I was thinking about this last night. If we limit copyright strictly to the lifetime of the artist, we might see even more artists die young under mysterious circumstances.
Paranoia aside, copyright is often a form of life insurance for a persons family and should be transferable for a reasonable amount of time. So just make it 14 or 20 or whatever fixed number of years and move on. Having something set forth to encourage creativity last for the lifetime of the creator is rather absurd.
Yeah! And why bother investigating burglary, just buy better locks. No need to investigate embezzlement just have better accountants. Oh, and murder, pshaw. We should focus on inventing better medicine.
Accountability is important. There is not nearly enough of it in the American government, at any level.
In a speech today, Bush promoted renewed investment in the space agency. "See, we've finally found the WMD and they're in another galaxy, see. It is imperative we develop the technology to impose regime change as quick as possible. 9-11."
The fact that we can compare the security model of Slashdot and iDisk and reasonably argue that Slashdot's is better is enough of a condemnation of the iDisk service. I don't care if someone gets access to my Slashdot account, they'd probably just kill my karma. Most likely, I would care if they got in to my iDisk account... if I had one... and a Mac... and didn't do everything with DynDNS and SSH.
First, for the vast majority of people, remote access to their desktop isn't daily use. Second, for you it is worthwhile to spend over a hundred dollars to get a slower, less stable system just so that you can avoid having to install a free VNC server? Not to mention, unless you have Win2003 server, only one person can use your 'workstation' at a time and last I checked licenses for that went for over $1000 (not that I've checked recently since I have zero use for it).
Yes, VNC is not encrypted. There are probably better alternatives. And I don't really care since I'm not a windows user (and when I use VNC it is over an SSH tunnel).
Win98SE is not comparable to Win2k. Win2k would still be the best Windows for daily use if security updates were provided. WinXP is fine once one switches to the classic theme. The same is probably true for Vista. Each newer version of Windows just requires turning off more crap to get back to a sane system. That said, all my machines run Linux.
Considering how quickly cellphone frequencies (900MHz and up) are absorbed by tissue, I don't see how this is a viable solution. Most implanted devices communicate at 100MHz or less. There is a 400MHz band available for these types of applications, but I haven't seen it widely used yet. The article has pretty much zero details but it looks like the guy does purely conceptual work and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Anyway, the real problem with these things is how to power them. Once we have nanorobots that work off blood sugar, that will be exciting. That might be a good time to become paranoid too.
My 256mb memory stick has been through the wash at least 4 times (I always forget things in my pockets). It isn't the wash that killed it. Either her dryer is way too hot or she plugged it in while still wet. *zzt*.
When I was an undergrad, our school ID cards doubled as National and then I think TCF bank cards (this was a while ago)... it was a horrible service but people used it because it was already there. Ironically, the school credit union is much better and not pushed at all by the school.
I realize it has no real bearing on the man's guilt or innocence, but that man is seriously creepy. Did they have him on doped to the eyeballs? I had it mute the sound when he read the poem to his kid or I would have had nightmares.
I think the fear is that anybody can edit it and might include something distasteful to the school board, not the quality of the articles. When I was in high school, one of the staff had a website where anybody would post links (this was well before Wikipedia or blogs). He ended up being fired when a lot of those links were porn. Schools are masters of overreacting.
Of course. I was just pointing out that there are physical reasons why 48kHz may be better than 44kHz and it doesn't have to be all in their heads (as so many audiophile things are).
I make no claims that my free TV tuner and built-in audio are a super hi-def system.
If I record audio with my computer at 44kHz, there is a high pitched whine. I suspect most people over 30 can't hear it, but I'm not that old yet and it is extremely annoying. At 48kHz, the whine is, almost, completely gone. The problem is that when you sample at a certain rate, any signal above half that rate tends to get stuffed into the very high frequency range. Since at 44kHz, that is just at the edge of hearing, a noisy recording system becomes much worse. Of course, if I had a decent audio system in my computer this probably wouldn't be such an issue.
I am using latex, but none of my classmates are. It is probably because they kind find anyone to have sex with them and you don't need it when you're alone.
Oh! You mean the formatting language. Yes, I do use Latex for all of my papers. But, for group projects we need to work together. So my options are redo it all myself or use what they are using. It sucks. At least OO.org has a latex like syntax for entering equations, although I keept switcing \ (latex) and % (OO.org).
The teachers could care less what we use. This is college (grad school even), not middle school. We had everything in in PDF. The problem is collaborating. For one group we're trying to use google docs and keep everything 'format free' until putting together the final version, but my group mate keeps sending me.docs anyway (even though google docs was her idea!).
Speaking of which, the revisions feature of google docs makes it great for this collaborative work. The only missing feature seems to be search (ironic, isn't it).
What makes this even worse is the abominable equation editors that are used with word. At school here they've made it even worse by installing MathType for equations in word, which is even worse to use and not even compatible with the built in equation editor so I can't edit the equations at home even using MS Office.
I don't use OpenOffice because it is free, I use it because it is better.
If I wanted to show them precision widths under a microscope, I could show them.... I know, MEMS!
Most MEMS have features that are visible to the naked eye, if not easy to identify. The point is not to have an accurate unit of measure (we have tools for that) but to give a sense of scale that students can easily internalize. The same is true in science reporting, precision is not necessary so long as the analogy gives a reasonable feel for the scale.
So specifying something in hair widths is okay (variations within an order of magnitude), but not hair lengths!
As someone who teaches MEMs technology, I find myself frequently using the human hair comparison with new students. It is the closet thing to a microstructure that people have daily physical experience with, and helps give a feeling of scale. A 200 micron wide bridge is an abstract number until you understand it is about 1 to 4 hair-widths (depending on whose hair). Its not nearly as meaningless of a unit as LOCs (Libraries of Congress). If you have a better suggestion for a comparison, I'd love to hear it.
Your point about leaving off the length is a good one. Science journalists don't seem to understand enough about what they're covering to know which points are important or which claims are plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
Paranoia aside, copyright is often a form of life insurance for a persons family and should be transferable for a reasonable amount of time. So just make it 14 or 20 or whatever fixed number of years and move on. Having something set forth to encourage creativity last for the lifetime of the creator is rather absurd.
Accountability is important. There is not nearly enough of it in the American government, at any level.
You mean re-release XP? It would certainly save on development costs.
In a speech today, Bush promoted renewed investment in the space agency. "See, we've finally found the WMD and they're in another galaxy, see. It is imperative we develop the technology to impose regime change as quick as possible. 9-11."
"I read it for the Articles, I swear"
The fact that we can compare the security model of Slashdot and iDisk and reasonably argue that Slashdot's is better is enough of a condemnation of the iDisk service. I don't care if someone gets access to my Slashdot account, they'd probably just kill my karma. Most likely, I would care if they got in to my iDisk account ... if I had one ... and a Mac ... and didn't do everything with DynDNS and SSH.
Yes, VNC is not encrypted. There are probably better alternatives. And I don't really care since I'm not a windows user (and when I use VNC it is over an SSH tunnel).
Win98SE is not comparable to Win2k. Win2k would still be the best Windows for daily use if security updates were provided. WinXP is fine once one switches to the classic theme. The same is probably true for Vista. Each newer version of Windows just requires turning off more crap to get back to a sane system. That said, all my machines run Linux.
The makers of Splenda will probably push through a law banning the research of sugar eating nanobots in the name of "protecting the children."
Anyway, the real problem with these things is how to power them. Once we have nanorobots that work off blood sugar, that will be exciting. That might be a good time to become paranoid too.
I'm waiting for bounty to start marketing its "anti-static" fabric softener sheets as an electronic device protection method.
My 256mb memory stick has been through the wash at least 4 times (I always forget things in my pockets). It isn't the wash that killed it. Either her dryer is way too hot or she plugged it in while still wet. *zzt*.
Everyone knew these devices wear out, they just didn't know what the cause was. It may be interesting, but not earth shattering.
When I was an undergrad, our school ID cards doubled as National and then I think TCF bank cards (this was a while ago) ... it was a horrible service but people used it because it was already there. Ironically, the school credit union is much better and not pushed at all by the school.
Actually, I think Fermilab is closing down, or at least the accelerator part of it, in just another year or two.
No, it doesn't slowly corrode like XP. Vista instead begins as sluggish corroded mess ... and stays that way.
I realize it has no real bearing on the man's guilt or innocence, but that man is seriously creepy. Did they have him on doped to the eyeballs? I had it mute the sound when he read the poem to his kid or I would have had nightmares.
I think the fear is that anybody can edit it and might include something distasteful to the school board, not the quality of the articles. When I was in high school, one of the staff had a website where anybody would post links (this was well before Wikipedia or blogs). He ended up being fired when a lot of those links were porn. Schools are masters of overreacting.
I make no claims that my free TV tuner and built-in audio are a super hi-def system.
If I record audio with my computer at 44kHz, there is a high pitched whine. I suspect most people over 30 can't hear it, but I'm not that old yet and it is extremely annoying. At 48kHz, the whine is, almost, completely gone. The problem is that when you sample at a certain rate, any signal above half that rate tends to get stuffed into the very high frequency range. Since at 44kHz, that is just at the edge of hearing, a noisy recording system becomes much worse. Of course, if I had a decent audio system in my computer this probably wouldn't be such an issue.
I am using latex, but none of my classmates are. It is probably because they kind find anyone to have sex with them and you don't need it when you're alone. Oh! You mean the formatting language. Yes, I do use Latex for all of my papers. But, for group projects we need to work together. So my options are redo it all myself or use what they are using. It sucks. At least OO.org has a latex like syntax for entering equations, although I keept switcing \ (latex) and % (OO.org).
The teachers could care less what we use. This is college (grad school even), not middle school. We had everything in in PDF. The problem is collaborating. For one group we're trying to use google docs and keep everything 'format free' until putting together the final version, but my group mate keeps sending me .docs anyway (even though google docs was her idea!).
Speaking of which, the revisions feature of google docs makes it great for this collaborative work. The only missing feature seems to be search (ironic, isn't it).
What makes this even worse is the abominable equation editors that are used with word. At school here they've made it even worse by installing MathType for equations in word, which is even worse to use and not even compatible with the built in equation editor so I can't edit the equations at home even using MS Office.
I don't use OpenOffice because it is free, I use it because it is better.
If I wanted to show them precision widths under a microscope, I could show them .... I know, MEMS!
Most MEMS have features that are visible to the naked eye, if not easy to identify. The point is not to have an accurate unit of measure (we have tools for that) but to give a sense of scale that students can easily internalize. The same is true in science reporting, precision is not necessary so long as the analogy gives a reasonable feel for the scale.
So specifying something in hair widths is okay (variations within an order of magnitude), but not hair lengths!
Your point about leaving off the length is a good one. Science journalists don't seem to understand enough about what they're covering to know which points are important or which claims are plausible.