That's what I want to know. What was HE doing when he found these images? Either he was cruising for gay porn for recreational purposes, or he was intentionally seeking the porn for some persecution purpose, or he was in some way assaulted by it in a pop-up?
If he was cruising for gay porn, someone should bring that up. If he claims he was researching something, someone should call him on that age old lie. If he was assaulted by it, why was he hanging out on the seedy websites that carry gay porn ads?
Or did San Andreas sneak into his house and plant this gay porn all over the place?
I was in the Boy Scouts for several years, and there was a recurring debate among every new year of parents as to how to deal with the swearing problem in scouts.
My mother, I thought, offered the simplest explanation: we can't deprive them of the knowledge of the words. They'll pick them up everywhere else, from school and friends and the gardener and us. A vacuum of information doesn't help.
What you have to do is give them knowledge to deal with these words, you have to teach them to be good people and to have respect and to speak kindly. THAT's what our Boy Scout troop had to be all about. Become good people, not hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil.
I worked as an asphalt inspector, and I have a exhaustive list of public roads for my county, including segmented width measurement. A simple table calculation yields the following calculations (along with Census data):
Total square area: 4.4 sq. miles
Population: 240,000
Area per person: 500 sq. ft. (47 sq. m)
Intensity of Sunlight: 250 w/m^2 (source)
At an upward bound of 50 sq. meters per person, that's about 12.5kw per person theoretical. Multiply that by all your efficiencies and you get an idea of the acutal power available. A more useful thought, maybe, would be having the county give the power generated to the company and demand that this be served free to county residents as a rate-reducer. The output of the county roads as a whole is 2.9 gigawatts theoretical. Assuming 1% efficiency (I have no idea how much is actually being achieved) that's 29 megawatts possible, or a medium-large sized generating station.
Remember, though, that about 8% of asphalt roads are repaired (only counting resurfacing and reconstruction) each year, and the solar panels would have to replaced on those, increasing costs significantly. I wish I had the database of buildings in my county on hand so I could do measurements on roof surface area. Also, I wish I had any data on the energy saved by houses that don't just have dark roofs sitting in the sun all day.
"I think students should get used to the fact that not all resources at at our fingertips 24-7"
No I think we should work to make all the resources (that are cheap to provide) available 24-7. Libraries are damn near the cheapest thing to provide 24-7, especially when (on college campuses) there are cheap workers who like graveyard shifts and most of the "use" is really just access.
I'm sorry, but your idea is on the "it's the way it's always been" line of thinking. Remember, work places are slowly approaching "work day" independence, too. More than half of my immediate family works on flex hours of varying degrees, from "8 hours a day, including 9-3" to "80 hours every pay period, whenever, and come to long-ahead-scheduled meetings" to that plus work from home.
Why should we train students to meet arbitrary requirements that are dissappearing from society, and which especially don't affect the "knowledge workers" that most College Graduates are today?
Summary: Why bend the people when you can bend the reality (and it's already bending that way anyway)?
P.S.- The LAN party is indefensible, except as part of an interface research seminar for the librarians, maybe. And those courses are already offered in the CS department, so why offer it in the library, too?
But these are the same people who click "Allow" when their software firewall says "H4xoR!tR0jun.exe is attempting to access the Internet. Permit or Allow?" If those are the only two options, can you really blame them?
"An implanted vibrator..." Oh come on, the internet is for porn, and the skele-wire is for your girlfriend. This has got to be the obvious application.
As demand goes up and supply stays the same, both quantity and price rise.
Then, suppliers see the economic profit, new firms enter, and supply expands, lowering prices and increasing the quantity.
Why isn't that happening? Market failures. Monopolies/monopolistic competition, regulation, rapid technological change... there are a million factors leading to it, but we let our information distribution industry grow badly, and now we're paying for it with bad service.
But don't worry, our legislators have expert knowledge about this series of tubes, so they should fix it soon.
A growing problem is that the vast majority of young people today (people my age, below 25) don't know how to read maps. They can usually follow a GPS or a GoogleMap, but hand them a mapbook and they're SOL.
This reminds me of my "senior week" when myself and some other high-school graduates went camping to celebrate our graduation. One night, they all got up the idea that they'd get tattoo's. But all they knew was the name of the town where the shop was. I was the only map-reader and I said I wouldn't take them there, but I'd give them one of my paper maps. They couldn't read the map, so they couldn't go.
But for their ignorance, there'd be a group of 20-21 year old kids trying to hide their "BFF" tattoos.
Wealth beyond basic needs is all relative. The owner of that new Hummer doesn't really care what other's think. He doesn't care what it's capable of.
He just feels superior. That's why we have conspicuous consumption: we don't buy to be happy, we buy to compete, and we're all extremely inefficient at it.
I'm not arguing that technical stuff is copyrightable, but that "art" is not copyrightable under the Constitution, regardless of what Congress says.
You're point about the intent of the first few Congresses revealing the constitutional intent is sound, though, under intent tests. I know it's a valid legal theory.
That scares me, though, because that means that the meaning of the constitution isn't the words but what Congress makes of it. To me, that reeks of "the law is whatever we tell you it is." That seems more dangerous than having no constitution at all. After all, today's Congress is choosing not to amend the constitution; doesn't that mean that the Constitution is really just what today's Congress (and state legislatures) thinks it is? Why even bother putting limits on the legislature down on paper if they are just what the legislators of the day want them to mean?
This is something that has confused me for a while. We frequently ask whether something is "artistic in nature" enough for copyright protection, but then I keep thinking about what the constitution says about copyright:
Article I, Secion 8: The Congress shall have the power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
So tell me... where does pure "art" come into play? Let alone photography or photographers? Don't give me the "they couldn't forsee photographers" bit, cause they surely could foresee painters, and they didn't mention them while explicitly mentioning the other professions.
The use of "authors" seems to imply creative writing, but I wonder if they didn't simply mean the writers of instructional books like "a guide to the production of lead bullets" or "how to pack a cartridge." My educated guess would be that the intent of "useful arts" would be things like metalsmithing, carpenty, etc. The kinds of things that had economic use, not just aesthetic.
Regardless, how would photographs fit into either a strict-text or intent-based reading of the Constitution? The best I can figure would be a really, really loose reasonable-construction test. But hell, I think the process for forging licenses would be more of a "useful art" than any individual mug shot, so how would the photo be more copyright-able than the license itself?
Real Life is like soul's hell. Want to know what Real Life looks like? Read [insert religious text here], then take out anything at all cool about that world. It is one big undending strip mall comprised mostly of casinos, sex shops, and brothels.
Real Life is in no ganger of becoming anything bigger. It is messy, awkward to use, and has little interesting going on in it. Something more interesting might grow from the original idea (which in truth, is not all that original), but it has a long way to go before it even begins to touch the sort of mass media acceptance as games like Fantasy.
Unbeknownst to her, Archive.org had sent a packet to her server saying "By sending packets to Archive.org, you enter into a contract giving Archiving.org full right to reproduce this page." How could she be so irresponsible as to let it keep serving the pages?
I wonder about the practicality of sending someone around to take pictures of everyhome.
But I have the unique perspective of some experience. I spend my summers driving around Harford County, MD, a moderate density area. I and a partner drive at about 10 mph to inspect the roadway for potholes/cracking/oxidation/etc. We don't rate when it's raining or recently rained, since it covers up the defects in the road.
It takes us about 6 weeks of driving 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to cover the whole county, representing about 1,050 miles of road.
I think it wouldn't be too unreasonable to think that the an automated, well practiced crew could work at a similar rate. Couple GPS tech to the camera and you shouldn't have to manually enter address information. It shouldn't be too hard to attach a digital camera with a couple servo motors to the side of a car, with a remote control inside the car in the passenger seat. The passenger could just sit there hitting the capture button when the next house is in frame.
According to the US Census, there are 3,141 counties in the U.S. I'd say that Harford County is probably a fair average for both the densely populated urban areas and the rural.
That puts the car-weeks up to over 18,000, or more than 360 years. That might sound unreasonable, but consider that the whole region (or the vast majority) is covered each year by pavement rating crews.
The catch is that it costs a lot. Not so for municipal governments, because each one only covers it's small area. This company would have to single handedly cover the whole area.
Here's my bet: they're going to mass mail real estate agencies around the country for copies of their photos. Then they're going to go back over and get more detailed photos of those areas not covered at all AND those areas with really expensive homes.
(Just my two cents. Not redeemable for cash value.)
Actually, most vegans refuse animal products, byproducts, and other things which production depends on the abuse of animals. So, using these eggs (or derivative science from them) would be (at best) like using make up tested on animals.
Anyhow, the standard/. reply is of course "who cares? they have these stupid beliefs, let those stupid (creationists | vegans | amish) die because they don't like this science!"
Who the hell wears FLIP FLOPS (aks- sandals/click-clacks/slippers) in a physics lab? let alone a lab where there's super-hot materials bouncing around?
We think the U.S. government only has a responibility to protect the rights of U.S. citizens.
It isn't that we think only U.S. citizens deserve them, but we don't think we have to provide them to you. And if you do something voluntary that requires our permission (visiting the U.S.) we feel not-very-guilty putting some conditions on it. Actually, all the "horrible" things the U.S. do tend to be a two-way street; we always say "ok, but we want _________" in negotiations and the rest of the world always says ok. They also then go on international tv, message boards, and slashdot and complain about how despicable the U.S. is.
(That's just the justification though. I still don't think it's a good idea. And as far as "Gitmo Logic," well, welcome to war. Also just a justification, not a good idea, though.)
You're thining food security like "what if we can't import food". Food security also (and primarily) describes situations like "what if food production fails." It's also "can everyone afford food." See this page.
Food security is (in a really simplified form) just relative food surplus:
(Food produced - Food desired) / (Food Desired)
Examples would include crop failures due to drought or disease, decreased economic access due to depression (a big problem in the U.S. during the Great Depression; we actually had enough food, it just wasn't getting to the hungry), and other problems beyond diplomatic conflicts.
Some Africans countries are good examples right now of what happens when food security fails. Some actually produce more food than they consume, but farmers (and the government) export it for profit. International agencies try to give (or sell really cheaply) food, but that food is either refused ("We're doing fine, that other ethnic group doesn't count anyway) or misdistributed (the poor can't buy it, or it's not given to an "inferior" starving group).
Another example would be Ethiopia trying to cope with an incredibly long drought and population growth.
Ireland during the potato famine was also a good example. They actually produced enough food, but the British took it away.
You have to remember why we care about domestic food production. It's the food security formula. In case of emergency, we want as much of our food produced domestically (where we can ensure its supply) as possible.
Actually, France's solution sounds pretty good. Everyone pays taxes to ensure national (food) security. That security money is spent (in effect) to raise the wages of poor AND increase employment or the poor. (And without sending them to Iraq! Hoorah!)
The U.S. system (depending on illegal immigration and people generally breaking the rules) leads to a contrary effect: less food security, as production depends on unregulated/undocumented international migration. Also, the poorest legal Americans are deprived of work.
(Your gut reaction to this agricultural surplus idea will be to point at corn subsidies, but I think everyone know's that's not what I mean. You'll also want to point out France's unemployment again, but maybe that's caused by labor laws that make it prohibitively expensive to hire skilled workers because you can never fire them.)
I have to relate a shameful story to you. I was walking across campus with a friend of mine a couple years ago. He grabbed me all of a suden and pulled me back, right as a parking gate lowered in front me. Sure enough, there was a warning sign on the gate (right where it would have hit me, too) with a man being cracked over the head by the gate.
Now, I think that warning could be useful, except for one problem: It's hard to read when the gate is about to hit you on the head.
I don't know if I've ever seen a PC with Firewire. I know the hardware exists and works well, but most people don't have it. Those that do probably don't know and don't use it. It's sad but true.
I disagreee, because apple has this trend of making USEFUL gadgets. What are we going to use wireless on an iPod for? You can imagine nifty little we browsers all you want, but the market wouldn't support it.
Apple discovered this with the Firewire connection on iPods. It was great for a subset of iPod users who had macs and knew Firewire was better, but in the end it cost too much and didn't sell any additional iPods. Now, iPods don't ship with support for it.
iPod wifi is a neat idea, but not a very practical one.
(On the other hand, I have to admit that having that "check box" checked would make a lot of geeks buy new ones, regardless of usefulness.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I want to know. What was HE doing when he found these images? Either he was cruising for gay porn for recreational purposes, or he was intentionally seeking the porn for some persecution purpose, or he was in some way assaulted by it in a pop-up?
If he was cruising for gay porn, someone should bring that up.
If he claims he was researching something, someone should call him on that age old lie.
If he was assaulted by it, why was he hanging out on the seedy websites that carry gay porn ads?
Or did San Andreas sneak into his house and plant this gay porn all over the place?
I was in the Boy Scouts for several years, and there was a recurring debate among every new year of parents as to how to deal with the swearing problem in scouts.
My mother, I thought, offered the simplest explanation: we can't deprive them of the knowledge of the words. They'll pick them up everywhere else, from school and friends and the gardener and us. A vacuum of information doesn't help.
What you have to do is give them knowledge to deal with these words, you have to teach them to be good people and to have respect and to speak kindly. THAT's what our Boy Scout troop had to be all about. Become good people, not hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil.
Maybe, maybe not. Let me throw some data out.
I worked as an asphalt inspector, and I have a exhaustive list of public roads for my county, including segmented width measurement. A simple table calculation yields the following calculations (along with Census data):
Total square area: 4.4 sq. miles
Population: 240,000
Area per person: 500 sq. ft. (47 sq. m)
Intensity of Sunlight: 250 w/m^2 (source)
At an upward bound of 50 sq. meters per person, that's about 12.5kw per person theoretical. Multiply that by all your efficiencies and you get an idea of the acutal power available. A more useful thought, maybe, would be having the county give the power generated to the company and demand that this be served free to county residents as a rate-reducer. The output of the county roads as a whole is 2.9 gigawatts theoretical. Assuming 1% efficiency (I have no idea how much is actually being achieved) that's 29 megawatts possible, or a medium-large sized generating station.
Remember, though, that about 8% of asphalt roads are repaired (only counting resurfacing and reconstruction) each year, and the solar panels would have to replaced on those, increasing costs significantly. I wish I had the database of buildings in my county on hand so I could do measurements on roof surface area. Also, I wish I had any data on the energy saved by houses that don't just have dark roofs sitting in the sun all day.
Because we're nerds, so it's neat to do? Or because it's a great way to learn about networks?
No I think we should work to make all the resources (that are cheap to provide) available 24-7. Libraries are damn near the cheapest thing to provide 24-7, especially when (on college campuses) there are cheap workers who like graveyard shifts and most of the "use" is really just access.
I'm sorry, but your idea is on the "it's the way it's always been" line of thinking. Remember, work places are slowly approaching "work day" independence, too. More than half of my immediate family works on flex hours of varying degrees, from "8 hours a day, including 9-3" to "80 hours every pay period, whenever, and come to long-ahead-scheduled meetings" to that plus work from home.
Why should we train students to meet arbitrary requirements that are dissappearing from society, and which especially don't affect the "knowledge workers" that most College Graduates are today?
Summary: Why bend the people when you can bend the reality (and it's already bending that way anyway)?
P.S.- The LAN party is indefensible, except as part of an interface research seminar for the librarians, maybe. And those courses are already offered in the CS department, so why offer it in the library, too?
Or, it would be if this weren't slashdot.
*BEEP* Wrong Answer
As demand goes up and supply stays the same, both quantity and price rise.
Then, suppliers see the economic profit, new firms enter, and supply expands, lowering prices and increasing the quantity.
Why isn't that happening? Market failures. Monopolies/monopolistic competition, regulation, rapid technological change... there are a million factors leading to it, but we let our information distribution industry grow badly, and now we're paying for it with bad service.
But don't worry, our legislators have expert knowledge about this series of tubes, so they should fix it soon.
A growing problem is that the vast majority of young people today (people my age, below 25) don't know how to read maps. They can usually follow a GPS or a GoogleMap, but hand them a mapbook and they're SOL.
This reminds me of my "senior week" when myself and some other high-school graduates went camping to celebrate our graduation. One night, they all got up the idea that they'd get tattoo's. But all they knew was the name of the town where the shop was. I was the only map-reader and I said I wouldn't take them there, but I'd give them one of my paper maps. They couldn't read the map, so they couldn't go.
But for their ignorance, there'd be a group of 20-21 year old kids trying to hide their "BFF" tattoos.
Wealth beyond basic needs is all relative. The owner of that new Hummer doesn't really care what other's think. He doesn't care what it's capable of.
He just feels superior. That's why we have conspicuous consumption: we don't buy to be happy, we buy to compete, and we're all extremely inefficient at it.
I'm not arguing that technical stuff is copyrightable, but that "art" is not copyrightable under the Constitution, regardless of what Congress says.
You're point about the intent of the first few Congresses revealing the constitutional intent is sound, though, under intent tests. I know it's a valid legal theory.
That scares me, though, because that means that the meaning of the constitution isn't the words but what Congress makes of it. To me, that reeks of "the law is whatever we tell you it is." That seems more dangerous than having no constitution at all. After all, today's Congress is choosing not to amend the constitution; doesn't that mean that the Constitution is really just what today's Congress (and state legislatures) thinks it is? Why even bother putting limits on the legislature down on paper if they are just what the legislators of the day want them to mean?
/argument-for-strict-text-reading
So tell me... where does pure "art" come into play? Let alone photography or photographers? Don't give me the "they couldn't forsee photographers" bit, cause they surely could foresee painters, and they didn't mention them while explicitly mentioning the other professions.
The use of "authors" seems to imply creative writing, but I wonder if they didn't simply mean the writers of instructional books like "a guide to the production of lead bullets" or "how to pack a cartridge." My educated guess would be that the intent of "useful arts" would be things like metalsmithing, carpenty, etc. The kinds of things that had economic use, not just aesthetic.
Regardless, how would photographs fit into either a strict-text or intent-based reading of the Constitution? The best I can figure would be a really, really loose reasonable-construction test. But hell, I think the process for forging licenses would be more of a "useful art" than any individual mug shot, so how would the photo be more copyright-able than the license itself?
Real Life is like soul's hell. Want to know what Real Life looks like? Read [insert religious text here], then take out anything at all cool about that world. It is one big undending strip mall comprised mostly of casinos, sex shops, and brothels.
Real Life is in no ganger of becoming anything bigger. It is messy, awkward to use, and has little interesting going on in it. Something more interesting might grow from the original idea (which in truth, is not all that original), but it has a long way to go before it even begins to touch the sort of mass media acceptance as games like Fantasy.
Unbeknownst to her, Archive.org had sent a packet to her server saying "By sending packets to Archive.org, you enter into a contract giving Archiving.org full right to reproduce this page." How could she be so irresponsible as to let it keep serving the pages?
This is why there should be a "+1 So-Real-It's-Scary" mod
I wonder about the practicality of sending someone around to take pictures of everyhome.
But I have the unique perspective of some experience. I spend my summers driving around Harford County, MD, a moderate density area. I and a partner drive at about 10 mph to inspect the roadway for potholes/cracking/oxidation/etc. We don't rate when it's raining or recently rained, since it covers up the defects in the road.
It takes us about 6 weeks of driving 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to cover the whole county, representing about 1,050 miles of road.
I think it wouldn't be too unreasonable to think that the an automated, well practiced crew could work at a similar rate. Couple GPS tech to the camera and you shouldn't have to manually enter address information. It shouldn't be too hard to attach a digital camera with a couple servo motors to the side of a car, with a remote control inside the car in the passenger seat. The passenger could just sit there hitting the capture button when the next house is in frame.
According to the US Census, there are 3,141 counties in the U.S. I'd say that Harford County is probably a fair average for both the densely populated urban areas and the rural.
That puts the car-weeks up to over 18,000, or more than 360 years. That might sound unreasonable, but consider that the whole region (or the vast majority) is covered each year by pavement rating crews.
The catch is that it costs a lot. Not so for municipal governments, because each one only covers it's small area. This company would have to single handedly cover the whole area.
Here's my bet: they're going to mass mail real estate agencies around the country for copies of their photos. Then they're going to go back over and get more detailed photos of those areas not covered at all AND those areas with really expensive homes.
(Just my two cents. Not redeemable for cash value.)
Actually, most vegans refuse animal products, byproducts, and other things which production depends on the abuse of animals. So, using these eggs (or derivative science from them) would be (at best) like using make up tested on animals.
/. reply is of course "who cares? they have these stupid beliefs, let those stupid (creationists | vegans | amish) die because they don't like this science!"
Anyhow, the standard
Who the hell wears FLIP FLOPS (aks- sandals/click-clacks/slippers) in a physics lab? let alone a lab where there's super-hot materials bouncing around?
Close:
We think the U.S. government only has a responibility to protect the rights of U.S. citizens.
It isn't that we think only U.S. citizens deserve them, but we don't think we have to provide them to you. And if you do something voluntary that requires our permission (visiting the U.S.) we feel not-very-guilty putting some conditions on it. Actually, all the "horrible" things the U.S. do tend to be a two-way street; we always say "ok, but we want _________" in negotiations and the rest of the world always says ok. They also then go on international tv, message boards, and slashdot and complain about how despicable the U.S. is.
(That's just the justification though. I still don't think it's a good idea. And as far as "Gitmo Logic," well, welcome to war. Also just a justification, not a good idea, though.)
You're thining food security like "what if we can't import food". Food security also (and primarily) describes situations like "what if food production fails." It's also "can everyone afford food." See this page.
Food security is (in a really simplified form) just relative food surplus:
(Food produced - Food desired) / (Food Desired)
Examples would include crop failures due to drought or disease, decreased economic access due to depression (a big problem in the U.S. during the Great Depression; we actually had enough food, it just wasn't getting to the hungry), and other problems beyond diplomatic conflicts.
Some Africans countries are good examples right now of what happens when food security fails. Some actually produce more food than they consume, but farmers (and the government) export it for profit. International agencies try to give (or sell really cheaply) food, but that food is either refused ("We're doing fine, that other ethnic group doesn't count anyway) or misdistributed (the poor can't buy it, or it's not given to an "inferior" starving group).
Another example would be Ethiopia trying to cope with an incredibly long drought and population growth.
Ireland during the potato famine was also a good example. They actually produced enough food, but the British took it away.
You have to remember why we care about domestic food production. It's the food security formula. In case of emergency, we want as much of our food produced domestically (where we can ensure its supply) as possible.
Actually, France's solution sounds pretty good. Everyone pays taxes to ensure national (food) security. That security money is spent (in effect) to raise the wages of poor AND increase employment or the poor. (And without sending them to Iraq! Hoorah!)
The U.S. system (depending on illegal immigration and people generally breaking the rules) leads to a contrary effect: less food security, as production depends on unregulated/undocumented international migration. Also, the poorest legal Americans are deprived of work.
(Your gut reaction to this agricultural surplus idea will be to point at corn subsidies, but I think everyone know's that's not what I mean. You'll also want to point out France's unemployment again, but maybe that's caused by labor laws that make it prohibitively expensive to hire skilled workers because you can never fire them.)
I have to relate a shameful story to you. I was walking across campus with a friend of mine a couple years ago. He grabbed me all of a suden and pulled me back, right as a parking gate lowered in front me. Sure enough, there was a warning sign on the gate (right where it would have hit me, too) with a man being cracked over the head by the gate.
Now, I think that warning could be useful, except for one problem:
It's hard to read when the gate is about to hit you on the head.
I said, HOW DO YOU CLEAN YEARS? Hello? Can you hear me?
Seriously though, how?
(This caught the lameness filter because "Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING." But that's what i meant to do. Duh.)
I don't know if I've ever seen a PC with Firewire. I know the hardware exists and works well, but most people don't have it. Those that do probably don't know and don't use it. It's sad but true.
I disagreee, because apple has this trend of making USEFUL gadgets. What are we going to use wireless on an iPod for? You can imagine nifty little we browsers all you want, but the market wouldn't support it.
Apple discovered this with the Firewire connection on iPods. It was great for a subset of iPod users who had macs and knew Firewire was better, but in the end it cost too much and didn't sell any additional iPods. Now, iPods don't ship with support for it.
iPod wifi is a neat idea, but not a very practical one.
(On the other hand, I have to admit that having that "check box" checked would make a lot of geeks buy new ones, regardless of usefulness.)