Because many "pirates", especially the more competent ones, are motivated in part by the sheer immorality of the copyright extensions (or so many have claimed here on HN and a few other places I frequent). In many ways, copyright enforcement is in a similar place to the enforcement of Prohibition at the end of the 1920s, where otherwise law-abiding citizens willingly broke what they considered bad law.
Good article. If you want more, rather than reading Darwin, I suggest Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which gives a broader, more modern view of the importance of evolution. Especially of "variation and selection", the core ideas of Darwin, and without a lot of frequently irrelevant, for the general reader, biological details.
The "next big distribution channel" already exists. Why do you think the MPAA and RIAA keep trying to choke off the internet. Fortunately, they got a late start, so there is a chance to keep ahead of their lawyers.
For now, any way. As soon as it's out of the news, after the elections, they will almost certainly try to pass them, or another similar bill, again. It's a never ending game of Whack-A-Mole. Eventually, one will get through.
"The material, aluminium oxynitride, known as AION, is four times harder than fused silica glass, 85 per cent as hard as sapphire and stable up to a temperature of 1,200C."
Those sites that are completely blacked out, like makezine and Wikipedia, are doing exactly what many accuse DRM of doing. Annoying their users while producing no real benefit. Google's and HN's methods are better.
ADDED: Most of them don't particularly matter to me, I rarely use Wikipedia, for example. The one that has annoyed me is the Internet Archive blackout - www.archive.org
They argue that way because their inflated claims have no merit. The only justification for copyright that doesn't amount to arrogant and unjustifiable claims of "creator privilege" (my phrase, but that is what their wordy arguments amount to) is that given in the US Constitution, as a practical matter "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".
You might notice in "useful arts" that an argument could be made right now, that fiction, music, movies, and video games never should have been covered. And, in fact, music wasn't covered for decades afterward.
Actually, it is the freedom of speech clause in the First Amendment that gives fair use rights, as interpreted by the courts. It could even be argued by a future court that the First Amendment invalidates copyright altogether; it wouldn't be the first time a court had changed direction like that.
That is a less extreme change than that from Plessy vs Ferguson to Brown vs the Board of Education, for example. And a good case can be made for freedom of speech trumping copyright; the Constitutional argument for copyright is a practical one for "encouraging" the advance of arts and sciences; eternal copyright has already undercut that argument.
Academia is mostly about signalling, not entirely, but mostly (see Robin Hanson's http://www.overcomingbias.com posts on academia). Making it difficult and expensive to publish increases the signalling effect and helps keep out the riff-raff.
No they didn't. They talked about how sharing pictures of cats was a running internet joke. All they said about that particular file was that it was named cat.jpg.
If a technology is critical to your success, then you must either thoroughly understand it, or you need to maintain a tight professional, and preferably also social, connection to those who do.
>At least a repeal would entail the difficulty of repealing opposing & established legislation.
Nonsense, they do that all the time. A large part of Obamacare and most other large bills modify existing law. New laws simply over-write previous laws.
>Standard barbells can't handle more than 230 lbs safely.
Did you get a hollow bar or something? I regularly deadlift 350# on my 6 foot standard bar with no problems. And I haven't seen any claims about safety issues elsewhere. If you actually look at the bars, the central section when the maximum loading is is the same diameter on standard and Olympic bars.
Indeed, OSHA is another. That is why a lot of small businesses, mechanics and machinists for example, purposely stay small. They can't afford to grow because of the increasing regulations. There were several studies at the time of the early-1990s recession and again about the time of the dot-com crash about this, investigating the causes of "non-growth", because most new hiring usually occurs in mid-size companies. I don't really understand why anyone surprised that the economy (especially unemployment) is still screwed-up this long with the hammering mid-size companies have taken in the past decade.
Of the three "solutions", wikis and discussion forums are "pull" formats, they don't work well for notifications, for example, informing team members of a change. The third, newsfeeds or activity feeds are going to be even more cluttered than a heavily CC'ed email system.
Do you have an equivalent of Google Scholar? At least 75% of my searches recently have been through Scholar and I would love to find a useable replacement. On the other hand, most of the nasty problems on the front page aren't happening (yet) on Scholar.
One thing that can work, if you only need a day here and there, is to get a motel room to use as a meeting room/conference room. Even fewer distractions than an office and you don't have to pay for it when you aren't using it. (We did this a few times in the 1980s/90s when I was working for an architect, when we needed a meeting place near a job.)
The problem is that for nerds, the game is making stuff. The "doing business" part is what we have to go through in order to keep making stuff. And, as long as it is harder in Chile and other parts of Latin America, they will never come close to catching up to Europe, much less the US.
Maybe, but I doubt it. The problem is that Latin American societies, and to a lesser extent Southern European countries, are fundamentally lower trust societies than northern European ones, and especially the Anglo-sphere. While there is possibility of change, it will be a slow, hard process. (For a historical example of the difference, compare the development of Japan, a high trust society, with that of China, which is lower trust.)
If it was worth taking seriously it also would have been much longer. Go read Sissela Bok's Lying: Moral choice in Public and Private Life then try taking Harris seriously.
You might find Sissela Bok's books, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life and Secrets, interesting. Boiled down, her arguments amount to 1) there is rarely adequate justification for lying, and 2) the problem of secrets is far more complex. The arguments are very good and well-supported.
Anyone who can't think faster than they can talk ought to go get a job washing dishes somewhere. So people are still needing to filter what they say, since no one can say everything they think.
All systems evolve, if they can change at all. Systems with intelligent actors (software, language, economics, etc) involve more factors than biological evolution does. Biological evolution is mainly through variation and selection. Intelligent evolution also involves borrowing (acquisition) from outside the "genome", planning of future changes, analogical reasoning between "lineages", and other means of generating and fixing variations.
I don't think so. If I remember the explanation, superconductors "block" magnetism, rather like having another magnet with the same pole opposed. In that case, the magnet would probably just fall as though the tube was made of plastic or other non-conductor. (Just speculation, it has been several years since I read about superconductivity).
Actually large generators normally do use electromagnets today. They need an external source of power when starting, but drain off a very small part of the generated power to keep running. As jacques wrote, that isn't done with small generators because the added complexity usually isn't worth it.