I'm sure that back in the 1600s, you had to agree that the earth was flat to get funding as well.
The best science that money can buy isn't always the best science.
Actually, no. If at any point in recorded history, you proposed that the earth was flat, the overwhelming majority of people thought you were a nutjob.
The idea that Columbus' opponents thought the earth was flat was made up by supporters' of Darwin in the 1800's to belittle their opposition (not all of which was religious).
Columbus' opposition said that if the diameter of the earth was what they calculated it to be (which it turns out was a reasonable approximation of the actual diameter of the earth), Columbus and his crewmen would run out of fresh water before they reached East Asia. Columbus, using his own calculations, said the earth isn't that big. It turns out that Columbus got lucky, because neither side was aware that there was another land mass between Europe and Asia (there is reason to believe that there were Europeans who did know, but that is speculation).
I agree there are ways to circumvent it, but the majority of bots will not go to the trouble of doing that, and that's the key.
Another idea would be to observe mouse movements through Javascript to detect a real user. This would be VERY inefficient for a bot, and probably not worth the while.
This would work great until the majority of websites do it, then it is worth the overhead for the bot to go to the trouble of doing it. When CAPTCHA started it wasn't worth the bot writers' trouble to crack it. They just went to easier sites, but as more and more sites adopted CAPTCHA the value of cracking it became greater. Any successful system will eventually be adopted by a large enough number of websites to make it worth the bot writers' time to crack. At which time they will.
Actually, historical evidence suggests that a revolution needs somewhere around 30% of the population to strongly support it to succeed. The American Revolution had about 1/3 of the population strenuously supporting it, about 1/3 strenuously opposed (Tories/Loyalists), and about 1/3 neutral. I have seen similar breakdowns of other successful revolutions but I no longer remember which countries/areas they were.
The law of supply and demand applies the number of suppliers as well. If I have all of the supply of something, if you want it, you have to pay whatever price I want for it. The other side of that is, if you are the only one who wants to buy it, if I want to sell it, I have to accept the price you are willing to pay for it. If something is unique and only has one potential buyer, its value is either, the most the buyer will pay to get it, or the least the owner will accept to sell it, whichever is greater.
The thing that the record companies seem to not understand is that they are not the only source for something that is in essentially infinite supply. They are however the only legal source. There is some value to most people to obtaining the product legally. Unfortunately for the record industry, many people have decided that this value is less than the price that the record companies are willing to sell for. Some people choose to obtain it illegally, I choose not to obtain it at all.
AP's barrier to entry wasn't distribution, it was a worldwide network of skilled journalists. The Internet hasn't removed that barrier to entry, because bloggers on the ground don't have the detachment and big-picture view of the skilled journalist, and rarely have the writing skills. If anything is damaging AP's business model, it's not the barriers to entry, it's whether the product (informed, well written journalism) is in demand nowadays.
I was going to give examples of how naive your concept of "skilled journalists" is, but instead I will comment on the AP's barrier to entry.
One of the barriers to entry to something like the AP was getting news from where it happened to where people were. That used to be expensive. Now it is fairly cheap to connect to the Internet and send your information out from just about anywhere.
Can we please make 2012 a no party year? Candidates should be themselves rather than cloak themselves in stupid pointless ideologies.
And this sums up the problem, you think the only elections that matter are the Presidential ones every four years. Why wait for 2012? Why not make 2010 a no party year? Why not make sure that the guys running the local government are doing a good job?
If people would start putting more emphasis on local and state elections, it would have a much bigger impact on the state of affairs than any amount of effort on the Federal level.
Good science fiction won't necessarily give you the reason that the sky is purple, however there is a reason and the book is consistent. If the book couldn't have taken place on a world with a purple sky, yet the sky is purple, it's Fantasy.
No, the second isn't necessarily Fantasy, it is just bad writing. Any book that is worth reading is consistent.
The key to writing good Speculative Fiction is to take a basic assumption about the world and say, "What if this were true? How would the world look?" and then build a plot in that world. If the change is something like "faster than light travel is possible" than you are writing Science Fiction. If the change is something like "there are people who can make changes to the physical world by wishing it so" you are writing Fantasy.
The problem is there are more people who are willing to report news than there are dollars people are willing to pay to receive news. Anybody can start a website and report news. Whether that news is reliable is another question, but since the advent of the Internet people have discovered that the old news sources aren't terribly reliable either.
Why did so many big companies get caught out by the internet? They had the capital, and the human resources to do something, but they just sat there and let it hit them with full force.
It wasn't like it crept up on them overnight!
It is really simple, under the companies' pre-Internet business model they made $X. Under every Internet business model anyone could come up with they would make at best $.0X. They continued using the pre-Internet business model as long as they could, hoping that someone would come up with an Internet business model that would allow them to make $X. It hasn't happened.
These companies that got caught out by the Internet are in businesses that just don't have the potential to make the kind of money they are used to in the Internet age.
These businesses used to have high barriers to entry. The Internet eliminated those barriers to entry.
What is left out of this story (and most others on the Internet) is a key part of this guy's prediction methodology: the phases of Venus http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/04/06/2009-04-06_italian_scientist_warned_of_deadly_laqui-1.html .
I could buy emissions of radon gas providing insight into the timing of earthquakes, but I have trouble understanding how the phases of Venus have anything to do with when an earthquake will occur.
It seems like most of the news reports on it have the same problem, so to keep the story an "OMG, this guy predicted it and the evil bureaucrats covered it up," they left that part out.
The actual complaint as someone further up posted seems to be that Google will have the copyright on the digitized version. If they have copyright on it, you cannot make a new digitized version without at least facing legal confrontation with Google (whether or not you win, it will still be expensive). If these works were worth the legal expense of confronting Google, they would still be in print.
You post that as if signing a UN document means that a country actually intends to abide by it. Take a look at the current membership of the UN Human Rights Council.
Based on the history of other UN documents (and my knowledge of world history), I'd rather take my chances as a child in the U.S. than in over 50% of the signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
I worked with a bunch of science fiction geeks when Star Trek V came out. We all went to opening night as a group. When we came out of the theater, one member of the group said,"Wasn't that the best Star Trek Movie yet?" He was serious. The rest of us replied instantly in unison, "No!"
You blame this on Republicans, but both of the judges on this case were Democrats.
I was unable to find any information about who made the decision to contract out the detention centers to the company involved, but the references I found indicated that Luzerne County politics is dominated by Democrats, which suggests that it was Democrats who were responsible for this particular privatization.
So this case doesn't work out as such a good indictment of Republicans. When you are trying to support your opposition to policies you believe to be "republican", it would be a good idea not to base it on the actions of Democrats.
You missed one other factor that is an advantage of English over many other languages. English has two mechanisms for creating new words when needed. The first is by combining Latin or Greek root words to form a new word that means what is intended. The second is to just import a word with the necessary meaning from another language.
Considering that some Chinese dialects are mutually incomprehensible, in a discussion like this that is significant. However, more significant is how practical is written Chinese as a language for writing comments in a computer program?
I don't know the answer, but my impression is that written Chinese would be problematical as a base for programming.
May I suggest that any news site which believes that Google is making money in a way which costs them lost revenue, ask Google to stop linking to them? If Google refuses to honor such a request, then is the time to rewrite the laws.
The question comes down to this: do these organizations make more money because they are listed by Google (or other news aggregator)than they would if they were not listed by the aggregator? If the answer is yes, then the aggregator does not owe them anything.
Does it matter what the proponents of this move are really concerned with?
I am sorry, but just exactly is wrong with teaching critical thinking?
You may believe that the proponents of this language are using it to get falsehoods taught, but the wording calls for teaching critical thinking.
Apparently a lot of people posting on slashdot don't believe that the theory of evolution will stand up to critical thinking. Once again, it doesn't matter what the people who proposed this wording intend, the wording explicitly calls for teaching critical thinking. How can that be bad?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that back in the 1600s, you had to agree that the earth was flat to get funding as well.
The best science that money can buy isn't always the best science.
Actually, no. If at any point in recorded history, you proposed that the earth was flat, the overwhelming majority of people thought you were a nutjob.
The idea that Columbus' opponents thought the earth was flat was made up by supporters' of Darwin in the 1800's to belittle their opposition (not all of which was religious).
Columbus' opposition said that if the diameter of the earth was what they calculated it to be (which it turns out was a reasonable approximation of the actual diameter of the earth), Columbus and his crewmen would run out of fresh water before they reached East Asia. Columbus, using his own calculations, said the earth isn't that big. It turns out that Columbus got lucky, because neither side was aware that there was another land mass between Europe and Asia (there is reason to believe that there were Europeans who did know, but that is speculation).
I agree there are ways to circumvent it, but the majority of bots will not go to the trouble of doing that, and that's the key.
Another idea would be to observe mouse movements through Javascript to detect a real user. This would be VERY inefficient for a bot, and probably not worth the while.
This would work great until the majority of websites do it, then it is worth the overhead for the bot to go to the trouble of doing it. When CAPTCHA started it wasn't worth the bot writers' trouble to crack it. They just went to easier sites, but as more and more sites adopted CAPTCHA the value of cracking it became greater. Any successful system will eventually be adopted by a large enough number of websites to make it worth the bot writers' time to crack. At which time they will.
a man that has enough money in liquid cash to support the next 36 generations of his offspring in a lavish life of hookers and beer.
Well, of course - he's trying to save enough cash to keep the next 36 generations of his offspring in a lavish life of hookers and cocaine.
Frankly, what else would you expect from a conservative?
Yeah, he's so different from Teddy Kennedy.
Actually, historical evidence suggests that a revolution needs somewhere around 30% of the population to strongly support it to succeed. The American Revolution had about 1/3 of the population strenuously supporting it, about 1/3 strenuously opposed (Tories/Loyalists), and about 1/3 neutral. I have seen similar breakdowns of other successful revolutions but I no longer remember which countries/areas they were.
The law of supply and demand applies the number of suppliers as well. If I have all of the supply of something, if you want it, you have to pay whatever price I want for it. The other side of that is, if you are the only one who wants to buy it, if I want to sell it, I have to accept the price you are willing to pay for it. If something is unique and only has one potential buyer, its value is either, the most the buyer will pay to get it, or the least the owner will accept to sell it, whichever is greater.
The thing that the record companies seem to not understand is that they are not the only source for something that is in essentially infinite supply. They are however the only legal source. There is some value to most people to obtaining the product legally. Unfortunately for the record industry, many people have decided that this value is less than the price that the record companies are willing to sell for. Some people choose to obtain it illegally, I choose not to obtain it at all.
AP's barrier to entry wasn't distribution, it was a worldwide network of skilled journalists. The Internet hasn't removed that barrier to entry, because bloggers on the ground don't have the detachment and big-picture view of the skilled journalist, and rarely have the writing skills. If anything is damaging AP's business model, it's not the barriers to entry, it's whether the product (informed, well written journalism) is in demand nowadays.
I was going to give examples of how naive your concept of "skilled journalists" is, but instead I will comment on the AP's barrier to entry.
One of the barriers to entry to something like the AP was getting news from where it happened to where people were. That used to be expensive. Now it is fairly cheap to connect to the Internet and send your information out from just about anywhere.
Can we please make 2012 a no party year? Candidates should be themselves rather than cloak themselves in stupid pointless ideologies.
And this sums up the problem, you think the only elections that matter are the Presidential ones every four years. Why wait for 2012? Why not make 2010 a no party year? Why not make sure that the guys running the local government are doing a good job?
If people would start putting more emphasis on local and state elections, it would have a much bigger impact on the state of affairs than any amount of effort on the Federal level.
Good science fiction won't necessarily give you the reason that the sky is purple, however there is a reason and the book is consistent. If the book couldn't have taken place on a world with a purple sky, yet the sky is purple, it's Fantasy.
No, the second isn't necessarily Fantasy, it is just bad writing. Any book that is worth reading is consistent.
The key to writing good Speculative Fiction is to take a basic assumption about the world and say, "What if this were true? How would the world look?" and then build a plot in that world. If the change is something like "faster than light travel is possible" than you are writing Science Fiction. If the change is something like "there are people who can make changes to the physical world by wishing it so" you are writing Fantasy.
The problem is there are more people who are willing to report news than there are dollars people are willing to pay to receive news. Anybody can start a website and report news. Whether that news is reliable is another question, but since the advent of the Internet people have discovered that the old news sources aren't terribly reliable either.
Why did so many big companies get caught out by the internet? They had the capital, and the human resources to do something, but they just sat there and let it hit them with full force.
It wasn't like it crept up on them overnight!
It is really simple, under the companies' pre-Internet business model they made $X. Under every Internet business model anyone could come up with they would make at best $.0X. They continued using the pre-Internet business model as long as they could, hoping that someone would come up with an Internet business model that would allow them to make $X. It hasn't happened.
These companies that got caught out by the Internet are in businesses that just don't have the potential to make the kind of money they are used to in the Internet age.
These businesses used to have high barriers to entry. The Internet eliminated those barriers to entry.
What is left out of this story (and most others on the Internet) is a key part of this guy's prediction methodology: the phases of Venus http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/04/06/2009-04-06_italian_scientist_warned_of_deadly_laqui-1.html .
I could buy emissions of radon gas providing insight into the timing of earthquakes, but I have trouble understanding how the phases of Venus have anything to do with when an earthquake will occur.
It seems like most of the news reports on it have the same problem, so to keep the story an "OMG, this guy predicted it and the evil bureaucrats covered it up," they left that part out.
The actual complaint as someone further up posted seems to be that Google will have the copyright on the digitized version. If they have copyright on it, you cannot make a new digitized version without at least facing legal confrontation with Google (whether or not you win, it will still be expensive). If these works were worth the legal expense of confronting Google, they would still be in print.
You post that as if signing a UN document means that a country actually intends to abide by it. Take a look at the current membership of the UN Human Rights Council.
Based on the history of other UN documents (and my knowledge of world history), I'd rather take my chances as a child in the U.S. than in over 50% of the signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Yeah, Bush did a great job boosting our leadership status. Cough.
Yeah, if Bush had used Obama's approach maybe he could have gotten Libya to give up its Nuclear Weapons program. Oh that's right, they did!!
Yes, but the Democratic Party isn't.
Twitter: Micro Blogging Service Tweet: To send a message on twitter. Twat: Any journalist that reports on/about twitter.
You missed one:
Twit: Someone who uses Twitter
I worked with a bunch of science fiction geeks when Star Trek V came out. We all went to opening night as a group. When we came out of the theater, one member of the group said,"Wasn't that the best Star Trek Movie yet?" He was serious. The rest of us replied instantly in unison, "No!"
What would be the point? The people who watch/listen to Colbert don't vote in real elections.
You blame this on Republicans, but both of the judges on this case were Democrats.
I was unable to find any information about who made the decision to contract out the detention centers to the company involved, but the references I found indicated that Luzerne County politics is dominated by Democrats, which suggests that it was Democrats who were responsible for this particular privatization.
So this case doesn't work out as such a good indictment of Republicans. When you are trying to support your opposition to policies you believe to be "republican", it would be a good idea not to base it on the actions of Democrats.
You missed one other factor that is an advantage of English over many other languages. English has two mechanisms for creating new words when needed. The first is by combining Latin or Greek root words to form a new word that means what is intended. The second is to just import a word with the necessary meaning from another language.
Considering that some Chinese dialects are mutually incomprehensible, in a discussion like this that is significant. However, more significant is how practical is written Chinese as a language for writing comments in a computer program?
I don't know the answer, but my impression is that written Chinese would be problematical as a base for programming.
May I suggest that any news site which believes that Google is making money in a way which costs them lost revenue, ask Google to stop linking to them? If Google refuses to honor such a request, then is the time to rewrite the laws.
The question comes down to this: do these organizations make more money because they are listed by Google (or other news aggregator)than they would if they were not listed by the aggregator? If the answer is yes, then the aggregator does not owe them anything.
"Fox news has investigative journalists."
Well, they do if "investigative journalists" means "people who make stuff up".
No, that's the New York Times you are thinking of (google Jayson Blair, Walter Duranty).
So, how would you word that to say that children should be taught the scientific method?
Does it matter what the proponents of this move are really concerned with?
I am sorry, but just exactly is wrong with teaching critical thinking?
You may believe that the proponents of this language are using it to get falsehoods taught, but the wording calls for teaching critical thinking.
Apparently a lot of people posting on slashdot don't believe that the theory of evolution will stand up to critical thinking. Once again, it doesn't matter what the people who proposed this wording intend, the wording explicitly calls for teaching critical thinking. How can that be bad?