Speaking of humid climates, in many humid climates they have these things called "rainy season", or just the usual scattered heavy downpours. The rain/storm can be rather heavy and it can last for at least an hour or two (and then it could still keep going for quite a long while after - just not as heavy). So either you get really wet or you end up two hours late, or you get hospitalized after you cycle into a open hole/drain that didn't show up because the road and hole was evenly covered with water (and nowadays there are more people stealing grates and covers for the metal...).
So it's not just the hot and humid thing that's a prob.
I'm sure cycling it's nice in some climates. I didn't mind walking two miles to some place and two miles back every day when I was living in a temperate climate. But in the tropics, very few want to do that in the sun or rain if they can help it.
The formula for Coke is branding, marketing and distribution.
The "Trade Secret" part of it is a marketing gimmick. Just like KFC's "herbs and spices". There's lots of fried chicken out there that tastes better than KFC. I don't really like Coke much, but I'm sure there are lots of colas out there that people consider better than Coke.
You could try selling the identical recipe with a different label, and you'd do just about as well as some unknown brand.
Even if you get the actual recipe, Coca Cola could claim it was a decoy recipe, and the marketing gimmick would be preserved and you would still be "Just Another Cola".
As for the "actual recipe" itself, I've heard from many people that Coca Cola's Coke tastes different from country to country and even state to state. Most of USA uses corn syrup (except for special coke supposed for Jews during one of their festivals) and most other countries use cane sugar.
So much for the magical recipe. I bet the main ingredient Coca Cola cares about in their recipe is that it must be secret. That and maybe real vanilla? Or have they manage to switch away from that without people caring?
"Consider the alternative to patents and copyrights - trade secrets. Do you want closed systems that you can never hack? Never improve upon? Never reach the public domain?"
Never hack? You must be new here.
So far I've been on this website and I've seen lots of complicated closed systems that have been hacked.
If it weren't for copyright and patents they most certainly could be copied.
The Chinese can copy almost any stuff you sell that's worth copying.
If it's some military tech that's not available on the market, then sure that makes it harder for the Chinese etc to copy. But that sort of military top secret stuff is not going to be patented either, and so that's different.
"How do you protect a play, book or musical performance in the absence of copyright?"
You're really an attorney? Read my post again, I was talking about patents not copyrights.
Regarding copyright: copyright terms should be getting shorter and shorter, since the pace of progress is supposed to be getting faster and faster, and marketing and distribution is supposedly so much more efficient nowadays - complete a product today, and you can tell the world by tomorrow if you want.
In fact the marketing is so efficient that lots of companies even tell the world way before they have a product;).
That copyright terms are getting longer and longer should show you how broken things are.
Copyright terms should be not longer than 14 years, maybe even as short as 7 years.
Then Microsoft would really have to make something significantly better than Windows 2000. Instead of stuff like Vista.
If people cannot make money from their monopoly over their copyrighted work in 7 years, and instead need a 75 year monopoly, they should be doing something else to make money.
Giving such people 75 year monopolies just so they can profit is a misallocation of resources, poor economics and a disservice to society.
If it takes you 75 years to make enough money from your book, then I think you should stick to writing books as a hobby and do something else as a job.
(To be clear I believe filtering should still be done, I'm saying it isn't sufficient and things are getting harder)
Your suggestion works if you don't want to allow much user/3rd party HTML.
But it's not so simple for many sites - the more tags you allow, the more likely is you are going to forget something.
For example: Say you are a popular webmail provider and you want to allow your users to receive and view html webmail, or you are one of those "social" sites and you want to allow users to do fancier html stuff, and you want to allow multibyte, UTF etc. What would your filters look like now? There are lots of ways to sneak in "dynamic stuff".
So if you want to allow _some_ HTML and you add stuff like multibyte/UTF and browsers behaving differently, it's not so simple to filter out the bad stuff anymore.
I think you'll see that my proposal provides an _easy_ _additional_ layer of protection.
I'm not saying don't do filtering, I'm saying we _also_ need a way to tell the browser that "between these two points behave like a dumb browser with a minimum set of features".
Browsers parse stuff differently, but if they have been told "disable javascript from now on", even if they have a buggy parsers and javascript sneaks through - it's off on the browser.
And what if the browser or W3C bunch unleash some new "HTML feature"? At least with my proposal, there's some chance of sites still being safe by default. It's not 100%, but brakes on a car aren't 100% either.
Lastly there are many other scenarios where you need to allow 3rd party HTML that you can't trust to be "safe" - e.g. ad content from partners.
Windshield wiper delay circuit. Oh my, what an innovation, NOT. 17 years monopoly for that? Fuck the patent system.
That's not innovation. That's "hmm I need to walk to X, looks like I should move one of my feet forward, WOW I just made an innovation".
Firstly patents aren't the same as copyrights (as someone has already told you).
Secondly, the patent system is so broken it isn't funny.
The geniuses who come up with real innovations are typically so far ahead of their time that people only "get it" years later. Way after the patents have expired, or at least near the expiry. Google for "Douglas Engelbart" and the "mother of all demos". Check out the _whole_ system they built 40 years ago, now that's what I call innovation. This is: "Hey guys let's walk to Y instead, and here's a whole system that can get us there".
Long terms would benefit the lame brains who come up with "one click" crap and think it's so innovative, and the patent office's overworked lame brains will just rubber stamp it.
There more lame brains than geniuses. So therefore the patent system as is will cause more harm than good.
Prizes for Innovation that are awarded in hindsight might be better. Get people to pay a fee to register their inventions to be eligible for the prizes, the registration helps in figuring out who was first which is quite important[1].
In my opinion it'll be more likely that lame brains in charge of awarding the prizes can figure out that something was innovative in _hingsight_ than lame brains in charge of reading a patent application can figure out whether the "invention" is innovative or not.
It is clear that patents as is are currently being used by companies as an anticompetitive tool, and they are not actually improving the pace of progress. They are in fact impeding progress in many cases.
Read the second link and simulate the likely future, guess what happens to the little guy?
Eventually you might have one patent, but for you to even move your little finger to implement it you would be infringing on thousands of patents owned by Allied Security Trust.
So guess what happens you try to do stuff and their lawyers meet your lawyers?
Or guess what some people might do instead: they don't actually implement stuff! Can't get sued that way. They sit and wait for the Allied Security Trust bunch to do stuff, and when the time is ripe they sue the relevant Allied Security Trust member and get $$$$$$$.
Tell me how this would improve the pace of progress and benefit society?
I'd take the rampant mutual copying ala China over this thank you very much.
I've got a Made in China 15g remote controlled heli that's rather cheap (about USD20 retail). Not amazingly innovative, but that's why it should be cheap, just the way I like it. Go figure out how many patents it infringes on from the infrared controller to the helicopter. It'll probably cost a fair bit to figure it out and you might never really be sure given how vague people write patent apps.
Yes inventors are going to cry that they aren't being rewarded, they're collateral damage. I will take great comfort in the _FACT_ that most of those "inventors" aren't real inventors and a great proportion of them are quacks who just think they're innovative. So only a very few will be hurt.
If my suggestion is done, some of those few might win a Prize for Innovation years later.
[1] A real inventor usually gets a fair bit of satisfaction from seeing his idea getting implemented, even if it's by others, AS LONG people know he was _first_. Sitting on it = not much satisfaction. In fact if lots of people implement his idea, that increases his odds of winning a Prize for Innovation (if his idea was indeed nonobvious and inventive).
Then even if someone manages to slip in javascript or other html naughties into an allowed content-type=text/html that's uploaded or emailed to the site, it still won't work on the target's browser.
(if the browser supports the feature, and the website encloses all stuff that _should_ be "plain old harmless stuff" with such tags).
Basically when the browser sees such tags, it will go "Ah, between these tags, I behave as a browser with the fancy stuff disabled". So java, activeX, javascript AND _NEW_STUFF_ that people think up that slips through the upload checks would still be disabled.
That's right, even fancy new stuff that people are thinking of, could be disabled without the website having to keep up with the latest and greatest way to pwn you that the browser or w3c have decided to bless the world with.
It's been 7 years already and everyone seems to be happy to create new "foot guns" for the world but nobody seems interested in making a "foot gun safety".
Huh. Magic databases are a contributor to the problem not the solution.
The problem is browsers are NOT respecting the mime type AND are using a "magic database" to decide whether something can be executed. It's not that relevant whether magic database is from the O/S or from the browser. The main issue is the browsers are NOT respecting the mime type.
With magic databases stuff that contains executable stuff can get executed no matter what it is called.
The way to protect against the "magic database" is to set permissions on the file to "not execute" (and even so might still work).
But currently the browser does not know what permissions are on a file that's downloaded (all it knows is it can read it). You are supposed to set the mime type, but seems the browsers aren't respecting that.
I have actually proposed something that could help against stuff like this AND other attacks, to both the browser people and the W3 bunch but they were NOT interested.
If they had implemented my suggestion years ago, the myspace worms and other similar worms would likely not have worked on browsers that supported the security feature - it would be trivial for the websites to restrict 3rd party stuff to allowed behaviours.
"That crazy amendment brought material that was in the public domain back into copyright!"
Now that is what I call stealing.
Anyway, if people think the pace of progress is getting faster and faster (or want it to be so), and that marketing and distribution is better than years ago, then it makes no sense that copyright terms should be getting longer and longer.
Logically they should be getting shorter and shorter.
One reason why Blizzard might not like such bots is these bots could break Blizzard's control over players in Blizzard's "operant conditioning chamber"[1] aka "skinner box".
When a primate can get the reward without having to press your levers, you lose some control over that primate.
And if other primates are smart enough and see that primate getting the reward, they may choose to "cheat" the same way given that option or give up cooperating and not press the levers when they're expected to or even totally "not play the game" anymore.
You may only legally copy this post to the contents of your memory or distribute it to others, if you do whatever I command you to (in the future) and also send me 10% of your income every month in cash equivalent.
Oh yeah, and you must also howl at the full moon every month while standing on one leg in a public place.
And if you are someone who writes EULAs (or those stupid Corporate Email Signatures), please move to Sudan and eat sand for the rest of your hopefully short life.
"So I should go walk on the highway because I'm just as likely to die falling in my bathtub as I am by getting hit by a car? Give me a break"
Give me a break. Who's forcing you to walk on the highway? The smokers? I don't think so. Without widespread bans, I've still been able to avoid smoke when I want to.
Here's a car analogy for you:
It's more like the right to drive a car, in places where driving is not necessary - in many countries this is true (in some countries most people are too poor to have cars).
Driving cars can be dangerous for people around them - kills thousands of people a year, it's bad for the environment.
If you ban cars, there would be fewer car accidents and fewer people killed. In fact many people might actually live a lot longer since they would be getting a lot more exercise every day.
Many people enjoy driving cars, and consider the risks and costs worth it.
Should we ban cars in countries where there's good public transport? Just because pedestrians who don't drive might get killed/maimed by cars?
To me it's all about actual risks.
The increased risk to a smoker is significant, but hey if they are an adult it's their choice and their life[1].
The increased risk to a nonsmoker is not very significant- given the fact that in most cases they can choose to go elsewhere. In places where it's not possible e.g. emergency room in hospital, sure ban smoking.
Tax places that allow smoking, let there be a choice for both smokers and nonsmokers. Nonsmokers can go elsewhere. And nonsmokers can benefit from the extra $$$.
Widespread smoking bans are just silly. They don't ban guns everywhere. Ban smoking at fuel pumps, and other places like that.
Now the other issue is when parents smoke and their children have to breathe in their smoke - their children don't have as much choice - they can't walk away. BUT it's their children, their responsibility. If you really want a super nanny state, you might as well have the state bring children up if their parents don't pass the requirements (e.g. smoke in the house, didn't pass Parenting 101, get drunk "too often", brainwash their kids in State disapproved ways, or to think the "wrong ways").
[1] Except if you're married. In my opinion if you marry, your spouse has say too (well I guess your spouse is going to "have say" whether you like it or not;) ).
Here's news for you: practically everybody dies whether they're a smoker or not, and whether they are exposed to tobacco smoke or not.
The top 3 likely ways to go (in no particular order): heart problem, stroke, cancer.
You cut your odds of getting heart disease and stroke, you increase your odds of getting cancer.
Doc sees you have bad lipid levels, so you go on those statin thingies and whoopee you don't die of a heart attack.
So guess what is likely to kill you eventually?
Either way, given modern medical tech, the odds of you getting something expensive to treat and very unpleasant are pretty high whether or not you get smoke in your lungs. They can often keep you alive till it becomes too expensive or too unpleasant to bear (and sometimes beyond that unfortunately).
I'm a nonsmoker myself, and don't like the smell of tobacco but I think having widespread smoking bans is going too far.
Just tax places that allow smoking more. If a pub wants to allow smoking, let it, but tax it more.
Then you get more "drug money" to spend on us nonsmokers (since nonsmokers tend to live longer ). And smokers grudgingly _accept_ being taxed and they put up with it - since it's considered a vice and it's addictive. Doesn't lose you huge amounts of votes.
Look at Japan - they have smokers everywhere smoking like chimneys and the Gov is worried that people aren't dropping dead fast enough aka "aging population", but at the same time is trying to get people to stop smoking (and recently made laws to get people to be slimmer). Strange.
The enemy has to get many shots in the air at once (nearly), they can't just stay in one spot and keep pounding away - someone will be blasting at them soon.
Unless they also have one of these devices AND they've managed to get it to not shoot outgoing mortars, whilst shooting the incoming ones. Then it could get interesting - if your laser leaves, your artillery gets hit, but if the laser doesn't leave, eventually there may be too many mortars heading for the laser and it gets hit. So it's a race to get as many mortars heading to both targets.
Ebola doesn't scare me. Odds are you die in a few days. Painful sure. You'd probably hate it every moment, but I think the bright side is you know it'll be over _soon_.
Dementia is a pretty bad way to go. The end stage is probably not so bad for the person with it (just bad for everyone around who cares). But the months where you know you are malfunctioning bit by bit can be pretty depressing.
What scares me would be to not lose all my mental faculties but instead "just" be trapped without sight or sound or most of my other senses.
I believe a stroke could cause something like this.
Solitary confinement for the rest of my life. And modern medical technology could keep people alive for rather long.
Imagine that you are in darkness, you can't feel anything, you can't see anything, you can't hear anything, and this goes on, for not just for days. Worse of all you don't know how long it will go on for - it could go on for years.
I'll take ebola over that anytime.
On a related note - it's funny how so many people think that it would be great to be one of those Highlaner Immortals. It's all fun and games till one day you get stuck in a bad situation for "a long while".
The main problem is drivers might swerve to avoid hitting them and thus kill someone else. They should just brake in a straight line instead - better for overall safety, if it doesn't work, the bright side is the cyclist may never run a red light again.
One of the things you might be able to do is to create fake records (don't forget which ones are fake!). Some should never appear on the internet, and some might appear, but you have special contact addresses, email, phone for the,
Then if the fake records ever show up on Google, or on one of those databases for sale or if someone/something ever tries to contact _your_ Mr Alan Adams (whether via phone, email or snail mail), you know you've got a problem.
You could have modified records - e.g. have a real person (you for instance) but special contact addresses instead. Or your contact addresses but different name or surname.
Of course, some applications/bosses might not like fake records or even slightly altered ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of humid climates, in many humid climates they have these things called "rainy season", or just the usual scattered heavy downpours. The rain/storm can be rather heavy and it can last for at least an hour or two (and then it could still keep going for quite a long while after - just not as heavy). So either you get really wet or you end up two hours late, or you get hospitalized after you cycle into a open hole/drain that didn't show up because the road and hole was evenly covered with water (and nowadays there are more people stealing grates and covers for the metal...).
So it's not just the hot and humid thing that's a prob.
I'm sure cycling it's nice in some climates. I didn't mind walking two miles to some place and two miles back every day when I was living in a temperate climate. But in the tropics, very few want to do that in the sun or rain if they can help it.
"The formula for Coke is a Trade Secret"
;).
The formula for Coke is branding, marketing and distribution.
The "Trade Secret" part of it is a marketing gimmick. Just like KFC's "herbs and spices". There's lots of fried chicken out there that tastes better than KFC. I don't really like Coke much, but I'm sure there are lots of colas out there that people consider better than Coke.
You could try selling the identical recipe with a different label, and you'd do just about as well as some unknown brand.
Even if you get the actual recipe, Coca Cola could claim it was a decoy recipe, and the marketing gimmick would be preserved and you would still be "Just Another Cola".
As for the "actual recipe" itself, I've heard from many people that Coca Cola's Coke tastes different from country to country and even state to state. Most of USA uses corn syrup (except for special coke supposed for Jews during one of their festivals) and most other countries use cane sugar.
So much for the magical recipe. I bet the main ingredient Coca Cola cares about in their recipe is that it must be secret. That and maybe real vanilla? Or have they manage to switch away from that without people caring?
"Consider the alternative to patents and copyrights - trade secrets. Do you want closed systems that you can never hack? Never improve upon? Never reach the public domain?"
Never hack? You must be new here.
So far I've been on this website and I've seen lots of complicated closed systems that have been hacked.
If it weren't for copyright and patents they most certainly could be copied.
The Chinese can copy almost any stuff you sell that's worth copying.
If it's some military tech that's not available on the market, then sure that makes it harder for the Chinese etc to copy. But that sort of military top secret stuff is not going to be patented either, and so that's different.
"How do you protect a play, book or musical performance in the absence of copyright?"
You're really an attorney? Read my post again, I was talking about patents not copyrights.
Regarding copyright: copyright terms should be getting shorter and shorter, since the pace of progress is supposed to be getting faster and faster, and marketing and distribution is supposedly so much more efficient nowadays - complete a product today, and you can tell the world by tomorrow if you want.
In fact the marketing is so efficient that lots of companies even tell the world way before they have a product
That copyright terms are getting longer and longer should show you how broken things are.
Copyright terms should be not longer than 14 years, maybe even as short as 7 years.
Then Microsoft would really have to make something significantly better than Windows 2000. Instead of stuff like Vista.
If people cannot make money from their monopoly over their copyrighted work in 7 years, and instead need a 75 year monopoly, they should be doing something else to make money.
Giving such people 75 year monopolies just so they can profit is a misallocation of resources, poor economics and a disservice to society.
If it takes you 75 years to make enough money from your book, then I think you should stick to writing books as a hobby and do something else as a job.
(To be clear I believe filtering should still be done, I'm saying it isn't sufficient and things are getting harder)
Your suggestion works if you don't want to allow much user/3rd party HTML.
But it's not so simple for many sites - the more tags you allow, the more likely is you are going to forget something.
For example: Say you are a popular webmail provider and you want to allow your users to receive and view html webmail, or you are one of those "social" sites and you want to allow users to do fancier html stuff, and you want to allow multibyte, UTF etc. What would your filters look like now? There are lots of ways to sneak in "dynamic stuff".
See:
http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/malicious.yahooligans.pdf
http://namb.la/popular/tech.html
So if you want to allow _some_ HTML and you add stuff like multibyte/UTF and browsers behaving differently, it's not so simple to filter out the bad stuff anymore.
I think you'll see that my proposal provides an _easy_ _additional_ layer of protection.
I'm not saying don't do filtering, I'm saying we _also_ need a way to tell the browser that "between these two points behave like a dumb browser with a minimum set of features".
Browsers parse stuff differently, but if they have been told "disable javascript from now on", even if they have a buggy parsers and javascript sneaks through - it's off on the browser.
And what if the browser or W3C bunch unleash some new "HTML feature"? At least with my proposal, there's some chance of sites still being safe by default. It's not 100%, but brakes on a car aren't 100% either.
Lastly there are many other scenarios where you need to allow 3rd party HTML that you can't trust to be "safe" - e.g. ad content from partners.
Windshield wiper delay circuit. Oh my, what an innovation, NOT. 17 years monopoly for that? Fuck the patent system.
That's not innovation. That's "hmm I need to walk to X, looks like I should move one of my feet forward, WOW I just made an innovation".
Firstly patents aren't the same as copyrights (as someone has already told you).
Secondly, the patent system is so broken it isn't funny.
The geniuses who come up with real innovations are typically so far ahead of their time that people only "get it" years later. Way after the patents have expired, or at least near the expiry. Google for "Douglas Engelbart" and the "mother of all demos". Check out the _whole_ system they built 40 years ago, now that's what I call innovation. This is: "Hey guys let's walk to Y instead, and here's a whole system that can get us there".
Long terms would benefit the lame brains who come up with "one click" crap and think it's so innovative, and the patent office's overworked lame brains will just rubber stamp it.
There more lame brains than geniuses. So therefore the patent system as is will cause more harm than good.
Prizes for Innovation that are awarded in hindsight might be better. Get people to pay a fee to register their inventions to be eligible for the prizes, the registration helps in figuring out who was first which is quite important[1].
In my opinion it'll be more likely that lame brains in charge of awarding the prizes can figure out that something was innovative in _hingsight_ than lame brains in charge of reading a patent application can figure out whether the "invention" is innovative or not.
It is clear that patents as is are currently being used by companies as an anticompetitive tool, and they are not actually improving the pace of progress. They are in fact impeding progress in many cases.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobasys#Patent_dispute_with_Panasonic_EV_Energy
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINBNG11177720080630
Read the second link and simulate the likely future, guess what happens to the little guy?
Eventually you might have one patent, but for you to even move your little finger to implement it you would be infringing on thousands of patents owned by Allied Security Trust.
So guess what happens you try to do stuff and their lawyers meet your lawyers?
Or guess what some people might do instead: they don't actually implement stuff! Can't get sued that way. They sit and wait for the Allied Security Trust bunch to do stuff, and when the time is ripe they sue the relevant Allied Security Trust member and get $$$$$$$.
Tell me how this would improve the pace of progress and benefit society?
I'd take the rampant mutual copying ala China over this thank you very much.
I've got a Made in China 15g remote controlled heli that's rather cheap (about USD20 retail). Not amazingly innovative, but that's why it should be cheap, just the way I like it. Go figure out how many patents it infringes on from the infrared controller to the helicopter. It'll probably cost a fair bit to figure it out and you might never really be sure given how vague people write patent apps.
Yes inventors are going to cry that they aren't being rewarded, they're collateral damage. I will take great comfort in the _FACT_ that most of those "inventors" aren't real inventors and a great proportion of them are quacks who just think they're innovative. So only a very few will be hurt.
If my suggestion is done, some of those few might win a Prize for Innovation years later.
[1] A real inventor usually gets a fair bit of satisfaction from seeing his idea getting implemented, even if it's by others, AS LONG people know he was _first_. Sitting on it = not much satisfaction. In fact if lots of people implement his idea, that increases his odds of winning a Prize for Innovation (if his idea was indeed nonobvious and inventive).
What would be good is what I proposed _years_ ago:
http://osdir.com/ml/mozilla.security/2002-10/msg00029.html
Then even if someone manages to slip in javascript or other html naughties into an allowed content-type=text/html that's uploaded or emailed to the site, it still won't work on the target's browser.
(if the browser supports the feature, and the website encloses all stuff that _should_ be "plain old harmless stuff" with such tags).
Basically when the browser sees such tags, it will go "Ah, between these tags, I behave as a browser with the fancy stuff disabled". So java, activeX, javascript AND _NEW_STUFF_ that people think up that slips through the upload checks would still be disabled.
That's right, even fancy new stuff that people are thinking of, could be disabled without the website having to keep up with the latest and greatest way to pwn you that the browser or w3c have decided to bless the world with.
It's been 7 years already and everyone seems to be happy to create new "foot guns" for the world but nobody seems interested in making a "foot gun safety".
Huh. Magic databases are a contributor to the problem not the solution.
The problem is browsers are NOT respecting the mime type AND are using a "magic database" to decide whether something can be executed. It's not that relevant whether magic database is from the O/S or from the browser. The main issue is the browsers are NOT respecting the mime type.
With magic databases stuff that contains executable stuff can get executed no matter what it is called.
The way to protect against the "magic database" is to set permissions on the file to "not execute" (and even so might still work).
But currently the browser does not know what permissions are on a file that's downloaded (all it knows is it can read it). You are supposed to set the mime type, but seems the browsers aren't respecting that.
I have actually proposed something that could help against stuff like this AND other attacks, to both the browser people and the W3 bunch but they were NOT interested.
Example:
http://osdir.com/ml/mozilla.security/2002-10/msg00029.html
If they had implemented my suggestion years ago, the myspace worms and other similar worms would likely not have worked on browsers that supported the security feature - it would be trivial for the websites to restrict 3rd party stuff to allowed behaviours.
"That crazy amendment brought material that was in the public domain back into copyright!"
Now that is what I call stealing.
Anyway, if people think the pace of progress is getting faster and faster (or want it to be so), and that marketing and distribution is better than years ago, then it makes no sense that copyright terms should be getting longer and longer.
Logically they should be getting shorter and shorter.
Why they exist? It's part of the conditioning.
One reason why Blizzard might not like such bots is these bots could break Blizzard's control over players in Blizzard's "operant conditioning chamber"[1] aka "skinner box".
When a primate can get the reward without having to press your levers, you lose some control over that primate.
And if other primates are smart enough and see that primate getting the reward, they may choose to "cheat" the same way given that option or give up cooperating and not press the levers when they're expected to or even totally "not play the game" anymore.
That outcome might affect Blizzard's income ;).
But what do I know.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
Plenty I hope. WoW appears to have lots for max lev characters to do.
;).
Maybe some people find it fun to buy WoW stuff with USD.
Not so easy to buy skill at playing though
We call such characters Politicians around here.
You may only legally copy this post to the contents of your memory or distribute it to others, if you do whatever I command you to (in the future) and also send me 10% of your income every month in cash equivalent.
Oh yeah, and you must also howl at the full moon every month while standing on one leg in a public place.
And if you are someone who writes EULAs (or those stupid Corporate Email Signatures), please move to Sudan and eat sand for the rest of your hopefully short life.
"So I should go walk on the highway because I'm just as likely to die falling in my bathtub as I am by getting hit by a car? Give me a break"
;) ).
Give me a break. Who's forcing you to walk on the highway? The smokers? I don't think so. Without widespread bans, I've still been able to avoid smoke when I want to.
Here's a car analogy for you:
It's more like the right to drive a car, in places where driving is not necessary - in many countries this is true (in some countries most people are too poor to have cars).
Driving cars can be dangerous for people around them - kills thousands of people a year, it's bad for the environment.
If you ban cars, there would be fewer car accidents and fewer people killed. In fact many people might actually live a lot longer since they would be getting a lot more exercise every day.
Many people enjoy driving cars, and consider the risks and costs worth it.
Should we ban cars in countries where there's good public transport? Just because pedestrians who don't drive might get killed/maimed by cars?
To me it's all about actual risks.
The increased risk to a smoker is significant, but hey if they are an adult it's their choice and their life[1].
The increased risk to a nonsmoker is not very significant- given the fact that in most cases they can choose to go elsewhere. In places where it's not possible e.g. emergency room in hospital, sure ban smoking.
Tax places that allow smoking, let there be a choice for both smokers and nonsmokers. Nonsmokers can go elsewhere. And nonsmokers can benefit from the extra $$$.
Widespread smoking bans are just silly. They don't ban guns everywhere. Ban smoking at fuel pumps, and other places like that.
Now the other issue is when parents smoke and their children have to breathe in their smoke - their children don't have as much choice - they can't walk away. BUT it's their children, their responsibility. If you really want a super nanny state, you might as well have the state bring children up if their parents don't pass the requirements (e.g. smoke in the house, didn't pass Parenting 101, get drunk "too often", brainwash their kids in State disapproved ways, or to think the "wrong ways").
[1] Except if you're married. In my opinion if you marry, your spouse has say too (well I guess your spouse is going to "have say" whether you like it or not
Here's news for you: practically everybody dies whether they're a smoker or not, and whether they are exposed to tobacco smoke or not.
The top 3 likely ways to go (in no particular order): heart problem, stroke, cancer.
You cut your odds of getting heart disease and stroke, you increase your odds of getting cancer.
Doc sees you have bad lipid levels, so you go on those statin thingies and whoopee you don't die of a heart attack.
So guess what is likely to kill you eventually?
Either way, given modern medical tech, the odds of you getting something expensive to treat and very unpleasant are pretty high whether or not you get smoke in your lungs. They can often keep you alive till it becomes too expensive or too unpleasant to bear (and sometimes beyond that unfortunately).
I'm a nonsmoker myself, and don't like the smell of tobacco but I think having widespread smoking bans is going too far.
Just tax places that allow smoking more. If a pub wants to allow smoking, let it, but tax it more.
Then you get more "drug money" to spend on us nonsmokers (since nonsmokers tend to live longer ). And smokers grudgingly _accept_ being taxed and they put up with it - since it's considered a vice and it's addictive. Doesn't lose you huge amounts of votes.
Look at Japan - they have smokers everywhere smoking like chimneys and the Gov is worried that people aren't dropping dead fast enough aka "aging population", but at the same time is trying to get people to stop smoking (and recently made laws to get people to be slimmer). Strange.
"Why aren't the 'good cops' turning in their corrupt, violent and evil coworkers"
Because they are in the same family/gang/tribe.
Most people don't turn the bad people in their family unless something really drastic happens (like they kill people, and even then who knows).
When was the last time you turned in your coworker?
And if your boss and upper ranks are corrupt well good luck turning them in.
> 80% of the people won't bother - they go with the flow. If the flow is evil, they do evil. If the flow is good, they do good.
Only a few will have integrity and be good against the "flow"/norm. Even defying their bosses.
And there'll be the bad bunch who will be bad no matter what.
So you want a good "norm", you start with the people at the top who are responsible for setting the norms.
Cuil is not even as good as Yahoo's search or Microsoft's search.
Yahoo:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=aes+zip+linux
Microsoft:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=aes+zip+linux
These two are actually competitive in search quality nowadays and they still have trouble getting Google's share.
So what are the odds Cuil is going to get anywhere?
When Google first started, I recall they _were_ significantly better than their competitors (Altavista, Infoseek, hotbot etc).
Seriously what does Cuil do better for users than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?
It's still useful.
The enemy has to get many shots in the air at once (nearly), they can't just stay in one spot and keep pounding away - someone will be blasting at them soon.
Unless they also have one of these devices AND they've managed to get it to not shoot outgoing mortars, whilst shooting the incoming ones. Then it could get interesting - if your laser leaves, your artillery gets hit, but if the laser doesn't leave, eventually there may be too many mortars heading for the laser and it gets hit. So it's a race to get as many mortars heading to both targets.
"Last winter I dug my '91 Chrysler Daytona out of the snow (literally up to over a meter high) a few times "
:).
You left out "in a blizzard and you liked it"
"Even if you recover you may be brain damaged."
;).
Just make sure you don't recover then
"If you want to reduce your risk of dementia, the best advice is to simply live healthily"
:)
Really? I thought if you really want to reduce your risk of dementia, you have supersize McD meals for every meal every day.
>99% of people sticking to this diet plan will never get dementia or cancer.
It works even better with Bacon.
Mmmmm. Bacon.
Of course the side effects might be a showstopper for you.
Thing is, many people are not quite sure what happens after death.
If it just ends there, then sure there are far far worse things than death.
BUT if we have an immortal soul and we "kind of remain as we are", then eternity is a bit too long for an immortal but _imperfect_ person.
Hands up those of you who are perfect and can handle an eternity of existence.
Ebola doesn't scare me. Odds are you die in a few days. Painful sure. You'd probably hate it every moment, but I think the bright side is you know it'll be over _soon_.
Dementia is a pretty bad way to go. The end stage is probably not so bad for the person with it (just bad for everyone around who cares). But the months where you know you are malfunctioning bit by bit can be pretty depressing.
What scares me would be to not lose all my mental faculties but instead "just" be trapped without sight or sound or most of my other senses.
I believe a stroke could cause something like this.
Solitary confinement for the rest of my life. And modern medical technology could keep people alive for rather long.
Imagine that you are in darkness, you can't feel anything, you can't see anything, you can't hear anything, and this goes on, for not just for days. Worse of all you don't know how long it will go on for - it could go on for years.
I'll take ebola over that anytime.
On a related note - it's funny how so many people think that it would be great to be one of those Highlaner Immortals. It's all fun and games till one day you get stuck in a bad situation for "a long while".
The main problem is drivers might swerve to avoid hitting them and thus kill someone else. They should just brake in a straight line instead - better for overall safety, if it doesn't work, the bright side is the cyclist may never run a red light again.
Flying Kiwi with lasers.
He's from NZ after all.
Anyway it doesn't look very practical at all - the two guys hardly ever let go of the thing.
My estimates are a 380 pound crocodile can get by on about 1000 calories.
So maybe it's not impossible to do what you do, however it means your metabolism must be really efficient for a mammal.
But have you checked your calorie calculations? Or you're leaving something out - like drinks?
One of the things you might be able to do is to create fake records (don't forget which ones are fake!). Some should never appear on the internet, and some might appear, but you have special contact addresses, email, phone for the,
Then if the fake records ever show up on Google, or on one of those databases for sale or if someone/something ever tries to contact _your_ Mr Alan Adams (whether via phone, email or snail mail), you know you've got a problem.
You could have modified records - e.g. have a real person (you for instance) but special contact addresses instead. Or your contact addresses but different name or surname.
Of course, some applications/bosses might not like fake records or even slightly altered ones.