The problem with hydrogen is where you get it from: as it is not produced by any biological process, you have to make it via the electrolysis of water. That requires power which needs a power source which may be more or less polluting. Thus hydrogen is at best a clean lossless way to transport power.
Yes, but you can use solar power to manufacture hydrogen (e.g. in the Sahara, in the southwestern US, etc.), which can then be shipped in fuel cells to wherever it is needed. The entire cycle, from creation to burn, is thus clean, environmentally safe, and sustainable.
I will guess that this instant artificial product placement, like the network show mentioned, will be common place within a year or two, and annoy the heck out of consumers. However, it may reduce the number of distinct commercials as product placement becomes more common and as Tivo and Replay make it easier to ignore separate commericals.
I agree that in a year or two there will be a lot of instant artifical product placement, and it will continue to grow over time. I do not think it will lead to a decrease in the number of rude commercials (didn't we all learn it was rude to interrupt as children? Obviously the network executives did not take the lesson to heart...) but rather simply to an increase in adds altogether.
We'll need a junkbuster for video, just to keep the dreck of the marketers from clogging up our already over-sensed minds.
On another note, I fear the use of this product in the hands of the government (read: corporate america). How soon until the police beat demonstrators who are (hypothetically speaking) protesting Exxon's pollution of the Alaskan coastline after another accident senseless, then manufacture the footage showing said protestors rampaging and rioting, to justify their actions to the public after the fact?
The future, such as it is, is growing increasingly ugly. I only wish I could punch the amoral idiots who are developing this technology in the nose -- just because we could do something doesn't mean we should, much less that we have to do it.
We as in the Open Source community. I'm not saying people should be forced to use YAOS (Yet Another Operating System), but at least the OSS community should have the choice.
The Free Software/Open Source community has plenty of choices. Some people develop for *BSD, many for Linux, a few for BeOS, and a very few brave and masochistic souls for Windows/*.
Most have chosen Linux for a variety of reasons, ranging from the licensing (GNU GPL) of the OS and underlying libraries to the simple fact that, for whatever reason, right or wrong, welike and prefer Linux. This may not reflect your preference, but it does reflect theres, and if you don't like it you are free to start your own project, or fork off any of the free software projects you wish.
The community hasn't ralleyed around Linux because it doesn't have a choice, its ralleyed around Linux because its license (GPL) and quality reflect the desires of the community more than anything else out there.
That having been said, there is a (smaller but just as enthusiastic) community which has formed around *BSD, also largely because they favor the license (FreeBSD) and the quality of the platform more than anything else out there.
BeOS is neat, but proprietary. Bug fixes are arduously slow in coming, precisely because the OS is proprietary and there is limited manpower fixing bugs, creating new features, etc. This makes the platform as a whole less dynamic and less satisfying for me, the end user, when I discover my video captures die after 9 minutes and don't get a fix for six months. It is hard to form a community around a product one cannot contribut bug fixes to, or get bug fixes from in a timely manner. while there is a small, vocal, and enthusiastic developer community or Be despite this, the proprietary nature of the platform (with all its disadvantages) make it singularly unattractive to open source developers regardless of how nice its programming API may be.
Ditto for MacOS. Proprietary OSes are simply unappealing to most open source developers.
Ditto for windows (with the caveat that the APIs are ugly, the system even less stable and much less elegant than any of the aforementioned OSes, etc.)
We have plenty of choice, and most of us have chosen, with FreeBSD and Linux the clear winners. However, the beauty of the free software movement (and open source) is that our decisions in no way force you to conform -- you are free to take the source code and develope it for whatevre program you like. You even have the right to bitch and moan because the rest of us don't share your platform preference. However, the rest of us have the right to ignore you, or even chortle with amusement, should we in turn find your choice to be as silly as you find ours.
It is called freedom, and it is a wonderful thing.
I went out and bought a minidisc player for about $200. It is a dream since discs are only $1.50 a piece and hold as much as a CD.
Blank CDRs are going for about $0.50 / disk. Using ogg or mp3 format, they hold roughly 10 CDs worth of music on one disk.
MP3 players which double as CD Players are the perfect solution -- you can burn your own music collection onto CDs and listen to them anywhere. As the original poster correctly points out, we need ogg support on these hardware mp3 players! Fortunately, most are flashable, so upgrading to new, better formats (such as ogg) shouldn't be a problem.
OK, firstly the infrastructure costs money. It's not free. You have to pay for it *somehow*.
The cost of the distribution infrastructure (read: internet) for digital art is already borne entirely by the end user, in the form of ISP fees and the local equipment to view, download, and store, and share such art. This is a non-issue which completely misses the point.
The cost of putting together an album is actually quite inexpensive, unless it is the recording companies (as opposed to individual bands) doing it, in which case the prices are artifically inflated by orders of magnitude. Why? Because this is a cost that is charged by the recording companies to the bands, thus, the higher the (artifically inflated) cost of recording, the more money goes into the pockets of the record company and is taken from the pockets of the artists. That is a very strong incentive for the recording companies to inflate their prices, and they do.
Even if we say that we can reduce all these costs by making all music purchasable on-line, somebody somewhere is going to have to pay for servers and bandwidth. A popular artist is going to use a lot of bandwidth. Especially if we're talking about 6Mb tracks.
Napster, GNUtella, and FreeNet have all already addressed (and solved) this issue. Bandwidth is paid by the end user (ISP fees). Servers and clients are peer to peer -- each user is paying for storage of the art, both for their personal use and for the use of others (as "servers") who wish to download said art from their local drives. Again, this is a non-issue. (I wonder, do you actually even understand the technology you are trying to critique?)
What I was trying to get across originally was that music will not, and will never, be free.
Music was free for most of the three million years of human existence. It is only within the last few hundred years, and primarilly within the last century, that it has become at first a luxery for the wealthy, and then a commodity for the masses (to be traded like so many pork bellies). This is not a "natural state" for music, it is an anomoly stemming from an imperfect interim technology and the distribution channels (and cartels) it engendered. Those times are now past.
Much music is and will be free. You do not pay for music you hear on the radio, do you? No. You pay for the radio itself, and that is the end of it. When I was growing up, that was my sole source of music. It did not cost me a penny, it was free.
What I did pay for were concert tickets, tee-shirts, and posters. Later, when I made money, I did get sucked into buying the records (and later CDs), a habit I have mostly broken thanks to my boycott of the RIAA.
It's called capitalism, it works, and it benefits those who contribute to "the system".
Capitalism works (with modifications such as anti-trust legislation) for systems in which there is natural scarcity. Physical products fall into the category.
However, there are other categories of products for which capitalism is at best dysfuncitonal, and at worst completely inappropriate. Areas requiring human compassion (care for the elderly, medical care) map very imperfectly to the capitalist model, with some very alarming deficiencies as a result.
With digital products, where there is no scarcity whatsoever (unless artifically applied through draconian legislation and the force of the gun), capitalism falls completely on its face. The Free Software/Open Source phenomenon vs. the ever less successful "closed source" approach is one example. Digitized music is another.
Now, the alternative is to maintain an incorrect paradigm (capitalism) against the real world reality (no scarcity, abundance for all), but in so doing you will need laws of such draconian strength and breadth as to make the communist regimes of Asia and Eastern Europe look like liberal democracies in comparison (these regimes were, ironically, a mirror example of applying an incorrect paradigm -- communism -- to the real world of physical scarcity). This is far too high a price to our society simply to maintain the profitability of an obsolete institution, or even to promote the much more noble cause of insuring the artists get compensation.
As others have pointed out, there are numerous alternatives for the artists to receive compensation, making the notion of a choice between "draconial legislation or starving artists" a false dichotomy of the highest order.
As to your last point, you are in no way qualified to determine who is and is not "deserving" of their music, much less to set an arbitary benchmark to define such.
If you don't like how ICANN operates, what alternatives do you have? Does ICANN have a government-granted monopoly on com/net/org addresses?
I strongly urge you to use and support opennic. While not as subversive as I would prefer (I would have relegated all ICANN domains to domain.com.icann, rathar than respecting their.ocm domains, but that's just me) they do cooperate with other alternative DNS heiarchies (e.g. alternic) and are compatible with ICANN. They are also very democratic about how TLDs are given out, and are compatible with ICANN.
This means you can still resolve all ICANN names, but in addition you can resolve alternic, opennic, and various other competitor's TLDs as well.
ICANN has been given a monopoly by our governments, primarilly because our governments cannot (or will not) imagine a system in which there is not some central authority. It is up to us, as individuals and as ISPs, to thwart this powergrab at the grass roots level, by supporting independent, democratic, and popularist efforts to take back control of our internet.
Of course the creative work of students using university machines belongs to the students, not the university. I would never argue such a ridiculous position.
I'm glad to hear it -- when I read your first post it sounded quite different (to me at least). Unfortunately, there are numerous universities who would argue just that, just as there are employers who get people to sign contracts giving them all rights to all of their creative work, whether done on the job or on their own time, related to work or not, done on their own equipment or not.
So, while I am relieved that you are quite reasonable in your stance, I remain quite aghast at the extortionate money grabs both employers and some universities are engaged in (and have been appalled for years, I might add).
You guys really don't have a clue about property rights, do you?
Actually, most people here (yourself perhaps excepted) have a perfectly good understanding of property rights.
However, Intellectual Property is a misleading term. It is not property per se, but a privelege granted by the government for a limited time[1] that allows one exclusive control over the first sale of their product.
That is all. Calling such Intellectual Privelege "Intellectual Property" doesn't make it an actual piece of property, any more than calling a Pig a Duck would suddenly cause the pig to grow feathers.
As an aside, concerning property rights, there are such things as easements, abandonment, and squatters rights which allow people who have been tresspassing for a certain period of time to retain defacto rights to do so in the future even if you, the property owner, don't like it. In the case of squatting, ownership of the property can actually change hands as a result. In the case of abandoned property, typically anyone can come along, pay back taxes, and take possession (again, after a period of time).
Such periods of time are typically measured in years (I believe Illinois allows 10 years for easement, 20 years for squatters, and 7 years for taking possession of abandoned property, but I haven't checked the law recently and could be off by several years either way. Regardless, this is a far cry fron 120 years [corporate copyright] or life plus 95 years [individual copyright]).
So even your misplaced and misguided example doesn't apply, as the property rights you hold so dear, and are so eager to misapply to the intellectual realm, have clear limitations and provisions which kick in after a remarkably short time, when compared with period of time for which copyright grants authors and corporations such near absolute priveleges of monopoly over the works they market.
We did... for a very brief period, we had the "Line Item Veto", which allowed the president to strike portions of laws, thus preventing congress from passing a bill that contained the meat of a law, while tacking on unrelated "pork barrel" projects to it that the president may not agree with.
I happen to agree with the Republicans that challenged the Line Iten Veto (and won) as well as the democrats in congress who (successfully) buried the attempt to amend our constitution to allow the Line Item Veto.
What we need is a constitutional amendment disallowing unrelated riders from being attached to legislation. This would put the power to nullify inappropriate portions of the law where it belongs, in the judiciary.
The Line Item Veto IMHO puts far too much power in the hands of the president, be he Republican or Democrat.
Movie companies usually destroy films when
the copyright expires rather than allow them
to enter the public domain.
How spiteful! It's a wonder how society limps
along at all when nobody is willing to
cooperate even minimally with others...
Looked at the right way, Copyrights (and all other laws) ARE an agreement to cooperate with each other.
It is the movie studios that are not abiding by the copyright law, by destroying movies as they enter the public domain rather than adhere to the other side of copyright law (the other side of the "contract" if you prefer), namely that eventually such material over which they enjoyed such exclusive priveleges would enter the public domain and enrich us all. Instead, they are deliberately destroying stuff which has entered the public domain. In a sane society, this kind of behavior would be punishable as an act of vandalism against all of us.
Compared to the movie industries systematic misuse and abuse of the copyright system, even the damage done by those consumers who do violate copyright is minimal. Destroying old, valuable footage rather than giving it over to the public domain as is there obligation is merely the most flagrant and appalling example of an ethical and moral bankrupcy which infects that industry at virtually every level.
The diminishment of our culture by such greed is an outrage of dimensions seldom achieved, comparable in both scope and breadth to the nazi sponsored destruction of so much art and culture prior to the second World War.
Of course, if the students used skills that were honed in university classes, focused by university faculty, or done in conjuncture w/ university projects, then I think the university has a legitimate claim to some of the spoils.
Hogwash.
Why don't you send your paycheck to your Alma Matar if you truly believe this nonsense? Chances are pretty good you got your first post-college job as a result of your degree, which in turn led to your subsequent jobs. You'd be nothing without the university, therefor by your reasoning they should be entitled to a portion of what you make. But wait, if you hadn't gone to high school, you wouldn't have been able to attend college. Better hold back some of the check for your old teenage stomping ground. But of course, to get into high school you first had to learn literacy and arithmetic in grade school...
The university is entitled to Tuition and Fees. Nothing more. The students (or their parents) have paid a premium for their education and use of the university's facilities. This does not give the university any right whatsoever to any creative product their student's have created, not matter how good the equipment and study environment are, or how brilliant the education given.
Professors, being employees, are in a different category. If they are a fraction as smart as they would have us believe, then they have negotiated reasonable terms for ownership of their own creative work. Whatever form their negotiations and contract have taken, it gives them no right whatsoever to the creative products of their students.
However, students, being customers, clearly have a right to retain their own intellectual property, regardless of the money grabbing the university may be attempting. If students are being used as free labor in a professor's or universities project (or worse, paying for the privelege) then they should retain some rights to such work. Otherwise, the university should be compensating them for their work, in which case, as employees, the situation resolves itself favorably to the university in question. TANSTAAFL: the universities are not entitled to pilfer students minds for their own profit, and most certainly not against the students' will and without compensating them for the work done (and yes, that includes creative things like thinking).
The idea that "any work conducted on university equipment belongs to the university" is rediculous, particularly given that the students in question have paid exhorbitant prices for the privelege of using said equipment. I would suggest any student running afoul of such a policy sue, and sue hard.
The point of research is to develop technology for the good of society, right? So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
Let's take the American Medical Association as an example.
What would happen if, say, a generalized cure for all our physical ailments were developed (e.g. nano-facilitated medical immortality)? Suddenly there is no more disease or death (save accidental, violent, or suicide). The need for doctors is diminished to almost nil, save for the occasional accident victim.
Would the AMA push for approval of such a technology, knowing it would put most of their membership in the unemployment line? Or would they delay, possibly even bury, such a breakthrough to maintain their own profession? To suggest the former is to stretch credibility beyond any reasonable bound, while to suggest the latter, unpleasant, possibility, conjurs unpleasant memories of similar actions in other industries which have already been documented.
Many arguments (of varying veracity: some quite compelling, most not) have been put forward that the medical establishment has already buried cures for various ailments which are more profitable to treat than to cure. True or not, it does point to the disturbing fact that there is a hideous amount of financial incentive not to cure many diseases.
A flagrant real-world case of abuse is the criminalization of marijuana. A natural substance with medical and practical non-medical uses (paper, rope, textiles) has been outlawed in no small part to protect certain business interests (the cotton industry, the wood-pulp industry, and more recently the pharmaceutical industry).
In Normal, Illinois teenagers convicted of possession of marijuana were enrolled in manditory treatment centers, where many were then diagnosed with depression (what teenager wouldn't be, especially after getting "busted" and having their life turned upside down by the authorities?), and required to take anti-depressents. An exchange of a relatively innocuous substance for an addictive and very potent psychiatric drug!
Clearly, pharmaceutical profits were being protected at the direct expense of the good of the people. Is it reasonable to believe this is the only occurance of such abuse by this one industry? I don't think so. I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg -- how many penecillin-esque wonder drugs have simply been buried, because they would undermine the profitability of other, well selling product lines? Since we are privy to so little privately funded research, we may never know.
Do you honestly believe research conducted by private, for profit groups, is going to be anywere near as open and accessible to public scrutiny as research funded today by public institutions such as the National Science Foundation?
I would submit that recent history demonstrates the opposite: corporations with existing business models will, on average, find it more profitable to bury their own research than change their business models (which most breakthroughs generally entail).
While conducting public research does not eliminate this problem, reducing it (as was done in the 1980s) and eliminating it (which is the trend today) certainly makes the problem worse and the abuses both more chronic and more acute.
It's hard to see how so many people are getting this mixed up.
Only if you are obtuse is it difficult to see how people would mix this up.
Many libraries packages, when one attempts to "install" them, report that they conflict with some older version of the same library. The natural thing for a user is to think "of course, I need to upgrade" and do so, promptly removing the older, conflicting package.
It is in no way intuitive to use "--install --force", particularly when "--force" is documented as being dangerous to use.
The default behavior of "--upgrade" should be to not remove the older libraries, but install the newer libraries such that they coexist, without offensive messages warning of conflicts and dire consiquences. If someone wants to remove the older version of the library a modified "--upgrade" switch should be used, perhaps "--upgrade-remove-old" or something equally intuitive.
I've been using Linux since the 0.49 days, and UNIX even longer than that, but one of the real problems the *nix community really has is an almost religious unwillingness to accept criticism. This is counter productive and doesn't help any of us (except maybe Redmond).
RPM upgrades as they are currently implimented behave in some non-intuitive and confusing ways. Is it really so difficult to accept a little criticism and improve the semantics, such that even the newer, less experienced users have an easier time coming to grips with it?
What I like with the ICANN is their democratic system. To propose a new TLD, you must pay 20 000 $US. How can they stay serious when they speak of democraty ?
ICANN "democracy" is basically a farce, although I wouldn't let that stop you from voting (if you've registered) and getting at least one or two intellegent voices of dissent into the loop.
If you want a truly democratic approach to domain name registration and TLD management, check out
Opennnic.
Note: I am an Opennic user and supporter, but not an ICANN candidate.
Opennic, an effort at democratizing the management of domains and TLDs, is putting forward ICANN candidates as well. I strongly urge everyone to support their efforts, as they are truly trying to make the entire domain management issue more equitable and democratic.
We are using Opennic root servers where I work -- allowing us to resolve both ICANN domain names (.com,.org, etc.) and Opennic domains (.opennic,.null,.oss,.paroduy). Opennic has cooperative agreements with other alternative domains heirarchies as well, allowing those who use their root servers to resolve their TLDs as well (such as.xxx,.biz, etc.). It is a far more equitable and democratic arrangement than what ICANN is doing (e.g. anyone can start a TLD by submitting a proposal to the mailing list and getting more than 50% of the vote), and worthy of support by anyone who values the freedom and liberty of the internet, particularly those of us in the free software and open source communities.
Used to be, anyway. But there's no way I'm installed eighty-eleven libraries the hard way. I'm gonna find RPMs. And RPM -U removes the old lib. Whoops.
That is a misfeature of RPM then (and other packaging systems which have the same problem). Dependencies should not be an either/or thing -- different versions of libraries can and do coexist just fine. I agree that -U should not nuke old libraries by default, but an alternative would be --install --force, whereby both library packages are in place. Of course, one must use this with caution, as many packages include other files (headers, config files, etc.) with libraries, whcih IMHO is also a mistake. Libraries are LIBRARIES, header files and config files are something else. The -devel scheme tries to address this and (mostly) succeeds, but a more explicit approach might be better:
Whatever scheme is used, I agree it is a mistake (and disengenuous to some degree) for popular packaging systems to actually undue one of *nixes tremendous strengths: library versioning and peaceful coexistence.
No, it is not useless. It is designed for people with a REAL reason for being anonymous, yet wanting to spread information. For example, whistlerblowers, or people in countries with a less than perfect track record of censorship.
Except that, without the ability to do searches, no one will be able to find the material in question. Giving out the precise key is tantamount to publishing, so anonymity is preserved at one level, but possibly compromised at another.
Furthermore, whistleblowers and the like often need audio-visual proof of what has happened, such as audio recordings (ideally compressed with ogg or mp3 format for space), images, and even video footage. How is one going to reasonably publish that kind of important evidence of wrongdoing with a 100K filesize limit? By breaking up the files into 100K chunks? Then why not get rid of that limit to begin with.
It is not designed for pirates who want their MP3's (go to freenet for that sort of stuff).
This is a very unfair characterization of freenet and downright slandorous.
Freenet is intended to do precisely the same thing as publius, with the exception that freenet make no judgement whatsoever about content. Publius may make use of some better algorithms, but has also clearly made policy choices which make it less than ideal for dissidents to skirt censorship (such as the lack of searchability and the filesize limit, and worse: a philosophy of passing judgement on material and what is "fit" to be protected from censorship and what is not, with who deciding such criteria an open question). FreeNet can always adopt better encryption and storage approaches now or in the future, without making the same kinds of misguided compromises.
FreeNet remains IMHO the most promising approach to thwarting censorship of all kinds, today and in the future.
I'm beginning to wonder when/if Apple will see the errors of their ways and realize what they are doing to themselves.
Probably about the time they file for Chapter Eleven. Though with Steve Jobs' inability to ever recognize his prior mistakes, I wouldn't be surprised if, even then, they never figured out just what it was they did wrong.
It is a little known fact that anyone can be sued for any reason.
To bring a lawsuit requires no legal basis whatsoever, though winning one usually (not always!) does and, in some states, even persuing one beyond the initial hearing phase generally does.
Despite anti-SLAPP efforts and legislation there are many, many frivolous lawsuits which clog the system, wreck lives, and poison the social fabric.
It would not suprise me if Apple were engaged in such a suit, using the power of the legal system as a proxy for thugs in persuing a policy of intimidation and fear, in order to maintain iron-fisted control of their products' announcements, releases, and, yes, even rumors.
Misguided? Yes. Unenlightened? Obviously. Wrong? Most certainly. Legal? Quite probably.
Why is it considered selfish to believe that I know best how to lead MY life?
Good question. Probably because those in power (and in this purile chick's case, power takes on the form of old media cultural gestapo defining what is "in", what is "out", what is "good", and what is not) feel slighted when we deny them that power.
Control freaks are drawn to power like moths to fire, and I've yet to meet an old media reporter who wasn't, in some way, addicted to the power their words have over others. Our rejection of this paradigm, and of the kind of power mongering this sad woman personifies, is in a way selfish. After all, we should be giving of our own freedom freely, to feed the cravings of the poor, desperate, power-hungary political and cultural elite.
Shame on us.
Ob: incompetent moderation: There is nothing, anywhere in the preceeding post, to justify moderating it down as a troll, or for that matter, moderating it down at all.
I would love to have a Linux based watch capable of the following:
Cell Phone (a la Dick Tracy)[1]
Palm Pilot capabilities (touch screen + grafiti or similar handwriting recognition system)
MP3 playback and sufficient storage for lots of music on the go
Digital camera capabilities (camera in wristband, watch face as greyscale or color viewfinder, button on side to take snapshot)
The above, with a second microcamera in the watch face to facilitate "video phone" cababilities
GPS with moving map (color preferred)
Wireless internet capabilities. Quick access to email, the web (low res, but for quick and dirty info gathering that would be fine), etc.
Ability to access a command line interface (on a different VC from the palm-like watch interface) and write commands using grafiti -- a quick and dirty way to ssh into remote machines and do admin work as needed, while on the go.
Ability to auto-sync with atomic clocks, use GPS to detect timezones (and don't forget odd timezones like portions of Indiana and Nepal's 15 minute difference from India.)
Of course, that means I'd like it to tell time, too.:-)
The nice thing about using Linux is that it scales to all of these levels, has the flexibility to allow third parties to add capabilities later, has a huge installed user and developer base to mine for cool applications, is incredibly stable and reliable, and is powerful enough to facilitate uses none of us have yet thought of (multi-user capabilities to allow users to securely move data between watches, lend watches to friends without having to worry about the privacy of their own data, etc. etc.). Give it a nice, friendly palm like GUI and it would be a truly killer app.
To use a decimal time coordinate system we'd also need to develop a decimal earth coordinate.
Actually, that would fit rather nicely with the metric units of distance already in use. I believe the meter was arbitrarilly designed to be one millionth of the circumference of the earth (I don't recall if it was at the eqautor, or at some longitude passing through Paris).
Given that, use 1000 metric degrees per circle, and you have (at the equator) almost exactly one kilometer per degree longitude, and at all lattitudes one kilometer per metric degree latitude.
Although for navigation (in aviation at least) it wouldn't be any more difficult to use metric minutes and hours with existing units of degrees or distance (nautical miles per metric hour might be silly, but km/mh wouldn't be).[1] For shipping, using sextants to measure off distances, it would make less sense.
It would definitely be a tradeoff: converting units in physics, and navigation for cars and planes would be as easier, or at worst as easy (no more divide/multiply by 3600), but boat skippers would have a tougher time.
Of course, since shipping (and aviation for that matter) uses different units for distance, they could continue using the depricated, archaic 24 hour system while the rest of us switch to the more elegant metric approach.:-)
[1] For reasons of safety (and existing instrumentation) it is unlikely aviation will ever switch from using feet for altitude, nautical miles for distance, or degrees for direction. Switching from inches Hg to millibars, and from 24-hour time to metric time, would be pretty trivial though. Ironically, aviators do use celsius for most temperature measurements -- that conversion was easy to make with no safety implications to speak of (but even so, it isn't 100% complete. A feSomew weather stations still report temperature/dew point spreads in faranheit).
It was a good idea, unfortunately it never caught on (of course, here in the US the entire metric system 'never caught on' despite being our official standard for decades now).
I wrote an amusing java applet which is viewable on my homepage, which impliments a kind of "metric time."
10 hours / day, 100 minutes/hour, 100 seconds/minute, e.g. 5:00:00 is 12:00 noon
Actually, it would make more sense in terms of nomenclature to have 1000 seconds / minute, such
that one has hours (decirotations), minutes (millirotations), and seconds (microrotations), e.g. 7:50:000 would be 6:00 PM.
The smokers knew that smoking would cause them many health problems, there was a warning on the side of the package for crying out loud.
This is correct (with an important caveat mentioned below).
Essentially the smokers sued the Tabacco companies for their own stupidity, and the ruling is almost sure to be struck down on appeal.
The is incorrect (though it is what the tobacco firms in question would like you to believe).
The smokers sued the Tobacco companies because the tobacco companies willfully and knowlingly made the substance more addictive and much more harmful than it was in its natural state. The warnings on the boxes did not notify the buyer that the tobacco company had added carninegentic materials to enhance flavor and doped the tobacco with additional nicotine to thwart smokers efforts to stop smoking.
This is far and away beyond simply marketing a legal but harmful substance, and is why the jury awarded the plaintiffs such a large amount and is also why it is unlikely that an appeals court will overturn the ruling. Some amount of the award may be reduced, but it is unlikely that the ruling itself will be changed. Indeed, given the appalling and blatent behavior of the tobacco companies in question it is by no means certain that the appeals court will even reduce the award.
Their own scientists came forward and blew the whistle on what they were doing: willfully and knowingly killing people[1] in order to pad their own bottom line.
[1]By some estimates, as many as twice as many people per thousand were afflicted with cancer because of additives they willfully and knowingly added to tobacco, above and beyond what would have occurred naturally.
In fact, an even better example of how companies can be litigated against for what they do would be the cigarette company litigations that have won billion dollor settlements.
Well, the tabacco companies deliberately and knowingly increased nicotine content to maximize the addictiveness of their product, and added a known carcinogenic substance to improve flavor despite protests by their own scientists that doing so would kill even more people.
The reason the jury awarded such high damages was the willful and deliberate manipulation of the product to make it even more dangerous and harmful to consumers than it already was. It was not because people think tobacco should be illegal.
Put another way: it would not be a bad thing to put the tobacco companies who did these things out of business. Someone else could start a tobacco company with more ethical marketing and production policies (read: selling the natural substance, not doping it with more nicotine and additional carcinogens, and not marketing to children and young teens). Tobacco should not be illegal, but doping it with substances known to cause even more harm, and manipulating its addictive properties to make quitting physiologically more difficult should be -- and just like bars who abuse their liquor licenses, tobacco companies which abuse their priveleges should be shut down and put out of business.
What the tobacco companies did was heinous and unacceptable by just about any standard, and unless we want such irresponsible behavior to continue unabated it is important that they pay the full price for what they have done.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with hydrogen is where you get it from: as it is not produced by any biological process, you have to make it via the electrolysis of water. That requires power which needs a power source which may be more or less polluting. Thus hydrogen is at best a clean lossless way to transport power.
Yes, but you can use solar power to manufacture hydrogen (e.g. in the Sahara, in the southwestern US, etc.), which can then be shipped in fuel cells to wherever it is needed. The entire cycle, from creation to burn, is thus clean, environmentally safe, and sustainable.
I will guess that this instant artificial product placement, like the network show mentioned, will be common place within a year or two, and annoy the heck out of consumers. However, it may reduce the number of distinct commercials as product placement becomes more common and as Tivo and Replay make it easier to ignore separate commericals.
I agree that in a year or two there will be a lot of instant artifical product placement, and it will continue to grow over time. I do not think it will lead to a decrease in the number of rude commercials (didn't we all learn it was rude to interrupt as children? Obviously the network executives did not take the lesson to heart...) but rather simply to an increase in adds altogether.
We'll need a junkbuster for video, just to keep the dreck of the marketers from clogging up our already over-sensed minds.
On another note, I fear the use of this product in the hands of the government (read: corporate america). How soon until the police beat demonstrators who are (hypothetically speaking) protesting Exxon's pollution of the Alaskan coastline after another accident senseless, then manufacture the footage showing said protestors rampaging and rioting, to justify their actions to the public after the fact?
The future, such as it is, is growing increasingly ugly. I only wish I could punch the amoral idiots who are developing this technology in the nose -- just because we could do something doesn't mean we should, much less that we have to do it.
We as in the Open Source community. I'm not saying people should be forced to use YAOS (Yet Another Operating System), but at least the OSS community should have the choice.
The Free Software/Open Source community has plenty of choices. Some people develop for *BSD, many for Linux, a few for BeOS, and a very few brave and masochistic souls for Windows/*.
Most have chosen Linux for a variety of reasons, ranging from the licensing (GNU GPL) of the OS and underlying libraries to the simple fact that, for whatever reason, right or wrong, welike and prefer Linux. This may not reflect your preference, but it does reflect theres, and if you don't like it you are free to start your own project, or fork off any of the free software projects you wish.
The community hasn't ralleyed around Linux because it doesn't have a choice, its ralleyed around Linux because its license (GPL) and quality reflect the desires of the community more than anything else out there.
That having been said, there is a (smaller but just as enthusiastic) community which has formed around *BSD, also largely because they favor the license (FreeBSD) and the quality of the platform more than anything else out there.
BeOS is neat, but proprietary. Bug fixes are arduously slow in coming, precisely because the OS is proprietary and there is limited manpower fixing bugs, creating new features, etc. This makes the platform as a whole less dynamic and less satisfying for me, the end user, when I discover my video captures die after 9 minutes and don't get a fix for six months. It is hard to form a community around a product one cannot contribut bug fixes to, or get bug fixes from in a timely manner. while there is a small, vocal, and enthusiastic developer community or Be despite this, the proprietary nature of the platform (with all its disadvantages) make it singularly unattractive to open source developers regardless of how nice its programming API may be.
Ditto for MacOS. Proprietary OSes are simply unappealing to most open source developers.
Ditto for windows (with the caveat that the APIs are ugly, the system even less stable and much less elegant than any of the aforementioned OSes, etc.)
We have plenty of choice, and most of us have chosen, with FreeBSD and Linux the clear winners. However, the beauty of the free software movement (and open source) is that our decisions in no way force you to conform -- you are free to take the source code and develope it for whatevre program you like. You even have the right to bitch and moan because the rest of us don't share your platform preference. However, the rest of us have the right to ignore you, or even chortle with amusement, should we in turn find your choice to be as silly as you find ours.
It is called freedom, and it is a wonderful thing.
I went out and bought a minidisc player for about $200. It is a dream since discs are only $1.50 a piece and hold as much as a CD.
Blank CDRs are going for about $0.50 / disk. Using ogg or mp3 format, they hold roughly 10 CDs worth of music on one disk.
MP3 players which double as CD Players are the perfect solution -- you can burn your own music collection onto CDs and listen to them anywhere. As the original poster correctly points out, we need ogg support on these hardware mp3 players! Fortunately, most are flashable, so upgrading to new, better formats (such as ogg) shouldn't be a problem.
OK, firstly the infrastructure costs money. It's not free. You have to pay for it *somehow*.
The cost of the distribution infrastructure (read: internet) for digital art is already borne entirely by the end user, in the form of ISP fees and the local equipment to view, download, and store, and share such art. This is a non-issue which completely misses the point.
The cost of putting together an album is actually quite inexpensive, unless it is the recording companies (as opposed to individual bands) doing it, in which case the prices are artifically inflated by orders of magnitude. Why? Because this is a cost that is charged by the recording companies to the bands, thus, the higher the (artifically inflated) cost of recording, the more money goes into the pockets of the record company and is taken from the pockets of the artists. That is a very strong incentive for the recording companies to inflate their prices, and they do.
Even if we say that we can reduce all these costs by making all music purchasable on-line, somebody somewhere is going to have to pay for servers and bandwidth. A popular artist is going to use a lot of bandwidth. Especially if we're talking about 6Mb tracks.
Napster, GNUtella, and FreeNet have all already addressed (and solved) this issue. Bandwidth is paid by the end user (ISP fees). Servers and clients are peer to peer -- each user is paying for storage of the art, both for their personal use and for the use of others (as "servers") who wish to download said art from their local drives. Again, this is a non-issue. (I wonder, do you actually even understand the technology you are trying to critique?)
What I was trying to get across originally was that music will not, and will never, be free.
Music was free for most of the three million years of human existence. It is only within the last few hundred years, and primarilly within the last century, that it has become at first a luxery for the wealthy, and then a commodity for the masses (to be traded like so many pork bellies). This is not a "natural state" for music, it is an anomoly stemming from an imperfect interim technology and the distribution channels (and cartels) it engendered. Those times are now past.
Much music is and will be free. You do not pay for music you hear on the radio, do you? No. You pay for the radio itself, and that is the end of it. When I was growing up, that was my sole source of music. It did not cost me a penny, it was free.
What I did pay for were concert tickets, tee-shirts, and posters. Later, when I made money, I did get sucked into buying the records (and later CDs), a habit I have mostly broken thanks to my boycott of the RIAA.
It's called capitalism, it works, and it benefits those who contribute to "the system".
Capitalism works (with modifications such as anti-trust legislation) for systems in which there is natural scarcity. Physical products fall into the category.
However, there are other categories of products for which capitalism is at best dysfuncitonal, and at worst completely inappropriate. Areas requiring human compassion (care for the elderly, medical care) map very imperfectly to the capitalist model, with some very alarming deficiencies as a result.
With digital products, where there is no scarcity whatsoever (unless artifically applied through draconian legislation and the force of the gun), capitalism falls completely on its face. The Free Software/Open Source phenomenon vs. the ever less successful "closed source" approach is one example. Digitized music is another.
Now, the alternative is to maintain an incorrect paradigm (capitalism) against the real world reality (no scarcity, abundance for all), but in so doing you will need laws of such draconian strength and breadth as to make the communist regimes of Asia and Eastern Europe look like liberal democracies in comparison (these regimes were, ironically, a mirror example of applying an incorrect paradigm -- communism -- to the real world of physical scarcity). This is far too high a price to our society simply to maintain the profitability of an obsolete institution, or even to promote the much more noble cause of insuring the artists get compensation.
As others have pointed out, there are numerous alternatives for the artists to receive compensation, making the notion of a choice between "draconial legislation or starving artists" a false dichotomy of the highest order.
As to your last point, you are in no way qualified to determine who is and is not "deserving" of their music, much less to set an arbitary benchmark to define such.
If you don't like how ICANN operates, what alternatives do you have? Does ICANN have a government-granted monopoly on com/net/org addresses?
.ocm domains, but that's just me) they do cooperate with other alternative DNS heiarchies (e.g. alternic) and are compatible with ICANN. They are also very democratic about how TLDs are given out, and are compatible with ICANN.
I strongly urge you to use and support opennic. While not as subversive as I would prefer (I would have relegated all ICANN domains to domain.com.icann, rathar than respecting their
This means you can still resolve all ICANN names, but in addition you can resolve alternic, opennic, and various other competitor's TLDs as well.
ICANN has been given a monopoly by our governments, primarilly because our governments cannot (or will not) imagine a system in which there is not some central authority. It is up to us, as individuals and as ISPs, to thwart this powergrab at the grass roots level, by supporting independent, democratic, and popularist efforts to take back control of our internet.
Of course the creative work of students using university machines belongs to the students, not the university. I would never argue such a ridiculous position.
I'm glad to hear it -- when I read your first post it sounded quite different (to me at least). Unfortunately, there are numerous universities who would argue just that, just as there are employers who get people to sign contracts giving them all rights to all of their creative work, whether done on the job or on their own time, related to work or not, done on their own equipment or not.
So, while I am relieved that you are quite reasonable in your stance, I remain quite aghast at the extortionate money grabs both employers and some universities are engaged in (and have been appalled for years, I might add).
You guys really don't have a clue about property rights, do you?
Actually, most people here (yourself perhaps excepted) have a perfectly good understanding of property rights.
However, Intellectual Property is a misleading term. It is not property per se, but a privelege granted by the government for a limited time[1] that allows one exclusive control over the first sale of their product.
That is all. Calling such Intellectual Privelege "Intellectual Property" doesn't make it an actual piece of property, any more than calling a Pig a Duck would suddenly cause the pig to grow feathers.
As an aside, concerning property rights, there are such things as easements, abandonment, and squatters rights which allow people who have been tresspassing for a certain period of time to retain defacto rights to do so in the future even if you, the property owner, don't like it. In the case of squatting, ownership of the property can actually change hands as a result. In the case of abandoned property, typically anyone can come along, pay back taxes, and take possession (again, after a period of time).
Such periods of time are typically measured in years (I believe Illinois allows 10 years for easement, 20 years for squatters, and 7 years for taking possession of abandoned property, but I haven't checked the law recently and could be off by several years either way. Regardless, this is a far cry fron 120 years [corporate copyright] or life plus 95 years [individual copyright]).
So even your misplaced and misguided example doesn't apply, as the property rights you hold so dear, and are so eager to misapply to the intellectual realm, have clear limitations and provisions which kick in after a remarkably short time, when compared with period of time for which copyright grants authors and corporations such near absolute priveleges of monopoly over the works they market.
We did... for a very brief period, we had the "Line Item Veto", which allowed the president to strike portions of laws, thus preventing congress from passing a bill that contained the meat of a law, while tacking on unrelated "pork barrel" projects to it that the president may not agree with.
I happen to agree with the Republicans that challenged the Line Iten Veto (and won) as well as the democrats in congress who (successfully) buried the attempt to amend our constitution to allow the Line Item Veto.
What we need is a constitutional amendment disallowing unrelated riders from being attached to legislation. This would put the power to nullify inappropriate portions of the law where it belongs, in the judiciary .
The Line Item Veto IMHO puts far too much power in the hands of the president, be he Republican or Democrat.
Movie companies usually destroy films when
the copyright expires rather than allow them
to enter the public domain.
How spiteful! It's a wonder how society limps
along at all when nobody is willing to
cooperate even minimally with others...
Looked at the right way, Copyrights (and all other laws) ARE an agreement to cooperate with each other.
It is the movie studios that are not abiding by the copyright law, by destroying movies as they enter the public domain rather than adhere to the other side of copyright law (the other side of the "contract" if you prefer), namely that eventually such material over which they enjoyed such exclusive priveleges would enter the public domain and enrich us all. Instead, they are deliberately destroying stuff which has entered the public domain. In a sane society, this kind of behavior would be punishable as an act of vandalism against all of us.
Compared to the movie industries systematic misuse and abuse of the copyright system, even the damage done by those consumers who do violate copyright is minimal. Destroying old, valuable footage rather than giving it over to the public domain as is there obligation is merely the most flagrant and appalling example of an ethical and moral bankrupcy which infects that industry at virtually every level.
The diminishment of our culture by such greed is an outrage of dimensions seldom achieved, comparable in both scope and breadth to the nazi sponsored destruction of so much art and culture prior to the second World War.
Of course, if the students used skills that were honed in university classes, focused by university faculty, or done in conjuncture w/ university projects, then I think the university has a legitimate claim to some of the spoils.
...
Hogwash.
Why don't you send your paycheck to your Alma Matar if you truly believe this nonsense? Chances are pretty good you got your first post-college job as a result of your degree, which in turn led to your subsequent jobs. You'd be nothing without the university, therefor by your reasoning they should be entitled to a portion of what you make. But wait, if you hadn't gone to high school, you wouldn't have been able to attend college. Better hold back some of the check for your old teenage stomping ground. But of course, to get into high school you first had to learn literacy and arithmetic in grade school
The university is entitled to Tuition and Fees. Nothing more. The students (or their parents) have paid a premium for their education and use of the university's facilities. This does not give the university any right whatsoever to any creative product their student's have created, not matter how good the equipment and study environment are, or how brilliant the education given.
Professors, being employees, are in a different category. If they are a fraction as smart as they would have us believe, then they have negotiated reasonable terms for ownership of their own creative work. Whatever form their negotiations and contract have taken, it gives them no right whatsoever to the creative products of their students.
However, students, being customers, clearly have a right to retain their own intellectual property, regardless of the money grabbing the university may be attempting. If students are being used as free labor in a professor's or universities project (or worse, paying for the privelege) then they should retain some rights to such work. Otherwise, the university should be compensating them for their work, in which case, as employees, the situation resolves itself favorably to the university in question. TANSTAAFL: the universities are not entitled to pilfer students minds for their own profit, and most certainly not against the students' will and without compensating them for the work done (and yes, that includes creative things like thinking).
The idea that "any work conducted on university equipment belongs to the university" is rediculous, particularly given that the students in question have paid exhorbitant prices for the privelege of using said equipment. I would suggest any student running afoul of such a policy sue, and sue hard.
The point of research is to develop technology for the good of society, right? So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
Let's take the American Medical Association as an example.
What would happen if, say, a generalized cure for all our physical ailments were developed (e.g. nano-facilitated medical immortality)? Suddenly there is no more disease or death (save accidental, violent, or suicide). The need for doctors is diminished to almost nil, save for the occasional accident victim.
Would the AMA push for approval of such a technology, knowing it would put most of their membership in the unemployment line? Or would they delay, possibly even bury, such a breakthrough to maintain their own profession? To suggest the former is to stretch credibility beyond any reasonable bound, while to suggest the latter, unpleasant, possibility, conjurs unpleasant memories of similar actions in other industries which have already been documented.
Many arguments (of varying veracity: some quite compelling, most not) have been put forward that the medical establishment has already buried cures for various ailments which are more profitable to treat than to cure. True or not, it does point to the disturbing fact that there is a hideous amount of financial incentive not to cure many diseases.
A flagrant real-world case of abuse is the criminalization of marijuana. A natural substance with medical and practical non-medical uses (paper, rope, textiles) has been outlawed in no small part to protect certain business interests (the cotton industry, the wood-pulp industry, and more recently the pharmaceutical industry).
In Normal, Illinois teenagers convicted of possession of marijuana were enrolled in manditory treatment centers, where many were then diagnosed with depression (what teenager wouldn't be, especially after getting "busted" and having their life turned upside down by the authorities?), and required to take anti-depressents. An exchange of a relatively innocuous substance for an addictive and very potent psychiatric drug!
Clearly, pharmaceutical profits were being protected at the direct expense of the good of the people. Is it reasonable to believe this is the only occurance of such abuse by this one industry? I don't think so. I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg -- how many penecillin-esque wonder drugs have simply been buried, because they would undermine the profitability of other, well selling product lines? Since we are privy to so little privately funded research, we may never know.
Do you honestly believe research conducted by private, for profit groups, is going to be anywere near as open and accessible to public scrutiny as research funded today by public institutions such as the National Science Foundation?
I would submit that recent history demonstrates the opposite: corporations with existing business models will, on average, find it more profitable to bury their own research than change their business models (which most breakthroughs generally entail).
While conducting public research does not eliminate this problem, reducing it (as was done in the 1980s) and eliminating it (which is the trend today) certainly makes the problem worse and the abuses both more chronic and more acute.
Upgrade removes old versions. Install keeps them.
It's hard to see how so many people are getting this mixed up.
Only if you are obtuse is it difficult to see how people would mix this up.
Many libraries packages, when one attempts to "install" them, report that they conflict with some older version of the same library. The natural thing for a user is to think "of course, I need to upgrade" and do so, promptly removing the older, conflicting package.
It is in no way intuitive to use "--install --force", particularly when "--force" is documented as being dangerous to use.
The default behavior of "--upgrade" should be to not remove the older libraries, but install the newer libraries such that they coexist, without offensive messages warning of conflicts and dire consiquences. If someone wants to remove the older version of the library a modified "--upgrade" switch should be used, perhaps "--upgrade-remove-old" or something equally intuitive.
I've been using Linux since the 0.49 days, and UNIX even longer than that, but one of the real problems the *nix community really has is an almost religious unwillingness to accept criticism. This is counter productive and doesn't help any of us (except maybe Redmond).
RPM upgrades as they are currently implimented behave in some non-intuitive and confusing ways. Is it really so difficult to accept a little criticism and improve the semantics, such that even the newer, less experienced users have an easier time coming to grips with it?
What I like with the ICANN is their democratic system. To propose a new TLD, you must pay 20 000 $US. How can they stay serious when they speak of democraty ?
ICANN "democracy" is basically a farce, although I wouldn't let that stop you from voting (if you've registered) and getting at least one or two intellegent voices of dissent into the loop.
If you want a truly democratic approach to domain name registration and TLD management, check out
Opennnic.
[shameless plug]
.org, etc.) and Opennic domains (.opennic, .null, .oss, .paroduy). Opennic has cooperative agreements with other alternative domains heirarchies as well, allowing those who use their root servers to resolve their TLDs as well (such as .xxx, .biz, etc.). It is a far more equitable and democratic arrangement than what ICANN is doing (e.g. anyone can start a TLD by submitting a proposal to the mailing list and getting more than 50% of the vote), and worthy of support by anyone who values the freedom and liberty of the internet, particularly those of us in the free software and open source communities.
Note: I am an Opennic user and supporter, but not an ICANN candidate.
Opennic, an effort at democratizing the management of domains and TLDs, is putting forward ICANN candidates as well. I strongly urge everyone to support their efforts, as they are truly trying to make the entire domain management issue more equitable and democratic.
We are using Opennic root servers where I work -- allowing us to resolve both ICANN domain names (.com,
[/shameless plug]
Used to be, anyway. But there's no way I'm installed eighty-eleven libraries the hard way. I'm gonna find RPMs. And RPM -U removes the old lib. Whoops.
That is a misfeature of RPM then (and other packaging systems which have the same problem). Dependencies should not be an either/or thing -- different versions of libraries can and do coexist just fine. I agree that -U should not nuke old libraries by default, but an alternative would be --install --force, whereby both library packages are in place. Of course, one must use this with caution, as many packages include other files (headers, config files, etc.) with libraries, whcih IMHO is also a mistake. Libraries are LIBRARIES, header files and config files are something else. The -devel scheme tries to address this and (mostly) succeeds, but a more explicit approach might be better:
package-0.0-1.bin.rpm
package-0.0-1.conf.rpm
package-0.0-1.lib.rpm
package-0.0-1.devel.rpm
Whatever scheme is used, I agree it is a mistake (and disengenuous to some degree) for popular packaging systems to actually undue one of *nixes tremendous strengths: library versioning and peaceful coexistence.
No, it is not useless. It is designed for people with a REAL reason for being anonymous, yet wanting to spread information. For example, whistlerblowers, or people in countries with a less than perfect track record of censorship.
Except that, without the ability to do searches, no one will be able to find the material in question. Giving out the precise key is tantamount to publishing, so anonymity is preserved at one level, but possibly compromised at another.
Furthermore, whistleblowers and the like often need audio-visual proof of what has happened, such as audio recordings (ideally compressed with ogg or mp3 format for space), images, and even video footage. How is one going to reasonably publish that kind of important evidence of wrongdoing with a 100K filesize limit? By breaking up the files into 100K chunks? Then why not get rid of that limit to begin with.
It is not designed for pirates who want their MP3's (go to freenet for that sort of stuff).
This is a very unfair characterization of freenet and downright slandorous.
Freenet is intended to do precisely the same thing as publius, with the exception that freenet make no judgement whatsoever about content. Publius may make use of some better algorithms, but has also clearly made policy choices which make it less than ideal for dissidents to skirt censorship (such as the lack of searchability and the filesize limit, and worse: a philosophy of passing judgement on material and what is "fit" to be protected from censorship and what is not, with who deciding such criteria an open question). FreeNet can always adopt better encryption and storage approaches now or in the future, without making the same kinds of misguided compromises.
FreeNet remains IMHO the most promising approach to thwarting censorship of all kinds, today and in the future.
I'm beginning to wonder when/if Apple will see the errors of their ways and realize what they are doing to themselves.
Probably about the time they file for Chapter Eleven. Though with Steve Jobs' inability to ever recognize his prior mistakes, I wouldn't be surprised if, even then, they never figured out just what it was they did wrong.
It is a little known fact that anyone can be sued for any reason.
To bring a lawsuit requires no legal basis whatsoever, though winning one usually (not always!) does and, in some states, even persuing one beyond the initial hearing phase generally does.
Despite anti-SLAPP efforts and legislation there are many, many frivolous lawsuits which clog the system, wreck lives, and poison the social fabric.
It would not suprise me if Apple were engaged in such a suit, using the power of the legal system as a proxy for thugs in persuing a policy of intimidation and fear, in order to maintain iron-fisted control of their products' announcements, releases, and, yes, even rumors.
Misguided? Yes. Unenlightened? Obviously. Wrong? Most certainly. Legal? Quite probably.
Why is it considered selfish to believe that I know best how to lead MY life?
Good question. Probably because those in power (and in this purile chick's case, power takes on the form of old media cultural gestapo defining what is "in", what is "out", what is "good", and what is not) feel slighted when we deny them that power.
Control freaks are drawn to power like moths to fire, and I've yet to meet an old media reporter who wasn't, in some way, addicted to the power their words have over others. Our rejection of this paradigm, and of the kind of power mongering this sad woman personifies, is in a way selfish. After all, we should be giving of our own freedom freely, to feed the cravings of the poor, desperate, power-hungary political and cultural elite.
Shame on us.
Ob: incompetent moderation: There is nothing, anywhere in the preceeding post, to justify moderating it down as a troll, or for that matter, moderating it down at all.
The nice thing about using Linux is that it scales to all of these levels, has the flexibility to allow third parties to add capabilities later, has a huge installed user and developer base to mine for cool applications, is incredibly stable and reliable, and is powerful enough to facilitate uses none of us have yet thought of (multi-user capabilities to allow users to securely move data between watches, lend watches to friends without having to worry about the privacy of their own data, etc. etc.). Give it a nice, friendly palm like GUI and it would be a truly killer app.
[1]Video Phone capabilities optional
To use a decimal time coordinate system we'd also need to develop a decimal earth coordinate.
:-)
Actually, that would fit rather nicely with the metric units of distance already in use. I believe the meter was arbitrarilly designed to be one millionth of the circumference of the earth (I don't recall if it was at the eqautor, or at some longitude passing through Paris).
Given that, use 1000 metric degrees per circle, and you have (at the equator) almost exactly one kilometer per degree longitude, and at all lattitudes one kilometer per metric degree latitude.
Although for navigation (in aviation at least) it wouldn't be any more difficult to use metric minutes and hours with existing units of degrees or distance (nautical miles per metric hour might be silly, but km/mh wouldn't be).[1] For shipping, using sextants to measure off distances, it would make less sense.
It would definitely be a tradeoff: converting units in physics, and navigation for cars and planes would be as easier, or at worst as easy (no more divide/multiply by 3600), but boat skippers would have a tougher time.
Of course, since shipping (and aviation for that matter) uses different units for distance, they could continue using the depricated, archaic 24 hour system while the rest of us switch to the more elegant metric approach.
[1] For reasons of safety (and existing instrumentation) it is unlikely aviation will ever switch from using feet for altitude, nautical miles for distance, or degrees for direction. Switching from inches Hg to millibars, and from 24-hour time to metric time, would be pretty trivial though. Ironically, aviators do use celsius for most temperature measurements -- that conversion was easy to make with no safety implications to speak of (but even so, it isn't 100% complete. A feSomew weather stations still report temperature/dew point spreads in faranheit).
In 1960s the french actually tried decimal time :)
/hour, 100 seconds /minute, e.g. 5:00:00 is 12:00 noon
It was a good idea, unfortunately it never caught on (of course, here in the US the entire metric system 'never caught on' despite being our official standard for decades now).
I wrote an amusing java applet which is viewable on my homepage, which impliments a kind of "metric time."
10 hours / day, 100 minutes
Actually, it would make more sense in terms of nomenclature to have 1000 seconds / minute, such
that one has hours (decirotations), minutes (millirotations), and seconds (microrotations), e.g. 7:50:000 would be 6:00 PM.
The smokers knew that smoking would cause them many health problems, there was a warning on the side of the package for crying out loud.
This is correct (with an important caveat mentioned below).
Essentially the smokers sued the Tabacco companies for their own stupidity, and the ruling is almost sure to be struck down on appeal.
The is incorrect (though it is what the tobacco firms in question would like you to believe).
The smokers sued the Tobacco companies because the tobacco companies willfully and knowlingly made the substance more addictive and much more harmful than it was in its natural state. The warnings on the boxes did not notify the buyer that the tobacco company had added carninegentic materials to enhance flavor and doped the tobacco with additional nicotine to thwart smokers efforts to stop smoking.
This is far and away beyond simply marketing a legal but harmful substance, and is why the jury awarded the plaintiffs such a large amount and is also why it is unlikely that an appeals court will overturn the ruling. Some amount of the award may be reduced, but it is unlikely that the ruling itself will be changed. Indeed, given the appalling and blatent behavior of the tobacco companies in question it is by no means certain that the appeals court will even reduce the award.
Their own scientists came forward and blew the whistle on what they were doing: willfully and knowingly killing people[1] in order to pad their own bottom line.
[1]By some estimates, as many as twice as many people per thousand were afflicted with cancer because of additives they willfully and knowingly added to tobacco, above and beyond what would have occurred naturally.
In fact, an even better example of how companies can be litigated against for what they do would be the cigarette company litigations that have won billion dollor settlements.
Well, the tabacco companies deliberately and knowingly increased nicotine content to maximize the addictiveness of their product, and added a known carcinogenic substance to improve flavor despite protests by their own scientists that doing so would kill even more people.
The reason the jury awarded such high damages was the willful and deliberate manipulation of the product to make it even more dangerous and harmful to consumers than it already was. It was not because people think tobacco should be illegal.
Put another way: it would not be a bad thing to put the tobacco companies who did these things out of business. Someone else could start a tobacco company with more ethical marketing and production policies (read: selling the natural substance, not doping it with more nicotine and additional carcinogens, and not marketing to children and young teens). Tobacco should not be illegal, but doping it with substances known to cause even more harm, and manipulating its addictive properties to make quitting physiologically more difficult should be -- and just like bars who abuse their liquor licenses, tobacco companies which abuse their priveleges should be shut down and put out of business.
What the tobacco companies did was heinous and unacceptable by just about any standard, and unless we want such irresponsible behavior to continue unabated it is important that they pay the full price for what they have done.