The point of free speech is to protect informative discussion and analysis of policy.
No, the point of free speech is to allow me to say whatever the hell I want without fear of government reprisal, so long as I'm not stomping on someone else's rights in the process. Whose rights are being violated by this man burning a poppy? There is no right to never, ever, ever be offended.
Emotional gestures don't actually do that.
Yes, they do. Some of the most important political statements in history have been emotional gestures.
Burning flags, burning poppies, etc. express discontent but not much else. In fact, it seems to me that these events get in the way of actually having a discussion on the issue and getting closer to resolution.
Expressing discontent with your country's leadership is one of the very, very core ideas supporting freedom of speech. Expressing discontent publicly anounces to other people who aren't happy that they are not alone, allowing movements encouraging change to grow and flourish from small groups to larger ones.
It's more like karma-whoring than political speech.
Nevermind that the patent was actually filed in 1989, long before the World Wide Web was even invented.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is patent trolling at it's absolute worst, but what exactly is this quote supposed to mean? We (rightly) complain all the freakin time how people shouldn't be granted patents just by adding "on the internet" or "on a computer", we can't have it both ways. If there is a valid patent to provide secure communications through USPS and the key steps of that patent are being performed as part of secure communications online, why shouldn't that be considered to be violating the patent?
Why does this keep getting spread? The US is the second largest manufacturing base in the world, second to only china and that just, just barely and despite having less than 1/3 the population and the presence of strong labor and environmentally laws. Just because the US doesn't make cheap (in terms of quality and type, not price) consumer products doesn't mean that the US doesn't know how to manufacture any more.
How about: Write something whiled doped. Read that when sobered up. Pick out the good bits. Write it into a coherent story, edit, publish. I suspect that is much closer to the way most writers use drugs to increase creativity. Good writing is only 5% creative ideas, but that 5% can destroy an otherwise gifted author's career if it just won't show up to the party. The idea is that the sober brain has a lot of filters that stop 'stupid' thoughts making it up to the conscious level, getting doped relaxes those filters letting a lot of stupid stuff through. But like any piece of filtering software, sometimes there are false positives, and those false positives are more likely to be groundbreakingly creative ideas simply by their nature of being so close to the stupid line.
The body compensates to anything one throws at it to make up for the temporary gains. It's a zero sum gain sadly.
That is a very strong assertion with very little real research to support. There is absolutely no reason to think the human body is at it's biochemical optimum, even if you could define what that biochemical optimum might be.
Just because it seems reasonable doesn't make it true. Yes, getting plenty of sleep will put you on par or better than someone with less sleep on caffeine, that's not the question. The question should be does a person with plenty of sleep and caffeine outperform someone with plenty of sleep and no caffeine.
If low-dose LSD helps you stay off alcoholism, for example, which is entirely possible
It's better than that, a single hit of LSD can seriously increase your chances of staying on the wagon for months. The fact that it isn't part of the treatment for alcoholism says more about our irrational war on drugs than it does about anything else.
I don't think the idea is you code while high. I think the idea is that getting high last night affects the way your brain works today. Either because of simple stress relief or something more complicated. LSD in particular is known to have serious and long lasting effects on brain function, and not all of them negative. For example, a single dose of LSD can increase the chances of an alcoholic staying sober by a significant margin, significant enough that if it weren't for the stigma associated with it it would probably be part of standard rehab.
My problem is that wistleblowers still have a responsibility to act... well, responsibly. Releasing a handful of documents that you read that made you really concerned about things that are happening? That I can understand. Releasing hundreds of thousands of documents en masse, most of which you have never read and have no idea what they contain? That I cannot support in any way shape or form. As for taking the contents into account: imagine someone knows there's a murderer in the next room over, even knows what he looks like, so he sprays automatic gunfire into the crowded room and by dumb stupid luck to hit the murderer and only the murderer - he shouldn't be punished for that behavior?
Did you notice though, that the only part of the drawing that wasn't dotted lines was the shape? The speaker, the button, the I/O ports, even the depth were drawn in dotted lines, meaning those features weren't part of what was being patented. The only thing patented by the new patent was the basic shape of the top surface of the device. Once you consider that screen aspect ratio is going to dictate device ratio, and the fact that no one wants a 90 degree corner jabbing them in the thigh, you're pretty well guaranteed to be infringing if you make a tablet in that size range.
I would consider golfing 8 hours a day to be a detriment too. Or weight lifting. Or knitting. Or pretty much any other hobby that takes up more time than a full time job. It's not about gaming, it's about priorities and the time sink.
There is no such thing as "synchronous" when you're talking about relativistic effects.
Getting around that would be a very interesting problem to try to solve in multiplayer. At first blush, it seems impossible: player 1 won't be experiencing the same moment of time as player 2 at any given time. However, whenever two players interact in any way, whatever caused the interaction has to have happened for both players and that includes even just seeing them. If you can keep a log of what player 2 did in the past, you can figure out what instant of player 2's timeline player one should be seeing (of you could just simulate the actual flight of the photons, but that seems computationally impossible). And you can do the same for player 2's screen drawing player 1.
As long as, just like in the real world, no one can travel faster than light you'll always have all the information you need. If you allow FTL though, everything breaks, you can set up situations where you simply won't have the information about player 2 that you need to draw player 1's screen, which is awesome because it maps directly to breaking causality in the real world.
I haven't had a chance to look up the pertinent law regarding whether someone else is allowed to read the ballot or not, but I would imagine this same scenario has played out many times over
Literacy and sight are not requirements for voting. I don't think her husband can read the ballot for her (as he could pressure her or lie mislead her into voting the way he thinks she should, not as outlandish as you might expect) but someone at the polling station should have assisted her.
50k is enough to live on today, but you've got to at least keep up with inflation; that means puts your minimum return at 5% which is a bit harder to guarantee, especially when you start talking about a 60 year time span that would be the rest of a 20 year old's life. Not to say you couldn't do it, especially if a few of your early investments paid off to give you a slightly bigger bankroll, but living out your life on $2.5 million might not be as easy as you imagine.
A lot of their machinery is made largely from aluminum, which, while very inefficient to harvest, is present just about everywhere. As for iron and steel, well, it's the apocalypses isn't it? There's an awful lot of scrap to be had if the population drops to 1/100th it's current size. One of the first machines they designed and tested was a smelter to extract aluminum from regular old clay.
Your points about power requirements, however, are spot on which is probably where it all falls apart. Quite bluntly, all the easy to access power supplies have been harvested already. Maybe they have a still in their suite of machines? You could conceivably build a still out of wood and metal scrap relatively easily. Of course, that presupposes you've got enough food lying around to waste it distilling ethanol to try to bootstrap your technology level.
I think just how difficult it would be to return to industrial civilazation would largely be a function of how bad the hypothetical die off is. If 10% die and chaos ensues, things will settle down soon enough. If 90% die you've got bigger problems, not enough people to maintain what exists but far too many for scavenging to support the population long term. But if 99% were to die off, I could imagine a smart, resourceful group or two clawing their way back to industrialization within a generation.
I think some people are missing the point about their design's being open source. The idea is for these machines to be built and used in poor, developing nations today. This would prove that they can be built by relative laymen, can be repaired, and can compete with (much, much, much more expensive) commercially available options, not on a feature for feature basis, but on a cost and effort to reward basis. If you can get even a tiny bit of momentum going, maybe 100 farmers knocking together these machines in their machine sheds, you'll get said farmers coming back to you saying "this part was really difficult to get right during construction", "this was prone to breaking when hauling heavy loads", and - the holy grail - "you'd get better performance if you change this part to look more like this". You'd be amazed at the practical engineering knowledge a poor, desperate farmer has.
Why is this better than reverse engineering John Deere's designs? Because a modern tractor is an enormously complex piece of machinery. Would one run without any integrated circuits? I doubt it. Without refined fuel? Doubtful too. How many individual parts go into building one? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Yes, there are simpler, older designs out there, some are even still in use (see the note about the ingenuity of poor and desperate farmers). But I'd rather take a machine that was designed from the ground up to be producible, maintainable and usable with the minimum of infrastructure than one that just happens to be less complicated because it's 80 years old.
Not to mention all the other aspects that people are ignoring. One of their main points is synergy amongst the machines that they are designing. The same powerplant that is used to drive the bulldozer is also used as a hydraulic pump in their other machines, is also used as a generator, is also used as the power source for their aluminum smelter. They're trying to design a system of machines that a small, isolated group could conceivable build from the absolute bare minimum of available tools. And that is a very different problem than building the best tractor money can buy with all the resources of modern civilization.
There are probably more people in the world who can benefit from a robust, easy to build, easy to repair, fully documented bulldozer than there are people who can benefit from open source software. Now, whether they have actually produced a design that is any of those things is another question that I'm not equipped to try to answer.
It's worth noting that they did fix the issue with face unlock, and in a brilliantly simple way. There's an option no (at least on my Galaxy Nexus) to require a blink to unlock. Hard to make a photo blink... wonder if you could still do it with a video though.
The idea here is that you take all the nerves that would go to the amputated limb, and reroute them to some other muscle group. Then you hook your sensors up to the new muscle group and move the limb based on how that muscle twitches. But, since the nerves have been rewired, you don't have to think about twitching your thigh to move your calf, you just try to move your calf and the prosthetic responds intuitively.
Fatal levels of whatever the doctor prescribed? And once you get that it gets to be pretty easy to search the pharmacy records and see that "Doctor K ordered 10 doses of morphine and 1 syringe" at 1AM and the patient died at 1:30.
Pills won't work for many of these patients, many are intubated or have a feeding tube, others are physically incapable of swallowing a pill because of the very diseases and disorders that are making their lives a living hell. A simple injection of morphine or something simple. Almost impossible to screw up and virtually guaranteed to produce painless death.
Doctor: "They died in their sleep last night". Family: "Ah, well their suffering is over at least". Pretty much never: "I bet you turned their morphine up you bastard!"
Pretty much never isn't good enough. If you're a doctor, are you really going to risk your career on the off chance that you get a family who is so overcome with rage that they demand a toxicology screen on their dead loved one? How about twice? How about 100 times over the course of your career? (sounds like a lot, but if you only practice for 20 years that would be less than one patient every two months). How about we have it nice and legal; so the decision is documented and acknowledged by the family and no one has to risk getting their life destroyed for doing what more and more people are of the opinion is the right thing to do.
It's easy to get a lethal dose, but it's less easy to get a lethal dose in forms that many of these people can actually take. It's hard to swallow a fist full of sleeping pills if you're on a feeding tube 24/7. Heck, it can be hard to swallow pills if you have a stroke. Then there's the fact that none of the drugs you mentioned produce death in ways that are at all pleasant. A terminal patient who wants to end their life shouldn't have to worry about spending their last conscious moments vomiting themselves to death. And that's if they don't botch it (not taking enough, vomiting up the pills before your body metabolizes them, etc).
Letting doctors prescribe a lethal dose means a single large injection of morphine and it means being unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes, with virtually no failure rate.
It's antiquated because the last time someone really tried to push for it, he became a pariah to some people and a joke to others; which is why we needed a new term to introduce to people so that it doesn't carry the baggage of the previous attempts.
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The point of free speech is to protect informative discussion and analysis of policy.
No, the point of free speech is to allow me to say whatever the hell I want without fear of government reprisal, so long as I'm not stomping on someone else's rights in the process. Whose rights are being violated by this man burning a poppy? There is no right to never, ever, ever be offended.
Emotional gestures don't actually do that.
Yes, they do. Some of the most important political statements in history have been emotional gestures.
Burning flags, burning poppies, etc. express discontent but not much else. In fact, it seems to me that these events get in the way of actually having a discussion on the issue and getting closer to resolution.
Expressing discontent with your country's leadership is one of the very, very core ideas supporting freedom of speech. Expressing discontent publicly anounces to other people who aren't happy that they are not alone, allowing movements encouraging change to grow and flourish from small groups to larger ones.
It's more like karma-whoring than political speech.
So what? Karma-whoring should be illegal now?
Nevermind that the patent was actually filed in 1989, long before the World Wide Web was even invented.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is patent trolling at it's absolute worst, but what exactly is this quote supposed to mean? We (rightly) complain all the freakin time how people shouldn't be granted patents just by adding "on the internet" or "on a computer", we can't have it both ways. If there is a valid patent to provide secure communications through USPS and the key steps of that patent are being performed as part of secure communications online, why shouldn't that be considered to be violating the patent?
There is now also "Red" which have some NAS features and a 3 year warranty.
Why does this keep getting spread? The US is the second largest manufacturing base in the world, second to only china and that just, just barely and despite having less than 1/3 the population and the presence of strong labor and environmentally laws. Just because the US doesn't make cheap (in terms of quality and type, not price) consumer products doesn't mean that the US doesn't know how to manufacture any more.
How about: Write something whiled doped. Read that when sobered up. Pick out the good bits. Write it into a coherent story, edit, publish. I suspect that is much closer to the way most writers use drugs to increase creativity. Good writing is only 5% creative ideas, but that 5% can destroy an otherwise gifted author's career if it just won't show up to the party. The idea is that the sober brain has a lot of filters that stop 'stupid' thoughts making it up to the conscious level, getting doped relaxes those filters letting a lot of stupid stuff through. But like any piece of filtering software, sometimes there are false positives, and those false positives are more likely to be groundbreakingly creative ideas simply by their nature of being so close to the stupid line.
The body compensates to anything one throws at it to make up for the temporary gains. It's a zero sum gain sadly.
That is a very strong assertion with very little real research to support. There is absolutely no reason to think the human body is at it's biochemical optimum, even if you could define what that biochemical optimum might be.
Just because it seems reasonable doesn't make it true. Yes, getting plenty of sleep will put you on par or better than someone with less sleep on caffeine, that's not the question. The question should be does a person with plenty of sleep and caffeine outperform someone with plenty of sleep and no caffeine.
If low-dose LSD helps you stay off alcoholism, for example, which is entirely possible
It's better than that, a single hit of LSD can seriously increase your chances of staying on the wagon for months. The fact that it isn't part of the treatment for alcoholism says more about our irrational war on drugs than it does about anything else.
I don't think the idea is you code while high. I think the idea is that getting high last night affects the way your brain works today. Either because of simple stress relief or something more complicated. LSD in particular is known to have serious and long lasting effects on brain function, and not all of them negative. For example, a single dose of LSD can increase the chances of an alcoholic staying sober by a significant margin, significant enough that if it weren't for the stigma associated with it it would probably be part of standard rehab.
My problem is that wistleblowers still have a responsibility to act... well, responsibly. Releasing a handful of documents that you read that made you really concerned about things that are happening? That I can understand. Releasing hundreds of thousands of documents en masse, most of which you have never read and have no idea what they contain? That I cannot support in any way shape or form. As for taking the contents into account: imagine someone knows there's a murderer in the next room over, even knows what he looks like, so he sprays automatic gunfire into the crowded room and by dumb stupid luck to hit the murderer and only the murderer - he shouldn't be punished for that behavior?
Did you notice though, that the only part of the drawing that wasn't dotted lines was the shape? The speaker, the button, the I/O ports, even the depth were drawn in dotted lines, meaning those features weren't part of what was being patented. The only thing patented by the new patent was the basic shape of the top surface of the device. Once you consider that screen aspect ratio is going to dictate device ratio, and the fact that no one wants a 90 degree corner jabbing them in the thigh, you're pretty well guaranteed to be infringing if you make a tablet in that size range.
I would consider golfing 8 hours a day to be a detriment too. Or weight lifting. Or knitting. Or pretty much any other hobby that takes up more time than a full time job. It's not about gaming, it's about priorities and the time sink.
There is no such thing as "synchronous" when you're talking about relativistic effects.
Getting around that would be a very interesting problem to try to solve in multiplayer. At first blush, it seems impossible: player 1 won't be experiencing the same moment of time as player 2 at any given time. However, whenever two players interact in any way, whatever caused the interaction has to have happened for both players and that includes even just seeing them. If you can keep a log of what player 2 did in the past, you can figure out what instant of player 2's timeline player one should be seeing (of you could just simulate the actual flight of the photons, but that seems computationally impossible). And you can do the same for player 2's screen drawing player 1.
As long as, just like in the real world, no one can travel faster than light you'll always have all the information you need. If you allow FTL though, everything breaks, you can set up situations where you simply won't have the information about player 2 that you need to draw player 1's screen, which is awesome because it maps directly to breaking causality in the real world.
I haven't had a chance to look up the pertinent law regarding whether someone else is allowed to read the ballot or not, but I would imagine this same scenario has played out many times over
Literacy and sight are not requirements for voting. I don't think her husband can read the ballot for her (as he could pressure her or lie mislead her into voting the way he thinks she should, not as outlandish as you might expect) but someone at the polling station should have assisted her.
50k is enough to live on today, but you've got to at least keep up with inflation; that means puts your minimum return at 5% which is a bit harder to guarantee, especially when you start talking about a 60 year time span that would be the rest of a 20 year old's life. Not to say you couldn't do it, especially if a few of your early investments paid off to give you a slightly bigger bankroll, but living out your life on $2.5 million might not be as easy as you imagine.
A lot of their machinery is made largely from aluminum, which, while very inefficient to harvest, is present just about everywhere. As for iron and steel, well, it's the apocalypses isn't it? There's an awful lot of scrap to be had if the population drops to 1/100th it's current size. One of the first machines they designed and tested was a smelter to extract aluminum from regular old clay.
Your points about power requirements, however, are spot on which is probably where it all falls apart. Quite bluntly, all the easy to access power supplies have been harvested already. Maybe they have a still in their suite of machines? You could conceivably build a still out of wood and metal scrap relatively easily. Of course, that presupposes you've got enough food lying around to waste it distilling ethanol to try to bootstrap your technology level.
I think just how difficult it would be to return to industrial civilazation would largely be a function of how bad the hypothetical die off is. If 10% die and chaos ensues, things will settle down soon enough. If 90% die you've got bigger problems, not enough people to maintain what exists but far too many for scavenging to support the population long term. But if 99% were to die off, I could imagine a smart, resourceful group or two clawing their way back to industrialization within a generation.
I think some people are missing the point about their design's being open source. The idea is for these machines to be built and used in poor, developing nations today. This would prove that they can be built by relative laymen, can be repaired, and can compete with (much, much, much more expensive) commercially available options, not on a feature for feature basis, but on a cost and effort to reward basis. If you can get even a tiny bit of momentum going, maybe 100 farmers knocking together these machines in their machine sheds, you'll get said farmers coming back to you saying "this part was really difficult to get right during construction", "this was prone to breaking when hauling heavy loads", and - the holy grail - "you'd get better performance if you change this part to look more like this". You'd be amazed at the practical engineering knowledge a poor, desperate farmer has.
Why is this better than reverse engineering John Deere's designs? Because a modern tractor is an enormously complex piece of machinery. Would one run without any integrated circuits? I doubt it. Without refined fuel? Doubtful too. How many individual parts go into building one? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Yes, there are simpler, older designs out there, some are even still in use (see the note about the ingenuity of poor and desperate farmers). But I'd rather take a machine that was designed from the ground up to be producible, maintainable and usable with the minimum of infrastructure than one that just happens to be less complicated because it's 80 years old.
Not to mention all the other aspects that people are ignoring. One of their main points is synergy amongst the machines that they are designing. The same powerplant that is used to drive the bulldozer is also used as a hydraulic pump in their other machines, is also used as a generator, is also used as the power source for their aluminum smelter. They're trying to design a system of machines that a small, isolated group could conceivable build from the absolute bare minimum of available tools. And that is a very different problem than building the best tractor money can buy with all the resources of modern civilization.
There are probably more people in the world who can benefit from a robust, easy to build, easy to repair, fully documented bulldozer than there are people who can benefit from open source software. Now, whether they have actually produced a design that is any of those things is another question that I'm not equipped to try to answer.
It's worth noting that they did fix the issue with face unlock, and in a brilliantly simple way. There's an option no (at least on my Galaxy Nexus) to require a blink to unlock. Hard to make a photo blink... wonder if you could still do it with a video though.
The idea here is that you take all the nerves that would go to the amputated limb, and reroute them to some other muscle group. Then you hook your sensors up to the new muscle group and move the limb based on how that muscle twitches. But, since the nerves have been rewired, you don't have to think about twitching your thigh to move your calf, you just try to move your calf and the prosthetic responds intuitively.
Fatal levels of whatever the doctor prescribed? And once you get that it gets to be pretty easy to search the pharmacy records and see that "Doctor K ordered 10 doses of morphine and 1 syringe" at 1AM and the patient died at 1:30.
Pills won't work for many of these patients, many are intubated or have a feeding tube, others are physically incapable of swallowing a pill because of the very diseases and disorders that are making their lives a living hell. A simple injection of morphine or something simple. Almost impossible to screw up and virtually guaranteed to produce painless death.
Doctor: "They died in their sleep last night". Family: "Ah, well their suffering is over at least". Pretty much never: "I bet you turned their morphine up you bastard!"
Pretty much never isn't good enough. If you're a doctor, are you really going to risk your career on the off chance that you get a family who is so overcome with rage that they demand a toxicology screen on their dead loved one? How about twice? How about 100 times over the course of your career? (sounds like a lot, but if you only practice for 20 years that would be less than one patient every two months). How about we have it nice and legal; so the decision is documented and acknowledged by the family and no one has to risk getting their life destroyed for doing what more and more people are of the opinion is the right thing to do.
It's easy to get a lethal dose, but it's less easy to get a lethal dose in forms that many of these people can actually take. It's hard to swallow a fist full of sleeping pills if you're on a feeding tube 24/7. Heck, it can be hard to swallow pills if you have a stroke. Then there's the fact that none of the drugs you mentioned produce death in ways that are at all pleasant. A terminal patient who wants to end their life shouldn't have to worry about spending their last conscious moments vomiting themselves to death. And that's if they don't botch it (not taking enough, vomiting up the pills before your body metabolizes them, etc).
Letting doctors prescribe a lethal dose means a single large injection of morphine and it means being unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes, with virtually no failure rate.
It's antiquated because the last time someone really tried to push for it, he became a pariah to some people and a joke to others; which is why we needed a new term to introduce to people so that it doesn't carry the baggage of the previous attempts.