You're basically saying "because we couldn't get the public to agree with us, even using our best tape, it follows that the public is a bunch of idiots who'd rather follow baseball".
Newsflash: The fact that people don't agree with you doesn't make them stupid or lazy. It can, and often does, mean that the other side has a lot more merit than you think and that you haven't made your case as well as you think. The "Collateral Murder" video is not proof that your side is correct, and the fact that people don't take it as proof doesn't mean that there's something wrong with them.
This seems to be a favorite belief on the left: nobody can legitimately disagree with them. If you're not convinced by the left's overwhelming evidence, you have to be dumb, lazy, in someone's pay, willfully blind, anything except someone who disagrees for legitimate reasons. Perhaps they do, and the evidence just isn't as overwhelming as you think.
You can only make something open source if you own the rights to it or manage to get the appropriate rights to someone else. You can't make something open source if the intellectual property rights are owned by someone else.
So if, as claimed in the article, "haggling over the code's intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley", then he shouldn't be able to take it open source at all. (Unless it just means that he had the rights and was haggling over giving them up.)
Copying a game you own in order to run it on a different machine is fair use and doesn't require permission from anyone. The writers of this paper seem to take Nintendo's word as to what type of emulation is actually legal.
But then again, what do you expect from a paper that uses the term "128-bit system"?
A FPS figure is an average. If you get a very high number of FPS you may not be able to see it all the time, but it means that your FPS remains good in scenarios where the FPS goes below average.
Although it's phrased so as to sound nonpartisan, when you look at the examples of misinformation you'll see that they're all on the right politically. The article is yet another "my political opponents don't believe as they do because of arguments and evidence, like I do; instead, they oppose me because of some psychological reason", which is just an ad hominem attack.
The real reason why people don't change their beliefs upon seeing "corrections" is probably that they expect that any true correction will make its way around to more than one source and that a "correction" that they never heard before is inherently untrustworthy because that one person could have an agenda and be omitting, distorting, or misrepresenting in a way that isn't obvious unless you thoroughly check it out. People without the time to check it out themselves won't believe it until it's been seen by lots of others (under the assumption that some of them will have had the time to check it out, and would discover any problems).
The article tries to imply that because they quoted reliable sources like the FBI there should be no worry about them making up the facts. Obviously they couldn't be making up the specific numbers, but they could have been quoting out of context, omitting qualifiers, or otherwise lying with statistics even if it's literally true that the numbers themselves are being accurately quoted.
1) Since the code is created from the original 6502 code, it's a copyright violation unless you own a Commodore 64.
2) BASIC on the Commodore was pretty much ported from the PET and has minimal access to graphics and sound from BASIC, so just about any useful Commodore 64 BASIC program is going to be full of PEEKs, POKEs, and generally accessing things that aren't part of BASIC itself. There's no way that will work without emulating the entire machine. In other words, no C64 BASIC program that you'd actually want to run, even from a retrocomputing standpoint, will run on this.
Why should it make the least bit of difference that it's opt-in? It's only opt-in for the people who use the list, it's not opt-in for people targetted by the list.
Yeah, the targets of the list do seem to be spammers this time, but the guilty are given protections because that's the only way to protect the innocent as well. And I'd really hate to set a precedent of "the list owner isn't responsible because the list is opt-in" in order to catch spammers, and then discover that the same precedent applies when the person running the list is evil or thoughtless and starts spreading actual lies.
The cost of these printers is heavily subsidized (because they make their money on the ink), and by buying a new one each time you're also getting the benefit of new technology.
This is a bad idea. Manufacturers are perfectly capable of selling printers with half full cartridges to prevent this behavior from being economical.
I agree with you about drying up, though. That's a major benefit of laser printers. I used to have problems with ink drying or clogging constantly on inkjets until I got a Samsung CLP color laser.
If you read the article, it was Galileo who was persecuted. Copernicus wasn't persecuted; his ideas weren't called heretical until long after he died. He was buried as a normal person because he wasn't famous yet, not because the church forced him to be buried like that.
Besides that, I never understood the argument about "limited vocabulary" anyway. For instance, I'm sure the word "computer" appears a lot. Now, there are lots of synonyms for "computer" than can be used, and there are lots of flowery phrases that are possible. But we don't complain that someone has a "limited vocabulary" because he says "computer" instead of replacing the word with some kind of phrase that's more creative. Why should this be a legitimate complaint about swear words? Sure, they're not creative. Neither is calling your computer a computer or using the word "the" (one of the most unoriginal words in common use). Unless you're judging a creative writing competition, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
"It was demonstrated that penicillin could cure ulcers as early as 1955,"
No. Causation is not the same as correlation. Saying "someone took penicillin and his ulcer goes away" is not a demonstration that penicillin can cure ulcers, regardless of what incorrect summary is made in a Wikipedia article.
The bacteria causing ulcers idea has been distorted by the media. It was proven that bacteria caused ulcers, however:
1) There were in fact a lot of papers published on the subject. 2) Proving that an infectious agent causes a disease requires being able to reproduce the disease. This did not happen for a while. Even the scientist who experimented on himself didn't actually get an ulcer. 3) Many healthy people have the same bacteria but don't get ulcers. 4) The existing non-antibiotic treatments for ulcers did work. The antibiotics just prevented a relapse, and the correct treatment is to use both (i.e. not to avoid the existing anti-ulcer drugs) 5) The length of time it took for the medical community to accept the theory was reasonable, considering the steps you need to go through to prove it, the length of time required, and the research needed. Trials take time.
But it's poorly thought out and misses the main issue, despite using a lot of buzzwords. Its answer is basically that since buying lice only results in harm when they are used against someone, it should be okay to sell the lice and that nobody should be stopped unless they try to use them on another person.
That's sounds okay as a theory, but the fact is that pretty much the only use of buying lice is to hurt someone. Yeah, there may be one or two people who have some non-injurious purpose for buying lice, but that's a vanishingly small proportion of all the purchases (and doubly so when the site itself claims the lice are for revenge). Yet the free market solution is to just ignore that and allow that vanishingly small percentage to justify letting it be legal to sell lice.
If your free market theory can't handle the concept of "this product is almost always used to violate someone's rights, so we should crack down on it if we can, even though the person selling the product is not himself the one violating the rights", then the free market sucks and we need something else. And it doesn't apply to just selling lice, but to selling plague bacteria and lots of other things.
I played the first Pokemon game about a year ago (luckily the battery held out, since the game is pretty old). I'm an adult and I have some qualms about playing any more Pokemon after that. Not because Pokemon is kid stuff; the cartoon is kids' stuff but the games are more tolerable for all ages.
But because Pokemon so highly depends on looking up guidebooks, figuring out how to optimize your party with inadequate information, knowing things like that a particular Pokemon gets a particular attack at level 50, knowing intricacies about the level up system (did you know that your Pokemon gain stats differently depending on what they fight to level up?), etc. Later games get a lot worse, with things like rules for gaining attacks when breeding Pokemon, Pokemon that evolve under obscure circumstances you can't guess, or that only appear at certain times on the real time clock, etc.
In other words, it's complex. And complex, here, is bad. I can just imagine someone starting a newer game in this series and having to figure out "you get this Pokemon by fishing on one out of several hundred randomly chosen tiles, then find the right Pokemon, and feed it a particular stat increasing item many times while making sure it doesn't have the stat which makes the stat-increasing items useless, then let it evolve".
What gets me is no backups. I just saw this show up again the other day on Smallville; Chloe and Tess can escape a trap by freezing and shattering the walls but it destroys the computer data. Not if you have backups.
But what does that mean? He did other things, some of which were more clearly criminal. Fine. Was he found guilty of *only* those things, such that his trial can't be used as precedent in the way everyone's worried about? (putting us in jail for following established security procedures)
I'm reminded of the Lori Drew case. Lori Drew was a sleazebag and helped taunt an emotionally fragile girl to death. But they tried to punish her by using an interpretation of the law which would make everyone into criminals. This would have been extremely bad for all of us.
If you are having such serious problems with immigration, your quarrel is with Federal immigration law for having requirements that you can't reasonably satisfy, not with state law for enforcing Federal restrictions that already exist anyway.
I'm fairly sure that, having seen what the Mumbai slums look like, that they're about as awesome as being homeless.
Look at that little footnote indicated by the *. "Unless they are in poverty."
That's the footnote that swallows the rule. Mumbai slums are already being excluded.
Of course developing countries are great if you're not in poverty--the problem with developing countries is that there is a lot more poverty in the first place. And if you're not part of it, you can take advantage of it via cheap prices, cheap labor, etc.
It may not have occurred to you that some of us only do IT for out organizations part time, and visiting the blogs of every single open-source component on our servers is not always practical.
The issue has nothing to do with your servers, really; it has to do with their servers. If you're using a free service on someone else's servers, you really can't be surprised when that service suddenly stops functioning. It's not your equipment.
And I would wager that while visiting the blogs of everything on your servers isn't practical, visiting the blogs of (or subscribing to a mailing list, or other monitoring of) everything that's on your servers but uses someone else's servers is practical
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Not hard Googling up a refutation of the Taliban aid myth
You're basically saying "because we couldn't get the public to agree with us, even using our best tape, it follows that the public is a bunch of idiots who'd rather follow baseball".
Newsflash: The fact that people don't agree with you doesn't make them stupid or lazy. It can, and often does, mean that the other side has a lot more merit than you think and that you haven't made your case as well as you think. The "Collateral Murder" video is not proof that your side is correct, and the fact that people don't take it as proof doesn't mean that there's something wrong with them.
This seems to be a favorite belief on the left: nobody can legitimately disagree with them. If you're not convinced by the left's overwhelming evidence, you have to be dumb, lazy, in someone's pay, willfully blind, anything except someone who disagrees for legitimate reasons. Perhaps they do, and the evidence just isn't as overwhelming as you think.
(appropriate rights from someone else, that is.)
You can only make something open source if you own the rights to it or manage to get the appropriate rights to someone else. You can't make something open source if the intellectual property rights are owned by someone else.
So if, as claimed in the article, "haggling over the code's intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley", then he shouldn't be able to take it open source at all. (Unless it just means that he had the rights and was haggling over giving them up.)
Copying a game you own in order to run it on a different machine is fair use and doesn't require permission from anyone. The writers of this paper seem to take Nintendo's word as to what type of emulation is actually legal.
But then again, what do you expect from a paper that uses the term "128-bit system"?
A FPS figure is an average. If you get a very high number of FPS you may not be able to see it all the time, but it means that your FPS remains good in scenarios where the FPS goes below average.
Although it's phrased so as to sound nonpartisan, when you look at the examples of misinformation you'll see that they're all on the right politically. The article is yet another "my political opponents don't believe as they do because of arguments and evidence, like I do; instead, they oppose me because of some psychological reason", which is just an ad hominem attack.
The real reason why people don't change their beliefs upon seeing "corrections" is probably that they expect that any true correction will make its way around to more than one source and that a "correction" that they never heard before is inherently untrustworthy because that one person could have an agenda and be omitting, distorting, or misrepresenting in a way that isn't obvious unless you thoroughly check it out. People without the time to check it out themselves won't believe it until it's been seen by lots of others (under the assumption that some of them will have had the time to check it out, and would discover any problems).
The article tries to imply that because they quoted reliable sources like the FBI there should be no worry about them making up the facts. Obviously they couldn't be making up the specific numbers, but they could have been quoting out of context, omitting qualifiers, or otherwise lying with statistics even if it's literally true that the numbers themselves are being accurately quoted.
1) Since the code is created from the original 6502 code, it's a copyright violation unless you own a Commodore 64.
2) BASIC on the Commodore was pretty much ported from the PET and has minimal access to graphics and sound from BASIC, so just about any useful Commodore 64 BASIC program is going to be full of PEEKs, POKEs, and generally accessing things that aren't part of BASIC itself. There's no way that will work without emulating the entire machine. In other words, no C64 BASIC program that you'd actually want to run, even from a retrocomputing standpoint, will run on this.
Why should it make the least bit of difference that it's opt-in? It's only opt-in for the people who use the list, it's not opt-in for people targetted by the list.
Yeah, the targets of the list do seem to be spammers this time, but the guilty are given protections because that's the only way to protect the innocent as well. And I'd really hate to set a precedent of "the list owner isn't responsible because the list is opt-in" in order to catch spammers, and then discover that the same precedent applies when the person running the list is evil or thoughtless and starts spreading actual lies.
The cost of these printers is heavily subsidized (because they make their money on the ink), and by buying a new one each time you're also getting the benefit of new technology.
This is a bad idea. Manufacturers are perfectly capable of selling printers with half full cartridges to prevent this behavior from being economical.
I agree with you about drying up, though. That's a major benefit of laser printers. I used to have problems with ink drying or clogging constantly on inkjets until I got a Samsung CLP color laser.
If you read the article, it was Galileo who was persecuted. Copernicus wasn't persecuted; his ideas weren't called heretical until long after he died. He was buried as a normal person because he wasn't famous yet, not because the church forced him to be buried like that.
Besides that, I never understood the argument about "limited vocabulary" anyway. For instance, I'm sure the word "computer" appears a lot. Now, there are lots of synonyms for "computer" than can be used, and there are lots of flowery phrases that are possible. But we don't complain that someone has a "limited vocabulary" because he says "computer" instead of replacing the word with some kind of phrase that's more creative. Why should this be a legitimate complaint about swear words? Sure, they're not creative. Neither is calling your computer a computer or using the word "the" (one of the most unoriginal words in common use). Unless you're judging a creative writing competition, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
"It was demonstrated that penicillin could cure ulcers as early as 1955,"
No. Causation is not the same as correlation. Saying "someone took penicillin and his ulcer goes away" is not a demonstration that penicillin can cure ulcers, regardless of what incorrect summary is made in a Wikipedia article.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/bacteria_ulcers_and_ostracism_h._pylori_and_the_making_of_a_myth/
The bacteria causing ulcers idea has been distorted by the media. It was proven that bacteria caused ulcers, however:
1) There were in fact a lot of papers published on the subject.
2) Proving that an infectious agent causes a disease requires being able to reproduce the disease. This did not happen for a while. Even the scientist who experimented on himself didn't actually get an ulcer.
3) Many healthy people have the same bacteria but don't get ulcers.
4) The existing non-antibiotic treatments for ulcers did work. The antibiotics just prevented a relapse, and the correct treatment is to use both (i.e. not to avoid the existing anti-ulcer drugs)
5) The length of time it took for the medical community to accept the theory was reasonable, considering the steps you need to go through to prove it, the length of time required, and the research needed. Trials take time.
There wasn't any suppression.
But it's poorly thought out and misses the main issue, despite using a lot of buzzwords. Its answer is basically that since buying lice only results in harm when they are used against someone, it should be okay to sell the lice and that nobody should be stopped unless they try to use them on another person.
That's sounds okay as a theory, but the fact is that pretty much the only use of buying lice is to hurt someone. Yeah, there may be one or two people who have some non-injurious purpose for buying lice, but that's a vanishingly small proportion of all the purchases (and doubly so when the site itself claims the lice are for revenge). Yet the free market solution is to just ignore that and allow that vanishingly small percentage to justify letting it be legal to sell lice.
If your free market theory can't handle the concept of "this product is almost always used to violate someone's rights, so we should crack down on it if we can, even though the person selling the product is not himself the one violating the rights", then the free market sucks and we need something else. And it doesn't apply to just selling lice, but to selling plague bacteria and lots of other things.
I played the first Pokemon game about a year ago (luckily the battery held out, since the game is pretty old). I'm an adult and I have some qualms about playing any more Pokemon after that. Not because Pokemon is kid stuff; the cartoon is kids' stuff but the games are more tolerable for all ages.
But because Pokemon so highly depends on looking up guidebooks, figuring out how to optimize your party with inadequate information, knowing things like that a particular Pokemon gets a particular attack at level 50, knowing intricacies about the level up system (did you know that your Pokemon gain stats differently depending on what they fight to level up?), etc. Later games get a lot worse, with things like rules for gaining attacks when breeding Pokemon, Pokemon that evolve under obscure circumstances you can't guess, or that only appear at certain times on the real time clock, etc.
In other words, it's complex. And complex, here, is bad. I can just imagine someone starting a newer game in this series and having to figure out "you get this Pokemon by fishing on one out of several hundred randomly chosen tiles, then find the right Pokemon, and feed it a particular stat increasing item many times while making sure it doesn't have the stat which makes the stat-increasing items useless, then let it evolve".
What gets me is no backups. I just saw this show up again the other day on Smallville; Chloe and Tess can escape a trap by freezing and shattering the walls but it destroys the computer data. Not if you have backups.
But what does that mean? He did other things, some of which were more clearly criminal. Fine. Was he found guilty of *only* those things, such that his trial can't be used as precedent in the way everyone's worried about? (putting us in jail for following established security procedures)
I'm reminded of the Lori Drew case. Lori Drew was a sleazebag and helped taunt an emotionally fragile girl to death. But they tried to punish her by using an interpretation of the law which would make everyone into criminals. This would have been extremely bad for all of us.
I have a US drivers license, but that doesn't prove I'm here legally - after all my visa could have ran out.
Again, someone quoted the law above. The license is sufficient proof for the purposes of complying with this particular law.
Or rather, legal residency.
But driver's licenses prove only identity, not citizenship.
Someone quoted the law just a little bit above. For the purpose of this law, drivers licenses prove citizenship.
If you are having such serious problems with immigration, your quarrel is with Federal immigration law for having requirements that you can't reasonably satisfy, not with state law for enforcing Federal restrictions that already exist anyway.
I'm fairly sure that, having seen what the Mumbai slums look like, that they're about as awesome as being homeless.
Look at that little footnote indicated by the *. "Unless they are in poverty."
That's the footnote that swallows the rule. Mumbai slums are already being excluded.
Of course developing countries are great if you're not in poverty--the problem with developing countries is that there is a lot more poverty in the first place. And if you're not part of it, you can take advantage of it via cheap prices, cheap labor, etc.
In fact, keeping gays out of the prom (in public schools, not in private ones) has been illegal since 1980.
It may not have occurred to you that some of us only do IT for out organizations part time, and visiting the blogs of every single open-source component on our servers is not always practical.
The issue has nothing to do with your servers, really; it has to do with their servers. If you're using a free service on someone else's servers, you really can't be surprised when that service suddenly stops functioning. It's not your equipment.
And I would wager that while visiting the blogs of everything on your servers isn't practical, visiting the blogs of (or subscribing to a mailing list, or other monitoring of) everything that's on your servers but uses someone else's servers is practical