1,021 karma · joined August 8, 2008
Email me here: http://definingterms.com/contact/
http://definingterms.com/
http://github.com/aag
I think you've got it backwards. Joe Harrison first published responsiveicons.co.uk and the Smashing Magazine article is a later improvement on it. He didn't use the newer method because it wasn't around when he created the page.
Funny idea, but for the record, there is almost no overlap between the Midwest and the Bible Belt (which is essentially the South):
On the one hand, you do not have a monopoly over land in the sense of copyright. Sure, you control the use of the particular piece of land, but if someone else wants to copy it by reshaping their own land to have the same topography as yours, you have no recourse. Also, if someone wants to make a derivative work, like a map, they are free to do so. In this sense, the land is in the public domain.
On the other hand, you already have indefinite government granted monopoly of creative works in the sense of land ownership. You can write a novel, print it, bind it, and put it in a drawer. As long as you just have the one copy and don't give it to anyone else, the government will protect your right to exclusive usage and ownership of the work. In this sense, the book is protected property like land.
Where the equivalence falls apart is when you want to sell or transfer the property. If you sell your land, you have no say in what the new owners do with it. If you sell a book, you expect to be able to control what the new owners do with it. This is why this comparison is not very useful.
Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/stylish/
Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...
Jim Myers began breeding a plant he now calls “The O.P.,”
which stands for “open-pollinated.” Until then, his broccoli
were either hybrids or inbreds, created by a process of
narrowing the genetics until one select mother is bred with
one select father to create a single, most desirable combination
of genes. The O.P., by contrast, is the result of a
horticultural orgy. Myers began with twenty-three different
broccoli hybrids and inbreds, including some of the lines
behind the exserted-head trait. He let insects cross-pollinate
them en masse, and the resulting plants were crossed at random
again—and again, and again, four generations in a row. He then
sent germplasm to farmers around the country, had them grow it
in their fields, and send back the seed they collected. Over
the winter, Myers bred it in another greenhouse orgy, then
sent it back to farmers. For six years, he repeated this process.
The broccoli evolved in two ways simultaneously. The
back-and-forth of the breeding scrambled the plants’ genetics,
making the germplasm wildly diverse. It also let the environment
whittle away at individual genes. For instance, plants without
pest resistance produced less seed or simply died, reducing
their presence in the gene pool. When it was hot, plants that
could tolerate heat produced more seed, increasing their
presence. Survival of the fittest.
In the seventh year, Myers sent most of the seed back to the
farmers—just gave it to them, without licenses, royalties or
restrictions. The idea was that each farmer would adapt that
dynamic gene pool to his or her farm’s particular climate and
conditions, selecting the best plants every year to refine the
population. In other words, they could breed it themselves. In
time, each would end up with his or her own perfect broccoli.
The beauty of the O.P. is that rather than challenge the
intellectual-property system, it inherently rejects the concept
of ownership. It contains many of the desirable genetics of
Myers’s commercial broccoli lines, but in a package that is
designed to be shared, not owned. Because it is open-pollinated,
not a hybrid, its seeds can be saved by any farmer. And because
it is genetically diverse, it would be difficult to pin down
with a patent. Even if someone did claim to own it, because each
new seedling is a little different, that claim would be all but
impossible to enforce. In this case, the plant’s natural
instinct to mate, multiply, change—to evolve—isn’t an impediment
at all. Rather, it is a central reason why people would want to
grow it in the first place.
Is there an equivalent anti-patent strategy for software?
PHP -> Yii
I don't think I am. Something can be generally accepted as payment for goods and services without it being legal tender.
> But in any case, you can just travel to the Utah
That article is about coins produced by the US mint, not lumps of gold. And even so, the article says, "so far, it is hard to find anyone who is using gold or silver to buy anything."
Gold is not generally accepted as payment for goods and services in any culture that I know of (excluding jewelry and metal stores, of course). I'd be genuinely interested to hear about places where you can still take a lump of gold to a store and pay with it.
hey guys, you are not understanding us, we are not
understanding what you say as well, and it is hard to find
people that, once your understanding limits are obvious,
will try to slow down the peace of the conversation. Often
even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same
sentence repeated the same at speed of light.
Making these changes to your speech in real time is a difficult skill that must be cultivated and practiced. I would encourage native speakers to work at this skill, as it can make a big difference. I was once speaking to a couple of Russians and an American from the same region of the US as me. The Russians said they could understand me easily, but had difficulty understanding the other American. The difference was that I was making an effort to speak more clearly for them.
I use K-9 Mail on Android with Fastmail. They both support IMAP IDLE, so you get immediate push notifications of new messages.
For others who have made it this far down into the thread: the "study" that papsosouid linked to controls for years experience and also probably hours worked, but still concluded that there's a wage gap.
http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-wage-gap/women-...
The text of your link says that "the gender wage gap disappears for most positions". How is that not the opposite of the graph and the data?
http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-wage-gap/job-di...
It shows that men make more than women in 11/12 common professions and women make more than men in 0/12. Again, this is the opposite of the text of your link (and of your assertion).
Did I miss something?
In a legal sense, this is patently false in every country I know of. Even ignoring the point others have made that theft is not copyright infringement under the law, the assertion is false. Every country I know of has exceptions to copyright law. In the US it's called Fair Use, in many Commonwealth nations it's called Fair Dealing, in Germany it's just called "Limitations on Copyright" (Schranken des Urheberrechts). In every case, the creator's wishes are not absolute.
But more interesting to me is that we have taken a purely legal concept that was completely new just 303 years ago and turned it into a broadly accepted moral imperative. Those with a vested interest have succeeded in tying this new legal concept to an ancient moral wrong, that of theft. And they have been so successful at this, that many people would dismiss the distinction as semantic quibbling. To me, this is a fascinating sociological and philosophical phenomenon.
For anyone else who is interested in this cultural history, I highly recommend "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars" by William Patry.
The second link of my little chain is this company called Scott Bader,
a plastics company founded by Ernest Bader, a Swiss Quaker immigrant to
England before the First World War. He's now about eighty-five. Ernest
Bader was penniless when he started in England. He said, All my life I
will have to work for others. What a dreadful system. Well, it didn't
work out like that. He was an entrepreneur and he had a business and in
1951 he suddenly woke up and said, I am now doing to all these people what
I suffered from when it was done to me. I am not going to go out of this
life with this feeling. No, I must do something. So he got in touch with
various people, including myself, and said, I want to put this on a basis
that I as a Quaker and a pacifist believe in. I don't believe in what I
am doing. And so we worked very hard and hammered out a constitution for
this firm. Ernest Bader said, No, I don't want to have ownership of this
company, and so all the capital, except 10 percent, was vested in the
commonwealth, which was set up for this purpose as a limited company. The
equity doesn't lie anymore with Ernest Bader, it lies with that
commonwealth, and everybody who works for a certain length of time becomes
a member of the commonwealth. Legally speaking, the commonwealth is the
owner of the operating company. At first the family retained 10 percent
founder's share, so arranged that they had a majority, not with the
intention of using it but as a last resort. Because it is jolly difficult
to build something up but it is very easy to ruin it.
[...]
It was not until 1963, that is, twelve years later, that we felt it worked.
The founder's shares were also put into the general pocket of the
commonwealth, so it is the administration of the commonwealth that owns
the thing.
Scott Bader still exists and is still owned and run by the employees:
I think that's incorrect. I think this would be infringement due to it being considered a public performance, not commercial distribution. As the copyright act says, "A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication."
The MPAA also describes the situation as a public performance issue:
http://www.mpaa.org/contentprotection/public-performance-law
Do you know of any cases where a public performance was prosecuted as a commercial distribution case?
My experience, as a native English speaker who has learned German as an adult, is that different stages in language learning benefit from different kinds of study. There have been times where memorizing grammar rules have been enormously helpful to me, others where reading a lot is what I needed, and still others where holes in my vocabulary were holding me back. After a certain level of proficiency, the only new thing you encounter in the language is unknown words and phrases, so it makes sense to focus on learning them.
> Words in one language do not have a one-to-one mapping with words in any other language.
As you have mainly studied non-European languages, this might be more true in your experience than for those who are focusing on European languages. There are certainly many words that map one-to-one between German and English, especially in common usage.
What I like about the author's technique is that it seems like a smart way of priming the pump for real and detailed learning: when he encounters a new word in the text, he has a general idea of what it means from the definition, but he can sharpen that meaning with the particulars of the context where he finds it. Otherwise, he might get only the vaguest sense of what a word means from context, or have no clue at all.
This is an interesting idea that I haven't heard before. In what ways has copyright law governed the distribution of objects when no copying is involved?
"Each upgrade license applies to only one PC and you can install the upgrade only on PCs that have a valid base license and one of the following operating systems: Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP (SP3)."
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/terms-condition...
During the upgrade process, you have the option of reformatting the hard drive and doing a "clean install", but it must be on the same disk that already has Windows installed on it.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-w...
I tend to lean toward the cynical interpretation.
Here are the Q1 2012 numbers:
PC sales [1]: 88.9 million
iPad sales [2]: 11.8 million
About 13% as many iPad sales as PC sales. While the iPad sales are impressive, it doesn't seem like PCs are dying yet.