Now, if only we could produce the software Y'know, the set of "good algorithms" to produce the layouts and the other set of "good algorithms" to test fitness and... everything else necessary to automatically produce solutions.
*That* seems to be the hard task at the moment. I don't design processors either, so I don't know what types of issues the current design software has but to me it seems that this is probably the hurdle they are facing on that front, not processor power.
Well, you may be correct but that doesn't prevent you from being an idiot. You seem to forget that the reason we need the GPL in the first place is because of copyright laws!
IOW, without copyright law there wouldn't be a need for the GPL.
Certainly without copyright law you could "abuse" the GPL. Now, what would that mean "abusing the GPL" in a world without copyright? Hmm. A world where anyone could copy any source code they like for any reason.
Hmm. Corporations could take your GPL code and just use it. Well, ok. You could take any code from any corporation and just use it too! See how that works out? They can't take your GPL code and lock it away because if they use it that code appears in the final product along with all modifications they made internally.
Also, there would be no legal penalty for a random person to upload the source to Photoshop (say) to BT, or for anyone to d/l it, compile and modify it and even release their own version. You could have "LingNoi's Photoshop Clone".
Now, I'm not advocating for the removal of copyright. Since the distribution cost for digital items trends towards zero, while the fixed costs do not, it seems we need some sort of system to prevent parasites (such as a Photoshop Clone). Otherwise a systemic negative feedback loop created that supresses creation of new works and I don't see how that can be good if you're trying to promote that creation.
Corporations are not quite willing to show their true strength at this point in the timeline.
Google has the Power to force the release of the executive -- the citizens of Italy would be up in arms if they couldn't access Google's online properties and will massively pressure the government. However, Governments around the world would start looking at them as actual competitive Rivals (which they are, but the big G's don't quite realize that).
Corporations do not want that. Sure, buying a few paramilitary platoons or whatnot to install your pro-business facist in a developing country somewhere is OK, but they cannot quite do the same to Italy.
Of course since Italy is run by Berlesconi it may be that Italy is already under corporate control, making this simple corporate knife fighting.
I think (in the same vein) Crusader would work. My Crusaders could easily wipe out mere Evangelists. After all, evangelists don't even generally have a sword (much less a warhorse)!
I think that Crusaders could even take on fanbois; there's not much like having your gut run through to take the wind out of your sails, or having a metal shod hoof crush your skull to quiet the mind.
I certainly seem to also remember something kind of epic about the word crusader, something about quite a long time period, maybe wars and battles, cities taken, retaken, continents in upheaval, etc. You know, Epic. Nah, that's probably just my imagination.
Tell that to the camera in my Nokia E65. Depending on the type of light source some colours can be completely off. Not just a shade or two, but they really turn into a different colour, eg. blue tends to become bright green under halide lamps at night if the object I want to photograph only receives indirect lighting, and anything white or greyish tends to turn bright red-orange.
The question then turns to:
Which of these colour changes turn into *really* enough of a different colour to be wrongly encoded? Let's take a look at your list:
* blue->green
Could the "green" be mistaken for black, magenta or yellow? Not very likely
* white->orange
This might screw up if it gets encoded as yellow, especially if you have white triangles. But this code doesn't have any white triangles. Oh well.
This exercise gets back to the reason they chose CMYK. The colour separations are just so far apart that regardless of most colour transform based on lighting conditions or performed by the majority of crappy sensors it's still good enough to tell a blue triangle from a yellow one from a magenta one from a black one most of the time.
No, it's not. Microsoft's implementation from a data standpoint is simply inferior.
There is no conceptual difference between a Microsoft Index and a URL and there is nothing to stop QRcodes from being URLs. The data on the "other end" can either be there or not, modified at any point in time, etc
Either way doesn't really matter. Either the service provider will update the data to be relevant data or they won't.
The benefit of QRcodes over the MS implementation is that in addition to encoding a pointer to the information one could choose to encode the actual information in the tag. Yes, this would be static data. But since you have your choice of dynamic and static data I would expect that a static tag only be used in situations where this makes sense.
So... if I keep the music I purchased for private use private, I have no privacy violation? Right?
Well, no. You seem to have fallen hook line and sinker for the RIAA's line and don't seem to even know it.
I suspect much of slashdot is similar, given the responses to this dupe. I guess I am still stuck in the "old days" when I could share my music with my friends. [note: someone you have never met 1200 miles away does not count as your "friend"]. Be it a mix tape, a compilation CD, a usb key, an external hard drive or a darknet, private use is still private use. Somewhere we lost this in the onslaught.
So, yes, possible privacy violation, but that begs the question as to what should truly be considered private use. I believe I should have the ability to hand my friend a compliation and tell them "Hey - check these guys out!"
So I don't believe it is simply a matter of "Don't Share!" (or as your said keep private stuff private) which is the party line of the RIAA and that you are defending.
I like owning my music, and I don't like people taking advantage of that (EVERYONE at the office thinks I'll make copies of my music, which I refuse to do).
This is sad and I wonder why. I wonder if you have been subtly brainwashed by the RIAA's campaign.
Why do you think people are taking advantage of you? Is that why you refuse to share your music? I don't quite get your thought process here. Do you feel that since you paid for the music your co-workers should also? Is that how they are taking advantage of you?
We used to have a culture where a lot of music was distributed hand to hand, and it was okay to do so. I don't understand where so many people lost that sense, except in the RIAA's demonization of distributed music sharing. Certainly a person you've never met 1000 miles away can't really be considered your friend, but the person in the next cube... why shouldn't I give them some songs I really like to check out, or even my entire catalog of an artist I like?
You posted an eloquent reply, but we'll have to agree to disagree on it. While it's true that survival means more than just short-term, your claim that "sustainable living is only a short term solution" is wrong, and here's why. Sustainable living is, by its very nature, sustainable indefinitely (look it up), and living in such a way provided over three million years of security for humans and their direct ancestors. That is, in your words, "medium to long term (thousands of years to billions of years)" survival. To wit, this was through a number of disasters and climate changes with pre-technological societies (herein lies the "effortless" part).
You do know that around 70,000 years ago humans were "sustainably" whittled down to some ~1,000 persons in the whole world? You are aware that in the past 600M years we have records of at least five mass extinctions? That is, more than half the planet's population of species destroyed? That doesn't sound like security to me.
Sustainable living deals with methods to survive our own waste products and our own consumptive models. How to not kill ourselves off through our own actions. Sorry but you can't tell me I'm wrong based on a dictionary definition. It is not by it's very nature "indefinite" in this scenario. Dictionary definitions are only as good as they are applicable.
None of the scenarios involved in sustainable living deal with catastrophic events such as killer asteroids that wipe out all life larger than a microbe, for example. They all deal with having the Earth still be a viable place to live. Since we are talking about a time scale in which the earth may no longer habitable, the "indefinite" nature of sustainable living is suspect (and in fact, incorrect).
That is why it's only the short term solution. Certainly it is a necessary step for our "indefinite" survival, but it does not appear sufficient to do so. That is, humans will be wiped out if all we concentrate on is living sustainably on this planet.
However, sustainability is pressing issue. Put it this way, if we don't pursue sustainability at this time we may not have another chance to. If our technology totally crashes we may not be able to reboot it. We also won't like our lives much. In which case we'll be wiped out anyway, either through some relatively minor occurrence such as happened 70,000 years ago or by some major event.
I think you may agree with me on principle with this: you said the only way to ensure our survival is to be sure a world catastrophe doesn't kill all humans. Given the size and resiliency of Earth, the access to materials, and the known working environment, making a sustainable and hospitable environment here that would withstand catastrophe is a far easier plan than making one that would survive catastrophe outside Earth.
This is true even with your asteroid example. Like I said in my first post, Earth's worst day in the last billion years was a picnic compared to Mars' best day. People consistently underestimate Earth as a hospitable place, and underestimate space as a hostile place.
You are presenting a false dichotomy. We are not talking a catastrophe in space versus a catastrophe on Earth and who would fare better. We are talking about a catastrophe on earth wiping out humans there and what to do about it if you want the species to survive that event.
Unless there is a technological measure we can take to not have the asteroid hit us there is no sustainable or hospitable environment we could create on the planet that would withstand the catastrophe. It really is game over for people still on the planet at that point. You appear to be underestimating the nature of, well, Nature.
Given that, in your words, we have a readily available means to keep our species alive for the medium to long term, the focus should be on making Earth more hospitable for us, not on space exploration.
I'm calling bullshit on this. What is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species is figuring out how to live sustainably on Earth. There's nothing wrong with Earth. It has some bad spots, sure, but it's a good planet and the best one anyone has ever found.
Well, I believe you are wrong to do so.
You see, for our species to survive we have to survive in the short-term, the medium term and the long term.
Most people advocating for space as a method of species survival are looking at the medium to long term. (thousands of years to billions of years).
You appear to be looking at the short term. Certainly we have to find a way to live sustainably on Earth, because we won't make it(technologically) beyond that if we don't. This could easily come to a head within a thousand years. Even then the consequences of this probably means population crash not end of the species.
But sustainable living is only a short term solution.
People who think the only way we can survive is to get off this rock are absolutely blind--this planet has effortlessly supported life for four billion years, and has done so on its worst days (Permian-Triassic, Ordovician-Silurian). Walk outside on Mars' best day in the last ten million years and you have zero chance of living.
No, you are the blind one. Certainly the planet has "effortlessly supported life" in general for billions of years. You conflate the planet's ability to sustain life with the planet's ability to sustain human life, and that is wrong.
For example, go ask a trilobite how "effortless" their survival has been. Or have you ever asked yourself how many of those "effortlessly supported" years humans can't even breathe in? (As a hint, there wasn't always enough oxygen for us). There is no reason to suspect the planet will not move to a phase that is inhospitable to human life again.
So in the medium to long term those people are perfectly correct. The only way to ensure survival of the species is to ensure that a world altering catastrophe does not kill all the humans. The only way to do that is to have humans off planet - enough of them in sustainable solutions elsewhere such that the gene pool is viable.
We already know that in a long enough timeframe we will have another major asteroid event, for example. That could turn the planet into another Mars (no atmosphere, core dead, etc.) or simply be large enough to kill off everything larger than a german cockroach. Unless we have major population centers off of this world when that happens so does the death of our species.
That is not the only scenario one can imagine where species survivability depends on having sustainable off world colonies, but it is one scenario that is absolutely certain to happen (barring some deus ex machina scientific way of deflecting the thing).
Who is more likely to survive: the most clever species from Earth with all the resources that Earth has to offer, or the most clever species from Earth without any of the resources that Earth has to offer?
Your question is nonsensical. It isn't a race between some humans "out there" w/o Earth's resources vs. us with the resources. It's us with Earth's resources creating technologies to allow us to survive in space with the resources available "out there". It's not like space is just totally empty!
Consider Earth as a bootstrap mechanism in this case. Certainly we can't just plop people out in space and expect them to survive but we can develop all the technologies to enable them to do so, and use enough Earth resources to enable them to start to utilize the resources available "out there" and thus be independent of Earth. We hope.
Yes, she manipulated the hell out of someone who was vulnerable. But how is that different than commercials on TV, selling us crap we don't need? How is it different than the mormons coming over every sunday to try and convert you? It's not, except for intent.
I disagree.
Clearly this is a case of child abuse. An adult abused a child. End of story.
I don't see the difference between verbal abuse in person or on the internet. Neither should you. If we had an adult who did the a smilar thing in person (caused a child to kill themselves through their actions) do you believe that no crime would have been committed?
Certainly they used the wrong law to punish her but the dunderheads in Legal haven't gotten the message that crimes on the internet are no different than crimes "in real life". Because the internet is actually part of real life. Go figure.
How do you demonstrate the effect of a highly mobile medium on literature if you protect against that effect ?
Well, perhaps there is less of an effect to be demonstrated since this clearly rebuts your premise.
Certainly it may be against the intent of the artist but perhaps the point to be made is that the work is much more resilient than you think.
Do you (can you) see DRM in action through the medium of paper ? It is impossible because you can always go back a page - not so with this. This is ice sculpture for the modern age.
Yes, we can do so even with this. period. We now know experientially that the "ice sculpture for the modern age" can be placed in a "modern age refrigerator" and be kept indefinitely, DRM or no.
The true issue of DRM is the legal ramification, not the technological limitations it imposes (as we can see, we are even able to recover this poem).
A major problem with VR was having to construct everything manually.
This may be true, but is beside the point.
I don't know many people who would rather "browse" around a virtual store than search for the products they want in a faster and more efficient manner, say by typing the item or category into a search box.
And before anyone complains that it's slow, hard to use, etc. - it's little different from "first person shooters", which provide a familiar 3D interactive walkthru experience. Difference is, this one is the real world - without all that tedious hand-measuring hand-coding of agonizing detail of reality.
Yes, well so what? I'm not entirely sure there *is* a target market for such "stores".
Imagine Word, for example, where you "walked" your avatar down to the "Printer" and fed it your job to print. Oh, that is Innovative! You could probably even do it with Photosynth! Woo hoo.
Doesn't make it even remotely a good idea.
The question to ask is are virtual stores using photosynth a good idea, not ooh shiny new technology must be good for every application!
Certainly if it is necessary to identify someone to determine if what they have done is illegal or not then this must be part of the process. If you read what I wrote I made it clear that illegal activities should not be afforded protection on the internet. Twice. Maybe three times.
Your argument appeared to be that discovery of identity outweighs consideration of illegality. That is what I had an issue with. Since you have amended or detailed your view to include the provision that anonymity should only be given up in cases where it is necessary to determine illegality (or of course, where it is apparent that the actions are illegal), we appear to be on similar pages.
It is not in the best interest of society to allow trolling of anonymous persons especially if no illegal activity has occurred. I believe that this can be established in this case without having to reveal the identities of the anonymous parties.
So, I'll take your response as an affirmative answer to my question: You believe that anonymous persons should be compelled to reveal their true identities regardless if a crime is committed.
Please re-read what I wrote. I'll say the same here in different terms and perhaps we can approach understanding.
Again, "The Internet" is no safety shield from prosecution of illegal activities. Should an anonymous (*but with the potential to be identified) individual break any law then clearly they deserve their day in court under their true identity.
However, this particular case is stuck in the illegality determination phase. On the face of it, it does not appear if the anonymous parties did anything illegal. This is an important point!
Do you believe that anonymous persons should be compelled to reveal their true identities regardless if a crime is committed?
Oh, they can't take the OLD version away from you. But the NEW version could be completely craptacular. Lack of new features. Slow down development. Don't fix bugs. Half hearted support.
Sure it's open source and other people could do all of those. But if they don't, it doesn't happen. With a business sponsor such as Sun, there are quite a few less people willing to give their effort to ultimately help out a for profit company.
As a law student, it seems *entirely* prudent to me that a business man should be able to get a subpoena to get the IPs and names of people who are posting defamatory comments on the internet (assuming they are in fact defamatory).
Of course! You're a law student. Already well away down the dark path. I'm only partially kidding.
You are assuming as a basis part of what the judge is trying to decide. I thought as a law student you would have at least read what was going on before posting. Sigh.
Yes, I don't think many people are saying that illegal things done over the internet can use the partial anonymity of the Net to shield themselves from the consequences of their illegal actions.
At the same time, it doesn't appear that there were any illegal actions. In that case, it doesn't appear prudent of the courts to let someone muck around with private citizens who are offering their opinions on businesses.
No matter how much it hurts the business.
So, does this case still seem 100% reasonable to you?
How "efficient" has legislative reform been so far? How close are we to invalidating business method patents, or software algo patents?
Efficiency means that in the real world something gets done with the near minimal energy required to produce some desired output range. Since patent laws have not been reformed, despite the tremendous energy that has been put forth already to do so, I question the efficiency of the approach.
I do not question that it is a "better" method than nibbling from the bottom in terms of overall wholesale effect, should it ever be accomplished. But, in terms of actual accomplishment it seems to be much less efficient.
A wavelet is just - a small piece of waveform that has a particular shape. Adding up a bunch of these with different sizes and you approximate your original.
There is nothing to say that the wavelet transform cannot be of a form that is modeled on how we perceive sound. That is, the small waveform itself could be shaped such that the form captures most of what we perceive. This possibly gives a much higher perceived resolution.
Of course, finding the right wavelet would be key (*and still SERIOUSLY hard work, I would imagine), but if done "simple wavelet compression" would be all you need. Of course, there is nothing to say that wavelets can't be combined with perceptive sound models in some other fashion as well (such as more wavelets where you need them).
Sure. I can certainly understand that mental illness tends to be a touchy subject, especially when mixed with the topic of drugs. I also agree that a drug dealer with a spiritual bent is much less likely to want to harm their people through selling "inappropriate" drugs. Most of them are of the "we are in this together" camp and would see such harm as in effect harming themselves as well (and being responsible for that harm, too).
Not that you don't get outliers, as in all groupings.
The parent poster was looking for relationships between drugs in a economic system, and I was implying that a religious/spiritual component may influence the manner in which drugs may be sold. I implied that some may be sold individually as spiritual "aids" and some drugs are sold together due to a desire for profit - answering the poster's question regarding "get 'em hooked" practices of drug sales.
I can see your point that a spiritual dealer may well have a higher motivation that profit and thus not attempt to "upsell" to something they considered bad, but surely it isn't the intent of the dealer that determines if the substance is used in a spiritual manner? Also, I fail to see you talk about the dichotomy you originally imposed re: natural and synthetic origins which this subsequent post also failed to illuminate.
I'd also add that I've experienced "life in the big world" as you call it. When I was 18 a good friend was admitted to a psychiatric institution due to his persistent abuse of daytura and psylocibin based mushrooms; two more friends follow him for the same reason within a month. Two of them are "out" now, but that took a long time. I don't think the other will ever leave. Don't make light of other people's experiences until you know what they are.
I'm sorry that your friends abused various substances. I'm even more sorry that they had to take responsibility for their actions in such permanent ways. I was not making light of any experiences you have had. However - that doesn't appear to be the subculture I was talking about. Thanks for bringing that up. I'm also sorry that you thought I was making light of any experiences you had. I'm not. Rather that your experiences don't cover the whole big world.
Instead of your friends think rather of those people that started Erowid, or perhaps the Shulgin's, how about all the fine folks at www.maps.org... point is there has been an undercurrent of responsible experimentation ever since there needed to be an underground. I'm sorry that you haven't met them (as I said it is a *big* world), but they even hold conferences now, so... Or you can vicariously experience it all in the internet.
Responsible drug use is not an oxymoron; is a requirement. Some drugs are more dangerous than others. Some will exacerbate pre-existing fault lines (see schizophrenia and LSD use, for example). Some will create new ones. Some will destroy one individual but leave another centered. When people aren't being responsible for their own actions (especially when they are affecting themselves directly through those actions) tragedy happens. That's the lesson of your friends but by no means the only lesson that can be provided.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, we have the horsepower.
Now, if only we could produce the software Y'know, the set of "good algorithms" to produce the layouts and the other set of "good algorithms" to test fitness and ... everything else necessary to automatically produce solutions.
*That* seems to be the hard task at the moment. I don't design processors either, so I don't know what types of issues the current design software has but to me it seems that this is probably the hurdle they are facing on that front, not processor power.
Well, you may be correct but that doesn't prevent you from being an idiot. You seem to forget that the reason we need the GPL in the first place is because of copyright laws!
IOW, without copyright law there wouldn't be a need for the GPL.
Certainly without copyright law you could "abuse" the GPL. Now, what would that mean "abusing the GPL" in a world without copyright? Hmm. A world where anyone could copy any source code they like for any reason.
Hmm. Corporations could take your GPL code and just use it. Well, ok. You could take any code from any corporation and just use it too! See how that works out? They can't take your GPL code and lock it away because if they use it that code appears in the final product along with all modifications they made internally.
Also, there would be no legal penalty for a random person to upload the source to Photoshop (say) to BT, or for anyone to d/l it, compile and modify it and even release their own version. You could have "LingNoi's Photoshop Clone".
Now, I'm not advocating for the removal of copyright. Since the distribution cost for digital items trends towards zero, while the fixed costs do not, it seems we need some sort of system to prevent parasites (such as a Photoshop Clone). Otherwise a systemic negative feedback loop created that supresses creation of new works and I don't see how that can be good if you're trying to promote that creation.
Not going to happen (yet).
Corporations are not quite willing to show their true strength at this point in the timeline.
Google has the Power to force the release of the executive -- the citizens of Italy would be up in arms if they couldn't access Google's online properties and will massively pressure the government. However, Governments around the world would start looking at them as actual competitive Rivals (which they are, but the big G's don't quite realize that).
Corporations do not want that. Sure, buying a few paramilitary platoons or whatnot to install your pro-business facist in a developing country somewhere is OK, but they cannot quite do the same to Italy.
Of course since Italy is run by Berlesconi it may be that Italy is already under corporate control, making this simple corporate knife fighting.
I usually wear a pirate or ninja costume or pirate ninja costume with a mask on so they cannot see my face.
I guess that gives me infinite Captain Morgan Spiced Rum ads, and Martial Arts ads.
I wear a pirate costume. After all Ninjas are masters of disguise!
Now, if the cameras can tell that I'm a Ninja in disguise, expect the dev team and executive management to be dead within the week...
I accept your challenge!
I think (in the same vein) Crusader would work. My Crusaders could easily wipe out mere Evangelists. After all, evangelists don't even generally have a sword (much less a warhorse)!
I think that Crusaders could even take on fanbois; there's not much like having your gut run through to take the wind out of your sails, or having a metal shod hoof crush your skull to quiet the mind.
I certainly seem to also remember something kind of epic about the word crusader, something about quite a long time period, maybe wars and battles, cities taken, retaken, continents in upheaval, etc. You know, Epic. Nah, that's probably just my imagination.
Tell that to the camera in my Nokia E65. Depending on the type of light source some colours can be completely off. Not just a shade or two, but they really turn into a different colour, eg. blue tends to become bright green under halide lamps at night if the object I want to photograph only receives indirect lighting, and anything white or greyish tends to turn bright red-orange.
The question then turns to:
Which of these colour changes turn into *really* enough of a different colour to be wrongly encoded? Let's take a look at your list:
* blue->green
Could the "green" be mistaken for black, magenta or yellow? Not very likely
* white->orange
This might screw up if it gets encoded as yellow, especially if you have white triangles. But this code doesn't have any white triangles. Oh well.
This exercise gets back to the reason they chose CMYK. The colour separations are just so far apart that regardless of most colour transform based on lighting conditions or performed by the majority of crappy sensors it's still good enough to tell a blue triangle from a yellow one from a magenta one from a black one most of the time.
No, it's not. Microsoft's implementation from a data standpoint is simply inferior.
There is no conceptual difference between a Microsoft Index and a URL and there is nothing to stop QRcodes from being URLs. The data on the "other end" can either be there or not, modified at any point in time, etc
Either way doesn't really matter. Either the service provider will update the data to be relevant data or they won't.
The benefit of QRcodes over the MS implementation is that in addition to encoding a pointer to the information one could choose to encode the actual information in the tag. Yes, this would be static data. But since you have your choice of dynamic and static data I would expect that a static tag only be used in situations where this makes sense.
So... if I keep the music I purchased for private use private, I have no privacy violation? Right?
Well, no. You seem to have fallen hook line and sinker for the RIAA's line and don't seem to even know it.
I suspect much of slashdot is similar, given the responses to this dupe. I guess I am still stuck in the "old days" when I could share my music with my friends. [note: someone you have never met 1200 miles away does not count as your "friend"]. Be it a mix tape, a compilation CD, a usb key, an external hard drive or a darknet, private use is still private use. Somewhere we lost this in the onslaught.
So, yes, possible privacy violation, but that begs the question as to what should truly be considered private use. I believe I should have the ability to hand my friend a compliation and tell them "Hey - check these guys out!"
So I don't believe it is simply a matter of "Don't Share!" (or as your said keep private stuff private) which is the party line of the RIAA and that you are defending.
I like owning my music, and I don't like people taking advantage of that (EVERYONE at the office thinks I'll make copies of my music, which I refuse to do).
This is sad and I wonder why. I wonder if you have been subtly brainwashed by the RIAA's campaign.
Why do you think people are taking advantage of you? Is that why you refuse to share your music? I don't quite get your thought process here. Do you feel that since you paid for the music your co-workers should also? Is that how they are taking advantage of you?
We used to have a culture where a lot of music was distributed hand to hand, and it was okay to do so. I don't understand where so many people lost that sense, except in the RIAA's demonization of distributed music sharing. Certainly a person you've never met 1000 miles away can't really be considered your friend, but the person in the next cube... why shouldn't I give them some songs I really like to check out, or even my entire catalog of an artist I like?
You posted an eloquent reply, but we'll have to agree to disagree on it. While it's true that survival means more than just short-term, your claim that "sustainable living is only a short term solution" is wrong, and here's why. Sustainable living is, by its very nature, sustainable indefinitely (look it up), and living in such a way provided over three million years of security for humans and their direct ancestors. That is, in your words, "medium to long term (thousands of years to billions of years)" survival. To wit, this was through a number of disasters and climate changes with pre-technological societies (herein lies the "effortless" part).
You do know that around 70,000 years ago humans were "sustainably" whittled down to some ~1,000 persons in the whole world? You are aware that in the past 600M years we have records of at least five mass extinctions? That is, more than half the planet's population of species destroyed? That doesn't sound like security to me.
Sustainable living deals with methods to survive our own waste products and our own consumptive models. How to not kill ourselves off through our own actions. Sorry but you can't tell me I'm wrong based on a dictionary definition. It is not by it's very nature "indefinite" in this scenario. Dictionary definitions are only as good as they are applicable.
None of the scenarios involved in sustainable living deal with catastrophic events such as killer asteroids that wipe out all life larger than a microbe, for example. They all deal with having the Earth still be a viable place to live. Since we are talking about a time scale in which the earth may no longer habitable, the "indefinite" nature of sustainable living is suspect (and in fact, incorrect).
That is why it's only the short term solution. Certainly it is a necessary step for our "indefinite" survival, but it does not appear sufficient to do so. That is, humans will be wiped out if all we concentrate on is living sustainably on this planet.
However, sustainability is pressing issue. Put it this way, if we don't pursue sustainability at this time we may not have another chance to. If our technology totally crashes we may not be able to reboot it. We also won't like our lives much. In which case we'll be wiped out anyway, either through some relatively minor occurrence such as happened 70,000 years ago or by some major event.
I think you may agree with me on principle with this: you said the only way to ensure our survival is to be sure a world catastrophe doesn't kill all humans. Given the size and resiliency of Earth, the access to materials, and the known working environment, making a sustainable and hospitable environment here that would withstand catastrophe is a far easier plan than making one that would survive catastrophe outside Earth.
This is true even with your asteroid example. Like I said in my first post, Earth's worst day in the last billion years was a picnic compared to Mars' best day. People consistently underestimate Earth as a hospitable place, and underestimate space as a hostile place.
You are presenting a false dichotomy. We are not talking a catastrophe in space versus a catastrophe on Earth and who would fare better. We are talking about a catastrophe on earth wiping out humans there and what to do about it if you want the species to survive that event.
Unless there is a technological measure we can take to not have the asteroid hit us there is no sustainable or hospitable environment we could create on the planet that would withstand the catastrophe. It really is game over for people still on the planet at that point. You appear to be underestimating the nature of, well, Nature.
Given that, in your words, we have a readily available means to keep our species alive for the medium to long term, the focus should be on making Earth more hospitable for us, not on space exploration.
I'm calling bullshit on this. What is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species is figuring out how to live sustainably on Earth. There's nothing wrong with Earth. It has some bad spots, sure, but it's a good planet and the best one anyone has ever found.
Well, I believe you are wrong to do so.
You see, for our species to survive we have to survive in the short-term, the medium term and the long term.
Most people advocating for space as a method of species survival are looking at the medium to long term. (thousands of years to billions of years).
You appear to be looking at the short term. Certainly we have to find a way to live sustainably on Earth, because we won't make it(technologically) beyond that if we don't. This could easily come to a head within a thousand years. Even then the consequences of this probably means population crash not end of the species.
But sustainable living is only a short term solution.
People who think the only way we can survive is to get off this rock are absolutely blind--this planet has effortlessly supported life for four billion years, and has done so on its worst days (Permian-Triassic, Ordovician-Silurian). Walk outside on Mars' best day in the last ten million years and you have zero chance of living.
No, you are the blind one. Certainly the planet has "effortlessly supported life" in general for billions of years. You conflate the planet's ability to sustain life with the planet's ability to sustain human life, and that is wrong.
For example, go ask a trilobite how "effortless" their survival has been. Or have you ever asked yourself how many of those "effortlessly supported" years humans can't even breathe in? (As a hint, there wasn't always enough oxygen for us). There is no reason to suspect the planet will not move to a phase that is inhospitable to human life again.
So in the medium to long term those people are perfectly correct. The only way to ensure survival of the species is to ensure that a world altering catastrophe does not kill all the humans. The only way to do that is to have humans off planet - enough of them in sustainable solutions elsewhere such that the gene pool is viable.
We already know that in a long enough timeframe we will have another major asteroid event, for example. That could turn the planet into another Mars (no atmosphere, core dead, etc.) or simply be large enough to kill off everything larger than a german cockroach. Unless we have major population centers off of this world when that happens so does the death of our species.
That is not the only scenario one can imagine where species survivability depends on having sustainable off world colonies, but it is one scenario that is absolutely certain to happen (barring some deus ex machina scientific way of deflecting the thing).
Who is more likely to survive: the most clever species from Earth with all the resources that Earth has to offer, or the most clever species from Earth without any of the resources that Earth has to offer?
Your question is nonsensical. It isn't a race between some humans "out there" w/o Earth's resources vs. us with the resources. It's us with Earth's resources creating technologies to allow us to survive in space with the resources available "out there". It's not like space is just totally empty!
Consider Earth as a bootstrap mechanism in this case. Certainly we can't just plop people out in space and expect them to survive but we can develop all the technologies to enable them to do so, and use enough Earth resources to enable them to start to utilize the resources available "out there" and thus be independent of Earth. We hope.
Yes, she manipulated the hell out of someone who was vulnerable. But how is that different than commercials on TV, selling us crap we don't need? How is it different than the mormons coming over every sunday to try and convert you? It's not, except for intent.
I disagree.
Clearly this is a case of child abuse. An adult abused a child. End of story.
I don't see the difference between verbal abuse in person or on the internet. Neither should you. If we had an adult who did the a smilar thing in person (caused a child to kill themselves through their actions) do you believe that no crime would have been committed?
Certainly they used the wrong law to punish her but the dunderheads in Legal haven't gotten the message that crimes on the internet are no different than crimes "in real life". Because the internet is actually part of real life. Go figure.
Well, perhaps not missing the point.
How do you demonstrate the effect of a highly mobile medium on literature if you protect against that effect ?
Well, perhaps there is less of an effect to be demonstrated since this clearly rebuts your premise.
Certainly it may be against the intent of the artist but perhaps the point to be made is that the work is much more resilient than you think.
Do you (can you) see DRM in action through the medium of paper ? It is impossible because you can always go back a page - not so with this. This is ice sculpture for the modern age.
Yes, we can do so even with this. period. We now know experientially that the "ice sculpture for the modern age" can be placed in a "modern age refrigerator" and be kept indefinitely, DRM or no.
The true issue of DRM is the legal ramification, not the technological limitations it imposes (as we can see, we are even able to recover this poem).
Regards.
Bah. Your comment is old and outdated, except in the general sense.
Yes, it is not as easy for older people to learn (rewire). That doesn't mean it is impossible, or even *that hard*.
We also used to think that the body never grew any new brain cells. Now we know that's incorrect, too.
The adult human brain is much more plastic than your comment seems to imply.
Umm. Sure. So Photosynth is new.
A major problem with VR was having to construct everything manually.
This may be true, but is beside the point.
I don't know many people who would rather "browse" around a virtual store than search for the products they want in a faster and more efficient manner, say by typing the item or category into a search box.
And before anyone complains that it's slow, hard to use, etc. - it's little different from "first person shooters", which provide a familiar 3D interactive walkthru experience. Difference is, this one is the real world - without all that tedious hand-measuring hand-coding of agonizing detail of reality.
Yes, well so what? I'm not entirely sure there *is* a target market for such "stores".
Imagine Word, for example, where you "walked" your avatar down to the "Printer" and fed it your job to print. Oh, that is Innovative! You could probably even do it with Photosynth! Woo hoo.
Doesn't make it even remotely a good idea.
The question to ask is are virtual stores using photosynth a good idea, not ooh shiny new technology must be good for every application!
Yup, we are arguing past each other now.
Certainly if it is necessary to identify someone to determine if what they have done is illegal or not then this must be part of the process. If you read what I wrote I made it clear that illegal activities should not be afforded protection on the internet. Twice. Maybe three times.
Your argument appeared to be that discovery of identity outweighs consideration of illegality. That is what I had an issue with. Since you have amended or detailed your view to include the provision that anonymity should only be given up in cases where it is necessary to determine illegality (or of course, where it is apparent that the actions are illegal), we appear to be on similar pages.
Cheers.
You are swerving around the main point.
It is not in the best interest of society to allow trolling of anonymous persons especially if no illegal activity has occurred. I believe that this can be established in this case without having to reveal the identities of the anonymous parties.
So, I'll take your response as an affirmative answer to my question: You believe that anonymous persons should be compelled to reveal their true identities regardless if a crime is committed.
I disagree strenuously.
Please re-read what I wrote. I'll say the same here in different terms and perhaps we can approach understanding.
Again, "The Internet" is no safety shield from prosecution of illegal activities. Should an anonymous (*but with the potential to be identified) individual break any law then clearly they deserve their day in court under their true identity.
However, this particular case is stuck in the illegality determination phase. On the face of it, it does not appear if the anonymous parties did anything illegal. This is an important point!
Do you believe that anonymous persons should be compelled to reveal their true identities regardless if a crime is committed?
If not, please clarify what your position is... :)
Oh, they can't take the OLD version away from you. But the NEW version could be completely craptacular. Lack of new features. Slow down development. Don't fix bugs. Half hearted support.
Sure it's open source and other people could do all of those. But if they don't, it doesn't happen. With a business sponsor such as Sun, there are quite a few less people willing to give their effort to ultimately help out a for profit company.
As a law student, it seems *entirely* prudent to me that a business man should be able to get a subpoena to get the IPs and names of people who are posting defamatory comments on the internet (assuming they are in fact defamatory).
Of course! You're a law student. Already well away down the dark path. I'm only partially kidding.
You are assuming as a basis part of what the judge is trying to decide. I thought as a law student you would have at least read what was going on before posting. Sigh.
Yes, I don't think many people are saying that illegal things done over the internet can use the partial anonymity of the Net to shield themselves from the consequences of their illegal actions.
At the same time, it doesn't appear that there were any illegal actions. In that case, it doesn't appear prudent of the courts to let someone muck around with private citizens who are offering their opinions on businesses.
No matter how much it hurts the business.
So, does this case still seem 100% reasonable to you?
No, I don't believe that accusing a food service establishment of being unsanitary is defamatory.
As long as I state that as my opinion. Which was done in this case.
Or are you trying to say that it is only defamatory if untrue?
Yes, that is another possible reason; statements of fact are not defamatory.
Cheers.
I don't know about that.
How "efficient" has legislative reform been so far? How close are we to invalidating business method patents, or software algo patents?
Efficiency means that in the real world something gets done with the near minimal energy required to produce some desired output range. Since patent laws have not been reformed, despite the tremendous energy that has been put forth already to do so, I question the efficiency of the approach.
I do not question that it is a "better" method than nibbling from the bottom in terms of overall wholesale effect, should it ever be accomplished. But, in terms of actual accomplishment it seems to be much less efficient.
I disagree with your disagreement. :p
A wavelet is just - a small piece of waveform that has a particular shape. Adding up a bunch of these with different sizes and you approximate your original.
There is nothing to say that the wavelet transform cannot be of a form that is modeled on how we perceive sound. That is, the small waveform itself could be shaped such that the form captures most of what we perceive. This possibly gives a much higher perceived resolution.
Of course, finding the right wavelet would be key (*and still SERIOUSLY hard work, I would imagine), but if done "simple wavelet compression" would be all you need. Of course, there is nothing to say that wavelets can't be combined with perceptive sound models in some other fashion as well (such as more wavelets where you need them).
Sure. I can certainly understand that mental illness tends to be a touchy subject, especially when mixed with the topic of drugs. I also agree that a drug dealer with a spiritual bent is much less likely to want to harm their people through selling "inappropriate" drugs. Most of them are of the "we are in this together" camp and would see such harm as in effect harming themselves as well (and being responsible for that harm, too).
Not that you don't get outliers, as in all groupings.
The parent poster was looking for relationships between drugs in a economic system, and I was implying that a religious/spiritual component may influence the manner in which drugs may be sold. I implied that some may be sold individually as spiritual "aids" and some drugs are sold together due to a desire for profit - answering the poster's question regarding "get 'em hooked" practices of drug sales.
I can see your point that a spiritual dealer may well have a higher motivation that profit and thus not attempt to "upsell" to something they considered bad, but surely it isn't the intent of the dealer that determines if the substance is used in a spiritual manner? Also, I fail to see you talk about the dichotomy you originally imposed re: natural and synthetic origins which this subsequent post also failed to illuminate.
I'd also add that I've experienced "life in the big world" as you call it. When I was 18 a good friend was admitted to a psychiatric institution due to his persistent abuse of daytura and psylocibin based mushrooms; two more friends follow him for the same reason within a month. Two of them are "out" now, but that took a long time. I don't think the other will ever leave. Don't make light of other people's experiences until you know what they are.
I'm sorry that your friends abused various substances. I'm even more sorry that they had to take responsibility for their actions in such permanent ways. I was not making light of any experiences you have had. However - that doesn't appear to be the subculture I was talking about. Thanks for bringing that up. I'm also sorry that you thought I was making light of any experiences you had. I'm not. Rather that your experiences don't cover the whole big world.
Instead of your friends think rather of those people that started Erowid, or perhaps the Shulgin's, how about all the fine folks at www.maps.org ... point is there has been an undercurrent of responsible experimentation ever since there needed to be an underground. I'm sorry that you haven't met them (as I said it is a *big* world), but they even hold conferences now, so... Or you can vicariously experience it all in the internet.
Responsible drug use is not an oxymoron; is a requirement. Some drugs are more dangerous than others. Some will exacerbate pre-existing fault lines (see schizophrenia and LSD use, for example). Some will create new ones. Some will destroy one individual but leave another centered. When people aren't being responsible for their own actions (especially when they are affecting themselves directly through those actions) tragedy happens. That's the lesson of your friends but by no means the only lesson that can be provided.