I suggest you look at the issue more closely. Doctow who was only one of many that was destroyed in this fashion.
If you want another historical instance of how keeping all the eggs in one basket is bad, look at the ancient library of alexandria. The only books to survive the fire were either in the sub basement, or "pirated" by arabian scholars.
We owe much of our knowledge of antiquity to ancient "software pirates."
For a stellat example, look at the systematic destruction of works by the BBC from the 60s and 70s.
There were over 200 episodes of Dr Who alone (there were many other series besides that one in the burn bin) that were destroyed without backup copies, because the bbc did not have room to store them, and because the copyright licensing of those episodes required outside stations and studios to return *all* copies sent to them.
Currently, only 20 or so episodes remain totally MIA from the first doctor series, due almost exclusively to painstaking reconstruction from poor quality pirate recordings collected by the viewing public when the series ran.
The only reason approx 180 of the 200 were recovered, was BECAUSE of "piracy".
Something to consider, given the cultural impact of that series in the UK, as well as in other countries.
If nothing else, rampant piracy protects popular and influential works from willful destruction, by massively replicating the number of copies. This alone is reason to support personal use piracy.
The premise is faulted though. It implies that god created evil to be malevolent, rather than instructional.
Eg, is a parent allowing little timmy's fish to die because little timmy refuses to take care of it being willfully evil, or is the parent using the unfortunate circumstance to teach a lesson?
The parent is able, but unwilling to save the fish. By the pronouncement of the rhetoric, this makes the parent evil. However, should the parent intercede, the child learns nothing, and continues to disregard the fish selfishly. Having never learned the lesson, he is worse off for it.
The argument is fundementally faulted, because it presumes the only way for god to be loving and benevolent is by kissing humanity's hairy ape asses 24/7, and bailing them out of the consequences of their actions. It smacks of having been made by a rhetorical philosopher who had never really read the body of work he was criticizing.
The stated purpose for god's creation of mankind, was because god was lonely. God made humans with the intention of elevating them to his own level eventually. ("We shall know him, for we shall be like him.", etc.) This means humans need to be accountable for the things they do.
The bible says that the rain (metaphorical for hardship) falls on the wicked and the righteous alike. This is because ours is a world of consequences. Our actions impact others, whether we know it or not. The purpose of allowing people to be evil, is so that others, if not ther evil person themselves, see plainly and clearly that such things are wasteful and destructive, and to be avoided. This is precisely the reason why humans have free will.
Special note: I am agnostic, but I feel a literary critique requires the literary work to have been read first.
However, with religious groups they make assertions without any form of evidence. (Or at least any that is not distinguishable from random or natural mundane occurances.)
Thus they are making an outstanding claim, and need outstanding evidence.
Scientifically motivated cryptozoologists are not making such outstanding claims. (Despite the noise from the crackpots, they do not assert that bigfoot can become invisible, for instance.) They instead propose the possible existence of a mundane creature that could meet the physical description of such. To this end, they collect data as best they can. Eg, photographing grass nests, broken limbs, piles of leaves, tufts of hait caught in branches, and casts of footprints.
Unlike the religious argumenter, who can only rely on circular logic and assertions (god is infallable, because the bible says so\the bible is totally accurate because it came from god), the scientist studying cryptids collects and evaluated physical pieces of evidence.
The argument really then becomes one of how much evidence, and of what kinds are necessary to have the existence of a creature validated. (This is due to clever hoaxes like piltdown man and friends, and is perfectly reasonable. However, total dismissal of all collected data due to not meeting those requirements would be like shutting down the LHC because you didn't find the higgs straight away. Instead, the correct opinion to hold is more in line with "it hasn't been found, but there is some evidence to suggest it will be if we keep looking." Much like the data collected for null results at cern are useful in unexpected ways, a thurough investigation, conducted seriously while looking for a cryptid could reveal something previously unknown about the area, even if said cryptid is not found. This is why that kind of expedition is not a total waste.)
This is radically different from the religious debate, which does not present evidence, because the divine is axiomatically unknowable, and never leaves any.
This is a case of apples vs oranges. The only similarities are that they are round, and are fruit.
It lives very deep in the ocean, where no sunlight reaches. This is presumed to have little if any nutritional sources, so a squid that size, living that deep, annot exist. It would starve to death.
This was before the invention of reliable submersables that could go that deep, which discovered a wide abundance of chemotrophic lifeforms near deep ocean hotspots.
Then, as you pointed out:
Ok, so maybe a squid could still eat and live that deep, but how do we know that this isn't just a very large version, or even if squid even CAN get that big? We are talking 100 meters long here.
Serendipidy provided the solution, by the capture of such a squid in a japanese fisherman's deep ocean drag net. Genetic testing showed it was indeed a previously unkmown species.
We only know this now, because happenstance managed to get one snared in a fishing net, while nobody was actively looking.
As for them attacking fishing boats- many animals tend to react negatively to being ensnared. A tiny traditional wooden fishing boat lacks the necessary displacement to pull one in. Should one have been so ensnared, what do you think would have happened?
We now know that giant squid mostly eat fish and some whales when they get large enough, and know that they are mostly docile creatures. I would chalk up the "attacks fishing boats" part of the story as being observer bias, as the observers in question were japanese fishermen, using nets and ensnaring such creatures.
When the only times you observe something is during exceptional circumstances, you report that it appears under such circumstances. This does not mean that the reported circumstances are common, or characteristic of what you are observing.
I believe I already pointed out that scientists look for mundane things. "Bigfoot", the cultural and mythical creature is not a mundane creature.
A hypothetical large ape meeting the physical description of "bigfoot" is a mundane creature. You can conduct experiments and create hypotheses of the latter. That makes it the pervue of science, even if you don't like it.
Scientists also research how having to pee effects judgement. An ignobel was awarded on that very topic. Simply because something is silly, does not make it stop being science.
Reported well before 1600 by japanese fishermen, with eyewitness accounts of them attacking fishing boats.
Western science, for hundreds of years, insisted such a fanciful creature not only didn't exist, but also couldn't exist.
The terms you cite were created in 1983, as you state. However, the Giant Squid was not a scientifically proven species until the 1990s, a full decade later.
The difference between a cryptid and a known species is that somebody managed to snag a living sample of the latter. Unless people actually look for those animals, that is very unlikely to happen.
As such, people who genuinely look for such animals to further scientific knowledge and to abolish ignorance are indeed scientists, if they follow the scientific method to do so.
Blandly asserting a negative without evidence is contrary to the scientific method, and therefor not science: In order to conduct science, one must be actively observing, and making testable hypotheses based on those observations; a bland assertion accomplishes neigther.
Now that I can relate to, but that is also linguistic pedantry.
The fundemental logic still does not hold:
All cryptozologists study cryptids. All cryptozologists are crackpots. Therefor anyone who studies cryptids is a crackpot.
The logic is clearly faulted, when we substitute a few terms.
All snails are gastropods. All snails have shells. Therefor all gastropods have shells.
This is patently untrue, as there are many species of gastropod that do not have shells. (Slugs for instance.)
All you have managed to assert is that a legitimate researcher interested in cryptids cannot be a cryptozoologist. There is not causal link to crackpottery evidenced.
The reason I used the term "cryptozoologist", is because it literally means "a person who studies hidden\unknown animals."
This is why I pointed out that the term has been malapropriated by crackpots, to disambiguate the term.
As examples of "former" cryptids discovered through such work, you have the lowland gorilla, and the orangutan.
So, I don't see how the point I made previously is invalidated by your statement.
This is a cryptid, since has not yet been officially "discovered", but is widely reported, leaves footprints and nests, and has a sensible basis for existence.
My non-grid computer is a 200$ netbook powered directly to the power port (screw that wasteful wallwart!) Using ceramic encased thermocouples, driven in the back yard with my post driver!
My computer will still be up and running long after you have deforested your environment, you polluting imperialist!
Many people think the search for cryptids is a waste of time, and not an area where any serious discoveries could be made, due to the large number of very unscientific crackpots.
The alarming number of such crackpots claiming to be cryptozoologists casts a very thick layer of tarnish on the more sincere and truly scientific in that speciality, but the assertion that nothing good can come from those few, due to the noise in the channel from the many, is not a sound assertion, and is a guilt by association rhetorical fallcy.
Other people will assert that any large macrofauna like "sasquatch", or "yeti" would surely have been discovered by now, but that is also an erroneous assertion. (Not that far removed from the false assertions made by several prominent politicians concerning the closure of patent offices during the 1900s, basing such rhetoric on the assertion that "everything worthy of a patent has already been invented." History clearly shows this is not the case.)
If these are *real* scientists looking for evidence of a cryptid, then I wish them well, and hope they find something. The methods they report in their field journals will surely be useful, even with a null result.
If however, this is just a bunch of poorly trained "enthusiasts" claiming to be crytpozoologists, but lacking any measure of proper scientific method, then this expidition is a colossal waste, and I hope they get frostbite of the penis for wasting resources and time.
Wafflecones (iirc, invented at a world's fair) Hamburgers (same as above) French toast (invented at a bed and breakfast, and was originally "French's toast", after the proprietor of the establishment.) Potato chips/crisps (reportedly invented by a chef at a restaurant in the UK, after a patron demanded impossibly thin chips.)
The logical thing to do then, is to look and see how patent law has changed since that period, with emphasis on the impacts of said changes.
It is my understanding that patents were originally for implementations, and that this required physical objects. Admittedly, this was before software created a new class of ephemeral machine, which does a task, but has no physical basis except as a flow of electrons.
This limitation was challenged in the 1900s with the invention of the steam engine. Broad patent classes for "steam engine" were covered by the patent, regardless of the implementation specifics, which resulted in a similarly dismal regression of the rate of innovation in that new technology.
With the (widespread) invention of computer software in the late 60s and early 70s, patent law had to cope with this new class of invention (the spreadsheet was indeed a novel invention that changed the world) and as a consequence of the ephemeral nature of such invention, patents for such things are vague descriptions, and not specific implementations.
Due to international treaties in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, patent law has been further changed incrementally to ratify the terms of such treaties, with the consequences of these treaties being increasing levels of innovative regression, and increasing levels of stagnation.
This could be resolved by forcing software patents to implement language neutral logic charts of the software and components with the patent application, and to stop issuing patents to classes of inventions, and only to specific implementations.
The added costs of producing such charts for most modern pieces of software would make it more difficult to file such an application, and with many legal firms charging fees based on a per sheet rate, this would drastically reduce financial incentive to blanketbomb patent requests for frivelous software constructs.
If this was coupled with a "no sale" doctrine of patents exchange (where patents can only exchange hands through either a full merger, company split, or hostile buyout, but NEVER through a cash or barter transaction in which both parties continue to operate independently) it would neatly clean up a great deal of the problems of the current system.
1) limit patent sale. (Patents that change hands are patents that no longer protect inventers.)
2) provide a whole new class of not for profit "academic" innovator, with legal immunity to patent law. (The research scientist studying $PatentedTechnology, doing such study for non-profit purposes, and with no intent to sell or produce a product of any kind other than the research itself.) This class of researcher would instantly win by default in patent litigation, unless intent to produce products could be demonstrated.
Even with ludicrous patents being granted, the limitation of resale of such, and the instant immunity to researchers would greatly help in disarming the thermonuclear patent war arms race.
Ms claims they diabled the start menu because nobody uses it. To validate this statement, they give a nonsense statistic about a tangental feature of the start menu being rarely used. This means that their logic for disabling the start menu asserts the only use of the start menu was to view documents and images, otherwise the argument does not follow.
For the win8 afflicted though, there is hope. There is a DWORD named RPEnabled in
That controls the activation of Metro. Setting it to "1" enables Metro. Setting it to "0" disables Metro.
A curious bit of trivia to liven up discussion:
Setting RPEnabled to 0 turns on additional scare text on the win8 developer preview, which threatens job termination for unauthorized distribution and leaking.
10 guesses what the MS developers keep this key set to.
This is a fundemental problem, often erroneously addressed as an education problem.
Hear me out here:
The training an engineer gets revolves around already known points of data. Things like the shear of a sheet of 2025, or the total energy in 1 liter of octane, etc. This is what an education gets you.
Using this already known information to produce provably airworthy craft with minimal risks and unknowns is the staple of commercial avionics.
The application of what is already known, to devise new and untested approaches to old problems (and as such, the extension of knowledge) has 2 homes: the high priced university, which has a financial motive to patent encumber all new knowledge to improve their financial standing, and the garage tinkerer, who has to operate under the sword of damoclese held aloft by established commerical and government interests.
Sending kids to school to become engineers will greatly increase your engineering talent pool, but that alone will not propell you to the forefront of innovation. Trained is not the same as inspired.
The reason why the US is stagnating on the engineering frontier, and losing relevence as an industrial innovator is because the leadership of the US has enacted policies and foriegn trade deals which have the active consequence of stifiling that very characteristic, and does so at nearly all levels.
1) a poor educational system that emphasizes social welfare and political correctness over such obviously less important things as science and math, which creates future generations who lack the fundemental educational backgrounds to even attempt such innovation even with government and industrial blessings. When you diminish the number of minds properly trained, you exponentially diminish the number of truly inspired people who could push the state of the art ahead. (Eg, imagine if einstien had ended up working a dead end job at McDonalds, due to a substandard education.)
2) lobbyist activity has managed to dupe the government into believing that private industry is the source of innovation, and has scored such private industry some very powerful tools to actively suppress the true sources of innovation. Such tools include draconian intellectual property laws, and revolving door politics.
3) falling standards of living and base levels of education have forced institutions of higher learning to continually raise the costs of tuition (due both to greed, and due to increasing base costs to meet minimum student performance ratings to maintain accredation), which reduces the available resources with which student researchers would be able to perform said research, leading to subpar and marginally effective research projects, and a vicious cycle of cuthroat academic politics as said researchers gouge each other's eyes out to scramble and claw for every scrap of funding they can get.
3) indulging in modern McCarthyism, such that anything out of the ordinary being created in a garage is treated as a potential terrorist plot if reported by ignorant people, complete with all the life changing consequences of such social abberation such as being blacklisted in one's chosen vocation, or even jail time.
4) the implied and over-reaching threat of corporate litigation over silly things (like making a device with rounded corners), or of government smackdowns and red tape for failure to secure "proper permits", where the bureaucratic maze to obtain such permits is byzantine and intractible.
Taken together, the pace of innovation has basically ground to a screeching halt in favor of milking the status quo, and attempts at stifling real innovation in competing countries as they take advantage of the laxity of the current US leadership. The inspired individuals who envision radical new technologies and materials are dis-incentivized at every turn, if not outright victimized by the currently established players. (In the words of Edison, when referring to why he prevented rapid adoption of FM radios, "You don't sell AM radios th
To an extent. There are many propagandist newsrags circularing in the manufacturing industry aimed at management level readership, and many CAD/CAM packages that are total garbage promote themselves quite heavily therein.
If your manager has been brainwashed by a well trained industry evangeist, there can be simillarly nasty circumstances for everyone involved excepting said evangelist.
Good companies ask their engineers what does and does not work for them, and buy accordingly, but good companies are becoming scarce in all vocational fields lately.
Most businesses seem engaged in what I derisively call "facebook economics", which revolves around the "do we chet 'em, and how?" Philosophy of maket capitalism, in which managers destroy companies, bail out in golden parachutes, and move on to greener pastures seeking ever more short term personal gains.
It goes so much deeper than that! If you leave your mind open, all kinds of filth gets in!
Nobody likes to be around people with dirty minds! That's why most tried and true religious organizations routinely institute brain washing, to keep things nice and clean in there!
I think one of the problems with modern aastronomy is that they often cannot help BUT see that church down the street.
I think it might have something to do with the las-vegas style neon lights, dancing searchlight beams, the well illuminated "second coming landing pad" which tries earnestly to coax jesus to put his foot down there, or the fact that it is owned and operated by Landover Ministries.
But then again, I am one of those heathen "unsaved" that only makes 30k/year, and am excluded from even bronze level membership, so maybe I hold a little bit of jealous bias when I say that it would be a good thing to regulalrly cut power to that light pollution retching eyesore so that astronomers might get some REAL insight into the nature of the heavens, but I don't think it would be a whole lot of it.
I wouldn't know.. I never actually *used* their pittiful service, and used a real ISP.
(I only took notice of aol when they started sending out reasonably high quality floppy disks with shitty software on them, which was closer to 94 or 95. Investing in a 1$ roll of masking tape could net you all the free floppies you could ask for. It was awsome.)
Besides, that wasn't the joke. The joke was that a butthurt netcopper whined about somebody calling his mom a whore, and only just now did the technologically challeneged in government figure out how to use their ancient coppy of fedora freeagent.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you look at the issue more closely. Doctow who was only one of many that was destroyed in this fashion.
If you want another historical instance of how keeping all the eggs in one basket is bad, look at the ancient library of alexandria. The only books to survive the fire were either in the sub basement, or "pirated" by arabian scholars.
We owe much of our knowledge of antiquity to ancient "software pirates."
For a stellat example, look at the systematic destruction of works by the BBC from the 60s and 70s.
There were over 200 episodes of Dr Who alone (there were many other series besides that one in the burn bin) that were destroyed without backup copies, because the bbc did not have room to store them, and because the copyright licensing of those episodes required outside stations and studios to return *all* copies sent to them.
Currently, only 20 or so episodes remain totally MIA from the first doctor series, due almost exclusively to painstaking reconstruction from poor quality pirate recordings collected by the viewing public when the series ran.
The only reason approx 180 of the 200 were recovered, was BECAUSE of "piracy".
Something to consider, given the cultural impact of that series in the UK, as well as in other countries.
If nothing else, rampant piracy protects popular and influential works from willful destruction, by massively replicating the number of copies. This alone is reason to support personal use piracy.
The premise is faulted though. It implies that god created evil to be malevolent, rather than instructional.
Eg, is a parent allowing little timmy's fish to die because little timmy refuses to take care of it being willfully evil, or is the parent using the unfortunate circumstance to teach a lesson?
The parent is able, but unwilling to save the fish. By the pronouncement of the rhetoric, this makes the parent evil. However, should the parent intercede, the child learns nothing, and continues to disregard the fish selfishly. Having never learned the lesson, he is worse off for it.
The argument is fundementally faulted, because it presumes the only way for god to be loving and benevolent is by kissing humanity's hairy ape asses 24/7, and bailing them out of the consequences of their actions. It smacks of having been made by a rhetorical philosopher who had never really read the body of work he was criticizing.
The stated purpose for god's creation of mankind, was because god was lonely. God made humans with the intention of elevating them to his own level eventually. ("We shall know him, for we shall be like him.", etc.) This means humans need to be accountable for the things they do.
The bible says that the rain (metaphorical for hardship) falls on the wicked and the righteous alike. This is because ours is a world of consequences. Our actions impact others, whether we know it or not. The purpose of allowing people to be evil, is so that others, if not ther evil person themselves, see plainly and clearly that such things are wasteful and destructive, and to be avoided. This is precisely the reason why humans have free will.
Special note: I am agnostic, but I feel a literary critique requires the literary work to have been read first.
However, with religious groups they make assertions without any form of evidence. (Or at least any that is not distinguishable from random or natural mundane occurances.)
Thus they are making an outstanding claim, and need outstanding evidence.
Scientifically motivated cryptozoologists are not making such outstanding claims. (Despite the noise from the crackpots, they do not assert that bigfoot can become invisible, for instance.) They instead propose the possible existence of a mundane creature that could meet the physical description of such. To this end, they collect data as best they can. Eg, photographing grass nests, broken limbs, piles of leaves, tufts of hait caught in branches, and casts of footprints.
Unlike the religious argumenter, who can only rely on circular logic and assertions (god is infallable, because the bible says so\the bible is totally accurate because it came from god), the scientist studying cryptids collects and evaluated physical pieces of evidence.
The argument really then becomes one of how much evidence, and of what kinds are necessary to have the existence of a creature validated. (This is due to clever hoaxes like piltdown man and friends, and is perfectly reasonable. However, total dismissal of all collected data due to not meeting those requirements would be like shutting down the LHC because you didn't find the higgs straight away. Instead, the correct opinion to hold is more in line with "it hasn't been found, but there is some evidence to suggest it will be if we keep looking." Much like the data collected for null results at cern are useful in unexpected ways, a thurough investigation, conducted seriously while looking for a cryptid could reveal something previously unknown about the area, even if said cryptid is not found. This is why that kind of expedition is not a total waste.)
This is radically different from the religious debate, which does not present evidence, because the divine is axiomatically unknowable, and never leaves any.
This is a case of apples vs oranges. The only similarities are that they are round, and are fruit.
The obvious solution is to use something that is at once ubiquitous and innately evil, like twitter or facebook.
Imagine the new 'activates malware' hashtag!
Are you suggesting that he should rise as a zombie, and start the apocolypse?
The arguments against existence were:
It lives very deep in the ocean, where no sunlight reaches. This is presumed to have little if any nutritional sources, so a squid that size, living that deep, annot exist. It would starve to death.
This was before the invention of reliable submersables that could go that deep, which discovered a wide abundance of chemotrophic lifeforms near deep ocean hotspots.
Then, as you pointed out:
Ok, so maybe a squid could still eat and live that deep, but how do we know that this isn't just a very large version, or even if squid even CAN get that big? We are talking 100 meters long here.
Serendipidy provided the solution, by the capture of such a squid in a japanese fisherman's deep ocean drag net. Genetic testing showed it was indeed a previously unkmown species.
We only know this now, because happenstance managed to get one snared in a fishing net, while nobody was actively looking.
As for them attacking fishing boats- many animals tend to react negatively to being ensnared. A tiny traditional wooden fishing boat lacks the necessary displacement to pull one in. Should one have been so ensnared, what do you think would have happened?
We now know that giant squid mostly eat fish and some whales when they get large enough, and know that they are mostly docile creatures. I would chalk up the "attacks fishing boats" part of the story as being observer bias, as the observers in question were japanese fishermen, using nets and ensnaring such creatures.
When the only times you observe something is during exceptional circumstances, you report that it appears under such circumstances. This does not mean that the reported circumstances are common, or characteristic of what you are observing.
I believe I already pointed out that scientists look for mundane things. "Bigfoot", the cultural and mythical creature is not a mundane creature.
A hypothetical large ape meeting the physical description of "bigfoot" is a mundane creature. You can conduct experiments and create hypotheses of the latter. That makes it the pervue of science, even if you don't like it.
Scientists also research how having to pee effects judgement. An ignobel was awarded on that very topic. Simply because something is silly, does not make it stop being science.
Example species: "Giant Squid"
Reported well before 1600 by japanese fishermen, with eyewitness accounts of them attacking fishing boats.
Western science, for hundreds of years, insisted such a fanciful creature not only didn't exist, but also couldn't exist.
The terms you cite were created in 1983, as you state. However, the Giant Squid was not a scientifically proven species until the 1990s, a full decade later.
Amusingly, people said the exact same things about the lowland gorilla and the orangutan, back when they were cryptids.
There are quite a few cryptids that turned out to be real that established zoologists insisted were not real, just as you asserted about Orang Pendek.
The difference between a cryptid and a known species is that somebody managed to snag a living sample of the latter. Unless people actually look for those animals, that is very unlikely to happen.
As such, people who genuinely look for such animals to further scientific knowledge and to abolish ignorance are indeed scientists, if they follow the scientific method to do so.
Blandly asserting a negative without evidence is contrary to the scientific method, and therefor not science: In order to conduct science, one must be actively observing, and making testable hypotheses based on those observations; a bland assertion accomplishes neigther.
Now that I can relate to, but that is also linguistic pedantry.
The fundemental logic still does not hold:
All cryptozologists study cryptids.
All cryptozologists are crackpots.
Therefor anyone who studies cryptids is a crackpot.
The logic is clearly faulted, when we substitute a few terms.
All snails are gastropods.
All snails have shells.
Therefor all gastropods have shells.
This is patently untrue, as there are many species of gastropod that do not have shells. (Slugs for instance.)
All you have managed to assert is that a legitimate researcher interested in cryptids cannot be a cryptozoologist.
There is not causal link to crackpottery evidenced.
The reason I used the term "cryptozoologist", is because it literally means "a person who studies hidden\unknown animals."
This is why I pointed out that the term has been malapropriated by crackpots, to disambiguate the term.
As examples of "former" cryptids discovered through such work, you have the lowland gorilla, and the orangutan.
So, I don't see how the point I made previously is invalidated by your statement.
Untrue.
Real cryptozoologists research things like Orang Pendek.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang_Pendek
This is a cryptid, since has not yet been officially "discovered", but is widely reported, leaves footprints and nests, and has a sensible basis for existence.
Crackpots look for magical creatures.
Scientists look for mundane creatures.
PLEASE, PLEASE tell me this is a fully manned spaceprobe, manned by politicians and world leaders, to help them become better aquainted with science!
Woodfire? How totally unsustainable!
My non-grid computer is a 200$ netbook powered directly to the power port (screw that wasteful wallwart!) Using ceramic encased thermocouples, driven in the back yard with my post driver!
My computer will still be up and running long after you have deforested your environment, you polluting imperialist!
Many people think the search for cryptids is a waste of time, and not an area where any serious discoveries could be made, due to the large number of very unscientific crackpots.
The alarming number of such crackpots claiming to be cryptozoologists casts a very thick layer of tarnish on the more sincere and truly scientific in that speciality, but the assertion that nothing good can come from those few, due to the noise in the channel from the many, is not a sound assertion, and is a guilt by association rhetorical fallcy.
Other people will assert that any large macrofauna like "sasquatch", or "yeti" would surely have been discovered by now, but that is also an erroneous assertion. (Not that far removed from the false assertions made by several prominent politicians concerning the closure of patent offices during the 1900s, basing such rhetoric on the assertion that "everything worthy of a patent has already been invented." History clearly shows this is not the case.)
If these are *real* scientists looking for evidence of a cryptid, then I wish them well, and hope they find something. The methods they report in their field journals will surely be useful, even with a null result.
If however, this is just a bunch of poorly trained "enthusiasts" claiming to be crytpozoologists, but lacking any measure of proper scientific method, then this expidition is a colossal waste, and I hope they get frostbite of the penis for wasting resources and time.
Sorry.. I felt I needed to clarify that issue.
I can tell you are not a gourmand.
Culinary inventions of the past 200 years:
Wafflecones (iirc, invented at a world's fair)
Hamburgers (same as above)
French toast (invented at a bed and breakfast, and was originally "French's toast", after the proprietor of the establishment.)
Potato chips/crisps (reportedly invented by a chef at a restaurant in the UK, after a patron demanded impossibly thin chips.)
And many more.
I would say the analogy is sound.
The logical thing to do then, is to look and see how patent law has changed since that period, with emphasis on the impacts of said changes.
It is my understanding that patents were originally for implementations, and that this required physical objects. Admittedly, this was before software created a new class of ephemeral machine, which does a task, but has no physical basis except as a flow of electrons.
This limitation was challenged in the 1900s with the invention of the steam engine. Broad patent classes for "steam engine" were covered by the patent, regardless of the implementation specifics, which resulted in a similarly dismal regression of the rate of innovation in that new technology.
With the (widespread) invention of computer software in the late 60s and early 70s, patent law had to cope with this new class of invention (the spreadsheet was indeed a novel invention that changed the world) and as a consequence of the ephemeral nature of such invention, patents for such things are vague descriptions, and not specific implementations.
Due to international treaties in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, patent law has been further changed incrementally to ratify the terms of such treaties, with the consequences of these treaties being increasing levels of innovative regression, and increasing levels of stagnation.
This could be resolved by forcing software patents to implement language neutral logic charts of the software and components with the patent application, and to stop issuing patents to classes of inventions, and only to specific implementations.
The added costs of producing such charts for most modern pieces of software would make it more difficult to file such an application, and with many legal firms charging fees based on a per sheet rate, this would drastically reduce financial incentive to blanketbomb patent requests for frivelous software constructs.
If this was coupled with a "no sale" doctrine of patents exchange (where patents can only exchange hands through either a full merger, company split, or hostile buyout, but NEVER through a cash or barter transaction in which both parties continue to operate independently) it would neatly clean up a great deal of the problems of the current system.
Here's my stab at a suggestion:
1) limit patent sale. (Patents that change hands are patents that no longer protect inventers.)
2) provide a whole new class of not for profit "academic" innovator, with legal immunity to patent law. (The research scientist studying $PatentedTechnology, doing such study for non-profit purposes, and with no intent to sell or produce a product of any kind other than the research itself.) This class of researcher would instantly win by default in patent litigation, unless intent to produce products could be demonstrated.
Even with ludicrous patents being granted, the limitation of resale of such, and the instant immunity to researchers would greatly help in disarming the thermonuclear patent war arms race.
Ask and you shall receive.
Set RPEnabled in:
HK_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
To "0". This disables Metro, and re-enables the win7 style start menu behavior.
Additionally, on the win8 developer preview version, doing this enables additional scare text about being fired if you leak your copy....
10 guesses which way microsoft employees use it.
Ms claims they diabled the start menu because nobody uses it. To validate this statement, they give a nonsense statistic about a tangental feature of the start menu being rarely used. This means that their logic for disabling the start menu asserts the only use of the start menu was to view documents and images, otherwise the argument does not follow.
For the win8 afflicted though, there is hope. There is a DWORD named RPEnabled in
HK_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
That controls the activation of Metro. Setting it to "1" enables Metro. Setting it to "0" disables Metro.
A curious bit of trivia to liven up discussion:
Setting RPEnabled to 0 turns on additional scare text on the win8 developer preview, which threatens job termination for unauthorized distribution and leaking.
10 guesses what the MS developers keep this key set to.
This is a fundemental problem, often erroneously addressed as an education problem.
Hear me out here:
The training an engineer gets revolves around already known points of data. Things like the shear of a sheet of 2025, or the total energy in 1 liter of octane, etc. This is what an education gets you.
Using this already known information to produce provably airworthy craft with minimal risks and unknowns is the staple of commercial avionics.
The application of what is already known, to devise new and untested approaches to old problems (and as such, the extension of knowledge) has 2 homes: the high priced university, which has a financial motive to patent encumber all new knowledge to improve their financial standing, and the garage tinkerer, who has to operate under the sword of damoclese held aloft by established commerical and government interests.
Sending kids to school to become engineers will greatly increase your engineering talent pool, but that alone will not propell you to the forefront of innovation. Trained is not the same as inspired.
The reason why the US is stagnating on the engineering frontier, and losing relevence as an industrial innovator is because the leadership of the US has enacted policies and foriegn trade deals which have the active consequence of stifiling that very characteristic, and does so at nearly all levels.
1) a poor educational system that emphasizes social welfare and political correctness over such obviously less important things as science and math, which creates future generations who lack the fundemental educational backgrounds to even attempt such innovation even with government and industrial blessings. When you diminish the number of minds properly trained, you exponentially diminish the number of truly inspired people who could push the state of the art ahead. (Eg, imagine if einstien had ended up working a dead end job at McDonalds, due to a substandard education.)
2) lobbyist activity has managed to dupe the government into believing that private industry is the source of innovation, and has scored such private industry some very powerful tools to actively suppress the true sources of innovation. Such tools include draconian intellectual property laws, and revolving door politics.
3) falling standards of living and base levels of education have forced institutions of higher learning to continually raise the costs of tuition (due both to greed, and due to increasing base costs to meet minimum student performance ratings to maintain accredation), which reduces the available resources with which student researchers would be able to perform said research, leading to subpar and marginally effective research projects, and a vicious cycle of cuthroat academic politics as said researchers gouge each other's eyes out to scramble and claw for every scrap of funding they can get.
3) indulging in modern McCarthyism, such that anything out of the ordinary being created in a garage is treated as a potential terrorist plot if reported by ignorant people, complete with all the life changing consequences of such social abberation such as being blacklisted in one's chosen vocation, or even jail time.
4) the implied and over-reaching threat of corporate litigation over silly things (like making a device with rounded corners), or of government smackdowns and red tape for failure to secure "proper permits", where the bureaucratic maze to obtain such permits is byzantine and intractible.
Taken together, the pace of innovation has basically ground to a screeching halt in favor of milking the status quo, and attempts at stifling real innovation in competing countries as they take advantage of the laxity of the current US leadership. The inspired individuals who envision radical new technologies and materials are dis-incentivized at every turn, if not outright victimized by the currently established players. (In the words of Edison, when referring to why he prevented rapid adoption of FM radios, "You don't sell AM radios th
To an extent. There are many propagandist newsrags circularing in the manufacturing industry aimed at management level readership, and many CAD/CAM packages that are total garbage promote themselves quite heavily therein.
If your manager has been brainwashed by a well trained industry evangeist, there can be simillarly nasty circumstances for everyone involved excepting said evangelist.
Good companies ask their engineers what does and does not work for them, and buy accordingly, but good companies are becoming scarce in all vocational fields lately.
Most businesses seem engaged in what I derisively call "facebook economics", which revolves around the "do we chet 'em, and how?" Philosophy of maket capitalism, in which managers destroy companies, bail out in golden parachutes, and move on to greener pastures seeking ever more short term personal gains.
It goes so much deeper than that! If you leave your mind open, all kinds of filth gets in!
Nobody likes to be around people with dirty minds! That's why most tried and true religious organizations routinely institute brain washing, to keep things nice and clean in there!
I think one of the problems with modern aastronomy is that they often cannot help BUT see that church down the street.
I think it might have something to do with the las-vegas style neon lights, dancing searchlight beams, the well illuminated "second coming landing pad" which tries earnestly to coax jesus to put his foot down there, or the fact that it is owned and operated by Landover Ministries.
But then again, I am one of those heathen "unsaved" that only makes 30k/year, and am excluded from even bronze level membership, so maybe I hold a little bit of jealous bias when I say that it would be a good thing to regulalrly cut power to that light pollution retching eyesore so that astronomers might get some REAL insight into the nature of the heavens, but I don't think it would be a whole lot of it.
I wouldn't know.. I never actually *used* their pittiful service, and used a real ISP.
(I only took notice of aol when they started sending out reasonably high quality floppy disks with shitty software on them, which was closer to 94 or 95. Investing in a 1$ roll of masking tape could net you all the free floppies you could ask for. It was awsome.)
Besides, that wasn't the joke. The joke was that a butthurt netcopper whined about somebody calling his mom a whore, and only just now did the technologically challeneged in government figure out how to use their ancient coppy of fedora freeagent.