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Picture the future. As StCredZero suggests, the unleashing of robots into society will raise privacy and other legal questions. The questions can in part be answered with devices that resemble the end-user license agreements we see on software today. Robot "terms of service" will be one tool for regulating robot bad behavior or unwanted spying. http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/01/robot-surveillance-contracts.html

One of the most common features of Ron Paul's economic reasoning is to regularly use the concepts of inflation and exchange rates as if they were the same thing -- a mistake which no one with any knowledge of economics would make.

The dollar has lost like 50% of its value to the euro; if that were to be explained by inflation, then prices in this country would have to have doubled during the same period, which obviously is not the case.

If the federal reserve created money to finance government spending, then the government wouldn't owe anything at the end of the day. Obviously this isn't true.

If you think they haven't been printing to finance military and empire, among other things, you're deluding yourself.

I would appreciate you input in any case if you would be so kind.

all the best,

drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

"open source = source code is made available"

That part was a quote from the parent I was replying to.

""Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:" ... followed by a 10 point list of compliance criteria."

Yup, I agree, So the MS offering is not open source in my book. Even though I prefer to speak in terms of Free Software and not in terms of Open Source Software.

So, open source is much more than just "open source = source code is made available". Do we agree? I think we do and you missed the fact that I was quoting something to disagree with it.

all the best,

drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

MMOG companies are doing this too.

"Property tax is the most onerous of all taxes. You don't pay income tax unless you make money, you don't pay sales tax unless you have money to spend, but if you don't have money for property tax you can lose* your home."

In my country, we don't pay property tax on unimproved land, only on improved land / property. I kind of like that setup myself. I have often thought of buying some out of the way acreage in the US wilderness, but the idea of paying property tax on land that I just want to sit on for a possible rainy day is not appealing. I hear talk of being able to put a few cows on the land or some other tricks to get out of the tax, but my brain does not want to deal with the games.

all the best,

drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

"Simple: The creator/owner sets a price for the intellectual property, and is taxed based on that price. If they want to change the price, they have to back-date taxes for 3 years. If a person wants to buy the intellectual property, it must be up for grabs for a certain multiple of the price the creator sets."

Bingo!

Can I get your comments on refinements to this idea here:

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts-on-copyright-offensive.html

all the best,

drew

"How do you appraise the value of a copyrighted work?"

Let the copyright holder set the value and build in some checks to keep them honest. Give works with Free licenses a pass on the tax, consider the license they give to the public to be their contribution to the public good instead of the tax.

See: http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts-on-copyright-offensive.html

all the best,

drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

"How do you appraise the value of a copyrighted work?"

Let the copyright holder set the value and build in some checks to keep them honest. Give works with Free licenses a pass on the tax, consider the license they give to the public to be their contribution to the public good instead of the tax.

See: http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts-on-copyright-offensive.html

all the best,

drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

It's unfortunate that the central issue among commenters here isn't that Wales may or may not have abused his expense account (and really, he'd be far from the first to do so), it's that this puts the Rachel Marsden editing scuffle from a few months back into an a new light:

http://talkcontribs.blogspot.com/2007/06/whitewash-on-wikipedia.html

Now, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here (was work done on the articles in question done before or after work was done on Wales?) but this kind of bending of the facts to suit a Wales (or anyone with responsibility at Wikipedia) really gives Wikipedia a black eye. If a normal media executive distorted facts about someone he/she was personally involved with, there would be a call from directors for a resignation if for no other reason than to save the organization's reputation. Between this and the overstock.com fiasco, it might be time for some resignations to happen before their credibility is overly damaged.

Singularity Installation Tips & Screenshots at singularityos.blogspot.com

"open source = source code is made available"

http://www.opensource.org/

They may have coinded tghe term, they certainly promoted it and made it polular. They disagree.

all the best,

drew

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

that the person involved was more conscientious than this guy: http://youhavegotthewrongperson.blogspot.com/

She will NOT have more delegates (even with Super Delegates thrown in):

http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/

"You question whether this is a sustainable business model for the rest of the artists, since you postulate that this is a one time reaction to a novel idea."

Some possibly relevant info:

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-baseballs/
Derek Jeter Autographed Baseball
List Price: $647.35
Our Price: $474.99

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-footballs/
Peyton Manning Autographed Football
List Price: $588.50
Our Price: $467.50

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-basketballs/
LeBron James Autographed Basketball
List Price: $1,412.37
Our Price: $1,049.00

Jordan's is more.

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-golf-balls/
Tiger Woods Autographed Dubai Panoramic Framed 12x30 Photograph
List Price: $1,522.04
Our Price: $1,086.08

I think there is a lot of room for sales with this formula.

all the best,

drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

This is already fixed in m5-rc15 which was released yesterday...

Yes but that was an OUTRIGHT LIE on their part, TubeSteak. Didn't you read our reply?

RICO, Oregon version previously discussed here. If you check the links and read you will see the case has been given class action status.

Who should I trust? Some blogger that writes a sensationalist article that uses a star wars reference and can't be bothered to read his own sources, or a wiki article that lists proper sources? Decisions, decisions ...

It depends ... if Jimbo himself was involved in the edits ... that $325 per bottle champaigne he's charged to Wikipedia may have clouded his judgment. like this, etc, etc.

Who should I trust? Some blogger that writes a sensationalist article that uses a star wars reference and can't be bothered to read his own sources, or a wiki article that lists proper sources? Decisions, decisions ...

It depends ... if Jimbo himself was involved in the edits ... that $325 per bottle champaigne he's charged to Wikipedia may have clouded his judgment. like this, etc, etc.

I remember seeing this demonstrated by a traffic simulation program run from a box of cards loaded into an IBM1800 in the 70's (The IBM1800 was a big old computer see http://2eo.blogspot.com/ )

Learn to read. The studies all show that not wearing a seatbelt also increases your likelyhood of serious injury, as opposed to just walking away.

The money you save by people dying who wouldn't if they were belted is not enough to compensate for those who have injuries that are more serious than they would have been if they had buckled up.

Also,

most of the other philosophy majors I know have moved on to law school (the career prospects for law students are pretty good I've gathered),

So, philosophy is a real career-boster, huh? Guess not. There's an oversupply of lawyers. Why not ask why more lawyers are moving to "inactive status" (read: unemployed), and the real elephant in the room - the trend to outsource legal work to India.

here's the warning about outsourcing in 2005

Outsourcing of Legal Work

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, ominously entitled "More U.S. Legal Work Moves to India's Low-Cost Lawyers," provides an eerie forecast of what the near future may bring to the legal field. The authors report on how "increasingly, squads of experienced but inexpensive lawyers based in India are doing things ranging from patent applications to divorce papers to legal research for Western clients." The article mentions legal outsourcing firms with operations in India ranging from Pangea3 and ALMT Synergies to the Dallas law firm Bickel & Brewer. While the legal tasks are currently confined to mostly non-legal or paralegal work, this could quickly change. Legal outsourcing to India is currently focused on repetitive activity such as databasing the detailed documentation required to meet regulatory compliance requirements or databasing large amounts of evidence for complex trial work. While currently it is estimated that 12,000 legal jobs are already outsourced world-wide, more and more are certainly in the works. Forrester Research predicts that the numbers will increase dramatically to 29,000 in 2008, with most of the growth being to India. At this rate, it won't be long before the document reviewing tasks that my friend, a recent graduate from a top five Ivy League law school and chief editor of the law review, does at a prestigious D.C. law firm will be in danger of being outsourced to overseas as well.

Here's the result 2 years later

Document Review Being Outsourced

Finding the document review market a little slow? While you were busy busting your hump and clicking away on the "Anita" project, Kirkland was coming up with a way to outsource your jobs:

Jones Day, Kirkland Send Work to India to Cut Costs (Update1)

Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Bruce Masterson, chief operating officer of Socrates Media LLC, asked his outside counsel to customize a residential lease for all 50 U.S. states in 2003. The firm's estimate: about $400,000. He rejected that price tag and hired QuisLex, in Hyderabad, India, which did it for $45,000.

"It was good quality," said Masterson, whose Chicago-based company publishes legal forms on the Internet. "We've been working together ever since."

Clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India, where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The firms are reacting to a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Boston- based Forrester Research Inc.

"The objective is to have only the most valuable people in London or New York, and the others in India, China or Columbus, Ohio," said Robert Profusek, co-head of the mergers and acquisitions practice at Jones Day in New York, who sends low-end work to t

And as to transitional fossils - here's my favorite, one you can even partially test on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.)

It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over 11 separate stages have been found. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.

Common descent explains this, and many other similar things, handily. I'm still waiting on creationist explanations. Can you point me to one?

http://anangrydakotademocrat.blogspot.com/2007/10/obamas-goal-eliminate-all-nuclear.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/us/politics/02obama.html

As well as a speech he made last week that I cannot find online at the moment. He said 'greatly reduce' at first, then alluded that the US should eliminate them to 'lead the way'.

Then again, posting truth gets you modded as Flamebait around here.

Tim Brown has has many interesting things to say about daylight savings.

It does indicate "horrible project management" when errors like this jeopardise a multi-billion dollar, 5 year project.

Besides, there's plenty of other evidence of horrible project management of Vista.

No it's not. It's just more Microsoft marketing-speak. For example:

The new video and audio drivers have nothing to do with DRM.

No, if Microsoft doesn't support it, we can ALL kiss DRM'd high-def media good-bye, and good riddance. Microsoft had been a key supporter and booster of computer DRM despite their customers' distaste for it. Don't try to pretend they are anything but complicit partners with the studios in this.

The blog finally admitted that it was fake: http://encounterheidi.blogspot.com/2007/05/here-is-catch-i-am-totally-not-real.html . I love how the students who created this blog chose the ditsy valley girl stereotype to convey their message, and stuck with the persona 'till the bitter end: "Here is the catch- I am totally not real!"...the bolding was me.

Then look at ours. We are only getting started (two months active), but here we are in our beginnings. We are doing it on our own, and with flac no less. http://thecedarstwo.blogspot.com/

Freud is indeed modern. Before Freud, "psychology" consisted of talking to a priest, or some slightly less primitive interaction. Freud's own models of the mind have been updated, but they're extremely productive for most patients, and his overall technique and basic model of the interaction of conscious, subconscious and behavior are completely validated - even if it all still has a long way to go.

To argue with Freud, you're citing (without bothering to link or credit) some random blog post, and then merely asserting that the conflict between sex and death drives is both his entire system, and wrong?

I think you need a shrink. Tom Cruise, is that you?

Scratch that... Turns out everybody has done a last supper pose with their cast: http://culturepopped.blogspot.com/2007/04/suddenly-last-supper.html
Most notable lately would be BSG and House

Maybe if you have money to throw.

As long as it runs Vista it's a good laptop! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

A regulated industry has to justify the prices it charges. Some of the justification revolves around maintenance and capital costs. In other words, the industry is rewarded for spending on infrastructure and upkeep. An unregulated industry has a different motivation. All it has to do is spend enough to keep the customers from defecting, if they can, en masse. In other words, they will provide the lowest quality service the customers will put up with. Any other course of action would be financial suicide.

In the telecom industry, the result of deregulation is customer annoyance. In the aviation industry, on the other hand, deregulation produces greater danger to the flying public. In fact, air travelers are indicating that they have had more than they can stomach. http://strandedpassengers.blogspot.com/ We are seeing a grass roots movement that is forcing legislatures to enact legislation. As it stands, an airline can confine passengers forever in a plane on the tarmac. Even the cops can't do that legally (ok but I realize that they do it anyway). They can also make a healthy profit selling your lost luggage for more than they paid you for losing it.

The crap we have to put up with from our airlines, telcos and ISPs will only stop when the customers rise up and force their congress critters to act. (This turned out to be a rant, didn't it?)

I agree. Finland needs bad publicity because is on its way to become a fascist state. It's already to 80% there. http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/09sep/finlandpolstate2006.html http://india.indymedia.org/en/2003/09/7503.shtml http://inhiit.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html http://piraattiliitto.org/uutiset/2008/01/ruotsin-ifpi-perustelee-sik-l-ist-lex-karpelaa-suomen-hyvill-kokemuksilla And a more personal story from a friend:http://www.youtube.com/user/Seaniehunter http://seanhunter.00home.com/index.htm http://seanhunter.00home.com/cgi-bin/framed/2522/pages/obvious.htm

Obama - through sheer audacity of hope and lefty rhetoric - actually can bring the dead back to life.

Actually, it's because he's the Messiah - naturally!

I remember previous discussions here on this topic mentioning that a lot of drug development funding currently comes from the government. Assuming the private research disappeared completely, there would still be pharmaceutical research, albeit less.

I am not sufficiently familiar with the topic to argue about it myself, but some googling found a blog post with arguments similar to those I have seen here in the past (with references).

Why, at the used car dealership of course.

The sad thing is that he got barely 11k after nearly 2 years of slaving away for a verdict. Now he still has to collect. It's great that he won, but what kind of system do we have that awards RIAA 6 figures against filesharing housewives, but virtually nothing against a company that ripped him off, lied about it, and was caught red-handed. http://copyrightorwrong.blogspot.com/2008/02/sometimes-little-guy-wins.html

Any negative comments about Microsoft or it's products should also be added to the "filters" guys! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

The "group" I played with got a little carried away and we killed a Milkman, that's when we decided to stop playing! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

You used the wrong tool people! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

The 'Ol OpenSource Trap! The International Organization for Standardization votes again next week on wether or not to approve our Office Open XML document formats. My PI, Jack Stone informed me last week that the votes in favor will fall short of approval again! His report said that we were going to fail spectacularly agian, because most of the members of the board thought of Microsoft as (I quote:) an "Insular, self-obsessive, paranoid entity which cares nothing for standards or interoperability even amoung it's own applications!" They simplly don't realise that getting OOXML approved as an international standard is the lynch-pin of my whole strategy to undermine the entire OpenSource movement! Then the answer came to me! "Just lie to them!" That is what the big announcements were about today! I paraded out all of the Microsoft top brass and had them say that we are ready to work with the Free-freaks and OpenSource morons! The press is eating it up too! "Microsoft finally learning to let 'X' talk to 'Y'" "Microsoft to share information" "Microsoft opens door to open-source software community " "Microsoft Pledges To Open Up Software" WOW! I'm a hero again! How can they vote against me now? I have repented brother! This poor standards-sinner has seen the light! Halleuah! As an unexpected side effect even those filthy, greasy-haired, garlic-smelling, bad-teethed, snail-eating EU judges who keep ruling against us are believing us! lol HAWWWW GLORY! hehehehe http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

I don't really understand any of this but I am commenting anyways, as I always do! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

This kind of stuff must be stopped! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

He is indeed an idiot! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/