Does anyone know if *any* work has become public domain in the last few years in US and Canada? From what I see it just sounds like anything that's was copyrighted will now forever be copyrighted as copyright gets extended by X years every X years (with X=20 here).
In the USA, the answer is "no". Unfortunately, some years ago the classical music label Naxos got greedy and put out a CD in the USA of a 1930s classical work, specifically Pablo Casal's recordings of the complete Bach cello suites. In Europe this recording had clearly entered the public domain, but not in the USA. In fact, there was no question that it was still under US copyright at the time Naxos put it out. Not only was it under copyright, but the US copyright owner (Capitol Records) had their own copy in print and sued Naxos for copyright violation. It was really idiotic for Naxos to try to get away this in the US market and they lost the case. But a worst case scenario happened in the case. The court that heard it (in my opinion) basically made up the law and came to the conclusion that every recording every made or sold in the USA, even as far back as Edison's first attempts in the late 1800s, was still under copyright in the USA because they basically claimed that "common law copyright" protected them until the US law covered them. Naxos couldn't really appeal this because they had no way to argue that what they did was legal, so this horrible court decision that all US sound recordings are still under copyright became US law. Short of convincing Congress to pass a law on the subject, we're basically screwed now as there's nothing ever recorded or sold in the USA that is in the public domain at this time. Do note that this crazy legal finding doesn't apply to books, movies or anything else.
While I don't personally agree with this, I get that businesses and musicians and such want copyright to last for a really really long time. There's a way to meet their desires and satisfy the public's desire for things to actually enter the public domain. If these copyrights are so valuable that 50 years is simply too short, then rather than give extensions away for free, make the copyright holder fill out a form, just like they used to have to do, and pay big money for an extension. Offer 20 year extensions, but make the rate they charge go up exponentially with each renewal. Perhaps the first renewal costs $100,000. The 2nd renewal costs $10 million dollars. The 3rd renewal costs $1 billion and so on. I'm pretty sure that even Disney isn't going to pay $1 billion to keep Steamboat Willie out of the public domain or even if they do pay it for that one, there would be plenty of other properties that they simply can't afford to renew and thus they'd have to enter the public domain. If these are so valuable then why isn't the government getting paid for each renewal? And if the copyright holders forget to renew in time, well, tough. In the old days people did forget to renew and nobody cried out that this was just the most unfair thing ever in the history of mankind.
You might ask, "Well if we know what the problem is, we can fix it! Why not close the loopholes?" The fundamental problem there is that the people in position to close the loopholes are the ones receiving the bribes, and they want the bribes to keep coming. The only thing that could get them to change the law would be if their corporate overlords, i.e. those providing the bribes, bribed them to make it illegal. The problem with that is that the corporate overlords also want the bribes to remain legal, so that they can influence public officials.
I don't remember the exact wording, but I read somewhere where I think a lawyer said something like this - "You pass a law. I use a hole in your law. You plug the hole. I drill a hole in your plug." This is the real reason why the loopholes can't ever be closed. Lawyers, which is what most politicians are, are simply too good at finding ways around everything.
Finally, you might say, "Well why not just vote those bribe-takers out of office?" The problem there is that the bribes are used to buy elections. Without that money, you can't run ads, you can't get on TV, and you can't even participate in the public debate.
I think the real problem is that probably about 70-75% of the US electorate votes only on party affiliation and nothing else in a general election and they simply won't ever vote for a candidate of the other party. This is the reason why people keep getting re-elected to Congress once they get in as long as they don't commit outright crimes. The money does help in primaries and in rare general elections that are up for grabs. I've never voted in an election for the US House that was actually competitive. I've lived in both solid Democrat and Republican districts at various times and none of those elections ever had a candidate from the less popular political party have a real chance to win.
Farms: the northern half of the US is going to need to stop insisting on a seasonless produce aisle. Its unsustainable. Strawberries in january contribute to carbon emissions and water depletion. Stop pumping the avocado market and realize its a fatty fruit that doesnt need to become the staple diet of a population with 60% obesity and leading the world in heart disease. We dont need to be grazing cattle and making rice, a crop that requires a flooded field. The thing we do best is dates, a plant that grows in arid climates anyhow.
Pretty ignorant posting for a post currently modded "5, Insightful". Dude, there's no chance avocados are going to become a "staple diet" of the USA. It would be great from a health perspective if they did because they contain heart healthy fats and they can make you feel full in addition to being good sources of various nutrients but I can tell you that actually it seems to me that most people I know don't like them very much. Is there really all that much cattle grazing and rice growing in California? All the US rice I've seen comes from either Texas, Louisiana or Arkansas. I would think that land is too valuable in California to use it for cattle grazing. And sorry man, but I'm not real crazy about dates and neither are most Americans. Date palms don't tolerate cold weather at all, which is why I assume they only grow them much further south than Los Angeles. You can actually get snow there on rare occasions, which is very bad for date palms.
Many years ago, it was assumed that in order for a computer to beat humans at chess that major advances would have to happen in artificial intelligence. In the end IBM just simply brute forced an approach by basically allowing the computer the equivalent of an open book test against a poor human who could only go by memory. Maybe some improvements got made in searching in order to beat humans, but I think that's about it. I know that arimaa was developed in the hope that it would spur new AI advances in order for a computer to beat humans. I have no idea - did Wu just simply brute force his way to victory? Is arimaa so little played by humans that the best players are far weaker at it than humans are at chess and thus it just wasn't all that hard to eventually write a program that could defeat the best human players? Did Wu actually advance the art any with his winning program?
Considering the company gave $32M to various democratic campaign orgs during the 2012 election cycle, this should come as no surprise.
It is absolutely no coincidence that VA and PA, both reddish states, and both critical to Obama's re-election, somehow fell to the blue category using these voting machines.
Democratic supporters in 2004 claimed that Ohio was "stolen" to help Bush win re-election. It seems funny to me that the losing side always claims the winning side cheated. If the Republicans cheated in 2004, then why did they lose Ohio in the two following elections? I know it's always fun to tout conspiracy theories, but the simple truth is that in presidential elections, a significant number of Democratic supporters vote that can't be bothered to go to the polls otherwise. Florida went to Obama in 2008 and 2012 but it will likely be a cold day in Hell before a Democrat can win a state election there in a non-presidential election year. Same with VA and PA.
Besides, even if it was revoked, they would likely just find a really good accountant / lawyer team and end up paying the same amount (or less) in taxes. Last year Prudential insurance paid no corporate income tax and received a $106 million rebate. Time Warner cable paid no taxes on $4.3B in profit, CBS no taxes on $1.8B. Scientology could probably do better on their taxes by registering as a corporation anyways.
Liberty Media is another company like those you mentioned. They actually pride themselves on not ever paying US taxes on their earnings and they have an entire accounting department dedicated to finding legal loopholes and deductions that allow them to pay no taxes. They became the owners of the Atlanta Braves baseball team through a complicated transaction with Time Warner that resulted in neither company paying any taxes on the deal. That deal happened in the previous decade so I don't remember if Liberty Media actually wanted the Braves or if they simply acquired them as the best way to avoid taxes on the deal with Time Warner but that deal raised a lot of eyebrows in the US sporting world and provided the first insights into how far Liberty Media will go to legally avoid paying taxes.
Given his poor defense, I'm really not all that surprised. Though I wonder how it will flesh out in appeals if he gets the death penalty. One might argue the poor quality defense would force a retrial if they can convince an appeals court of incompetence or something like that.
The "But my lawyers sucked!" argument very rarely works. If it did work, then a significant amount of defendants would deliberately get bad lawyers, roll the dice, and if they lose ask for a retrial. Even trying this trick by representing yourself as your own lawyer doesn't work. People tried that in the past and then when they lost, they argued that they had incompetence representation, namely themselves. I'm sure that his next set of lawyers will indeed argue that his defense was incompetent, but the odds of a court agreeing are pretty low. That kind of argument really only works when you can prove criminal misconduct or incompetence to the extreme, not just merely being dumb. You're allowed to have bad lawyers in the USA and yes, you often lose when that happens. His lawyers knew that they couldn't run the standard "He didn't do it so you have to prove it" argument so they gambled that maybe sympathy would work. It sounds stupid, but honestly, I don't see how it's worse than defiantly arguing "It was somebody else", especially in sentencing. All it takes is one juror to give him credit for admitting to it in the penalty phase and he can escape the death penalty. Well, I actually don't know the federal rule but most US states have an "all or nothing" rule in the death penalty where one dissenter can stop it.
My thoughts exactly. A human-spoken language designed from scratch to be simple and easy to learn? It's been done, Esperanto. And, since my mother learned it in the '50s, it's been around for a while. How long have UN documents been available in Eperanto? Been there, done that... Why reinvent the wheel?
I can't say this without sounding like an old man, so you kids stay off my lawn. There.
One of the problems I see with younger IT people, like presumably the poster who asked about this, is that there are always the following assumptions.
1) Everybody older than me is an idiot.
2) I've had some kind of genius insight that nobody before has had, because, well, see #1.
Perl is just horrifically bad? Then let's invent Python which is just so much better in every way possible. Oh wait. Python sucks bad, so let's invent Ruby. There's probably something out there now that will replace Ruby because Ruby just sucks too. The people like the original poster never ask these kinds of questions:
1) Has this been tried before and failed for a really good reason? Really good reasons might include it being really difficult to do this, being able to do it but not well, being able to do it well but nobody wants to use it, etc.
2) If there's been no big push in the past to get this done, is there really some kind of true demand for this?
I don't go around insulting people who start topics here, but this does seem rather pointless.
If a country wants a piece of the action, maybe they should take a good hard look at their tax code. They may have to lower taxes *gasp* Perhaps getting 17% of something is better than getting 30% of $0.
The reason companies do this is because it's more profitable to hire an army of lawyers and accountants to skirt local laws.
I agree that this sounds reasonable, but I am afraid the reality is that once countries start changing their laws to do this, it won't be enough. If country A says "OK, we'll change the law to get 17%" then country B offers 15% and then later country C offere 12% and so on, businesses will continue to complain about the declining tax rates as still being "excessive" until they reach zero. I can't rule out that some enterprising country might find a way to make a tax rate of 0% work for them if it's done in exchange for the company bringing so many jobs at specified rates there. I just don't believe that cutting the tax rates is really going to solve anything. Here in the USA there may actually be some companies that want the tax code to stay the same. I've read it claimed that Liberty Media prides itself on never paying any US income tax and even has an accounting office dedicated to zeroing out their tax bill every year.
Because Dallas Buyers Club made almost no money. In total it made $59 million and out of that had to come all the expenses.
In comparison Frozen grossed $1.219 Billion at the box office alone. Lets not even count the merchandising on that film. That is why you don't see Disney suing over Frozen. They made their money and know they will destroy a cash cow in the process.
Correct. Hurt Locker cost $15 million to make and almost nobody in the USA watched it when it was in theaters. It barely made $15 million in US box office, so depending on what was spent for advertising and such, it either lost money or was barely profitable when counting foreign receipts (I don't know what it made in foreign box office receipts). This is why those 2 films are singled out. Rather than admit that the films either sucked or nobody was interested in the subjects even if the films were good, Hollywood is trying to sue its way into profitability there.
Hulu has captions. Amazon Prime Video has captions. It's not like you're being completely denied the joys of interwebs TV.
My experience is that Netflix has a lot more videos with captions than Amazon Prime. Last year I had a girlfriend who spoke English as a second language. Her English was pretty good, but not fluent. She wanted to improve, so sometimes we would stream movies and I would turn on the captions or subtitles (whichever is the right term) if available as she said it helped her. There were several times when both Amazon and Netflix had a movie and only Netflix has the captions. It got so common that basically we only used Amazon in cases where Netflix simply didn't have it available for streaming. I'm sure there are some movies or shows where Amazon has captions and Netflix didn't, but I think that those are exceptions.
I know that it's popular to believe that China just wants to stop Bitcoin because it can't control it and while that may be part of the reasoning behind their actions, there are possibly other reasons as well. My last 2 girlfriends were Chinese and I mean "born and raised in China". In China as the stock market is fairly new thing and the general population doesn't understand it very well, there are a lot of misconceptions about how it works. I had issues with money with both of them, although slightly different issues with each. The 2nd one had this belief I couldn't ever correct that everybody can get rich by simply buying the correct stocks and she didn't understand why I wasn't a millionaire or how it was even possible to not make tons of money on every stock available. The first one didn't understand anything about the stock market so that wasn't specifically an issue, but what ended up being an issue was a huge disconnect between her lifestyle expectations and the reality of my salary should we get married. She dumped me and went looking for someone with a lot more in the bank. The reason I bring this up is that my experience is that people in China just assume they can get rich without doing any kind of work to reach that goal. Just buy the right stocks and you'll be rich. If it was that easy, believe me, everybody would be doing that. Or "Why aren't you saving 100% of your salary?" from the first one. I think some of this may be that the government is trying to protect its citizens from themselves so they don't have to deal with massive Bitcoin ripoffs and scams that will inevitably result from an uneducated public buying them thinking that in a year or two they're all going to be rich.
Seriously... if you use a nuke first these days, the entire planet will cut you off, if they don't come at you with everything they have. If you were nuked first, then the taboo has already been broken, and the world would almost expect you to unleash hell on whoever bombed you.
I realize that global politics is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize, and maybe I'm wrong, but on this subject, it seems pretty damned cut and dried.
I really couldn't disagree more. If Russia or China nuked anybody, there would be a lot of world wide anger, but any actual acts against them? Ha ha ha ha ha. Even the USA's BFF the UK really could not possibly be more of China's bitch on a constant basis.
Here's how I see the nuclear powers.
Bad actors: Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea.
Good actors: USA, France, UK, Israel.
I doubt that any of the "good actors" would ever use a nuclear device first. Putin may be just trying to make everybody else think he's unbalanced or he may actually be crazy enough to possibly use a nuke first. I'm not happy with either possibility. India probably wouldn't use a nuke first, but Pakistan may be crazy or irrational enough to do so. North Korea is definitely irrational enough to do so. I doubt that China's civilian government would use a nuke as a first choice, but I fear that the Communist Party may not have as great a control over the PLA as they'd like to think and if the PLA has the ability to launch strikes without the CCP giving the order, there just might be generals crazy enough to do it because they don't believe anybody has the guts to make them pay for it. No amount of public pressure can make the 'bad actors" I listed back off and if anybody honestly thinks the USA, France and the UK are the greatest threats to the world, then you're delusional to a point that nobody can bring you back from.
I have to admit to being surprised at how many posts suggest that contacting your Congresscritter will actually work. Those days are long gone for several reasons.
1) The Supreme Court ruling that basically allows virtually limitless campaign contributions means that reps and senators no longer have to depend on the public for financing, meaning that they can do whatever they want and if Big Money likes it, they'll get re-election money. I don't see this as anything Big Money cares about.
2) There's a possibility that the majority of Americans may actually be in favor of the Patriot Act. I know that it's common for American Slashdotters to believer that the entire nation agrees with them politically, but I believe that in fact the majority of Americans are not troubled at all by the things that drive American Slashdotters mad.
3) Voters have proven for decades that they don't pay attention to issues at all, they have short memories, and they merely vote on party lines every time. Incumbents have little incentive to listen to the voters when they can literally do anything short of breaking the law and handily get re-elected. And polls have laughingly shown that year after year the US electorate wants to "throw everybody out, except my representative/senator" and they fail to grasp that when the entire country insists that their rep/senator isn't the problem but yours is, nothing will ever change.
I have to ask - Is the linked article on techworm a fake? It's the first link in the parent post. The quality of English there is just a little bit off. It's not quite natural sounding. It's like something someone would say when writing as a second language when their skills are very good, but not fluent. The article reads a bit like an email spam as a result.
Linguists know that a language is just a dialect with an army.
To a certain extent you have a point, but I wouldn't say you're completely correct with that statement. I believe that the most correct statement I ever read on the subject was where a linguist said that it's up to the speakers of a language to determine what is a dialect and what is a separate language. German and Dutch are regarded as separate languages by their speakers yet the degree of mutual intelligibility is extremely high. Spanish and Portuguese are probably roughly 90% the same but the speakers regard them as separate languages. Galician is even closer to Portuguese than Spanish and while it probably really should be a dialect of Portuguese, nobody gets upset that everybody thinks it's a separate language. Speakers of English from the UK or USA wouldn't regard Jamaican English as anything but a dialect. China's official policy is that there is one Chinese language and Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghaiese, Hakka, Min and others are simply dialects of I guess some theoretical single ancestor language, yet some of these "dialects" are as close to each other as English is to Polish. As far as the Romanian/Moldovan thing goes, you need to remember that the USSR stole Moldova during WWII and kept it and it was in their interest to promote the idea that Moldovans were culturally and linguistically distinct from Romanians. Romania never allowed Soviet troops to be stationed there and operated a relatively independent foreign policy during the Ceausescu era. The last thing the USSR wanted was large numbers of Moldovans seeking to rejoin Romania, hence they overpromoted the idea that Moldovan was a completely separate language. This idea is starting to fade in today's world and I would think that a majority of people in Moldova outside of Transnistria would easily admit that they speak Romanian, not some wildly different "Moldovan" language.
You're quite right, but there's even more to the story that might be of interest to the readers here.
The Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, died in 1967 and some time later, I think in late 1968 or very early 1969, the group decided to hire a new manager. The Rolling Stone recommended Allen Klein. John Lennon met him and convinced Ringo Starr and George Harrison to agree to let him become the group's manager. Paul McCartney had been arguing for his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, to manage the group and refused to sign the contract with Klein, although the other signatures were enough to make him the manager anyway. Apparently John, George and Ringo believed that Eastman would favor Paul's interests over the rest of the group, so that was why they rejected him. In 1971, Paul sued to dissolve the group so he could get out from under Klein's control. John, George and Ringo all eventually turned on Klein as did the Rolling Stones. Paul became quite rich under Lee Eastman, so you can judge for yourself just how "bad" he would have been to have managed the group.
Klein's relationship with George unraveled first following some mismanagement of funds from the Concert for Bangladesh. The "My Sweet Lord" plagarsm case went through the court for decades. Yes, decades. Litigation began in 1971 and finally ended in 1998. To stick it to George, because Klein was nothing if not vindictive, eventually he bought the publishing company that had successfully sued George in the plagiarism case. In 1981, the original amount of damages assessed were reduced to George because of Klein's duplicity in being George's manager at the start of the legal case and then switching sides to being on the side seeking compensation. In the end George just bought the publishing company from Klein to help bring the situation to a close.
My first job after college was as a computer programmer for a branch of the US military that I don't like to name. I'm glad I did the job at the time and just as glad that I left for private industry 20+ years ago. The reality of government service is that big shots do whatever they want whether it makes sense or not and whether it's legal or not because the people under them who realize "Hey. That's NOT allowed!" don't have the authority to make them do what they are supposed to do and the people above them who do have the authority have bigger fish to fry. So nobody tells them "John Doe isn't following the rules on email" or whatever. Plus, people in the military and government are amazingly vindictive and if you complain about a superior doing something wrong/illegal, the person who is likely to pay for it is you, not them. So I totally understand how Hillary came up with this stupid idea to use her own email server and everybody below her was too scared to complain about it and Obama had bigger issues like Ben Laden to worry about than what server Hillary was using for email.
When I worked for the US military, we had a general who ran our base and he single handedly kept an ancient Vax system alive for his email. I had a job that got me into contact at times with fairly senior civilian managers and they used to complain about how they loved a new Unix based email system that the base had setup but the general refused to use it. He insisted on using an old Vax that at the time couldn't easily be integrated into the newer system for some kind of technical problem that had to be overcome, so the top military and civilian managers had to have an email account on the Vax just to see if the general sent them email, but everything they sent amongst themselves that didn't need to go to him went through the new system. The general finally had to retire and once he left, his successor didn't care anything about the old Vax email system, so it finally got shut down. So I've personally seen it where some big shot in the government just does whatever the heck they want to when it comes to email. I've wondered how much it cost in manpower and other costs to keep one old email system alive because one general refused to use anything else.
There's been some speculation that somebody's military might have a really good idea about where the plane went and they aren't sharing it deliberately because it's in their strategic interest to not let other nations know that they have this capability. But ledow does have some rock solid arguments for why nobody may have noticed the flight at all and it may be that nobody paid enough attention to be able to help investigators know where it went. At this point either nobody knows anything or those who do know are deliberately not sharing, so it amounts to the same thing.
Snowden isn't going to come to the USA willingly to face trial. This is all a ruse. His Russian handlers may just be messing with the US or it may be said to get some publicity. If Snowden really wanted to face justice, he wouldn't have done what he did. His handler is quite right that if Snowden leaves Russia he may end up extradited to the USA. Snowden is going to stay as a permanent "guest" of the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russian Republic as long as Putin is in charge and possibly longer. Wait for it - in the end Snowden or his handlers will say that he couldn't get the guarantees he needed about a fair trial, so he won't be coming. Even if he really wanted to leave and face US justice with no pre-conditions, I don't think Putin and his former KGB boys would let Snowden leave.
Of course, this leaking in of foreign entertainment and information via USB sticks is becoming harder and harder to control and once the Kim family looses control of the propaganda war, things will change on their own. I think we are actually pretty close to the tipping point in some places in NK, but for now the fear of the Kim family is keeping things under control. Once the country tips though, there will be a short and intense period of violence that I hope stays contained within the country, but I fear will spill out to the south. Once that is over, North Korea will be split into two parts, one unified with the south and a portion annexed into China. I have no idea where the split will be.
I really could not disagree more. Victor Cha, who wrote the book _The Impossible State_ about North Korea, has actually been there and served under multiple US presidents as an expert on the regime. Cha says that the average person in North Korea is so busy just trying to survive day to day that it is impossible for any kind of revolution to spring up from the masses. This plan that information being smuggled in is going to make a huge difference is simply the unrealistic dream of a generation raised on Twitter who believes that if they retweet something from the front line, it's just as good or maybe even better than being on the front line themselves.
Keep in mind that the military is one of the very few things in North Korea that actually gets priority for the limited funds. They get food and weapons and a huge dose of propaganda to keep them in line. The only way the Kim family will fall is if the military steps in, but I don't see that as likely. I also don't think it's likely that North Korea will be split in half. As Cha points out in his book, while the Chinese have plenty of problems with North Korea in general and aren't crazy about it having nukes, which is why China is always pushing for them to stop doing nuclear testing, the reality is that China benefits from a dependent state there. They get valuable rare earths at a fraction of their value and China fears a unified Korea under the control of South Korea that might allow US troops to be stationed near the Chinese border and a South Korea that now has the North's nuclear arsenal.
A somewhat recent defector in her 20s participated late last year in an online chat and she said that she thinks that few people in North Korea really believe the propaganda about the Kims, but life there is so tough that they don't have time to think about a big change. And I think that few North Koreans really believe or understand just how different life is in the south and the developed world. It wouldn't surprise me if some people believed that our movies and information are just our propaganda to deceive them. Keep in mind that North Koreans are essentially told all the time by their government "Yes, life here is very hard, but it's even worse in the countries of our enemies. This is why we must be ever vigilant to protect our lives here." I just don't see any of this stuff making much difference. If you read Cha's book you will see how brilliantly the North Korean government has been able to stifle dissent over the years.
I'm unimpressed by Google's position: in other countries they push back against restriction on free speech. It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.
No offense, but like most non-lawyers you fail to understand what "part of the constitution" really means in reality. Your right to free speech or for that matter anything is not infinite. SCOTUS judges Thomas and Scalia, both as conservative as they come, stated a few years ago in a 2nd amendment case that the 2nd amendment didn't mean that there could never be any restrictions on guns at all. Your right to free speech is not infinite either, with the classic example that you certainly don't have the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire, cause a panic and maybe get some people killed, and then say that nothing can be done to you because you have a free speech right to do that.
Google is not the government. While the US government has rather severe restrictions on being able to limit your speech because of the constitution, private employers do not have the same restrictions. SCOTUS has ruled on many "free speech" cases and consistently found that employers, schools, etc. have a right to limit speech in a way that would be seen as a violation of the constitution if the government were to do it. I'm not a lawyer but I can tell you that the simple legal argument against your position is that Google is not stopping you from using other blogs which may have completely different policies and thus your rights are not being violated.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know if *any* work has become public domain in the last few years in US and Canada? From what I see it just sounds like anything that's was copyrighted will now forever be copyrighted as copyright gets extended by X years every X years (with X=20 here).
In the USA, the answer is "no". Unfortunately, some years ago the classical music label Naxos got greedy and put out a CD in the USA of a 1930s classical work, specifically Pablo Casal's recordings of the complete Bach cello suites. In Europe this recording had clearly entered the public domain, but not in the USA. In fact, there was no question that it was still under US copyright at the time Naxos put it out. Not only was it under copyright, but the US copyright owner (Capitol Records) had their own copy in print and sued Naxos for copyright violation. It was really idiotic for Naxos to try to get away this in the US market and they lost the case. But a worst case scenario happened in the case. The court that heard it (in my opinion) basically made up the law and came to the conclusion that every recording every made or sold in the USA, even as far back as Edison's first attempts in the late 1800s, was still under copyright in the USA because they basically claimed that "common law copyright" protected them until the US law covered them. Naxos couldn't really appeal this because they had no way to argue that what they did was legal, so this horrible court decision that all US sound recordings are still under copyright became US law. Short of convincing Congress to pass a law on the subject, we're basically screwed now as there's nothing ever recorded or sold in the USA that is in the public domain at this time. Do note that this crazy legal finding doesn't apply to books, movies or anything else.
While I don't personally agree with this, I get that businesses and musicians and such want copyright to last for a really really long time. There's a way to meet their desires and satisfy the public's desire for things to actually enter the public domain. If these copyrights are so valuable that 50 years is simply too short, then rather than give extensions away for free, make the copyright holder fill out a form, just like they used to have to do, and pay big money for an extension. Offer 20 year extensions, but make the rate they charge go up exponentially with each renewal. Perhaps the first renewal costs $100,000. The 2nd renewal costs $10 million dollars. The 3rd renewal costs $1 billion and so on. I'm pretty sure that even Disney isn't going to pay $1 billion to keep Steamboat Willie out of the public domain or even if they do pay it for that one, there would be plenty of other properties that they simply can't afford to renew and thus they'd have to enter the public domain. If these are so valuable then why isn't the government getting paid for each renewal? And if the copyright holders forget to renew in time, well, tough. In the old days people did forget to renew and nobody cried out that this was just the most unfair thing ever in the history of mankind.
You might ask, "Well if we know what the problem is, we can fix it! Why not close the loopholes?" The fundamental problem there is that the people in position to close the loopholes are the ones receiving the bribes, and they want the bribes to keep coming. The only thing that could get them to change the law would be if their corporate overlords, i.e. those providing the bribes, bribed them to make it illegal. The problem with that is that the corporate overlords also want the bribes to remain legal, so that they can influence public officials.
I don't remember the exact wording, but I read somewhere where I think a lawyer said something like this - "You pass a law. I use a hole in your law. You plug the hole. I drill a hole in your plug." This is the real reason why the loopholes can't ever be closed. Lawyers, which is what most politicians are, are simply too good at finding ways around everything.
Finally, you might say, "Well why not just vote those bribe-takers out of office?" The problem there is that the bribes are used to buy elections. Without that money, you can't run ads, you can't get on TV, and you can't even participate in the public debate.
I think the real problem is that probably about 70-75% of the US electorate votes only on party affiliation and nothing else in a general election and they simply won't ever vote for a candidate of the other party. This is the reason why people keep getting re-elected to Congress once they get in as long as they don't commit outright crimes. The money does help in primaries and in rare general elections that are up for grabs. I've never voted in an election for the US House that was actually competitive. I've lived in both solid Democrat and Republican districts at various times and none of those elections ever had a candidate from the less popular political party have a real chance to win.
Farms: the northern half of the US is going to need to stop insisting on a seasonless produce aisle. Its unsustainable. Strawberries in january contribute to carbon emissions and water depletion. Stop pumping the avocado market and realize its a fatty fruit that doesnt need to become the staple diet of a population with 60% obesity and leading the world in heart disease. We dont need to be grazing cattle and making rice, a crop that requires a flooded field. The thing we do best is dates, a plant that grows in arid climates anyhow.
Pretty ignorant posting for a post currently modded "5, Insightful". Dude, there's no chance avocados are going to become a "staple diet" of the USA. It would be great from a health perspective if they did because they contain heart healthy fats and they can make you feel full in addition to being good sources of various nutrients but I can tell you that actually it seems to me that most people I know don't like them very much. Is there really all that much cattle grazing and rice growing in California? All the US rice I've seen comes from either Texas, Louisiana or Arkansas. I would think that land is too valuable in California to use it for cattle grazing. And sorry man, but I'm not real crazy about dates and neither are most Americans. Date palms don't tolerate cold weather at all, which is why I assume they only grow them much further south than Los Angeles. You can actually get snow there on rare occasions, which is very bad for date palms.
Many years ago, it was assumed that in order for a computer to beat humans at chess that major advances would have to happen in artificial intelligence. In the end IBM just simply brute forced an approach by basically allowing the computer the equivalent of an open book test against a poor human who could only go by memory. Maybe some improvements got made in searching in order to beat humans, but I think that's about it. I know that arimaa was developed in the hope that it would spur new AI advances in order for a computer to beat humans. I have no idea - did Wu just simply brute force his way to victory? Is arimaa so little played by humans that the best players are far weaker at it than humans are at chess and thus it just wasn't all that hard to eventually write a program that could defeat the best human players? Did Wu actually advance the art any with his winning program?
Considering the company gave $32M to various democratic campaign orgs during the 2012 election cycle, this should come as no surprise.
It is absolutely no coincidence that VA and PA, both reddish states, and both critical to Obama's re-election, somehow fell to the blue category using these voting machines.
Democratic supporters in 2004 claimed that Ohio was "stolen" to help Bush win re-election. It seems funny to me that the losing side always claims the winning side cheated. If the Republicans cheated in 2004, then why did they lose Ohio in the two following elections? I know it's always fun to tout conspiracy theories, but the simple truth is that in presidential elections, a significant number of Democratic supporters vote that can't be bothered to go to the polls otherwise. Florida went to Obama in 2008 and 2012 but it will likely be a cold day in Hell before a Democrat can win a state election there in a non-presidential election year. Same with VA and PA.
Besides, even if it was revoked, they would likely just find a really good accountant / lawyer team and end up paying the same amount (or less) in taxes. Last year Prudential insurance paid no corporate income tax and received a $106 million rebate. Time Warner cable paid no taxes on $4.3B in profit, CBS no taxes on $1.8B. Scientology could probably do better on their taxes by registering as a corporation anyways.
Liberty Media is another company like those you mentioned. They actually pride themselves on not ever paying US taxes on their earnings and they have an entire accounting department dedicated to finding legal loopholes and deductions that allow them to pay no taxes. They became the owners of the Atlanta Braves baseball team through a complicated transaction with Time Warner that resulted in neither company paying any taxes on the deal. That deal happened in the previous decade so I don't remember if Liberty Media actually wanted the Braves or if they simply acquired them as the best way to avoid taxes on the deal with Time Warner but that deal raised a lot of eyebrows in the US sporting world and provided the first insights into how far Liberty Media will go to legally avoid paying taxes.
Something of a dick move. But it highlighted the kinds of crap USA can pull with virtual impunity.
Got any of that anger available for Russia and China, who both also consistently do all kinds of nasty things "with virtual impunity"?
Given his poor defense, I'm really not all that surprised. Though I wonder how it will flesh out in appeals if he gets the death penalty. One might argue the poor quality defense would force a retrial if they can convince an appeals court of incompetence or something like that.
The "But my lawyers sucked!" argument very rarely works. If it did work, then a significant amount of defendants would deliberately get bad lawyers, roll the dice, and if they lose ask for a retrial. Even trying this trick by representing yourself as your own lawyer doesn't work. People tried that in the past and then when they lost, they argued that they had incompetence representation, namely themselves. I'm sure that his next set of lawyers will indeed argue that his defense was incompetent, but the odds of a court agreeing are pretty low. That kind of argument really only works when you can prove criminal misconduct or incompetence to the extreme, not just merely being dumb. You're allowed to have bad lawyers in the USA and yes, you often lose when that happens. His lawyers knew that they couldn't run the standard "He didn't do it so you have to prove it" argument so they gambled that maybe sympathy would work. It sounds stupid, but honestly, I don't see how it's worse than defiantly arguing "It was somebody else", especially in sentencing. All it takes is one juror to give him credit for admitting to it in the penalty phase and he can escape the death penalty. Well, I actually don't know the federal rule but most US states have an "all or nothing" rule in the death penalty where one dissenter can stop it.
My thoughts exactly. A human-spoken language designed from scratch to be simple and easy to learn? It's been done, Esperanto. And, since my mother learned it in the '50s, it's been around for a while. How long have UN documents been available in Eperanto? Been there, done that... Why reinvent the wheel?
I can't say this without sounding like an old man, so you kids stay off my lawn. There.
One of the problems I see with younger IT people, like presumably the poster who asked about this, is that there are always the following assumptions.
1) Everybody older than me is an idiot.
2) I've had some kind of genius insight that nobody before has had, because, well, see #1.
Perl is just horrifically bad? Then let's invent Python which is just so much better in every way possible. Oh wait. Python sucks bad, so let's invent Ruby. There's probably something out there now that will replace Ruby because Ruby just sucks too. The people like the original poster never ask these kinds of questions:
1) Has this been tried before and failed for a really good reason? Really good reasons might include it being really difficult to do this, being able to do it but not well, being able to do it well but nobody wants to use it, etc.
2) If there's been no big push in the past to get this done, is there really some kind of true demand for this?
I don't go around insulting people who start topics here, but this does seem rather pointless.
If a country wants a piece of the action, maybe they should take a good hard look at their tax code. They may have to lower taxes *gasp* Perhaps getting 17% of something is better than getting 30% of $0.
The reason companies do this is because it's more profitable to hire an army of lawyers and accountants to skirt local laws.
I agree that this sounds reasonable, but I am afraid the reality is that once countries start changing their laws to do this, it won't be enough. If country A says "OK, we'll change the law to get 17%" then country B offers 15% and then later country C offere 12% and so on, businesses will continue to complain about the declining tax rates as still being "excessive" until they reach zero. I can't rule out that some enterprising country might find a way to make a tax rate of 0% work for them if it's done in exchange for the company bringing so many jobs at specified rates there. I just don't believe that cutting the tax rates is really going to solve anything. Here in the USA there may actually be some companies that want the tax code to stay the same. I've read it claimed that Liberty Media prides itself on never paying any US income tax and even has an accounting office dedicated to zeroing out their tax bill every year.
Because Dallas Buyers Club made almost no money. In total it made $59 million and out of that had to come all the expenses.
In comparison Frozen grossed $1.219 Billion at the box office alone. Lets not even count the merchandising on that film. That is why you don't see Disney suing over Frozen. They made their money and know they will destroy a cash cow in the process.
Correct. Hurt Locker cost $15 million to make and almost nobody in the USA watched it when it was in theaters. It barely made $15 million in US box office, so depending on what was spent for advertising and such, it either lost money or was barely profitable when counting foreign receipts (I don't know what it made in foreign box office receipts). This is why those 2 films are singled out. Rather than admit that the films either sucked or nobody was interested in the subjects even if the films were good, Hollywood is trying to sue its way into profitability there.
Hulu has captions. Amazon Prime Video has captions. It's not like you're being completely denied the joys of interwebs TV.
My experience is that Netflix has a lot more videos with captions than Amazon Prime. Last year I had a girlfriend who spoke English as a second language. Her English was pretty good, but not fluent. She wanted to improve, so sometimes we would stream movies and I would turn on the captions or subtitles (whichever is the right term) if available as she said it helped her. There were several times when both Amazon and Netflix had a movie and only Netflix has the captions. It got so common that basically we only used Amazon in cases where Netflix simply didn't have it available for streaming. I'm sure there are some movies or shows where Amazon has captions and Netflix didn't, but I think that those are exceptions.
I know that it's popular to believe that China just wants to stop Bitcoin because it can't control it and while that may be part of the reasoning behind their actions, there are possibly other reasons as well. My last 2 girlfriends were Chinese and I mean "born and raised in China". In China as the stock market is fairly new thing and the general population doesn't understand it very well, there are a lot of misconceptions about how it works. I had issues with money with both of them, although slightly different issues with each. The 2nd one had this belief I couldn't ever correct that everybody can get rich by simply buying the correct stocks and she didn't understand why I wasn't a millionaire or how it was even possible to not make tons of money on every stock available. The first one didn't understand anything about the stock market so that wasn't specifically an issue, but what ended up being an issue was a huge disconnect between her lifestyle expectations and the reality of my salary should we get married. She dumped me and went looking for someone with a lot more in the bank. The reason I bring this up is that my experience is that people in China just assume they can get rich without doing any kind of work to reach that goal. Just buy the right stocks and you'll be rich. If it was that easy, believe me, everybody would be doing that. Or "Why aren't you saving 100% of your salary?" from the first one. I think some of this may be that the government is trying to protect its citizens from themselves so they don't have to deal with massive Bitcoin ripoffs and scams that will inevitably result from an uneducated public buying them thinking that in a year or two they're all going to be rich.
Seriously... if you use a nuke first these days, the entire planet will cut you off, if they don't come at you with everything they have. If you were nuked first, then the taboo has already been broken, and the world would almost expect you to unleash hell on whoever bombed you.
I realize that global politics is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize, and maybe I'm wrong, but on this subject, it seems pretty damned cut and dried.
I really couldn't disagree more. If Russia or China nuked anybody, there would be a lot of world wide anger, but any actual acts against them? Ha ha ha ha ha. Even the USA's BFF the UK really could not possibly be more of China's bitch on a constant basis.
Here's how I see the nuclear powers.
Bad actors: Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea.
Good actors: USA, France, UK, Israel.
I doubt that any of the "good actors" would ever use a nuclear device first. Putin may be just trying to make everybody else think he's unbalanced or he may actually be crazy enough to possibly use a nuke first. I'm not happy with either possibility. India probably wouldn't use a nuke first, but Pakistan may be crazy or irrational enough to do so. North Korea is definitely irrational enough to do so. I doubt that China's civilian government would use a nuke as a first choice, but I fear that the Communist Party may not have as great a control over the PLA as they'd like to think and if the PLA has the ability to launch strikes without the CCP giving the order, there just might be generals crazy enough to do it because they don't believe anybody has the guts to make them pay for it. No amount of public pressure can make the 'bad actors" I listed back off and if anybody honestly thinks the USA, France and the UK are the greatest threats to the world, then you're delusional to a point that nobody can bring you back from.
I have to admit to being surprised at how many posts suggest that contacting your Congresscritter will actually work. Those days are long gone for several reasons.
1) The Supreme Court ruling that basically allows virtually limitless campaign contributions means that reps and senators no longer have to depend on the public for financing, meaning that they can do whatever they want and if Big Money likes it, they'll get re-election money. I don't see this as anything Big Money cares about.
2) There's a possibility that the majority of Americans may actually be in favor of the Patriot Act. I know that it's common for American Slashdotters to believer that the entire nation agrees with them politically, but I believe that in fact the majority of Americans are not troubled at all by the things that drive American Slashdotters mad.
3) Voters have proven for decades that they don't pay attention to issues at all, they have short memories, and they merely vote on party lines every time. Incumbents have little incentive to listen to the voters when they can literally do anything short of breaking the law and handily get re-elected. And polls have laughingly shown that year after year the US electorate wants to "throw everybody out, except my representative/senator" and they fail to grasp that when the entire country insists that their rep/senator isn't the problem but yours is, nothing will ever change.
I have to ask - Is the linked article on techworm a fake? It's the first link in the parent post. The quality of English there is just a little bit off. It's not quite natural sounding. It's like something someone would say when writing as a second language when their skills are very good, but not fluent. The article reads a bit like an email spam as a result.
I think they are trying to be clever and play on the term China Syndrome, where the fuel melts all the way through the earth to it's Antipodal point.
Thank you as I had no idea at all what this was. I think somewhere Dennis Miller is reading this and saying "Even by my standards that's obscure."
Linguists know that a language is just a dialect with an army.
To a certain extent you have a point, but I wouldn't say you're completely correct with that statement. I believe that the most correct statement I ever read on the subject was where a linguist said that it's up to the speakers of a language to determine what is a dialect and what is a separate language. German and Dutch are regarded as separate languages by their speakers yet the degree of mutual intelligibility is extremely high. Spanish and Portuguese are probably roughly 90% the same but the speakers regard them as separate languages. Galician is even closer to Portuguese than Spanish and while it probably really should be a dialect of Portuguese, nobody gets upset that everybody thinks it's a separate language. Speakers of English from the UK or USA wouldn't regard Jamaican English as anything but a dialect. China's official policy is that there is one Chinese language and Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghaiese, Hakka, Min and others are simply dialects of I guess some theoretical single ancestor language, yet some of these "dialects" are as close to each other as English is to Polish. As far as the Romanian/Moldovan thing goes, you need to remember that the USSR stole Moldova during WWII and kept it and it was in their interest to promote the idea that Moldovans were culturally and linguistically distinct from Romanians. Romania never allowed Soviet troops to be stationed there and operated a relatively independent foreign policy during the Ceausescu era. The last thing the USSR wanted was large numbers of Moldovans seeking to rejoin Romania, hence they overpromoted the idea that Moldovan was a completely separate language. This idea is starting to fade in today's world and I would think that a majority of people in Moldova outside of Transnistria would easily admit that they speak Romanian, not some wildly different "Moldovan" language.
You're quite right, but there's even more to the story that might be of interest to the readers here.
The Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, died in 1967 and some time later, I think in late 1968 or very early 1969, the group decided to hire a new manager. The Rolling Stone recommended Allen Klein. John Lennon met him and convinced Ringo Starr and George Harrison to agree to let him become the group's manager. Paul McCartney had been arguing for his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, to manage the group and refused to sign the contract with Klein, although the other signatures were enough to make him the manager anyway. Apparently John, George and Ringo believed that Eastman would favor Paul's interests over the rest of the group, so that was why they rejected him. In 1971, Paul sued to dissolve the group so he could get out from under Klein's control. John, George and Ringo all eventually turned on Klein as did the Rolling Stones. Paul became quite rich under Lee Eastman, so you can judge for yourself just how "bad" he would have been to have managed the group.
Klein's relationship with George unraveled first following some mismanagement of funds from the Concert for Bangladesh. The "My Sweet Lord" plagarsm case went through the court for decades. Yes, decades. Litigation began in 1971 and finally ended in 1998. To stick it to George, because Klein was nothing if not vindictive, eventually he bought the publishing company that had successfully sued George in the plagiarism case. In 1981, the original amount of damages assessed were reduced to George because of Klein's duplicity in being George's manager at the start of the legal case and then switching sides to being on the side seeking compensation. In the end George just bought the publishing company from Klein to help bring the situation to a close.
My first job after college was as a computer programmer for a branch of the US military that I don't like to name. I'm glad I did the job at the time and just as glad that I left for private industry 20+ years ago. The reality of government service is that big shots do whatever they want whether it makes sense or not and whether it's legal or not because the people under them who realize "Hey. That's NOT allowed!" don't have the authority to make them do what they are supposed to do and the people above them who do have the authority have bigger fish to fry. So nobody tells them "John Doe isn't following the rules on email" or whatever. Plus, people in the military and government are amazingly vindictive and if you complain about a superior doing something wrong/illegal, the person who is likely to pay for it is you, not them. So I totally understand how Hillary came up with this stupid idea to use her own email server and everybody below her was too scared to complain about it and Obama had bigger issues like Ben Laden to worry about than what server Hillary was using for email.
When I worked for the US military, we had a general who ran our base and he single handedly kept an ancient Vax system alive for his email. I had a job that got me into contact at times with fairly senior civilian managers and they used to complain about how they loved a new Unix based email system that the base had setup but the general refused to use it. He insisted on using an old Vax that at the time couldn't easily be integrated into the newer system for some kind of technical problem that had to be overcome, so the top military and civilian managers had to have an email account on the Vax just to see if the general sent them email, but everything they sent amongst themselves that didn't need to go to him went through the new system. The general finally had to retire and once he left, his successor didn't care anything about the old Vax email system, so it finally got shut down. So I've personally seen it where some big shot in the government just does whatever the heck they want to when it comes to email. I've wondered how much it cost in manpower and other costs to keep one old email system alive because one general refused to use anything else.
There's been some speculation that somebody's military might have a really good idea about where the plane went and they aren't sharing it deliberately because it's in their strategic interest to not let other nations know that they have this capability. But ledow does have some rock solid arguments for why nobody may have noticed the flight at all and it may be that nobody paid enough attention to be able to help investigators know where it went. At this point either nobody knows anything or those who do know are deliberately not sharing, so it amounts to the same thing.
Snowden isn't going to come to the USA willingly to face trial. This is all a ruse. His Russian handlers may just be messing with the US or it may be said to get some publicity. If Snowden really wanted to face justice, he wouldn't have done what he did. His handler is quite right that if Snowden leaves Russia he may end up extradited to the USA. Snowden is going to stay as a permanent "guest" of the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russian Republic as long as Putin is in charge and possibly longer. Wait for it - in the end Snowden or his handlers will say that he couldn't get the guarantees he needed about a fair trial, so he won't be coming. Even if he really wanted to leave and face US justice with no pre-conditions, I don't think Putin and his former KGB boys would let Snowden leave.
Of course, this leaking in of foreign entertainment and information via USB sticks is becoming harder and harder to control and once the Kim family looses control of the propaganda war, things will change on their own. I think we are actually pretty close to the tipping point in some places in NK, but for now the fear of the Kim family is keeping things under control. Once the country tips though, there will be a short and intense period of violence that I hope stays contained within the country, but I fear will spill out to the south. Once that is over, North Korea will be split into two parts, one unified with the south and a portion annexed into China. I have no idea where the split will be.
I really could not disagree more. Victor Cha, who wrote the book _The Impossible State_ about North Korea, has actually been there and served under multiple US presidents as an expert on the regime. Cha says that the average person in North Korea is so busy just trying to survive day to day that it is impossible for any kind of revolution to spring up from the masses. This plan that information being smuggled in is going to make a huge difference is simply the unrealistic dream of a generation raised on Twitter who believes that if they retweet something from the front line, it's just as good or maybe even better than being on the front line themselves.
Keep in mind that the military is one of the very few things in North Korea that actually gets priority for the limited funds. They get food and weapons and a huge dose of propaganda to keep them in line. The only way the Kim family will fall is if the military steps in, but I don't see that as likely. I also don't think it's likely that North Korea will be split in half. As Cha points out in his book, while the Chinese have plenty of problems with North Korea in general and aren't crazy about it having nukes, which is why China is always pushing for them to stop doing nuclear testing, the reality is that China benefits from a dependent state there. They get valuable rare earths at a fraction of their value and China fears a unified Korea under the control of South Korea that might allow US troops to be stationed near the Chinese border and a South Korea that now has the North's nuclear arsenal.
A somewhat recent defector in her 20s participated late last year in an online chat and she said that she thinks that few people in North Korea really believe the propaganda about the Kims, but life there is so tough that they don't have time to think about a big change. And I think that few North Koreans really believe or understand just how different life is in the south and the developed world. It wouldn't surprise me if some people believed that our movies and information are just our propaganda to deceive them. Keep in mind that North Koreans are essentially told all the time by their government "Yes, life here is very hard, but it's even worse in the countries of our enemies. This is why we must be ever vigilant to protect our lives here." I just don't see any of this stuff making much difference. If you read Cha's book you will see how brilliantly the North Korean government has been able to stifle dissent over the years.
I'm unimpressed by Google's position: in other countries they push back against restriction on free speech. It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.
No offense, but like most non-lawyers you fail to understand what "part of the constitution" really means in reality. Your right to free speech or for that matter anything is not infinite. SCOTUS judges Thomas and Scalia, both as conservative as they come, stated a few years ago in a 2nd amendment case that the 2nd amendment didn't mean that there could never be any restrictions on guns at all. Your right to free speech is not infinite either, with the classic example that you certainly don't have the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire, cause a panic and maybe get some people killed, and then say that nothing can be done to you because you have a free speech right to do that.
Google is not the government. While the US government has rather severe restrictions on being able to limit your speech because of the constitution, private employers do not have the same restrictions. SCOTUS has ruled on many "free speech" cases and consistently found that employers, schools, etc. have a right to limit speech in a way that would be seen as a violation of the constitution if the government were to do it. I'm not a lawyer but I can tell you that the simple legal argument against your position is that Google is not stopping you from using other blogs which may have completely different policies and thus your rights are not being violated.