Posts by Tom 13

Re: simply requested politely

There was no 'polite' about it. He was ordered to take them down. It came from State under the auspices of some unratified international gun treaty.

Yes, the guy was a putz and a fool for putting them up in the first place, and as such probably didn't deserve polite treatment.

@Uffish

If it weren't for the space program, he wouldn't be able to criticize it on El Reg. The local pub perhaps, but not El Reg.

@AisForApple: Mostly true.

But you should remember that when the first firearms were introduced the orientals laughed because their swordsmen could easily stop the bullets and could kill far more people more quickly than the English could with their new found technology. So with more engineering it will present a more serious threat than what was put out in this demo. What's important is thinking rationally about that threat. Which those who are panicked about this video and the plans are unlikely to do.

Re: Sure, you could take this onto a plane.

Testing teams still routinely get ammunition, guns, and even bombs onto planes via non-approved means. The government just doesn't advertise the failure rate.

Franklin has the correct counterpoint: passengers will no longer allow airplanes to be hijacked, even if 5 or 10 of them have to die to stop it. This (and not the TSA granny strip searches) is what is stopping that line of attack.

Re: there's a reason guns aren't usually made out of plastic.

Yeah, we passed a law against it.

It wasn't the 3D printers that prompted that law. It was lawfully constituted gun manufacturers. Plastics in the gun make them lighter, easier to handle, and surprisingly more accurate. And when they found you could get them past metal detectors the spam hit the fan so to speak. Yes there were claims that you could set the scanners so it would find the casings for the bullets and everything would still be good. But it still resulted in a law to prohibit manufacturing plastic guns.

Frankly, I think it stifled innovation that I would like to have seen. I actually like guns, and the idea of an all plastic gun has an appeal to me. I'm not surprised that the hoplophobe in the listed city were quick out the gates with new legislation since what they really want is to ban all privately owned firearms. I might after some thinking even concur that we should take the risks associated with plastic guns and focus on the real problems with murders, which is not the guns. But that doesn't mean that I don't recognize certain risks associated with plastic guns and that society thought they'd already closed that barn door.

Re: rudderless on the way to the waterfall.

They may appear that way to you, but monkeyboy has his sock puppet doing exactly what he wants: turning them into the next SCO.

Re: leave your garage with a full load, go a hundred miles

So it's suitable for maybe Denmark or Luxembourg, but probably wouldn't get me to and back from my alma mater's Saturday football game.

Re: Google is never making any book available online without first having the author's permission.

Patently false. If it were true Google's lawyers would present the signed contracts with the authors indicating they've signed over permission and the lawsuit would be summarily dismissed, with prejudice.

Just because you want that to be true, doesn't mean it is.

Re: S/B class action, but authors should lose

An even longer, more rambling, more pointless post.

How very Marxian of you.

Re: Cory Doctorow is full of shit

There once was a relatively unknown sf writer who couldn't get a book published in the US because he mostly wrote short stories and was a relatively new writer. He did manage to get some stuff published in the UK where short story collections weren't so out of vogue. But he was willing to go to SF conventions. And there was this smallish but somewhat old convention held near Baltimore, MD every year. And it had some folks at it who thought he was a good author. So a few of them formed a new company. I believe they contacted one of the British publishers and contracted the right to use their proofs to publish a small press run of his works to sell at a convention the author was attending. (They might have actually had to set and proof this one, but I think they got the proofs.) Shortly thereafter the author had a contract with a major US publisher and is now reasonably well known for his works. His name is Allen Steele and that first book was Rude Astronauts published by Rare Earth Books. I know because I knew all the people involve with the creation of Rare Earth Books and had the good fortune to meet Mr. Steele at that convention and have him sign a book from one of those small print runs.

Bottom line, if you write good stuff in SF and work on selling it, you will make it. Maybe not big, but certainly enough to support you in middle class fashion.

Re: Socialists!

That's what I expect statists such as yourself to say. Socialism in the US has advance precisely because we've allowed too many socialist twits to impose their views on society from the bench.

Re: 2- TPB makes available the work in full

So are Google, only you'll have to work at it a bit. Different search terms in subsequent searches, but you can pull the whole thing out given enough time. Or maybe an automated program.

Re: at least not until it hits the SCoTUS.

Not even Scotus has the power to revoke the property right involved in copyright. It's power is limited to determining whether the legal rules have been followed, including the legal rules of what is constitutional.

Invalidating the protection ought to require an act of Congress with approval from Potus.

Where Scotus has issued a warning about copyrights is that the Constitution clearly states copyrights and patents should be for a "limited time." Recent Congressional actions have technically kept limits on the time, but that as we were rapidly approaching the point at which everyone who read/saw/heard such a work when it was first copyrighted is long dead, we might be exceeding the practical meaning of "limited time."

Re: many smaller suits

Hell, at that level it's likely many of the suits couldn't even afford the court filing fees let alone the cost of lawyers prior to that.

Re: Seems counterproductive...

In the specific instance you have provided you would fail on several counts, not the least of which is there is no criticism or commentary on the part copied. Even were that present, because so much of the book continues intact, you would still be guilty of infringement.

In order to get to fair use, you need to be in the sentences or paragraphs area, not pages and pages. This is well established in case law.

Re: Seems counterproductive...

Except they aren't simply serving snippets they are scanning and indexing the whole book, and the fact that they actively have to engage in scanning, then using ocr to convert the book to the machine readable files moves them well outside 'fair use' coverage. In fact, it pretty much moves them into Napster territory. Well, actually beyond Napster territory because Napster at least had the fig leaf that they weren't the one uploading the unauthorized music, while Google are actively doing it.

Once you understand the legal implications of that, you understand why Google's lawyers want the class action status resolved first. Resolve the copyright issue first and it's a slam dunk for the authors. Once that's established, class action makes perfect sense. If on the other hand you can split out all the suits into a mouse versus Goliath, the mouse is probably gonna lose, repeatedly.

Re: robots.txt is your friend.

Scanners, that is those things that make whiring noises as the bright light goes across the page on the glass, don't give a rat's tail end about any 'robot.txt' file.

@wowfood

No, Bing!

...

or! perhaps! Yahoo!

Re: then HP (or their insurers)

Not necessarily HP's insurers, but some insurance company somewhere. Although yes, the company usually purchase insurance against this sort of thing for their members in the US. It's only prudent is a lawsuit happy country. The possible exception is if they can prove willful/gross negligence on the part of the defendants.

Re: A restriction which is largely artificial

Yes, it is largely artificial. But it is legally binding. Which is of course the bitch when you game the legal system.

Re: I'm tired of this typical MSFT marketing crap.

If you don't know the root cause of the exploit, it might not be sufficient to be using a different browser so long as IE8 is installed. This is the huge technical mistake MS made in their legal anti-trust fuster cluck all those years ago: the IE components are still part of the OS and therefore accessible to other apps even if you aren't actively using them. I'm assuming the other versions aren't vulnerable because they've replaced the vulnerable files as opposed to some other improvement (like sandboxing) in the browser itself.

Re: And

I'd like to and am inclined to agree, but I do have a caveat.

SF readers are a bit of an outlier. They know what they like to read and they know they need to pay the people who produce it so they can get more of it. I think they are also inclined to put peer pressure on any friends who might try to leech from the creative commons. I expected similar results for Anime.

I'd like to believe the same will be true if other publishers adopt the same stance. But we'll need the data to confirm it.

Re: Cancer kills, find a cure for it,

I have no data to support my hypothesis, but I long ago decided that there is no cure for cancer because there is no cause, or definable set of causes for it. I think cancer is just an error in the cell reproductive process. The body has mechanism to either repair or remove most of them, but even running at 16 nines of reliability, every so often something is going to slip through.

The best you can do is reduce exposure to things we know that can increase the likelihood that the repair/removal mechanism is needed. So technically any increase in exposure to radioactivity is increases those chances. The rub is in figuring out which increases it is reasonable to avoid. For example, I think the reason we see increased lung cancers associated with cigarettes and asbestos (particularly short length fiber varieties) is that they cut lung material which requires repair and the repair itself is subject to that 1 in a trillion chance of failure. Increase the opportunities enough and you will get a failure. Exposure to either increases that damage exponentially, which is why we been able to statistically tie them to cancer. Genetics of course modifies that because some folks will have better repair/removal mechanisms. Which is why George Burns could live to such a ripe old age smoking cigars without getting cancer while the Marlboro Man didn't.

Re: Free speech ground

If you're a rational person as opposed to a knee-jerk statist, it's pretty easy. Let's try this one on for size (deleting as is appropriate for your world view):

All warmists/denialists be forced to put a disclaimer on their research that their research might be biased.

Yeah, until you are on an ultra firm legal basis (like loosing a court case) it's dangerous to require certain kinds of speech on products sold.

@Peter 45

Yep, even back in the 1770s they called them 'coffin nails' for a reason.

Re: Frack much?

No he doesn't. He's seen the movie Gasland and he knows its true. It says so on the internets.

Re: as a scientist

The first draft as you describe =/= the first draft from WG1 of IPCC

Their first draft is akin to your published paper.

And frankly even as you described it, if I were looking for nefarious inputs into YOUR process, I'd want the whole thing. If there are mistakes and irrelevancies in it and the process by which they are removed is documented in your updates (Dr. Smith pointed to a faulty assumption for ..., Dr Samms corrected my math in ...) you will remain in good standing. But if I find a branch of your hypothesis is suddenly dropped at the same time you received funding from someone with a contrary opinion with no evidence pointing to a valid change in the research path... Yeah, I'll want you to lose not only the grant but that good standing too.

Re: MS fans have fallen so low

I rather thought he was *nix guy.

I'm a softie myself, but his was funny and I gave him an upvote. Yours is not, although I didn't thumb you down.

Re: I'm still curious to know

I know at least one person who bought a Win7 system and got Win8 in addition because they were selling it for a mere $25 more. He installed and uses 7 and frankly would have preferred XP if not for the fact that support was being discontinued.

Re: new experimental UI that does away with the screen

Hey, if they can do it and it works, that my be worth half the price of my monitor in OS costs!

Re: To be fair to Vista

No, the underpowered machines were just the excuse. I built a system with a Quadcore, 8G of RAM, a Raptor drive, and a kick ass video card for gaming. It still sucked. Mostly because the drivers weren't there for 32-bit let alone 64-bit, and without the drivers, nobody (including the high end game companies that should have been eating it up) was writing software specifically for it.

At one point the Vista drive failed and I rebuilt the system on Win 7. Still using it today and I think my original build was about 6 years back.