Who told me that there was no problem with armed citizens because criminals were denied access to guns (he isn't something I made up: I got that response recently)?
I guess it's like the old porn shop gag, ex Monty Python I think:
"I want to buy an...iPhone"
"Sorry, Sir, wrong euphemism."
"A microwave oven?"
"Try again..."
"A high-definition TV?"
"Ah, now Sir is talking. If you come in back you can peruse our...interesting equipment."
I am reliably informed that at proper finishing schools you learn how to pluck and gut game birds, if not actually how to shoot them. So I think you may be misunderestimating what happens there.
First, you have to consider the relative motion of earth and asteroid. The asteroid is in an orbit and at this point its velocity relative to us is, say, around 5km per second. Now you blow it up.
The velocity of the bits relative to the original asteroid is going to be nothing like 5km/s. To do that, the energy required would be many times that of actually fracturing it. I can't be bothered to work it out because my latest install will be finished soon, but let's say that it is a pretty big impact and the average speed of the bits is around 200M/s.
Relative to the earth, the velocity of the exploded bits is in a range around 5km/s, with most of them in the range 4.7-5.3. They are still coming towards us. Since the original center of the asteroid is still in the same trajectory (remember we blew it up from the middle, see TFA) gravity will gradually pull most of those bits towards that center. After a while, we will have a very heavy comet, still on exactly the same path.
Now, how about the earth impact? The original asteroid was 1000km dia. Interestingly, if it missed Earth by as little as a few hundred km, we would lose satellites, coastal cities and places like Bangladesh, but we would survive. But now we have approaching us a comet maybe 20 000km across. It is far more likely to hit us. Even if the particles were dust grains, what do you think would be the effect on the atmosphere of dumping all that mass into it at high velocity? Correct: the atmosphere would be stripped off instantly and everybody would die. Even lumps a few meters across will create sizeable craters.
So, by blowing up the asteroid, we would more or less guarantee our extinction, and after blowing it up failed we would have no other course of action. Whereas sending a succession of deflectors would give us a reasonable chance of success.
The last thing you want is lots of pieces - there's something called gravity which would cause them to re-agglutinate on the rest of the journey. Breaking up an asteroid takes far more energy than deflection, as should be obvious-despite the current illiteracy, it takes far less energy to brake a car than it does to break it up. Of course Hollywood wouldn't want deflection because there's nothing to see on screen - but deflecting it into a safe orbit would be much safer because you only have to predict the track of one object, not millions of small ones with different trajectories.
The corporation only has to tell the FBI you have caused them more than a certain number of dollars of loss, and they will come round and annoy you. Corporations simply pay the State to invade your privacy by force.
I think you miss an important point here: the Government snoops but is expected to protect from commercial snooping. Someone will do it. Even in Switzerland, where it will be the neighbors. On the whole I tend to trust the State more than corporations.
When BNW was written, corporal punishment was rife in most schools across the developed world. At Eton, you could be beaten with a stick by a boy two years older than you were. This was all part of the conditioning to put up with arbitrary punishment and maltreatment in future, and led to a number of upper class men with very kinky personalities. In BNW, much gentler conditioning is used early on so that corporal punishment isn't necessary. It is much kinder than the social norms when Huxley was writing.
I think you are confused. As I've already posted above, the "outsiders" in BNW get sent to islands full of other highly intelligent people; it is a reward rather than a punishment.
In fact I don't find BNW scary at all. It is a utopia. Most people are happy and well-adjusted, there is no crime, very little illness. When people emerge who don't fit and are intelligent, they simply get sent off to a community of other intelligent people so they don't upset the sheep. If you're a Bernard Marx, you'd really like to live in a world like that. The prize for not fitting in is to be sent to the equivalent of an Ivy League university. As Mustafa Mond points out to Helmholtz, Marx thinks he's being punished but in fact he is being rewarded. The rulers of BNW, in fact, are Platonic philosopher-kings, and they recognise that they must allow the gene pool to throw up exceptions because it is from those exceptional people that the rulers of the world will be drawn. They are altruistic, and the system is designed to ensure that they stay that way. It is only depressing if you believe that there are sky fairies who make rules for humankind.
Your argument does not necessarily follow. "Using a browser which has DNT set by default" could itself be taken as expressing such a preference. And in Europe we tend to see privacy as opt-out rather than opt-in.
Looking at Microsoft's business model, on the one hand you have companies like Google, Facebook (and many iOS apps) which raise money through advertising (advertising is a source of income) and Microsoft and companies like RIM which raise money through licensing fees and direct sales (advertising is a cost center). I am sure that Microsoft would like an Internet in which everything has to be paid for by the end user. And so, possibly, would Apple. Together, they outweigh the opposition.
You obviously aren't keeping up. It seems a remarkable number of women postgraduate students pay their way with a little prostitution on the side. It really isn't so different from marrying a rich man and divorcing as soon as possible. Some women go in for one-night-stands, and whatever that says about their self-esteem, the fact is that it happens. Being a PhD student, working long hours and really not having the energy or social time to support a relationship, the fact that they can earn enough to pay their way in three hours a week obviously counts for a lot. Stripping and lap-dancing pay a lot less per hour.
This is, basically, what you get if you have a rather unregulated capitalist society which is still a long, long way from male/female equality. So where was I...
Ah yes. Calling Florian Mueller a whore is deeply insulting to honest prostitutes.
I'm running a large country. I want control of my computers and the software they run. I tell people to sort out compatibility and support. Labour costs aren't a worry. And being sued by Microsoft? How many ICBMs do they have?
I really do not think you quite get the commercial environment here.
I have no idea where Vladimir Putin lies on the scale from evil KGB dictator to enlightened ruler trying to extract Russian from its appalling history, but, had he ever read the books, I rather expect he would be flattered by the comparison.
In Pratchett's books, Vetinari travels the reverse way from, say, the Assads or Stalin. They start as probably quite well meaning and gradually become more paranoid, violent and repressive. Vetinari starts as a repressive ruler of a backward city state and, as it rapidly advances technically and socially, gradually becomes more liberal and devolves more power to the general public.
Look at the abstract. This isn't arguing about the accuracy of fractional degree measurements at individual weather stations: it is about > 3 sigma events over >10% of the Earth's surface, quite large changes and exactly the kind of thing that would be expected if more energy was being added to the atmosphere. For years the climatologists have been trying to explain that adding energy doesn't simply make everything slightly warmer, but will have effects larger in one place and smaller in another. This study tends to bear that out and emphasises that the extremes are over large land masses - again as would be expected. I am rather glad I live close enough to the Atlantic to be affected by Atlantic weather patterns, but far enough that we rarely get the worst of the storms, even though I am going to have to put in extra soil drainage in October.
No, you don't. I can see you've never worked in a resource-constrained country.
There are a lot of extant programs that don't have *NIX versions and for which the source code isn't available. Let's take Office 2000...please. Let's assume that I am the Russian Government and I have cracked copies of, I don't know, older Photoshop, Office, you name it.
Now someone gives me an OS that runs all those programs but to which I have the source code. Which is easier: to add required new functions to the OS, or to write an OS from scratch that will run all those programs, or to reverse engineer all those programs? Perhaps I don't want the Civil Service running on LibreOffice because all the people who matter are trained on Office 2000. I don't care if the rest of the world is on Windows 9: what I care about is that all my bureaucrats and schools across a vast country are running something which runs my programs with my controls. I can develop new programs and know they won't be borked by OS changes.
Why should I care what Microsoft does? My users are writing Cyrillic script with a whole lot of different cultural assumptions from the Microsoft target audience.
Having lots of brilliant programmers isn't the problem: at the end of the day it is business processes and users. If you are stuck with all those PhDs doing desktop support for Rubuntu (or Pubuntu perhaps), they can't be out there planning the cyber-destruction of the United States, can they?
So that Russians can use Windows programs, of which there are very many, without using an American OS. I imagine that what he told Putin was "if this gets completed Russia can be sure that Windows programs can be run in secure environments with no risk of them reporting back to the US, and you don't have to pay Microsoft anything for it."
It's funny how a lot of people who seem to be American do not seem to get that for a large part of the world the USA is a threat as well as a promise. It's the butt headed attitude that the Roman Empire got into - we are the bringers of civilisation, everybody must love us. Only it turned out that the Goths didn't want it.
I venture to disagree. The Torch is well made but it looks and feels old fashioned next to an HP Pre 3. Which flopped despite a better OS. The market, other than weirdos like me, just seems to like mini_2001 slabs.
MicrosoftofficelivestyleUImediacentereditionforwindowsgenuineadvantage Gesellschaft mit beschrankte Haftung und Co. By making it a partnership, they don't have to file proper accounts.
I am not an IP lawyer but I have often instructed IP lawyers (and applied for trademarks direct - it isn't difficult) and I can tell you that being clear-cut from where you sit cuts no ice whatsoever with a German court. Also, Metro AG has been around a lot longer than a transient phone UI.
In the US, by the way, Intel Corp was able to force an HR company to change its name from Gentium (Latin for "people") to, I think, Gentia. I suspect that would not have happened in Europe because the test is somewhat different.
I hope you aren't thinking that Microsoft should win because anything an American company wants to do should override the interests of foreigners.
It is not as simple as that. Trademarks are applicable to NICE classes, not industry sectors. A retail store might sell own-branded computers, a plumbing manufacturer might sell CAD software for kitchens and bathrooms (Grohe not only supply CAD data but also phone apps). So long as they were the first to register their trade marks in those sectors, they can use them.
There are exceptions, of course; some terms are generics in some industry sectors, so I couldn't trademark "Keelson" for shipbuilding, but I could probably trademark "Keelson Business Software".
Retail department stores are particularly wide ranging in applicable classes, because they can sell so many different things and under their own brand names.
They don't need to so long as they defend the trademark they have been awarded. As a large retailer they could start selling own-branded computers in a few weeks if they wanted to. They registered it, they paid for it, it is a well known brand...they just can't use it for building underground railways.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it's like the old porn shop gag, ex Monty Python I think:
"I want to buy an...iPhone"
"Sorry, Sir, wrong euphemism."
"A microwave oven?"
"Try again..."
"A high-definition TV?"
"Ah, now Sir is talking. If you come in back you can peruse our...interesting equipment."
I am reliably informed that at proper finishing schools you learn how to pluck and gut game birds, if not actually how to shoot them. So I think you may be misunderestimating what happens there.
The velocity of the bits relative to the original asteroid is going to be nothing like 5km/s. To do that, the energy required would be many times that of actually fracturing it. I can't be bothered to work it out because my latest install will be finished soon, but let's say that it is a pretty big impact and the average speed of the bits is around 200M/s.
Relative to the earth, the velocity of the exploded bits is in a range around 5km/s, with most of them in the range 4.7-5.3. They are still coming towards us. Since the original center of the asteroid is still in the same trajectory (remember we blew it up from the middle, see TFA) gravity will gradually pull most of those bits towards that center. After a while, we will have a very heavy comet, still on exactly the same path.
Now, how about the earth impact? The original asteroid was 1000km dia. Interestingly, if it missed Earth by as little as a few hundred km, we would lose satellites, coastal cities and places like Bangladesh, but we would survive. But now we have approaching us a comet maybe 20 000km across. It is far more likely to hit us. Even if the particles were dust grains, what do you think would be the effect on the atmosphere of dumping all that mass into it at high velocity? Correct: the atmosphere would be stripped off instantly and everybody would die. Even lumps a few meters across will create sizeable craters.
So, by blowing up the asteroid, we would more or less guarantee our extinction, and after blowing it up failed we would have no other course of action. Whereas sending a succession of deflectors would give us a reasonable chance of success.
Was far too classy ever to be mentioned on Slashdot.
The last thing you want is lots of pieces - there's something called gravity which would cause them to re-agglutinate on the rest of the journey. Breaking up an asteroid takes far more energy than deflection, as should be obvious-despite the current illiteracy, it takes far less energy to brake a car than it does to break it up. Of course Hollywood wouldn't want deflection because there's nothing to see on screen - but deflecting it into a safe orbit would be much safer because you only have to predict the track of one object, not millions of small ones with different trajectories.
The corporation only has to tell the FBI you have caused them more than a certain number of dollars of loss, and they will come round and annoy you. Corporations simply pay the State to invade your privacy by force.
I think you miss an important point here: the Government snoops but is expected to protect from commercial snooping. Someone will do it. Even in Switzerland, where it will be the neighbors. On the whole I tend to trust the State more than corporations.
When BNW was written, corporal punishment was rife in most schools across the developed world. At Eton, you could be beaten with a stick by a boy two years older than you were. This was all part of the conditioning to put up with arbitrary punishment and maltreatment in future, and led to a number of upper class men with very kinky personalities. In BNW, much gentler conditioning is used early on so that corporal punishment isn't necessary. It is much kinder than the social norms when Huxley was writing.
I think you are confused. As I've already posted above, the "outsiders" in BNW get sent to islands full of other highly intelligent people; it is a reward rather than a punishment.
In fact I don't find BNW scary at all. It is a utopia. Most people are happy and well-adjusted, there is no crime, very little illness. When people emerge who don't fit and are intelligent, they simply get sent off to a community of other intelligent people so they don't upset the sheep. If you're a Bernard Marx, you'd really like to live in a world like that. The prize for not fitting in is to be sent to the equivalent of an Ivy League university. As Mustafa Mond points out to Helmholtz, Marx thinks he's being punished but in fact he is being rewarded. The rulers of BNW, in fact, are Platonic philosopher-kings, and they recognise that they must allow the gene pool to throw up exceptions because it is from those exceptional people that the rulers of the world will be drawn. They are altruistic, and the system is designed to ensure that they stay that way. It is only depressing if you believe that there are sky fairies who make rules for humankind.
Looking at Microsoft's business model, on the one hand you have companies like Google, Facebook (and many iOS apps) which raise money through advertising (advertising is a source of income) and Microsoft and companies like RIM which raise money through licensing fees and direct sales (advertising is a cost center). I am sure that Microsoft would like an Internet in which everything has to be paid for by the end user. And so, possibly, would Apple. Together, they outweigh the opposition.
You appear not to have heard of perjury.
This is, basically, what you get if you have a rather unregulated capitalist society which is still a long, long way from male/female equality. So where was I...
Ah yes. Calling Florian Mueller a whore is deeply insulting to honest prostitutes.
I really do not think you quite get the commercial environment here.
In Pratchett's books, Vetinari travels the reverse way from, say, the Assads or Stalin. They start as probably quite well meaning and gradually become more paranoid, violent and repressive. Vetinari starts as a repressive ruler of a backward city state and, as it rapidly advances technically and socially, gradually becomes more liberal and devolves more power to the general public.
Look at the abstract. This isn't arguing about the accuracy of fractional degree measurements at individual weather stations: it is about > 3 sigma events over >10% of the Earth's surface, quite large changes and exactly the kind of thing that would be expected if more energy was being added to the atmosphere. For years the climatologists have been trying to explain that adding energy doesn't simply make everything slightly warmer, but will have effects larger in one place and smaller in another. This study tends to bear that out and emphasises that the extremes are over large land masses - again as would be expected. I am rather glad I live close enough to the Atlantic to be affected by Atlantic weather patterns, but far enough that we rarely get the worst of the storms, even though I am going to have to put in extra soil drainage in October.
The answer to your rather stupid header is "Russians, of course". Are you a Russian?
There are a lot of extant programs that don't have *NIX versions and for which the source code isn't available. Let's take Office 2000...please. Let's assume that I am the Russian Government and I have cracked copies of, I don't know, older Photoshop, Office, you name it.
Now someone gives me an OS that runs all those programs but to which I have the source code. Which is easier: to add required new functions to the OS, or to write an OS from scratch that will run all those programs, or to reverse engineer all those programs? Perhaps I don't want the Civil Service running on LibreOffice because all the people who matter are trained on Office 2000. I don't care if the rest of the world is on Windows 9: what I care about is that all my bureaucrats and schools across a vast country are running something which runs my programs with my controls. I can develop new programs and know they won't be borked by OS changes.
Why should I care what Microsoft does? My users are writing Cyrillic script with a whole lot of different cultural assumptions from the Microsoft target audience.
Having lots of brilliant programmers isn't the problem: at the end of the day it is business processes and users. If you are stuck with all those PhDs doing desktop support for Rubuntu (or Pubuntu perhaps), they can't be out there planning the cyber-destruction of the United States, can they?
It's funny how a lot of people who seem to be American do not seem to get that for a large part of the world the USA is a threat as well as a promise. It's the butt headed attitude that the Roman Empire got into - we are the bringers of civilisation, everybody must love us. Only it turned out that the Goths didn't want it.
I venture to disagree. The Torch is well made but it looks and feels old fashioned next to an HP Pre 3. Which flopped despite a better OS. The market, other than weirdos like me, just seems to like mini_2001 slabs.
MicrosoftofficelivestyleUImediacentereditionforwindowsgenuineadvantage Gesellschaft mit beschrankte Haftung und Co. By making it a partnership, they don't have to file proper accounts.
In the US, by the way, Intel Corp was able to force an HR company to change its name from Gentium (Latin for "people") to, I think, Gentia. I suspect that would not have happened in Europe because the test is somewhat different.
I hope you aren't thinking that Microsoft should win because anything an American company wants to do should override the interests of foreigners.
There are exceptions, of course; some terms are generics in some industry sectors, so I couldn't trademark "Keelson" for shipbuilding, but I could probably trademark "Keelson Business Software".
Retail department stores are particularly wide ranging in applicable classes, because they can sell so many different things and under their own brand names.
They don't need to so long as they defend the trademark they have been awarded. As a large retailer they could start selling own-branded computers in a few weeks if they wanted to. They registered it, they paid for it, it is a well known brand...they just can't use it for building underground railways.
Confractus, circumfractus, intermissus,infractus are all perhaps more apt.