
Apple's USB support was better than the general Windows support for a while, and the Mac platform in general provided a better USB experience for quite a while. But they weren't first.
Apple, 10-some years ago realised something that you have yet to realise: Firewire and USB have different purposes.
The iMac was first released in May, 1988. That would be less than seven years ago. PowerMacs didn't get Firewire and USB until 1999.
The intelligent rich realize that paying current tax rates is a small price to pay for living in a stable democracy that gave them the opportunity to be rich in the first place. (Whereas if you tax the poor at high rates, they have a big incentive to switch to the underground economy so you don't get the taxes anyway, and promote less reputable enterprises.)
Perhaps not much cheaper, but they would be cheaper to produce (which reduces the optimum sales price), and easier to store. I've considered buying cheap DVD replacements of my videotapes just to reduce the storage space needs.
1% of the population already pays 33% of federal income taxes.
But social security taxes, which fall solely on the first ~$90K of income, are used in large part for general government expenditures. So not including FICA at all in your statistics is lying with them.
Moreover, don't tell me the rich don't get better service, government contracts, favorable rules (DMCA, Sonny Bono, farm subsidies, giveaway mining right rates, Price-Anderson, ad infinitum), etc.
BluRay and HD-DVD are not only going to have much better hardware to read the Discs, they are also required to be able to decode WMV9, VP6, MPEG-4AVC, etc.
Codecs are practically free. There's a minimal licensing fee per unit for some, but the MPEG-2 licenses haven't made DVD players pricey.
Right now, Pioneer has an HDTV WMV9 player that retails for well-over a thousand dollars...
I remember $8,000 CD writers in 1995, $500 DVD players in 1999*, $8,000 20" LCDs in ~2000*. Within five years, probably less, expect high-def players for under $200.
DVD players can be had for under $40. I doubt mass produced BluRay or HD DVD players that still play regular DVDs would cost much more, so people will probably end up buying a dual format player and slowly migrating to the new formats. Discs with entire seasons of shows would be cheaper than the current ones, and thus those discs will probably kick-start the higher def format sales.
I agree that most people would be loathe to replace many DVDs with HDTV format ones, except their very favorite ones.
I do see the footnote. Is there a practical limitation, if not a legal one, on recovering such small damages? After all, even in this case, it looks like the copyright owners only got an injunction, not damages.
Also, does U.S. law actually allow CD owners to transfer their music to hard drives and other media?
The Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry case discusses how people looking at web pages can be held liable for infringement
It said such people infringed, but they didn't specifically discuss liability as far as I can tell. Is that necessarily implied? The defendants here were the web page providers, not people browsing the site. Granted, the law can be an ass, but it seems a bit dodgy if I can be held liable for copyright infringement even if I had no reason to believe the materials I was copying were not being provided legitimately.
Sharing the US copyright with a 3rd party gives that party the ability to do anything they could do were they the sole owner of said copyright
But that's not the hypothetical. We started with "What if person A owns the copyright in country A, and person B owns the copyright in country B?" They don't both own the U.S. copyright. Usually you get group ownership if you have a group of creators, like a musical group. Are the music companies really selling national copyrights outright? I thought licensing agreements would be the standard system.
I can sell off the rights in each country to different people as I see fit, as a rule. (YMMV in different countries)
But isn't that essentially the same as individual licensing, where the rights you transfer to the different people are subject to whatever conditions you specify?
You sure you're a lawyer? Let's test this: list a few hearsay exceptions.
What if person A owns the copyright in country A, and person B owns the copyright in country B?
Multiple groups can't "own" the same copyright. There's the original holder, who can then license party A and party B to redistribute. The holder can impose conditions on A and B, such as no international sales. However, at least in the U.S., first sale doctrine would mean that anyone who bought from A (assuming A has U.S. distribution rights) could then legally resell to anyone just about anywhere, and individual purchasers could take their copies home to B's country (again, assuming U.S.-like laws.)
I read the headline...
on
Sim Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
I read the headline as "Sin Epidemic." I was hoping I would catch it...
no no no, we want microsoft to WIN this time. why this time?
Because in the end, Microsoft will inevitably lose to open source.
Functionally, is Windows XP radically different from Windows 95? Hardly. The WIMP interface hasn't changed much, Word isn't radically different from a few years ago, and so on. Meanwhile, Linux and open source are relentlessly improving, constantly narrowing the gap in those things people like better in Windows than in Linux, and patents that might hinder Linux et al constantly march towards their expiration date.
Note that given that just about any audience for this discussion is gone, I'll make this quick:
"Over a thousand Americans now die each year from electrocution, and the power-conditioning equipment needed for a solar electricity installation would represent a major increase in this risk."
This "over a thousand" combines both all home accidents and all electricians, as well as people electrocuted at their workplace. Without a breakdown it tells us nothing about the risk having solar electricity systems in our homes would present.
"In construction, the LLE... is... 38 days for those involved with heating, plumbing, and electrical wiring."
38 days is relatively low on his scale, about 7 times the risk of an average American dying from electrocution, and about the same risk as being one pound overweight. An electrician apparently is 4.5 times as likely to die in a car crash (LLE 180) than from his profession.
Cohen says, "If photovoltaic panels on houses become widespread, how many people would be killed and injured in cleaning or replacing solar panels on roofs, or in clearing them of snow?"
That doesn't say thousands, you do. Shingle workers work on roofs all day, and presumably are part of that LLE 38 group. If you assume a similar risk from solar, and assume solar installers make up 1 worker in 20 (a gross overestimate, since that would be about the same fraction employed in all forms of agriculture), you get 1/900 the deaths from car crashes, or well under 1000.
Solar collectors work best in areas where there is little snow, and the continued existence of the grid is assumed. Few homeowners would be clearing their collectors. Perhaps the collectors would have a heat or vibration system to clear them though if needed.
I'll add in passing that Cohen talks about concrete needed for solar (how, I've no idea) and its pollution, yet completely ignores those massive concrete cooling towers or the concrete needed to entomb defunct plants when discussing costs.
You're full of it. That's your completely unsupported claim. The only thing the book you referenced said is, "The principal health impact of solar energy is in the coal that must be burned to produce the vast quantities of steel, glass, and concrete required to emplace the solar collectors; this is about 3% of the coal that would be burned to produce the same energy by direct coal burning,9 so the health effects are 3% of those of the latter, or an LLE of 1.0 day, if we obtained all of our electricity from the sun."
This has sod-all to do with claims of thousands of people plummetting from roofs.
Are you dishonest or simply stupid? I'm still trying to figure it out.
If your solar electricity is being generated at home, then (as was pointed out at the link you were referring to) it needs to be processed and conditioned at home. This increases the electrocution likelihood beyond that of grid power.
Perhaps, but I haven't exactly been shaking with fear since I got an extra circuit breaker box added; I doubt solar cell circuitry would be a major danger to my life.
No, because it is well-understood by contractors and insurance companies that unmodified roofs cannot support solar panels without being destroyed.
B.S. Anything you put on a roof has to be supported by the roof. Roofs are supposed to be able to support, typically, up to three layers of shingles (depends on code, but at least two.) As long as the whole solar power system/roof protection isn't heavier than that limit, no modification is needed. Even if it is, so what? Contractors reinforce roofs, decks, etc. all the time, it's not rocket science; it's part of the job.
As for the writer, he has a screw loose, or more likely, an ideological axe to grind.
All electrical energy technologies bring with them the risk of electrocution, which has an LLE of 5 days for the average American.
I.e., you have a chance of getting electrocuted at home. Ooo. This is irrelevant to whether that comes from solar, nuclear, coal, etc.
Note that this is far higher than the effects of generating nuclear electricity
Huh? He's comparing apples to oranges here. Nor, I bet, do his stats include non-nuclear accidents from generating nuclear power (construction accidents, transportation accidents, etc.) Except... he has no stats to begin with. All he's doing is making an unsupported claim that installing solar collectors would lead to the deaths of thousands. Over the history of mankind, he's probably right, but what of it? Replacing shingles probably also will lead to thousands of deaths by the same measure, but there's no widespread panic to avoid shingling houses.
So we have not only the accident risk for solar of falling off of roofs, but we also have the accident risk of electrocution.
And yet I've hired a number of electricians, none of whom have been updating their wills just before starting the job.
Slashdot Mirror
And that N. Ireland thing really bugs me. Get out already.
You should understand that the majority of the residents of Northern Ireland do not favor independence. Telling them to "get out" would be akin to telling most Americans to get out and return this country to its rightful Amerind owners.
Six months ago, PNY claimed I didn't send the UPC from the product for a $30 rebate. How do I prove otherwise?
So artists are incapable of investing? My boss doesn't keep paying me for work I did last year. Most of an artist's profit for a work is going to come in a relatively short period of time, and if there's a revival, they can use the old stuff to promote the new, go on tour, etc.
Moreover, it's generally not the arists who are campaigning for immensely long copyrights, it's companies. Indeed, often the artists battle the companies who try to tie up their rights, like the company that sued John Fogarty for sounding too much like himself, Prince's battles with his record company, and so on. A lot of musicians also want to allow legal bootlegging, but are pressured by their record companies into restricting or prohibiting it.
iMacs came out in May, 1998, Windows 98 came out in June. There were probably as many or more PCs with USB ports being sold or being upgraded to 98 as there were iMacs being sold. You would be hard-pressed to prove that the iMac was more important than Windows 98 in promoting USB.
The hardware to decode these other formats is already present in the player, it's just the firmware that would need additional format support.
That's fine, but that still doesn't come close to the current $40 price of standard DVD players.
Yeah, that might take a year or two longer.
It wasn't very long ago that DVD-Rs cost more than your standard DVD movie. This week they're 20 cents each in lots of 100 at CompUSA.
I might remind you that the iMac was the first PC to come with USB
You might try to remind me of that, but it's incorrect. I still have a Toshiba Infinia with USB ports that predates the earliest iMacs.
Apple's USB support was better than the general Windows support for a while, and the Mac platform in general provided a better USB experience for quite a while. But they weren't first.
Apple, 10-some years ago realised something that you have yet to realise: Firewire and USB have different purposes.
The iMac was first released in May, 1988. That would be less than seven years ago. PowerMacs didn't get Firewire and USB until 1999.
The intelligent rich realize that paying current tax rates is a small price to pay for living in a stable democracy that gave them the opportunity to be rich in the first place. (Whereas if you tax the poor at high rates, they have a big incentive to switch to the underground economy so you don't get the taxes anyway, and promote less reputable enterprises.)
Perhaps not much cheaper, but they would be cheaper to produce (which reduces the optimum sales price), and easier to store. I've considered buying cheap DVD replacements of my videotapes just to reduce the storage space needs.
1% of the population already pays 33% of federal income taxes.
But social security taxes, which fall solely on the first ~$90K of income, are used in large part for general government expenditures. So not including FICA at all in your statistics is lying with them.
Moreover, don't tell me the rich don't get better service, government contracts, favorable rules (DMCA, Sonny Bono, farm subsidies, giveaway mining right rates, Price-Anderson, ad infinitum), etc.
"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
BluRay and HD-DVD are not only going to have much better hardware to read the Discs, they are also required to be able to decode WMV9, VP6, MPEG-4AVC, etc.
Codecs are practically free. There's a minimal licensing fee per unit for some, but the MPEG-2 licenses haven't made DVD players pricey.
Right now, Pioneer has an HDTV WMV9 player that retails for well-over a thousand dollars...
I remember $8,000 CD writers in 1995, $500 DVD players in 1999*, $8,000 20" LCDs in ~2000*. Within five years, probably less, expect high-def players for under $200.
(* I think I have those years right.)
DVD players can be had for under $40. I doubt mass produced BluRay or HD DVD players that still play regular DVDs would cost much more, so people will probably end up buying a dual format player and slowly migrating to the new formats. Discs with entire seasons of shows would be cheaper than the current ones, and thus those discs will probably kick-start the higher def format sales.
I agree that most people would be loathe to replace many DVDs with HDTV format ones, except their very favorite ones.
17 USC 1008 works for some music to some media
Ah yes, the digital audio devices section.
Is there any reason video games wouldn't be considered computer programs, particularly with respect to the archiving provisions?
And the court noted that, if you read the opinion
I do see the footnote. Is there a practical limitation, if not a legal one, on recovering such small damages? After all, even in this case, it looks like the copyright owners only got an injunction, not damages.
Also, does U.S. law actually allow CD owners to transfer their music to hard drives and other media?
The Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry case discusses how people looking at web pages can be held liable for infringement
It said such people infringed, but they didn't specifically discuss liability as far as I can tell. Is that necessarily implied? The defendants here were the web page providers, not people browsing the site. Granted, the law can be an ass, but it seems a bit dodgy if I can be held liable for copyright infringement even if I had no reason to believe the materials I was copying were not being provided legitimately.
Sharing the US copyright with a 3rd party gives that party the ability to do anything they could do were they the sole owner of said copyright
But that's not the hypothetical. We started with "What if person A owns the copyright in country A, and person B owns the copyright in country B?" They don't both own the U.S. copyright. Usually you get group ownership if you have a group of creators, like a musical group. Are the music companies really selling national copyrights outright? I thought licensing agreements would be the standard system.
I can sell off the rights in each country to different people as I see fit, as a rule. (YMMV in different countries)
But isn't that essentially the same as individual licensing, where the rights you transfer to the different people are subject to whatever conditions you specify?
You sure you're a lawyer? Let's test this: list a few hearsay exceptions.
What if person A owns the copyright in country A, and person B owns the copyright in country B?
Multiple groups can't "own" the same copyright. There's the original holder, who can then license party A and party B to redistribute. The holder can impose conditions on A and B, such as no international sales. However, at least in the U.S., first sale doctrine would mean that anyone who bought from A (assuming A has U.S. distribution rights) could then legally resell to anyone just about anywhere, and individual purchasers could take their copies home to B's country (again, assuming U.S.-like laws.)
I read the headline as "Sin Epidemic." I was hoping I would catch it...
no no no, we want microsoft to WIN this time. why this time?
Because in the end, Microsoft will inevitably lose to open source.
Functionally, is Windows XP radically different from Windows 95? Hardly. The WIMP interface hasn't changed much, Word isn't radically different from a few years ago, and so on. Meanwhile, Linux and open source are relentlessly improving, constantly narrowing the gap in those things people like better in Windows than in Linux, and patents that might hinder Linux et al constantly march towards their expiration date.
Don't patents become invalid if you don't defend them after a certian time period?
Yep, twenty years. The same as if you do defend them...
Not necessarily. My ISP has threatened to disconnect me, as they received a complaint from the studio who puts out Stargate Atlantis.
Damn, I guess I'll just have to stick to porn then...
Note that given that just about any audience for this discussion is gone, I'll make this quick:
... is ... 38 days for those involved with heating, plumbing, and electrical wiring."
"Over a thousand Americans now die each year from electrocution, and the power-conditioning equipment needed for a solar electricity installation would represent a major increase in this risk."
This "over a thousand" combines both all home accidents and all electricians, as well as people electrocuted at their workplace. Without a breakdown it tells us nothing about the risk having solar electricity systems in our homes would present.
"In construction, the LLE
38 days is relatively low on his scale, about 7 times the risk of an average American dying from electrocution, and about the same risk as being one pound overweight. An electrician apparently is 4.5 times as likely to die in a car crash (LLE 180) than from his profession.
Cohen says, "If photovoltaic panels on houses become widespread, how many people would be killed and injured in cleaning or replacing solar panels on roofs, or in clearing them of snow?"
That doesn't say thousands, you do. Shingle workers work on roofs all day, and presumably are part of that LLE 38 group. If you assume a similar risk from solar, and assume solar installers make up 1 worker in 20 (a gross overestimate, since that would be about the same fraction employed in all forms of agriculture), you get 1/900 the deaths from car crashes, or well under 1000.
Solar collectors work best in areas where there is little snow, and the continued existence of the grid is assumed. Few homeowners would be clearing their collectors. Perhaps the collectors would have a heat or vibration system to clear them though if needed.
I'll add in passing that Cohen talks about concrete needed for solar (how, I've no idea) and its pollution, yet completely ignores those massive concrete cooling towers or the concrete needed to entomb defunct plants when discussing costs.
You're full of it. That's your completely unsupported claim. The only thing the book you referenced said is, "The principal health impact of solar energy is in the coal that must be burned to produce the vast quantities of steel, glass, and concrete required to emplace the solar collectors; this is about 3% of the coal that would be burned to produce the same energy by direct coal burning,9 so the health effects are 3% of those of the latter, or an LLE of 1.0 day, if we obtained all of our electricity from the sun."
This has sod-all to do with claims of thousands of people plummetting from roofs.
Are you dishonest or simply stupid? I'm still trying to figure it out.
If your solar electricity is being generated at home, then (as was pointed out at the link you were referring to) it needs to be processed and conditioned at home. This increases the electrocution likelihood beyond that of grid power.
Perhaps, but I haven't exactly been shaking with fear since I got an extra circuit breaker box added; I doubt solar cell circuitry would be a major danger to my life.
No, because it is well-understood by contractors and insurance companies that unmodified roofs cannot support solar panels without being destroyed.
B.S. Anything you put on a roof has to be supported by the roof. Roofs are supposed to be able to support, typically, up to three layers of shingles (depends on code, but at least two.) As long as the whole solar power system/roof protection isn't heavier than that limit, no modification is needed. Even if it is, so what? Contractors reinforce roofs, decks, etc. all the time, it's not rocket science; it's part of the job.
As for the writer, he has a screw loose, or more likely, an ideological axe to grind.
All electrical energy technologies bring with them the risk of electrocution, which has an LLE of 5 days for the average American.
I.e., you have a chance of getting electrocuted at home. Ooo. This is irrelevant to whether that comes from solar, nuclear, coal, etc.
Note that this is far higher than the effects of generating nuclear electricity
Huh? He's comparing apples to oranges here. Nor, I bet, do his stats include non-nuclear accidents from generating nuclear power (construction accidents, transportation accidents, etc.) Except... he has no stats to begin with. All he's doing is making an unsupported claim that installing solar collectors would lead to the deaths of thousands. Over the history of mankind, he's probably right, but what of it? Replacing shingles probably also will lead to thousands of deaths by the same measure, but there's no widespread panic to avoid shingling houses.
So we have not only the accident risk for solar of falling off of roofs, but we also have the accident risk of electrocution.
And yet I've hired a number of electricians, none of whom have been updating their wills just before starting the job.