Trademarks aren't really that clear-cut. It's not like copyright; verbatim reproduction of the mark is not a key element of the offense. Trademark infringement is defined in terms of the potential for consumer confusion.
Now, if you mean to say that because the C is part of what makes the SPARC mark distinct, and therefore a name containing Spark (spelled correctly) isn't likely to cause confusion, you'd have a viable - but subjective - point. In fact that would be my basis for siding with SparkFun at the moment.
However, if SPARC's lawyers were to follow that reasoning, then SPARC would have every raeson to dismiss them and replace them with someone that would advocate for the mark.
When a society actively punishes a behavior, I find it difficult to call that behavior a requirement for being a good citizen.
If the lawyer were dismissed from SPARC's legal team, then this would discourage proactive defense of the SPARC trademark. If the trademark isn't proactively protected, then it will lose legal standing. The legislature has specifically attached negative consequences to the behavior you're suggesting; so no, I don't think that's what SPARC or Sun have to do to be a good citizen.
Trademark is, was, and always will be a thorny issue. Bad policy regarding the relationship of trademarks to domain name management has made things worse. Throw on top of that the many layers of confusion and misinformation that the layperson carries around regarding trademark, and it really is a fine mess.
The wording in the letter - especially about "identical" products - was clearly sloppy. Lawyer is factually wrong on technical matter, film at 11. I'm not 100% sure, but I bet they are considered to be in the same industry for trademark purposes.
As for whether the mark is confusingly similar - well, that's a subjective question by nature. Ideally I suppose you'd poll customers to see if people really are confused. In any case, it's SPARC's lawyer's job to assert that it might be confusing, it's SparkFun's job to assert that it's not, and if they can't reach an agreement then it's the court's job to decide.
If I were on a jury and had to decide based on what I know now, I'd probably side with SparkFun, if for no other reason than because the unique spelling is part of what makes SPARC a distinct mark IMO. But, I don't think SPARC's lawyers acted wrongly.
If the government regulates how you must treat traffic, then the government is setting network management poilcy. Turning the phrasing around doesn't change that.
I'm also not sure how you figure refusing to hold an ISP liable for someone else's actions is giving "a lot of leeway", or how shaping network traffic has any relationship to such refuasl.
Your mention of the FCC is a bit off topic (this story is about Canadian law).
As for your wish to sue Comcast... you certainly can. You'll lose unless they've contractually agreed to do something for you that they aren't doing. Good luck with that.
If your biggest complaint about this law is that the realities of the legal system might allow people (or ISP's) to do something that the law means to forbid... then what's your point? Every law is vulnerable in this regard.
The problem with this regulation isn't the use of the word "lawful". The problem with this regulation is that the government shouldn't be setting network management policies.
Those defenses sound good, until you think about them in a world where this attack might be in play. GP's assertion notwithstanding, there are people who really should be this paranoid in their understanding of the limits of security; to those people, what good is the hotel room safe? You're in a position where you have to worry about an evil maid, but you assume the hotel has really provided you with a box that only you will be able to open? Come on.
As for screensaver locks... at best that's going to force the attacker to start by rebooting your system - which is the first step in this attack anyway. So maybe you'll know your machine has been tampered with... unless, being unaware of evil maid attacks, you just assume Windows threw a fit and rebooted itself.
Because standards that lag current technology by 17 years would go unused anyway? So instead of having to interoperate with one system and therefore needing to pay royalties to one group of patent-holders, any device manufacturer would have to either (1) play to a niche market, or (2) address the fragmented market by interoperating with many systems that each work differently, therefore needing to pay royalties to many groups of patent-holders?
Your question is reasonable when applied to standards that cover doing things for which there are alternatives unburdened by patents. In many areas (such as wireless telecommunications) that is not the case.
If there are instances that are like this one except that they didn't end well, use one of them to prove your anti-IP point. If the best you can do is "here's a situation that almost went badly but really ended up ok, and there are other situations that didn't end up as well", then you have no case.
More specifically - show me a case where someone was actually held liable for singing to himself or herself. Otherwise you're just sensationalizing by pointing to this story.
I see a lot of people saying that this law is useless. On its own, with the market for service as limited as it is in many places, maybe that's so.
On the other hand, do you really want to start living with government-mandated network management policies? Do you think they'll get it right? Do you think political influences won't lead to regulations that require network management policies to suppress, say, p2p traffic?
Perhaps you wonder what's wrong with a law that says "all traffic must be treated as equal"? Apart from the fact that this is bad network management policy, what's wrong is it will never happen.
Why do I say it's bad policy? Well, spam is traffic. Botnet c&c is traffic.
Pretend we can write regulations that require all "legitimate" traffic to be treated as equal (and somehow define 'legitimate' in an appropraite way -- again, do you think p2p won't be slighted?)... now you're saying the only service that can be legally sold is flat bandwidth? If I want to offer a service that reserves some of your bandwidth for VoIP or streaming media, I can't? If I come up with some innovative new service that requires special network QoS treatment, it can never be marketed?
Ok, so maybe we say that you can offer traffic shaping, but you have to offer a flat bandwidth option as well. I'm not sure this is technically feasible, and I have my doubts about letting regulators make that call, but we're getting close to the solutions I think are reasonable.
The key element is the involvement of consumer choice. Consumer choice requires (1) that there be options, and (2) that the consumer be informed enough to choose among those options. This law helps with the second point, so I'm not so sure it's useless... but it does leave the first point unaddressed.
In general, consumer choice does not require that any particular option you may want be available. If there is true competition, then any option that "everybody wants" is going to be offered by someone. Regulating an industry to ensure true competition isn't easy, though.
If you don't have true competition, what can you do? Well, requiring everyone to offer a particular option amongst their offerings is one possibility. It can get tricky. ("Sure, we have a flat, unshaped 1Mbps option.") I dislike the idea that to sell one thing I'd be required to also sell something else, as this could destroy legitimate niche business models.
Setting up a government-run option to compete with the private providers is another idea; the US is debating this approach to healthcare. It's tricky to ensure the government provides just the right offering. Ideally you want it to be good enough that it keeps the other guy honest, but not so good that people flock to it unless the other guy becomes dishonest. It drags the government into lines of business many of us don't think they should be in. It is subject to politics. (Again, what happens when the government says "no p2p on our network"?) And in the case of ISP service, you have to decide if you trust the government to handle all of your traffic; will they respect your privacy?
Overall, any solution that doesn't involve true competition is going to be a compromise, and true competition is going to be hard to get. So, pick your poison and start pushing for whichever solution seems practical and acceptable to you.
But if you really look at it, any good solution is going to include keeping consumers more informed; so instead of wallowing in negativity about how this law doesn't solve the entire problem, you should consider it a positive first step and start doing something useful toward the next step.
The funny thing is, this story already has its beginning and its end... yet the headline only addresses the beginning.
What I love about this summary is, it quietly notes that the PRS backed down and apologized, yet then goes on to paint this not as a problem with the PRS trying to abuse copyright, but as a problem with the nature of copyright.
Yes, copyright balances music (and other creative works) as both art for the common enjoyment and property for commercial gain. That is specifically what it is and has always been. That is not what led to this situation. One organization's greed leading it to over-reach its rights under copyriht is what led to this situation. Large organizations abuse every area of law to get what they want; it's nothing unqiue to IP law.
Is copyright as it exists today out of balance? I think so. Is this story an example of that imbalance? Well, since its resolution was correct I guess I'd have to say "no". But I guess we can't let that stand in the way of a good anti-IP FUD-mongering session.
Great! Let's apply this idea to all rights, too! After all, it's not like copyright is the only law that's used to harass people.
So, if you sue someone for damaging your car, and you can't prove they damaged your car, you lose your car. Sure, maybe they just got lucky, or had a good lawyer, but if you didn't know you could win, why were you suing?
Big company pollutes your city's water supply? Well, don't sue unless you have iron-clad proof, because if you lose you'll no longer have a right to safe drinking water.
"Punish the loser" schemes are useless; they serve only to give even more leverage in the legal system to those who can afford the best lawyer. Start thinking about cases where a copyright is held by an individual rather than a media holding company, and you'll hopefully recognize that they are just as harmful in copyright as in any other area of law.
"Sure, the fans kick in and you aren't saving as much, but are you still saving? I suspect you still are, there is a reason you are told to run ceiling fans in your house even with the AC on."
If only someone would do a study based on real-world testing, we could be sure... Oh, wait...
There are several differences between ceiling fans and server fans. You can't use one to make predications about the other. "Using one large fan to increase airflow in a room is a more efficient way for people to feel cooler than using AC to actually drop the temp a few extra degrees", but this does not imply that "running a bunch of little fans to individually increase heat sink efficiency in each of a number of computers would be moer efficient than just keeping the room cool enough for those heat sinks to do their job in the first place".
Yes... If only there were some way to get more information than just what's presented in the summary then perhaps we could make some sense of it; but alas, it's just another of life's mysteries.
If majority rule is your highest value, then I suppose you have a point.
"I don't care about your rights, I just want things a certain way" is tyrany. Getting 51% of the people to agree on which tyranical practices to implement doesn't make it ok.
Mortgage interest deductability is limited by the value of the collateral. What is the collateral on a student loan again? Oh, right, it's unsecured; which means trying to compare it apples-to-apples with a mortgage is nonsense.
I was one of three kids in a middle-class family. We all went to college - two of us at the same time, the third right after. My debt at graduation was zero. As for how good or bad a deal student loans are... well, they're a good enough deal that I had classmates who were using them to pocket spending money. (And even when it came time to repay the loans, I've not heard them complain...)
Guess what? Graduating and not being able to find a job right away sucks. A bad job market sucks, and while the economy may well be recovering the job recovery lags behind the technical recovery... so right now things suck. If you didn't have any loans... it would still suck.
I don't see anything predatory about these loans, and therefore I don't think any major bailout is called for. I have a hard time not seeing this as people who were happy to eat their cake over the past four years, and now want to know why they can't still have it too.
I'd say very limited relief might make some sense. I could go along with the idea that, for student loans that are designed not to accrue interest while yuo're still a student, it might make sense to suspend accrual of interest for the nest 6-12 months while the job market recovers.
"All the traffic to the site is going to somewhere you can donate to a good cause and earn some actual karma."
Uh, yeah... and so now those of us who read the nonsense comments and thought "I'd like to see for myself what he really said" can't actually get to your original blog post.
Well played, genius boy.
Can't speak for anyone else, of course, but as for me... when someone hides his original words I'm not inclined to trust his claim that they were misrepresented.
"the actual HTTP URL standard does use the double slashes"
True. But the actual behavior of IE does not require the double slashes, which makes IE's behavior a useful example of what can happen when you omit them.
"how do the slashes help?"
Like any rule, it only helps if the tool enforces it. If IE required the slashes, then it could hot have interpreted GP's URL as a news URL. It either would default the protocol to http (what was intended) or throw an error (more annoying, but reasonable).
The point is, while protocol:host[:port]/path may be unambiguous, [protocol:]host[:port]/path is not.t
Are we really this far from what we've always known?
In the early 80's (probably before that too, but that's the earliest I can remember) it was common for games to start out with a skill level selection. This is manual and leaves the choice up to the user. It still rewards good play because "I beat the 'hard' level" is a different accomplishment from "I beat the 'easy' level". One of the best relatively recent examples I can think of is F-Zero, which starts out offering 3 levels of difficulty (on each of 3 progressively harder sets of track), and when you beat the 3rd level on a set of tracks it unlocks a 4th.
Another common technique is for the game to get progressively more difficult as you play successfully. Tetris is probably the purest example. Again, anyone can play but the best players are "more rewarded" ('I got to level 30!')
That idea was expanded on by games like Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda, which have a "second quest" should you be good enough to beat the game (or if you know the codes to skip ahead).
This idea of "rubber banding" seems to aim for making skill-level adaptation automatic (take control from the player), dynamic, and transparent.
Finding creative ways to make skill-level adaptation dynamic could be a good thing for some types of game.
Making it automatic is murkier. Generally I think the user should be able to override skill-level adaptation to get the game experience he/she wants, though I'm not opposed to the idea that you have to acheive a certain skill level to unlock higher levels.
Making it transparent is a bad idea IMO. There should always be clear feedback - You are playing at this level; you beat the game at this level; etc.
Especially in games where the implied goal is "finish the game", a dynamic, automatic, transparent handicapping system just encourages sandbagging.
"Either you've done the research and are making it publicly available to all of mankind - or you are keeping it for yourself and only offering the benefits of the research to the select individuals who can afford it."
By patenting the invention, you are (1) motiviating a company to fund the research, (2) publishing the designs for your inventino, and (3) ensuring that after about 20 years anyone will be free to follow those designs with or without your approval or profit.
That may not do as much for mankind as you would like to think we would get were everyone an altruist, but in the real world the alternative is that the invention waits uninvented. (You are not going to create a bioengineered cancer drug without expensive equipment - i.e. without deep pockets funding you.)
Now specifically talking about medical research in the U.S., I do firmly believe the system is broken - but that would be the healthcare system, not the patent system. The wide disparity between brand and generic pricing for drugs is a symptom of a broader problem, and trying to skip the brand phase for new medicines will only change symptoms without addressing the root cause.
(And no, I'm not suggesting that a so-called public option solves it either... but I digress.)
The Nobel Prize should recognize and honor the acheivement, end of story. The acheivement will further mankind in due course.
Perhaps the idea of "sequestering" energy is an over-simplification.
I think rather than "black holes account for 100x the mass we thought", they may actually mean "mass (energy) in black holes is 100x more useless than we thought".
In other words, the sequestering of energy in a black hole isn't absolute; to the extent that we can observe properties of the black hole that are a result of the energy it contains, we are interacting with said energy. E.g. we could in theory use a black hole's gravity as a power source, though we'd do so at the expense of throwing more mass into the black hole.
But to the extent that those observations are limited, so is the ability of the energy in the black hole to interact with the rest of the universe. A black hole could contain pockets of hot and cold matter at a very microscopic level (analogous to the ice cube in hot water I talked about before), but if we can't externally observe those hot and cold pockets then, from the point of view of the outside universe, they might as well not exist. The black hole could contain configurations of energy that would be "useful" in most contexts, but those are indistinguishable from configurations of energy that are not.
I'm afraid the BAC analogy really isn't appilcable. You're describing an impurity which builds up to a critical level to "kill" the host, and pointing out that if you could sequester the impurity the sequestered quantity wouldn't matter. Entropy is not an impurity that is slowly building up to eventually cause the universe to break; it's nothing like that at all.
I find it conceptually confusing to think about entropy as a finite/positive quantity. The way it's defined mathematically, of course, it is... but at a physical level there's just something backwards about it.
Entropy describes the degree to which energy in a system isn't usable. If you consider as a closed system a bit of ice in a glass of hot water: the heat in the water is "useful" in this system. It will melt the ice, and then equalize the temperature of the water from the melted ice to that of the rest of the water. (That may not seem "useful"; I suppose the point is other processes could capture and use the energy for other ends.)
But, as the ice melts and the water temperature equalizes (or as any other process fuels itself by accelerating this process), you don't run out of energy (which is constant) - but you do run out of "usability" of energy. When your system contains only water at a fixed temperature, there is no way to make heat flow, and all of teh energy in the system is useless. (Again, this assumesa closed system.)
So the point with black holes is, they aren't sequestering entropy to keep it from harming the universe in some way (like your BAC example); if anything they sequester energy and keep it from interacting with the rest of the universe, rendering it useless. (Not sure how Hawking radiation fits in that analysis, though.)
You're missing the point. It is legitimately illegal to risk other people's lives. You don't get to buy the right to do it via insurance premiums.
If anything, distracted driving laws - like many traffic laws - ought to account for the fact that they can't "make things right" after the fact by doing a better job of prevention. You should not be able to 'fix' a ticket to a non-moving violation, and if you do something truly stupid you should lose the privilege of driving.
Just because American society has reached the point where driving is assumed commonplace to the extent that we'll let a turnip do it, doesn't mean that's how it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Trademarks aren't really that clear-cut. It's not like copyright; verbatim reproduction of the mark is not a key element of the offense. Trademark infringement is defined in terms of the potential for consumer confusion.
Now, if you mean to say that because the C is part of what makes the SPARC mark distinct, and therefore a name containing Spark (spelled correctly) isn't likely to cause confusion, you'd have a viable - but subjective - point. In fact that would be my basis for siding with SparkFun at the moment.
However, if SPARC's lawyers were to follow that reasoning, then SPARC would have every raeson to dismiss them and replace them with someone that would advocate for the mark.
When a society actively punishes a behavior, I find it difficult to call that behavior a requirement for being a good citizen.
If the lawyer were dismissed from SPARC's legal team, then this would discourage proactive defense of the SPARC trademark. If the trademark isn't proactively protected, then it will lose legal standing. The legislature has specifically attached negative consequences to the behavior you're suggesting; so no, I don't think that's what SPARC or Sun have to do to be a good citizen.
Trademark is, was, and always will be a thorny issue. Bad policy regarding the relationship of trademarks to domain name management has made things worse. Throw on top of that the many layers of confusion and misinformation that the layperson carries around regarding trademark, and it really is a fine mess.
The wording in the letter - especially about "identical" products - was clearly sloppy. Lawyer is factually wrong on technical matter, film at 11. I'm not 100% sure, but I bet they are considered to be in the same industry for trademark purposes.
As for whether the mark is confusingly similar - well, that's a subjective question by nature. Ideally I suppose you'd poll customers to see if people really are confused. In any case, it's SPARC's lawyer's job to assert that it might be confusing, it's SparkFun's job to assert that it's not, and if they can't reach an agreement then it's the court's job to decide.
If I were on a jury and had to decide based on what I know now, I'd probably side with SparkFun, if for no other reason than because the unique spelling is part of what makes SPARC a distinct mark IMO. But, I don't think SPARC's lawyers acted wrongly.
Eh? Thought I was replying in yesterday's thread.
Congrats. Now care to address any of the substance of the discussion?
If the government regulates how you must treat traffic, then the government is setting network management poilcy. Turning the phrasing around doesn't change that.
I'm also not sure how you figure refusing to hold an ISP liable for someone else's actions is giving "a lot of leeway", or how shaping network traffic has any relationship to such refuasl.
Your mention of the FCC is a bit off topic (this story is about Canadian law).
As for your wish to sue Comcast... you certainly can. You'll lose unless they've contractually agreed to do something for you that they aren't doing. Good luck with that.
If your biggest complaint about this law is that the realities of the legal system might allow people (or ISP's) to do something that the law means to forbid... then what's your point? Every law is vulnerable in this regard.
The problem with this regulation isn't the use of the word "lawful". The problem with this regulation is that the government shouldn't be setting network management policies.
Those defenses sound good, until you think about them in a world where this attack might be in play. GP's assertion notwithstanding, there are people who really should be this paranoid in their understanding of the limits of security; to those people, what good is the hotel room safe? You're in a position where you have to worry about an evil maid, but you assume the hotel has really provided you with a box that only you will be able to open? Come on.
As for screensaver locks... at best that's going to force the attacker to start by rebooting your system - which is the first step in this attack anyway. So maybe you'll know your machine has been tampered with... unless, being unaware of evil maid attacks, you just assume Windows threw a fit and rebooted itself.
Because standards that lag current technology by 17 years would go unused anyway? So instead of having to interoperate with one system and therefore needing to pay royalties to one group of patent-holders, any device manufacturer would have to either (1) play to a niche market, or (2) address the fragmented market by interoperating with many systems that each work differently, therefore needing to pay royalties to many groups of patent-holders?
Your question is reasonable when applied to standards that cover doing things for which there are alternatives unburdened by patents. In many areas (such as wireless telecommunications) that is not the case.
I suppose the snarky answer is "citation needed".
If there are instances that are like this one except that they didn't end well, use one of them to prove your anti-IP point. If the best you can do is "here's a situation that almost went badly but really ended up ok, and there are other situations that didn't end up as well", then you have no case.
More specifically - show me a case where someone was actually held liable for singing to himself or herself. Otherwise you're just sensationalizing by pointing to this story.
I see a lot of people saying that this law is useless. On its own, with the market for service as limited as it is in many places, maybe that's so.
On the other hand, do you really want to start living with government-mandated network management policies? Do you think they'll get it right? Do you think political influences won't lead to regulations that require network management policies to suppress, say, p2p traffic?
Perhaps you wonder what's wrong with a law that says "all traffic must be treated as equal"? Apart from the fact that this is bad network management policy, what's wrong is it will never happen.
Why do I say it's bad policy? Well, spam is traffic. Botnet c&c is traffic.
Pretend we can write regulations that require all "legitimate" traffic to be treated as equal (and somehow define 'legitimate' in an appropraite way -- again, do you think p2p won't be slighted?)... now you're saying the only service that can be legally sold is flat bandwidth? If I want to offer a service that reserves some of your bandwidth for VoIP or streaming media, I can't? If I come up with some innovative new service that requires special network QoS treatment, it can never be marketed?
Ok, so maybe we say that you can offer traffic shaping, but you have to offer a flat bandwidth option as well. I'm not sure this is technically feasible, and I have my doubts about letting regulators make that call, but we're getting close to the solutions I think are reasonable.
The key element is the involvement of consumer choice. Consumer choice requires (1) that there be options, and (2) that the consumer be informed enough to choose among those options. This law helps with the second point, so I'm not so sure it's useless... but it does leave the first point unaddressed.
In general, consumer choice does not require that any particular option you may want be available. If there is true competition, then any option that "everybody wants" is going to be offered by someone. Regulating an industry to ensure true competition isn't easy, though.
If you don't have true competition, what can you do? Well, requiring everyone to offer a particular option amongst their offerings is one possibility. It can get tricky. ("Sure, we have a flat, unshaped 1Mbps option.") I dislike the idea that to sell one thing I'd be required to also sell something else, as this could destroy legitimate niche business models.
Setting up a government-run option to compete with the private providers is another idea; the US is debating this approach to healthcare. It's tricky to ensure the government provides just the right offering. Ideally you want it to be good enough that it keeps the other guy honest, but not so good that people flock to it unless the other guy becomes dishonest. It drags the government into lines of business many of us don't think they should be in. It is subject to politics. (Again, what happens when the government says "no p2p on our network"?) And in the case of ISP service, you have to decide if you trust the government to handle all of your traffic; will they respect your privacy?
Overall, any solution that doesn't involve true competition is going to be a compromise, and true competition is going to be hard to get. So, pick your poison and start pushing for whichever solution seems practical and acceptable to you.
But if you really look at it, any good solution is going to include keeping consumers more informed; so instead of wallowing in negativity about how this law doesn't solve the entire problem, you should consider it a positive first step and start doing something useful toward the next step.
The funny thing is, this story already has its beginning and its end... yet the headline only addresses the beginning.
What I love about this summary is, it quietly notes that the PRS backed down and apologized, yet then goes on to paint this not as a problem with the PRS trying to abuse copyright, but as a problem with the nature of copyright.
Yes, copyright balances music (and other creative works) as both art for the common enjoyment and property for commercial gain. That is specifically what it is and has always been. That is not what led to this situation. One organization's greed leading it to over-reach its rights under copyriht is what led to this situation. Large organizations abuse every area of law to get what they want; it's nothing unqiue to IP law.
Is copyright as it exists today out of balance? I think so. Is this story an example of that imbalance? Well, since its resolution was correct I guess I'd have to say "no". But I guess we can't let that stand in the way of a good anti-IP FUD-mongering session.
Great! Let's apply this idea to all rights, too! After all, it's not like copyright is the only law that's used to harass people.
So, if you sue someone for damaging your car, and you can't prove they damaged your car, you lose your car. Sure, maybe they just got lucky, or had a good lawyer, but if you didn't know you could win, why were you suing?
Big company pollutes your city's water supply? Well, don't sue unless you have iron-clad proof, because if you lose you'll no longer have a right to safe drinking water.
"Punish the loser" schemes are useless; they serve only to give even more leverage in the legal system to those who can afford the best lawyer. Start thinking about cases where a copyright is held by an individual rather than a media holding company, and you'll hopefully recognize that they are just as harmful in copyright as in any other area of law.
"Sure, the fans kick in and you aren't saving as much, but are you still saving? I suspect you still are, there is a reason you are told to run ceiling fans in your house even with the AC on."
If only someone would do a study based on real-world testing, we could be sure... Oh, wait...
There are several differences between ceiling fans and server fans. You can't use one to make predications about the other. "Using one large fan to increase airflow in a room is a more efficient way for people to feel cooler than using AC to actually drop the temp a few extra degrees", but this does not imply that "running a bunch of little fans to individually increase heat sink efficiency in each of a number of computers would be moer efficient than just keeping the room cool enough for those heat sinks to do their job in the first place".
I need to go make some t-shirts...
Yes... If only there were some way to get more information than just what's presented in the summary then perhaps we could make some sense of it; but alas, it's just another of life's mysteries.
If majority rule is your highest value, then I suppose you have a point.
"I don't care about your rights, I just want things a certain way" is tyrany. Getting 51% of the people to agree on which tyranical practices to implement doesn't make it ok.
Mortgage interest deductability is limited by the value of the collateral. What is the collateral on a student loan again? Oh, right, it's unsecured; which means trying to compare it apples-to-apples with a mortgage is nonsense.
I was one of three kids in a middle-class family. We all went to college - two of us at the same time, the third right after. My debt at graduation was zero. As for how good or bad a deal student loans are... well, they're a good enough deal that I had classmates who were using them to pocket spending money. (And even when it came time to repay the loans, I've not heard them complain...)
Guess what? Graduating and not being able to find a job right away sucks. A bad job market sucks, and while the economy may well be recovering the job recovery lags behind the technical recovery... so right now things suck. If you didn't have any loans... it would still suck.
I don't see anything predatory about these loans, and therefore I don't think any major bailout is called for. I have a hard time not seeing this as people who were happy to eat their cake over the past four years, and now want to know why they can't still have it too.
I'd say very limited relief might make some sense. I could go along with the idea that, for student loans that are designed not to accrue interest while yuo're still a student, it might make sense to suspend accrual of interest for the nest 6-12 months while the job market recovers.
"All the traffic to the site is going to somewhere you can donate to a good cause and earn some actual karma."
Uh, yeah... and so now those of us who read the nonsense comments and thought "I'd like to see for myself what he really said" can't actually get to your original blog post.
Well played, genius boy.
Can't speak for anyone else, of course, but as for me... when someone hides his original words I'm not inclined to trust his claim that they were misrepresented.
"the actual HTTP URL standard does use the double slashes"
True. But the actual behavior of IE does not require the double slashes, which makes IE's behavior a useful example of what can happen when you omit them.
"how do the slashes help?"
Like any rule, it only helps if the tool enforces it. If IE required the slashes, then it could hot have interpreted GP's URL as a news URL. It either would default the protocol to http (what was intended) or throw an error (more annoying, but reasonable).
The point is, while protocol:host[:port]/path may be unambiguous, [protocol:]host[:port]/path is not.t
Are we really this far from what we've always known?
In the early 80's (probably before that too, but that's the earliest I can remember) it was common for games to start out with a skill level selection. This is manual and leaves the choice up to the user. It still rewards good play because "I beat the 'hard' level" is a different accomplishment from "I beat the 'easy' level". One of the best relatively recent examples I can think of is F-Zero, which starts out offering 3 levels of difficulty (on each of 3 progressively harder sets of track), and when you beat the 3rd level on a set of tracks it unlocks a 4th.
Another common technique is for the game to get progressively more difficult as you play successfully. Tetris is probably the purest example. Again, anyone can play but the best players are "more rewarded" ('I got to level 30!')
That idea was expanded on by games like Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda, which have a "second quest" should you be good enough to beat the game (or if you know the codes to skip ahead).
This idea of "rubber banding" seems to aim for making skill-level adaptation automatic (take control from the player), dynamic, and transparent.
Finding creative ways to make skill-level adaptation dynamic could be a good thing for some types of game.
Making it automatic is murkier. Generally I think the user should be able to override skill-level adaptation to get the game experience he/she wants, though I'm not opposed to the idea that you have to acheive a certain skill level to unlock higher levels.
Making it transparent is a bad idea IMO. There should always be clear feedback - You are playing at this level; you beat the game at this level; etc.
Especially in games where the implied goal is "finish the game", a dynamic, automatic, transparent handicapping system just encourages sandbagging.
Uh... I'll worry about that in a few hundred years, when it's depleted?
"Either you've done the research and are making it publicly available to all of mankind - or you are keeping it for yourself and only offering the benefits of the research to the select individuals who can afford it."
By patenting the invention, you are (1) motiviating a company to fund the research, (2) publishing the designs for your inventino, and (3) ensuring that after about 20 years anyone will be free to follow those designs with or without your approval or profit.
That may not do as much for mankind as you would like to think we would get were everyone an altruist, but in the real world the alternative is that the invention waits uninvented. (You are not going to create a bioengineered cancer drug without expensive equipment - i.e. without deep pockets funding you.)
Now specifically talking about medical research in the U.S., I do firmly believe the system is broken - but that would be the healthcare system, not the patent system. The wide disparity between brand and generic pricing for drugs is a symptom of a broader problem, and trying to skip the brand phase for new medicines will only change symptoms without addressing the root cause.
(And no, I'm not suggesting that a so-called public option solves it either... but I digress.)
The Nobel Prize should recognize and honor the acheivement, end of story. The acheivement will further mankind in due course.
I'm not sure, actually. Keep in mind a lot of things about black holes aren't known (or at least there isn't universal agreement about them).
Perhaps the idea of "sequestering" energy is an over-simplification.
I think rather than "black holes account for 100x the mass we thought", they may actually mean "mass (energy) in black holes is 100x more useless than we thought".
In other words, the sequestering of energy in a black hole isn't absolute; to the extent that we can observe properties of the black hole that are a result of the energy it contains, we are interacting with said energy. E.g. we could in theory use a black hole's gravity as a power source, though we'd do so at the expense of throwing more mass into the black hole.
But to the extent that those observations are limited, so is the ability of the energy in the black hole to interact with the rest of the universe. A black hole could contain pockets of hot and cold matter at a very microscopic level (analogous to the ice cube in hot water I talked about before), but if we can't externally observe those hot and cold pockets then, from the point of view of the outside universe, they might as well not exist. The black hole could contain configurations of energy that would be "useful" in most contexts, but those are indistinguishable from configurations of energy that are not.
I'm afraid the BAC analogy really isn't appilcable. You're describing an impurity which builds up to a critical level to "kill" the host, and pointing out that if you could sequester the impurity the sequestered quantity wouldn't matter. Entropy is not an impurity that is slowly building up to eventually cause the universe to break; it's nothing like that at all.
I find it conceptually confusing to think about entropy as a finite/positive quantity. The way it's defined mathematically, of course, it is ... but at a physical level there's just something backwards about it.
Entropy describes the degree to which energy in a system isn't usable. If you consider as a closed system a bit of ice in a glass of hot water: the heat in the water is "useful" in this system. It will melt the ice, and then equalize the temperature of the water from the melted ice to that of the rest of the water. (That may not seem "useful"; I suppose the point is other processes could capture and use the energy for other ends.)
But, as the ice melts and the water temperature equalizes (or as any other process fuels itself by accelerating this process), you don't run out of energy (which is constant) - but you do run out of "usability" of energy. When your system contains only water at a fixed temperature, there is no way to make heat flow, and all of teh energy in the system is useless. (Again, this assumesa closed system.)
So the point with black holes is, they aren't sequestering entropy to keep it from harming the universe in some way (like your BAC example); if anything they sequester energy and keep it from interacting with the rest of the universe, rendering it useless. (Not sure how Hawking radiation fits in that analysis, though.)
So we should also abandon laws related to murder?
You're missing the point. It is legitimately illegal to risk other people's lives. You don't get to buy the right to do it via insurance premiums.
If anything, distracted driving laws - like many traffic laws - ought to account for the fact that they can't "make things right" after the fact by doing a better job of prevention. You should not be able to 'fix' a ticket to a non-moving violation, and if you do something truly stupid you should lose the privilege of driving.
Just because American society has reached the point where driving is assumed commonplace to the extent that we'll let a turnip do it, doesn't mean that's how it should be.