I say that anyone who can look at our current corporatocracy and claim with a straight face that "the unions are MORE powerful than their employers" -- or even present that state of affairs as a plausible scenario -- is completely disconnected from reality.
In particular with Hollywood we aren't talking about minors who are perpetually in debt to the company store and working in dangerous conditions. We are talking about rich people working in the environment they choose.
"Warriors are capering heroes, good only for dying when they meet trained troops." The equivalent in the network security realm is the flashy wannabe uberhacker vs. the solid network administrator who gets the job done. It doesn't really matter where the military gets the people, only that they're more of the latter than the former -- whether that's on the battlefield, or sitting behind a desk.
I don't buy this "urban sprawl" thing. Yes, I work far from my office. About 25 miles, I think. I dunno; I go there maybe once a month.
If you have a job where you can telecommute, great, enjoy it. Most people (who have jobs at all, that is) still have to go in to work five days a week, and most of the time, that means driving. Don't pretend your situation is typical.
Try going up in a hot-air balloon some time. Being able to see all around you, most of the way below, and a good portion of above -- all at once -- from even a few hundred feet off the ground is really spectacular. I'd expect that at airliner altitudes, it would be even more so. Not as much detail visible on the ground, of course, but the scale of the view would be worth it.
Some libertarians are anti-corporation too. They fear centralization of power either in government or quasi-governments (large corporations) as dangerous to individuals.
I believe you, but I have to note that very few people who self-identify as libertarians bother to talk about this issue. It's pretty much "all government-is-bad, all the time." A little more acknowledgement that Big Anything is bad -- Big Government to be sure, but also Big Business and Big Religion -- and that playing the various Bigs off against each other can make things go a lot more smoothly for the rest of us, might do a lot to help the LP broaden its base.
Should we toss quantum physics out too just because Schroedinger used a fanciful example of a cat?
Schroedinger used a cat as an example; he didn't base his whole argument on it or claim that the example served as evidence. As far as I can tell, a lot of people think that the "philosophical zombie" concept actually proves something. That's the difference in a nutshell.
I think it's more that the show has gone through good and bad periods. When it premiered, it was very funny indeed, then it declined, then it got better, then it declined... there have been plenty of episodes which were hysterically funny the day they were broadcast, and many others which no amount of aging will improve.
First, I would think slashdotter's would be for this. Remember, the GPL and other "free" or "open" licenses all get their power of enforcement from copyright law. So if you want strong open source software licenses, you need strong copyright protection.
This argument comes up a lot in discussions of copyright law, but it's just a specious "gotcha." The F/OSS movement exists as a response to the increasingly Draconian nature of copyright, and it's a clever hack, but hacking the system does not mean approval of the system. The ideal situation would simply be for open source licenses to be unnecessary. Instead, as the copyright lobby pushes for ever-increasing restrictions on the dissemination of information, F/OSS advocates have to work harder to keep the system from being quite as awful as it could be.
You could start by reading the Summary where it clearly states that the Troll is the company suing the holder of the expired patent.
We know who's suing whom. The question is whether it's fair to call the plaintiffs "trolls" when what they're doing is nothing like the type of behavior that usually gets called "patent trolling." GPP seems to believe, and I agree, that it's not trolling at all, but in fact providing a useful service to help prevent abuse of the patent system.
Seriously, there was a time when he pretty much was West Coast hip-hop. That time is long gone, of course, and he's turned into self-parody now, but it did happen.
"Don't Copy That Floppy" Part 2! It was a stupid idea then, and it hasn't improved with age.
Also, Snoop Dogg has just signed his name to the roster of formerly cool stars embarrassing themselves by remaining in the public eye long past their sell-by date. Doing this kind of lame public (dis)service crap is like wearing a neon sign saying "IRRELEVANT" in glowing foot-high letters.
Which leads me to think that the simplest, most politically acceptable, and most immediately useful type of patent reform would be this: change the law to state that if one claim in a patent is held to be invalid, the entire patent is invalid. This would prevent absurdly broad "claim 1" items like the one you cite, and force patent filers to concentrate on specific aspects of the implementation instead of trying to seize ownership of general ideas. I know the game they're playing -- make absurdly overbroad claims early in the patent, and hope that if they're challenged, the court will accept only slightly less absurd later claims as a "compromise" -- but there's no reason We the People should allow this kind of crap.
This is what they're talking about. Don't blame the reporters; if they said "non-drinkers have a hazard ratio of 1.6 ± 0.2 (p 0.05) relative to heavy drinkers" most people would say "Whaaa...?"
Your analogy would be meaningful if I subscribed to a religious ideology which required me to reject Newton's laws of motion and optics. But I don't, and I don't think any such ideology exists. IMO, knowledge is knowledge, whatever the source, and the beliefs of the people who originate the knowledge are completely irrelevant. Creationists quite explicitly reject this view; I think their insistence on doing so is bizarre, but they should at least have the courage to live (or die) by their stated beliefs.
As a biomedical researcher, I wouldn't want the fruits of my labor to be withheld from anyone who needs medical treatment on the basis of their ideology. I would, however, like to see more people living up to their putative beliefs by refusing to make use of technology derived from practices they claim to find morally objectionable. If you're opposed to stem cell research, then refuse any treatment based on such research; if you're a creationist, then refuse any treatment based on modern biology at all; etc. This applies outside the medical realm, too -- consider the number of people who bitch about open source on Slashdot, or more generally, people using the internet to complain about how terrible the internet is. Put your money where your mouth is, folks.
I'm pretty sure it applies to all of them; IIRC, the judge found that not only the Obama-era but also the Bush-era research violated the law. TFA seems to indicate that all hESC research under the auspices of NIH is covered by the order.
There are those who think nature is incapable of recovering from any perturbation, be it an oil spill or burning of fossil fuel.
There are those who think no amount of perturbation will have any effect on the quality of human life, no matter how much evidence exists to show that it can and will.
Everything has to be controlled from Washington by infinitely wise bureaucrats.
Everything has to be controlled from corporate headquarters by infinitely wise bureaucrats, who we know are infinitely wise because they're so rich.
The possibility that naturally occurring microbes have been consuming oil leaking into the Gulf for eons is incomprehensible to them.
The possibility that the amount of oil spilled in the area of the Deepwater Horizon spill is enormously greater than the amount spilled by natural leakage, and that the consumption of this oil by naturally occurring microbes will take a very long time and have undesirable side effects, is incomprehensible to them.
If you cause harm to others, including polluting their environment, you ARE supposed to pay for it. This is NOT inconsistent with the free market.
Agreed. Now, can you convince the politicians of that? If libertarian idealists want the market to reflect the costs of pollution, great, but the reality is that libertarian idealists aren't the ones bearing the "free market" standard in the national political debate. Instead, it's the rallying cry of right-wing ideologues who will talk at great length about the virtues of the free market but scream "OMG socialism" every time market-based attempts (e.g. cap-and-trade) are made to include the costs of pollution in the way the market actually operates.
You and your grandmother likely have different definitions of "hard".
The stereotypical computer-illiterate grandmother isn't going to be doing any kind of multi-booting in the first place, so whatever GRUB might do to her computer, and how to fix it, is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
What say you?
I say that anyone who can look at our current corporatocracy and claim with a straight face that "the unions are MORE powerful than their employers" -- or even present that state of affairs as a plausible scenario -- is completely disconnected from reality.
Also, I don't understand the anti-union attitude some otherwise sane Americans seem to have.
Generations of concerted anti-union propaganda.
In particular with Hollywood we aren't talking about minors who are perpetually in debt to the company store and working in dangerous conditions. We are talking about rich people working in the environment they choose.
You don't know any actors, do you?
"Warriors are capering heroes, good only for dying when they meet trained troops." The equivalent in the network security realm is the flashy wannabe uberhacker vs. the solid network administrator who gets the job done. It doesn't really matter where the military gets the people, only that they're more of the latter than the former -- whether that's on the battlefield, or sitting behind a desk.
I don't buy this "urban sprawl" thing. Yes, I work far from my office. About 25 miles, I think. I dunno; I go there maybe once a month.
If you have a job where you can telecommute, great, enjoy it. Most people (who have jobs at all, that is) still have to go in to work five days a week, and most of the time, that means driving. Don't pretend your situation is typical.
Agreed.
Try going up in a hot-air balloon some time. Being able to see all around you, most of the way below, and a good portion of above -- all at once -- from even a few hundred feet off the ground is really spectacular. I'd expect that at airliner altitudes, it would be even more so. Not as much detail visible on the ground, of course, but the scale of the view would be worth it.
Some libertarians are anti-corporation too. They fear centralization of power either in government or quasi-governments (large corporations) as dangerous to individuals.
I believe you, but I have to note that very few people who self-identify as libertarians bother to talk about this issue. It's pretty much "all government-is-bad, all the time." A little more acknowledgement that Big Anything is bad -- Big Government to be sure, but also Big Business and Big Religion -- and that playing the various Bigs off against each other can make things go a lot more smoothly for the rest of us, might do a lot to help the LP broaden its base.
Actually, that's neither the mean nor the median, but the midrange.
No, I went to school where they still teach you actual science and critical thinking.
Not if they taught you the "three races" idea, you didn't.
Caucasian, Mongoloid (Asian) or Negroid (African) which can be easily determined by physical evidence.
You went to high school in the 19th century?
Should we toss quantum physics out too just because Schroedinger used a fanciful example of a cat?
Schroedinger used a cat as an example; he didn't base his whole argument on it or claim that the example served as evidence. As far as I can tell, a lot of people think that the "philosophical zombie" concept actually proves something. That's the difference in a nutshell.
I think it's more that the show has gone through good and bad periods. When it premiered, it was very funny indeed, then it declined, then it got better, then it declined ... there have been plenty of episodes which were hysterically funny the day they were broadcast, and many others which no amount of aging will improve.
First, I would think slashdotter's would be for this. Remember, the GPL and other "free" or "open" licenses all get their power of enforcement from copyright law. So if you want strong open source software licenses, you need strong copyright protection.
This argument comes up a lot in discussions of copyright law, but it's just a specious "gotcha." The F/OSS movement exists as a response to the increasingly Draconian nature of copyright, and it's a clever hack, but hacking the system does not mean approval of the system. The ideal situation would simply be for open source licenses to be unnecessary. Instead, as the copyright lobby pushes for ever-increasing restrictions on the dissemination of information, F/OSS advocates have to work harder to keep the system from being quite as awful as it could be.
You could start by reading the Summary where it clearly states that the Troll is the company suing the holder of the expired patent.
We know who's suing whom. The question is whether it's fair to call the plaintiffs "trolls" when what they're doing is nothing like the type of behavior that usually gets called "patent trolling." GPP seems to believe, and I agree, that it's not trolling at all, but in fact providing a useful service to help prevent abuse of the patent system.
Snoop Dog was cool? When did that happen?
You're very young, aren't you? ;)
Seriously, there was a time when he pretty much was West Coast hip-hop. That time is long gone, of course, and he's turned into self-parody now, but it did happen.
"Don't Copy That Floppy" Part 2! It was a stupid idea then, and it hasn't improved with age.
Also, Snoop Dogg has just signed his name to the roster of formerly cool stars embarrassing themselves by remaining in the public eye long past their sell-by date. Doing this kind of lame public (dis)service crap is like wearing a neon sign saying "IRRELEVANT" in glowing foot-high letters.
Or they wouldn't submit the bullshit claims in the first place. If they chose to do so, at least they'd be paying for the privilege.
Which leads me to think that the simplest, most politically acceptable, and most immediately useful type of patent reform would be this: change the law to state that if one claim in a patent is held to be invalid, the entire patent is invalid. This would prevent absurdly broad "claim 1" items like the one you cite, and force patent filers to concentrate on specific aspects of the implementation instead of trying to seize ownership of general ideas. I know the game they're playing -- make absurdly overbroad claims early in the patent, and hope that if they're challenged, the court will accept only slightly less absurd later claims as a "compromise" -- but there's no reason We the People should allow this kind of crap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_ratio
This is what they're talking about. Don't blame the reporters; if they said "non-drinkers have a hazard ratio of 1.6 ± 0.2 (p 0.05) relative to heavy drinkers" most people would say "Whaaa ...?"
Your analogy would be meaningful if I subscribed to a religious ideology which required me to reject Newton's laws of motion and optics. But I don't, and I don't think any such ideology exists. IMO, knowledge is knowledge, whatever the source, and the beliefs of the people who originate the knowledge are completely irrelevant. Creationists quite explicitly reject this view; I think their insistence on doing so is bizarre, but they should at least have the courage to live (or die) by their stated beliefs.
As a biomedical researcher, I wouldn't want the fruits of my labor to be withheld from anyone who needs medical treatment on the basis of their ideology. I would, however, like to see more people living up to their putative beliefs by refusing to make use of technology derived from practices they claim to find morally objectionable. If you're opposed to stem cell research, then refuse any treatment based on such research; if you're a creationist, then refuse any treatment based on modern biology at all; etc. This applies outside the medical realm, too -- consider the number of people who bitch about open source on Slashdot, or more generally, people using the internet to complain about how terrible the internet is. Put your money where your mouth is, folks.
I'm pretty sure it applies to all of them; IIRC, the judge found that not only the Obama-era but also the Bush-era research violated the law. TFA seems to indicate that all hESC research under the auspices of NIH is covered by the order.
Whee, this is fun!
There are those who think nature is incapable of recovering from any perturbation, be it an oil spill or burning of fossil fuel.
There are those who think no amount of perturbation will have any effect on the quality of human life, no matter how much evidence exists to show that it can and will.
Everything has to be controlled from Washington by infinitely wise bureaucrats.
Everything has to be controlled from corporate headquarters by infinitely wise bureaucrats, who we know are infinitely wise because they're so rich.
The possibility that naturally occurring microbes have been consuming oil leaking into the Gulf for eons is incomprehensible to them.
The possibility that the amount of oil spilled in the area of the Deepwater Horizon spill is enormously greater than the amount spilled by natural leakage, and that the consumption of this oil by naturally occurring microbes will take a very long time and have undesirable side effects, is incomprehensible to them.
If you cause harm to others, including polluting their environment, you ARE supposed to pay for it. This is NOT inconsistent with the free market.
Agreed. Now, can you convince the politicians of that? If libertarian idealists want the market to reflect the costs of pollution, great, but the reality is that libertarian idealists aren't the ones bearing the "free market" standard in the national political debate. Instead, it's the rallying cry of right-wing ideologues who will talk at great length about the virtues of the free market but scream "OMG socialism" every time market-based attempts (e.g. cap-and-trade) are made to include the costs of pollution in the way the market actually operates.
You and your grandmother likely have different definitions of "hard".
The stereotypical computer-illiterate grandmother isn't going to be doing any kind of multi-booting in the first place, so whatever GRUB might do to her computer, and how to fix it, is irrelevant.