Of course they downgraded it - after all, it's way down there at the bottom of the table since 1941, now collecting dust with the rest of the Actinoid Series. It barely made it into the top 100. All the popular ones like oxygen, carbon, silicon, etc. are way up near the top where they belong.
I am certainly no grammar nazi (nor is my grammar perfect), but yes, it matters. If one reads a sentence which has a clearly out-of-place phrase (there/their/they're, where/were, wood/would, "could have" vs. "could of"), it breaks the flow of the text, which interrupts the readers thoughts. If it pisses the reader off enough, it destroys any chance the writer had of getting their message across. The same holds true of overuse of the apostrophe [1] as well as wholly ridiculous spelling errors. Consider these sentences:
"There is no way they're coming because their car died." "There is no way their coming because they're care died."
"There are 20 pounds of bananas on the table at 50 cents a pound." "There are 20 pound's of bannana's on the table at 50 cent's a pound."
They are contrived examples to be sure, but I have seen it get this bad more times than I can count (and I don't mean just here on Slashdot). Can you honestly sit there and say that you could read the second sentence of each pair, assuming they were written as part of an actual conversation, without getting at least a little irritated?
A typo is one thing, but that failure of simple effort is what pisses many of us off, and it is precisely because every last one of us, from the stupidest to the brightest, were taught proper grammar in grade school. It takes very little effort to remember and apply what we were taught.
[1] Some older books taught that pluralizing an all-caps abbreviation, such as DVD, can and should get an apostrophe, but acronyms such as LASER don't, so "DVD's" would have been accepted as correct. Modern experts insist that no apostrophe is warranted or allowed. I was taught with an older set of books.
I can't speak for the MIT license, but the GPL is most definitely NOT a EULA. It doesn't govern the usage of the software, it governs only the redistribution of the software. You are not bound by any part of the GPL when you use software so licensed, if you do not redistribute it, even if you modify it for your own purposes.
If it doesn't leave your computer once you download it, the license doesn't apply.
The difference is that a milling machine is always a subtractive process, while a 3D printer is generally additive.
That is, with a milling machine, you start with a solid block of some material and (with apologies to Michaelangelo) chip away everything that doesn't look like whatever it is you want to make. Your common shop lathe works this way, of course. In the end, you end up with your design and a shitload of waste material which may or may not be reusable.
With a 3D printer, you start with an empty platform, and build up your design by using a print head or extruder to deposit your working material from a continuous feed, a layer at a time. RepRap does this. At the end, you end up with just your design and usually no waste unless your part needs temporary supporting structures.
Some 3D printers deposit entire layers of dry plaster or resin powder, into which the actual design is deposited using a binding agent using an inkjet-like system. The plaster serves as both the working material and a reusable support material.
Some rapid prototyping machines use a pre-filled tank of polymer liquid as the media, and lasers or very bright lights are fired into it to cause parts of the liquid to harden. When the tank is drained, all that remains is the piece in question and almost no waste, provided the liquid polymer is reusable (I can't seem to find any data on this).
Not to mention that, depending on where they make landfall, hurricanes often fire up occasional tornadoes. I've seen this happen in Florida, for example. Talk about getting hit from every possible angle.
Except that...the States, all of them, do have the authority if they want to take it back. That includes California.
Remember that the federal government isn't the only governing body in existence in this country that has the firepower to back up its claims. The States have police forces at various levels which can, if so ordered, defend that State against what its governing body may view as an illegal incursion by the federal government. If there aren't enough such police in existence, more can be recruited fairly easily I'm sure (if the State is desperate enough).
Does that mean it will actually happen? Probably not. But it is possible. All that really needs to happen, though, is for the federal government to get the idea into their collective heads that at least one State is willing to fight back and is able to actually win. No shots need be fired for that to happen.
Also correct me if I am wrong here but wasnt the DMCA because of a treaty? Yet suddenly all the other countries do not want it. So why exactly did we in the US get stuck with harsher rules?
I don't have the time to research it, but as a guess, I'd say you answered your own question without realizing it. The rules ended up so harsh here because of pressure from the likes of the RIAA and other media organizations to make them that way, then got signed into law. After years and years of 'field testing' the DMCA, the leaders of the various countries who intend to be a part of the ACTA have probably also realized, to at least some degree, how bad of an idea laws that harsh really are.
Given that hindsight is, as they say, 20/20, what leader/governing body (outside the US anyway) wants to be known for ratifying such a treaty now?
I sent the following email to Macmillan, parent company of St. Martin's Press. I didn't hear about the book until it was too late; needless to say, I'm PISSED:
----------
Please forward this to St. Martin's Press, this is meant specifically for them, though it also pertains to Macmillan as well. ===
As a natural born American citizen and someone who cares deeply about her civil rights, I am writing to tell you how utterly disgusted and angry I am at your company for censoring a publication at the Department of Defense's request. I refer to Operation Dark Heart, detailing Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's time fighting in Afghanistan.
To make matters even worse, I am especially angry at your company for ALLOWING THE ENTIRE FIRST RUN OF BOOKS TO BE DESTROYED BY OUR OWN GOVERNMENT!!
Remember Germany during World War II? The Nazi Party? This was the very tactic that government used to control the spread of information - gather up every book, scroll, and other publication they could find that covered the subject they wanted to suppress, by any means necessary (usually by direct theft), and burn them, often quite publicly in huge middle-of-the-street piles.
This is not Nazi Germany, this is America. This is NOT supposed to happen here!
What happened to the concept of Freedom of the Press? Freedom of Speech? Does the First Amendment mean nothing anymore? You are a book publisher. Therefore, you are a member of the Press, as the word was defined when our Constitution was first put into practice. That definition has not been changed in our Constitution, therefore, the First Amendment would have protected your right to continue to publish the information in that book - that was part of its original purpose.
Don't tell me you couldn't have known - the warnings were in the news on September 10th. Don't tell me you needed the money - the destroyed content is worth less than $260,000 retail, compared to over $1 Billion in total sales in the past year. You had the right and the absolute DUTY to refuse sale of those books, knowing full well they were to be destroyed, and you have the right and the DUTY to argue against the government where censorship of any work is concerned, especially since this government has played the "national security" card WAY too many times. I am so utterly angry with your company and everyone therein who had anything whatsoever to do with allowing this to happen, that I will NEVER AGAIN buy anything from ANY company under your purview.
You have lost all credibility in the eyes of whatever Americans still exist who believe in the protection of their rights.
9500 books. DESTROYED. Shame on you. Shame on all of the people who continue to work for you from this point forward.
I understand there were 10,000 copies made in the first run, meaning that nearly 500 of them made it into private hands (or eventually will). With any luck, at least one will get scanned and put online in text form, uncensored, unrestricted, and freely available (and it won't be my doing, so call off your lawyers). If you don't understand why I say this, look up the "Streisand Effect" sometime.
The buyer gets a normal vinyl album, made somewhat heavier than usual for durability, but still a normal, ordinary LP. Included "with" the record is a code, probably printed on card stock to make it look important, that allows the owner to go online and download an MP3 of the contents of the LP.
Best case, it eliminates most of the need to rip those particular albums, but it does not eliminate the *ability* to do so if the owner does find a reason.
I can think of a few reasons why someone might want to rip the album even with the MP3s being available:
* The owner wants different equalization settings than the MP3 ripper used, perhaps to avoid the same over-done mastering that CDs often get these days. * The MP3s will probably be cleaned of all clicks, pops, crackles, etc., and the owner may want to preserve these sounds for whatever reason. * The owner wants to do something unusual with the LP that are either poor quality or just not as easily done with MP3s, such as beatmixing, scratching, and other effects that are common to the market these records are aimed at. * Maybe the owner wants a lossless format like FLAC, or wants to avoid MP3 for whatever reason. Transcoding from one to another would be pointless.
(Watch me get sued for copying legal text verbatim)
Let 'em try. As a work of the federal government, prepared by someone as part of his or her official duties, and taken directly from a government-controlled site that purports to be the official source of the work, the text you copied is public domain.
Hey, here's an idea for the poor, unfortunate station owners and their employees who are so downtrodden by the rightful boycotting of BP-supplied stations: go work for or get your fuel supply from SOMEONE ELSE besides BP. I've seen more stations switch brands over the years than I can count, some without changes in management or even significant changes in employees.
BP is not the only oil company in existence, nor are the various stations they supply the only ones out there which need able-bodied employees. Add to that the fact that there appear to be plenty of jobs to be had elsewhere, despite the slump in the economy.
To put it bluntly, BP made so many poor decisions that it's as though they set this up to fail. This is the kind of fuckup that bring forth a punishment as damaging to BP as the spill itself is to the environment.
x. Public at-large will be exposed to the details of the patented 'device' and how it works before it's marketed,
And you fail there, because that's one of the requirements of a patent in the first place. The details of the product - how it is made, what makes it work, indeed how to duplicate it in its entirety, expressed in terms familiar to anyone who is competent in the field in question - are supposed to be part of the patent. A company could, of course, market a product before the patent goes through (and many do this), but for something sufficiently unique, it would be suicide if it's also easy to copy.
x. Public at-large would use the details to manufacture their own products and never have to buy from the market in the first place.
And someone can already do this now with the existing patent system, except that the "public at large" doesn't actually have this capacity. A few large manufacturers in any given field could, but as broken as it is, we at least have our regular legal system to handle that. In the meantime, we already have places like China that clone everything anyway, and that ain't changing anytime soon.
Until every Jane and Joe has a Star Trek-esque replicator in their house, your argument is unwarranted (if it ever does happen, then we just have to deal with supplying raw materials, which need no extra protection, and replication data, which can be protected sufficiently via the copyright system).
x. Part of the above, some people would meet the in-between demand by manufacturing new devices for others who can't do it.
And this differs from the normal process of manufacturing something, how? There are many businesses out there where one entity designs something, a second entity markets it, a third handles the sales, and a fourth entity handles the actual manufacturing of the product, even within the same company.
Now, all of that said, I don't think crowd sourcing is the right way to go either, if only because the "crowd" isn't a particularly good way to get information at times (Wikipedia is a good example of that). Rather, as others have suggested, the USPTO needs to start forbidding software patents, patents on business methods, anything that is just plain silly (others here have provided good examples, such as the mannequin-based "handshake machine"), and anything that does not include with it a complete, working prototype, which is already a requirement of the existing system (and is part of why, for example, one cannot patent a perpetual motion machine).
Subtitles also don't move based on the scene.. For example, text for edited CC is often positioned from side to side to match two people bantering or italicized for an off screen speaker [...].
This is incorrect - since DVD Subtitles are actually a series of low-color images embedded into the MPEG data, the text can be positioned anywhere on the screen that the designer wants. I have a few movies in my library with Subtitles that do just as you describe. Hell, one movie that comes to mind blows this idea completely off the map - one of the two Men in Black movies has a Subtitles channel available that contains animated images of two figures sitting between the viewer and the video (as if in a theater), rather than text.
As for whether a movie has one or the other, again I have a few movies in my collection that are set up explicitly to provide Closed Captions (which of course my TV is too old to decode), but not regular DVD subtitles.
Sure, one of the posters above you already said it - park your car in your driveway or on the street and plug it in, assuming you can get the electricity to the car to begin with, and you run the risk of some asshole coming along while you aren't watching, seeing that you're plugged in, and tapping into that electric supply, or perhaps just unplugging your EV as a prank.
Park and charge in a garage, assuming you have one to begin with, and you run far less risk of the above, if only because it isn't obvious that you're plugged in.
One way to practically prevent this does come to mind though:
Key-locked mains plug, flexible steel-jacketed cabling, and an encrypted data channel between the car and the mains panel that offers a simple authentication and power-metering protocol.
If the panel sees more power draw than the car says should be the case, within some small margin of error, the panel could interpret this as someone having tapped into the cable, and could shut the power off, and perhaps set off the car's alarm (but without the "OMG!..." bit). If the panel sees a different car than what should be there, refuse to turn the power on until some additional step is completed, such as entering an 8-digit security code.
It isn't hack-proof, but then again neither are the locks on your doors. It just needs to be good enough to stop Joe Neighbor from sponging off of you. Those who could break into this would probably also be the kind who would just steal the car outright anyway.
If it's been long enough since the content in question was first made, abso-fucking-lutely we're entitled to it.
After 10 or 15 years, all copyrighted material, whatever its origin, should be free to copy, download, etc. Keep and protect your oh-so-precious trademarks if you want, and let the credit remain with the creators of the content, but let the content itself fall into the public domain like it is supposed to.
Surely you remember the concept of copyrights that eventually expire? Oh the horror - the sheer nerve of people to demand that which is rightfully theirs!
No, think about it - he is right. It doesn't matter a whole lot what the project is - just like adults, if the venue allows for it, kids like to destroy stuff too, especially when they're encouraged to do so. Put a group of kids at the controls of that airboat (or a proper wind machine anyway), or some other apparatus designed to test various school projects to their limits, with adults there to supervise of course, and they'll have a blast trying to destroy whatever it is the other kids get to put in front of it.
Let it become a competition between the kids operating the testing machine and each of the kids submitting their projects for testing. The more extreme the test gets before each project falls apart, the higher their score and the lower the operator's (which would start at some reasonably high number to ensure a fair contest). If it falls apart early, the operator's score goes up. Kids can work as a team to drive the operators' collective scores down while building up their own individual scores.
It encourages kids to build stuff that will gracefully withstand as much thrashing as possible, while at the same time encouraging the testing crew to design ever more abusive testing devices (while still remaining within legal and safe limits, of course).
All the while, they get to blow shit up with adult approval. Kids would love that sort of thing.
Sometimes, a machine will go from seemingly normal to suddenly thrashing about in swap rather heavily, with no warning at all. This has been the bulk of my experience, anyway. When your machine gets to that point, and you're in a graphical environment like the majority of desktop users are, you may not be *able* to look into the problem at all. You have to wait until after the damn thing comes to its senses, because you can't even switch to a regular text console, let alone log in in from another box. Forget trying to spawn a terminal. Every little program you launch to try to find the cause just causes the machine to use more memory or swap at this point, which just compounds the problem.
When the offending program finally does end, it's too late to see what went wrong because most programs leave no traces of their actions other than doing whatever they're programmed to do. Unless you're running some kind of process/resource logging program on your box (I'm not aware of anyone who does this outside of security professionals perhaps), good luck finding out what actually caused the problem, unless you saw something visibly bug out just before the machine stopped responding.
There are no two ways about it - this is absolutely the worst way to handle an out-of-memory condition. Most people would much rather have programs complain about lack of memory than to have their machine "lock up" for an hour while sitting there churning away in swap. In my experience, the average user figures their computer's being stupid again, and it's time to hit the power switch or the reset button, or maybe call someone for help (which doesn't work anyway, so they're back to square one).
To give an example, I once set my machine off to run a build which should have taken maybe half an hour, and went off to run some errands and watch a movie. It was still going three hours later, and had dug the machine so deep into swap that mouse events were taking 10-20 seconds just to echo to the screen, and keyboard events were nonexistent as far as X was concerned. I tried my level best to bring the machine back to a sane state, but I eventually had to give up and hit it with Alt-SysRq-U/S/B.
I love Linux as much as anyone, but I got sick and tired of this happening on my boxes, and responded the only way that seemed to make sense: I disabled swap entirely on both systems and added enough RAM to each to make up for the lost "memory".
Aside from older hardware that clearly needs it because of sheer lack of RAM, is there even any reason to recommend/enable swap by default anymore? Modern machines come standard with around 4GB of insanely fast RAM - isn't that enough?
His point is that you can add a thousand tons of emissions-cleaning equipment to each of the thousands of old coal- and oil-fired power plants (and for that matter, whatever other types you want to name that you consider to be "dirty") if that's what it takes to clean them up, because they don't have to move around.
You can't do the same thing for the hundreds of millions of cars out there - even if you could scale such equipment down to a car-sized option.
Adding more equipment to them (or replacing what's already there) would just mean more weight to carry around, with less available engine power to handle it, which just increases total fuel consumption, putting you back where you started, and raising the price of oil/gasoline in the process.
As for the efficiency of electric versus gasoline, you're leaving some stuff out:
The average loss in transmission from a power station to the end consumer (you and me) is only about 6.5% according to industry estimates, or 93.5% efficient.
Really good brushless electric motors can do 96% efficiency, but most common ones are closer to 90%, so let's go with that.
Lithium-Ion batteries have between 80 and 90% charge/discharge efficiency. Let's assume the middle of that range, or 85% efficient.
93.5% x 90% x 85% = ~71.5% efficient from the generating station to the axle of the motor. A quick check of Wikipedia seems to suggest that I'm perhaps underestimating the overall efficiency.
The best ICEs only give you about 38% efficiency for the same energy input, and that's when used in a constant-speed application like a diesel series-hybrid, under ideal conditions. That doesn't count the cost of transporting the fuel to the gas station.
Note that I leave out the efficiency of the actual car because that is entirely dependent on the design of the vehicle as a whole - any car manufacturer can design a nice, efficient frame and body, it's just a matter of what components they choose to power it with.
Sure, you could use the same oil to run your ICE as you might use to generate power to run a comparable electric motor, but most power plants don't use oil to begin with. Most use one of coal, natural gas, nuclear, or various renewable resources. As of 2009, petroleum only accounted for about one percent of the US's electricity usage - literally 99% of the electricity came from the above sources (I can only guess that most other countries are at least similar)
You could probably cover that 1% by converting those oil-based power stations over to use ethanol (switchgrass-based).
We do have the technology right now to supply both the continuous load and the peak loads that the cars would add to the grid, we just need to stop the NIMBY shit and scale up (starting with renewables and nuclear, of course). Since we would also be taking ICE-based vehicles off the road, the oil formerly being used for them can be put to other uses, or just be left in the ground since the power stations don't need it either.
As far as I'm concerned, electric vehicles can't take over fast enough - the internal combustion engine should be relegated to niche applications or museums as soon as possible.
Please ignore the "violently" remark above, I accidentally hit the submit button before I was finished. That should probably read "aggressively" or something a little less severe.
Considering the example given in the summary is Alice in Wonderland, your comment, while true to a certain extent, is also rather ironic: Alice herself made it quite clear that she'd prefer books to have pictures if at all possible.
I took a look at the video link in the summary and I have to say one thing: It's way over-hyped. I mean, come on - the person doing the video did everything possible to make the various little doodads respond, and so violently that I would think any reasonably healthy person would get more than a little tired from it. In other words, so far over the top as to lose all credibility.
Kids will shake the thing around plenty just to see those animations I'm sure, but there's nothing at all wrong with those little animations if they grab the child's interest. Sooner or later, the child will find a story he or she will actually read.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they downgraded it - after all, it's way down there at the bottom of the table since 1941, now collecting dust with the rest of the Actinoid Series. It barely made it into the top 100. All the popular ones like oxygen, carbon, silicon, etc. are way up near the top where they belong.
I am certainly no grammar nazi (nor is my grammar perfect), but yes, it matters. If one reads a sentence which has a clearly out-of-place phrase (there/their/they're, where/were, wood/would, "could have" vs. "could of"), it breaks the flow of the text, which interrupts the readers thoughts. If it pisses the reader off enough, it destroys any chance the writer had of getting their message across. The same holds true of overuse of the apostrophe [1] as well as wholly ridiculous spelling errors. Consider these sentences:
"There is no way they're coming because their car died."
"There is no way their coming because they're care died."
"There are 20 pounds of bananas on the table at 50 cents a pound."
"There are 20 pound's of bannana's on the table at 50 cent's a pound."
They are contrived examples to be sure, but I have seen it get this bad more times than I can count (and I don't mean just here on Slashdot). Can you honestly sit there and say that you could read the second sentence of each pair, assuming they were written as part of an actual conversation, without getting at least a little irritated?
A typo is one thing, but that failure of simple effort is what pisses many of us off, and it is precisely because every last one of us, from the stupidest to the brightest, were taught proper grammar in grade school. It takes very little effort to remember and apply what we were taught.
[1] Some older books taught that pluralizing an all-caps abbreviation, such as DVD, can and should get an apostrophe, but acronyms such as LASER don't, so "DVD's" would have been accepted as correct. Modern experts insist that no apostrophe is warranted or allowed. I was taught with an older set of books.
I can't speak for the MIT license, but the GPL is most definitely NOT a EULA. It doesn't govern the usage of the software, it governs only the redistribution of the software. You are not bound by any part of the GPL when you use software so licensed, if you do not redistribute it, even if you modify it for your own purposes.
If it doesn't leave your computer once you download it, the license doesn't apply.
The difference is that a milling machine is always a subtractive process, while a 3D printer is generally additive.
That is, with a milling machine, you start with a solid block of some material and (with apologies to Michaelangelo) chip away everything that doesn't look like whatever it is you want to make. Your common shop lathe works this way, of course. In the end, you end up with your design and a shitload of waste material which may or may not be reusable.
With a 3D printer, you start with an empty platform, and build up your design by using a print head or extruder to deposit your working material from a continuous feed, a layer at a time. RepRap does this. At the end, you end up with just your design and usually no waste unless your part needs temporary supporting structures.
Some 3D printers deposit entire layers of dry plaster or resin powder, into which the actual design is deposited using a binding agent using an inkjet-like system. The plaster serves as both the working material and a reusable support material.
Some rapid prototyping machines use a pre-filled tank of polymer liquid as the media, and lasers or very bright lights are fired into it to cause parts of the liquid to harden. When the tank is drained, all that remains is the piece in question and almost no waste, provided the liquid polymer is reusable (I can't seem to find any data on this).
The Wikipedia article on 3D printing has more info.
Not to mention that, depending on where they make landfall, hurricanes often fire up occasional tornadoes. I've seen this happen in Florida, for example. Talk about getting hit from every possible angle.
Or, to quote Mel Brooks:
"Take a look - we put the picture's name on everything! Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made!"
Aww, just go look at the scene on Youtube.
Except that...the States, all of them, do have the authority if they want to take it back. That includes California.
Remember that the federal government isn't the only governing body in existence in this country that has the firepower to back up its claims. The States have police forces at various levels which can, if so ordered, defend that State against what its governing body may view as an illegal incursion by the federal government. If there aren't enough such police in existence, more can be recruited fairly easily I'm sure (if the State is desperate enough).
Does that mean it will actually happen? Probably not. But it is possible. All that really needs to happen, though, is for the federal government to get the idea into their collective heads that at least one State is willing to fight back and is able to actually win. No shots need be fired for that to happen.
I don't have the time to research it, but as a guess, I'd say you answered your own question without realizing it. The rules ended up so harsh here because of pressure from the likes of the RIAA and other media organizations to make them that way, then got signed into law. After years and years of 'field testing' the DMCA, the leaders of the various countries who intend to be a part of the ACTA have probably also realized, to at least some degree, how bad of an idea laws that harsh really are.
Given that hindsight is, as they say, 20/20, what leader/governing body (outside the US anyway) wants to be known for ratifying such a treaty now?
I sent the following email to Macmillan, parent company of St. Martin's Press. I didn't hear about the book until it was too late; needless to say, I'm PISSED:
----------
Please forward this to St. Martin's Press, this is meant specifically for them, though it also pertains to Macmillan as well.
===
As a natural born American citizen and someone who cares deeply about her civil rights, I am writing to tell you how utterly disgusted and angry I am at your company for censoring a publication at the Department of Defense's request. I refer to Operation Dark Heart, detailing Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's time fighting in Afghanistan.
To make matters even worse, I am especially angry at your company for ALLOWING THE ENTIRE FIRST RUN OF BOOKS TO BE DESTROYED BY OUR OWN GOVERNMENT!!
Remember Germany during World War II? The Nazi Party? This was the very tactic that government used to control the spread of information - gather up every book, scroll, and other publication they could find that covered the subject they wanted to suppress, by any means necessary (usually by direct theft), and burn them, often quite publicly in huge middle-of-the-street piles.
This is not Nazi Germany, this is America. This is NOT supposed to happen here!
What happened to the concept of Freedom of the Press? Freedom of Speech? Does the First Amendment mean nothing anymore? You are a book publisher. Therefore, you are a member of the Press, as the word was defined when our Constitution was first put into practice. That definition has not been changed in our Constitution, therefore, the First Amendment would have protected your right to continue to publish the information in that book - that was part of its original purpose.
Don't tell me you couldn't have known - the warnings were in the news on September 10th. Don't tell me you needed the money - the destroyed content is worth less than $260,000 retail, compared to over $1 Billion in total sales in the past year. You had the right and the absolute DUTY to refuse sale of those books, knowing full well they were to be destroyed, and you have the right and the DUTY to argue against the government where censorship of any work is concerned, especially since this government has played the "national security" card WAY too many times. I am so utterly angry with your company and everyone therein who had anything whatsoever to do with allowing this to happen, that I will NEVER AGAIN buy anything from ANY company under your purview.
You have lost all credibility in the eyes of whatever Americans still exist who believe in the protection of their rights.
9500 books. DESTROYED. Shame on you. Shame on all of the people who continue to work for you from this point forward.
I understand there were 10,000 copies made in the first run, meaning that nearly 500 of them made it into private hands (or eventually will). With any luck, at least one will get scanned and put online in text form, uncensored, unrestricted, and freely available (and it won't be my doing, so call off your lawyers). If you don't understand why I say this, look up the "Streisand Effect" sometime.
...except that it doesn't.
The buyer gets a normal vinyl album, made somewhat heavier than usual for durability, but still a normal, ordinary LP. Included "with" the record is a code, probably printed on card stock to make it look important, that allows the owner to go online and download an MP3 of the contents of the LP.
Best case, it eliminates most of the need to rip those particular albums, but it does not eliminate the *ability* to do so if the owner does find a reason.
I can think of a few reasons why someone might want to rip the album even with the MP3s being available:
* The owner wants different equalization settings than the MP3 ripper used, perhaps to avoid the same over-done mastering that CDs often get these days.
* The MP3s will probably be cleaned of all clicks, pops, crackles, etc., and the owner may want to preserve these sounds for whatever reason.
* The owner wants to do something unusual with the LP that are either poor quality or just not as easily done with MP3s, such as beatmixing, scratching, and other effects that are common to the market these records are aimed at.
* Maybe the owner wants a lossless format like FLAC, or wants to avoid MP3 for whatever reason. Transcoding from one to another would be pointless.
I'm sure other people can think of more reasons.
Let 'em try. As a work of the federal government, prepared by someone as part of his or her official duties, and taken directly from a government-controlled site that purports to be the official source of the work, the text you copied is public domain.
Hey, here's an idea for the poor, unfortunate station owners and their employees who are so downtrodden by the rightful boycotting of BP-supplied stations: go work for or get your fuel supply from SOMEONE ELSE besides BP. I've seen more stations switch brands over the years than I can count, some without changes in management or even significant changes in employees.
BP is not the only oil company in existence, nor are the various stations they supply the only ones out there which need able-bodied employees. Add to that the fact that there appear to be plenty of jobs to be had elsewhere, despite the slump in the economy.
To put it bluntly, BP made so many poor decisions that it's as though they set this up to fail. This is the kind of fuckup that bring forth a punishment as damaging to BP as the spill itself is to the environment.
And you fail there, because that's one of the requirements of a patent in the first place. The details of the product - how it is made, what makes it work, indeed how to duplicate it in its entirety, expressed in terms familiar to anyone who is competent in the field in question - are supposed to be part of the patent. A company could, of course, market a product before the patent goes through (and many do this), but for something sufficiently unique, it would be suicide if it's also easy to copy.
And someone can already do this now with the existing patent system, except that the "public at large" doesn't actually have this capacity. A few large manufacturers in any given field could, but as broken as it is, we at least have our regular legal system to handle that. In the meantime, we already have places like China that clone everything anyway, and that ain't changing anytime soon.
Until every Jane and Joe has a Star Trek-esque replicator in their house, your argument is unwarranted (if it ever does happen, then we just have to deal with supplying raw materials, which need no extra protection, and replication data, which can be protected sufficiently via the copyright system).
And this differs from the normal process of manufacturing something, how? There are many businesses out there where one entity designs something, a second entity markets it, a third handles the sales, and a fourth entity handles the actual manufacturing of the product, even within the same company.
Now, all of that said, I don't think crowd sourcing is the right way to go either, if only because the "crowd" isn't a particularly good way to get information at times (Wikipedia is a good example of that). Rather, as others have suggested, the USPTO needs to start forbidding software patents, patents on business methods, anything that is just plain silly (others here have provided good examples, such as the mannequin-based "handshake machine"), and anything that does not include with it a complete, working prototype, which is already a requirement of the existing system (and is part of why, for example, one cannot patent a perpetual motion machine).
Only then will this crap end.
This is incorrect - since DVD Subtitles are actually a series of low-color images embedded into the MPEG data, the text can be positioned anywhere on the screen that the designer wants. I have a few movies in my library with Subtitles that do just as you describe. Hell, one movie that comes to mind blows this idea completely off the map - one of the two Men in Black movies has a Subtitles channel available that contains animated images of two figures sitting between the viewer and the video (as if in a theater), rather than text.
As for whether a movie has one or the other, again I have a few movies in my collection that are set up explicitly to provide Closed Captions (which of course my TV is too old to decode), but not regular DVD subtitles.
You forgot to use a sarcmark. ;-)
Sure, one of the posters above you already said it - park your car in your driveway or on the street and plug it in, assuming you can get the electricity to the car to begin with, and you run the risk of some asshole coming along while you aren't watching, seeing that you're plugged in, and tapping into that electric supply, or perhaps just unplugging your EV as a prank.
Park and charge in a garage, assuming you have one to begin with, and you run far less risk of the above, if only because it isn't obvious that you're plugged in.
One way to practically prevent this does come to mind though:
Key-locked mains plug, flexible steel-jacketed cabling, and an encrypted data channel between the car and the mains panel that offers a simple authentication and power-metering protocol.
If the panel sees more power draw than the car says should be the case, within some small margin of error, the panel could interpret this as someone having tapped into the cable, and could shut the power off, and perhaps set off the car's alarm (but without the "OMG! ..." bit). If the panel sees a different car than what should be there, refuse to turn the power on until some additional step is completed, such as entering an 8-digit security code.
It isn't hack-proof, but then again neither are the locks on your doors. It just needs to be good enough to stop Joe Neighbor from sponging off of you. Those who could break into this would probably also be the kind who would just steal the car outright anyway.
After 10 or 15 years, all copyrighted material, whatever its origin, should be free to copy, download, etc. Keep and protect your oh-so-precious trademarks if you want, and let the credit remain with the creators of the content, but let the content itself fall into the public domain like it is supposed to.
Surely you remember the concept of copyrights that eventually expire? Oh the horror - the sheer nerve of people to demand that which is rightfully theirs!
A good joke all the way to the end, yet you missed a perfect opportunity to add an AYB reference, however old and dusty and outdated it might be.
A.D. 2101: War was beginning. Japanese-to-English translators found to be in particularly high demand.
(Score:-1, Funny)
Only on Slashdot could the above comment end up with this kind of score. heh.
No, think about it - he is right. It doesn't matter a whole lot what the project is - just like adults, if the venue allows for it, kids like to destroy stuff too, especially when they're encouraged to do so. Put a group of kids at the controls of that airboat (or a proper wind machine anyway), or some other apparatus designed to test various school projects to their limits, with adults there to supervise of course, and they'll have a blast trying to destroy whatever it is the other kids get to put in front of it.
Let it become a competition between the kids operating the testing machine and each of the kids submitting their projects for testing. The more extreme the test gets before each project falls apart, the higher their score and the lower the operator's (which would start at some reasonably high number to ensure a fair contest). If it falls apart early, the operator's score goes up. Kids can work as a team to drive the operators' collective scores down while building up their own individual scores.
It encourages kids to build stuff that will gracefully withstand as much thrashing as possible, while at the same time encouraging the testing crew to design ever more abusive testing devices (while still remaining within legal and safe limits, of course).
All the while, they get to blow shit up with adult approval. Kids would love that sort of thing.
You're forgetting one thing:
Sometimes, a machine will go from seemingly normal to suddenly thrashing about in swap rather heavily, with no warning at all. This has been the bulk of my experience, anyway. When your machine gets to that point, and you're in a graphical environment like the majority of desktop users are, you may not be *able* to look into the problem at all. You have to wait until after the damn thing comes to its senses, because you can't even switch to a regular text console, let alone log in in from another box. Forget trying to spawn a terminal. Every little program you launch to try to find the cause just causes the machine to use more memory or swap at this point, which just compounds the problem.
When the offending program finally does end, it's too late to see what went wrong because most programs leave no traces of their actions other than doing whatever they're programmed to do. Unless you're running some kind of process/resource logging program on your box (I'm not aware of anyone who does this outside of security professionals perhaps), good luck finding out what actually caused the problem, unless you saw something visibly bug out just before the machine stopped responding.
There are no two ways about it - this is absolutely the worst way to handle an out-of-memory condition. Most people would much rather have programs complain about lack of memory than to have their machine "lock up" for an hour while sitting there churning away in swap. In my experience, the average user figures their computer's being stupid again, and it's time to hit the power switch or the reset button, or maybe call someone for help (which doesn't work anyway, so they're back to square one).
To give an example, I once set my machine off to run a build which should have taken maybe half an hour, and went off to run some errands and watch a movie. It was still going three hours later, and had dug the machine so deep into swap that mouse events were taking 10-20 seconds just to echo to the screen, and keyboard events were nonexistent as far as X was concerned. I tried my level best to bring the machine back to a sane state, but I eventually had to give up and hit it with Alt-SysRq-U/S/B.
I love Linux as much as anyone, but I got sick and tired of this happening on my boxes, and responded the only way that seemed to make sense: I disabled swap entirely on both systems and added enough RAM to each to make up for the lost "memory".
Aside from older hardware that clearly needs it because of sheer lack of RAM, is there even any reason to recommend/enable swap by default anymore? Modern machines come standard with around 4GB of insanely fast RAM - isn't that enough?
His point is that you can add a thousand tons of emissions-cleaning equipment to each of the thousands of old coal- and oil-fired power plants (and for that matter, whatever other types you want to name that you consider to be "dirty") if that's what it takes to clean them up, because they don't have to move around.
You can't do the same thing for the hundreds of millions of cars out there - even if you could scale such equipment down to a car-sized option.
Adding more equipment to them (or replacing what's already there) would just mean more weight to carry around, with less available engine power to handle it, which just increases total fuel consumption, putting you back where you started, and raising the price of oil/gasoline in the process.
As for the efficiency of electric versus gasoline, you're leaving some stuff out:
The average loss in transmission from a power station to the end consumer (you and me) is only about 6.5% according to industry estimates, or 93.5% efficient.
Really good brushless electric motors can do 96% efficiency, but most common ones are closer to 90%, so let's go with that.
Lithium-Ion batteries have between 80 and 90% charge/discharge efficiency. Let's assume the middle of that range, or 85% efficient.
93.5% x 90% x 85% = ~71.5% efficient from the generating station to the axle of the motor. A quick check of Wikipedia seems to suggest that I'm perhaps underestimating the overall efficiency.
The best ICEs only give you about 38% efficiency for the same energy input, and that's when used in a constant-speed application like a diesel series-hybrid, under ideal conditions. That doesn't count the cost of transporting the fuel to the gas station.
Note that I leave out the efficiency of the actual car because that is entirely dependent on the design of the vehicle as a whole - any car manufacturer can design a nice, efficient frame and body, it's just a matter of what components they choose to power it with.
Sure, you could use the same oil to run your ICE as you might use to generate power to run a comparable electric motor, but most power plants don't use oil to begin with. Most use one of coal, natural gas, nuclear, or various renewable resources. As of 2009, petroleum only accounted for about one percent of the US's electricity usage - literally 99% of the electricity came from the above sources (I can only guess that most other countries are at least similar)
You could probably cover that 1% by converting those oil-based power stations over to use ethanol (switchgrass-based).
We do have the technology right now to supply both the continuous load and the peak loads that the cars would add to the grid, we just need to stop the NIMBY shit and scale up (starting with renewables and nuclear, of course). Since we would also be taking ICE-based vehicles off the road, the oil formerly being used for them can be put to other uses, or just be left in the ground since the power stations don't need it either.
As far as I'm concerned, electric vehicles can't take over fast enough - the internal combustion engine should be relegated to niche applications or museums as soon as possible.
Please ignore the "violently" remark above, I accidentally hit the submit button before I was finished. That should probably read "aggressively" or something a little less severe.
Considering the example given in the summary is Alice in Wonderland, your comment, while true to a certain extent, is also rather ironic: Alice herself made it quite clear that she'd prefer books to have pictures if at all possible.
I took a look at the video link in the summary and I have to say one thing: It's way over-hyped. I mean, come on - the person doing the video did everything possible to make the various little doodads respond, and so violently that I would think any reasonably healthy person would get more than a little tired from it. In other words, so far over the top as to lose all credibility.
Kids will shake the thing around plenty just to see those animations I'm sure, but there's nothing at all wrong with those little animations if they grab the child's interest. Sooner or later, the child will find a story he or she will actually read.
With apologies to Samuel Clemens, Western Design Center would tell you that the report of the 6502 lineage's death has been exaggerated.