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Freedom fruit only grows on the tree of liberty.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Perhaps the Red Cross can help you make a withdrawl from your account?

No, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance (--Thomas Jefferson). In that regard, we citizens of America have failed horrendously.

This is but an interesting sideline, however, since I believe what you were trying to say is that the price of safety and security (or at least, "the appearance of...") is freedom, since we seem to have offered our freedom up wholesale for TSA's security theater.

I said essentially drown. The point was that oxygen using life didn't crowd out anaerobic life, the oxygen produced by clorophyll based life forced it to places with still no oxygen or killed it. If drowning doesn't do it for you as an analogy instead of disrupted enzyme production, then I'm glad everyone was able to see the technically correct explanation.

Breaking things down into simpler ideas that more people can understand is a good thing but you run into the danger of oversimplifying and creating bad analogies that serve to confuse the less technically-minded. Drowning is definitely a bad analogy, saying that too much oxygen poisoned these organism is much more accurate and just as easy to understand. It also allows people to better understand that some of the organisms might be able to tolerate some of the poison better than others.

Your statement has been commonly accepted scientific lore but the actual forests bursting into flame thing is based on one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness.

It's actually based on the finding of charred remains of plant matter and correlating it with global oxygen levels:

The diversification of Paleozoic fire systems and fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen concentration

The forests don't just burst into flame but higher levels of oxygen do make it easier for fires to start and spread from events such as lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions. There is a TON more scientific methodology to this hypothesis than "one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness".

Anyways, my main point is that we have to be careful in how we summarize and simplify complicated concepts. There were a number of things in the original post that I replied to that were a little misleading, as you said yourself:

I'm a programmer but just happen to be reading Nick Lane's books on this. If I get something wrong please biologists jump in and correct me.

I am a chemist, not a biologist, but I have a solid grasp on combustion chemistry and the use of oxygen by organisms. It's good that you are sharing what you have read but simplifying these concepts can be tricky at times. I'm just trying to clarify some of the statements so that people aren't mislead by an overzealous summary. Remember what Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -T. S. Elliot

"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal." -Pablo Picasso

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -Igor Stravinsky

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." -Steve Jobs

"Good coders code, great coders reuse." -anonymous

You don't get it....

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." Mel Brooks

One of the main benefits of copyright, is that it allows someone creating a product to spread cost of creation onto many consumers, rather than having to find one customer willing to pay e.g. $300 million upfront to see "Lord of the rings" as the first viewer.

Slave labor built the great pyramids in Giza. I'm not too sad that such projects are no longer common. Instead I am glad to have billions of dwellings that suit single (living) families, and glad that people are not forced to serve a centralized master with grand, but stupidly inefficient visions.

At any rate, Assurance Contracts have nothing to do with finding "one" customer. They have everything to do with finding a finite number of customers interested enough in banding together to fund your work however, while the rest of society is left (rightly) out of your transaction.

The good thing about your suggestion, is that everyone who supports it can do it today.

No, not precisely. Today the funds are dry because of the money average people pay to have themselves hogtied by Big Media. On top of that, I cannot produce independent content without the exponential expense of sufficiently obscuring my sources as to prevent the liability of third parties demanding a slice of all possible revenue.. or just squashing my production if that is the level of control they desire.

Feel free to make your 100% genuinely original magnum opus. When someone sues you claiming it's too similar to their work you have never heard of, you'll see where I am coming from. And don't go thinking you can just rely on public domain fables as a backbone for your work, as there no longer is such a thing.

Aside from the cost of connecting with your audience without using any trace of material they have ever actually heard of before, you have the expense of retaining legal counsel for the inevitable lawsuits as you grow.

No wonder a body cannot find sufficient grass-roots funding for projects anything like I am recommending. Well screw it then, we'll just buy the LOTR book. and Pay to watch the movie in theaters. Pay again to have it on DVD, oops forgot the extended edition, oops now we need it in Blu Ray. How much again for the ringtone?

I think the editors or owners of Slashdot are either 1) Trying to increase viewership by appealing to a lowest denominator (Star go boom! Big word scary! Chemicals are mean! Vroom vroom car!) or 2) Trying to deliberately weaken the readership for purposes I can only speculate that. That second theory is bolstered by the clumsy rolling out of 'features' during the past few weeks - breaking things that once worked, adding new features that don't, and in general doing their best to make the site almost more trouble to read than it's worth.

Does anyone else have any suggestions or inside information? It's almost a meme now that 'Slashdot is self-sabotauging', but lately it's just gotten noticibly worse.

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

- Napolean Bonaparte

Just because people are more than happy to break the law, they can now bully copyright holders into paying unfairly low prices.

I have a better idea. How about if content producers were paid for delivering a product or service. You know, since that is how most of our global economy works.

You see, experiential media is simply not a commodity. It would do you well to stop pretending it is. If you want to somehow make money by producing experiential content, then I wish you the best of luck finding a good business model. The one you are accustomed to is irretrievably broken. It reeks of fail to sell "copies" of recorded media as if they were a scarce resource. They are not scarce, they are infinitely copyable as an inevitable consequence that experiencing the media copies it by definition.

Big Media got away with this for about a century (and books before them for several centuries earlier) simply because copying was difficult enough that copyright was enforceable in a "good enough for production" sense of the word. Now that is no longer true, the badly built boat has capsized and you can't arrest the water for flooding in through the battered hull.

Now, you talk about entitlement. YES, I feel entitled to be able to experience my life. To re-experience parts of my life indefinitely.. in memory or via digital appliance. To archive what I see and hear. To share that archive with others, or mix it into a collage of "original" work to share with others.

Just because your work happens to impinge upon my life — be it because of public exhibition on the radio, or because a friend shares a copy with me — does not sanely give you the right to a chunk of my wallet, any more than your reading this post gives me a right to a chunk of yours.

So far as "being able to make money", well I'm so sorry that your beloved extortion racket has outlived it's profitability. Just because you used to make money charging people for the cost of marketing to them limitless facsimiles of a single performance does not justify eroding our freedoms on our own electronic devices, hampering the innovation of digital storage mediums and communal media sharing services (from bittorrent to Youtube to facebook), and strangling any creative forces that choose not to sell their souls to your oligopoly.

Our founding fathers gave you an inch when they included copyright and patent law into the US constitution (which other nations including the UK have then mimicked in their own parliamentary fashions), and it is safe to say that you have consumed your mile quite effectively. That inch ought never have been given back then, but it is even easier to live without in the nano-priced global publishing ocean we live in today. We should completely eliminate copyright and patent law. Trademark is fine, but the former two have proven themselves to be thoroughly detrimental to the free market.

Morally the scroogey pirates win and the greedy industry loses. In a practical sense we pirates also win (the unethical law happens to be utterly unenforceable) and as long as we act in (financially advantaged) solidarity, we can force the law to collapse so that we win legally as well. It is simply a matter of time and patience.

In the meantime, enjoy your life and don't let anyone put a toll booth on your senses. Yar, har, fiddle-dee-dee!

A pet peeve of mine: "Deja Vu" has a perfectly good meaning, it doesn't need to be doubled up with "all over again". Yogi Berra used the phrase with his tongue firmly placed in his cheek, laughing at the stupidity in which people use and abuse the English language. http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1304

Domain Name: GOLDENCASINO.COM

Registrant:
        Commonwealth of Kentucky
        Michael Brown (secretaryofjustice@ky.gov)

I call him Gamblor, and it's time to snatch our mothers from his neon claws!

...

But speaking of constitutionalist, how about this? "Montana Secretary of State Brad Johnson's Comment in the Washington Times"

In the District of Columbia, et al. v. Dick Anthony Heller case the Supreme Court made the right ruling. The Founding Fathers of the USA above all feared government and knew the only way citizens could keep a reign on government was if they were armed. Beware the armed citizen sort of thing. On this Thomas Jefferson wrote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Falcon

Something of a paradox. But easily solved: http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/4192

I thought Picasso said that.

Then again, maybe he stole it.

I'm sure it's a popular topic at joint Corvo-Cetacean science conferences.

I deal with the .Net framework. It's by Microsoft. You can imagine the API bloat it has. (The Win32 API is worse though).

When it comes to language and library design (and, IMHO, program and OS design), I am reminded of the quote:

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." — Antoine de Saint-Exuper (source)

I believe you are thinking of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein:

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1349

for the Reich is to have PATRIOT III include language to require logging and storage of unencrypted copies of all data that has an endpoint on said ISP's server. All your POPS belong to us..... For the guy a few posts earlier who asked the obvious question about when we're going to get riots in the street, watering Jefferson's "tree of liberty": the two obvious answers are that 1) thanks to the efforts of those who really run the country, consumers (formerly known as "the people" or, in even more archaic terms, "voters") have been relieved of the burdens of "critical thinking" and "political dynamism" since about 1974, and 2) just in case, the Best Congress Money Can Buy has been funding military semi-lethal weapons and domestic deployments (Posse Comitatus? The Decider says it's "just a scrap of paper") since shortly after the events in Item 1. Short version: The United States of America was a Constitutional republic from 4 March 1789 to sometime around November 1974; a hybrid state from 1974 to 12 December 2000, and a fascist kleptocracy since that time. This is just another warhead tossed onto the pile to see how high the rubble of freedom can be bounced.

The old quote about never assigning to conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by incompetance comes to mind (Machievelli?)

Correction: Napolean (mea culpa): http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2308

I think you missed the point, although you're very, very close.

In your earlier post, you say: I guess liberty and options come only at a very high price. So, I elucidated: of course, they do (at what point does citing Jefferson mean I was making any reference to George Bush, or to something dealing with America only?). I also pointed out that liberty has never entailed a lack of consequences for your actions. If you wish to steal bread because you are hungry, you had best be prepared to be arrested if you should be caught, and to suffer whatever penalties come with petty theft. That the mercy and patience of others may allow you to avoid those things does not, in fact, give you the right to do them. But this is still a bit misleading. There are reasonable justifications for stealing bread, like starvation.

You said, just now, I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt the patriots gave their life for my country so I can but songs on iTunes. And, you know what? You're right! They didn't! (Or I assume not, unless yours were astonishingly farsighted.) Presumably, they didn't give their lives so you could steal it, either. (Or are you liberating it? These semantic differences always cause me such trouble.) If it's important enough that you think you should be allowed to break the law to do it, surely you'll be willing to pay any fines or do any jail time that's entailed as punishment?

I'll let you have the last word here, if you want it: I don't intend to respond further, but I do want to say one last thing before I go:

I'm not sure I could care less about karma points, but it's a nice bit of ad hominem, and a really keen way to dodge the point. Hey, you're not making a serious argument in good faith: you're just karma-whoring! Of course, I won't be able to make a meaningful distinction between the two, but I'll be sure to apply this sort of trick the next time I go fishing for karma points. (Might I suggest you put Schopenhauer back on the shelf?) Even if that had been what I was doing, would it have justified your equating the ability to copyright violation with essential liberty?

The business of America is BUSINESS. Leave your morality at the door.

Isn't Nintendo's inability to keep it on the shelf a sign that the excitement is still there? If the excitement were gone, would stores still sell out within days of recieving a shipment?

Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.
- Yogi Berra

I think it's far more likely that Earth is another planet's Hell. Alien civilizations haven't visited us for the same reason that you don't spend family vacations in Supermax.

Too bad our collective self-centered arrogance prevents us from considering this.

This makes sense from a mechanical, product, 'make things work' standpoint... but it doesn't really hold, for me, for works of art.

"A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

For some reason, this reminds me of the Douglas adams quote...

Although I think you meant alpha-release, unless you really meant we were made out of beer... ;-)

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi

QuoteDB

Has Microsoft changed their way of thinking, or will Windows One Care just be another facet of the continuing Windows problem?

http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/3500

* If god created all things, then god created sex as it is and god created porn.

you have this firmly held belief that the rest of the world owes you something?

No, his point is that he's not being paid for this, so people should stop treating him like an employee. Part of the freedom of writing FOSS code is that you don't have to bend over backwards to accomodate people, because they aren't paying customers. If somebody thinks some software I wrote should have some feature, or should work in a certain way, and whines because it doesn't, I can tell them to take a hike, because I provide the software at my whim and convenience. If I'm a good, conscientious developer, then I'll listen and add their request to the "future directions" list, but I certainly don't have a mandate to do so.

To paraphrase Al Capone, "You can get better support with polite e-mail and a $100 check than with polite e-mail alone".

http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2283

See if you can understand the implications?

Question one: Does someone that refuses to implicate himself in a government witchhunt prove he is guilty?

Does someone that denies he is involved in the communist party mean he is guilty?

The point is that any american that is worth his salt SHOULD deny telling the government anything for fear that failure to state his position on something will be construed as anything other than defending his constutuional rights. Check www.papersplease.org for more information.

Erik

Hold on a sec. I am not butchering anything. I obtained and confirmed the quote from several independent sources. You only provide one. While yours does look like it has been researched (or copied) by that wiki author in a little more detail, that doesn't guarantee it is more accurate. For the sake of argument that yours is correct since it really isn't important at all to the point.

What is perhaps more important than the actual wording of the quote is the point: that trading rights and freedoms for security is generally not a good idea. I don't think anybody would have interpretted it as mean any right or freedom starting from 100% no restrictions. That's just silly.

But you are completely bypassing the point I was making for the sake of trying too be geekier about the correct quote. Millions died protecting the rights to not have government monitoring them over reading books on Winnie the Pooh, or Islam, or whatever (as an example). That 3000 more have died and everyone turns 180 degrees on these issues, without even requiring the government to demonstrate the necessity or usefulness, is a travesty and says a lot about the self-centeredness of today's society in America and the ability of propaganda to scare the crap out of them and just start handing over their rights.

I'd rather live with a 1/100,000 chance (3000 out of 300 million) of being killed by a terrorist on American soil than have 300 million people lose rights like this. And that terrorist risk also doesn't take into account the bungling of the intelligence under the existing system in 2001 nor in the increase in security that could be done without reducing rights and freedoms. It hasn't been demonstrated that these measures are even necessary. In some cases, the response security measures (and potentially violations of rights) are even counter-productive towards securing against terrorism.

...if it seems necessary.

The people studying bones look at a myriad factors. They study density and structure in the bones themselves, wear patterns and tooth-marks (or whatever), state of articulation, any adjacent indications of soft tissue or the like, chemical residues in the bones (including, in several cases, complete blood cells and still-flexible cartilage: a flares-fireworks-and-sirens tip-off that we really are barking up the wrong tree in several fields of scientific endeavour, but one which has been largely blipped over), features in bones of similar appearance, location, orientation, lots of stuff. It's not at all slapdash in that regard, but it is all still basically a guess. Often a very educated one, mind you, nevertheless, a guess.

...if it seems necessary.

The people studying bones look at a myriad factors. They study density and structure in the bones themselves, wear patterns and tooth-marks (or whatever), state of articulation, any adjacent indications of soft tissue or the like, chemical residues in the bones (including, in several cases, complete blood cells and still-flexible cartilage: a flares-fireworks-and-sirens tip-off that we really are barking up the wrong tree in several fields of scientific endeavour, but one which has been largely blipped over), features in bones of similar appearance, location, orientation, lots of stuff. It's not at all slapdash in that regard, but it is all still basically a guess. Often a very educated one, mind you, nevertheless, a guess.

You are a pawn of the fantasies inside your head.

"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence", or even apply Occam's Razor. None of this makes sense compared to the simple truth that some people are nasty and have their own agenda; there is no overarching conspiracy across the generations. Or shall we start discussing the New World Order?

This is what is truly damaging - those who should be helping the fight instead damage it by acting like crackpots. How do you expect to effect any change if unable to convince others?

Stallman said "Your freedom to throw your fist ends at the tip of my nose". Building ordnances are there for a reason, the same that forbids you from tanning in your underwear in the front lawn.
STALLMAN!?!?!?
Try Oliver Wendell Holmes

We're definitely past the first stage, and it sounds as if we've skipped right over the second and third stages with Adobe.

Seriously, we're on the radar screen of a company which has never shown any interest in anything which wasn't strictly proprietary. This isn't even the beginning of the end, but it's a big change in the right direction.

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
-- Albert Einstein

From QuoteDB.com

"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." - attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes

"War does not determine who's right, only who's left" was written by Bertrand Russell, not Mark Twain.

:)