Having used both Apple phones and MS phones, personally though I'd rather go back to having a decent phone (IE good at calls and sms at a pinch), decent pda (email, organiser, some apps) and a decent media player.
Haven't you basically just described an iPhone (try 'Airplane Mode' when you're working on a problem). Most criticisms come from people who were hoping for a portable general-purpose computer, but if you see it as a pretty decent phone and SMS client, a PDA with the option for (quite a lot of) PDA-type apps, plus a decent media player, the lockdown and limitations begin to make sense.
Thanks for being so open about this, it's refreshing to discuss with someone who has understood the issue and changed his/her mind. Sorry you've taken so much flack and got modded troll - totally inappropriate mod there, unfortunately.
Then your pediatrician and physician need to get a better understanding of basic science. There's about 25 micrograms of mercury in 0.5mL of a vaccine preserved with thimerisol (see FDA & Thimerisol under heading 'Thimerisol as a preservative'). The EPA recommendation is 0.1 micrograms/kg/day maximum mercury ingestion (see Mercury in Fish under heading 'Step 1'.) That means for a 6 year-old child, their weight is estimated as (age + 4)*2=20kg. So 2mcg/day. That means a single dose of an average vaccine would give about 2 weeks worth of mercury ingestion, so unless your child goes and eats a swordfish steak the next day, they're perfectly safe.
I understand the desire to avoid ingesting toxic substances, but it's not necessary to avoid ingesting substances in safe levels. To do so really borders on superstition, where you believe that any amount of a 'bad' substance could be harmful.
The probability is 0%. There is no causal link between the two. They are unrelated disease processes, and have no more link than if you walked under a ladder, had a black cat cross your path, then got bowel cancer. The only thing that has ever raised the possibility of a link is a very small, very biased study by a crackpot doctor who wasn't even a specialist in the field, funded by a group of parents who had an a priori wish to have a link proven. You might as well pick any other unrelated medical intervention in your child with no biologically plausible relation to autism (e.g. having the umbilical cord to less than 5cm length at delivery, to pick something random from thin air) and then refuse to have the umbilical cord cut short in any subsequent children you may have until someone relents and does a study.
Yes, but the 'freeloaders' should be those who medically cannot have the vaccines. For instance, those who have always been too unwell to be vaccinated, those with cancers that preclude vaccination, those who have had a severe anaphylaxis reaction to the first does and cannot complete the course. The system cannot support thousands or even tens of thousands who refuse vaccination out of ignorance, misinformation or stupidity.
Sorry, at what point was this anything to do with the iPhone? This was about similarities between a desktop GUI produced by Sun (that never saw the light of day) and the then Mac OS user interface.
What you're talking about it exactly what is done in healthcare rationing. It's also been used as a football in the US healthcare debate (I think some idiot called the UK system that decides this 'death panels'). They way it's done is to ask a representative sample of the population to rate the value of a year in a certain condition. It's based on QALYs - Quality Adjusted Life Years. So, for instance, someone might say that 1 year in a wheelchair has the same ' value' as 2 years able to walk unaided, so you would say that a year in a wheelchair has 0.5 QALYs. Bear in mind, this isn't done by a panel but by survey of the population.
What a group of experts / managers / politicians / etc. does do is decide how much the health service is prepared to spend per QALY. So, a certain type of cancer treatment might buy 0.01 QALY per treatment, at a thousand pounds a treatment. A cutoff can then be set over the whole population, for every type of treatment, to say that as a society we agree not to pay more than e.g. GBP 500,000 per 1 QALY.
The whole idea is of course terrible, grotesque, but also elegant and necessary in the job it does. Of course, people with enough money can buy whatever health insurance and private healthcare for whatever treatments they desire. Every so often, there's a big media storm about a certain treatment (usually for a cancer) that has been deemed too expensive, and you get lots of protests over putting a price on life. Of course, if there's a cap on public healthcare spending then to provide that expansive treatment, something else would have to go.
But he's talking about Ubuntu. Why does the standard gamut of replies to criticism of any OSS project always include "well, you don't have to use it...". Half the point of OSS is that the user base can improve it, but clearly it's important to be consistent and not have 100 forks of every project just to have different colour schemes. The brown theme has been a big turn-off for many people, and this may be fixing it, which is a good thing.
You should never roll back at all. I'm in the UK so I always drive manual/stick except for a few months when I had my parents' automatic. On steep inclines you should always use the handbrake to move off; on more shallow inclines you can quickly move the right foot from the brake to the gas whilst slightly moving the clutch up with the left foot to get the clutch to bite. Rolling back a foot would fail a driving test here, and could get you a ticket if the police spot you doing it (although pretty unlikely).
Rubbish. I have a car with hill assist, and a second car without. I can easily move off on a medium hill by moving from brake to gas whilst slightly lifting the clutch on the car without. The car with hill assist is a much heavier vehicle and I'm not sure I could manage without rolling back.
I drive a manual transmission car, and I usually drive against the brake at a slow speed for a short distance after going through deep water. That's the only reason I can think of to use both at once.
Sure. Although I did have a 'teacher' at school who wouldn't believe me about the above... I had to actually use a multimeter to prove to him that 1/r=1/r1 + 1/r2 cannot be approximated to r=(r1+r2)/2.
Well, I probably can't explain _exactly_ what it is. My understanding is that the human eye doesn't perceive brightness linearly, so gamma correction is used to logarithmically scale the values so that we can get more detail in the low-brightness regions. The upshot is that e.g. in 8-bit colour, a value of 128 in a given colour isn't perceived as half as bright as a value of 256, but as much darker. So an algorithm that just takes the mean of a given number of pixels in order to scale will generally produce much darker pictures than expected. A good compromise would be to take the root of the mean of the squares (i.e. a gamma of 2.0) because the commonest gamma is 2.2, and on older Macs it is 1.8.
That's like saying rendering the proper color gamut isn't the purpose of a monitor. Or that fidelity to the original source material isn't the purpose of speakers.
I'm a Mac user, and I happen to agree with your basic arguments, but I do think you've missed the point that there may be different standards to measure hardware by in different contexts. I want my LED Cinema Display to be accurate with perfect gamma. I don't care so much about the display in my MacBook - I would trade-off plenty of accuracy for good operation in sunlight and power efficiency; the monitor for my MythTV PC in the living room is set-up to give punchy over-saturated pictures because that suits the films I enjoy and makes it bright even when my wife has all the lights on in the living room. I want the speakers in my home studio to have excellent fidelity to the source material, but the Bose Lifestyle system hooked up to my MythTV setup is aweful in terms of fidelity - but it sounds great for an action movie and is unobtrusive in the living room.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, even using a gamma of 2.0 (i.e. the root of the mean of the squares) would be a better compromise, and split the difference (sort-of) between 1.8 and 2.2. That would certainly produce better results than presuming a gamma of 1.0, and wouldn't be a huge programming or computation overhead. This bug is akin to a circuit simulator presuming that the total resistance of several resistors in parallel can be approximated to the arithmetic mean.
I'm not sure Christian groups generally attempt to "force people to share their beliefs". I agree that some individuals and specific groups can be extreme, as can e.g. animal rights groups and environmental lobbyists, but most Christians try to inform and debate rather than force anyone. I would say that extremism is really to do with the method. People who send letter bombs to those who perform abortions are definitely extreme, but that's a small minority within a very large movement. Saying that Christianity is an extremist religion is a bit like saying that all vegetarians are extreme because an animal rights lobbyist once attacked a research scientist.
No, but the post higher up says "freedom of speech applies [only] to adults". If anyone has freedom of speech, they have it by reference to the Constitution (in the US, at least) and in Europe under the The European Convention on Human Rights. Neither of those specify age limits.
Any right the Principal thinks he has in this situation would have to have been granted to him under US law, and that law would have to be constitutionally valid. Ergo, the Principal has no right to limit freedom of speech, unless there exists a law which is att odds with the constitution.
Obviously, there has to be some curtailment of freedoms in order for an educational system to work (otherwise, for instance, requiring children to be in class might be unlawful detention). But such curtailment should be the absolute minimum required for the system to work, and should be handled very carefully (I would say, for instance, giving children fora in which they could discuss issues which have been banned in class).
My goodness, why not post the same reply another 30 times? I hope your example does get brought up in trial, because I would love to see the RIAA documentation of the loss of licensing value for tracks that they have proven to have been "distributed" via P-P. The notion of 'lost sales' to consumers has always been a problem because they can pick a number and double it to claim what the pirates have cost them. It should be easy, however, for them to show loss of licensing revenue. I suspect, however, that the reverse is true and that the proliferation of digital distribution via iTunes, Amazon, etc., has actually been very good for the record companies despite ongoing piracy in the background.
I think his point was that H&M wouldn't pay to license a work that their customers could get for free. I don't think he was trying to claim that H&M would get it from Gnutella and redistribute. His argument is interesting, but ultimately comes down against the RIAA because it would be easy to look at the licensing arrangements for the 30 songs in question and see if they have indeed become less valuable in terms of licensing than before the alleged distribution.
I don't know which songs he allegedly distributed, but surely it is a simple matter to disprove your hypothesis. For how much do iTunes and Amazon license to distribute those songs? Do they pay less for the 30 songs in question, or the same amount as other songs of the same age/genre? It seems to me that actual damages could be established very easily based on your example, and therefore statutory damages would be unfair and unnecessary.
The problem with all of your analogies is that the are totally different to the question of "stealing" a digital work. In all of your examples, the original owner no longer has the item in question. In the example of copyright infringement, the original possessor has no less items than they originally possessed. Copyright infringement is not stealing, and it is unhelpful (and disingenuous) to try to pretend that it is. It isn't rape, arson or assault either. I have a feeling that at least your second example would be fraud rather than theft, although I have heard fraud described as a type of theft so I'm not sure.
No, you're putting "spin" on the issue. It's a gross misrepresentation to claim that placing a file (mp3 or whatever) in a publicly accessible folder is "distribution". It's no more distribution than me renting a DVD and accidentally leaving it on my garden wall on my way in from the car. Someone could take it, rip it and sell pirated copies, but they would be committing the crime. There is no evidence at all that anyone actually downloaded any of these files, what the motives and subsequent actions of those possible downloaders might be, what the motives of the defendant might be, etc. etc.. All you have is a file sitting on a computer.
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Having used both Apple phones and MS phones, personally though I'd rather go back to having a decent phone (IE good at calls and sms at a pinch), decent pda (email, organiser, some apps) and a decent media player.
Haven't you basically just described an iPhone (try 'Airplane Mode' when you're working on a problem). Most criticisms come from people who were hoping for a portable general-purpose computer, but if you see it as a pretty decent phone and SMS client, a PDA with the option for (quite a lot of) PDA-type apps, plus a decent media player, the lockdown and limitations begin to make sense.
Thanks for being so open about this, it's refreshing to discuss with someone who has understood the issue and changed his/her mind. Sorry you've taken so much flack and got modded troll - totally inappropriate mod there, unfortunately.
Then your pediatrician and physician need to get a better understanding of basic science. There's about 25 micrograms of mercury in 0.5mL of a vaccine preserved with thimerisol (see FDA & Thimerisol under heading 'Thimerisol as a preservative'). The EPA recommendation is 0.1 micrograms/kg/day maximum mercury ingestion (see Mercury in Fish under heading 'Step 1'.) That means for a 6 year-old child, their weight is estimated as (age + 4)*2=20kg. So 2mcg/day. That means a single dose of an average vaccine would give about 2 weeks worth of mercury ingestion, so unless your child goes and eats a swordfish steak the next day, they're perfectly safe.
I understand the desire to avoid ingesting toxic substances, but it's not necessary to avoid ingesting substances in safe levels. To do so really borders on superstition, where you believe that any amount of a 'bad' substance could be harmful.
The probability is 0%. There is no causal link between the two. They are unrelated disease processes, and have no more link than if you walked under a ladder, had a black cat cross your path, then got bowel cancer. The only thing that has ever raised the possibility of a link is a very small, very biased study by a crackpot doctor who wasn't even a specialist in the field, funded by a group of parents who had an a priori wish to have a link proven. You might as well pick any other unrelated medical intervention in your child with no biologically plausible relation to autism (e.g. having the umbilical cord to less than 5cm length at delivery, to pick something random from thin air) and then refuse to have the umbilical cord cut short in any subsequent children you may have until someone relents and does a study.
Yes, but the 'freeloaders' should be those who medically cannot have the vaccines. For instance, those who have always been too unwell to be vaccinated, those with cancers that preclude vaccination, those who have had a severe anaphylaxis reaction to the first does and cannot complete the course. The system cannot support thousands or even tens of thousands who refuse vaccination out of ignorance, misinformation or stupidity.
Sorry, at what point was this anything to do with the iPhone? This was about similarities between a desktop GUI produced by Sun (that never saw the light of day) and the then Mac OS user interface.
Replying to my own post, I've realised that I think it's more like 30,000 per QALY but the rest is the same.
What you're talking about it exactly what is done in healthcare rationing. It's also been used as a football in the US healthcare debate (I think some idiot called the UK system that decides this 'death panels'). They way it's done is to ask a representative sample of the population to rate the value of a year in a certain condition. It's based on QALYs - Quality Adjusted Life Years. So, for instance, someone might say that 1 year in a wheelchair has the same ' value' as 2 years able to walk unaided, so you would say that a year in a wheelchair has 0.5 QALYs. Bear in mind, this isn't done by a panel but by survey of the population.
What a group of experts / managers / politicians / etc. does do is decide how much the health service is prepared to spend per QALY. So, a certain type of cancer treatment might buy 0.01 QALY per treatment, at a thousand pounds a treatment. A cutoff can then be set over the whole population, for every type of treatment, to say that as a society we agree not to pay more than e.g. GBP 500,000 per 1 QALY.
The whole idea is of course terrible, grotesque, but also elegant and necessary in the job it does. Of course, people with enough money can buy whatever health insurance and private healthcare for whatever treatments they desire. Every so often, there's a big media storm about a certain treatment (usually for a cancer) that has been deemed too expensive, and you get lots of protests over putting a price on life. Of course, if there's a cap on public healthcare spending then to provide that expansive treatment, something else would have to go.
But he's talking about Ubuntu. Why does the standard gamut of replies to criticism of any OSS project always include "well, you don't have to use it...". Half the point of OSS is that the user base can improve it, but clearly it's important to be consistent and not have 100 forks of every project just to have different colour schemes. The brown theme has been a big turn-off for many people, and this may be fixing it, which is a good thing.
I think it means reducing power (i.e. lifting the gas) not turning off the engine.
You should never roll back at all. I'm in the UK so I always drive manual/stick except for a few months when I had my parents' automatic. On steep inclines you should always use the handbrake to move off; on more shallow inclines you can quickly move the right foot from the brake to the gas whilst slightly moving the clutch up with the left foot to get the clutch to bite. Rolling back a foot would fail a driving test here, and could get you a ticket if the police spot you doing it (although pretty unlikely).
Rubbish. I have a car with hill assist, and a second car without. I can easily move off on a medium hill by moving from brake to gas whilst slightly lifting the clutch on the car without. The car with hill assist is a much heavier vehicle and I'm not sure I could manage without rolling back.
I drive a manual transmission car, and I usually drive against the brake at a slow speed for a short distance after going through deep water. That's the only reason I can think of to use both at once.
Sure. Although I did have a 'teacher' at school who wouldn't believe me about the above... I had to actually use a multimeter to prove to him that 1/r=1/r1 + 1/r2 cannot be approximated to r=(r1+r2)/2.
Well, I probably can't explain _exactly_ what it is. My understanding is that the human eye doesn't perceive brightness linearly, so gamma correction is used to logarithmically scale the values so that we can get more detail in the low-brightness regions. The upshot is that e.g. in 8-bit colour, a value of 128 in a given colour isn't perceived as half as bright as a value of 256, but as much darker. So an algorithm that just takes the mean of a given number of pixels in order to scale will generally produce much darker pictures than expected. A good compromise would be to take the root of the mean of the squares (i.e. a gamma of 2.0) because the commonest gamma is 2.2, and on older Macs it is 1.8.
That's like saying rendering the proper color gamut isn't the purpose of a monitor. Or that fidelity to the original source material isn't the purpose of speakers.
I'm a Mac user, and I happen to agree with your basic arguments, but I do think you've missed the point that there may be different standards to measure hardware by in different contexts. I want my LED Cinema Display to be accurate with perfect gamma. I don't care so much about the display in my MacBook - I would trade-off plenty of accuracy for good operation in sunlight and power efficiency; the monitor for my MythTV PC in the living room is set-up to give punchy over-saturated pictures because that suits the films I enjoy and makes it bright even when my wife has all the lights on in the living room. I want the speakers in my home studio to have excellent fidelity to the source material, but the Bose Lifestyle system hooked up to my MythTV setup is aweful in terms of fidelity - but it sounds great for an action movie and is unobtrusive in the living room.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, even using a gamma of 2.0 (i.e. the root of the mean of the squares) would be a better compromise, and split the difference (sort-of) between 1.8 and 2.2. That would certainly produce better results than presuming a gamma of 1.0, and wouldn't be a huge programming or computation overhead. This bug is akin to a circuit simulator presuming that the total resistance of several resistors in parallel can be approximated to the arithmetic mean.
I'm not sure Christian groups generally attempt to "force people to share their beliefs". I agree that some individuals and specific groups can be extreme, as can e.g. animal rights groups and environmental lobbyists, but most Christians try to inform and debate rather than force anyone. I would say that extremism is really to do with the method. People who send letter bombs to those who perform abortions are definitely extreme, but that's a small minority within a very large movement. Saying that Christianity is an extremist religion is a bit like saying that all vegetarians are extreme because an animal rights lobbyist once attacked a research scientist.
No, but the post higher up says "freedom of speech applies [only] to adults". If anyone has freedom of speech, they have it by reference to the Constitution (in the US, at least) and in Europe under the The European Convention on Human Rights. Neither of those specify age limits.
Any right the Principal thinks he has in this situation would have to have been granted to him under US law, and that law would have to be constitutionally valid. Ergo, the Principal has no right to limit freedom of speech, unless there exists a law which is att odds with the constitution.
Obviously, there has to be some curtailment of freedoms in order for an educational system to work (otherwise, for instance, requiring children to be in class might be unlawful detention). But such curtailment should be the absolute minimum required for the system to work, and should be handled very carefully (I would say, for instance, giving children fora in which they could discuss issues which have been banned in class).
Freedom of speech applies to adults
I presume you meant adults only. Citation please.
My goodness, why not post the same reply another 30 times? I hope your example does get brought up in trial, because I would love to see the RIAA documentation of the loss of licensing value for tracks that they have proven to have been "distributed" via P-P. The notion of 'lost sales' to consumers has always been a problem because they can pick a number and double it to claim what the pirates have cost them. It should be easy, however, for them to show loss of licensing revenue. I suspect, however, that the reverse is true and that the proliferation of digital distribution via iTunes, Amazon, etc., has actually been very good for the record companies despite ongoing piracy in the background.
I think his point was that H&M wouldn't pay to license a work that their customers could get for free. I don't think he was trying to claim that H&M would get it from Gnutella and redistribute. His argument is interesting, but ultimately comes down against the RIAA because it would be easy to look at the licensing arrangements for the 30 songs in question and see if they have indeed become less valuable in terms of licensing than before the alleged distribution.
I don't know which songs he allegedly distributed, but surely it is a simple matter to disprove your hypothesis. For how much do iTunes and Amazon license to distribute those songs? Do they pay less for the 30 songs in question, or the same amount as other songs of the same age/genre? It seems to me that actual damages could be established very easily based on your example, and therefore statutory damages would be unfair and unnecessary.
The problem with all of your analogies is that the are totally different to the question of "stealing" a digital work. In all of your examples, the original owner no longer has the item in question. In the example of copyright infringement, the original possessor has no less items than they originally possessed. Copyright infringement is not stealing, and it is unhelpful (and disingenuous) to try to pretend that it is. It isn't rape, arson or assault either. I have a feeling that at least your second example would be fraud rather than theft, although I have heard fraud described as a type of theft so I'm not sure.
No, you're putting "spin" on the issue. It's a gross misrepresentation to claim that placing a file (mp3 or whatever) in a publicly accessible folder is "distribution". It's no more distribution than me renting a DVD and accidentally leaving it on my garden wall on my way in from the car. Someone could take it, rip it and sell pirated copies, but they would be committing the crime. There is no evidence at all that anyone actually downloaded any of these files, what the motives and subsequent actions of those possible downloaders might be, what the motives of the defendant might be, etc. etc.. All you have is a file sitting on a computer.