Actually, if you are a large corporation with say 7,000 desktop licenses for XP, and you are found by Microsoft to have say 7,500 copies deployed, you will not find yourself in serious legal trouble. You will find yourself with a strongly worded letter that basically says "Pay us or we'll see you in court."
The GPL community members basically did the same thing. MS was in violation, and were told "Pay us or we'll see you in court." The payment in this case isn't monetary, but is a royalty payment of giving the source code plus improvements back out for free to anyone who asks.
To sue Microsoft now would be the equivalent to having a company that realizes it is out of compliance with Microsoft's license, buy the necessary licenses to get back into compliance, and subsequently get sued for being out of compliance. It just isn't good business, and Microsoft knows that. The GPL community needs to know that too.
What anyone who holds copyright wants is for those that violate copyright to provide payment equal to the lost revenue from non-compliance. In the case of a Microsoft license, that equals paying for the license. In the case of the GPL, that equals 'paying' for the license by releasing the source code. Microsoft has paid in full by releasing the source code. This is a time for positive reinforcement "Thanks, MS, for the code. Let's keep this going for everyone's benefit!" not negative reinforcement "Thanks, MS, for the code, but it was too little too late. Notice how when you don't comply, we sue, and when you comply, we sue. So keep complying, or we'll sue." The second reaction doesn't make much sense, does it? It's not likely to encourage Microsoft to continue giving to the GPL community.
I guess I was thinking dark closet with only indirect light when door is opened (if this janitor was like other janitors I know, getting stuff out of the closet didn't require turning on the light, and often it was faster just to grab what you need and leave).
Anyways, I agree, it would be a very big stretch of the imagination to believe this could be the cause.
Some people just believe what they believe without seeking proof. Oh well.
Not that I'm for supporting the crazies in the world, but is it possible that it was the blinking lights, and not the RF, that was causing her headaches? Some people (myself included) can get headaches based on flickering light (CRT monitors, flourescents).... perhaps her brain was misfiring due to the constant distraction while in the closet?
Not very likely, but still plausible.
It'd need a real test to confirm the cause, such as placing people like her in a room with and without RF, with and without blinking lights, and with 50% told that the RF is off and 50% told that it is on, mixed evenly between those with and without lights on the box.
I'm just a software developer, so I likely missed something in that testing method to make it 100% scientific, but I think the idea is clear.
simple point: laptops. When the exact specs only exist on two manufacturer's machines, for example, and both only offer it with Windows installed, and jack the price $40 because of it, where is my choice? I can't just order the parts and build it.
Who? If I want the exact hardware I see for my new netbook, but cannot buy it anywhere without the OS as part of the price, am I not completely limited in my choices? Should any hardware manufacturer be able to tell me explicitly what software I must buy with my hard earned money? Should I not be able to say "Don't want it..." and get a reduced price, even if the reduction is only $40? Shouldn't I have the choice to say "whatever you paid to have that software installed, I don't want it, so don't pay to install it, and pass me the price difference" ?
I know you were joking, but I think that'd be awesome... follow the path of the rover... up next, follow the path of the rovers on mars, switch between satellite and street view, with maps and directions! (Kidding on the last one, but knowing Google, it'd probably exist and direct you to drive to your local space launch pad and hitch a ride to get there:-P).
Someone can be using my computer at the same time as me without my knowledge if my machine has been infected with malware.
It'd be rather obvious if some random stranger was trying to use my car at the same time as me. Even if you want to stretch the analogy and try to make it work, it would be more like you noticing that for the last 6 weeks, you have had to get gas more frequently, and though you haven't actually taken note of the odometer, you think someone is borrowing your car every night to go joyriding or something. You can't prove it easily, but you think something is up.... then there is a knock on your door. It's the police.
You see, in this second, slightly more accurate, analogy, your defense that someone else may have been using your car would be more valid. You would include testimony about the odd increase in gas usage, the fact that you are certain you haven't driven as many miles in the last month that your car indicates you did, and that you think someone has been stealing your car every night because it's not always quite where you left it when you come out in the morning.
A bit absurd for a car analogy, but not at all insane for a computer to be doing things you are unaware of.
It *is* the same. Broadcasting via radio is a form of encryption. It just happens to be easy to decrypt, and I can buy a decryption device from anyone anywhere. Encryption is simply any form of encoding. We just use a fancy word for encoding when we mean encoding so that no one else can decode except those that we want to be able to decode.
The real point I have is that there is nothing wrong with me buying the device that decodes, and using it. There is, however, something illegal about the guys who build the boxes that decode and then sell them for profit. (But this illegality is something I strongly disagree with)
Now, I think that the real problem lies with the DMCA.
Let's go back to my analogy. If the theater puts up a brick wall, for example, as their protection to disallow me from viewing their movie, but I find a chink in that brick wall, aim a telescope at the chink in the wall, or put a large tower on my house that allows me to point a contraption at their screen over the top of their wall that projects that image onto my tv, is that a crime? See, the principle is the same, but the issue is only complexity. The more complex my workaround to the theater's measures to ensure that I don't freeload what they are presenting in open air, the more illegal the workaround appears to be to the average person. There is no difference between the "encryption" of putting the audio into hard wired speakers, or "encrypting" the video by putting up a brick wall as compared to encrypting the satellite data. The principle of it is the same. If they put it into the air that is physically present on my property, it's their job to secure it if they don't want me viewing/hearing it. The satellite data is broadcast onto my property, the video and audio is "broadcast" onto my property as light and faint sound waves. In both cases, I may have to do some fancy work to make it viewable, but the point remains that both instances, the video and audio was present on my property in some form or anthoer, and I simply manipulated the data presented to me until I could use it.
If I have a wireless network, it is my job to secure it. If I put no encryption on my network, it is my fault. If I stupidly use WEP, or even WPA instead of WPA2, knowing that it can be cracked, it is my fault. I am responsible for securing my data to a level that ensures it is safe. What ever happened to personal responsibility?
Any laws that attempt to regulate my protection of my own data by disallowing someone to attempt to crack the encryption method leave me less secure. What if they had arrested every person that attempted to crack WEP? We still might be using WEP, and anyone who was quiet about knowing how to access it would have access to my data.
The satellite company started off with the equivalency of WEP. It was cracked. They improved. It was cracked again, they improved again. They now have an encryption that no one seems able to break, just as WPA2 does not seem reasonably possible to break in a manner that is of any value once broken in. To arrest those who would attempt to crack it just leaves us with bad encryption technology, rather than spurring innovation.
The DMCA is flawed. We need the ability to try and break these encryption methods so that the next encryption is better.
Here's a better one:
If you own a drive in theater, and I live nearby with a direct line of site of the theater, and someone sells me a radio that I use to receive the audio from the movie, and I sit on my porch every night and enjoy a different movie, all for free.... Is this a crime?
Effectively, they are blanketing the country with their signal, and someone else is providing me a tool that allows me to watch and hear this signal. It's not my fault that the drive-in, in this example, doesn't shield their picture or opt to hard wire their speakers so that I cannot watch the movie, and even if they did do these measures, it would not be illegal for me to strategically place mirrors in my yard and use a directional mic to pick up sound from someone's car in order to continue to watch the movie.
So, really, the only issue at stake is the DMCA itself (the breaking of the encryption), and I, for one, do not agree with the premise behind this law.
If you want your content to be unwatchable by others, secure it properly. If others figure out a way to watch it anyways, that's your problem, not the laws (or at least I wish it were this way!).
- 14 years from copyright registration
- renewable for 14 more years for 10% of gross receipts collected to date on the work
- renewable for 1 more year for 10% of the gross receipts collected in the last 14 years
- Renewable annually for a percentage of gross receipts for the previous year, calculated as the number of years since it was copyrighted, or $1 million, whichever is greater.
This means that a movie that grosses $10 billion from publication/copyright date in say, 2010, to 2023 would be renewable in 2024 for $1 billion. In 2038, let's say that $1 billion more has been earned since the last renewal in 2024, the cost to renew for another year would be $100 million. In 2039, let's say that $500 million was earned on the film in the previous year - the percentage to renew would be calculated as the number of years from publication: 2038-2010 = 28. So to renew the copyright for another year would be 28% of gross receipts for the previous year ($500 million). So, to renew for the year of 2039 would be the greater of $1 million or $140 million (28% of $500 million).
Consider that current works are Life+70 or some ridiculous amount. Let's assume a 30 year life span, so 100 years of copyright at this point. With the new system mentioned above, to keep the copyright until 100 years, that last year would cost you the entire gross receipts of the copyrighted work. This effectively keeps the same maximum length, but increasingly pushes the copyright holder to release it into the public domain, even if they are making good money off of it.
Most Hollywood works make their largest amount in the first year after release. How many Hollywood movies make enough after 14 years to be worth relinquishing 10% of gross receipts for another 14 years in order to attempt to surpass that additional cost for retaining copyright?
Most works would be in public domain in 14 years. Really good works would end up in the public domain after 28 years (due to the extreme cost and minimal benefit of renewing for an additional 10% of gross receipts from the previous 14 years). At 28 years, even the best films would not be forecasted to make more than that 10% in profits, so it would be more profitable for the copyright holder to simply allow the copyright to lapse.
Now that would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
Hrm... I think it'll buy you one pink spaceship from the greatest musician of all time, all the foie gras in London, the London Zoo, and allow you to tip the concierge at the hotel you are staying in by buying the hotel itself and giving it to him.
Or it buys you a demolition crew with horrible poetry and a nasty desire to obliterate earth in all of the infinite probability lines so that you can build a hyperspace highway through sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
Just sayin...
Yeah, mine wanted to get scratched every morning, so I trained him to listen for when the shower is done, wait a minute or so, and then come in. he sits patiently on the toilet seat, I scratch him for about 30 seconds to a minute and then say "All done", and he hops off and walks out. Before training him, he'd rub up against my leg all morning, driving me nuts. Now, I spend 1 minute giving him attention, he's happy, and I get my morning back.
No, you split the urea molecule with less energy, but then you recombine it with freely available oxygen from the air, resulting in a higher energy output. No free lunch (we still need to get the oxygen from somewhere), but since oxygen comes from photosynthesis, and that uses solar power to separate CO2 into carbon (in the plant itself) and oxygen, we effectively get solar powered cars using urea and oxygen from trees to generate power.
What I don't get is why all the fuss about these roundabout methods? Why not simply pull the electricity from the sun directly with solar power? Solar panels are much more efficient than trees at converting the energy, and if we use something like urea, which will use up lots of oxygen, aren't we in danger of suffocation in the long term?
If your church is run by corrupt men, you need a new church.
Matthew 18, verses 15-17 says (in the words of Jesus), "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.' If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector."
Sounds to me like the corrupt men in the church should have been treated as pagans, and a better definition of Luther's 99 theses was an attempt to do just that. Really, it isn't that when a church gets corrupt, you need a new church... its that when a church gets corrupt, you root out the corruption - it's just that Luther had to root out so much corruption that it was simpler to simply hack off the entire branch of Catholicism (and only after giving them a chance to follow the above teachings), and to rebuild the church under protest against the catholic corruption. Semantics, I know, but each church isn't a new church... they each believe that they are the church, and that the others are the old branches that have needed to be pruned away.
Personally, I think that the various denominations need to get their heads on straight and simply get back to rooting out the corruption on all levels, to not sweat the little details. Paul, in his 2nd letter to Timothy, chapter 2, verses 23-26, teaches: "Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will."
Now what would the world be like if all the christian denominations stopped arguing, rooted out corruption, and got on with the business of helping widows, feeding the homeless, and generally being the "salt and light" of the earth?
Just think about what you said for a minute. Do you understand how often these changes in taxes occur at the State, City, County, Borough, Township, and other levels? Do you understand that not every tax can be tied to a zip code, and that some boroughs or cities encompass more than one zip? Do you realize that there is no effectual way to be 100% certain of this data at this time without having a physical office in the area keeping track of where each brick and mortar store is located?
Not all states have the same tax structure, not all states even have sales tax, for that matter. Even if someone set up office in every tax region, based solely on how the tax lines are drawn, and kept an up to date database for all of the effective taxes in those areas, the monthly cost of getting this daily updated database would likely far exceed my business's monthly income, and would effectively run me out of business. This would happen to hundreds if not thousands of other small-time operations that don't make much, but are side businesses increasing the income and spending in many many homes.
Now, what happens when you suddenly kill off a chunk of the expendable income of hundreds of thousands of homes? You suddenly have less money flowing in the economy. Right now is a stupid time to be doing anything that kills of expendable income.
It's why I bought the Fuji Finepix A150 - extremely slim and uses double AAs. After loosing the proprietary camera charger for our other camera twice (and spending almost $30 each time to replace it), I decided spending $100 on a new camera that used AAs made a whole lot more financial sense. It's been great, and I could bum some batteries off a friend when mine died, so I missed nothing at my mother's wedding last weekend.
Thanks for posting that. Fascinating read, and 100% on-topic. Never thought of that being the primary method of understanding another alien culture, but it makes sense!
It would be trivial for their plugin to, on first load, determine if the runtime was installed, and notify the user with a popup that says "This pluging requires blah blah crap. Click Ok to install." No intrusion, no difficulty... just a well designed add-on.
Whoa... hold on there! I wasn't saying that they would never have been invented... I'm just saying that spam, ads, etc., have been shown to cause an increase in the speed at which we discover new concepts in programming.
If there were never any need for popup blockers because no one abused them, why would someone go to all the trouble of creating the idea of pop-ins? They are less convenient, less useful, and have more limitations than a standard popup. There are benefits to them too, such as styling the titlebar, adding additional menu items, controlling the overall function of the window (like minimizing to your own method of handling windows, rather than just defaulting to the taskbar), but these benefits would not have spurred the innovation at the speed that popup blockers did, and without popup abuse, popup blockers wouldn't have been created.
It makes the web better... for me. I'm tired of the ads, so I use the tools that get rid of them. If someone wants to use a browser that cannot do this, then they are choosing to make the web worse for them.
Another thing - as much as I hate how much more intrusive the ads have become (those that actually get through), some really cool functionalities not thought of before have been discovered, such as the long ago created "pop-in" windows, which has lead to an improvement in the functionality of AJAX web applications, and have given me tools I can use in an intranet environment since I can set the level of protections there to a different level than for the web (turn off popup blockers, allow javascript, and use these "intrusive" methods for making the apps easier to use).
So... the web is better for me, and in those instances where it is worse for me, I can learn from it and build better tools at work.
So... how is this a bad thing? Maybe if you still use those other browsers that cannot ignore these pieces, it's bad for you... so switch browsers!
Yeah, I had already gone to the link and when I started reading this comment, I'm like "Vibrant rollover technology? What's that?" I had a completely normal web page experience, and was unaware that they were using any kind of intrusive technology...
Firefox with the proper extensions just makes the web better.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you are a large corporation with say 7,000 desktop licenses for XP, and you are found by Microsoft to have say 7,500 copies deployed, you will not find yourself in serious legal trouble. You will find yourself with a strongly worded letter that basically says "Pay us or we'll see you in court."
The GPL community members basically did the same thing. MS was in violation, and were told "Pay us or we'll see you in court." The payment in this case isn't monetary, but is a royalty payment of giving the source code plus improvements back out for free to anyone who asks.
To sue Microsoft now would be the equivalent to having a company that realizes it is out of compliance with Microsoft's license, buy the necessary licenses to get back into compliance, and subsequently get sued for being out of compliance. It just isn't good business, and Microsoft knows that. The GPL community needs to know that too.
What anyone who holds copyright wants is for those that violate copyright to provide payment equal to the lost revenue from non-compliance. In the case of a Microsoft license, that equals paying for the license. In the case of the GPL, that equals 'paying' for the license by releasing the source code. Microsoft has paid in full by releasing the source code. This is a time for positive reinforcement "Thanks, MS, for the code. Let's keep this going for everyone's benefit!" not negative reinforcement "Thanks, MS, for the code, but it was too little too late. Notice how when you don't comply, we sue, and when you comply, we sue. So keep complying, or we'll sue." The second reaction doesn't make much sense, does it? It's not likely to encourage Microsoft to continue giving to the GPL community.
I guess I was thinking dark closet with only indirect light when door is opened (if this janitor was like other janitors I know, getting stuff out of the closet didn't require turning on the light, and often it was faster just to grab what you need and leave).
Anyways, I agree, it would be a very big stretch of the imagination to believe this could be the cause.
Some people just believe what they believe without seeking proof. Oh well.
Not that I'm for supporting the crazies in the world, but is it possible that it was the blinking lights, and not the RF, that was causing her headaches? Some people (myself included) can get headaches based on flickering light (CRT monitors, flourescents).... perhaps her brain was misfiring due to the constant distraction while in the closet?
Not very likely, but still plausible.
It'd need a real test to confirm the cause, such as placing people like her in a room with and without RF, with and without blinking lights, and with 50% told that the RF is off and 50% told that it is on, mixed evenly between those with and without lights on the box.
I'm just a software developer, so I likely missed something in that testing method to make it 100% scientific, but I think the idea is clear.
simple point: laptops. When the exact specs only exist on two manufacturer's machines, for example, and both only offer it with Windows installed, and jack the price $40 because of it, where is my choice? I can't just order the parts and build it.
Who? If I want the exact hardware I see for my new netbook, but cannot buy it anywhere without the OS as part of the price, am I not completely limited in my choices? Should any hardware manufacturer be able to tell me explicitly what software I must buy with my hard earned money? Should I not be able to say "Don't want it..." and get a reduced price, even if the reduction is only $40? Shouldn't I have the choice to say "whatever you paid to have that software installed, I don't want it, so don't pay to install it, and pass me the price difference" ?
I know you were joking, but I think that'd be awesome... follow the path of the rover... up next, follow the path of the rovers on mars, switch between satellite and street view, with maps and directions! (Kidding on the last one, but knowing Google, it'd probably exist and direct you to drive to your local space launch pad and hitch a ride to get there :-P).
Here's the problem with that analogy:
Someone can be using my computer at the same time as me without my knowledge if my machine has been infected with malware.
It'd be rather obvious if some random stranger was trying to use my car at the same time as me. Even if you want to stretch the analogy and try to make it work, it would be more like you noticing that for the last 6 weeks, you have had to get gas more frequently, and though you haven't actually taken note of the odometer, you think someone is borrowing your car every night to go joyriding or something. You can't prove it easily, but you think something is up.... then there is a knock on your door. It's the police.
You see, in this second, slightly more accurate, analogy, your defense that someone else may have been using your car would be more valid. You would include testimony about the odd increase in gas usage, the fact that you are certain you haven't driven as many miles in the last month that your car indicates you did, and that you think someone has been stealing your car every night because it's not always quite where you left it when you come out in the morning.
A bit absurd for a car analogy, but not at all insane for a computer to be doing things you are unaware of.
Would you risk having one drop of blood fall based on this? If just one drop fell, he would lose everything... so, worth the risk?
It *is* the same. Broadcasting via radio is a form of encryption. It just happens to be easy to decrypt, and I can buy a decryption device from anyone anywhere. Encryption is simply any form of encoding. We just use a fancy word for encoding when we mean encoding so that no one else can decode except those that we want to be able to decode.
The real point I have is that there is nothing wrong with me buying the device that decodes, and using it. There is, however, something illegal about the guys who build the boxes that decode and then sell them for profit. (But this illegality is something I strongly disagree with)
Now, I think that the real problem lies with the DMCA.
Let's go back to my analogy. If the theater puts up a brick wall, for example, as their protection to disallow me from viewing their movie, but I find a chink in that brick wall, aim a telescope at the chink in the wall, or put a large tower on my house that allows me to point a contraption at their screen over the top of their wall that projects that image onto my tv, is that a crime? See, the principle is the same, but the issue is only complexity. The more complex my workaround to the theater's measures to ensure that I don't freeload what they are presenting in open air, the more illegal the workaround appears to be to the average person. There is no difference between the "encryption" of putting the audio into hard wired speakers, or "encrypting" the video by putting up a brick wall as compared to encrypting the satellite data. The principle of it is the same. If they put it into the air that is physically present on my property, it's their job to secure it if they don't want me viewing/hearing it. The satellite data is broadcast onto my property, the video and audio is "broadcast" onto my property as light and faint sound waves. In both cases, I may have to do some fancy work to make it viewable, but the point remains that both instances, the video and audio was present on my property in some form or anthoer, and I simply manipulated the data presented to me until I could use it.
If I have a wireless network, it is my job to secure it. If I put no encryption on my network, it is my fault. If I stupidly use WEP, or even WPA instead of WPA2, knowing that it can be cracked, it is my fault. I am responsible for securing my data to a level that ensures it is safe. What ever happened to personal responsibility?
Any laws that attempt to regulate my protection of my own data by disallowing someone to attempt to crack the encryption method leave me less secure. What if they had arrested every person that attempted to crack WEP? We still might be using WEP, and anyone who was quiet about knowing how to access it would have access to my data.
The satellite company started off with the equivalency of WEP. It was cracked. They improved. It was cracked again, they improved again. They now have an encryption that no one seems able to break, just as WPA2 does not seem reasonably possible to break in a manner that is of any value once broken in. To arrest those who would attempt to crack it just leaves us with bad encryption technology, rather than spurring innovation. The DMCA is flawed. We need the ability to try and break these encryption methods so that the next encryption is better.
Bad analogy.
Here's a better one:
If you own a drive in theater, and I live nearby with a direct line of site of the theater, and someone sells me a radio that I use to receive the audio from the movie, and I sit on my porch every night and enjoy a different movie, all for free.... Is this a crime?
Effectively, they are blanketing the country with their signal, and someone else is providing me a tool that allows me to watch and hear this signal. It's not my fault that the drive-in, in this example, doesn't shield their picture or opt to hard wire their speakers so that I cannot watch the movie, and even if they did do these measures, it would not be illegal for me to strategically place mirrors in my yard and use a directional mic to pick up sound from someone's car in order to continue to watch the movie.
So, really, the only issue at stake is the DMCA itself (the breaking of the encryption), and I, for one, do not agree with the premise behind this law.
If you want your content to be unwatchable by others, secure it properly. If others figure out a way to watch it anyways, that's your problem, not the laws (or at least I wish it were this way!).
I think that we need an exponential system:
- 14 years from copyright registration
- renewable for 14 more years for 10% of gross receipts collected to date on the work
- renewable for 1 more year for 10% of the gross receipts collected in the last 14 years
- Renewable annually for a percentage of gross receipts for the previous year, calculated as the number of years since it was copyrighted, or $1 million, whichever is greater.
This means that a movie that grosses $10 billion from publication/copyright date in say, 2010, to 2023 would be renewable in 2024 for $1 billion. In 2038, let's say that $1 billion more has been earned since the last renewal in 2024, the cost to renew for another year would be $100 million. In 2039, let's say that $500 million was earned on the film in the previous year - the percentage to renew would be calculated as the number of years from publication: 2038-2010 = 28. So to renew the copyright for another year would be 28% of gross receipts for the previous year ($500 million). So, to renew for the year of 2039 would be the greater of $1 million or $140 million (28% of $500 million).
Consider that current works are Life+70 or some ridiculous amount. Let's assume a 30 year life span, so 100 years of copyright at this point. With the new system mentioned above, to keep the copyright until 100 years, that last year would cost you the entire gross receipts of the copyrighted work. This effectively keeps the same maximum length, but increasingly pushes the copyright holder to release it into the public domain, even if they are making good money off of it.
Most Hollywood works make their largest amount in the first year after release. How many Hollywood movies make enough after 14 years to be worth relinquishing 10% of gross receipts for another 14 years in order to attempt to surpass that additional cost for retaining copyright?
Most works would be in public domain in 14 years. Really good works would end up in the public domain after 28 years (due to the extreme cost and minimal benefit of renewing for an additional 10% of gross receipts from the previous 14 years). At 28 years, even the best films would not be forecasted to make more than that 10% in profits, so it would be more profitable for the copyright holder to simply allow the copyright to lapse.
Now that would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
Hrm... I think it'll buy you one pink spaceship from the greatest musician of all time, all the foie gras in London, the London Zoo, and allow you to tip the concierge at the hotel you are staying in by buying the hotel itself and giving it to him. Or it buys you a demolition crew with horrible poetry and a nasty desire to obliterate earth in all of the infinite probability lines so that you can build a hyperspace highway through sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha. Just sayin...
Yeah, mine wanted to get scratched every morning, so I trained him to listen for when the shower is done, wait a minute or so, and then come in. he sits patiently on the toilet seat, I scratch him for about 30 seconds to a minute and then say "All done", and he hops off and walks out. Before training him, he'd rub up against my leg all morning, driving me nuts. Now, I spend 1 minute giving him attention, he's happy, and I get my morning back.
Yes, you certainly can train a cat.
No, you split the urea molecule with less energy, but then you recombine it with freely available oxygen from the air, resulting in a higher energy output. No free lunch (we still need to get the oxygen from somewhere), but since oxygen comes from photosynthesis, and that uses solar power to separate CO2 into carbon (in the plant itself) and oxygen, we effectively get solar powered cars using urea and oxygen from trees to generate power.
What I don't get is why all the fuss about these roundabout methods? Why not simply pull the electricity from the sun directly with solar power? Solar panels are much more efficient than trees at converting the energy, and if we use something like urea, which will use up lots of oxygen, aren't we in danger of suffocation in the long term?
Mine says Taiwan?
If your church is run by corrupt men, you need a new church.
Matthew 18, verses 15-17 says (in the words of Jesus), "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.' If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector."
Sounds to me like the corrupt men in the church should have been treated as pagans, and a better definition of Luther's 99 theses was an attempt to do just that. Really, it isn't that when a church gets corrupt, you need a new church... its that when a church gets corrupt, you root out the corruption - it's just that Luther had to root out so much corruption that it was simpler to simply hack off the entire branch of Catholicism (and only after giving them a chance to follow the above teachings), and to rebuild the church under protest against the catholic corruption. Semantics, I know, but each church isn't a new church... they each believe that they are the church, and that the others are the old branches that have needed to be pruned away.
Personally, I think that the various denominations need to get their heads on straight and simply get back to rooting out the corruption on all levels, to not sweat the little details. Paul, in his 2nd letter to Timothy, chapter 2, verses 23-26, teaches: "Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will."
Now what would the world be like if all the christian denominations stopped arguing, rooted out corruption, and got on with the business of helping widows, feeding the homeless, and generally being the "salt and light" of the earth?
Just think about what you said for a minute. Do you understand how often these changes in taxes occur at the State, City, County, Borough, Township, and other levels? Do you understand that not every tax can be tied to a zip code, and that some boroughs or cities encompass more than one zip? Do you realize that there is no effectual way to be 100% certain of this data at this time without having a physical office in the area keeping track of where each brick and mortar store is located?
Not all states have the same tax structure, not all states even have sales tax, for that matter. Even if someone set up office in every tax region, based solely on how the tax lines are drawn, and kept an up to date database for all of the effective taxes in those areas, the monthly cost of getting this daily updated database would likely far exceed my business's monthly income, and would effectively run me out of business. This would happen to hundreds if not thousands of other small-time operations that don't make much, but are side businesses increasing the income and spending in many many homes.
Now, what happens when you suddenly kill off a chunk of the expendable income of hundreds of thousands of homes? You suddenly have less money flowing in the economy. Right now is a stupid time to be doing anything that kills of expendable income.
http://www.terrafugia.com/ -- this is about as close as you're going to get with our overly regulated system.
It's why I bought the Fuji Finepix A150 - extremely slim and uses double AAs. After loosing the proprietary camera charger for our other camera twice (and spending almost $30 each time to replace it), I decided spending $100 on a new camera that used AAs made a whole lot more financial sense. It's been great, and I could bum some batteries off a friend when mine died, so I missed nothing at my mother's wedding last weekend.
Thanks for posting that. Fascinating read, and 100% on-topic. Never thought of that being the primary method of understanding another alien culture, but it makes sense!
It would be trivial for their plugin to, on first load, determine if the runtime was installed, and notify the user with a popup that says "This pluging requires blah blah crap. Click Ok to install." No intrusion, no difficulty... just a well designed add-on.
Whoa... hold on there! I wasn't saying that they would never have been invented... I'm just saying that spam, ads, etc., have been shown to cause an increase in the speed at which we discover new concepts in programming.
If there were never any need for popup blockers because no one abused them, why would someone go to all the trouble of creating the idea of pop-ins? They are less convenient, less useful, and have more limitations than a standard popup. There are benefits to them too, such as styling the titlebar, adding additional menu items, controlling the overall function of the window (like minimizing to your own method of handling windows, rather than just defaulting to the taskbar), but these benefits would not have spurred the innovation at the speed that popup blockers did, and without popup abuse, popup blockers wouldn't have been created.
It makes the web better... for me. I'm tired of the ads, so I use the tools that get rid of them. If someone wants to use a browser that cannot do this, then they are choosing to make the web worse for them.
Another thing - as much as I hate how much more intrusive the ads have become (those that actually get through), some really cool functionalities not thought of before have been discovered, such as the long ago created "pop-in" windows, which has lead to an improvement in the functionality of AJAX web applications, and have given me tools I can use in an intranet environment since I can set the level of protections there to a different level than for the web (turn off popup blockers, allow javascript, and use these "intrusive" methods for making the apps easier to use).
So... the web is better for me, and in those instances where it is worse for me, I can learn from it and build better tools at work.
So... how is this a bad thing? Maybe if you still use those other browsers that cannot ignore these pieces, it's bad for you... so switch browsers!
Yeah, I had already gone to the link and when I started reading this comment, I'm like "Vibrant rollover technology? What's that?" I had a completely normal web page experience, and was unaware that they were using any kind of intrusive technology...
Firefox with the proper extensions just makes the web better.