the two sensations could have evolved at differing times. pain would be most useful to prevent damage and the abiltiy to sense an itch is useful for correcting problems such as dry skin, certain chemical exposure etc. pain is associated with injury perhaps cells that sense an itch don't work the same way [no one has lopped off an arm and felt an itch for it after all...]
I don't make such a claim, but one has to be somewhat suspicious that it almost never fails that a detractor has a monetary tie to a Big Oil company. I'm sorry, but that's far more of a conflict of interest than someone getting their money from NSF.
I believe that to be mostly the case, my point however is that it does not preclude the possibility of federal funding being dropped for certain areas of science given their politicised nature. Federal stem cell research as the prime example. My fear is that Bush won't be the last idiot president to decide what branch of science to fund and what won't for political reasons. Ideally the science would be done through anonymous funding as to reduce the possibility of interference.
Except Bush was a denier and yet the people doing research with federal funds held the opposite view of him.
yes that is true however, there have been several claims of political interference by Bush and friends in the sciences.
I trust the climatology community far more than i do Gore because they have actually spent years crunching the data and developing the science whereas Gore has done no more than use AGW as a political springboard. Same as I trust the biochemist community of which I am a member more so than any politician. Scientists should be making the decision not politicians.
it's already been suggested however this makes a decent case for a system with two competing patent offices. one to produce patents and the other invalidates them. give each a financial incentive to defend its position and let them fight it out. if the patent creating office issues a bogus patent and the patent invalidating office catches it, the patent creating office loses funding while the invalidating office gains funding.
that's why Gore should be ignored. He is not in it for the science. Anyway, the effect of a company does not need to be humanity destroying for action to be taken. it just needs to destroy someone else's property [which at the least rising sea levels undoubtably cause] Property rights were once respected to the point that industry could be sued for emitting smoke enough to darken someone else's laundry... The case of damaged property here is many orders of magnitude more substantial.
Why is it ok for one entity to cause damage to the evironment of someone else no matter how severe with few consequences? If this did destroy a species for example and that species was used by another individual for income, wouldn't that be a violation of property rights at the least? how about rising sea levels eroding land away- also property destruction. how do you propose taking that damage into account?
I think the only real debate left is how to reduce carbon emissions/reduce effects of AGW as cheaply as possible. Most of the left tends to support heavy government involvement and the right tends to support either letting the market adapt to the change or harnessing market forces to develop the needed advances to reduce CO2. I have come to be on the side that both accepts the existence of AGW and the likely necessity of using market forces as much as possible to solve the problem.
I know... If you are ethically opposed to governmental action and proposed AGW solutions usually require fairly heavy control over production to some extent it isn't hard to see why someone like that would tend to support private industry rather than any evidence pointing toward government action.
They are guilty of scientific fraud and should be charged as such. 1) everyone involved should face the criminal penalties of fraud 2) the corporations involved should be sued right into the ground by everyone affected in a massive class action lawsuit. The government's job is clear here. Why these guys are not frying for this is a clear indicator that something has gone terribly wrong in our justice/governmental system.
Technically pharma produces said vaccinations so I doubt they would acively try to discourage people from using them. Most of the problem with parents refusing vaccinations has been due to a combination of bad education and distrust of anything the public does not understand. Only a minority knows what vaccines are, how they work and what is in them hence, there is going to be a lot of people weary of using them.
From what I've encountered, the overuse of diagnostics etc. that don't do any real good seems to be the result of a fear of being sued for not doing enough to diagnose/treat the patient. As far as I am concerned such suits should be binding against actual malpractice. That is, failures on the part of the doctor's end that would not be considered a reasonable response. operating on the wrong leg, prescribing a drug that is clearly labeled as being a dangerous allergen to the patient etc..
almost nothing that has been produced in society was for someone else's greater good but rather in exchange for something of value to the producer. The system requires selfishness on the part of essentially everyone involved [pharma to research and produce the drug] the patient to stay reasonably informed and the government to enforce laws against fraud. The real problems arise when the power balance is broken: the government doesn't do its job of going after fraud or big pharma defrauding the patient or the patient using government as a baseball bat to do anything other than its basic purpose- police just laws.
I agree with your points however, be careful not to make the claim that just because big oil funds research means it is biased somehow makes federally funded research unbiased. Especially during the Bush years...
This is precisely why in science, real science, we have the scientific method which requires that experiments/studies etc. be repeatable. All it would take is for these fraudulent claims to be tested and it is over for the fools who tried to usurp the system.
You could say the opposing side has a lot to gain from AGW not being true. After all, the cost of reducing carbon emissions is significant to those who produce the most CO2. The difference between AGW and this nonsense is that *climatologists would have to be wrong [climate models and ice cores etc.] *physicists would have to be wrong [infared absorbsion spectrum of CO2] etc. In short, there would need to be a massive conspiracy of thousands of scientists all in on it.
If every case you describe at the lower levels were taken up to the higher courts, they would most likely be swamped. There is also the fear that the wrong decision at a higher court is far worse than a bad decision at a lower court and considering MS's history in court cases, it may very well be a good idea to discourage taking this to the top for now.
That argument's validity hinges on the assumption that the Swiss government made the decision on the merits of MS' software. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable to question the decision given a possibly cheaper route through FOSS, especially if I were concerned about controlling government waste.
The problem is that this deal quite possibly had nothing to do with any advantages FOSS had over MS but MS's connections. If the Swiss government made the decision for any other reason than technical merits then the Swiss have been done a great disservice.
A far more interesting result would have been if they hadn't been able to detect life on Earth as the inability to do so from such a close distance would make detecting Earth-like life elsewhere in the galaxy a laughable prospect.
I really hope SCII doesn't go the way of Starcraft Ghost... I also wonder how much of the problem is Blizzard simply putting every game but WOW on the back burner until they exhaust the franchise...
Fair Use is not a right. Free speech is a right. Fair Use is a defense against copyright infringement, due to the otherwise chilling affect it would have upon free speech.
And court's can't "strike down" private actions; they simply refuse to recognize them as legally valid.
Fun fact: when you make a contract (like the AP's license), there are three critically important things you should know: 1: Who wrote it. (You or them?) 2: What jurisdiction is covered (Do you just agree that you'd fly out to CA to defend yourself?) 3: What that jurisdiction has said about contracts like yours before.
fair use as you already noted exists because if it did not free speech would often be greatly stifled. what really bothers me about what the AP is doing is that their definition of copyright allows for very little room for criticism using small sections of text. Theoretically with AP's policy of charging for small pieces of text [which in this case DID NOT BELONG TO THEM] they could go after critics for citing anything more than sentence fragments from their stories. fair use may not be a right but its existence is crucial to defending free speech and this development is troubling. with the length of copyright up to 120 years they could bash people for otherwise fair use activities as long as it is profitable to do so.
The system is an utter mess abused by AP and other interests against the public benefit and spirit of copyright law. Copyright exists only because we as a society wish to make a bargain with artists/writers etc. that we grant a limited monopoly on their produced work in exchange for it being released into the public domain at some point. The idea being that both parties form a cooperative symbiosis that gives producers of works a greater incentive to further produce these works. If the producers of these works are acting to destroy competition and abuse these limited monopoly "rights" then there is no reason for said protection from society to exist.
if they can make more by cheating and/or laziness they should be expected to do so. this is not surprising, it is simply the result of millions of years of evolutionary selection- look out for you and yours through means available to you.
considering AP is a company that doesn't allow anything resembling fair use is it really surprising tht they would show the kind of laziness demonstrated here? Assuming some court doesn't strike this nonsense down as a violation of fair use rights, the system is completely broken and should be either reformed greatly or abolished.
Slashdot Mirror
the two sensations could have evolved at differing times. pain would be most useful to prevent damage and the abiltiy to sense an itch is useful for correcting problems such as dry skin, certain chemical exposure etc. pain is associated with injury perhaps cells that sense an itch don't work the same way [no one has lopped off an arm and felt an itch for it after all...]
I believe that to be mostly the case, my point however is that it does not preclude the possibility of federal funding being dropped for certain areas of science given their politicised nature. Federal stem cell research as the prime example. My fear is that Bush won't be the last idiot president to decide what branch of science to fund and what won't for political reasons. Ideally the science would be done through anonymous funding as to reduce the possibility of interference.
yes that is true however, there have been several claims of political interference by Bush and friends in the sciences.
I trust the climatology community far more than i do Gore because they have actually spent years crunching the data and developing the science whereas Gore has done no more than use AGW as a political springboard. Same as I trust the biochemist community of which I am a member more so than any politician. Scientists should be making the decision not politicians.
it's already been suggested however this makes a decent case for a system with two competing patent offices. one to produce patents and the other invalidates them. give each a financial incentive to defend its position and let them fight it out. if the patent creating office issues a bogus patent and the patent invalidating office catches it, the patent creating office loses funding while the invalidating office gains funding.
that's why Gore should be ignored. He is not in it for the science. Anyway, the effect of a company does not need to be humanity destroying for action to be taken. it just needs to destroy someone else's property [which at the least rising sea levels undoubtably cause] Property rights were once respected to the point that industry could be sued for emitting smoke enough to darken someone else's laundry... The case of damaged property here is many orders of magnitude more substantial.
Why is it ok for one entity to cause damage to the evironment of someone else no matter how severe with few consequences? If this did destroy a species for example and that species was used by another individual for income, wouldn't that be a violation of property rights at the least? how about rising sea levels eroding land away- also property destruction. how do you propose taking that damage into account?
Unless they decided to dump the DRM, why would anyone on Slashdot want to buy these?
I think the only real debate left is how to reduce carbon emissions/reduce effects of AGW as cheaply as possible. Most of the left tends to support heavy government involvement and the right tends to support either letting the market adapt to the change or harnessing market forces to develop the needed advances to reduce CO2. I have come to be on the side that both accepts the existence of AGW and the likely necessity of using market forces as much as possible to solve the problem.
I know... If you are ethically opposed to governmental action and proposed AGW solutions usually require fairly heavy control over production to some extent it isn't hard to see why someone like that would tend to support private industry rather than any evidence pointing toward government action.
They are guilty of scientific fraud and should be charged as such. 1) everyone involved should face the criminal penalties of fraud 2) the corporations involved should be sued right into the ground by everyone affected in a massive class action lawsuit.
The government's job is clear here. Why these guys are not frying for this is a clear indicator that something has gone terribly wrong in our justice/governmental system.
Technically pharma produces said vaccinations so I doubt they would acively try to discourage people from using them. Most of the problem with parents refusing vaccinations has been due to a combination of bad education and distrust of anything the public does not understand. Only a minority knows what vaccines are, how they work and what is in them hence, there is going to be a lot of people weary of using them.
From what I've encountered, the overuse of diagnostics etc. that don't do any real good seems to be the result of a fear of being sued for not doing enough to diagnose/treat the patient. As far as I am concerned such suits should be binding against actual malpractice. That is, failures on the part of the doctor's end that would not be considered a reasonable response. operating on the wrong leg, prescribing a drug that is clearly labeled as being a dangerous allergen to the patient etc..
almost nothing that has been produced in society was for someone else's greater good but rather in exchange for something of value to the producer. The system requires selfishness on the part of essentially everyone involved [pharma to research and produce the drug] the patient to stay reasonably informed and the government to enforce laws against fraud. The real problems arise when the power balance is broken: the government doesn't do its job of going after fraud or big pharma defrauding the patient or the patient using government as a baseball bat to do anything other than its basic purpose- police just laws.
I agree with your points however, be careful not to make the claim that just because big oil funds research means it is biased somehow makes federally funded research unbiased. Especially during the Bush years...
This is precisely why in science, real science, we have the scientific method which requires that experiments/studies etc. be repeatable. All it would take is for these fraudulent claims to be tested and it is over for the fools who tried to usurp the system.
You could say the opposing side has a lot to gain from AGW not being true. After all, the cost of reducing carbon emissions is significant to those who produce the most CO2. The difference between AGW and this nonsense is that *climatologists would have to be wrong [climate models and ice cores etc.] *physicists would have to be wrong [infared absorbsion spectrum of CO2] etc. In short, there would need to be a massive conspiracy of thousands of scientists all in on it.
If every case you describe at the lower levels were taken up to the higher courts, they would most likely be swamped. There is also the fear that the wrong decision at a higher court is far worse than a bad decision at a lower court and considering MS's history in court cases, it may very well be a good idea to discourage taking this to the top for now.
That argument's validity hinges on the assumption that the Swiss government made the decision on the merits of MS' software. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable to question the decision given a possibly cheaper route through FOSS, especially if I were concerned about controlling government waste.
The problem is that this deal quite possibly had nothing to do with any advantages FOSS had over MS but MS's connections. If the Swiss government made the decision for any other reason than technical merits then the Swiss have been done a great disservice.
A far more interesting result would have been if they hadn't been able to detect life on Earth as the inability to do so from such a close distance would make detecting Earth-like life elsewhere in the galaxy a laughable prospect.
too bad they took out LAN functionality, we could have had the game released by now.
I really hope SCII doesn't go the way of Starcraft Ghost... I also wonder how much of the problem is Blizzard simply putting every game but WOW on the back burner until they exhaust the franchise...
fair use as you already noted exists because if it did not free speech would often be greatly stifled. what really bothers me about what the AP is doing is that their definition of copyright allows for very little room for criticism using small sections of text. Theoretically with AP's policy of charging for small pieces of text [which in this case DID NOT BELONG TO THEM] they could go after critics for citing anything more than sentence fragments from their stories. fair use may not be a right but its existence is crucial to defending free speech and this development is troubling. with the length of copyright up to 120 years they could bash people for otherwise fair use activities as long as it is profitable to do so.
The system is an utter mess abused by AP and other interests against the public benefit and spirit of copyright law. Copyright exists only because we as a society wish to make a bargain with artists/writers etc. that we grant a limited monopoly on their produced work in exchange for it being released into the public domain at some point. The idea being that both parties form a cooperative symbiosis that gives producers of works a greater incentive to further produce these works. If the producers of these works are acting to destroy competition and abuse these limited monopoly "rights" then there is no reason for said protection from society to exist.
if they can make more by cheating and/or laziness they should be expected to do so. this is not surprising, it is simply the result of millions of years of evolutionary selection- look out for you and yours through means available to you.
considering AP is a company that doesn't allow anything resembling fair use is it really surprising tht they would show the kind of laziness demonstrated here? Assuming some court doesn't strike this nonsense down as a violation of fair use rights, the system is completely broken and should be either reformed greatly or abolished.