A "natural person" means a human being, as distinct from other entities such as corporations, partnerships, LLCs, etc. which are usually included in the legal definition of "person" or "individual."
TFA's author uses only examples of corporations using content created by natural persons, but I see nothing in TFA so suggest that the law only operates in this direction. According to TFA, the law permits "commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called 'orphan works'." This would also protect an individual or small business which innocently uses an orphaned image. The legislation makes it possible to use orphaned works, which otherwise would be impossible to use legally, as it is impossible to obtain permission from the copyright holder. Wikipedia's summary of the problem is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works
With increased automation you can either work less and maintain your standard of living, or work just as much and increase your standard of living. Instead of maintaining our 1970 standard of living, we all kept working and now we have the internet, iPads, better cars, etc. If you give up using any of the improvements we've made since 1970, your expenses will drop and you won't have to work as much. Go back to the living standards of 1900 and you'll hardly have to work at all.
I totally disagree. If we ban Emacs, it will just go underground, making the problem even worse than it is now. We need Emacs users to stay out in the open, where we can monitor them. Emacs should be legalized and taxed so the government can actually control it. And before you libertarian nutjobs go off about big government, the whole reason that government exists is to control things like Emacs, which the free market has obviously failed to do. I'd rather have people getting their Emacs at Wal-Mart after a background check than on Silk Road with Bitcoins. Sadly, our politicians are too stupid to know the difference between Emacs and Bitcoin, so we'll be stuck with our broken system for the foreseeable future, and this discussion is irrelevant.
I read the Economist in part because it's a weekly publication, which gives the writers time to write something interesting. I think Chesterton said it best, in 1922:
The tendency of all that is printed and much that is spoken to-day is to be, in the only true sense, behind the times. It is because it is always in a hurry that it is always too late. Give an ordinary man a day to write an article, and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the nearest text-book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school where he learnt his stalest politics. The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which, every day, is less worth delivering at all.
The difference is that Mike can violate the agreement at will, and only be liable for money damages. His "shareholders" have no legal right to physically confine him - they only have a civil remedy in contract law. It is impossible to legally turn yourself into a slave (or other non-person) because a person always has the right to breach a contract.
This is very unsurprising. Most people spend the majority of their time at home or at work, so location information will give you those two data points. If I gave you my address and my employment and you told me my name, I would not be very impressed. Why is anyone surprised or impressed by the results of this research?
Bitcoin miners use GPUs, which are orders or magnitude better than CPUs at Bitcoin mining. Unless your server has a high-end GPU in it, you will probably get nowhere (even assuming that the underlying idea is sound, which it is not for reasons pointed out by other posters).
You can do a scientific study of your own abilities using an ABX testing program. Some googling should reveal one for whatever OS you're running. When I tried it, I could tell the difference between CD-quality and a 128kbps mp3, but anything above 128kbps was indistinguishable to me.
Have a team go door-to-door during working hours, when most people are not home. If they find an empty house with an unlocked door, go inside and use the phone to call a bunch of people and conduct your research. As long as you publish the addresses of all of the houses for academic purposes, nobody should mind.
According to Wikipedia, attempts at preserving the last surviving Passenger Pigeons in the late 1800s failed because these birds only breed in extremely large groups. So unless they clone about 10,000 of them in one go, there won't be enough of them to prevent re-extinction.
Is logical argument even possible on the internet anymore? If not, what have we lost?
The core audiences of the internet—older, white, well-to-do elites—are not replacing themselves as they age out of their DSL connections. To survive, news websites must create vapid articles full of made-up controversies and straw-man arguments. By making up a series of "facts" without any valid support, these sites are able to trick their readers into believing that they are using their reasoning faculties to address an important issue. Not surprisingly, many web journalists and older netizens hate this idea, which they regard as pandering to the young. But thankfully, the debate over made-up journalism needn’t devolve into a depressing bout of intergenerational warfare. The controversy raises a number of questions that are hard to answer: Is the use of facts and reason even possible on the internet anymore? If not, what have we lost? But part of the discussion, taken on its own terms, boils down to a fairly tractable psychological question: Who, really, is more engaged? Is it the reader who zips through a dozen poorly-researched or made-up articles and posts them to Slashdot, or the one who realizes that it's all a bunch of bullshit and decides to get some real work done?
I use my desktop to run a 24/7 Minecraft server from home. The bandwidth is sufficient for a few friends, which is all I would ever need. I bought hardware that idles at a low wattage, so the whole rig draws about 50 watts at idle, making it cost ~$55.00 per year, since it will be idle the vast majority of the time. Sure, sometimes I bring the server down for a while to do other stuff, but who cares? It's a Minecraft server for a couple of friends who hardly ever sign on anyhow, so uptime doesn't really matter. The difference between me and TFA is that I'm not using a separate server, so for me the hardware and maintenance IS free -- I would have to invest in them regardless of whether I were running a Minecraft server.
The appropriate term for this is "statistical discrimination," and there is an academic literature surrounding it. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_discrimination_(economics) For example, if you want to avoid hiring ex-convicts, you can simply not consider any black men and you will make your job a lot easier. However, this obviously has a negative effect on black men who are not ex-convicts (and a positive effect on all other groups). The test for whether statistical discrimination is bad is whether it affects a particular group negatively. For example, old people can't get affordable private health insurance in the USA because they're so much more likely to become ill. To remedy this negative effect, we started Medicare.
So how is that process of experimenting and finding the right material a 'major invention', but experimenting and finding the right material to make a very thin but powerful battery 'nothing major'? Why are the thousands of 'minor' inventions that make up a cell phone 'not invention', but a lamp filament is?
Because the author of TFA does not understand how invention actually happens.
Slashdot Mirror
A "natural person" means a human being, as distinct from other entities such as corporations, partnerships, LLCs, etc. which are usually included in the legal definition of "person" or "individual."
TFA's author uses only examples of corporations using content created by natural persons, but I see nothing in TFA so suggest that the law only operates in this direction. According to TFA, the law permits "commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called 'orphan works'." This would also protect an individual or small business which innocently uses an orphaned image. The legislation makes it possible to use orphaned works, which otherwise would be impossible to use legally, as it is impossible to obtain permission from the copyright holder. Wikipedia's summary of the problem is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works
This legislation could also prevent "copyright troll" situations like this: http://www.ryanhealy.com/getty-images-extortion-letter/
With increased automation you can either work less and maintain your standard of living, or work just as much and increase your standard of living. Instead of maintaining our 1970 standard of living, we all kept working and now we have the internet, iPads, better cars, etc. If you give up using any of the improvements we've made since 1970, your expenses will drop and you won't have to work as much. Go back to the living standards of 1900 and you'll hardly have to work at all.
I totally disagree. If we ban Emacs, it will just go underground, making the problem even worse than it is now. We need Emacs users to stay out in the open, where we can monitor them. Emacs should be legalized and taxed so the government can actually control it. And before you libertarian nutjobs go off about big government, the whole reason that government exists is to control things like Emacs, which the free market has obviously failed to do. I'd rather have people getting their Emacs at Wal-Mart after a background check than on Silk Road with Bitcoins. Sadly, our politicians are too stupid to know the difference between Emacs and Bitcoin, so we'll be stuck with our broken system for the foreseeable future, and this discussion is irrelevant.
Also, a very poor choice of words when talking about phones. "Tapping" a phone doesn't usually mean bumping two phones together.
I read the Economist in part because it's a weekly publication, which gives the writers time to write something interesting. I think Chesterton said it best, in 1922:
The tendency of all that is printed and much that is spoken to-day is to be, in the only true sense, behind the times. It is because it is always in a hurry that it is always too late. Give an ordinary man a day to write an article, and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the nearest text-book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school where he learnt his stalest politics. The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which, every day, is less worth delivering at all.
Funny, I do the same with pizzas. For example, if I put $1000 in my IRA, I'll get 10 free pizzas at tax time.
The difference is that Mike can violate the agreement at will, and only be liable for money damages. His "shareholders" have no legal right to physically confine him - they only have a civil remedy in contract law. It is impossible to legally turn yourself into a slave (or other non-person) because a person always has the right to breach a contract.
This is very unsurprising. Most people spend the majority of their time at home or at work, so location information will give you those two data points. If I gave you my address and my employment and you told me my name, I would not be very impressed. Why is anyone surprised or impressed by the results of this research?
Bitcoin miners use GPUs, which are orders or magnitude better than CPUs at Bitcoin mining. Unless your server has a high-end GPU in it, you will probably get nowhere (even assuming that the underlying idea is sound, which it is not for reasons pointed out by other posters).
You can do a scientific study of your own abilities using an ABX testing program. Some googling should reveal one for whatever OS you're running. When I tried it, I could tell the difference between CD-quality and a 128kbps mp3, but anything above 128kbps was indistinguishable to me.
Use an ABX testing program. This will provide a definitive, scientific answer.
We didn't need Slashdot to tell us We Didn't Need Google's Schmidt To Tell Us Android and Chrome Wouldn't Merge
Have a team go door-to-door during working hours, when most people are not home. If they find an empty house with an unlocked door, go inside and use the phone to call a bunch of people and conduct your research. As long as you publish the addresses of all of the houses for academic purposes, nobody should mind.
According to Wikipedia, attempts at preserving the last surviving Passenger Pigeons in the late 1800s failed because these birds only breed in extremely large groups. So unless they clone about 10,000 of them in one go, there won't be enough of them to prevent re-extinction.
I have a standing desk. See this NYT article (which may or may not have been contradicted by a different pop-science NYT article): http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/stand-up-while-you-read-this/
Is logical argument even possible on the internet anymore? If not, what have we lost?
The core audiences of the internet—older, white, well-to-do elites—are not replacing themselves as they age out of their DSL connections. To survive, news websites must create vapid articles full of made-up controversies and straw-man arguments. By making up a series of "facts" without any valid support, these sites are able to trick their readers into believing that they are using their reasoning faculties to address an important issue. Not surprisingly, many web journalists and older netizens hate this idea, which they regard as pandering to the young. But thankfully, the debate over made-up journalism needn’t devolve into a depressing bout of intergenerational warfare. The controversy raises a number of questions that are hard to answer: Is the use of facts and reason even possible on the internet anymore? If not, what have we lost? But part of the discussion, taken on its own terms, boils down to a fairly tractable psychological question: Who, really, is more engaged? Is it the reader who zips through a dozen poorly-researched or made-up articles and posts them to Slashdot, or the one who realizes that it's all a bunch of bullshit and decides to get some real work done?
This reminds me of another military secrets trial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEabC9WzHck
The People's Liberation Army is part of the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese state.
Perhaps some of us would rather have Amazon spying on us, instead of Google.
I use my desktop to run a 24/7 Minecraft server from home. The bandwidth is sufficient for a few friends, which is all I would ever need. I bought hardware that idles at a low wattage, so the whole rig draws about 50 watts at idle, making it cost ~$55.00 per year, since it will be idle the vast majority of the time. Sure, sometimes I bring the server down for a while to do other stuff, but who cares? It's a Minecraft server for a couple of friends who hardly ever sign on anyhow, so uptime doesn't really matter. The difference between me and TFA is that I'm not using a separate server, so for me the hardware and maintenance IS free -- I would have to invest in them regardless of whether I were running a Minecraft server.
A more appropriate analogy is to a car lease. These have mileage limits which are analogous to bandwidth limits.
The appropriate term for this is "statistical discrimination," and there is an academic literature surrounding it. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_discrimination_(economics)
For example, if you want to avoid hiring ex-convicts, you can simply not consider any black men and you will make your job a lot easier. However, this obviously has a negative effect on black men who are not ex-convicts (and a positive effect on all other groups). The test for whether statistical discrimination is bad is whether it affects a particular group negatively. For example, old people can't get affordable private health insurance in the USA because they're so much more likely to become ill. To remedy this negative effect, we started Medicare.
Exactly: this applies to any military engagement, no matter what the technology. See, for example, Napoleon and Hitler's invasions of Russia.
So how is that process of experimenting and finding the right material a 'major invention', but experimenting and finding the right material to make a very thin but powerful battery 'nothing major'? Why are the thousands of 'minor' inventions that make up a cell phone 'not invention', but a lamp filament is?
Because the author of TFA does not understand how invention actually happens.