Heh, it was a good Christian who said "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God."
Is that intolerant? Expressing a desire to deny citizenship to folks based on their religion?
And lest anyone say he was just a nut, this was a sitting Vice-President who was shortly afterward elected President of the United States. No, it wasn't Al Gore.
Yes, the scientific method relies heavily on Occam's razor.
If two competing theories can explain the same set of phenomena, then the simpler one wins. There might be a luminiferous ether through which everything moves, that is compressed by that movement in a way that completely compensates for the motion, leaving one unable to detect ones motion relative to the ether. Complicated, complicated, complicated. Or there might be no ether. Simple.
Which theory is better?
There might be gods that push the planets around in complete accordance with Newton's inverse-square law (except for Mercury). Or the planets move of their own accord.
The deal that "the public" had with Elvis (etc.) is that if he recorded his music, he would get exclusive rights to it for 50 years, and the public would have rights to it afterward.
What does the public get in exchange for losing their rights to music published in 1953?
The problem of viruses occurrs because companies produced programmable products without considering the security consequences.
Viruses for environments that have decent security models, like Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS X are rare-to-nonexistant, unless one is running Microsoft Office in that environment.
Most of what people call "computer viruses" are only "MicroSoft viruses".
The more likely case is that the economy was already fragile and on course to cracking regardless if Bush or Gore had been president.
That is an adequate explanation for 2001. But it fails to explain that Bush promised hundreds of thousands of new jobs every month if his tax cut was passed, and it was passed, and the jobs just haven't materialized.
Most economists believe that other choices, like modest tax cuts targeting the middle class along with extending unemployment insurance, would have cost the treasury far less, and done far more to get the economy moving again.
Had Clinton's transgressions occurred years before being elected, it would matter to only a few partisans. The normal folks wouldn't care. The normal folks cared about Clinton because of the timing.
Whitewater. Paula Jones.
Alleged transgressions that occurred before being elected. Special Prosecutor.
He is through and through a spoiled brat; a rich kid from an old east coast family. He gets bailed out of every jam he creates by family friends. He has the smarmy arrogance of one who was born on third base thinking he hit a triple.
I remember some changes from the original 1977 release and the "A New Hope" release that came out with "The Empire Strikes Back". Most vivid in my memory is the bridge scene inside the death star: I recall Luke throwing his rope once, and it missed. The door opens a little bit, and Leia shoots stormtroopers on the other side, Luke throws the rope again, it catches, Leia kills the last storm troopers on the other side, climbs on Luke, and kisses him. He is startled, and asks "What was that for", and she answers "for luck", and they swing across.
To some extent, the incumbant carriers do have a legitimate beef: the possibility that the utilities will jack up the rates on the services they have monopolies on (water, gas, electricity) to subsidise artificially low prices to get customers for their (competitive) telecomms service. This is exactly what AT&T was doing that got them broken up in 1983; subsidising the supposedly-competitive long-distance market with revenues from the monopoly local market.
Yes, competition for local services is good. Yes, monopoly providers do not like it when competitors enter their markets. And it turns out that few businesses are willing to put out the investment to become a second provider in a community.
But that doesn't mean that other monopolies should be free to cross-subsidise a competitive market with revenues from a different monopoly.
Now, someone needs to sort out whether the local utilities are making a legitimate go of the competitive local communication ventures, of if they're subsidising them.
I dream of $30/month broadband. My choices are $45/month for Road Runner, or $65/month DSL from my local independent telephone company.
Road Runner hasn't been that bad, and they came out right away when lightning fried the cable modem (I had to replace the router, though, and the ethernet boards on the computers. And put a wireless card into my iMac, because ethernet on the motherboard was fried.) But they are expensive.
When the USA was a wee upstart of a country, it simply refused to recognize foreign patents and copyrights. Foreign inventions could be used here for free... unless someone here patented them as well. Foreign works could simply be printed; no need to compensate the foreign authors. Nothing they could do about it.
I expect that India, China, and Brazil are carefully weighing the pros and cons of doing the same. Remember that "intellectual property" is a fiction created ostensibly for the purpose of making society better off, but it has morphed into a tool to enrich certain corporate interests.
Were I a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, I would hold the view that legislation cannot change the duration of copyrights ex post fact. If Mickey was drawn when corporate copyrights were 30 years, then after that there are no restrictions on anyone else drawing pictures of Mickey. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act is just plain wrong, because it takes away rights that the public had to use works after copyrights expired, and gives the public nothing in return. Mickey is already drawn, and when he was drawn the deal was for howmanyever years. Extending the terms for the Disney Corp. gives the public nothing, and takes away quite a bit from the cultural commons.
I think it was more like "we need a no fly list. Give this important contributor to my last campaign a no-bid contract to implement it. Make very sure he has enough money left over to contribute to my next campaign. If the list actually improves security, that would be good, too."
Remember that Florida tried to purge Democratic-friendly voters a second time. At first, they refused to turn over a list of the names of the people purged, to prevent the tactic from being discovered until it was to late to counter. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me... won't get fooled again. They got caught working to steal the election.
It really looks like the TSA simply doesn't care whether innocent civilians are denied the ability to use the nation's airlines. The hassles in air travel now make the choice between driving six hours and buying an airplane ticket or two easy; I drive. I'm looking at a 14 hour drive in October for me and my wife. I am reluctant to try flying. What if my name is on the no-fly list?
Re:Uses existing signal and price is right.
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 1
Shouldn't that be "full RYGCBM color"?
I think the improvement is that the cyan, yellow, and magenta phosphors can be brighter than the (B,G), (G,R) or (B,R) pairs that light up. The cost of this approach, though, is that instead of lighting up one pixel in three for a (additive) primary color (R, G, or B), you will only be lighting up one pixel in five or six. Seems to me that this will reduce the best brightness for fully-saturated primary colors.
Suppose I succesfully work out all the problems and design the perfect cold fusion-based reactor.
My objection is that the current patent system doesn't force you to actually prove you have worked out all the problems with a cold-fusion-based reactor. All you have to do is to write down some vague ideas about how it might work. Then you go and sue the folks who actually put in the sweat to really solve the problems and make it work. So much easier getting money this way than all that hard work actually coming up with inventions that work.
Why limit yourself to graphite? Change that to "using solid or liquid material with light-absorbing properties distributed by a hand-held or mechanically positioned device" and get the pen, painting, typewriter, and printing markets as well.
(1) The mouse was invented by Doublas Englebart at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI), not PARC.
(2) Ideas are cheap. Proving that they work is hard. Edison's 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration. Rewarding those who dream up ideas without actually ever putting them into practice is rewarding the wrong people. In this case, the folks who dreamed up the patents seem to have done nothing help develop the JPEG standard (Lemuelson is another example of an "inventor" not inventing anything, and cashing in on the efforts of others), or did so under false pretenses (see RamBus).
Also remember, the point of Patents and Copyrights isn't to reward inventors and authors, it is to benefit society. Letting the creatively litigous enrich themselves while dragging down society is an abuse.
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Seriously, I've had a 60 MHz Power PC emulating a Moto 68000 emulating a 65c02. At about real speed (1 MHz).
Heh, it was a good Christian who said "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God."
Is that intolerant? Expressing a desire to deny citizenship to folks based on their religion?
And lest anyone say he was just a nut, this was a sitting Vice-President who was shortly afterward elected President of the United States. No, it wasn't Al Gore.
Yes, the scientific method relies heavily on Occam's razor.
If two competing theories can explain the same set of phenomena, then the simpler one wins. There might be a luminiferous ether through which everything moves, that is compressed by that movement in a way that completely compensates for the motion, leaving one unable to detect ones motion relative to the ether. Complicated, complicated, complicated. Or there might be no ether. Simple.
Which theory is better?
There might be gods that push the planets around in complete accordance with Newton's inverse-square law (except for Mercury). Or the planets move of their own accord.
Which theory is better?
The deal that "the public" had with Elvis (etc.) is that if he recorded his music, he would get exclusive rights to it for 50 years, and the public would have rights to it afterward.
What does the public get in exchange for losing their rights to music published in 1953?
The problem of viruses occurrs because companies produced programmable products without considering the security consequences.
Viruses for environments that have decent security models, like Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS X are rare-to-nonexistant, unless one is running Microsoft Office in that environment.
Most of what people call "computer viruses" are only "MicroSoft viruses".
That is an adequate explanation for 2001. But it fails to explain that Bush promised hundreds of thousands of new jobs every month if his tax cut was passed, and it was passed, and the jobs just haven't materialized.
Most economists believe that other choices, like modest tax cuts targeting the middle class along with extending unemployment insurance, would have cost the treasury far less, and done far more to get the economy moving again.
Because the economy kept growing for three and a half more years?
Whitewater. Paula Jones.
Alleged transgressions that occurred before being elected. Special Prosecutor.
Bush as a guy down the street?
What an act.
He is through and through a spoiled brat; a rich kid from an old east coast family. He gets bailed out of every jam he creates by family friends. He has the smarmy arrogance of one who was born on third base thinking he hit a triple.
You mean this?
"The fabled footage from the original 70mm release of Luke throwing the rope and missing once is not restored. "
I feel better now. I started to believe I had imagined it.
I remember some changes from the original 1977 release and the "A New Hope" release that came out with "The Empire Strikes Back". Most vivid in my memory is the bridge scene inside the death star: I recall Luke throwing his rope once, and it missed. The door opens a little bit, and Leia shoots stormtroopers on the other side, Luke throws the rope again, it catches, Leia kills the last storm troopers on the other side, climbs on Luke, and kisses him. He is startled, and asks "What was that for", and she answers "for luck", and they swing across.
Can anyone else confirm or deny?
To some extent, the incumbant carriers do have a legitimate beef: the possibility that the utilities will jack up the rates on the services they have monopolies on (water, gas, electricity) to subsidise artificially low prices to get customers for their (competitive) telecomms service. This is exactly what AT&T was doing that got them broken up in 1983; subsidising the supposedly-competitive long-distance market with revenues from the monopoly local market.
Yes, competition for local services is good. Yes, monopoly providers do not like it when competitors enter their markets. And it turns out that few businesses are willing to put out the investment to become a second provider in a community.
But that doesn't mean that other monopolies should be free to cross-subsidise a competitive market with revenues from a different monopoly.
Now, someone needs to sort out whether the local utilities are making a legitimate go of the competitive local communication ventures, of if they're subsidising them.
I dream of $30/month broadband. My choices are $45/month for Road Runner, or $65/month DSL from my local independent telephone company.
Road Runner hasn't been that bad, and they came out right away when lightning fried the cable modem (I had to replace the router, though, and the ethernet boards on the computers. And put a wireless card into my iMac, because ethernet on the motherboard was fried.) But they are expensive.
Deregulation of trucking and oil began under Carter.
Reagan's deregulation included the Savings and Loan industry. That one only cost the taxpayers $700 Billion.
Contemporary conservatives tend to focus on being generous.... with our children's money.
Many computers become useless in three or four years, especially if you have chosen one that does not meet your needs.
My 4 year old iMac DV is still going strong.
You cannot get a Dell with an LCD screen for $600!
The cheapest usable Dell with an LCD is over $1000.
The cheapest Dell with comperable specs (good 17" screen, 256 MB DDR400 RAM, 80 GB HD, CDRW-DVD) is more expensive than the iMac.
When the USA was a wee upstart of a country, it simply refused to recognize foreign patents and copyrights. Foreign inventions could be used here for free... unless someone here patented them as well. Foreign works could simply be printed; no need to compensate the foreign authors. Nothing they could do about it.
I expect that India, China, and Brazil are carefully weighing the pros and cons of doing the same. Remember that "intellectual property" is a fiction created ostensibly for the purpose of making society better off, but it has morphed into a tool to enrich certain corporate interests.
Were I a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, I would hold the view that legislation cannot change the duration of copyrights ex post fact. If Mickey was drawn when corporate copyrights were 30 years, then after that there are no restrictions on anyone else drawing pictures of Mickey. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act is just plain wrong, because it takes away rights that the public had to use works after copyrights expired, and gives the public nothing in return. Mickey is already drawn, and when he was drawn the deal was for howmanyever years. Extending the terms for the Disney Corp. gives the public nothing, and takes away quite a bit from the cultural commons.
End rant....
I think it was more like "we need a no fly list. Give this important contributor to my last campaign a no-bid contract to implement it. Make very sure he has enough money left over to contribute to my next campaign. If the list actually improves security, that would be good, too."
Remember that Florida tried to purge Democratic-friendly voters a second time. At first, they refused to turn over a list of the names of the people purged, to prevent the tactic from being discovered until it was to late to counter. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me... won't get fooled again. They got caught working to steal the election.
It really looks like the TSA simply doesn't care whether innocent civilians are denied the ability to use the nation's airlines. The hassles in air travel now make the choice between driving six hours and buying an airplane ticket or two easy; I drive. I'm looking at a 14 hour drive in October for me and my wife. I am reluctant to try flying. What if my name is on the no-fly list?
Shouldn't that be "full RYGCBM color"?
I think the improvement is that the cyan, yellow, and magenta phosphors can be brighter than the (B,G), (G,R) or (B,R) pairs that light up. The cost of this approach, though, is that instead of lighting up one pixel in three for a (additive) primary color (R, G, or B), you will only be lighting up one pixel in five or six. Seems to me that this will reduce the best brightness for fully-saturated primary colors.
Bogart never says "Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca. The closest he gets is "Play it, Sam. You played it for her, you can play it for me."
My objection is that the current patent system doesn't force you to actually prove you have worked out all the problems with a cold-fusion-based reactor. All you have to do is to write down some vague ideas about how it might work. Then you go and sue the folks who actually put in the sweat to really solve the problems and make it work. So much easier getting money this way than all that hard work actually coming up with inventions that work.
Why limit yourself to graphite? Change that to "using solid or liquid material with light-absorbing properties distributed by a hand-held or mechanically positioned device" and get the pen, painting, typewriter, and printing markets as well.
(1) The mouse was invented by Doublas Englebart at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI), not PARC.
(2) Ideas are cheap. Proving that they work is hard. Edison's 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration. Rewarding those who dream up ideas without actually ever putting them into practice is rewarding the wrong people. In this case, the folks who dreamed up the patents seem to have done nothing help develop the JPEG standard (Lemuelson is another example of an "inventor" not inventing anything, and cashing in on the efforts of others), or did so under false pretenses (see RamBus).
Also remember, the point of Patents and Copyrights isn't to reward inventors and authors, it is to benefit society. Letting the creatively litigous enrich themselves while dragging down society is an abuse.