By the way - companies go bankrupt all the time - in every industry. Even fossil fuel companies. Did you forget about Enron already ?
And the ExxonMobil scandal is very much true - they knew about it, they planned to exploit it for profit in future - and smearing the journalists won't change it. ONLY a blinkered right-wing fool who believes everything that suits his ideology over evidence could believe the ridiculous smear you just swallowed.
You talk about leftie lies - there is no such thing as a rightwing truth. Not one. Because everything the right believes, absolutely everything is flat-out and fundamentally disproven by evidence every time. Right down to "minimum wage increases cause job losses" - there is literally not a single example in history where it has ever done that. Whatever impact it does or does not have on jobs is so incredibly tiny as to be completely lost in the noise of the billions of other things that affect the economy and the employment rate. The empirical data is overwhelming. the prediction has been made about the introduction of the federal minimum wage and every single one of the 22 increases over the years and every state increase ever made - and not once has it happened. There is no measurable correlation whatsoever - yet the claim keeps getting made by people who think 'supply and demand' is a law of nature - but forget that economies are not controlled in a lab - and nothing ever changes in isolation, so the law often does not get followed because there are always other things happening that has a bigger impact.
If after 100-odd years of being proven wrong again and again and again they can't stop telling that lie - why would you believe anything else they say ? Why keep buying the lie just so you can have the honour of covering wallmart's wage-bill for them out of your taxes because nowadays it's apparently perfectly fine to employ people at less than the cost of living (only businesses should be profitable apparently - not people), and then have working people be unable to survive so the middle class has to carry them. The nett result is that the earned-income-tax-credit has shown an interesting pattern. That one is a good proxy to measure because ONLY working poor people qualify for it... and since Reagan it has grown at roughly 5 times the rate of the population growth, it is now by *far* the single largest poverty assistance program in the united states. You spend more on feeding working poor people than you do on feeding the people who can't find work ! Which actually DOES reduce employment. Very few people are motivated to go find work if they can't survive on their paychecks anyway. If that's teh case - why not just draw welfare if you'll need welfare after you get a job anyway ? It makes no economic sense to work at a loss. So increased minimum wage actually drives employment UP - and that's before you even factor in the income-effect, which by some measures means simply that - had the US been increasing the minimum wage alongside inflation all along the economic growth rate over the past 10 years would be 9% higher. Imagine how many more people would be employed in an a economy 9% larger. No wonder any job losses from 'increased price of labour' get lost in the noise.
It's all lies. The entire conservative ideology and everything associated with it is nothing but a massive fraud - and this one is highly believable because the only people who need to knowingly lie to participate are billionaires and politicians - two classes of professional liars, and the rewards for playing along is literally billions of dolars each, and it requires no cooperation between the members (it's not so much a conspiracy in other words as just a lot of people who each, individually, found that the same lie makes them rich).
You can't maintain a large conspiracy with a few hundred thousand each - it's mathematically impossible... but for a few billion each - when whistleblowing will only hurt yourself and do nothing to harm the lie ? Easy.
Oh - and there is nothing 'elusive' about the garbage patch - it's just not easy to photography because microscopic particles, by definition, needs a microscope to take photos off.
An there we go... scientists lie to get grant money. The heartland institute convinced you libertarians that this is not only a viable thing but a commonplace one - and now you see the conspiracy everywhere. It's bullshit.
The odds of a conspiracy this large even getting started is overwhelmingly against. It just doesn't work. Too many people have to be in on the lie - every one a potential whistleblower (or accidental leak). It's just not possible.
Anyway, how about the conspiracy that the atmosphere is full of oxygen - can you see any ? If there's so much oxygen in the atmosphere - why are there no photos of the stuff ? How can 71% of the gas in it be oxygen and we can't get a picture ? We have loads of pictures of water in the atmosphere - why not oxygen ? I sense a conspiracy among scientists to pretend that oxygen is in the air and that life depends on it, funded with grant money from the iron-lung industry. It all began with the space program really - to maintain the illusion so they could trick NASA into buying lots and lots and lots of oxygen to take with them to space for the astronauts. Never before has empty canisters been sold at such a markup.
>Software implemented by a machine, however, is no longer just mathematics - like the transmission, it's a bunch of interconnected parts configured to produce a particular result.
Nope. There is a huge difference. Software never becomes a physically manifested thing. Not even if you hardwire it into a circuit. It's always JUST a mathematical function. We go to great lengths to disguise this (to make programming easier) but it never changes. Basic computing theory proves you wrong. All software is nothing but basic mathematical formulas. You can replicate every program that has ever been written and will ever be written and every version of that program that will NEVER be written with a simple counter because EVERY program is nothing but a long number and programming is nothing but a set of skills for finding the useful numbers faster than by counting. Interesting question - if I wrote a counting algorithm that compares each number to the in-memory version of microsoft outlook and - once it matches - writes it do disk - would that count as a 'copy' ? A clean-room reverse engineer ? Or a dirty reverse engineer ? It's entirely possible (though it's likely to take a LOT longer than just writing my own e-mail client).
When you can create a transmission by counting for long enough - only then will your analogy be true.
>Hundreds of what you'd call software patents are being issued every day, and judges are upholding them Yes because of a series terrible supreme court decisions between 1980 and 1994 by judges who had never even operated a computer let alone understood what they were ruling over and were being fooled (just like you are) by the efforts to disguise the mathematical nature of software. The reversal of that process has just begun - with the Alice ruling as we now live in a world where judges have had computers around them for decades, and have had enough contact with the concept to be able to educate themselves, hell we even have judges like Wiliam Alsup who are, themselves, highly regarded programmers. That's starting to force a rethink and that rethink is happening. Lawyers can no longer fool the judges so easily. We're just at the start of that. But the actual constitution, national and international law as written have, in fact, NEVER allowed for software patents - judges who thought it did were simply wrong.
>I think you're going to have to eat that "never has been and never will be" statement. Nope, because what it meant and what you claim it meant had nothing to do with each other. Clearly you are a good lawyer, but I studied logic - and you don't fool me so easily.
> aerospace patents shouldn't exist Bad choice of example - since aerospace patents were a complete fucking disaster. The only country that had them was the US and the result was that by the start of world war I the US had the least aerospace development of any nation despite having had a massive head-start in powered flight. Their planes were terrible compared to what Germany and England was making. It was so bad that the government enforced a legislated settlement to end the patent war just so the US could actually make planes for the war somebody would sell. And damn good thing they did to - or when the US joined the war later their aerial combat abilities would have been so far behind Germany's that it's likely Germany would have won the war. Plenty of studies have suggested that patents have a nett negative effect on research and the economy. It may be debateable that in *some* industries they are more good than bad. For all the downsides pharma patents DO guarantee that eventually generics get on the market, one could argue that those ultimatley save more lives and money than are lost while patented drugs cost a fortune.I don't have the numbers to conclude it either way - but there at least a clear upside exists, I just don't know if it's really bigger than the downside. In most industries no such upside exists and interestingly innovation usually accelerates once a patent expires.
Bill Maher has had his fair share of... less than rational views (including excessive sympathy for antivaxxers - as in any at all) but he does get *this* right - and he sums it up very well:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A41WZBcmnfc
It's actually rather offensive to atheists to call it a religion by the way. You don't see atheists going into churches on Sunday and shouting "Fraud !" at the minister - we may not share your belief, may even ridicule it - but we generally respect your right to hold a ridiculous idea, while our rational position you disrespect so much that you insist it's merely another version of your irrationality.
>Atheism is not merely the absence of a belief in any god it is a belief that there is no god. The former is just a subset of the latter.
This is simply not true. You insist on believing it is that but it isn't what the word means. It is also not what those who embrace it say. I've NEVER met an atheist who said that he would persist in his beliefs if shown proof that a God exists. That would be an active rejection. What you're describing is closer to satanism than to atheism. Atheism is merely the logical meeting point of "I expect evidence before I believe something" and "There is no evidence whatsoever to support the existence of god". It's no more a religion than it is a religion to say that "On the balance of evidence the Loch Ness monster is almost certainly a hoax". And there is more, and more solid, evidence for Nessie than for God. Even a terrible (and almost certainly doctored) photograph is better than "absolutely nothing".
Your education is lacking. I was making a joke about the concept of privatives, you apparently don't know what a privative is. Hint the answer to ALL these questions is "no". A privative means a word that describes a concept that is only defined by the absence of something else. "Cold" is a privative", so is "sober" or "dark". 0 is a bit tricky.
Oh and you are flat out wrong about the definition of atheism. Atheism is defined as the absence of believe in any god. Everybody has an absence of believe in some gods. Most people, in fact, have such an absence for all but one god. Atheists have no belief in any god. Part of the joke is that the "abstinence as a sex position" is often used as an analogy to explain how atheism differs from religion. It's not a religion - it's abstaining from religion.
Atheist generally do not deny the possibility of (a) god - just the extreme unlikeliness (and with a fair amount of certainty that, if one does exist, no religion on this earth knows a thing about him) - but atheists believe only what there is evidence for and if they find evidence that a god exist, will believe in him. They just refuse to do so in the absence of any evidence whatsoever. Agnostics differ by degree - in remaining open to a highly unlikely possibility with no evidence. That's like saying "Russel's teapot might exist". Sure there's no evidence it doesn't - but just because somebody can imagine something does not make it real.
At the very least this is fraud. If an individual does this they will be charged with fraud and looking at 10 years minimum. Conmen who get caught *do* go to jail... but concompanies - they just get a lawsuit and a fine.
Limited liability should be scrapped as simple matter of justice - it flat out makes a joke out of the idea of equal-before-the-law.
>Any half-assed hacker can reverse engineer your code Reverse engineering is, in fact, one of the hardest forms of engineering and projects that reverse engineer are generally filled with some of the smartest brains we have- because it's very hard. You think the wine devs are idiots ? Yet it took them more than decade to get out of alpha !
>He can then replicate your software in 1/10th the time it took you to develop your software If what my software does is so simple that somebody can replicate it in 1/10th the time it took me to do it - then he's the better programmer and he deserves to win in the market place. My best defense, in fact, is to use a free software license in the first place - so it's to his benefit to rather add his features to *my* product where we can both profit than to go and create his own. Even then, sooner or later even the greatest code gets replaced by better stuff. By your reasoning - it was a horrible thing that nginx was developed because apache came first ? The fact that nginx does the core jobs apache did with a far more elegant design and has become the dominant product by being better doesn't matter ? You must be truly incompetent as a programmer if you are *this* afraid to compete on the merits of your product - that even with a first-to-market advantage you are this convinced any "half-assed-hacker" can make something better than you did... it sounds to me like, rather than wanting patents to put a dead-weight on the global software economy - you may be better off seeking a different career, one more suited to your particular talents - none of which, apparently, involve writing software.
>exactly the the reason patents exist No. That is not at all why patents exist. The reason patents exist is right there in the law. To promote open disclosure of how an invention works. Quite the opposite of what you think - it's to make sure you will have MORE competitors than you otherwise would. The reward for letting the world copy your invention, is having a brief time where nobody is allowed to. One of the major problems with software patents it the absolute lack of disclosure actually - I've yet to read a software patent include full source for an implementation of the idea - and nothing less than a working source implementation can count as 'blueprints' for a software program.
>Software is not languages. Software uses languages Novels are not languages. Novels *use* languages... so by your reckoning I'd best run off to the patent office really quick to patent "Romance novels. Soft-porn for housewives with sloppy plotlines and lots of sex scenes using vague euphemisms" before somebody else does ! If nothing else - I may be able to sue Barbara Cartland's estate to oblivion. Hey it's first-to-file - who gives a fuck that she died after spending 50 years 'inventing' romance novels before I got the patent right ?
> you can program software using 1s and 0s. Which language was used there? That would be mathematics. Which is, in fact, a language - and unpatentable all by itself anyway. You may want to study computing theory - if you think software is anything but NOT pure and unadulterated mathematics on every level it's because you don't actually know what software is. Only what we try very hard to make it pretend to be.
> Technology often consists of processing steps, which are patentable Having to disclose the steps involved in using a machine does not make the steps themselves patentable. Which is the most charitable way to interpret the complete bullshit you just spouted. No, 'technology' consists of real, physical things - machines and devices. Processing steps - a completely abstract set of ideas is not and has never been patentable, software was an abberation in this regard - and the Alice verdict was basically the supreme court telling you just that.
> and so should software. So what are you ? Patent lawyer ? Patent troll ? Since those are the *only* people who have ever benefited from software patents. No prog
Just because something doesn't photograph well does not mean it doesn't exist - Pasteur posited germ theory damn near two centuries before we could see a bacterium. I've seen every one of those links. The slate article's headline is fooling you - it's actually sarcastic. It points out that the basis for the entire 'it's a myth' genre of articles in rightwing publications is a really bad level of arguing over semantics - and that, even if you take THEIR excessively literal interpretation and acknowledge that this isn't what's there - it's still a huge problem.
When it comes to science topics- NOTHING you read in the mainstream press can EVER debunk or confirm anything- because it's all simplified to the point where everything is technically incorrect, most of it is written by journalists who don't know how science works and the rest by journalists who don't *care* how science works.
The actual scientific papers - not the sensationalist headlines (both for and against) is what smart people evaluate, or if you can't -at least confine yourself to mainstream publications that have a reputation for solid science reporting, by specialist journalists - things like National Geographic magazine (though in the post-Murdoch-buyout days I'm not so sure I trust it anymore). The science is that there is an ungodly amount of plastic in the pacific ocean, the vast majority of it is microparticles - which while not visible to the naked eye are deadly to fish and anything that eats fish (including humans). Among other things these have significantly increased the mercury content of the oceans - to the extent where, globally, it's now advised that pregnant women eat no fish at all (since a fetus has a much lower toxic-tolerance for mercury than an adult human). This is standard medical practise now - every obstetrician in the world knows it - and the cause is there. It's also a fact that the pacific ocean has a major vortex current where the vast majority of this stuff ends up. Indeed if you go there you may not see anything more than a bottle-cap in a 50 yards (as the federalist so eloquently put it). But what you see is deceptive. The entire patch of ocean between the bottle gaps is filled with plastic, you just can't see it with the naked eye.
When marine biologists and journalists (especially ones working for an extremely ideological political/economic publication) don't agree - the odds are it's the marine biologists who are telling the truth.
it's a tough one to call. Competition *can* leader to greater efficiency - but sometimes it causes very inefficient outcomes. Richard Dawkin's uses the following example: a meadow is a giant solar energy collector. A forrest is a meadow on stilts. The first plants to get stilts had an advantage over the other plants - they got more of the sunlight. Competition forced other plants to follow suit. By now you have a seriously inefficient outcome - all the plants are spending almost all the sunlight they get just on maintaining those stilts. It's a massive waste of the very energy they are competing for - but none of the plants can stop wasting it or they get none at all. That's an example of competition causing a terribly inefficient outcome. Competition causes efficient outcomes only when it's constrained so nobody can do something that actively hurts their competitors and forces their competitors to adopt the same tactic. In nature, that would be the climate restraints that stopped meadows in some parts of the world from getting a lot of tall trees and being turned into forests as happened elsewhere. In economics - that's the role of regulation (and why an unregulated market would, in fact, be the least efficient form of the market you can get, quite aside from it's propensity for evil. The same drives that lead to inefficient outcomes being enforced by unregulated competition also leads to evil behaviour being required for survival).
You don't have to be in orbit to be in space. That was never part of the definition. The standard definition is passing the Karman line - which is between 90 and 100km above earth (depending on where you launch from and the air pressures - but generally by convention assumed to be 100km or above). That's being in space. The next definition is leaving the atmosphere - again the boundary is not perfectly clearly defined but generally taken as being above 150km.
Those are "in space" the difference between orbital and suborbital is how long you can *stay* in space. Suborbital comes right back - but it's a *lot* cheaper to do (you need a lot less horizontal velocity). It has it's uses too - it's a very fast way to get very long distances. ICBMs are frequently designed for suborbital trajectories for example.
But orbit is another beast altogether - that's not just going to space but staying there for an extended period, it takes a lot more fuel - which means a much heavier rocket, meaning more powerful boosters and more complicated stages. That's what SpaceX is doing. They are working on the harder of the two. B.O. is working on the easier one - both are making great strides in their games, but they are not playing the same sport. They are merely similar sports - it's like asking who was better Babe Ruth or Peter Pollock. Both are absolute legends in games that involve hitting a hard ball thrown at you away with a stick -but it's not the same game, it isn't scored the same and you can't compare them directly.
I did respond to the false and misrepresented facts in the logic. I also didn't ridicule the source - but pointed out that their reputation predicts exactly what I found inside. Flagrant lies. I don't see anything funny about that. Oh and Occam's Razor says it's much more likely an ideological propaganda publication like the federalist is lying than hundreds of scientists in fields as varied as marine biology and biochem all lying about the same thing,
Because that's like complaining that other armies have guns now...
They aren't handing over things that still have military value - long before ARPAnet became the internet it was obvious it would be MORE valuable to the military the more widespread it was. You also forget that arpanet was never developed for the military. It was developed *by* the military *for* the public - originally as a way for the survivors of a nuclear war to be able to communicate. The idea was to build a network so resilient that in a post-war landscape any surviving pieces would still find a way to reach each other. If anything in that scenario it would increase the long-term survival odds of American survivors to be able to keep in contact with other survivors around the world.
Nothing published in the federalist ever counts as "debunking" or indeed anything other than "blatant lies to support our fantasy dream world".
You really want to know what a deregulated market looks like ? Think Chicago during prohibition. Now before you go yelling about how prohibition *was* regulation - that's smoke and mirrors, the people who remained in the business after it was illegal - were the ones who didn't care about the law - and so they didn't obey regulations of any kind. A black market is always an entirely deregulated market - the very regulation that prohibits it also makes it deregulated in practical terms.
What do black markets look like ? Killing the competition is a valid way to stay competitive. Shooting your own staff if they underperform is a perfectly viable way to keep workers productive. Turf wars. Torture - and the community living in fear with a rapidly declining life expectancy.
But that's what EVERY business will do if it thinks it can. Because that will always be the most profitable way to run any business. The ones who are run by people that wouldn't *do* that - well they don't stay in business. Prohibition is not an argument against regulation - it is an argument against prohibition but it's a false equivalence to pretend those are the same thing. It's proof of what deregulation inevitably leads to. It turns every market into a gangwar, every industry into a mafia.
Back during the industrial revolution it was standard practise to rape a female employee every Friday afternoon to keep workers disciplined. Every single factory owner in the UK did it. Every fucking one of them. It was 'rape' of the 'fuck me or I fire you' variety but rape nonetheless. The interesting thing is - a LOT of those factory owners kept diaries. They all admit to doing it in their diaries. They also, every one of them, write about how abhorent they find it. Many of them were once men who would find such behaviour disgusting. So why do it ? Because all the other factory owners do - if I don't, I'll have less disciplined workers than them - I could not compete, I would be out of business. Every single one of them blames all the others for forcing him to become a rapist.
That's business without regulation. Regulation is designed to prevent the most profitiable business practises (which is why libertarians hate it) but that is not a bad thing - because the most profitable business practises are always the ones that kill people. You simply cannot preserve life and the welbeing of others as cheaply as you can destroy it. You simply cannot ever compete more efficiently than to put your competition out of business for the price of a bullet.
And because this is the reality, those who embrace this as an outcome they want must constantly lie about reality. They must pretend that reality is something other than it is. Lying about the bad things rich people will do to get richer becomes standard practise. Once you do that- you will lie about anything that threatens the rich's ability to kill to get richer. There's a problem though - nobody believes a pathological liar... what to do what to do... oh I know, accuse everybody else of being pathological liars, misrepresent what they say, tell clever lies like when somebody speaks of arctic ice melt you link them to an article about the ice growing and hope they don't notice that this is in the antarctic and actually the growth is only in surface area, the volume is decreasing, and even then all the new shallow ice is refrozen melt-off from the arctic (fresh water freezes more easily than salt water). And in that grand tradition of flat out lying about reality, but doing it very cleverly, comes the federalist with another classic case. There are lots of reasons why microplastics are bad for the ocean and people - their spelled out all over this board by many posters - the article never denies the massive amount of microplastics around, it just says "not many big pieces" and pretends that disproves the shit ton of plastic floating around
You can only aid and abet something which is, in fact, a crime. It could be a crime to make a torrent of copyrighted material, it could be a crime to share it, and even to download it. But telling people it exists is not a crime - so telling people that somebody else said it exists (which is what a search engine does) is even further removed from anything that's a crime. If what KT did is aiding and abetting then it's also aiding and abetting to publish news reports of crimes as this could inspire other people to commit the same crime. Hell not to mention publishing vulnerabilities in software - it's a known fact that cyber criminals will sometimes use published vulnerabilities to attack private computer systems. We don't charge security researchers with aiding abetting criminals for telling people their software needs to be patched do we ?
Breaking into a house is a crime. Giving somebody lockpicks to break into a house with is aiding and abetting. But merely making lockpicks is not - they have plenty of legal uses after all. And sure as hell just mentioning that the locksmith round the corner may have a lockpick that can open your door is not aiding and abetting. The fact that a criminal could use this information doesn't mean it's illegal to tell you who can help you if you lock yourself out of your house !
You are right, calling Trump the slaughterhouse owner is seriously unfair... to slaughterhouse owners, who in this metaphor would be Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers. Trump is more like the crazy guy in the scarecrow suit who is asking the cows to vote for him to burn the barn down with them in it.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way - companies go bankrupt all the time - in every industry. Even fossil fuel companies. Did you forget about Enron already ?
And the ExxonMobil scandal is very much true - they knew about it, they planned to exploit it for profit in future - and smearing the journalists won't change it. ONLY a blinkered right-wing fool who believes everything that suits his ideology over evidence could believe the ridiculous smear you just swallowed.
You talk about leftie lies - there is no such thing as a rightwing truth. Not one. Because everything the right believes, absolutely everything is flat-out and fundamentally disproven by evidence every time. Right down to "minimum wage increases cause job losses" - there is literally not a single example in history where it has ever done that. Whatever impact it does or does not have on jobs is so incredibly tiny as to be completely lost in the noise of the billions of other things that affect the economy and the employment rate. The empirical data is overwhelming. the prediction has been made about the introduction of the federal minimum wage and every single one of the 22 increases over the years and every state increase ever made - and not once has it happened.
There is no measurable correlation whatsoever - yet the claim keeps getting made by people who think 'supply and demand' is a law of nature - but forget that economies are not controlled in a lab - and nothing ever changes in isolation, so the law often does not get followed because there are always other things happening that has a bigger impact.
If after 100-odd years of being proven wrong again and again and again they can't stop telling that lie - why would you believe anything else they say ? Why keep buying the lie just so you can have the honour of covering wallmart's wage-bill for them out of your taxes because nowadays it's apparently perfectly fine to employ people at less than the cost of living (only businesses should be profitable apparently - not people), and then have working people be unable to survive so the middle class has to carry them.
The nett result is that the earned-income-tax-credit has shown an interesting pattern. That one is a good proxy to measure because ONLY working poor people qualify for it... and since Reagan it has grown at roughly 5 times the rate of the population growth, it is now by *far* the single largest poverty assistance program in the united states.
You spend more on feeding working poor people than you do on feeding the people who can't find work ! Which actually DOES reduce employment. Very few people are motivated to go find work if they can't survive on their paychecks anyway. If that's teh case - why not just draw welfare if you'll need welfare after you get a job anyway ? It makes no economic sense to work at a loss. So increased minimum wage actually drives employment UP - and that's before you even factor in the income-effect, which by some measures means simply that - had the US been increasing the minimum wage alongside inflation all along the economic growth rate over the past 10 years would be 9% higher.
Imagine how many more people would be employed in an a economy 9% larger. No wonder any job losses from 'increased price of labour' get lost in the noise.
It's all lies. The entire conservative ideology and everything associated with it is nothing but a massive fraud - and this one is highly believable because the only people who need to knowingly lie to participate are billionaires and politicians - two classes of professional liars, and the rewards for playing along is literally billions of dolars each, and it requires no cooperation between the members (it's not so much a conspiracy in other words as just a lot of people who each, individually, found that the same lie makes them rich).
You can't maintain a large conspiracy with a few hundred thousand each - it's mathematically impossible... but for a few billion each - when whistleblowing will only hurt yourself and do nothing to harm the lie ? Easy.
Oh - and there is nothing 'elusive' about the garbage patch - it's just not easy to photography because microscopic particles, by definition, needs a microscope to take photos off.
Sure - almost 0.00001% of what is being made by the companies who fear it.
An there we go... scientists lie to get grant money. The heartland institute convinced you libertarians that this is not only a viable thing but a commonplace one - and now you see the conspiracy everywhere.
It's bullshit.
The odds of a conspiracy this large even getting started is overwhelmingly against. It just doesn't work. Too many people have to be in on the lie - every one a potential whistleblower (or accidental leak). It's just not possible.
Anyway, how about the conspiracy that the atmosphere is full of oxygen - can you see any ? If there's so much oxygen in the atmosphere - why are there no photos of the stuff ? How can 71% of the gas in it be oxygen and we can't get a picture ? We have loads of pictures of water in the atmosphere - why not oxygen ? I sense a conspiracy among scientists to pretend that oxygen is in the air and that life depends on it, funded with grant money from the iron-lung industry. It all began with the space program really - to maintain the illusion so they could trick NASA into buying lots and lots and lots of oxygen to take with them to space for the astronauts. Never before has empty canisters been sold at such a markup.
Yeah... that's what you sound like.
Okay, now make that the standard for all of them - that way at least when they expire we all get a working version.
>Software implemented by a machine, however, is no longer just mathematics - like the transmission, it's a bunch of interconnected parts configured to produce a particular result.
Nope. There is a huge difference. Software never becomes a physically manifested thing. Not even if you hardwire it into a circuit. It's always JUST a mathematical function. We go to great lengths to disguise this (to make programming easier) but it never changes. Basic computing theory proves you wrong. All software is nothing but basic mathematical formulas. You can replicate every program that has ever been written and will ever be written and every version of that program that will NEVER be written with a simple counter because EVERY program is nothing but a long number and programming is nothing but a set of skills for finding the useful numbers faster than by counting.
Interesting question - if I wrote a counting algorithm that compares each number to the in-memory version of microsoft outlook and - once it matches - writes it do disk - would that count as a 'copy' ? A clean-room reverse engineer ? Or a dirty reverse engineer ? It's entirely possible (though it's likely to take a LOT longer than just writing my own e-mail client).
When you can create a transmission by counting for long enough - only then will your analogy be true.
>Hundreds of what you'd call software patents are being issued every day, and judges are upholding them
Yes because of a series terrible supreme court decisions between 1980 and 1994 by judges who had never even operated a computer let alone understood what they were ruling over and were being fooled (just like you are) by the efforts to disguise the mathematical nature of software. The reversal of that process has just begun - with the Alice ruling as we now live in a world where judges have had computers around them for decades, and have had enough contact with the concept to be able to educate themselves, hell we even have judges like Wiliam Alsup who are, themselves, highly regarded programmers. That's starting to force a rethink and that rethink is happening. Lawyers can no longer fool the judges so easily. We're just at the start of that. But the actual constitution, national and international law as written have, in fact, NEVER allowed for software patents - judges who thought it did were simply wrong.
>I think you're going to have to eat that "never has been and never will be" statement.
Nope, because what it meant and what you claim it meant had nothing to do with each other. Clearly you are a good lawyer, but I studied logic - and you don't fool me so easily.
> aerospace patents shouldn't exist
Bad choice of example - since aerospace patents were a complete fucking disaster. The only country that had them was the US and the result was that by the start of world war I the US had the least aerospace development of any nation despite having had a massive head-start in powered flight. Their planes were terrible compared to what Germany and England was making. It was so bad that the government enforced a legislated settlement to end the patent war just so the US could actually make planes for the war somebody would sell. And damn good thing they did to - or when the US joined the war later their aerial combat abilities would have been so far behind Germany's that it's likely Germany would have won the war.
Plenty of studies have suggested that patents have a nett negative effect on research and the economy. It may be debateable that in *some* industries they are more good than bad. For all the downsides pharma patents DO guarantee that eventually generics get on the market, one could argue that those ultimatley save more lives and money than are lost while patented drugs cost a fortune.I don't have the numbers to conclude it either way - but there at least a clear upside exists, I just don't know if it's really bigger than the downside. In most industries no such upside exists and interestingly innovation usually accelerates once a patent expires.
Bill Maher has had his fair share of ... less than rational views (including excessive sympathy for antivaxxers - as in any at all) but he does get *this* right - and he sums it up very well:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A41WZBcmnfc
It's actually rather offensive to atheists to call it a religion by the way. You don't see atheists going into churches on Sunday and shouting "Fraud !" at the minister - we may not share your belief, may even ridicule it - but we generally respect your right to hold a ridiculous idea, while our rational position you disrespect so much that you insist it's merely another version of your irrationality.
>Atheism is not merely the absence of a belief in any god it is a belief that there is no god. The former is just a subset of the latter.
This is simply not true. You insist on believing it is that but it isn't what the word means. It is also not what those who embrace it say. I've NEVER met an atheist who said that he would persist in his beliefs if shown proof that a God exists. That would be an active rejection. What you're describing is closer to satanism than to atheism.
Atheism is merely the logical meeting point of "I expect evidence before I believe something" and "There is no evidence whatsoever to support the existence of god". It's no more a religion than it is a religion to say that "On the balance of evidence the Loch Ness monster is almost certainly a hoax". And there is more, and more solid, evidence for Nessie than for God. Even a terrible (and almost certainly doctored) photograph is better than "absolutely nothing".
Your education is lacking. I was making a joke about the concept of privatives, you apparently don't know what a privative is.
Hint the answer to ALL these questions is "no". A privative means a word that describes a concept that is only defined by the absence of something else. "Cold" is a privative", so is "sober" or "dark". 0 is a bit tricky.
Oh and you are flat out wrong about the definition of atheism. Atheism is defined as the absence of believe in any god. Everybody has an absence of believe in some gods. Most people, in fact, have such an absence for all but one god. Atheists have no belief in any god. Part of the joke is that the "abstinence as a sex position" is often used as an analogy to explain how atheism differs from religion.
It's not a religion - it's abstaining from religion.
Atheist generally do not deny the possibility of (a) god - just the extreme unlikeliness (and with a fair amount of certainty that, if one does exist, no religion on this earth knows a thing about him) - but atheists believe only what there is evidence for and if they find evidence that a god exist, will believe in him. They just refuse to do so in the absence of any evidence whatsoever.
Agnostics differ by degree - in remaining open to a highly unlikely possibility with no evidence. That's like saying "Russel's teapot might exist". Sure there's no evidence it doesn't - but just because somebody can imagine something does not make it real.
At the very least this is fraud. If an individual does this they will be charged with fraud and looking at 10 years minimum. Conmen who get caught *do* go to jail... but concompanies - they just get a lawsuit and a fine.
Limited liability should be scrapped as simple matter of justice - it flat out makes a joke out of the idea of equal-before-the-law.
To be fair... it looks like a couple of Russians (his parents) gave him a pretty bad name first..
Or they just vibrate really fast ? Like some spiders do ? It's a form of camoflage that does, in fact, exist in the animal kingdom.
It doesn't. This change is based on a supreme court ruling from last year. Prior to that the supreme court precedent was different.
CIvil cases don't get retroactively affected by a change in the judicial interpretation of the law - it only affects new cases going forward.
Is atheism a religion ?
Is abstinence a sex position ?
Is a hole an object ?
Is black a colour ?
Is 0 really a number ?
Is credit money ?
I say... this is fun.
>Any half-assed hacker can reverse engineer your code
Reverse engineering is, in fact, one of the hardest forms of engineering and projects that reverse engineer are generally filled with some of the smartest brains we have- because it's very hard. You think the wine devs are idiots ? Yet it took them more than decade to get out of alpha !
>He can then replicate your software in 1/10th the time it took you to develop your software
If what my software does is so simple that somebody can replicate it in 1/10th the time it took me to do it - then he's the better programmer and he deserves to win in the market place. My best defense, in fact, is to use a free software license in the first place - so it's to his benefit to rather add his features to *my* product where we can both profit than to go and create his own. Even then, sooner or later even the greatest code gets replaced by better stuff. By your reasoning - it was a horrible thing that nginx was developed because apache came first ? The fact that nginx does the core jobs apache did with a far more elegant design and has become the dominant product by being better doesn't matter ?
You must be truly incompetent as a programmer if you are *this* afraid to compete on the merits of your product - that even with a first-to-market advantage you are this convinced any "half-assed-hacker" can make something better than you did... it sounds to me like, rather than wanting patents to put a dead-weight on the global software economy - you may be better off seeking a different career, one more suited to your particular talents - none of which, apparently, involve writing software.
>exactly the the reason patents exist
No. That is not at all why patents exist. The reason patents exist is right there in the law. To promote open disclosure of how an invention works. Quite the opposite of what you think - it's to make sure you will have MORE competitors than you otherwise would. The reward for letting the world copy your invention, is having a brief time where nobody is allowed to. One of the major problems with software patents it the absolute lack of disclosure actually - I've yet to read a software patent include full source for an implementation of the idea - and nothing less than a working source implementation can count as 'blueprints' for a software program.
>Software is not languages. Software uses languages
Novels are not languages. Novels *use* languages... so by your reckoning I'd best run off to the patent office really quick to patent "Romance novels. Soft-porn for housewives with sloppy plotlines and lots of sex scenes using vague euphemisms" before somebody else does ! If nothing else - I may be able to sue Barbara Cartland's estate to oblivion. Hey it's first-to-file - who gives a fuck that she died after spending 50 years 'inventing' romance novels before I got the patent right ?
> you can program software using 1s and 0s. Which language was used there?
That would be mathematics. Which is, in fact, a language - and unpatentable all by itself anyway. You may want to study computing theory - if you think software is anything but NOT pure and unadulterated mathematics on every level it's because you don't actually know what software is. Only what we try very hard to make it pretend to be.
> Technology often consists of processing steps, which are patentable
Having to disclose the steps involved in using a machine does not make the steps themselves patentable. Which is the most charitable way to interpret the complete bullshit you just spouted. No, 'technology' consists of real, physical things - machines and devices. Processing steps - a completely abstract set of ideas is not and has never been patentable, software was an abberation in this regard - and the Alice verdict was basically the supreme court telling you just that.
> and so should software.
So what are you ? Patent lawyer ? Patent troll ? Since those are the *only* people who have ever benefited from software patents. No prog
So that kind of conclusively proves their brains are more advanced than those of Randroids.
Just because something doesn't photograph well does not mean it doesn't exist - Pasteur posited germ theory damn near two centuries before we could see a bacterium. I've seen every one of those links. The slate article's headline is fooling you - it's actually sarcastic. It points out that the basis for the entire 'it's a myth' genre of articles in rightwing publications is a really bad level of arguing over semantics - and that, even if you take THEIR excessively literal interpretation and acknowledge that this isn't what's there - it's still a huge problem.
When it comes to science topics- NOTHING you read in the mainstream press can EVER debunk or confirm anything- because it's all simplified to the point where everything is technically incorrect, most of it is written by journalists who don't know how science works and the rest by journalists who don't *care* how science works.
The actual scientific papers - not the sensationalist headlines (both for and against) is what smart people evaluate, or if you can't -at least confine yourself to mainstream publications that have a reputation for solid science reporting, by specialist journalists - things like National Geographic magazine (though in the post-Murdoch-buyout days I'm not so sure I trust it anymore).
The science is that there is an ungodly amount of plastic in the pacific ocean, the vast majority of it is microparticles - which while not visible to the naked eye are deadly to fish and anything that eats fish (including humans). Among other things these have significantly increased the mercury content of the oceans - to the extent where, globally, it's now advised that pregnant women eat no fish at all (since a fetus has a much lower toxic-tolerance for mercury than an adult human). This is standard medical practise now - every obstetrician in the world knows it - and the cause is there. It's also a fact that the pacific ocean has a major vortex current where the vast majority of this stuff ends up.
Indeed if you go there you may not see anything more than a bottle-cap in a 50 yards (as the federalist so eloquently put it). But what you see is deceptive. The entire patch of ocean between the bottle gaps is filled with plastic, you just can't see it with the naked eye.
When marine biologists and journalists (especially ones working for an extremely ideological political/economic publication) don't agree - the odds are it's the marine biologists who are telling the truth.
I stand corrected.
it's a tough one to call. Competition *can* leader to greater efficiency - but sometimes it causes very inefficient outcomes. Richard Dawkin's uses the following example: a meadow is a giant solar energy collector. A forrest is a meadow on stilts. The first plants to get stilts had an advantage over the other plants - they got more of the sunlight. Competition forced other plants to follow suit. By now you have a seriously inefficient outcome - all the plants are spending almost all the sunlight they get just on maintaining those stilts. It's a massive waste of the very energy they are competing for - but none of the plants can stop wasting it or they get none at all.
That's an example of competition causing a terribly inefficient outcome. Competition causes efficient outcomes only when it's constrained so nobody can do something that actively hurts their competitors and forces their competitors to adopt the same tactic. In nature, that would be the climate restraints that stopped meadows in some parts of the world from getting a lot of tall trees and being turned into forests as happened elsewhere. In economics - that's the role of regulation (and why an unregulated market would, in fact, be the least efficient form of the market you can get, quite aside from it's propensity for evil. The same drives that lead to inefficient outcomes being enforced by unregulated competition also leads to evil behaviour being required for survival).
You don't have to be in orbit to be in space. That was never part of the definition. The standard definition is passing the Karman line - which is between 90 and 100km above earth (depending on where you launch from and the air pressures - but generally by convention assumed to be 100km or above). That's being in space. The next definition is leaving the atmosphere - again the boundary is not perfectly clearly defined but generally taken as being above 150km.
Those are "in space" the difference between orbital and suborbital is how long you can *stay* in space. Suborbital comes right back - but it's a *lot* cheaper to do (you need a lot less horizontal velocity). It has it's uses too - it's a very fast way to get very long distances. ICBMs are frequently designed for suborbital trajectories for example.
But orbit is another beast altogether - that's not just going to space but staying there for an extended period, it takes a lot more fuel - which means a much heavier rocket, meaning more powerful boosters and more complicated stages. That's what SpaceX is doing. They are working on the harder of the two. B.O. is working on the easier one - both are making great strides in their games, but they are not playing the same sport. They are merely similar sports - it's like asking who was better Babe Ruth or Peter Pollock. Both are absolute legends in games that involve hitting a hard ball thrown at you away with a stick -but it's not the same game, it isn't scored the same and you can't compare them directly.
I did respond to the false and misrepresented facts in the logic. I also didn't ridicule the source - but pointed out that their reputation predicts exactly what I found inside. Flagrant lies. I don't see anything funny about that.
Oh and Occam's Razor says it's much more likely an ideological propaganda publication like the federalist is lying than hundreds of scientists in fields as varied as marine biology and biochem all lying about the same thing,
Because that's like complaining that other armies have guns now...
They aren't handing over things that still have military value - long before ARPAnet became the internet it was obvious it would be MORE valuable to the military the more widespread it was. You also forget that arpanet was never developed for the military. It was developed *by* the military *for* the public - originally as a way for the survivors of a nuclear war to be able to communicate. The idea was to build a network so resilient that in a post-war landscape any surviving pieces would still find a way to reach each other.
If anything in that scenario it would increase the long-term survival odds of American survivors to be able to keep in contact with other survivors around the world.
Nothing published in the federalist ever counts as "debunking" or indeed anything other than "blatant lies to support our fantasy dream world".
You really want to know what a deregulated market looks like ? Think Chicago during prohibition. Now before you go yelling about how prohibition *was* regulation - that's smoke and mirrors, the people who remained in the business after it was illegal - were the ones who didn't care about the law - and so they didn't obey regulations of any kind. A black market is always an entirely deregulated market - the very regulation that prohibits it also makes it deregulated in practical terms.
What do black markets look like ? Killing the competition is a valid way to stay competitive. Shooting your own staff if they underperform is a perfectly viable way to keep workers productive. Turf wars. Torture - and the community living in fear with a rapidly declining life expectancy.
But that's what EVERY business will do if it thinks it can. Because that will always be the most profitable way to run any business. The ones who are run by people that wouldn't *do* that - well they don't stay in business.
Prohibition is not an argument against regulation - it is an argument against prohibition but it's a false equivalence to pretend those are the same thing. It's proof of what deregulation inevitably leads to. It turns every market into a gangwar, every industry into a mafia.
Back during the industrial revolution it was standard practise to rape a female employee every Friday afternoon to keep workers disciplined. Every single factory owner in the UK did it. Every fucking one of them. It was 'rape' of the 'fuck me or I fire you' variety but rape nonetheless. The interesting thing is - a LOT of those factory owners kept diaries. They all admit to doing it in their diaries. They also, every one of them, write about how abhorent they find it. Many of them were once men who would find such behaviour disgusting. So why do it ? Because all the other factory owners do - if I don't, I'll have less disciplined workers than them - I could not compete, I would be out of business. Every single one of them blames all the others for forcing him to become a rapist.
That's business without regulation. Regulation is designed to prevent the most profitiable business practises (which is why libertarians hate it) but that is not a bad thing - because the most profitable business practises are always the ones that kill people. You simply cannot preserve life and the welbeing of others as cheaply as you can destroy it. You simply cannot ever compete more efficiently than to put your competition out of business for the price of a bullet.
And because this is the reality, those who embrace this as an outcome they want must constantly lie about reality. They must pretend that reality is something other than it is. Lying about the bad things rich people will do to get richer becomes standard practise. Once you do that- you will lie about anything that threatens the rich's ability to kill to get richer. There's a problem though - nobody believes a pathological liar... what to do what to do... oh I know, accuse everybody else of being pathological liars, misrepresent what they say, tell clever lies like when somebody speaks of arctic ice melt you link them to an article about the ice growing and hope they don't notice that this is in the antarctic and actually the growth is only in surface area, the volume is decreasing, and even then all the new shallow ice is refrozen melt-off from the arctic (fresh water freezes more easily than salt water).
And in that grand tradition of flat out lying about reality, but doing it very cleverly, comes the federalist with another classic case. There are lots of reasons why microplastics are bad for the ocean and people - their spelled out all over this board by many posters - the article never denies the massive amount of microplastics around, it just says "not many big pieces" and pretends that disproves the shit ton of plastic floating around
You can only aid and abet something which is, in fact, a crime. It could be a crime to make a torrent of copyrighted material, it could be a crime to share it, and even to download it.
But telling people it exists is not a crime - so telling people that somebody else said it exists (which is what a search engine does) is even further removed from anything that's a crime.
If what KT did is aiding and abetting then it's also aiding and abetting to publish news reports of crimes as this could inspire other people to commit the same crime. Hell not to mention publishing vulnerabilities in software - it's a known fact that cyber criminals will sometimes use published vulnerabilities to attack private computer systems. We don't charge security researchers with aiding abetting criminals for telling people their software needs to be patched do we ?
Breaking into a house is a crime. Giving somebody lockpicks to break into a house with is aiding and abetting. But merely making lockpicks is not - they have plenty of legal uses after all. And sure as hell just mentioning that the locksmith round the corner may have a lockpick that can open your door is not aiding and abetting. The fact that a criminal could use this information doesn't mean it's illegal to tell you who can help you if you lock yourself out of your house !
You are right, calling Trump the slaughterhouse owner is seriously unfair... to slaughterhouse owners, who in this metaphor would be Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers.
Trump is more like the crazy guy in the scarecrow suit who is asking the cows to vote for him to burn the barn down with them in it.