Maybe we ourselves are a component part of an infinity of intelligent life forms and an infinity of intelligent life forms are contained within each of us. Maybe it's even more dimensionally complicated than that.
The Fermi paradox seems define "life" as "life that is scaled reasonably near our own."
Good luck to you. I hope that your risk assessment, based on 'human time,' isn't overridden by a powerful volcanic incident, occurring in geologic time.
I'm thinking that a rich virtual environment, with multi-thousands of participants, would have room for lots of advertising.
For instance: Enter the virtual room, watch a video about our product, or take a survey about our candidate, and in exchange get a plasma blaster and 400 rounds of ammunition.
TV and the internet are merging very rapidly. Games and advertising will inevitably merge in that combined format. The advertising will be crude at first (like it was at the dawn of TV and radio), but it will become more and more refined with time. The targeting will become way more refined than TV or radio has become because the consumer will be interactively providing the advertiser(s) with huge amounts of data regarding the effectiveness of the advertising.
These games have the potential to be very seductive. They won't cost money because you'll be paying by providing the advertiser with rich marketing data about yourself. You'll be interacting with many others in an engaging environments, because marketing companies will be competing to create the most engaging environments.
It will be oh so much fun. The political parties will just HAVE to get involved in this rich gold mine of data collection. They'll probe for all your hot and cold buttons in a very sophisticated fashion. Then, the politicians will parrot it all back to you.
There is no need to inject partisan politics into this issue. Each individual congressperson (democrat or republican) bears responsiblilty for the lack of oversight in this matter.
Burying the issue in accusatory partisan politics is only helpful to those who seek to kill oversight.
Many posts on this thread are interesting. The journalist is attacked. The analyst is attacked. The story is attacked.
But the bottom line is: Nobody really knows anything. And that lack of knowledge is unacceptable. Congress is responsible for this. Congressional oversight of our spy agencies is their damn duty. And CONGRESS has let us down.
If this analyst's statements are false, we should be hearing assurances of that fact by our representatives and senators. The silence of the congressmen is deafening. They are betraying our trust in them.
As NYCL points out, you cannot appeal NONFINAL rulings of the trial court. Otherwise, people would be appealing EVERYTHING that happens in the trial courts, and the trial process would turn into an endless Dickensian jumble. A person has to wait until everything is over in the trial court before he or she can appeal. The RIAA didn't do that, so this "appeal" is doomed.
Right now, the RIAA's lawyers are looking stupid (even to themselves) and may be worried that their clients will be pissed at them for making such a silly procedural blunder. They'll seek to convert their appeal into an attempt at interlocutory review. The problem with interlocutory review is that it is EXTREMELY difficult to get (for the same reasons stated in the first paragraph). Very generally speaking, a person can only get interlocutory review if they can demonstrate that the trial court's decision was soooo bad that its consequence would screw up everything afterward. The appeals courts will bend over backward to uphold the trial court's use of its discretion. A motion for interlocutory review is a really bad in this case because it has virtually no chance of success.
This presents the really interesting question: Why is the RIAA acting so stupid? This appeal is a loser motion that will cost real money (and maybe elicit monetary sanctions) and will hurt the music company's public relations. Are the lawyers (not the client) making the decisions here? Is the client asleep at the wheel? Is the lawyer keeping the client in the loop so that the client can make informed decisions? Is the decisionmaker-client not any one person? Who is making the calls for the music company here?
Often rich ligitants seek to financially exhaust poor litigants by making tons of motions. That strategy doesn't make sense in this case, because Nesson's team is like the Borg. They'll eat that stuff up.
Generally, the strategic decisions are made by the clients and the tactical decisions are made by the lawyers. Maybe the lawyers reckoned that this is a tactical call that the lawyers get to make . . .
This is a high-order blunder by the RIAA. I'm just wondering why . . . .
The RIAA is, among other things, a joint venture formed by a bunch of music companies. The mandate of the RIAA, insofar as it is clearly expressed or understood, must be the product of negotiation and compromise and inertia.
This is just another American political distraction. Like religion, abortion, guns, etc. .., these distractions keep us from uniting on the really important issues like economic power. Move along. There's nothing new to see here.
(Although such an absurd statute would be really expensive to enforce . . . )
The meaning of object "A" does not depend upon the fact that object "B" is uniquely defined. Object "B" can be defined in such a way that object "B" will always include every object "A" and will also include different objects "B", "C", and "D." In the law, this concept is the concept of lesser included offenses.
Your ipse dixit: "Such definitions are relevant and important and have real moral consequences." Without explaining the relevance, importance, or moral consequence of your semantic distinctions, your semantic distinctions are meaningless.
You argue like a poorly trained hyper-didactic elementary school teacher.
When somebody says that they were robbed when they were in fact burglarized or stolen from, I'm not going to jump their shit over meaningless semantics.
Facts are SETTLED in the trial court. Once the trial court enters its judgment, those facts are set in stone.
Facts can be undone on appeal only if no reasonable factfinder could have found the challenged facts AND if the party appealing has complied with all the procedural requirements. Thanks to the lawyers, Groklaw, and others, that just isn't going to happen in this case because there is too much evidence supporting the decision of the trial court.
Facts almost NEVER get rewritten on appeal. The rules are tremendously slanted against that. If a fact gets undone on appeal, the issue gets sent back to the trial court for a new fact determination.
Groklaw's purpose was help in the development of a factual record in the trial court against SCO. As discussed above, there is no need for factual development on appeal. If the trial court must in the future decide some new facts, Groklaw will doubtless spring into action, but that isn't likely.
My dad lives in rural Michigan. He's got a natural gas generator. It powers the important circuits. It has worked wonderfully (over several years) when the electricity has failed. Sorry, I don't know much about hookup mechanics.
The user jacks his credit card into our system. We store user input. We process user input. We output processed data back to the user. We suck money out of the user's credit card account.
Mr. Heller pled guilty to a felony, per his legal fund website. If ever a case SCREAMED OUT for a pardon. This is it!! Mr. Heller committed a crime and was properly convicted for it, but the mitigating circumstance are outstanding. Cases like this are why State and Federal Constitutions provide the pardoning power. I sure hope for the best for this guy.
Even with advanced computer technology, data collection as undertaken by the Stasi, would require a big bureaucracy. Acting on any information mined from that data collection would require an even greater bureaucracy. I doubt that any half-aware political society would tolerate that kind of expense--especially when it results in significant annoyance.
On the other hand, the US has been putting up with the obnoxious TSA for a long time. ... Hopefully that officious bureaucracy will be mellowed out in the new administration.
Older people generally have either no sensitivity to malware, or are extremely oversensitive on the subject. If you can make clean re-installs easy for them you'll be doing them a great service.
If Linux wants to get big like Windows, then Linux needs to create a development environment that encourages closed-source, intellectual property loving, for profit software developers.
If this is anathema to the true GNU believers, then they are merely being shortsighted. Linux is already better than Windows. Any idiot can see that. Developers use Windows because they think that they can make money in Windows. When developers don't use Linux, the reason must be that the developers don't think that they can make money using Linux.
The Linux community should stop focusing on making cool Linux programs (for now). The community should devote most of its new effort to creating a development environment that makes it trivially easy to port a Windows or Mac program to Linux.
Windows was successful because it cultivated closed-source developers. Linux will only become that successful if it also cultivates closed source developers. This is screamingly obvious.
Once the closed source developers migrate to Linux, then Linux gets really interesting and political. It may not remain the same techno-elite benevolent dictatorship that it is now, but it will be interesting! The techno-elite can then reap the benefits of the GPL by harvesting improvements of GPL'd Linux code that are made at the behest of the for-profit closed source people.
In other words, EMBRACE for-profit-closed-source developers. EXTEND them a generous and profitable helping hand that allows them to port their products to Linux. EXTINGUISH Windows, when they--and their users--figure out how much better the Linux world is.
You present it as an article of faith that "we" (whoever that is) will "not return to The Jungle."
Your faith that the way things are right now is the way things will always be is the faith that the parent was challenging.
You ought to reexamine that faith. The social structure is not as sturdy as you suppose. The United States came DAMN close to revolution during the Great Depression, for example.
Term limits limit the power of the people to elect the candidate of their choice. That is undemocratic. The idea that term limits nevertheless serve some kind of democratic ideal is absurd.
The people who pull the strings of power will just nominate a different telegenic clone every two terms instead of nominating the same telegenic clone over and over.
Your analysis might fit shrink-wrapped software, but if custom software customers start demanding open source software you're going to have to go with the flow.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we ourselves are a component part of an infinity of intelligent life forms and an infinity of intelligent life forms are contained within each of us. Maybe it's even more dimensionally complicated than that.
The Fermi paradox seems define "life" as "life that is scaled reasonably near our own."
Good luck to you. I hope that your risk assessment, based on 'human time,' isn't overridden by a powerful volcanic incident, occurring in geologic time.
I'm thinking that a rich virtual environment, with multi-thousands of participants, would have room for lots of advertising.
For instance: Enter the virtual room, watch a video about our product, or take a survey about our candidate, and in exchange get a plasma blaster and 400 rounds of ammunition.
TV and the internet are merging very rapidly. Games and advertising will inevitably merge in that combined format. The advertising will be crude at first (like it was at the dawn of TV and radio), but it will become more and more refined with time. The targeting will become way more refined than TV or radio has become because the consumer will be interactively providing the advertiser(s) with huge amounts of data regarding the effectiveness of the advertising.
These games have the potential to be very seductive. They won't cost money because you'll be paying by providing the advertiser with rich marketing data about yourself. You'll be interacting with many others in an engaging environments, because marketing companies will be competing to create the most engaging environments.
It will be oh so much fun. The political parties will just HAVE to get involved in this rich gold mine of data collection. They'll probe for all your hot and cold buttons in a very sophisticated fashion. Then, the politicians will parrot it all back to you.
Sometimes the future doesn't seem so grand.
Can you imagine a combat flight simulator with a bendy screen that covers a whole hemisphere! There is cool . . . and then there is insanely cool!!!!
There is no need to inject partisan politics into this issue. Each individual congressperson (democrat or republican) bears responsiblilty for the lack of oversight in this matter.
Burying the issue in accusatory partisan politics is only helpful to those who seek to kill oversight.
Many posts on this thread are interesting. The journalist is attacked. The analyst is attacked. The story is attacked.
But the bottom line is: Nobody really knows anything. And that lack of knowledge is unacceptable. Congress is responsible for this. Congressional oversight of our spy agencies is their damn duty. And CONGRESS has let us down.
If this analyst's statements are false, we should be hearing assurances of that fact by our representatives and senators. The silence of the congressmen is deafening. They are betraying our trust in them.
As NYCL points out, you cannot appeal NONFINAL rulings of the trial court. Otherwise, people would be appealing EVERYTHING that happens in the trial courts, and the trial process would turn into an endless Dickensian jumble. A person has to wait until everything is over in the trial court before he or she can appeal. The RIAA didn't do that, so this "appeal" is doomed.
Right now, the RIAA's lawyers are looking stupid (even to themselves) and may be worried that their clients will be pissed at them for making such a silly procedural blunder. They'll seek to convert their appeal into an attempt at interlocutory review. The problem with interlocutory review is that it is EXTREMELY difficult to get (for the same reasons stated in the first paragraph). Very generally speaking, a person can only get interlocutory review if they can demonstrate that the trial court's decision was soooo bad that its consequence would screw up everything afterward. The appeals courts will bend over backward to uphold the trial court's use of its discretion. A motion for interlocutory review is a really bad in this case because it has virtually no chance of success.
This presents the really interesting question: Why is the RIAA acting so stupid? This appeal is a loser motion that will cost real money (and maybe elicit monetary sanctions) and will hurt the music company's public relations. Are the lawyers (not the client) making the decisions here? Is the client asleep at the wheel? Is the lawyer keeping the client in the loop so that the client can make informed decisions? Is the decisionmaker-client not any one person? Who is making the calls for the music company here?
Often rich ligitants seek to financially exhaust poor litigants by making tons of motions. That strategy doesn't make sense in this case, because Nesson's team is like the Borg. They'll eat that stuff up.
Generally, the strategic decisions are made by the clients and the tactical decisions are made by the lawyers. Maybe the lawyers reckoned that this is a tactical call that the lawyers get to make . . .
This is a high-order blunder by the RIAA. I'm just wondering why . . . .
The RIAA is, among other things, a joint venture formed by a bunch of music companies. The mandate of the RIAA, insofar as it is clearly expressed or understood, must be the product of negotiation and compromise and inertia.
This is just another American political distraction. Like religion, abortion, guns, etc. . ., these distractions keep us from uniting on the really important issues like economic power. Move along. There's nothing new to see here.
(Although such an absurd statute would be really expensive to enforce . . . )
The meaning of object "A" does not depend upon the fact that object "B" is uniquely defined. Object "B" can be defined in such a way that object "B" will always include every object "A" and will also include different objects "B", "C", and "D." In the law, this concept is the concept of lesser included offenses.
Your ipse dixit: "Such definitions are relevant and important and have real moral consequences." Without explaining the relevance, importance, or moral consequence of your semantic distinctions, your semantic distinctions are meaningless.
You argue like a poorly trained hyper-didactic elementary school teacher.
When somebody says that they were robbed when they were in fact burglarized or stolen from, I'm not going to jump their shit over meaningless semantics.
I agree with you to a large extent. Sony has blown away an awful lot of goodwill by shipping crummy products.
The laws must change . . .
Facts are SETTLED in the trial court. Once the trial court enters its judgment, those facts are set in stone.
Facts can be undone on appeal only if no reasonable factfinder could have found the challenged facts AND if the party appealing has complied with all the procedural requirements. Thanks to the lawyers, Groklaw, and others, that just isn't going to happen in this case because there is too much evidence supporting the decision of the trial court.
Facts almost NEVER get rewritten on appeal. The rules are tremendously slanted against that. If a fact gets undone on appeal, the issue gets sent back to the trial court for a new fact determination.
Groklaw's purpose was help in the development of a factual record in the trial court against SCO. As discussed above, there is no need for factual development on appeal. If the trial court must in the future decide some new facts, Groklaw will doubtless spring into action, but that isn't likely.
The criminal's accomplices shopped him. That, plus evidence of the public market that he created, was more than enough for a search warrant.
Once again . . . there is no honor among thieves. We should all be grateful for that.
I hope that the Feds launch that guy into the stratosphere.
My dad lives in rural Michigan. He's got a natural gas generator. It powers the important circuits. It has worked wonderfully (over several years) when the electricity has failed. Sorry, I don't know much about hookup mechanics.
That argument may resonate with the trial judge. Anything that fosters a more informed outcome ought to be welcome.
The user jacks his credit card into our system.
We store user input.
We process user input.
We output processed data back to the user.
We suck money out of the user's credit card account.
Behold the cloud!
Mr. Heller pled guilty to a felony, per his legal fund website. If ever a case SCREAMED OUT for a pardon. This is it!! Mr. Heller committed a crime and was properly convicted for it, but the mitigating circumstance are outstanding. Cases like this are why State and Federal Constitutions provide the pardoning power. I sure hope for the best for this guy.
Verry interesting!
Even with advanced computer technology, data collection as undertaken by the Stasi, would require a big bureaucracy. Acting on any information mined from that data collection would require an even greater bureaucracy. I doubt that any half-aware political society would tolerate that kind of expense--especially when it results in significant annoyance.
On the other hand, the US has been putting up with the obnoxious TSA for a long time. . .. Hopefully that officious bureaucracy will be mellowed out in the new administration.
Older people generally have either no sensitivity to malware, or are extremely oversensitive on the subject. If you can make clean re-installs easy for them you'll be doing them a great service.
What a sweet security breach story!
If Linux wants to get big like Windows, then Linux needs to create a development environment that encourages closed-source, intellectual property loving, for profit software developers.
If this is anathema to the true GNU believers, then they are merely being shortsighted. Linux is already better than Windows. Any idiot can see that. Developers use Windows because they think that they can make money in Windows. When developers don't use Linux, the reason must be that the developers don't think that they can make money using Linux.
The Linux community should stop focusing on making cool Linux programs (for now). The community should devote most of its new effort to creating a development environment that makes it trivially easy to port a Windows or Mac program to Linux.
Windows was successful because it cultivated closed-source developers. Linux will only become that successful if it also cultivates closed source developers. This is screamingly obvious.
Once the closed source developers migrate to Linux, then Linux gets really interesting and political. It may not remain the same techno-elite benevolent dictatorship that it is now, but it will be interesting! The techno-elite can then reap the benefits of the GPL by harvesting improvements of GPL'd Linux code that are made at the behest of the for-profit closed source people.
In other words, EMBRACE for-profit-closed-source developers. EXTEND them a generous and profitable helping hand that allows them to port their products to Linux. EXTINGUISH Windows, when they--and their users--figure out how much better the Linux world is.
You present it as an article of faith that "we" (whoever that is) will "not return to The Jungle."
Your faith that the way things are right now is the way things will always be is the faith that the parent was challenging.
You ought to reexamine that faith. The social structure is not as sturdy as you suppose. The United States came DAMN close to revolution during the Great Depression, for example.
Term limits limit the power of the people to elect the candidate of their choice. That is undemocratic. The idea that term limits nevertheless serve some kind of democratic ideal is absurd.
The people who pull the strings of power will just nominate a different telegenic clone every two terms instead of nominating the same telegenic clone over and over.
Your analysis might fit shrink-wrapped software, but if custom software customers start demanding open source software you're going to have to go with the flow.