Posts by SDoradus

Re: Compensation?

I bet the jewel case insert had a copyright indication on it somewhere. That, legally speaking put you on notice that terms and conditions of a licence existed. It's your responsibility to find out what those are.

Of course, people in general don't bother - just like they don't go into the stationmaster's office and look at the terms and conditions of carriage every time they go by train. Doesn't make the fine print non-existent.

Re: Compensation?

The courts would disagree with you. The value you gained was the permission to listen.

More generally, copyright takes many forms and you must have 'artificial constructs' or legal terms of art merely to discuss it.

For example, copyright subsists not just in the medium but in a performance. For decade upon decade, since radios began blaring popular music in the early years of last century, workers like garage mechanics had the radio going in their workplace. This meant the public could also listen to the radio broadcast. At least from 1988 (and arguably earlier) this changed, and a number of small businesses - a garage mechanic was the first - were put out of business by the legal costs associated with allowing the public to hear the radio blaring in the back of the workshop.

So remember: a "licence to hear a track anywhere" doesn't mean you won't be done for copyright infringement if the public can hear it too.

Re: Compensation?

Not sure why Mr Orlowski's comments above were so heavily downvoted.

One might not like that "you are not actually allowed to make a copy of something without a license to do so", but it's trite law for copyrightable items. That a copy "would still be illegal if I chose to make my "copy" available to others", likewise. And that there is no blank media subsidy in the UK is simply a fact.

I'd observe that it does make sense to offer a "license to hear [a track] anywhere" or even a "lifetime license", and I'm fascinated that the UK "may be moving to that"; but if we take that literally the implications are wider than one might think.

Re: Broke? - Yeah Right

He doesn't have a family anymore. His wife divorced him. Oddly, that tiny Chinese-Kiwi still speaks of him with admiration and affection.

It's true the family is now living, fairly modestly, apart from him, surviving on the trust you mention. It wasn't all that big. He never owned his mansion, for example. It was rented.

Re: UNGRATEFUL BASTARDS

"... how many of you would have the mettle to endure the mental pressure that he's had to..."

Quite. I'd like to think I would, but... I've never downloaded an illegal tune in my life.

That said, Dotcom might be a fat and carelessly criminal larrikin, but given what's been done to him in the name of the law, I hope the bugger prevails. I suspect, even if he's extradited and sent to a US jail for twenty years, in a way prevail he will.

Because in some jurisdictions a deputy to the national assembly is immune from any sort of prosecution.

Because it's a way to bring your case to the general public and rub their noses in what is being done in their name.

And because they can.

"Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns."

Manning up

"... if he had just manned up and gone to court..."

He did.

Till Dotcom's defence funds were sequestered, he won more often than he lost. Of course, these were NZ courts, including the High Court, which found the search and seizures illegal, to say nothing of the illegal transfer of evidence overseas.

One imagines he had less confidence in the ability to prevail in a US federal or state court. Given recent events, wouldn't you? When the need arises he'll have to battle it out in the US court as well, and I'd note his US lawyers don't seem inclined to drop him simply because he can't pay.

Meanwhile, why should he go to the US? He's a permanent resident of NZ. That, and bail, is what his current legal fight is all about.

Re: I assume this was their intention all along...

"Keep banging away until he runs out of money to pay his lawyers."

It's worse than that. He still owns or controls plenty of assets; however, the MPAA and similar organizations have had them frozen. The ability to do so is a comparatively recent legal development (writs of Mareva, freezing orders etc.) and normally part of the civil law, but clearly now being used to hobble the defendant in a related criminal case.

That's strictly a crown-realm common law development at the moment because US law doesn't tolerate that sort of thing - it's against the constitution, don't you know. This led a law school guest lecturer to complain about the 'dead hand of originalism'; but he predicted the US courts would eventually see compliance with such international orders as in their best interests.

The judicial arm of world government is tracking nicely into place.

That would be the UK

"US has the best justice money can buy.

(If you don't have money, you can't have any)"

Actually that would be NZ. For some reason the NZ lawyers did not need a judge's permission to withdraw from the case. That's frankly puzzling.

Dotcom's US lawyers are still on board, like Rothken. As far as one can tell, they're now fighting the US side of this fight for free (pro bono publico).

Re: Isn't this the premise of..

"Utter Gibberish"

You don't say...

"Either it is intelligent or it behaves like a neurotic religious nutcase or a child. Choose one."

So there are no intelligent religious nutcases? Or children? Gee, that's harsh. Can't we do the usual engineering thing and pick two of three?

"I hope to $DEITY you never get a position of responsibility in engineering. Ever."

Regrettably, $DEITY did not grant your wish.

Re: Phil Plait hates it

"> I can't find my copy of Leighton.

DAT NAMEDROPPING.

> Schwartzchild

Oh no, sorry."

Not sure what your point was. It's a very old book. Robert Leighton, that is, 'Principles of Modern Physics', and the range-energy curves I used were in the appendix.

Re: Phil Plait hates it

Actually I did pick up on one thing which Plait in his Slate article either missed, or thought wouldn't be understood. He mentioned that one has to be close to a Schwartzchild-metric event horizon for really large time dilations like that in the movie (which was about 1:62000). A little playing with the numbers would have shown just how catastrophically asymptotic that curve is, and illustrated his point rather better than overblown rhetoric.

Plait seems to assume the film's black hole is non-rotating and small (a few solar masses) but Thorne has made it clear it's a rotating supermassive one, so the numbers are a bit pointless. But let's try. For purposes of illustration let's take Plait's view and set the mass at 6Msol. Then a time dilation ratio of 1:32 occurs a bit more than half a kilometre from the event horizon. Dilation of 1:62000 occurs at just a foot from the event horizon, and a ten-million fold dilation happens just two millimetres away!

So never mind tides. What would happen to a person when time dilation is so different on one side of the brain that the signals are out of sync with the other side?

Re: Why does humanity deserve to survive?

"That must be one of the most hipster edgy things I have ever heard."

Oooh, compliments!

"And my latin courses are a bit way back now, and why are you pretending to know latin anyway?"

Almost certainly not as far back as mine, and probably because (a) I was taught it properly, and (b) I later took an honours in Romance languages with a minor in Linguistics, including the transition from Latin to Old French. Why? Because the University had the best crèche in town and it was a hell of a lot cheaper than other ways of having my kids looked after while at work. But hey! You can imagine I'm ignorant if you want! I'm sure you will!

Re: Phil Plait hates it

Wasn't the zooming done by the "Ranger" shuttles? The engines could be throttleable NERVA types, say. The S-N stage was certified ready for Mars missions by NASA back around 1971 I think. I don't see a hydrogen tank, though. More importantly, I agree about space opera vs. hard SF. In the old days the criterion for hard SF used to be "allow yourself ONE impossibility". These days, anything goes.

Re: Isn't this the premise of..

"Why do people of the future want to live on planets anyway?"

Excellent point. By 2042, say we could have AIs that are recognizably human from a Turing-test point of view. Send those out to space: 'be good little von Neumann machines, go forth, and prosper.' Since we created them, we'd be their god. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter (in at least geological time) their god would be dead.

Somehow I don't think the movie-going public would pay to watch that.

Re: Phil Plait hates it

That was another of Plait's points, but it's another canard. Accretion disks do radiate hugely, but the worst the "Interstellar" probe would see is X-rays except at the rotational axis (where jets form) and in the plane of the disk (where you would get accelerated massive particles in some numbers). The path of the probe avoided both, which was, one suspects, deliberate.

The crew would need to have adequate shielding, perhaps a water-ice shroud over a 'safe room', but for photons this isn't too hard. Particulate radiation - and cosmic rays - would have been a different matter, depending on the range-energy curves, and I can't find my copy of Leighton.

Also nearly all the X-rays are emitted near the internal edge of the accretion disk, if there is one. Some black holes are so old they've cleared the stellar neighbourhood so no accretion disk exists. Others are so massive the accretion disk doesn't take a recognizable form.

Consider a supermassive Schwartzchild-metric black hole (say, a hundred million solar masses) - we're making the same assumption Plait would, here. It would have a Schwartzchild radius three hundred million kilometres out - you'd barely know you'd passed the event horizon. In particular, this means the inner edge of the accretion disk would be nearly a billion klicks from the singularity. The material would orbit quite slowly, thank you, and barely radiate at all by comparison with a hole of just six solar masses.

Perhaps just enough to keep a planet warm, thereby answering another of Plait's criticisms.

Re: "Gravity" was accurate and realistic? Really?

' That's like saying that my old Ford Cortina was supersonic, "as accurately as the roads and limitations of the car allow". It wasn't supersonic. It was barely mobile. '

Oh, I don't know. I'm sure your old Cortina would have been supersonic in some reference frame, even idling in neutral.

Re: "Gravity" was accurate and realistic? Really?

Shame you snipped the important part then: "as accurately as the plot and limitations of special effects allow"

Finally, some sanity.

Re: Why does humanity deserve to survive?

"You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of." Actually you make the good out of what you control, good or bad.

Besides, as Robert Penn Warren pointed out in almost the same breath (in All the King's Men), he wondered if [the Boss] believed what he had said: "it was scarcely consistent".

I decline to take my inspiration for saving the world from a science fiction novel, let alone science fantasy, let alone science fantasy quoting a poet who's not sure what he's saying.

Re: Why does humanity deserve to survive?

Yes. Equally poignant in that there's no sense in disputing the relative merits of two worthless statements.

Steven Baxter has the end of the human gene line sixty million years from now by which time we're a gazelle-like creature hunted to extinction. When we're gone, we won't be around to think either proposition poignant.

Re: Why does humanity deserve to survive?

More or less what Elon Musk would say. But it's too late really and has been since the nuclear option was foreclosed on.

Besides, he'd either put it in English or at least get the Latin right (tutemet isn't indeclinable, the first "tu" declines, so my fifth form Latin makes that tetemet... except the whole phrase reeks. Try 'liberate me ex inferis" (the n in infernis is not often observed in late medieval Latin, cf. the cognate French L'Enfer).

Re: Why does humanity deserve to survive?

The short answer is, it doesn't. Perhaps the point of the film was to hammer this home.

Re: Erm....

A less well known friend of Lorde, my kids tell me.

Re: Overgeneralisations much?

I might add, Korean Hangul script manages to be both a syllabary and an alphabet at the same time. It's the invention of one of their better monarchs but one still occasionally sees Chinese script (hanja) even now.

Re: Perhaps A mandatory Name Change Next Time?

That's canonically the name of a losing client's law firm - who was representing the trolls?

Re: This bloke is deluded

Typical Kiwi voters were indeed revolted by the prospect of a German, albeit a permanent resident, trying to tell them who to vote for in a particularly crass and graceless manner. However, the fact that Dotcom blamed himself for the electoral failure would tend to indicate that he is not 'deluded'. At least, not any more.

Otherwise, most of the above is fair comment, but with these caveats:

- That the email was a fake has not in fact been established. But it was certainly unsupported by other evidence.

- The Internet Mana party may or may not blame him for the loss, but in the TV broadcast of his self-flagellation one could hear loud shouts of "No!" when he blamed himself.

- It wasn't "his" party. Mana was a merger of two parties, one of which had existed long before, and the founding leader was Hone Harawira. Dotcom did however bankroll the merged entity.

- Mana spent only $60,000 NZ dollars on the campaign. Not $4.5 million. The money Dotcom provided didn't go to election expenses. One wonders how much was actually provided, and what it was spent on.

- The amount of money spent on the election was therefore vastly less than another unsuccessful party, the so-called "Conservatives", on the other side of the political spectrum. These are basically what a European would recognize as Christian Democrats. Their leader did bankroll their electoral effort to the tune of nearly two million NZ dollars - the second highest of any party contesting the election. (The highest spenders were the National party, which won.) In fact just after the vote the electoral commission filed a police complaint about two Conservative electoral officials for filing false expenses and spending more than was allowed during the election.

Re: A mea culpa and an apology?

Well yes. He wasn't running for office - he couldn't, being a German citizen, not NZ.