Posts by Tom 13 7611 posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I've been off on forums that aren't filled with hoplophobes, and they are pretty much unanimous that it is easier to build a fully automatic than a semi.
Interestingly they particularly note the usefulness of 3D printers in making the lower for an AR-15, which I think we can all agree is a real weapon.
To some extent, I think it was purposely made to be something that didn't have a long shelf life. Not a gunsmith myself, or even a tinkerer in that area, but I'd imagine a competent one COULD put together something more, shall we say, serviceable. Rigid plastics have been a huge improvement in the area of handguns with traditional manufacturers. But to some extent, they've kept the metal concentrations high specifically because of concerns that were raised back in the 1980s about plastic guns being able to circumvent then current security processes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I concur that rounded corners have been around for sufficiently long to invalidate that claim, I should note that there can exist instances were an exact physical dimension can be a valid point for a patent and/or trade secret. I once worked for a manufacturing company and the precise angle (to about 2 decimal places) for part of the mechanism was the key to the efficiency of the finished product and they held the patent for it. I expect by now the patent should be long expired, but being IP won't disclose more than what I have written.
except that Consumer Reports is not an advertising supported magazine. Theoretically they are unbiased because they are a member supported group. In fact, if you've got a subscription you'll find it comes with a disclaimer that if they give you a good review, you can't buy copies to put in your showroom.
The unbiased bit is of course pure bunkum. Their leftist biased. Okay as long as politics doesn't enter into it, but bring in an issue like AWG and their impartiality goes out the window.
Given the economics of the research publishing industry, probably not. I expect their publishers entered into contracts with the libraries to provide them with the books/papers. And I expect that without the money associated with those contracts, the books/papers wouldn't get published.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
No, there were a few decent search engines before Google. But Google became ubiquitous in part because of their minimalist interface. And as they became more and more dominant the other engines faded into obscurity.
My guess would be this bit from the article:
KPMG has denied doing a full audit, saying its review was limited to publicly available documents and it never audited Autonomy or looked at Deloitte's work.
You can pretty much bet KPMG will be able to show exactly what they were contracted to do, and that the alleged work isn't there. Because if it had been there, KPMG would have made a boatload more money than just reviewing the publicly available information. Also, their lawyers are probably even better paid than HP's are.
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.
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.
K's numbers may be extreme, but that's the basic principle of economics - so long as demand goes up more than production costs, you make more total profit at a lower price point than you do at a higher one.
I'm surprised you were surprised about limited edition high-cost printings if you're involved with small presses. It's how they ultimately make their money. Those editions go to people with a collecting interest who are willing to pay for the privilege. You try to cover your cost of production with the paperback/ebook and make your profit from the hardbacks (numbered, w/slipcover and optional signature) which you might have to store for 3-5 years before you sell them all. The numbers I typically heard were 100-300 such hardbacks at $25-$50, 500 regular hardbacks at $15, and a couple thousand paperbacks in the $5.50-$8.50 range. Prices on the regular hardbacks and paperbacks tended to be set high so you could still make a small profit after discounts if you arranged with a local mass distributor to sell them (20%-50% depending on the size of the distributor). Two SF NPOs in my local area were both involved in these sorts of ventures.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with you wet behind the ears youngins is that you have no concept of history.
Hell, I'm not even half a century old yet, but I recall reading as a child in those very early environmental awareness books about how we'd all be out of petroleum by now, or at the very least taking out house sized mortgages if we wanted to buy a gallon of it. Back then the US had a 600 year reserve of coal and a 70 year reserve of oil. When I check today despite increased consumption of all fossil fuels across the world we now have a 600 year supply of coal and as of a news report sometime last week, twice that in natural gas thanks to fracking. So unless we really are going to experience a Biblical flood as a result of global warming, I'm not too worried about finding replacements before fossil fuel runs out.
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.
Not sad, expected. Since I expect it, I'm occasionally surprised when he makes a thoughtful non-MS bashing post.
Although I do have to admit I sometimes wonder how much per post he gets paid by monkeyboy. Because I can't think of anything PR related that looks worse for *nix advocates than an Eadon post.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Join our daily or weekly newsletters, subscribe to a specific section or set News alerts
Subscribe
