They are surely most elusive, and I cannot imagine where I would start if I wanted to read through them in detail, along with all of the context needed to understand them.
I mean, sure, GP provided the link to the patent, which by definition is the document containing the claims; I could start by clicking on the link and reading the claims. But it's so much less time consuming to just ask what the claims are and hope nobody calls my bluff.
To implement what I'm saying, only the marketing has to change. And by "change", I mean "become honest".
The technical excuses for not delivering 20Mbps when advertising 20Mbps make no difference. If you can't deliver 20Mbps, then you don't get to advertise that you're going to.
For you to claim that the system I'm advocating "won't work" suggets that you're unaware that it has in fact been used without problem. Sure, cable modem providers have always played the game your way and sure, they like to claim that's the only way to play. In truth, it only meant that they could one-up providers who advertised honestly, and they could do it without making a technical investment to back up their claims.
In other words, "You'll get 20Mbps (if you're lucky but less if others in your area are online)" sounded better than "You'll get at least 3Mbps (and sometimes more, depending on network conditions)."
But let me guess - you've worked for a cable-based ISP and drank enough coolaid to believe what you're saying is true, right?
"Past experience with telcos? Give them the opportunity to charge for something and they will. Where's your source for your argument that they won't?"
Excuse me? A bunch of people are making an assertion, and you think that if I question why then the burden of proof is on me to prove that their assertion is wrong?
Well, then again, it's funny you should ask, because the answer is: Past experience with telcos.
No regulation is preventing an ISP from providng a tiered/sandboxed internet service right now. In fact, it's been tried (are you old enough to know what the original AOL was?), and it failed in the market with no need of regulation to prevent it.
Can someone point me to the source for all this "I'll have to pay more if I want to see the whole Internet" argument? I RTFA, and if either side (even those arguing pro-neutrality) alleged that's going to happen, I somehow didn't see it; but I see a whole lot of people here claiming it's what AT&T wants.
In the end, my position on "net neutrality" regulation is the same whether or not content providers contemplate blocking access in a price-tiered scheme; and it is this:
There should be regulations, but they should not be technical regulations. If the government tries to mandate management practices in any way, they will get it wrong. The regulations won't keep up with technology, and American consumers will fall behind the rest of the developed world in yet another technical arena. The government can do every bit as much harm as corporate greed, and the surest way to do so is to attempt technical regulation.
Instead, the regulations should be labeling laws, for example:
The large-print bandwidth you advertise for a service must be a guaranteed minimum. Obviously the ISP can't guarantee that a website run from behind a 2400-baud modem will keep up, but the ISP itself must never throttle any traffic below that limit without explicit consent from the end user. Traffic management may allow some traffic to go faster, and such provisions may be guaranteed and advertised as such, but they cannot be more conspicuous than the absolute minimum.
If the service is sold as "Internet access", then no traffic may be blocked without explicit consent from the user.
While we're at it, legal definitions for terms like "unlimited" should probably be considered, so that a provider can't put that in the large print and "up to 20GB/month" on the fifth page of the small print.
Let providers sell what they want to sell; but make them ensure that the buyer knows what's being offered, and then the premises of a free market start to work. (Note to the anti-market trolls: Free market does not mean "unregulated market". The market as it exists today is not a free market. More regulations to ensure the free flow of information in the market would help it to become a free market.)
Well, by all means let's bark back and forth about indiviual factors we think might influence the health of drinkers vs. non-drinkers rather than looking at the aggregate results (or, in simpler terms, "facts") as presented by the study.
If you want to find fault with the study methodology, look at the methodology and point out any flaws you find. If you want to counter the study with equally-weighted evidence, point to another such study with contradictory results and we can compare their validity.
Trying to explain (or explain away) the results, though, is just speculative.
Now, I'll grant the affect on blood sugar levels is an important detail for diabetics to be aware of; but as it applies to the general population, the study results are unchanged; regardless of the effect on blood sugar, moderate drinking correlated in the study with longer life when controlling for known variables.
"most of the fail is by the people who are supposed to administer the tags (but don't do a very good job)."
And? How are you going to design a system that isn't prone to fail when people don't take their responsibilities seriously? This isn't about whether "government" or "private businesses" can do the job - that's all just political jockeying. This is about how people will do the job, because both government agencies and corporations are made up of people.
It's about corruption, laziness, and plain old complacency. You're not going to escape them. Some aspects of this job are gonig to attract them. (For example, it's a job that confers power over others. And, there will be no competitive market for this service whether it be provided by the government or by private companies - who would likely have regional government-created monopolies at best.)
Finding a staff of honest, hard-working individuals who will respect and execute their duties day after day, implementing tedious procedures correctly even after a thousand instances where the tedious steps don't matter; it's a tall order, especially when the hiring managers' incentives aren't aligned with that goal (and how could they be?).
The same applies to running a prison system well. When people talk about the failures of traditional prisons, they may forget that this is one of the key reasons. Would a tag-based solution be better or worse if you don't eliminate this problem? Dunno; hence, pilot. But, any pilot program does need to learn from previous attempts and show a reason why it would be different.
Of the two reasons you gave, one (GPS) is valid but needs more elaboration - what exactly are we going to do with location data to make this system better than what's come before? The other (people issues) is only valid if you can suggest a way to avoid people issues in the new program.
'and requires over a hundred thousand online subscribers to equal it.'
No, it requires over a hundred thousand online subscriber-years to equal it. If the 30,000 users who purchased the print copy each subscribe to the online service for an average of 4 years (much less time than they proably hang on to the books), then Oxford is ahead. (And that's not even counting the fact that they'd not have to pay to manufacture the physical books.)
Then again, I bet most of those print copies went to libraries. A library will likely only buy one print copy, but depending on the license terms a library could want more than one concurrent subscription.
'TFS refers to "over 200 hits a month"'
No, TFS claims 2 million hits per month. That's 2,000,000.
In any event, it doesn't appear that TFA links to the Wikipedia article in question (or if so I missed it), but even so: it suggests that the OSG was taking information about teh DSM-IV from the Wikipedia site.
So to start, that's outright lazy. Once you know that the information you want is in the DSM-IV, you should find the original material and cite it. That's how every encypclopedia ever written is to be used; so this isn't just a "merits of Wikipedia" issue.
Let's pretend the OSG hadn't been quite that stupid. The manual in question spells out the guidelines for diganosing mental illnesses and conditions. Applying those guidelines is why you have experts (which is why you don't just buy a copy of the DSM-IV and self-diagnose from it). The testimony the OSG sought to impeach was an expert's diagnosis; by countering this with a reference to the diagnostic guidelines, the OSG was asserting itself as a mental health expert capable of applying those guidelines to a specific case, without having so much as examined the couple. This behavior should rightly be laughed out of court.
Let's pretend the OSG really were staffed by qualified mental health professionals who could practice their art without an examination - in other words, lets suppose that the argument were factually correct. It still woudln't matter, because you can't bring new facts in on appeal. Appeals are not a chance to drop in a new witness.
The OSG did a lazy job at the original trial and tried to make up for it with a too-little-too-late stunt. The real issue has little or nothing to do with Wikipedia.
"The start-up, which has two employees, aims to provide tools for teachers to manage their classrooms and share lesson plans and other resources. 'Effectively they're bombing a mosquito here"
Hmm... I wonder why Facebook might think a start-up with two employees has enough potential that they need to take the situation seriously. There must be some reason; maybe something from their past.
The size of the offending company just doesn't have anything to do with anything. Either they're violating a trademark or they're not; just because youre small doesn't mean you get a free pass, and it doesn't mean failure to defend the trademark wouldn't be an expensive mistake for FB to make.
When you say a term is or isn't "geenric", you need to consider context. Trademarks cover words that had prior meanings all the time. Apple (the computer company) chose an exiting, generic term for their computers; but they brought the term into the context of computing equipment, and they rightly control its use in that context. Same goes for Facebook.
Suppose Facebook did start buildnig specialized sites for different groups. How do you suppose they might name them? Or the more directly relevant question: How is soemone first hearing about Teachbook supposed to know that isn't exactly what happened? That's precisely the type of confusion trademarks are designed to avoid; you specifically cannot attract business by creating the impression that you're affiliated with me (unless you are).
Did Teachbook choose that name as a derivation from the colloquial term for a yearbook? No. If not for facebook(.com)'s use of the term, the name would never have even occured to Teachbook. So it's not like you can argue that Facebook is trying to carve out some wide swath of namespace that people naturally would've wanted to use.
No, someone says "I don't need a cell phone because I plan ahead", implying that anyone who uses a cell phone does not plan as well as he, and I call that condescending. Nice try, though.
Well, if you're willing to call $150,000 "a few hundred thousand", then I guess I shouldn't bother drawing attention to detail, but...
Having a supply of cash, even a very large one, is not illegal. Today it is uncommon (but it wasn't always), and so today it appears suspicious to most people; but it doesn't really add anything to a case against him.
How nice for you that you've found it comfortable to get by without a cell phone. It's too bad you feel the need to condescend to those who find cell phones useful. (Actually, it suggests you're probably compensating for the fact that you really aren't as happy with your choice as you'd like others to believe; but I digress.)
I plan ahead, and then I carry a cell phone in case reality interferes with my plans. This also allows me to quickly change my plans if an opportunity arises.
But then, some people don't value flexibility and are willing to accept any inconvenience resulting from a plan breaking down; if you're one of those, good for you.
I mostly agree. Not knowing what Jedi Mind does, I can only speculate uninformedly about some of the claims; but regardless I think trademark dillution is probably a fair one to raise.
I do have a bit of a problem with the "breach of contract" claim, though. Sounds to me like they just got fed up and decided to throw the book at Jedi Mind. The problem is, me saying "I agree to do X" isn't a contract; there has to be an "in exchange for you doing Y". If the only thing LucasFilm offered was that they wouldn't pursue the matter further, I'm not really sure that would stand as 'consideration' for the purpose of establishing a contract.
"it is important to realize that the person responsible for what the car hits is... the person _driving_ the damn car, not the pedestrians
Oh, okay. So if I get run over by an inattentive driver in a car that's running silent, I shouldn't worry that I could've gotten out of the way if I'd heard him coming. After all it was his responsibility rather than mine; it's not my fault that I'm now dead.
I'm sure the victims of such accidents find that very comforting.
"I don't know about your town but everyone here is jogging or walking around with headphones or earbuds bolted to their head. Unless the plan is to make these cars sound like some POS ricer or a Harley, it won't make a difference."
Hmm... so in your mind "it won't help people who take unnecessary risks" is the same as "it won't make a difference". Ok. Well, the cycling communities pretty much everywhere are violently opposed to wearing headphones on a bike, so I don't doubt that you've seen people do it but I do doubt that "everyone" there does it. Still, you live there and I don't; so let's assume you're right. If you'd like to have cars specially made for towns as stupid as yours, with a license restriction that they can't drive elsewhere and they can't drive at all when intelligent outsiders are visiting, I won't object. If they want to drive where sensible pedestrians live, they need to make enough noise to be heard by sensible pedestrians.
I'm responsible for listening; if I don't, that's my fault. If you make so little noise that listening doesn't help, that's your fault. Either way I'm the one at risk; there's a huge difference between me putting me at risk, vs. you putting me at risk.
"So, yeah, it would be good if people weren't idiots who only focused on themselves but you can legislate or require commonsense"
You seem to be wandering from the topic. "Legislate common sense" is an applicable complaint if you want to oppose laws designed to protect you from yourself - such as, had I advocated making it illegal to walk in traffic with headphones. (By the way, it is typically illegal to operate a vehicle while wearing headphones, and in some places that includes a bike. But I digress...) That's not what we're talking about, though.
Laws to protect others from you? Yeah, you can legislate that. Requiring a minimal noise level from cars is no different than requiring headlights at night; or do you think driving without lights should be ok, too? I mean, after all, by your logic since some people don't look, headlights won't do any good anyway. You can't legislate common sense, right?
Lovely series of rationalizations. There are a few problems.
(1) The visually impaired are not the only affected population. Just because we teach people to look doesn't mean they always do. Just because failing to look already carries some risk doesn't make it ok to add more risk to that situation. Even if you do look, visibility is not always on your side.
(2) Just because your sample of one visually impaired person was happy to limit where he walked doesn't mean we all do. Many major streets have sidewalks and crosswalks; the visually impaired have just as much expectation of safety on those streets as you (presuming they've had proper low-vision mobility training).
(3) Just because people should drive carefully and attentively in neighborhoods does not mean they do. Distracted drivers flying around a corner at a 4-way stop are a big enough threat to the pedestrian in the crosswalk when their cars can be heard.
(4) Car sound may not tyipcally be reliable enough to be a decision-making factor, but it is often the only warning a pedestrian gets that he or she has made the wrong decision and needs to adjust immediately.
(5) Car sound often is a decision-making factor, because all other (reliable) decision-making factors say "I can go" but then the screaming engine of someone doing something stupid alerts me that maybe I'd better wait a minute.
Sorry you don't like it, but silent cars are a bad idea and frankly should be banned from the road. And before you ask, no the same does not apply to bicycles because they are not nearly as dangerous as cars.
You're right that I got turned around, but you're wrong about where I was wrong. I was wrong before the dash.
The tides reduce the amount by which the rotational period changes. Without the tides, the rotational period would decrease, so the tides are effectively increasing the rotational period. For the tides to increase the rotational period, they must decrease the orbital period, which indicates a lower (not higher) orbit.
Thenet effect is for both periods to decrease. If you think about what tidal locking means, you already know this has to be true. In tidal lock, orbital period == rotational period, so you cannot go from one locked state to another locked state by increasing one period and reducing the other.
TFA mentions that building a home is less green than moving into a home, since a lot of energy goes into construction. All else being equal, that's true. Mr. Adams also demonstrates that this type of thinking becomes addictive to a fault, though, when he mentions the energy that goes into building a bicycle.
When you buy a bike (or anything, really) you're paying for all the energy that was ever spent building it, shipping it, etc. A good commuting bike can be had for $500. If every penny of that $500 bike paid for fuel/energy costs, then you might figure you need to put 7500 miles on the bike to offset up-front energy cost (I'd say a fair bit less). You may not do that in the first year, but if you commute on the bike, you'll get there within its lifetime. And don't forget, people like to make profits, so that full $500 price didn't go into energy.
On the one hand, maintenance costs along the way push the break-even point out. On the other hand, all this assuems you bought a new bike for the sole purpose of commuting and derive no other benefits from it. Apply those standards to buying a car and see how the picture looks. The point is, riding a bike may not be zero-impact, but it can be much lower impact than the alternatives.
This is not to say that cycling to work is a solution for everyone. I don't do it because I can't work out a safe route. Even if I could, my local climate would limit how often I'd ride. But to say that anyone who does ride and thinks he or she is "green" for doing so were a hypocrite is frankly dumb.
That said, it's good to think about up-front energy costs when doing your math, so back to the house: given the ratio of construction cost to annual energy cost for a typical house, it's a fair bet that in a vacuum, moving into an energy-inefficient house is still better than building an energy-efficient house, as measured over your lifetime.
Of course, your lifetime is not the house's lifetime. If the house is built to last, and if it doesn't get demolished early for some reason, it might eventually break even. That may be small economic comfort to the guy who built it, since he might well not extract a fair proportion of the investmet in efficiency at the time of sale. But if we're talking envrionmental impact, it's worth noting.
But maybe the biggest question - and I suppose this gets back to Adams's point about lifestyle - is whether the building of a new house is really balanced only against your option to move into an existing house.
Over time, new housing will have to be built. The population grows, old buildings deteriorate beyond repair or fall behind ever-more-strict local codes. Perhaps the most efficient housing to build would be apartment-style buildings, where the dedicated living space per individual is relatively small yet the collective economies of scale allow for effective use of technologies like geothermal heat pumps. But is everyone going to start moving into apartments? Is the demand for houses - even unnecessarily large houses - going to cap out at today's level?
If not - and I think not - then the lifecycle cost of building a green home should be weighed against the cost of eventually having another non-green home constructed in its place.
Interesting point. However, I think tidal locking makes it a little more complicated than that.
I'm not sure what happens when a tidally locked satelite's diameter gradually changes, but given that tidal locking is an equalibrium state it seems reasonable to suspect that the tidal lock is preserved.
If so, then as the moon's rotation would naturally tend to speed up, the Earth would pull back on it. This would reduce the increase in rotation, but to preserve angular momentum it would also have to increase the orbital period - meaning the moon would move to a lower orbit with both its period of orbit and its period of rotation slightly reduced.
If you think all that time examining sorting algorithms was intended to teach you about sorting, then you indeed missed the point. Programming courses spend a lot of time on sorting because it is a common task that can be easily understood, but for which there are a lot of different algorithms with very different performance characteristics. The point is to teach algorithm analysis skills.
Judging from the quality of code I encounter regularly, though, you're far from alone in failing to pick up that lesson.
Hm... expecting you to back up your claims is asking you to do my research for me? You'd make a great juror.
Well, doesn't matter. I was sandbagging. I've done the research, and I stand by my question. If you'd like to provide evidence for your point, go right ahead. Or keep being an asshat. Your call.
I agree that violating a civil offense is illegal, and that GP is conflating "illegal" with "criminal".
However, I have to ask, if running a red light is a civil matter, why is the government allowed to prosecute the offense? Why am I not allowed to sue someone for running a red light?
I agree they're treated as minor enough offenses that the government likes to say it's not a criminal matter (so as to avoid the need for a jury, as much as anything); but to say it's a civil matter, I'm going to have to ask for a citation.
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Yes, where ever might we fnid the claims?
They are surely most elusive, and I cannot imagine where I would start if I wanted to read through them in detail, along with all of the context needed to understand them.
I mean, sure, GP provided the link to the patent, which by definition is the document containing the claims; I could start by clicking on the link and reading the claims. But it's so much less time consuming to just ask what the claims are and hope nobody calls my bluff.
To implement what I'm saying, only the marketing has to change. And by "change", I mean "become honest".
The technical excuses for not delivering 20Mbps when advertising 20Mbps make no difference. If you can't deliver 20Mbps, then you don't get to advertise that you're going to.
For you to claim that the system I'm advocating "won't work" suggets that you're unaware that it has in fact been used without problem. Sure, cable modem providers have always played the game your way and sure, they like to claim that's the only way to play. In truth, it only meant that they could one-up providers who advertised honestly, and they could do it without making a technical investment to back up their claims.
In other words, "You'll get 20Mbps (if you're lucky but less if others in your area are online)" sounded better than "You'll get at least 3Mbps (and sometimes more, depending on network conditions)."
But let me guess - you've worked for a cable-based ISP and drank enough coolaid to believe what you're saying is true, right?
"Past experience with telcos? Give them the opportunity to charge for something and they will. Where's your source for your argument that they won't?"
Excuse me? A bunch of people are making an assertion, and you think that if I question why then the burden of proof is on me to prove that their assertion is wrong?
Well, then again, it's funny you should ask, because the answer is: Past experience with telcos.
No regulation is preventing an ISP from providng a tiered/sandboxed internet service right now. In fact, it's been tried (are you old enough to know what the original AOL was?), and it failed in the market with no need of regulation to prevent it.
Can someone point me to the source for all this "I'll have to pay more if I want to see the whole Internet" argument? I RTFA, and if either side (even those arguing pro-neutrality) alleged that's going to happen, I somehow didn't see it; but I see a whole lot of people here claiming it's what AT&T wants.
In the end, my position on "net neutrality" regulation is the same whether or not content providers contemplate blocking access in a price-tiered scheme; and it is this:
There should be regulations, but they should not be technical regulations. If the government tries to mandate management practices in any way, they will get it wrong. The regulations won't keep up with technology, and American consumers will fall behind the rest of the developed world in yet another technical arena. The government can do every bit as much harm as corporate greed, and the surest way to do so is to attempt technical regulation.
Instead, the regulations should be labeling laws, for example:
While we're at it, legal definitions for terms like "unlimited" should probably be considered, so that a provider can't put that in the large print and "up to 20GB/month" on the fifth page of the small print.
Let providers sell what they want to sell; but make them ensure that the buyer knows what's being offered, and then the premises of a free market start to work. (Note to the anti-market trolls: Free market does not mean "unregulated market". The market as it exists today is not a free market. More regulations to ensure the free flow of information in the market would help it to become a free market.)
Well, by all means let's bark back and forth about indiviual factors we think might influence the health of drinkers vs. non-drinkers rather than looking at the aggregate results (or, in simpler terms, "facts") as presented by the study.
If you want to find fault with the study methodology, look at the methodology and point out any flaws you find. If you want to counter the study with equally-weighted evidence, point to another such study with contradictory results and we can compare their validity.
Trying to explain (or explain away) the results, though, is just speculative.
Now, I'll grant the affect on blood sugar levels is an important detail for diabetics to be aware of; but as it applies to the general population, the study results are unchanged; regardless of the effect on blood sugar, moderate drinking correlated in the study with longer life when controlling for known variables.
Your specific choice of phrasing makes me think you're trolling; but I can't be sure.
Do you really need a list of references for why "automated justice" is a bad idea, even when you want punishment to be "swift and certain"?
"most of the fail is by the people who are supposed to administer the tags (but don't do a very good job)."
And? How are you going to design a system that isn't prone to fail when people don't take their responsibilities seriously? This isn't about whether "government" or "private businesses" can do the job - that's all just political jockeying. This is about how people will do the job, because both government agencies and corporations are made up of people.
It's about corruption, laziness, and plain old complacency. You're not going to escape them. Some aspects of this job are gonig to attract them. (For example, it's a job that confers power over others. And, there will be no competitive market for this service whether it be provided by the government or by private companies - who would likely have regional government-created monopolies at best.)
Finding a staff of honest, hard-working individuals who will respect and execute their duties day after day, implementing tedious procedures correctly even after a thousand instances where the tedious steps don't matter; it's a tall order, especially when the hiring managers' incentives aren't aligned with that goal (and how could they be?).
The same applies to running a prison system well. When people talk about the failures of traditional prisons, they may forget that this is one of the key reasons. Would a tag-based solution be better or worse if you don't eliminate this problem? Dunno; hence, pilot. But, any pilot program does need to learn from previous attempts and show a reason why it would be different.
Of the two reasons you gave, one (GPS) is valid but needs more elaboration - what exactly are we going to do with location data to make this system better than what's come before? The other (people issues) is only valid if you can suggest a way to avoid people issues in the new program.
Are you drunk?
'and requires over a hundred thousand online subscribers to equal it.'
No, it requires over a hundred thousand online subscriber-years to equal it. If the 30,000 users who purchased the print copy each subscribe to the online service for an average of 4 years (much less time than they proably hang on to the books), then Oxford is ahead. (And that's not even counting the fact that they'd not have to pay to manufacture the physical books.)
Then again, I bet most of those print copies went to libraries. A library will likely only buy one print copy, but depending on the license terms a library could want more than one concurrent subscription.
'TFS refers to "over 200 hits a month"'
No, TFS claims 2 million hits per month. That's 2,000,000.
"Sight" unseen? Come on, people.
In any event, it doesn't appear that TFA links to the Wikipedia article in question (or if so I missed it), but even so: it suggests that the OSG was taking information about teh DSM-IV from the Wikipedia site.
So to start, that's outright lazy. Once you know that the information you want is in the DSM-IV, you should find the original material and cite it. That's how every encypclopedia ever written is to be used; so this isn't just a "merits of Wikipedia" issue.
Let's pretend the OSG hadn't been quite that stupid. The manual in question spells out the guidelines for diganosing mental illnesses and conditions. Applying those guidelines is why you have experts (which is why you don't just buy a copy of the DSM-IV and self-diagnose from it). The testimony the OSG sought to impeach was an expert's diagnosis; by countering this with a reference to the diagnostic guidelines, the OSG was asserting itself as a mental health expert capable of applying those guidelines to a specific case, without having so much as examined the couple. This behavior should rightly be laughed out of court.
Let's pretend the OSG really were staffed by qualified mental health professionals who could practice their art without an examination - in other words, lets suppose that the argument were factually correct. It still woudln't matter, because you can't bring new facts in on appeal. Appeals are not a chance to drop in a new witness.
The OSG did a lazy job at the original trial and tried to make up for it with a too-little-too-late stunt. The real issue has little or nothing to do with Wikipedia.
"The start-up, which has two employees, aims to provide tools for teachers to manage their classrooms and share lesson plans and other resources. 'Effectively they're bombing a mosquito here"
Hmm... I wonder why Facebook might think a start-up with two employees has enough potential that they need to take the situation seriously. There must be some reason; maybe something from their past.
The size of the offending company just doesn't have anything to do with anything. Either they're violating a trademark or they're not; just because youre small doesn't mean you get a free pass, and it doesn't mean failure to defend the trademark wouldn't be an expensive mistake for FB to make.
When you say a term is or isn't "geenric", you need to consider context. Trademarks cover words that had prior meanings all the time. Apple (the computer company) chose an exiting, generic term for their computers; but they brought the term into the context of computing equipment, and they rightly control its use in that context. Same goes for Facebook.
Suppose Facebook did start buildnig specialized sites for different groups. How do you suppose they might name them? Or the more directly relevant question: How is soemone first hearing about Teachbook supposed to know that isn't exactly what happened? That's precisely the type of confusion trademarks are designed to avoid; you specifically cannot attract business by creating the impression that you're affiliated with me (unless you are).
Did Teachbook choose that name as a derivation from the colloquial term for a yearbook? No. If not for facebook(.com)'s use of the term, the name would never have even occured to Teachbook. So it's not like you can argue that Facebook is trying to carve out some wide swath of namespace that people naturally would've wanted to use.
No, someone says "I don't need a cell phone because I plan ahead", implying that anyone who uses a cell phone does not plan as well as he, and I call that condescending. Nice try, though.
Well, if you're willing to call $150,000 "a few hundred thousand", then I guess I shouldn't bother drawing attention to detail, but...
Having a supply of cash, even a very large one, is not illegal. Today it is uncommon (but it wasn't always), and so today it appears suspicious to most people; but it doesn't really add anything to a case against him.
How nice for you that you've found it comfortable to get by without a cell phone. It's too bad you feel the need to condescend to those who find cell phones useful. (Actually, it suggests you're probably compensating for the fact that you really aren't as happy with your choice as you'd like others to believe; but I digress.)
I plan ahead, and then I carry a cell phone in case reality interferes with my plans. This also allows me to quickly change my plans if an opportunity arises.
But then, some people don't value flexibility and are willing to accept any inconvenience resulting from a plan breaking down; if you're one of those, good for you.
I mostly agree. Not knowing what Jedi Mind does, I can only speculate uninformedly about some of the claims; but regardless I think trademark dillution is probably a fair one to raise.
I do have a bit of a problem with the "breach of contract" claim, though. Sounds to me like they just got fed up and decided to throw the book at Jedi Mind. The problem is, me saying "I agree to do X" isn't a contract; there has to be an "in exchange for you doing Y". If the only thing LucasFilm offered was that they wouldn't pursue the matter further, I'm not really sure that would stand as 'consideration' for the purpose of establishing a contract.
But then, IANAL.
"it is important to realize that the person responsible for what the car hits is... the person _driving_ the damn car, not the pedestrians
Oh, okay. So if I get run over by an inattentive driver in a car that's running silent, I shouldn't worry that I could've gotten out of the way if I'd heard him coming. After all it was his responsibility rather than mine; it's not my fault that I'm now dead.
I'm sure the victims of such accidents find that very comforting.
"I don't know about your town but everyone here is jogging or walking around with headphones or earbuds bolted to their head. Unless the plan is to make these cars sound like some POS ricer or a Harley, it won't make a difference."
Hmm... so in your mind "it won't help people who take unnecessary risks" is the same as "it won't make a difference". Ok. Well, the cycling communities pretty much everywhere are violently opposed to wearing headphones on a bike, so I don't doubt that you've seen people do it but I do doubt that "everyone" there does it. Still, you live there and I don't; so let's assume you're right. If you'd like to have cars specially made for towns as stupid as yours, with a license restriction that they can't drive elsewhere and they can't drive at all when intelligent outsiders are visiting, I won't object. If they want to drive where sensible pedestrians live, they need to make enough noise to be heard by sensible pedestrians.
I'm responsible for listening; if I don't, that's my fault. If you make so little noise that listening doesn't help, that's your fault. Either way I'm the one at risk; there's a huge difference between me putting me at risk, vs. you putting me at risk.
"So, yeah, it would be good if people weren't idiots who only focused on themselves but you can legislate or require commonsense"
You seem to be wandering from the topic. "Legislate common sense" is an applicable complaint if you want to oppose laws designed to protect you from yourself - such as, had I advocated making it illegal to walk in traffic with headphones. (By the way, it is typically illegal to operate a vehicle while wearing headphones, and in some places that includes a bike. But I digress...) That's not what we're talking about, though.
Laws to protect others from you? Yeah, you can legislate that. Requiring a minimal noise level from cars is no different than requiring headlights at night; or do you think driving without lights should be ok, too? I mean, after all, by your logic since some people don't look, headlights won't do any good anyway. You can't legislate common sense, right?
Lovely series of rationalizations. There are a few problems.
(1) The visually impaired are not the only affected population. Just because we teach people to look doesn't mean they always do. Just because failing to look already carries some risk doesn't make it ok to add more risk to that situation. Even if you do look, visibility is not always on your side.
(2) Just because your sample of one visually impaired person was happy to limit where he walked doesn't mean we all do. Many major streets have sidewalks and crosswalks; the visually impaired have just as much expectation of safety on those streets as you (presuming they've had proper low-vision mobility training).
(3) Just because people should drive carefully and attentively in neighborhoods does not mean they do. Distracted drivers flying around a corner at a 4-way stop are a big enough threat to the pedestrian in the crosswalk when their cars can be heard.
(4) Car sound may not tyipcally be reliable enough to be a decision-making factor, but it is often the only warning a pedestrian gets that he or she has made the wrong decision and needs to adjust immediately.
(5) Car sound often is a decision-making factor, because all other (reliable) decision-making factors say "I can go" but then the screaming engine of someone doing something stupid alerts me that maybe I'd better wait a minute.
Sorry you don't like it, but silent cars are a bad idea and frankly should be banned from the road. And before you ask, no the same does not apply to bicycles because they are not nearly as dangerous as cars.
You're right that I got turned around, but you're wrong about where I was wrong. I was wrong before the dash.
The tides reduce the amount by which the rotational period changes. Without the tides, the rotational period would decrease, so the tides are effectively increasing the rotational period. For the tides to increase the rotational period, they must decrease the orbital period, which indicates a lower (not higher) orbit.
Thenet effect is for both periods to decrease. If you think about what tidal locking means, you already know this has to be true. In tidal lock, orbital period == rotational period, so you cannot go from one locked state to another locked state by increasing one period and reducing the other.
Right, because up until FB came along, groups of people were really good at keeping secrets.
TFA mentions that building a home is less green than moving into a home, since a lot of energy goes into construction. All else being equal, that's true. Mr. Adams also demonstrates that this type of thinking becomes addictive to a fault, though, when he mentions the energy that goes into building a bicycle.
When you buy a bike (or anything, really) you're paying for all the energy that was ever spent building it, shipping it, etc. A good commuting bike can be had for $500. If every penny of that $500 bike paid for fuel/energy costs, then you might figure you need to put 7500 miles on the bike to offset up-front energy cost (I'd say a fair bit less). You may not do that in the first year, but if you commute on the bike, you'll get there within its lifetime. And don't forget, people like to make profits, so that full $500 price didn't go into energy.
On the one hand, maintenance costs along the way push the break-even point out. On the other hand, all this assuems you bought a new bike for the sole purpose of commuting and derive no other benefits from it. Apply those standards to buying a car and see how the picture looks. The point is, riding a bike may not be zero-impact, but it can be much lower impact than the alternatives.
This is not to say that cycling to work is a solution for everyone. I don't do it because I can't work out a safe route. Even if I could, my local climate would limit how often I'd ride. But to say that anyone who does ride and thinks he or she is "green" for doing so were a hypocrite is frankly dumb.
That said, it's good to think about up-front energy costs when doing your math, so back to the house: given the ratio of construction cost to annual energy cost for a typical house, it's a fair bet that in a vacuum, moving into an energy-inefficient house is still better than building an energy-efficient house, as measured over your lifetime.
Of course, your lifetime is not the house's lifetime. If the house is built to last, and if it doesn't get demolished early for some reason, it might eventually break even. That may be small economic comfort to the guy who built it, since he might well not extract a fair proportion of the investmet in efficiency at the time of sale. But if we're talking envrionmental impact, it's worth noting.
But maybe the biggest question - and I suppose this gets back to Adams's point about lifestyle - is whether the building of a new house is really balanced only against your option to move into an existing house.
Over time, new housing will have to be built. The population grows, old buildings deteriorate beyond repair or fall behind ever-more-strict local codes. Perhaps the most efficient housing to build would be apartment-style buildings, where the dedicated living space per individual is relatively small yet the collective economies of scale allow for effective use of technologies like geothermal heat pumps. But is everyone going to start moving into apartments? Is the demand for houses - even unnecessarily large houses - going to cap out at today's level?
If not - and I think not - then the lifecycle cost of building a green home should be weighed against the cost of eventually having another non-green home constructed in its place.
Interesting point. However, I think tidal locking makes it a little more complicated than that.
I'm not sure what happens when a tidally locked satelite's diameter gradually changes, but given that tidal locking is an equalibrium state it seems reasonable to suspect that the tidal lock is preserved.
If so, then as the moon's rotation would naturally tend to speed up, the Earth would pull back on it. This would reduce the increase in rotation, but to preserve angular momentum it would also have to increase the orbital period - meaning the moon would move to a lower orbit with both its period of orbit and its period of rotation slightly reduced.
If you think all that time examining sorting algorithms was intended to teach you about sorting, then you indeed missed the point. Programming courses spend a lot of time on sorting because it is a common task that can be easily understood, but for which there are a lot of different algorithms with very different performance characteristics. The point is to teach algorithm analysis skills.
Judging from the quality of code I encounter regularly, though, you're far from alone in failing to pick up that lesson.
Hm... expecting you to back up your claims is asking you to do my research for me? You'd make a great juror.
Well, doesn't matter. I was sandbagging. I've done the research, and I stand by my question. If you'd like to provide evidence for your point, go right ahead. Or keep being an asshat. Your call.
You people are killing me.
I agree that violating a civil offense is illegal, and that GP is conflating "illegal" with "criminal".
However, I have to ask, if running a red light is a civil matter, why is the government allowed to prosecute the offense? Why am I not allowed to sue someone for running a red light?
I agree they're treated as minor enough offenses that the government likes to say it's not a criminal matter (so as to avoid the need for a jury, as much as anything); but to say it's a civil matter, I'm going to have to ask for a citation.