A better counter-argument - and one which just occurred to me - would have been that, by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, nothing can "know" the exact position and vector of a given particle. Which is precisely why it's legitimate to say that the particle doesn't even have a precise position and vector. Which, in turn, means that its precise position and vector can't be a causal determinant of anything. Which then means that if we can identify the position and vector of every particle in question to the physical limits of knowledge, we can then recreate that same information at the far end, and the Heisenberg error won't matter in the slightest.
So, really, I'm suddenly of the opinion that Heisenberg is no bar to teleportation.
However, we do run into a real existential problem, here. If your information is being read and recreated at the far end of the teleporter, there isn't any reason for the current you to vanish in the process. Rather, we've just made an exact duplicate of you. Which would have interesting implications in the philosophy of "self".
Er...sorry? I'm not completely certain what resemblance my post has to the post you linked (aside from being written in English, I suppose) - nor do I know what the "switcheur GTFO posts" are - but please accept my apology for the affront.
But it's not my problem, as a customer of my ISP. They've sold me 6mbps/1mbps service, with no caveats about where I'm getting data from or sending data to. In my case, I actually had to sign a contract to this effect.
At that point, I frankly don't care what their costs are for providing me bandwidth. They should presumably have figured that out before selling it to me at the price I'm paying.
Note that I'm not anti-corporation, nor do I feel they shouldn't be making money, nor do I feel ripped off if they've got record profits every year: I agreed to pay what I agreed to pay because it was worth it to me. But, by the same token, they agreed to provide what they agreed to provide because it was worth it to them. I am expected to hold up my end of the deal by paying my bill every month, they're expected to hold up theirs by providing the promised service.
For years, they've been touting high speed connections, trying to upsell Joe Average to 3, 4, 5, 6 mbit service. They know full well that the vast majority of Joe Average's internet usage is viewing web sites, sending emails, and streaming porn ten minutes at a time. In other words, they're selling him 6 mbit service for images and text down, text and clicks up. They know Joe Average is only actually using his pipe for a few hours a day, when he's not at work and not asleep.
Of course, they've succeeded in getting a lot of people to pay more money for more bandwidth that they don't actually use almost ever. Which, in a surprise to no one except the ISPs, means that new services are cropping up that actually use the bandwidth people have been sold.
So now they don't like it. Whoops.
It is to be hoped that enough people - enough Joes Average - want to use the new services like VOIP and "legitimate" P2P that the ISPs will actually face market consequences for overselling bandwidth, throttling upstream speeds, and shaping traffic to favor the stuff that's ISP-approved.
A few geeks bitching about asynchronous connections and random throughput caps just doesn't make a dent in Charter's bottom line. A bunch of people being told that despite CBS' promises, they can't download Survivor 2718: Mariana Trench because their ISP won't let them may actually bring some pressure.
Overselling is a great profit method right up until people start trying to use what they've bought. Ponzi schemes are always terrific moneymakers until your suckers^W customers try to cash out.
Truth is the universal defense against slander and libel accusations.
Of course, in this case, you don't get to find out if it's true until the patents are tested in court. Even then, should the patents be found to be uninfringed by OSS, you would have to, in turn, sue MS and demonstrate in court that they knew ahead of time that the patents were not being infringed when they made their statements. And, as long as the patents themselves were not obviously on things that were not being infringed, MS can easily argue that they made a good-faith effort to defend their patents, since they also didn't know if it was true until it was determined in court.
And then, if you successfully demonstrate that MS knew its patent for "a device and method to rotate partially-cooked discs of batter to accomplish equal browning on both sides" was not being infringed by OSS prior to the courtroom test, you will only be awarded actual damages.
No. Trademarks must be vigorously defended, patents and copyrights need not be.
There is a special case if you're selectively enforcing patents; you can potentially lose patent protection if it can be shown you knowingly elected to not claim patent protection in order for the patent to enter widespread use. But that has more to do with operating under false pretenses than it does with not defending your patents. You do not automatically sacrifice patent protection by not pursuing it.
No, it isn't racketeering. This, though similar to, is not a protection scam.
"Boy, this sure is a nice store. Be a shame if something happened to it, wouldn't it?"
Is a protection scam. The threat is of performing an illegal act - breaking the windows, trashing the place, burning it down, or what have you. All of those things are themselves illegal.
While what MS is doing is similar in result (they hope), it is in content much the same as the DA offering a lighter sentence for witness cooperation. It's "we could prosecute, but we won't if you cooperate." This is - obviously - not illegal. It's the same thing as all the megacorp patent cross-licensing that goes on.
Which is itself indicative of how crap the system as a whole is, and this is perfect evidence of why we need patent reform yesterday. But waving the bloody shirt and calling it racketeering doesn't help anything.
I didn't intend the comment as a statement of policy, but simply a comment on the fact that we're still better off (from a "spread of freedom as defined by western civilization" standpoint) than we were twenty, thirty years ago in that country.
By no means do I draw the conclusion that it's time to dust off our hands and claim our work here is done. I was just trying to provide some perspective on the story, as opposed to wailing and gnashing of teeth. The fact that they had to step down at all means that there's a long way to go, and there's no arguing that the country is headed in the wrong direction currently.
It's maintain, though, that it is good news on the time scale of sweeping societal change.
Open source is already deeply embedded in enterprise roles at just about every major technology savy company in the world.
QFT
I work for a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, and we've got Linux solutions deployed in a couple key infrastructure spots. MS reps normally give us a hard time about this, but until they provide equivalent functionality (I'm looking at you, Virtual Server. Also ISA), we consistently tell them to pound sand.
Of course, they were also miffed that we gave away iPods instead of Zune's at last year's tech conference.
I suspect that I would be in for a legal hassle - possibly one I could win, granted - were I to follow you around every time you were in a public place and record video of everything you do to store in my private database that you don't get to see.
There's a difference between no expectation of privacy, meaning someone could be watching/recording any given thing you're doing in publc and no expectation of privacy, meaning someone is watching/recording every given thing you're doing in public.
It speaks well of the net progress in the ex-USSR from the mid-eighties to now that a) these journalists weren't shot/sent to Lefortovo and shot/sent to cut down trees in Siberia until they didn't need to be shot, and b) that the rest of the world has heard about it.
On the time scale of massive societal shifts, things are still looking up. Backsliding, certainly, but it's still a far cry from the heyday of Soviet control.
I think that governments have every right to put cameras out in public places if they so choose.
Intentionally or not, this sums up the entirety of the problem. Legitimate governments - by which I mean any government purportedly "of the people" - have no rights. Human beings have rights. Governments have powers granted them by the governed; either explicitly (through voting/running for office) or implicitly (by not taking up arms against the government). The term "rights" carries with inherent justification. Exercising your rights is an intrinsically ethical thing to do. Exerting force, however, has no inherent justification, and needs to be supported by some external reason.
It's semantics, yes, but it's important. Government don't exercise rights, governments wield power. The government has the power to put cameras in public places; not the right. The very term "public place," in fact, should give the lie to your statement. It's a public place; a place for the public. If the public doesn't want cameras there, then where the hell does the government get off having the "right" to do it?
(Yes, I realize that in the current situation, the public itself is who's accepting and/or asking for these cameras)
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think the evidence bears it out.
For your argument, that no TV = less socialization, to be true, it must also be true that there was less socialization amongst humans prior to the introduction of TVs as a common household device.
I do not believe this to be the case.
I don't have evidence to hand, however, so I could easily be demonstrated wrong.
Using your 1.5 Mbps figure: sure, you can't get more than 1.5 Mbps from that site. But, if you've got 6 Mbps down, you can get 1.5 Mbps from that site, and 1.5 Mbps from a different site, and 1.5 Mbps from another site, and 1.5 Mbps from one more site while you're at it.
Which means you can be snagging a torrent of Feisty Fawn while downloading HL2:E1 and simultaneously fetching all posts from alt.binary.erotica.midgets, getting the maximum possible throughput from each.
There's a flip side to this, of course. I have a strong suspicion that, were we ever to encounter life anywhere else, we'd turn out to be horrifyingly allergic to everything there.
...which sums up why I closed the post with "this is not a good idea".
However: how often do you see this happen in real life? It's certainly not never, but there really aren't all that many instances of people getting torqued enough to track down the guy who cut them off in traffic and shoot him.
You know, I do have one more bright idea: you should try reading the post before sounding off. Specifically the last bit, where I say that it's not a good idea.
On the other hand, you make an excellent example of the problem that needs to be solved. Easy to be a pissant when you're anonymous, isn't it?
Even if you knew that Uberleetkid was John Q. Smith who lived at 1234 Paved Street in Bumtown, Montana, you still couldn't do anything to him -- not even if you went there in person, as there are no laws against what he's doing in the game (yet?).
That there is nothing you can legally do to him does not mean there is nothing you can do to him. This is among the reasons I said it was a bad idea. But vigilanteism can be an effective deterrent; I suspect it wouldn't take too many examples of people getting the crap kicked out of them in real life for being jackasses in game before things would start to improve.
Of course, now you've just traded verbal abuse in game for physical battery in the real world, which isn't what I'd call a quality solution. But it would work.
The problem, of course, is anonymity. It's no secret that the more anonymous people are - or at least, the more anonymous people feel - the less likely they are to control their uncivil urges. Driving is a perfect example of this: if your experience is anything like mine, you see people do things with their cars every day that you simply do not see people doing to each other when there's face-to-face interaction.
The internet makes people feel perfectly anonymous (they're wrong about this, but that doesn't matter), which, for a significant percentage of people, means that they've got license to do anything they want.
Stereotyping or not, this is a problem that's much more prevalent in the early-to-mid teens boy than other demographics. The internet is kind of like the island in Lord Of the Flies, just with less dying.
Slashdot Mirror
A better counter-argument - and one which just occurred to me - would have been that, by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, nothing can "know" the exact position and vector of a given particle. Which is precisely why it's legitimate to say that the particle doesn't even have a precise position and vector. Which, in turn, means that its precise position and vector can't be a causal determinant of anything. Which then means that if we can identify the position and vector of every particle in question to the physical limits of knowledge, we can then recreate that same information at the far end, and the Heisenberg error won't matter in the slightest.
So, really, I'm suddenly of the opinion that Heisenberg is no bar to teleportation.
However, we do run into a real existential problem, here. If your information is being read and recreated at the far end of the teleporter, there isn't any reason for the current you to vanish in the process. Rather, we've just made an exact duplicate of you. Which would have interesting implications in the philosophy of "self".
Er...sorry? I'm not completely certain what resemblance my post has to the post you linked (aside from being written in English, I suppose) - nor do I know what the "switcheur GTFO posts" are - but please accept my apology for the affront.
Yes, it is.
But it's not my problem, as a customer of my ISP. They've sold me 6mbps/1mbps service, with no caveats about where I'm getting data from or sending data to. In my case, I actually had to sign a contract to this effect.
At that point, I frankly don't care what their costs are for providing me bandwidth. They should presumably have figured that out before selling it to me at the price I'm paying.
Note that I'm not anti-corporation, nor do I feel they shouldn't be making money, nor do I feel ripped off if they've got record profits every year: I agreed to pay what I agreed to pay because it was worth it to me. But, by the same token, they agreed to provide what they agreed to provide because it was worth it to them. I am expected to hold up my end of the deal by paying my bill every month, they're expected to hold up theirs by providing the promised service.
This is just reality biting ISPs on the ass.
For years, they've been touting high speed connections, trying to upsell Joe Average to 3, 4, 5, 6 mbit service. They know full well that the vast majority of Joe Average's internet usage is viewing web sites, sending emails, and streaming porn ten minutes at a time. In other words, they're selling him 6 mbit service for images and text down, text and clicks up. They know Joe Average is only actually using his pipe for a few hours a day, when he's not at work and not asleep.
Of course, they've succeeded in getting a lot of people to pay more money for more bandwidth that they don't actually use almost ever. Which, in a surprise to no one except the ISPs, means that new services are cropping up that actually use the bandwidth people have been sold.
So now they don't like it. Whoops.
It is to be hoped that enough people - enough Joes Average - want to use the new services like VOIP and "legitimate" P2P that the ISPs will actually face market consequences for overselling bandwidth, throttling upstream speeds, and shaping traffic to favor the stuff that's ISP-approved.
A few geeks bitching about asynchronous connections and random throughput caps just doesn't make a dent in Charter's bottom line. A bunch of people being told that despite CBS' promises, they can't download Survivor 2718: Mariana Trench because their ISP won't let them may actually bring some pressure.
Overselling is a great profit method right up until people start trying to use what they've bought. Ponzi schemes are always terrific moneymakers until your suckers^W customers try to cash out.
If it's true.
Truth is the universal defense against slander and libel accusations.
Of course, in this case, you don't get to find out if it's true until the patents are tested in court. Even then, should the patents be found to be uninfringed by OSS, you would have to, in turn, sue MS and demonstrate in court that they knew ahead of time that the patents were not being infringed when they made their statements. And, as long as the patents themselves were not obviously on things that were not being infringed, MS can easily argue that they made a good-faith effort to defend their patents, since they also didn't know if it was true until it was determined in court.
And then, if you successfully demonstrate that MS knew its patent for "a device and method to rotate partially-cooked discs of batter to accomplish equal browning on both sides" was not being infringed by OSS prior to the courtroom test, you will only be awarded actual damages.
No. Trademarks must be vigorously defended, patents and copyrights need not be.
There is a special case if you're selectively enforcing patents; you can potentially lose patent protection if it can be shown you knowingly elected to not claim patent protection in order for the patent to enter widespread use. But that has more to do with operating under false pretenses than it does with not defending your patents. You do not automatically sacrifice patent protection by not pursuing it.
No, it isn't racketeering. This, though similar to, is not a protection scam.
"Boy, this sure is a nice store. Be a shame if something happened to it, wouldn't it?"
Is a protection scam. The threat is of performing an illegal act - breaking the windows, trashing the place, burning it down, or what have you. All of those things are themselves illegal.
While what MS is doing is similar in result (they hope), it is in content much the same as the DA offering a lighter sentence for witness cooperation. It's "we could prosecute, but we won't if you cooperate." This is - obviously - not illegal. It's the same thing as all the megacorp patent cross-licensing that goes on.
Which is itself indicative of how crap the system as a whole is, and this is perfect evidence of why we need patent reform yesterday. But waving the bloody shirt and calling it racketeering doesn't help anything.
kilodelta, I have someone I think you should meet. His name is Werner Heisenberg, and he's got some ideas that may interest you.
If your counter-argument depends on the assumption that a Winnipeg February isn't frigid, I think you've got some shoring-up to do.
"Cool bit" is something of an understatement, don't you think? 43 Kelvin is well past "cool" and into "cold," possibly even "frigid" territory.
I'm not worried; I've duct-taped all my windows.
Don't be so sure.
It could be Al Qaeda.
Or child pornographers.
I didn't intend the comment as a statement of policy, but simply a comment on the fact that we're still better off (from a "spread of freedom as defined by western civilization" standpoint) than we were twenty, thirty years ago in that country.
By no means do I draw the conclusion that it's time to dust off our hands and claim our work here is done. I was just trying to provide some perspective on the story, as opposed to wailing and gnashing of teeth. The fact that they had to step down at all means that there's a long way to go, and there's no arguing that the country is headed in the wrong direction currently.
It's maintain, though, that it is good news on the time scale of sweeping societal change.
Open source is already deeply embedded in enterprise roles at just about every major technology savy company in the world.
QFT
I work for a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, and we've got Linux solutions deployed in a couple key infrastructure spots. MS reps normally give us a hard time about this, but until they provide equivalent functionality (I'm looking at you, Virtual Server. Also ISA), we consistently tell them to pound sand.
Of course, they were also miffed that we gave away iPods instead of Zune's at last year's tech conference.
I suspect that I would be in for a legal hassle - possibly one I could win, granted - were I to follow you around every time you were in a public place and record video of everything you do to store in my private database that you don't get to see.
There's a difference between no expectation of privacy, meaning someone could be watching/recording any given thing you're doing in publc and no expectation of privacy, meaning someone is watching/recording every given thing you're doing in public.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Good question. I'd guess sometime between users number 105495 and 861095.
I kid, of course.
...I see no reason the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
It speaks well of the net progress in the ex-USSR from the mid-eighties to now that a) these journalists weren't shot/sent to Lefortovo and shot/sent to cut down trees in Siberia until they didn't need to be shot, and b) that the rest of the world has heard about it.
On the time scale of massive societal shifts, things are still looking up. Backsliding, certainly, but it's still a far cry from the heyday of Soviet control.
I think that governments have every right to put cameras out in public places if they so choose.
Intentionally or not, this sums up the entirety of the problem. Legitimate governments - by which I mean any government purportedly "of the people" - have no rights. Human beings have rights. Governments have powers granted them by the governed; either explicitly (through voting/running for office) or implicitly (by not taking up arms against the government). The term "rights" carries with inherent justification. Exercising your rights is an intrinsically ethical thing to do. Exerting force, however, has no inherent justification, and needs to be supported by some external reason.
It's semantics, yes, but it's important. Government don't exercise rights, governments wield power. The government has the power to put cameras in public places; not the right. The very term "public place," in fact, should give the lie to your statement. It's a public place; a place for the public. If the public doesn't want cameras there, then where the hell does the government get off having the "right" to do it?
(Yes, I realize that in the current situation, the public itself is who's accepting and/or asking for these cameras)
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think the evidence bears it out.
For your argument, that no TV = less socialization, to be true, it must also be true that there was less socialization amongst humans prior to the introduction of TVs as a common household device.
I do not believe this to be the case.
I don't have evidence to hand, however, so I could easily be demonstrated wrong.
That's inaccurate.
Using your 1.5 Mbps figure: sure, you can't get more than 1.5 Mbps from that site. But, if you've got 6 Mbps down, you can get 1.5 Mbps from that site, and 1.5 Mbps from a different site, and 1.5 Mbps from another site, and 1.5 Mbps from one more site while you're at it.
Which means you can be snagging a torrent of Feisty Fawn while downloading HL2:E1 and simultaneously fetching all posts from alt.binary.erotica.midgets, getting the maximum possible throughput from each.
There's a flip side to this, of course. I have a strong suspicion that, were we ever to encounter life anywhere else, we'd turn out to be horrifyingly allergic to everything there.
...which sums up why I closed the post with "this is not a good idea".
However: how often do you see this happen in real life? It's certainly not never, but there really aren't all that many instances of people getting torqued enough to track down the guy who cut them off in traffic and shoot him.
You know, I do have one more bright idea: you should try reading the post before sounding off. Specifically the last bit, where I say that it's not a good idea.
On the other hand, you make an excellent example of the problem that needs to be solved. Easy to be a pissant when you're anonymous, isn't it?
That there is nothing you can legally do to him does not mean there is nothing you can do to him. This is among the reasons I said it was a bad idea. But vigilanteism can be an effective deterrent; I suspect it wouldn't take too many examples of people getting the crap kicked out of them in real life for being jackasses in game before things would start to improve.
Of course, now you've just traded verbal abuse in game for physical battery in the real world, which isn't what I'd call a quality solution. But it would work.
The problem, of course, is anonymity. It's no secret that the more anonymous people are - or at least, the more anonymous people feel - the less likely they are to control their uncivil urges. Driving is a perfect example of this: if your experience is anything like mine, you see people do things with their cars every day that you simply do not see people doing to each other when there's face-to-face interaction.
The internet makes people feel perfectly anonymous (they're wrong about this, but that doesn't matter), which, for a significant percentage of people, means that they've got license to do anything they want.
Stereotyping or not, this is a problem that's much more prevalent in the early-to-mid teens boy than other demographics. The internet is kind of like the island in Lord Of the Flies, just with less dying.