The reason for defining it as a body which orbits our sun is that the definition is basically a rule which states the reason why some astronomers don't want Pluto to be a planet, the "clearing the neighborhood" definition. It's impossible to tell whether something in another solar system has cleared the neighborhood of smaller objects (unless you travel there), so they had to exclude other solar systems to get the preferred definition in.
My personal definition of a planet would be "something big enough that scientifically interesting things on it happen that only happen on big objects". This would define Pluto as a planet, and probably not define most of the smaller Kuiper belt objects like Makemake as planets (Eris probably should be one).
First of all, the fallacy that you can refuse the vaccine. You can refuse to take the vaccine, but if you think that the vaccine's bad effects outweigh its good effects, you can't refuse the whole package consisting of both the good and bad effects. It's not possible to say "I'm refusing to improve my health with this vaccine, but I also refuse to cause the damage caused by Microsoft's support of patent laws". Of course, if it was possible to say that, then you should refuse, but it's not, and the damage becomes a sunk cost, which you should logically ignore at the point you're choosing to take the vaccine.
Second, the fact that Microsoft does things while harming others floods the market and keeps out other people who might do it without harming others. That printer which Microsoft helped bring to market wasn't really helped by Microsoft--if Microsoft hadn't been there, someone else would have done so without hurting people as much. You can't refuse to use the printer and un-flood the market so that you can buy a non-Microsoft-influenced printer--once again, you can only refuse the good parts, not refuse the entire bad deal (consisting of both good and bad parts).
Don't kid yourself. Piracy is an excuse. It's something that's prominently mentioned in press releases, but that doesn't make it any less of an excuse.
The main reason for this sort of DRM is to kill the used game market. Which it does. You can't sell games used because the recipient can't authenticate it, or at least can't get the "bonus" DLC for it. Each used game sold really is a lost sale for the company; however, writing a press release explaining how much money they lose from used games isn't going to sound very good, so they blame pirates.
Pointing out "the pirates probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, so you're not losing money, and this just makes it inconvenient for customers without stopping pirates anyway" is pointless, because the piracy is an excuse. They don't really care that it's useless against pirates.
Because this is a typical kdawson article, that in this case picked a New York Times article that was itself also clueless.
Most Holmes stories were published prior to 1923 and are in public domain in the US. The remaining stories are copyrighted, but if you don't use any elements from those copyrighted stories you should be fine, and since they are only a few at the end, it really isn't all that hard not to use anything from those stories. To say that Sherlock Holmes is copyrighted until 2023 is a little misleading--if you want to use material covering his entire Doyle career (his last Doyle story was 1927), then you have to wait until 2023, but you generally won't need to.
By this reasoning, any movie where a prophet actually performs miracles is also not related to real religions, because in the movie there are obvious miracles that can easily be seen even by unbelievers and in the real world miracles are always things which either happened a long time ago or are so vague that nobody can prove they exist.
The movie is aimed at, and probably written by, people who don't make fine distinctions between "supported by evidence" and "not supported by evidence" and easily interchange the two without realizing that that doesn't really make sense.
It's like the argument "the movie's actually pro-technology, see, they are all literally connected". That's true on a certain literal level, but what it really means is that the writers don't understand technology well enough to realize that their Gaia is a lot like things that humans make in big factories. It's still anti-technology, the fact that Gaia is portrayed as technology just makes into inconsistent, poorly-done anti-technology.
Replying to my own article because it's even worse than that, as said in a very interesting comment in the boingboing article: apparently 1) the person who started this whole thing sells copies of shows, and they're not all PD. 2) she's a fan who's using this as an excuse to expand her collection. 3) her claim that she was "overseeing the color specials transfer" seems to be a lie. 4) CBS is willing to license these episodes out; they did not, as falsely claimed, say that it would be too much trouble even if they could iron out the legal issues 5) the episodes are not some unique thing that only CBS has copies of
CBS claims that there could be music clearance problems--which is an entirely legitimate possibility. The episodes are probably public domain because when they were made copyrights had to be renewed and there's little chance they were renewed. But if the music came from any outside source, it's quite possible that they *did* renew it, leaving the music in copyright today--and leaving CBS liable for serious damages in court if they just give the episodes to some fans to copy. Blame the copyright system, but do not blame CBS.
I have yet to see a hardware player that plays Xvid 3 warp point GMC.
Exactly what 3 warp point GMC is is unimportant, except that divx doesn't have it and it takes a lot of CPU to decode by hardware player standards (it's nothing for a PC, of course), and lots of anime fansubs use that format.
So far the only "hardware" solution I know of to play these is to use a game console--a hacked Xbox or Wii with an open source player will do it, and I assume the standard players for PS3 or Xbox 360 will do it (never tried one).
What does choosing him leader have to do with it? It's a homegrown dictator, the Dalai Lama, versus a non-homegrown dictator, China. There's no choosing leaders in either version. The Dalai Lama talks about democracy a lot, but wanting anything resembling the pre-China government under other Dalai Lamas is not wanting democracy.
I'll have to go with Javascript. Along with some HTML, which isn't a language, but works with Javascript and introduces the concept of having computers follow instructions. Of course I'm by no means the first person to suggest it, but it does have some attractions for a beginner:
-- language is actually used nowadays (you'd think this is an easy criterion, but people suggesting Logo or ancient home computers because that's what they programmed on 20 years ago fail at this one) -- no compiling needed -- you already have something that runs it -- results immediately obvious, does things that are immediately useful, even to a 12 year old -- existing body of programs all over the place that you can examine for yourself (just look in a bunch of web pages and you'll eventually find something)
I would watch out, however, for trying to push programming in any language on someone who it isn't right for. Not all people can, want to, or need to, program, and I see an undercurrent of "of course he's going to program" in the original article. You can't push your little brother into programming unless he wants to.
I don't think they're just excuses, but they aren't independent of it, either. Most people have several goals and can approve of things for more than one reason, and to different degrees.
Besides, wanting to do things because of environmentalism can cause as much bias as wanting to do it because of taxes and regulation. A leftist claiming that he wants to stop global warming, but who suggests methods that just happen to match environmentalism, while conspicuously omitting methods that do not (like nuclear power) still has a conflict of interest.
Here's another spin on that: the idea of taking huge measures to stop climate change comes mostly from the left. Since it comes from the left, it becomes suspicious when the suggested measures happen to match the policy goals of the left.
If the measures we are supposed to take include things which don't match left-wing policies, it's more likely that the claims are genuine, because there's much less of a motive to exaggerate or be overconfident (or to distort or lie).
You can bet that if a left-winger says that global warming is so bad that he wants nuclear power, he's sincere about it. If he says that global warming is so bad that he wants taxes and regulation, he could be sincere, but might be using the global warming as an excuse, since he wants those things anyway.
It's a type of conflict of interest. People are more trustworthy when they say you should do things that don't match their other goals, than when they say you should do things that do. It's really not surprising.
Come on, now. Einstein did claim to believe in something called God, but this God was just about nothing like the God that Christians call God. Einstein's God was an unknowable mystical being who did not answer prayers, give out commandments, punish sins or define morality, send people to Hell, or affect anyone personally. If you stood up in church and said "yeah, I believe in God, but he doesn't punish sins or answer prayers, he never wrote any holy books, and there's no such thing as salvation", you'd be considered an atheist, even if you didn't use the word yourself and even if you technically still believe in God.
And it didn't affect his ability to do critical thinking (much) because this God doesn't say or do anything. If God doesn't say or do anything, there's not much room for him to get in the way of critical thinking.
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
I haven't yet seen a comment pointing this out, but laptops can be searched at the border without suspicion. They can just copy everything off your laptop and keep it. Homeland Security made some new rules in August when enough bigwigs complained about it, but it's still possible. The UK border officials can also do it. They only search relatively few of them, but there's a small chance the government will just take all your private information off your laptop.
And I don't know if anyone's ever been prosecuted for illegal music or video downloads on a border laptop, but personally I wouldn't risk it if I had any.
If the 5400 rpm hard drive came with a license saying you could return it for a refund, I darn well would expect to be able to unbundle the hard drive.
And no, you can't petition manufacturers to offer laptops without Windows. The manufacturer still has to pay for Windows even when they don't provide it, so they can't charge you less for such a laptop.
The people demanding refunds know very well that Windows has a EULA. The EULA doesn't say that you can only return it for a refund if you haven't heard of it. You're supposed to return it for a refund if you refuse to accept the terms, and it's entirely possible to know about it and still not want to accept the terms.
"If there's enough demand, large manufacturers will start offering fairly priced OS-free computers again in the consumer retail environment."
No, because Microsoft doesn't allow it. If the computer doesn't have an OS on it, the manufacturer still has to pay for Windows for that computer--that's how the licensing deal with Microsoft works. So the manufacturer doesm't have a lower cost for the Windows-free computer, and therefore can't charge less (without losing money).
Or to put it another way: suppose the consumer returned the entire computer. Should he be only given the wholesale price of the entire computer back? Or should he get what he paid for it?
Obviously he should get what he paid for it. Returning a component of the computer should work similarly. Just because the retail-price-as-a-component of Windows is hidden within the price of the whole thing doesn't make it equal to the wholesale price. If the components of the computer cost $500 wholesale and he paid $1000, he should also get twice the wholesale price of Windows if he returns it.
Why should they be given the wholesale price anyway? The markup the consumer pays is evenly divided among all parts of the computer; if the consumer gets a refund on any particular part, he should get a refund with the post-markup price.
The original article has this, posted four hours before the above comment:
Part of the treatment that a psychiatrist suggests to their patients, besides their antidepressants, is to engage in social activities outside the home. They also say that staying cooped up at home and failing to get out can lead to a relapse and readmission to hospital. The Insurance company is not licensed to practice medicine, only to read a doctor's diagnosis and pay what's due. Her lawyer should pursue this.
The "Conflict Petroleum Trade Act". Prohibits us from buying oil from countries with repeated human rights violations. Saudi Arabia should really like this one. It'll never happen, of course.
Oh, please. A minute with the Internet shows that Norway has a VAT of 25 percent (sales taxes in the US rarely break single digits, and a VAT taxes services as well), and a wealth tax (which would be considered bizarre in the US). Of course you've got free education; you pay through the nose for it in taxes much worse than the $400 that's in question here.
I don't see why not. You're refusing to play the Steam games because of the DRM. The indy game is probably sold over the developer's website and has at worst a single activation and doesn't prevent you from transferring it to a friend--no worse than the DRM on an Xbox 360 game. Why not play it.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason for defining it as a body which orbits our sun is that the definition is basically a rule which states the reason why some astronomers don't want Pluto to be a planet, the "clearing the neighborhood" definition. It's impossible to tell whether something in another solar system has cleared the neighborhood of smaller objects (unless you travel there), so they had to exclude other solar systems to get the preferred definition in.
My personal definition of a planet would be "something big enough that scientifically interesting things on it happen that only happen on big objects". This would define Pluto as a planet, and probably not define most of the smaller Kuiper belt objects like Makemake as planets (Eris probably should be one).
You are basing this on several fallacies.
First of all, the fallacy that you can refuse the vaccine. You can refuse to take the vaccine, but if you think that the vaccine's bad effects outweigh its good effects, you can't refuse the whole package consisting of both the good and bad effects. It's not possible to say "I'm refusing to improve my health with this vaccine, but I also refuse to cause the damage caused by Microsoft's support of patent laws". Of course, if it was possible to say that, then you should refuse, but it's not, and the damage becomes a sunk cost, which you should logically ignore at the point you're choosing to take the vaccine.
Second, the fact that Microsoft does things while harming others floods the market and keeps out other people who might do it without harming others. That printer which Microsoft helped bring to market wasn't really helped by Microsoft--if Microsoft hadn't been there, someone else would have done so without hurting people as much. You can't refuse to use the printer and un-flood the market so that you can buy a non-Microsoft-influenced printer--once again, you can only refuse the good parts, not refuse the entire bad deal (consisting of both good and bad parts).
Don't kid yourself. Piracy is an excuse. It's something that's prominently mentioned in press releases, but that doesn't make it any less of an excuse.
The main reason for this sort of DRM is to kill the used game market. Which it does. You can't sell games used because the recipient can't authenticate it, or at least can't get the "bonus" DLC for it. Each used game sold really is a lost sale for the company; however, writing a press release explaining how much money they lose from used games isn't going to sound very good, so they blame pirates.
Pointing out "the pirates probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, so you're not losing money, and this just makes it inconvenient for customers without stopping pirates anyway" is pointless, because the piracy is an excuse. They don't really care that it's useless against pirates.
Because this is a typical kdawson article, that in this case picked a New York Times article that was itself also clueless.
Most Holmes stories were published prior to 1923 and are in public domain in the US. The remaining stories are copyrighted, but if you don't use any elements from those copyrighted stories you should be fine, and since they are only a few at the end, it really isn't all that hard not to use anything from those stories. To say that Sherlock Holmes is copyrighted until 2023 is a little misleading--if you want to use material covering his entire Doyle career (his last Doyle story was 1927), then you have to wait until 2023, but you generally won't need to.
By this reasoning, any movie where a prophet actually performs miracles is also not related to real religions, because in the movie there are obvious miracles that can easily be seen even by unbelievers and in the real world miracles are always things which either happened a long time ago or are so vague that nobody can prove they exist.
The movie is aimed at, and probably written by, people who don't make fine distinctions between "supported by evidence" and "not supported by evidence" and easily interchange the two without realizing that that doesn't really make sense.
It's like the argument "the movie's actually pro-technology, see, they are all literally connected". That's true on a certain literal level, but what it really means is that the writers don't understand technology well enough to realize that their Gaia is a lot like things that humans make in big factories. It's still anti-technology, the fact that Gaia is portrayed as technology just makes into inconsistent, poorly-done anti-technology.
Replying to my own article because it's even worse than that, as said in a very interesting comment in the boingboing article: apparently
1) the person who started this whole thing sells copies of shows, and they're not all PD.
2) she's a fan who's using this as an excuse to expand her collection.
3) her claim that she was "overseeing the color specials transfer" seems to be a lie.
4) CBS is willing to license these episodes out; they did not, as falsely claimed, say that it would be too much trouble even if they could iron out the legal issues
5) the episodes are not some unique thing that only CBS has copies of
CBS claims that there could be music clearance problems--which is an entirely legitimate possibility. The episodes are probably public domain because when they were made copyrights had to be renewed and there's little chance they were renewed. But if the music came from any outside source, it's quite possible that they *did* renew it, leaving the music in copyright today--and leaving CBS liable for serious damages in court if they just give the episodes to some fans to copy. Blame the copyright system, but do not blame CBS.
I have yet to see a hardware player that plays Xvid 3 warp point GMC.
Exactly what 3 warp point GMC is is unimportant, except that divx doesn't have it and it takes a lot of CPU to decode by hardware player standards (it's nothing for a PC, of course), and lots of anime fansubs use that format.
So far the only "hardware" solution I know of to play these is to use a game console--a hacked Xbox or Wii with an open source player will do it, and I assume the standard players for PS3 or Xbox 360 will do it (never tried one).
What does choosing him leader have to do with it? It's a homegrown dictator, the Dalai Lama, versus a non-homegrown dictator, China. There's no choosing leaders in either version. The Dalai Lama talks about democracy a lot, but wanting anything resembling the pre-China government under other Dalai Lamas is not wanting democracy.
I'll have to go with Javascript. Along with some HTML, which isn't a language, but works with Javascript and introduces the concept of having computers follow instructions. Of course I'm by no means the first person to suggest it, but it does have some attractions for a beginner:
-- language is actually used nowadays (you'd think this is an easy criterion, but people suggesting Logo or ancient home computers because that's what they programmed on 20 years ago fail at this one)
-- no compiling needed
-- you already have something that runs it
-- results immediately obvious, does things that are immediately useful, even to a 12 year old
-- existing body of programs all over the place that you can examine for yourself (just look in a bunch of web pages and you'll eventually find something)
I would watch out, however, for trying to push programming in any language on someone who it isn't right for. Not all people can, want to, or need to, program, and I see an undercurrent of "of course he's going to program" in the original article. You can't push your little brother into programming unless he wants to.
I'd rather work for a bad employer than not be able to eat and pay rent.
I don't think they're just excuses, but they aren't independent of it, either. Most people have several goals and can approve of things for more than one reason, and to different degrees.
Besides, wanting to do things because of environmentalism can cause as much bias as wanting to do it because of taxes and regulation. A leftist claiming that he wants to stop global warming, but who suggests methods that just happen to match environmentalism, while conspicuously omitting methods that do not (like nuclear power) still has a conflict of interest.
Here's another spin on that: the idea of taking huge measures to stop climate change comes mostly from the left. Since it comes from the left, it becomes suspicious when the suggested measures happen to match the policy goals of the left.
If the measures we are supposed to take include things which don't match left-wing policies, it's more likely that the claims are genuine, because there's much less of a motive to exaggerate or be overconfident (or to distort or lie).
You can bet that if a left-winger says that global warming is so bad that he wants nuclear power, he's sincere about it. If he says that global warming is so bad that he wants taxes and regulation, he could be sincere, but might be using the global warming as an excuse, since he wants those things anyway.
It's a type of conflict of interest. People are more trustworthy when they say you should do things that don't match their other goals, than when they say you should do things that do. It's really not surprising.
Come on, now. Einstein did claim to believe in something called God, but this God was just about nothing like the God that Christians call God. Einstein's God was an unknowable mystical being who did not answer prayers, give out commandments, punish sins or define morality, send people to Hell, or affect anyone personally. If you stood up in church and said "yeah, I believe in God, but he doesn't punish sins or answer prayers, he never wrote any holy books, and there's no such thing as salvation", you'd be considered an atheist, even if you didn't use the word yourself and even if you technically still believe in God.
And it didn't affect his ability to do critical thinking (much) because this God doesn't say or do anything. If God doesn't say or do anything, there's not much room for him to get in the way of critical thinking.
I don't have time to look all of these up, but you can try this quote on for size:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
I haven't yet seen a comment pointing this out, but laptops can be searched at the border without suspicion. They can just copy everything off your laptop and keep it. Homeland Security made some new rules in August when enough bigwigs complained about it, but it's still possible. The UK border officials can also do it. They only search relatively few of them, but there's a small chance the government will just take all your private information off your laptop.
And I don't know if anyone's ever been prosecuted for illegal music or video downloads on a border laptop, but personally I wouldn't risk it if I had any.
If the 5400 rpm hard drive came with a license saying you could return it for a refund, I darn well would expect to be able to unbundle the hard drive.
And no, you can't petition manufacturers to offer laptops without Windows. The manufacturer still has to pay for Windows even when they don't provide it, so they can't charge you less for such a laptop.
"1) has no idea that Windows has a EULA"
The people demanding refunds know very well that Windows has a EULA. The EULA doesn't say that you can only return it for a refund if you haven't heard of it. You're supposed to return it for a refund if you refuse to accept the terms, and it's entirely possible to know about it and still not want to accept the terms.
"If there's enough demand, large manufacturers will start offering fairly priced OS-free computers again in the consumer retail environment."
No, because Microsoft doesn't allow it. If the computer doesn't have an OS on it, the manufacturer still has to pay for Windows for that computer--that's how the licensing deal with Microsoft works. So the manufacturer doesm't have a lower cost for the Windows-free computer, and therefore can't charge less (without losing money).
Or to put it another way: suppose the consumer returned the entire computer. Should he be only given the wholesale price of the entire computer back? Or should he get what he paid for it?
Obviously he should get what he paid for it. Returning a component of the computer should work similarly. Just because the retail-price-as-a-component of Windows is hidden within the price of the whole thing doesn't make it equal to the wholesale price. If the components of the computer cost $500 wholesale and he paid $1000, he should also get twice the wholesale price of Windows if he returns it.
Why should they be given the wholesale price anyway? The markup the consumer pays is evenly divided among all parts of the computer; if the consumer gets a refund on any particular part, he should get a refund with the post-markup price.
The original article has this, posted four hours before the above comment:
Part of the treatment that a psychiatrist suggests to their patients, besides their antidepressants, is to engage in social activities outside the home. They also say that staying cooped up at home and failing to get out can lead to a relapse and readmission to hospital. The Insurance company is not licensed to practice medicine, only to read a doctor's diagnosis and pay what's due. Her lawyer should pursue this.
The "Conflict Petroleum Trade Act". Prohibits us from buying oil from countries with repeated human rights violations. Saudi Arabia should really like this one. It'll never happen, of course.
Oh, please. A minute with the Internet shows that Norway has a VAT of 25 percent (sales taxes in the US rarely break single digits, and a VAT taxes services as well), and a wealth tax (which would be considered bizarre in the US). Of course you've got free education; you pay through the nose for it in taxes much worse than the $400 that's in question here.
I don't see why not. You're refusing to play the Steam games because of the DRM. The indy game is probably sold over the developer's website and has at worst a single activation and doesn't prevent you from transferring it to a friend--no worse than the DRM on an Xbox 360 game. Why not play it.