The poster was talking about local heating effects, not global, and while you're right that a few computers won't create a heat island and change the local ecology, there is one sort of local effect that is quite real and well-known all across the Arctic. Any warm structure will heat the ground it is built on slightly, and in the high Arctic where permafrost exists, anything you build (including all buildings and pipelines) has to take this into account or the permafrost melts and the structure sinks. The problem is usually solved by building on piles, or on really thick and heavily insulated foundations (sometimes with heat pipes). I presume the same goes for Antarctic research stations, except of course where a solid-rock site is available.
I recently set up torrentflux on my always-on box at home, sharing some music from Jamendo and the latest Kubuntu beta. Nothing wrong with that. But I sometimes wonder if someone will see that I'm running a bittorrent node and attack me because of that, without bothering to notice what content I am sharing.
A studio wouldn't attempt to sue a reviewer who published a review -- that's the "criticism" purpose which is expressly permitted in copyright law. However, if the "review" went beyond a plot summary and critique of the movie, and included a verbatim record of everything that was said (i.e. if it looked like what you and I would recognise as a script) then you can be sure the studio would sue, and win. It would be up to the court to decide whether a particular case crossed the blurry line between synopsis and script.
A similar distinction exists for public speeches. No-one would sue a newspaper for reporting a summary of a speech and quoting a few key phrases, but publishing an entire speech word for word might be actionable, depending on the circumstances and if the speech-maker saw a benefit in pursuing it. The estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, for example, holds copyright to King's "I have a dream" speech and has sued to protect it.
These might be taken as precedents when considering a lecture. The concepts and ideas communicated are not copyrightable, but the form of expression of them is, so I could imagine a court deciding that lecture notes that summarise the ideas in a lecture wouldn't violate copyright, but that a transcript of the lecture would.
The fact that the professor's lecture is derived from the textbook is irrelevant. The professor is allowed to do that because copyright law explicitly allows copying for education and criticism. The professor can even distribute photocopies of articles and book chapters for the entire class -- in the UK educational institutions pay fees to the Copyright Licensing Agency for permission to make copies of copyrighted works for students registered in their courses, and I suppose something similar probably exists in the USA. But students are not in the same position. Students are not allowed to make and distribute a derivative work from the textbook, or photocopy and distribute chapters of a book. Students can do these things for the purpose of personal use and study, but they do not have permission to distribute those personal-use copies, either for free or for profit.
Even if we never manage to build a working space elevator, we'll discover a lot of really neat and useful things by tinkering in that direction. Aim high!
Just a bit of fact-checking: treaties *are* more difficult than passing a law. Ratifying a treaty requires two-thirds of the Senate, while normal legislation requires only a simple majority.
Wouldn't it be great if that were true? But it's probably not. The incident was reported in 2005 in the Capitol Hill Blue blog, but it appears that Capitol Hill Blue is not a highly reliable source. The U of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Political Fact Check calls this story "extremely unlikely" and says, "the Web site that reported those words has a history of quoting phony sources and retracting bogus stories."
Maybe the US would have been screwed anyway, but it's now $3 trillion more screwed than it would have been without the war. That's $10,000 per person -- a significant amount of extra screwing, I'd say.
Most of my light bulbs are made by Philips. They turn on instantly and at full brightness, at least to my eye. My one bulb that is slow to turn on is branded Ikea, it's not obvious what company actually made it. I guess this means don't buy the cheapest bulbs.
Did you buy your slow-turning-on light bulbs this decade? If so, I suggest you either return them as defective, or post the brand name so that no-one ever buys them. Modern bulbs turn on to full brightness instantly and last a long time. I do have a CF bulb which is about seven years old that now takes as long as three seconds to come up to full brightness when cold, but all of my other CF bulbs which are newer than that turn on instantly.
People don't use these lights because of global warming, they use these lights because they make good economic sense: they last much longer than incandescents and use less energy, and although they are more expensive to buy initially they save money in the long run.
P.S.: The only serious debate about global warming is about whether we should try to prevent it, or roll with the punch, and how much effort we should make in either case.
You have an interesting point there. We should let the Nevada Gaming Commission run elections! Sounds dumb but maybe there's a public interest ad campaign in there somewhere. If people knew that slot machines were more rigorously certified than voting machines....
No, it's not the same problem. It's easy for people to watch the movements of pieces of paper, make sure they end up where they belong, and count them. It's much harder to do the same with electrons.
The solution for paper ballots is based on four principles: transparency, adversarial conditions, counting everything in a way that, if done right, makes double-entry accounting look like a random number generator, and decentralization.
Transparency means that every step of the process is done in the open, with multiple people watching. Adversarial conditions means that the people watching include representatives (i.e. campaign workers) of all candidates, who are highly motivated to ensure that the others don't cheat. In Scotland, for example, each candidate can even apply their own seal to the ballot boxes in addition to the electoral commission's seals, so they can verify for themselves that boxes haven't been swapped, opened, or lost. A fraudster would have to be able to duplicate the seals of every political party in addition to the electoral commission.
As for counting, every ballot paper must be accounted for. Polling stations start with a known number of blank ballots (verified by all candidates) and they must count the number of ballot papers issued, used, spoiled, and not used, as well as the number of ballots that end up in the ballot box, and if the numbers don't add up right then one can deduce that funny business is going on.
Finally, decentralization is important. With safeguards in place, it may still be possible to cheat in a few locations (although you'd have to get campaign workers from all sides to look the other way), but widespread fraud serious enough to steal a whole election becomes extremely difficult. It is difficult to compromise the process in many locations at once. And even though the central counting facility receives the counts from each polling station and adds them up, it can be made to echo the numbers back and discrepancies can be spotted. A centralized electronic system, though, can be compromised at the center, you don't have to take over every polling station.
This is called the Pygmalion effect. The test results change the teacher's expectations, and the teacher's expectations influence the kids' future performance. It has also been shown that teachers have different expectations of children based on race and sex, which affect children's performance as they fulfill these expectations. But it's a widespread phenomenon outside the classroom as well.
Besides, there's almost no chance that they'll discover anything useful in the mass of white noise of the Oyster network.
If they look hard enough in a large enough dataset they're bound to discover patterns, even completely coincidental ones. And even worse: they will feel pressure to justify the cost of analysis, and will be tempted to lower the threshold of significance until something interesting turns up.
Just to add a bit of detail to the above... the FAR and a US government FAQ indicate that while individual contracts can vary, the normal situation seems to be that the contractor retains copyright while the government gets a license to "reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display the copyrighted work". It is also true that the federal government can become a copyright owner if someone who owns a copyright assigns it to the government. So there are three possibilities:
The video was produced under contract, and the contractor retains copyright. If that were the case, the contractor could have written a takedown letter.
The video was produced under contract, and the contractor assigned copyright to the government.
The video was produced by government staff, and is not protected by copyright.
Most media companies demonize BitTorrent by reflex, and this is a story about a media company that overcomes that reflex, wakes up, seriously evaluates it in terms of costs and benefits, arrives at a positive financial result, and publicly announces that fact.
It is quite significant that a media company, rather than attacking BitTorrent, has seen the potential for themselves to benefit from it and is now prepared to join us geeks in a conversation about it, instead of blindly and prejudicially attacking it.
This was in no way the fault of the GPS device! She parked her car on a railway crossing in the dark, and claimed she didn't realise it was a railway crossing. Sure, the map told her to drive across, but the fact that she didn't see it was a railway track and parked her car on the tracks while she opened the gates is entirely her own fault!
Patents weren't really developed to discourage keeping trade secrets; they were developed to discourage free-riding. For many inventions, once the product is manufactured and distributed, it's easy for competitors to look at it, understand how it works, make cheap copies, and thereby benefit from the inventor's work without investing in R&D themselves. A patent allows the inventor to stop others from free riding for a limited time, thus strengthening the incentive for R&D.
But if you are an inventor and you have a product that is not possible to reverse-engineer, you should not patent it, you should simply keep your process a trade secret. The most famous example of this is Coca-Cola's recipe. Coca-Cola holds 800 US patents for various production and packaging methods, but the recipe for their fizzy water is not among them. They keep the formula secret instead of patenting it.
Who said anything about *federal* licenses? But nine states (Alabama, California, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas) and New York City license locksmiths. (Associated Locksmiths of America
Terminal velocity for raindrops is around 9 m/s (slower for smaller drops, like drizzle). Acceleration is 9.8 m/s/s. So big raindrops reach terminal velocity in 9/9.8 = 0.9 seconds, during which time they fall 0.5*a*t*t = 0.5*9.8*0.9*0.9 = 4 metres = 13 feet.
Sadly this is quite possible. The complete package would not only include a "trusted hardware" system that enforces DRM on any media you get from elsewhere while it happily violates your own copyright on anything you create yourself by sending a copy to Fort Meade.
Ok, I'll bite. Which one is it? Which one does not tell you to kill unbelievers? Is it the Bible?
"All who would not seek the LORD, the God of Israel, were to be put to death, whether small or great, man or woman." (2 Chronicles 15:13)
"If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known... thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die." (Deuteronomy 13:6-10)
"If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town." (Deuteronomy 13:12-15)
No, not the Bible. I guess it must be the Quran, then.
"They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back (to enmity) then take them and kill them wherever ye find them" (4:89)
"Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush." (9:5)
Slashdot Mirror
The poster was talking about local heating effects, not global, and while you're right that a few computers won't create a heat island and change the local ecology, there is one sort of local effect that is quite real and well-known all across the Arctic. Any warm structure will heat the ground it is built on slightly, and in the high Arctic where permafrost exists, anything you build (including all buildings and pipelines) has to take this into account or the permafrost melts and the structure sinks. The problem is usually solved by building on piles, or on really thick and heavily insulated foundations (sometimes with heat pipes). I presume the same goes for Antarctic research stations, except of course where a solid-rock site is available.
I recently set up torrentflux on my always-on box at home, sharing some music from Jamendo and the latest Kubuntu beta. Nothing wrong with that. But I sometimes wonder if someone will see that I'm running a bittorrent node and attack me because of that, without bothering to notice what content I am sharing.
A studio wouldn't attempt to sue a reviewer who published a review -- that's the "criticism" purpose which is expressly permitted in copyright law. However, if the "review" went beyond a plot summary and critique of the movie, and included a verbatim record of everything that was said (i.e. if it looked like what you and I would recognise as a script) then you can be sure the studio would sue, and win. It would be up to the court to decide whether a particular case crossed the blurry line between synopsis and script.
A similar distinction exists for public speeches. No-one would sue a newspaper for reporting a summary of a speech and quoting a few key phrases, but publishing an entire speech word for word might be actionable, depending on the circumstances and if the speech-maker saw a benefit in pursuing it. The estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, for example, holds copyright to King's "I have a dream" speech and has sued to protect it.
These might be taken as precedents when considering a lecture. The concepts and ideas communicated are not copyrightable, but the form of expression of them is, so I could imagine a court deciding that lecture notes that summarise the ideas in a lecture wouldn't violate copyright, but that a transcript of the lecture would.
The fact that the professor's lecture is derived from the textbook is irrelevant. The professor is allowed to do that because copyright law explicitly allows copying for education and criticism. The professor can even distribute photocopies of articles and book chapters for the entire class -- in the UK educational institutions pay fees to the Copyright Licensing Agency for permission to make copies of copyrighted works for students registered in their courses, and I suppose something similar probably exists in the USA. But students are not in the same position. Students are not allowed to make and distribute a derivative work from the textbook, or photocopy and distribute chapters of a book. Students can do these things for the purpose of personal use and study, but they do not have permission to distribute those personal-use copies, either for free or for profit.
Alas, without a system for users to submit their own jokes I don't think there's enough data in the system to get useful results out of it.
Ask and ye shall receive (if the site recovers from slashdotting): http://eigentaste.berkeley.edu/user/suggestjoke.php
Even if we never manage to build a working space elevator, we'll discover a lot of really neat and useful things by tinkering in that direction. Aim high!
Just a bit of fact-checking: treaties *are* more difficult than passing a law. Ratifying a treaty requires two-thirds of the Senate, while normal legislation requires only a simple majority.
Wouldn't it be great if that were true? But it's probably not. The incident was reported in 2005 in the Capitol Hill Blue blog, but it appears that Capitol Hill Blue is not a highly reliable source. The U of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Political Fact Check calls this story "extremely unlikely" and says, "the Web site that reported those words has a history of quoting phony sources and retracting bogus stories."
Maybe the US would have been screwed anyway, but it's now $3 trillion more screwed than it would have been without the war. That's $10,000 per person -- a significant amount of extra screwing, I'd say.
Most of my light bulbs are made by Philips. They turn on instantly and at full brightness, at least to my eye. My one bulb that is slow to turn on is branded Ikea, it's not obvious what company actually made it. I guess this means don't buy the cheapest bulbs.
Did you buy your slow-turning-on light bulbs this decade? If so, I suggest you either return them as defective, or post the brand name so that no-one ever buys them. Modern bulbs turn on to full brightness instantly and last a long time. I do have a CF bulb which is about seven years old that now takes as long as three seconds to come up to full brightness when cold, but all of my other CF bulbs which are newer than that turn on instantly.
People don't use these lights because of global warming, they use these lights because they make good economic sense: they last much longer than incandescents and use less energy, and although they are more expensive to buy initially they save money in the long run.
P.S.: The only serious debate about global warming is about whether we should try to prevent it, or roll with the punch, and how much effort we should make in either case.
You have an interesting point there. We should let the Nevada Gaming Commission run elections! Sounds dumb but maybe there's a public interest ad campaign in there somewhere. If people knew that slot machines were more rigorously certified than voting machines....
No, it's not the same problem. It's easy for people to watch the movements of pieces of paper, make sure they end up where they belong, and count them. It's much harder to do the same with electrons.
The solution for paper ballots is based on four principles: transparency, adversarial conditions, counting everything in a way that, if done right, makes double-entry accounting look like a random number generator, and decentralization.
Transparency means that every step of the process is done in the open, with multiple people watching. Adversarial conditions means that the people watching include representatives (i.e. campaign workers) of all candidates, who are highly motivated to ensure that the others don't cheat. In Scotland, for example, each candidate can even apply their own seal to the ballot boxes in addition to the electoral commission's seals, so they can verify for themselves that boxes haven't been swapped, opened, or lost. A fraudster would have to be able to duplicate the seals of every political party in addition to the electoral commission.
As for counting, every ballot paper must be accounted for. Polling stations start with a known number of blank ballots (verified by all candidates) and they must count the number of ballot papers issued, used, spoiled, and not used, as well as the number of ballots that end up in the ballot box, and if the numbers don't add up right then one can deduce that funny business is going on.
Finally, decentralization is important. With safeguards in place, it may still be possible to cheat in a few locations (although you'd have to get campaign workers from all sides to look the other way), but widespread fraud serious enough to steal a whole election becomes extremely difficult. It is difficult to compromise the process in many locations at once. And even though the central counting facility receives the counts from each polling station and adds them up, it can be made to echo the numbers back and discrepancies can be spotted. A centralized electronic system, though, can be compromised at the center, you don't have to take over every polling station.
This is called the Pygmalion effect. The test results change the teacher's expectations, and the teacher's expectations influence the kids' future performance. It has also been shown that teachers have different expectations of children based on race and sex, which affect children's performance as they fulfill these expectations. But it's a widespread phenomenon outside the classroom as well.
Besides, there's almost no chance that they'll discover anything useful in the mass of white noise of the Oyster network.
If they look hard enough in a large enough dataset they're bound to discover patterns, even completely coincidental ones. And even worse: they will feel pressure to justify the cost of analysis, and will be tempted to lower the threshold of significance until something interesting turns up.
Just to add a bit of detail to the above... the FAR and a US government FAQ indicate that while individual contracts can vary, the normal situation seems to be that the contractor retains copyright while the government gets a license to "reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display the copyrighted work". It is also true that the federal government can become a copyright owner if someone who owns a copyright assigns it to the government. So there are three possibilities:
Most media companies demonize BitTorrent by reflex, and this is a story about a media company that overcomes that reflex, wakes up, seriously evaluates it in terms of costs and benefits, arrives at a positive financial result, and publicly announces that fact.
It is quite significant that a media company, rather than attacking BitTorrent, has seen the potential for themselves to benefit from it and is now prepared to join us geeks in a conversation about it, instead of blindly and prejudicially attacking it.
That used to be called being a privateer...
This was in no way the fault of the GPS device! She parked her car on a railway crossing in the dark, and claimed she didn't realise it was a railway crossing. Sure, the map told her to drive across, but the fact that she didn't see it was a railway track and parked her car on the tracks while she opened the gates is entirely her own fault!
Patents weren't really developed to discourage keeping trade secrets; they were developed to discourage free-riding. For many inventions, once the product is manufactured and distributed, it's easy for competitors to look at it, understand how it works, make cheap copies, and thereby benefit from the inventor's work without investing in R&D themselves. A patent allows the inventor to stop others from free riding for a limited time, thus strengthening the incentive for R&D.
But if you are an inventor and you have a product that is not possible to reverse-engineer, you should not patent it, you should simply keep your process a trade secret. The most famous example of this is Coca-Cola's recipe. Coca-Cola holds 800 US patents for various production and packaging methods, but the recipe for their fizzy water is not among them. They keep the formula secret instead of patenting it.
Who said anything about *federal* licenses? But nine states (Alabama, California, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas) and New York City license locksmiths. (Associated Locksmiths of America
Terminal velocity for raindrops is around 9 m/s (slower for smaller drops, like drizzle). Acceleration is 9.8 m/s/s. So big raindrops reach terminal velocity in 9/9.8 = 0.9 seconds, during which time they fall 0.5*a*t*t = 0.5*9.8*0.9*0.9 = 4 metres = 13 feet.
Nope, can't remember that other stuff either.
Sadly this is quite possible. The complete package would not only include a "trusted hardware" system that enforces DRM on any media you get from elsewhere while it happily violates your own copyright on anything you create yourself by sending a copy to Fort Meade.
Ok, I'll bite. Which one is it? Which one does not tell you to kill unbelievers? Is it the Bible?
... thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die." (Deuteronomy 13:6-10)
"All who would not seek the LORD, the God of Israel, were to be put to death, whether small or great, man or woman." (2 Chronicles 15:13)
"If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known
"If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town." (Deuteronomy 13:12-15)
No, not the Bible. I guess it must be the Quran, then.
"They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back (to enmity) then take them and kill them wherever ye find them" (4:89)
"Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush." (9:5)
Nope...