I know this is a silly semantic point, and maybe a bit off topic, but copyright-able material != "intellectual property".
Its not a "silly semantic point", its an ideological crusade dressed up in semantic clothing. While technically, perhaps, correct (insofar as, pedantically, copyrightable material isn't necessarily intellectual property, copyrighted material, however, is, and all copyrightable material not expressly placed in the public domain is also copyrighted material), its inaccurate in its message.
Intellectual property is an ideology that implies that ideas should be treated like physical goods in that they can have one owner that controls it.
No, "intellectual property" is not an "ideology" of any kind. "Intellectual property" is a class of actual, existing legal rights (a component of the somewhat broader category of "intangible personal property".)
In the "natural order of things" there is a differece: ideas can be easily reproduced or shared among people and physical goods cannot.
Physical goods (and even moreso real property) can be easily shared among people as well; the existence of propietary rights, whether in tangible personal property, intangible personal property, or real property has nothing to do with whether or not they can be "shared" or "reproduced" in the "natural order of things", but with the social judgement that protection of a proprietary interest in those things enriches the community by encouraging the development of wealth that would otherwise not be developed.
Further, except for patents specifically, the subject matter of IP rights aren't "ideas".
So in the last few centuries many governments have granted creators of works abilities to control copying of their ideas, but with a limited time span and scope.
Both tangible personal property and real property being held for more than a limited time and with the free control we associated with modern ownership is also fairly new; grants for a period, or for life, of land from the government (some overlord) were common, and even personal property returning to a governing authority on death who had some practical discretion on whether or not to allow it to be inherited for a fee were not uncommon.
And when land wasn't granted for a period of time, it was often granted in fee tail where it was designated by the grantor to fall to the grantee's natural heirs and to revert to the grantor if the natural line failed.
Most people that take someone's physical property deprive them of it, which is why for millenia stealing of physical goods has been illegal in many societies.
Since "property" is merely an exclusive power over some thing, someone who takes your "intellectual property" deprives you of it no less than someone who takes your "physical property".
Using the term "intellectual property" conditions people to think of ideas like property.
Using the term "intellectual property" conditions people, if it does so at all, to think of the rights people possess over the subject matters of "intellectual property" (generally, not "ideas") as similar to the rights owners possess over other kinds of property, which they are.
They forget the limitations of copyright law and they forget that naturally ideas can be shared. That copyright came to be not out of a desire to protect the rights of creators but to promote the advancement of arts and sciences.
You seem to fail to realize that all property rights are social inventions to protect, and thereby encourage, the development of wealth on the presumption that its accumulation and development will redound to the common good.
I still have to agree that 11,000 fonts "IN USE" is still pretty extreme.
They are a publisher. If there is even one use of a font, anywhere, in any of things they publish, the font is "in use". A publisher having 11,000 fonts "in use" isn't even remotely extreme.
A publisher claiming to have only one font in active use is pretty silly, though.
This causes the magnetic field to collapse simultaneously with the coil being collapsed, causing the field to fluctuate and move very rapidly through neighboring space, thus inducing the currents that destroy things. In part, it is similar in concept to a car's ignition coil. It's not something easily miniaturized, nor affordably carried.
ISTR a Popular Mechanics article a few years back about EMP devices successfully tested that were on the order of a few tens of pounds and a couple thousand dollars; neither the size nor cost is really the barrier for criminals—finding a place to set it off where the EMP effects who you want to when you want it to, but the explosive effect doesn't interfere with whatever you are doing is probably the bigger problem.
(for bank robbers and other non-ideological, high risk:reward crimes, finding someone with the technical skill to build it that doesn't have a better way to make money is probably a challenge, too.)
That's true about letter shapes. But it is a nontrivial effort to go from a set of letter shapes to a digital (non-bitmap) font, which is a computer program and rather clearly subject to copyright. Since what is at issue here is the computer program and not the letter shapes...
A "font" and a "type face" aren't the same thing. While modern computers can do "good enough"mdash;for casual use, at least—extrapolations of different sizes and styles from a single font, professional publishers are going to use a distinct font (with appearance tweaks) for each different combination of face, style, and type size.
Times-12pt-Roman isn't the same font as Times-12pt-Italic, Times-10pt-Roman, etc.
It doesn't take a whole lot of different faces, sizes, and styles to get up around 11,000 fonts.
More significant, I think, than the current temperature compared to previous temperature levels is the trend over the last 100-200 years. Sharp, and accelerating increase.
Read the actual paper, and you'll find that, instead of all the very firm statements in the Yahoo article, there are lots of caveats, and the note that temperature reconstructions back further than 400 years are very chancy.
The actual article is not really full of caveats. Its very emphatic about the last 400 years, and points to strong indications about longer periods. Yes, there aren't as firm a number (though "very chancy" would more accurately describe its discussion of reconstructions farther back than A.D. 900, which is considerably more than 400 years.)
As to the greenhouse gas hypothesis, there are a couple of real problems with it:
Perhaps, but if so, you certainly haven't identified the actual problems.
about 60 percent of the temperature increase happened between 1500 and 1900. The notion that there was a lot of unusual greenhouse gases in that interval is questionable at best.
This is a combination of inaccurate and, to the degree it is remotely related to the truth, misleading: if you look at the chart on the second page of the report, most measures are clustering about the same place in 1800 as 1500; after 1800 (which marks a significant leap forward that made steam power increasing popular), the trend does turn markedly upward, but none of the various data series show more than about half their increase from there lowest point in the 1500-1600 period to now at 1900, and for all of them, most—in some cases all—of the 1500-1900 increase is, surprise surprise, in the 1800-1900 interval.
(2) there is significant data suggesting "global warming" of similar order of magnitude on Mars and other planets.
Over similar time periods? Clearly not explained by conditions not present on Earth? Where is this evidence?
most of the argument that greenhouse gases are causing the warming are based, first and foremost, on the assumption that there is unusual warming, which is not a very strong conclusion, as noted by the report.
The report notes no such thing.
Reasoning from "there has been global warming" to "there is an anthropogenic reason for global warming" to "anthropogenic causes for global warming are proven by the global warming" is circular.
True, but irrelevant, since that's not the actual reasoning.
If you place that 400 year figure next to the age of the earth (say 4+ billion years), it does not seem that significant.
If you put it next to the age of the Earth, the meteorite-induced disruption to the world's climate that put the nail in the coffin of pretty much every large land animal on Earth (including the dinosaurs) doesn't seem that significant.
Nevertheless, to the dinosaurs it was pretty significant.
Likewise, the question with anthropogenic global warming and other alterations to the environment induced by man is not "are the disruptions a huge deal on a geological timescale", but "do the disruptions pose an intense danger to the continuation and quality of human life on earth." To which the answer, for global warming, seems to be a pretty clear yes.
No, I don't think you understand. It was almost certainly not this hot any time in the last 400 years, and there are indications that support the belief that it was not this hot any time in the last 2,000 years, though indicators of temperature more than 400 years ago, and especially prior to A.D. 900, are pretty sketchy.
It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the
evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the
period from A.D. 900 to 1600. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures
at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any
period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing
hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward
in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified.
. . . The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has
subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface
temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such
as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be
unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years. Not all individual proxy records indicate that the recent warmth is unprecedented, although a larger fraction of geographically diverse sites experienced exceptional warmth during the late 20th century than during any other extended period from A.D. 900 onward.
While the contention that most VoIP users use Firefox (at least, exclusively) may be -- I suspect is -- wrong, neither of your points is relevant, when you consider point 3, which you omitted.
3) not only über-geeks use Firefox
Excuse me, any electronic format, unless it is a bitmap format, will have this problem unless all the viewers 100% honor the redaction as it's intended.
Well, no, the problem is not with the format, true, but its also not with the viewer. It's with the editor (by which, to be clear, I mean the "person doing the editing" nor the "software used to do the editing".
Redacting by placing a graphic over the text is a naive extension of a practice which doesn't even work that well with hardcopy (you've usually got to photocopy the marker-redacted version to have a decent chance of producing a copy where the text isn't readable). Its certainly inappropriate in an electronic context (now, true, bitmap format, or a vector format created by a tool that had smart optimization that removed information that didn't effect the final view would let that technique work). Instead, the text should be replaced with something that indicates that material has been removed.
I still don't get it! (and sorry for nagging about it, again) Is there a single Slashdotter here who clicks on ads?
Yes, especially on niche hobby forums where the ads are very often for things that both meet my interests and with which I was not previously familiar. Ads, in any medium, can be useful; OTOH, they can also be stupid. I don't block ads (I do block popups) -- if I site has ads that annoy me, I avoid the site.
I hate to be a Grammar Nazi (actually, I don't, but whatever;p), but if you're going to actually go to the trouble of italicizing a word, you should probably make sure it's the word you want to use.
Its not a matter of knowing, its a matter of proofreading (and, really, typing <i>...</i> isn't nearly as much trouble as proofreading.)
I think the point was that numbers should not be expressed to precision that is misleading about their accuracy (generally, IIRC, the rule is the best precision to use -- particularly where you aren't specifying accuracy explicitly -- is to the first uncertain digit, so if you write 3,145, the accuracy should probably be somewhere between +/- 0.5 and +/- 5); of course, where there are trailing 0's that are certain to the left of the decimal place, this becomes ambiguous if you aren't using scientific notation.
That sounds nice, write up until you get to the part where you realize it prevents anyone who provides internet infrastructure from having (for instance) a web page.
Google is, unquestionably, getting into at least the wireless ISP business with its joint venture with EarthLink in San Francisco. The question is where do they go from there.
Apply the expansion of eminent domain powers provided by the Kelo decision and let the government seize the telephone lines (and cables) for redevelopment!
Kelo didn't, really, expand the scope of eminent domain; about the only substantive difference between its facts and those of prior redevelopment decisions reaching the exact same conclusions of law about 50 years older is that the private residential property being taken for private redevelopment through a local government-approved redevelopment plan was not the residence of poor people.
Seems to me, though, that if you are going to use eminent domain at all, there is no reason to use anything out on the fringes like taking for "redevelopment" and handover to a new private operator to make better use of the property -- the old standard use of eminent domain makes more sense for the internet backbone. The internet is vital to trade, participation, etc., in the modern, information economy in very much the same way that roads, waterways, and other basic infrastructure have been and remains essential to the more traditional aspects of the economy, and all the same reasons that we have public roads justify having public information infrastructure.
Well, there are two ways to run a car off a compressed, extremely cold inert gas; you can let the gas out of the tank and let it do work driving a turbine with its pressure, or you can use the temperature differential with the environment to run a heat engine.
Unless I'm mistaken, both methods have been used to run vehicles (not necessarily with inert gases, but neither relies on chemical reactivity), though the rather more usual form of the latter is to use a hot working fluid rather than a supercold one, but the principle is pretty much the same.
But if it doesn't, what we seem to have here is a group of government-sponsored monopolies claiming that if they leverage their monopoly to compete unfairly against nonmonopolists, it's the "market in action."
Well, they are right. That is the market in action.
If you like the Intarwebs and want to see a neutral web, the best way NOT to have either is to promote their regulation. Legislation solves nothing - a free market would sort it out quite nicely.
A nice, concise expression of the religious doctrine I like to call "free market fundamentalism", the faith, completely without support, that in the absence of regulation, every market will function ideally, born, apparently, of the naive belief that every real world market is an Econ 101 perfectly competitive market with no substantial barriers to entry.
Also, consider physically removing the semicolon from your keyboard. Between the giggles over the misspelled title and the confusion of the above sentence, I have no idea what this article is about.
While the sentence you quoted may have been confusing, the semicolon was properly used, and shouldn't be blamed for any confusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not a "silly semantic point", its an ideological crusade dressed up in semantic clothing. While technically, perhaps, correct (insofar as, pedantically, copyrightable material isn't necessarily intellectual property, copyrighted material, however, is, and all copyrightable material not expressly placed in the public domain is also copyrighted material), its inaccurate in its message.
No, "intellectual property" is not an "ideology" of any kind. "Intellectual property" is a class of actual, existing legal rights (a component of the somewhat broader category of "intangible personal property".)
Physical goods (and even moreso real property) can be easily shared among people as well; the existence of propietary rights, whether in tangible personal property, intangible personal property, or real property has nothing to do with whether or not they can be "shared" or "reproduced" in the "natural order of things", but with the social judgement that protection of a proprietary interest in those things enriches the community by encouraging the development of wealth that would otherwise not be developed.
Further, except for patents specifically, the subject matter of IP rights aren't "ideas".
Both tangible personal property and real property being held for more than a limited time and with the free control we associated with modern ownership is also fairly new; grants for a period, or for life, of land from the government (some overlord) were common, and even personal property returning to a governing authority on death who had some practical discretion on whether or not to allow it to be inherited for a fee were not uncommon.
And when land wasn't granted for a period of time, it was often granted in fee tail where it was designated by the grantor to fall to the grantee's natural heirs and to revert to the grantor if the natural line failed.
Since "property" is merely an exclusive power over some thing, someone who takes your "intellectual property" deprives you of it no less than someone who takes your "physical property".
Using the term "intellectual property" conditions people, if it does so at all, to think of the rights people possess over the subject matters of "intellectual property" (generally, not "ideas") as similar to the rights owners possess over other kinds of property, which they are.
You seem to fail to realize that all property rights are social inventions to protect, and thereby encourage, the development of wealth on the presumption that its accumulation and development will redound to the common good.
They are a publisher. If there is even one use of a font, anywhere, in any of things they publish, the font is "in use". A publisher having 11,000 fonts "in use" isn't even remotely extreme.
A publisher claiming to have only one font in active use is pretty silly, though.
ISTR a Popular Mechanics article a few years back about EMP devices successfully tested that were on the order of a few tens of pounds and a couple thousand dollars; neither the size nor cost is really the barrier for criminals—finding a place to set it off where the EMP effects who you want to when you want it to, but the explosive effect doesn't interfere with whatever you are doing is probably the bigger problem.
(for bank robbers and other non-ideological, high risk:reward crimes, finding someone with the technical skill to build it that doesn't have a better way to make money is probably a challenge, too.)
Um, sure.
Your rights do, after all, include the right not to have your fonts pirated. This story clearly concerns that right.
That's true about letter shapes. But it is a nontrivial effort to go from a set of letter shapes to a digital (non-bitmap) font, which is a computer program and rather clearly subject to copyright. Since what is at issue here is the computer program and not the letter shapes...
A "font" and a "type face" aren't the same thing. While modern computers can do "good enough"mdash;for casual use, at least—extrapolations of different sizes and styles from a single font, professional publishers are going to use a distinct font (with appearance tweaks) for each different combination of face, style, and type size. Times-12pt-Roman isn't the same font as Times-12pt-Italic, Times-10pt-Roman, etc. It doesn't take a whole lot of different faces, sizes, and styles to get up around 11,000 fonts.
...on page 2 of the report.
More significant, I think, than the current temperature compared to previous temperature levels is the trend over the last 100-200 years. Sharp, and accelerating increase.
If you put it next to the age of the Earth, the meteorite-induced disruption to the world's climate that put the nail in the coffin of pretty much every large land animal on Earth (including the dinosaurs) doesn't seem that significant.
Nevertheless, to the dinosaurs it was pretty significant.
Likewise, the question with anthropogenic global warming and other alterations to the environment induced by man is not "are the disruptions a huge deal on a geological timescale", but "do the disruptions pose an intense danger to the continuation and quality of human life on earth." To which the answer, for global warming, seems to be a pretty clear yes.
No, I don't think you understand. It was almost certainly not this hot any time in the last 400 years, and there are indications that support the belief that it was not this hot any time in the last 2,000 years, though indicators of temperature more than 400 years ago, and especially prior to A.D. 900, are pretty sketchy.
The report itself says this (emphasis added):
While the contention that most VoIP users use Firefox (at least, exclusively) may be -- I suspect is -- wrong, neither of your points is relevant, when you consider point 3, which you omitted. 3) not only über-geeks use Firefox
I understand how things like "levels &mdash offering" get left in comments, but aren't the stories notionally "edited" by an "editor"?
I think the point was that numbers should not be expressed to precision that is misleading about their accuracy (generally, IIRC, the rule is the best precision to use -- particularly where you aren't specifying accuracy explicitly -- is to the first uncertain digit, so if you write 3,145, the accuracy should probably be somewhere between +/- 0.5 and +/- 5); of course, where there are trailing 0's that are certain to the left of the decimal place, this becomes ambiguous if you aren't using scientific notation.
That sounds nice, write up until you get to the part where you realize it prevents anyone who provides internet infrastructure from having (for instance) a web page.
Google is, unquestionably, getting into at least the wireless ISP business with its joint venture with EarthLink in San Francisco. The question is where do they go from there.
Well, there are two ways to run a car off a compressed, extremely cold inert gas; you can let the gas out of the tank and let it do work driving a turbine with its pressure, or you can use the temperature differential with the environment to run a heat engine.
Unless I'm mistaken, both methods have been used to run vehicles (not necessarily with inert gases, but neither relies on chemical reactivity), though the rather more usual form of the latter is to use a hot working fluid rather than a supercold one, but the principle is pretty much the same.
Well, they are right. That is the market in action.
"Market" is not the same thing as "good".
Yeah, but back in the day, they had miniature, usually monochrome, monitors -- even when vGA was becoming common for desktops.