Yeah, what a joke. "Let alone provide meaningful legal advice" - that's your counsel's job, not your damn schools.
Actually, there are a lot of universities that provide legal counsel for free to their students (unless, of course, you are suing the univerisity). At my undergraduate school, the attorneys would even represent you in court if you needed it. At my graduate school, even though the attorney would not represent the student officially, you could still get tons of free helpful legal advice to use. It came in handy for me during a landlord/lesee dispute (there are tons of dishonest/shady landlords at my old school).
The poster you originally applied to was making a humorous attempt to show that not all control freaks (Hitler being an extreme example) are saturated with testosterone. It was a perfectly valid use of the reference. Your mindless quoting of Godwin shows that you have no idea what you are talking about. Also, my writing "and your mother dresses you funny" should have been a rather blatant display of me just being a bit silly, but I guess the concept is beyond a mindlessly angry person like you. To give you another example of sarcastic silliness:
It's for a physical substance, that was developed by someone, which performs better/differently than anotehr compound used for the same purpose.
Isn't this what patent protection should be for?
Nowhere in the article or in the summary is there a reference to a bogus patent. Why the hell did *you* jump to the conclusion that this was bogus?
Well, this *is* slashdot. He probably just assumed that the article and half the posters will call it a bogus patent simply because someone was actually granted a patent.
And as long as the media chooses to ignore that fact, it doesn't sit on most Americans' consciences the way it ought to.
And even if the media did cover it, there are still plenty of Americans who would say "So? Fuck 'em! We'll take what we want! Don't fuck with America or Capitalism, you brown fucks!" Or, words to that effect. Sorry, but in too many places I've lived in the States, most people really are that disgusting.
If a DVD is public domain, why not just sell copies of it? No reason to pirate something that's available for free. Hell, you can even sell them for $5.
Actually, something similar happens with people who like Old Time Radio shows or old Victrola records. Most of them are now in the public domain, but they can be hard to find. So, some people will buy CDs/DVDs of mp3 collections of shows and records that have been digitized from the source recordings, either off sellers on Ebay or from websites. The difficulty in obtaining the material, along with the convenience of getting all of what you are looking for in a set of optical disks, makes paying for it from someone who has a full collection worth it for some people.
Copyright: 20 years, renewable once for an additional 20
Physical Patents: 20 years, and full specs are a requirement
Software Patents: Shouldn't be allowed to exist, but if they were: 1 year. Full example source code must be available under a BSD license. FOSS is exempt from having to comply with patent restrictions.
No, no, no! You see, that would actually make sense! The US government doesn't do things that actually make sense! If the US government actually tried to balance the needs of commerce with the needs of the people, all the corporate lawyers would commit suicide. I once had to kill a snake out on my stone patio on a hot summer day. The smell of snake guts on a hot stone patio is utterly horrible and nauseating. Can you imagine the smell of a bunch of rotting self-disemboweled corporate lawyers?
Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" actually infringes upon others' right to think. Imagine the future...
Actually, you don't even need any kind of sci-fi future. If copyright is made permanent and the amount of material that can be copyrighted (and thus be considered infringed upon) is gradually whittled down to a smaller and smaller amount, it will become impossible to express yourself in any medium without violating a bazillion pieces of copyrighted material. In this way, corporations (who will ultimately own all the copyrights) will control all that you can see, hear and speak and will extract extortionate fees from you simply for the privilege of being able to open your mouth and say anything.
That is one of the many problems with corporations. Their basic operating procedure causes them to devour anything and everything that can be considered in property in any way.
Let's say you are having a wedding. You want photos of that wedding. You can take them yourself, or pay someone to take them. If you pay someone, only part of that payment covers the total cost. The photographer makes his money back by selling the photos of your event.
Actually, it depends on the terms of the contract. If there are no terms relating to copyright, you get everything since it was a work for hire. That is why a good and normal wedding photography contract will spell out that the photographer retains the right to use the photographs taken of your wedding for advertising purposes. Otherwise, they wouldn't have the right to use anything. (BTW, IANAL).
Which can be really great depending on the problem. If you look at folding at home, the ratio of data : computation is quite low, so you get a good deal. Pass a little bit of data, and have the computers run the process, and send back a little bit of data. However, if you're doing something like parallelized video compression, you need a fairly fast network over which the data is travelling, because of a very high data : computation ratio. Stuff like this can be parallelized over a home network, but doing so over the internet isn't worth most people's times because a single computer can do the computation before it could even be distributed between the other computer(s).
Oh, very true. The best type of problem to solve by doing parallel processing this way, or even just sending the problem to a faster computer to process, is when both the code that needs to be compiled, the data to be run, and the data to return (or, if the code is resident on the computer, just the data to be run and the data to return) are all fairly small. An example of this is complex finite element analysis. The code, input data, and output data aren't generally very big (especially if you have modelled your problem efficiently), but the amount of computation required to obtain a result is enormous by comparison. This is the sort of problem that Arpanet was originally designed to handle by relaying data between computers - simply defined but computationally intensive physics/engineering problems.
wasn't its initial purpose something along the lines of military communication in the event of an emergency?
There were actually a few purposes, one of which is mentioned here (note the Background of Arpanet section). Basically, apart from communications, it was also meant to make new software readily available. One other purpose not really mentioned in the Wikipedia article is that one would not need to always upgrade a multi-million dollar (in those days) computer just to run computations faster. One could simply send the problem to the fastest computer and have it run the problem. This also had potential (now realized) for parallel processing since one only needs to pass the computed data back and forth between processors.
That would be assault, not rape. I'm always astounded as to how completely ignorant people are.
We are talking about *actual* rape, not necessarily the legal definition. When most people say "rape" they usually mean some form of non-consensual sexual activity (vaginal, oral, et cetera). So, by a more common sense definition, yes a man can be raped by a woman. In fact, in Sweden (IIRC), a woman was actually convicted of rape when a man woke up at a party to discover himself being fellated by a woman he didn't even know. Just because he is a man doesn't mean that he should be thrilled to have his penis inside any woman who is willing (I know, this is slashdot, so most people here wouldn't understand this concept). It's just not very common.
Let's see how many people they think they can arrest under... what law?
You seem to think the law actually matters in the US anymore. They sent the kid to an "Alternative Education Center". I don't know why they don't just cut through the bullshit and call it a "Re-Education Camp" for those who don't fall in line with the propaganda centers/prisons/day-cares mascarading as the US public education system.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no! Whatever will I do? Mommy! Please help!First God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made Jack Thompson.
That is one of the many problems with corporations. Their basic operating procedure causes them to devour anything and everything that can be considered in property in any way.
And you are a dumbass.
And your mother dresses you funny.
Sorry, *saw* someone get shot! (dyslexics untie!)
Shitfire! You hit the nail on the bloody head! It was at a fast food place near Georgia Tech that I was someone shot!
Jake: Hit it.