Novelty is probably not the problem. If I had to challenge this, I'd try to challenge the inventive step here. Bohemia had a feature erosion model implemented in Operation: Flashpoint. Cracked version were supposed to lower your aiming accuracy over time. Not for a demo though, but the man skilled in the art would most likely be able to create the claimed subject matter starting from Bohemia's model.
As a non-Californian, I second this. I am from Europe, but I have been living in San Diego for a year. Gotta agree with every point you make in that post. Now, please fix your politics, so that I actually might consider coming back again.:)
. That they put to death animals for which they are unable to find caretakers is entirely consistent with their stated objectives.
Wouldn't setting those animals free be the ethical choice here. Where do they get the idea that an animal needs a "caretaker". They can take care of themselves. Of course, those feral dogs and cats are so... untidy. Really ruins the neighborhood. So, the "ethical" way is of course to kill them. Wouldn't want our property values to suffer from the packs of feral dogs roaming around, no Sir. We have "Ethics" after all.
Hypocrites. Kill as many animals as you want, I do not care. But don't use the "ethical" tag unless you know what it means.
Actually, D2O is not generally toxic to biological systems. Multicellular organisms don't exactly like it, but it is possible to grow bacteria and yeasts in heavily deuterated media. It is generally used to produce deuterated proteins for various analytical methods. Bacteria do tolerate 12C and 15N diets rather well, too - of course, the isotopic effect is lower there than for hydrogen. I am not exactly sure where the difference between unicellular and multicellular organisms comes from in that regard.
Regarding the case of ID cards, I find it funny that in countries like the US and the UK --with no national ID card-- their citizens are asked to produce some form of ID even more times than citizens in countries with national ID cards. So, yeah, you don't have national ID cards, but you must present some kind of card zillions of times.
Indeed - around here, I had to present ID two times last year - and that was when I entered a secure research and development facility of a private business for a meeting. While I was living in the US, I had to ID myself for buying beer. At the age of 35, with a RMS-worthy beard. *Cough*
Way to go - that's how you get "insightful" on slashdot. If you give up patents, prepare for 2-3 megacorps crushing every small to mid-sized, innovative business due to ripping off their inventions. The patent hate on/. is way beyond clueless. Now, if you'd say put every business method and software application in the trash, I'd be with you - those do indeed serve no significant purpose in my opinion. But all the small engineering, chemical, metallurgical and whatever businesses who bust their asses to deliver innovative quality goods for the supply chains of large corporations would be thoroughly fucked by the abolishment of patents.
Hehe, do you think this has gone away? I am working for a firm that has several multinational corporations as clients. A sizable number of them demand the documents we prepare for them to be sent on 3.5 inch floppies by mail. The internal bureaucracies of corporations are not a wee bit more agile than government bureaucracies. Actually, dealing with our local patent office here is way more modern than dealing with most of our private industry clients. Heck, *I* get my e-mails printed out and brought to my desk. (It is mandated by law, however, that we keep a complete paper record, which is not a bad idea, in my opinion.)
Natural gas is indeed mostly methane, with some ethane, propane, CO2 in the mix. I was using the term to refer to fossil gas mostly associated with oil deposits and the like. I just looked it up and found that the distinction between fossil gas, methane clathrates and swamp gas seems not to be that strong in English, which is not my first language.
In most cases, probably not. The methane is seeping out at low local concentrations over a vast area - there is no huge concentrated deposit like it is the case with oil or natural gas. Instead it is dissolved at low concentrations in the soil. Pure, concentrated methane hydrate deposits exist and might be useable for fuel extraction, though. Those are usually deeper in the oceans, where the hydrate is stabilized by water pressure. Getting the stuff to the surface without prematurely releasing the methane due to the pressure reduction is non-trivial, though. I suppose oil and natural gas are too cheap to make harvesting such methane hydrate deposits economically viable at the moment.
I think I have to clarify something here - I am certainly not adhering to any "noble savage" theory here. I completely agree that from our point of view the quality of life and societal structure of hunter-gatherer societies are nothing desirable at all and with your assessment of the relative merits of our society compared to it. What I was arguing was that from the perspective of an early farmer, life has not really improved in the course of the neolithic revolution. I am not saying that there was a golden age we should strive to get back. I am saying that for the early neolithic farmer it might have looked that way, thus giving rise to the golden age myth present in so many cultures.
That's not necessarily a contradiction. Yes, carrying capacity was low and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle can't support the population a farming lifestyle can. However, the hunter-gatherer's were adapted to it and led a comparably comfortable life. I remember reading a study about the !Kung-bushmen, who live as hunter-gatherers under extremely scarce conditions and still have more free time - in that case time purely for social interaction - than any farmer can dream of.
The immense population growth of farming societies probably quickly drove the hunting and gathering tribes to near-extinction, for example by gobbling up the land for agricultural use, which became useless for the hunter-gatherers. I still hold the conviction that the life of an early hunter-gatherer was possibly more easy than that of an early farmer. While farming increased the carrying capacity of the land greatly, it also led to a less diverse diet and by that to malnutrition, as well as to a higher incident of disease due to the increased population density. Furthermore, the change to farming led to the rise of organizational hierarchies, of politics and probably of religions - keeping track of the date to identify planting season etc. was a major job of most early priests. The increase in organization of society led to loss of freedom - there are no landless serfs in hunter-gatherer societies. Control over land ownership, over irrigation and finally, over knowledge gave rise to despotism on a scale that never could work in a hunting tribe. Higher population density does not equal higher quality of life. It is all this which I think might be reflected in the idea of the lost golden age.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying all this is true, this is just a layman hypothesis of mine.
I always suspected that the theme of the lost "golden age" present in many creation myths is a faint echo of the change from a pure hunter-gatherer existance, where, given a low population density, food was abundant, to a settled farmer existance with high population density and the resulting resource shortage and long days of hard work. Those myths have a long oral tradition - it would not surprise me if this theme reaches back to the neolithic revolution. Interestingly, the loss of the golden age is often closely coupled with flood myths. This, too, points to a neolithic origin - memories of the floodings accompanying the end of the last ice age.
I agree with you that calling it simply "crap" might have been a bit too harsh. I am aware of the socioeconomic constraints composers had to work with. It is just that I do not care much for Mozart's music. What occasionally fuels my nerdrage is the fact that in every discussion remotely touching the subject of classical music, Mozart gets presented as prime example of the genius composer, as a yardstick with which to measure musical quality. And that is simply not true. In my opinion, much of Mozart's music already exhibits that special kind of, for lack of a better word, "austrian shallowness", which culminates in the Viennese operetta.
Oh god, the voice of reason. Finally someone sharing my hate of Mozart! Thank you, Sir, I shall cling on to the last shreds of my belief in humanity for a bit longer. That aside, you stated yourself why Mozart remains popular - it is crappy pop, simple as that. (Except for the requiem, maybe.)
I really try hard to keep the legalese out of slashdot comments
Come on, we can talk about the "Kompetenzkompetenz" of derivative subjects of international law here...;) Anyway, the idea of a constitutional core seems pretty strong in Germany, given that the constitution itself defines such an irrevocable core. I think we will see clarification on that issue in the next decade or so, at least if the European integration continues,
Actually no, I might have been unclear. What I was trying to say is that you do not expect the judges to be expert on the subject-matter at hand, you expect them rather to gather the necessary information during trial. I was not aiming at rules of discovery there. I am definitely not coming from a common law perspective - I am German myself and work in the field of patent law (where you actually can expect the judges to be experts, at least the technical judges at the patent court. But that is just a weirdness of the system and off-topic anyway).
As I see it, the German constitutional court (BVerfG - we love our abbreviations in the legal business) still reserves the right to rule on the applicability of EU law in cases where no equivalent legal protection is provided by EU institutions (BVerfG, "Solange II" i.V.m BVerfG "Lissabon"). As you said, though, it remains to be seen whether this holds up.
Tell me again why I'd want to colonize the bottom of a gravity well when sunshine is ubiquitous, water comets are floating about nearby and metallic asteroids are just waiting to be spun, melted with mirrors and mined for metals?
Don't ask me - I didn't come up with the idea, just pointing out the main problem with self-sustainability on the moon. I agree that there is not much reason to go there, except for the heck of it. As you said, the useful resources are somewhere else. I am not sure about the element composition of the asteroid belt, though - as I pointed out above, you absolutely need a decent supply of N and C for the atmosphere, for chemistry, to sustain your plants. Probably a non-trivial amount of S and P, too. Water and metals alone won't cut it. I suppose there should be supplies of it in the asteroids, but I am lacking proper references for it at the moment.
I doubt that there will ever be a completely self-sustaining lunar colony. The moon severely lacks in carbon and nitrogen. You need both to replenish lost atmosphere. For complete self-sustenance you also need a source of carbon to form a chemical supply chain. This is also not possible. So you would have to at least import those two elements in sizeable quantities.
The people who have challenged the german law are going after the EU directive next, as far as I know. Will be interesting to see what comes out of that. Apart from that, EU directives have to be implemented in national law, and that implementation has to work within the framework set down in the ruling at issue. The Constitutional Court has made it pretty clear that it has the last word in such matters, even if the EU is involved.
Hehe, indeed. Been saying for a long time that the Verfassungsschutz should at least monitor certain politicians that keep proposing unconstitutional laws. And I am not talking about out fringe parties here...
I think our legal system works pretty well, as demonstrated by this ruling. However, we have a problem with political culture. It is as you described. Our politicians seem more and more prone to implement draconic laws only to have them struck down by the court. It seems as if they either willfuly neglect to check for conformity with the constitution before implementing a law, simply don't care for it, or are too inept. I think we can rule out the last one, as the checks would be done by legal professionals in the ministries, so they probably stopped caring. That is a disturbing development.
You certainly got a point there, and I don't think there is the one, perfect method to choosing experts - That's why you don't listen to just one of them, but rather to a couple, so you get a view of differing opinions in the field. Or both sides bring in "their" experts - which of course will be pre-selected to emphasize on the position of each side. I guess there is no way to absolutely rule out bias in the information presented to the judges, but in practise, the system mostly works. As you said, freakin' hard to be a judge. I have great respect for the judges of the BVerfG, they seem to manage pretty well to reach informed, reasonable judgements.
Slashdot Mirror
Novelty is probably not the problem. If I had to challenge this, I'd try to challenge the inventive step here. Bohemia had a feature erosion model implemented in Operation: Flashpoint. Cracked version were supposed to lower your aiming accuracy over time. Not for a demo though, but the man skilled in the art would most likely be able to create the claimed subject matter starting from Bohemia's model.
As a non-Californian, I second this. I am from Europe, but I have been living in San Diego for a year. Gotta agree with every point you make in that post. Now, please fix your politics, so that I actually might consider coming back again. :)
. That they put to death animals for which they are unable to find caretakers is entirely consistent with their stated objectives.
Wouldn't setting those animals free be the ethical choice here. Where do they get the idea that an animal needs a "caretaker". They can take care of themselves. Of course, those feral dogs and cats are so... untidy. Really ruins the neighborhood. So, the "ethical" way is of course to kill them. Wouldn't want our property values to suffer from the packs of feral dogs roaming around, no Sir. We have "Ethics" after all.
Hypocrites. Kill as many animals as you want, I do not care. But don't use the "ethical" tag unless you know what it means.
I'd like to have a registry listing people in favor of registries. So I can avoid dealing with the fascist fucks.
Actually, D2O is not generally toxic to biological systems. Multicellular organisms don't exactly like it, but it is possible to grow bacteria and yeasts in heavily deuterated media. It is generally used to produce deuterated proteins for various analytical methods. Bacteria do tolerate 12C and 15N diets rather well, too - of course, the isotopic effect is lower there than for hydrogen. I am not exactly sure where the difference between unicellular and multicellular organisms comes from in that regard.
Regarding the case of ID cards, I find it funny that in countries like the US and the UK --with no national ID card-- their citizens are asked to produce some form of ID even more times than citizens in countries with national ID cards. So, yeah, you don't have national ID cards, but you must present some kind of card zillions of times.
Indeed - around here, I had to present ID two times last year - and that was when I entered a secure research and development facility of a private business for a meeting. While I was living in the US, I had to ID myself for buying beer. At the age of 35, with a RMS-worthy beard. *Cough*
Way to go - that's how you get "insightful" on slashdot. If you give up patents, prepare for 2-3 megacorps crushing every small to mid-sized, innovative business due to ripping off their inventions. The patent hate on /. is way beyond clueless. Now, if you'd say put every business method and software application in the trash, I'd be with you - those do indeed serve no significant purpose in my opinion. But all the small engineering, chemical, metallurgical and whatever businesses who bust their asses to deliver innovative quality goods for the supply chains of large corporations would be thoroughly fucked by the abolishment of patents.
Hehe, do you think this has gone away? I am working for a firm that has several multinational corporations as clients. A sizable number of them demand the documents we prepare for them to be sent on 3.5 inch floppies by mail. The internal bureaucracies of corporations are not a wee bit more agile than government bureaucracies. Actually, dealing with our local patent office here is way more modern than dealing with most of our private industry clients. Heck, *I* get my e-mails printed out and brought to my desk. (It is mandated by law, however, that we keep a complete paper record, which is not a bad idea, in my opinion.)
Natural gas is indeed mostly methane, with some ethane, propane, CO2 in the mix. I was using the term to refer to fossil gas mostly associated with oil deposits and the like. I just looked it up and found that the distinction between fossil gas, methane clathrates and swamp gas seems not to be that strong in English, which is not my first language.
In most cases, probably not. The methane is seeping out at low local concentrations over a vast area - there is no huge concentrated deposit like it is the case with oil or natural gas. Instead it is dissolved at low concentrations in the soil. Pure, concentrated methane hydrate deposits exist and might be useable for fuel extraction, though. Those are usually deeper in the oceans, where the hydrate is stabilized by water pressure. Getting the stuff to the surface without prematurely releasing the methane due to the pressure reduction is non-trivial, though. I suppose oil and natural gas are too cheap to make harvesting such methane hydrate deposits economically viable at the moment.
I think I have to clarify something here - I am certainly not adhering to any "noble savage" theory here. I completely agree that from our point of view the quality of life and societal structure of hunter-gatherer societies are nothing desirable at all and with your assessment of the relative merits of our society compared to it. What I was arguing was that from the perspective of an early farmer, life has not really improved in the course of the neolithic revolution. I am not saying that there was a golden age we should strive to get back. I am saying that for the early neolithic farmer it might have looked that way, thus giving rise to the golden age myth present in so many cultures.
That's not necessarily a contradiction. Yes, carrying capacity was low and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle can't support the population a farming lifestyle can. However, the hunter-gatherer's were adapted to it and led a comparably comfortable life. I remember reading a study about the !Kung-bushmen, who live as hunter-gatherers under extremely scarce conditions and still have more free time - in that case time purely for social interaction - than any farmer can dream of.
The immense population growth of farming societies probably quickly drove the hunting and gathering tribes to near-extinction, for example by gobbling up the land for agricultural use, which became useless for the hunter-gatherers. I still hold the conviction that the life of an early hunter-gatherer was possibly more easy than that of an early farmer. While farming increased the carrying capacity of the land greatly, it also led to a less diverse diet and by that to malnutrition, as well as to a higher incident of disease due to the increased population density. Furthermore, the change to farming led to the rise of organizational hierarchies, of politics and probably of religions - keeping track of the date to identify planting season etc. was a major job of most early priests. The increase in organization of society led to loss of freedom - there are no landless serfs in hunter-gatherer societies. Control over land ownership, over irrigation and finally, over knowledge gave rise to despotism on a scale that never could work in a hunting tribe. Higher population density does not equal higher quality of life. It is all this which I think might be reflected in the idea of the lost golden age.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying all this is true, this is just a layman hypothesis of mine.
I always suspected that the theme of the lost "golden age" present in many creation myths is a faint echo of the change from a pure hunter-gatherer existance, where, given a low population density, food was abundant, to a settled farmer existance with high population density and the resulting resource shortage and long days of hard work. Those myths have a long oral tradition - it would not surprise me if this theme reaches back to the neolithic revolution. Interestingly, the loss of the golden age is often closely coupled with flood myths. This, too, points to a neolithic origin - memories of the floodings accompanying the end of the last ice age.
I agree with you that calling it simply "crap" might have been a bit too harsh. I am aware of the socioeconomic constraints composers had to work with. It is just that I do not care much for Mozart's music. What occasionally fuels my nerdrage is the fact that in every discussion remotely touching the subject of classical music, Mozart gets presented as prime example of the genius composer, as a yardstick with which to measure musical quality. And that is simply not true. In my opinion, much of Mozart's music already exhibits that special kind of, for lack of a better word, "austrian shallowness", which culminates in the Viennese operetta.
Oh god, the voice of reason. Finally someone sharing my hate of Mozart! Thank you, Sir, I shall cling on to the last shreds of my belief in humanity for a bit longer. That aside, you stated yourself why Mozart remains popular - it is crappy pop, simple as that. (Except for the requiem, maybe.)
"The Return of The Son of The Litigator - McBride Rides Again"
I really try hard to keep the legalese out of slashdot comments
Come on, we can talk about the "Kompetenzkompetenz" of derivative subjects of international law here... ;)
Anyway, the idea of a constitutional core seems pretty strong in Germany, given that the constitution itself defines such an irrevocable core. I think we will see clarification on that issue in the next decade or so, at least if the European integration continues,
Actually no, I might have been unclear. What I was trying to say is that you do not expect the judges to be expert on the subject-matter at hand, you expect them rather to gather the necessary information during trial. I was not aiming at rules of discovery there. I am definitely not coming from a common law perspective - I am German myself and work in the field of patent law (where you actually can expect the judges to be experts, at least the technical judges at the patent court. But that is just a weirdness of the system and off-topic anyway).
As I see it, the German constitutional court (BVerfG - we love our abbreviations in the legal business) still reserves the right to rule on the applicability of EU law in cases where no equivalent legal protection is provided by EU institutions (BVerfG, "Solange II" i.V.m BVerfG "Lissabon"). As you said, though, it remains to be seen whether this holds up.
Tell me again why I'd want to colonize the bottom of a gravity well when sunshine is ubiquitous, water comets are floating about nearby and metallic asteroids are just waiting to be spun, melted with mirrors and mined for metals?
Don't ask me - I didn't come up with the idea, just pointing out the main problem with self-sustainability on the moon. I agree that there is not much reason to go there, except for the heck of it. As you said, the useful resources are somewhere else. I am not sure about the element composition of the asteroid belt, though - as I pointed out above, you absolutely need a decent supply of N and C for the atmosphere, for chemistry, to sustain your plants. Probably a non-trivial amount of S and P, too. Water and metals alone won't cut it. I suppose there should be supplies of it in the asteroids, but I am lacking proper references for it at the moment.
I doubt that there will ever be a completely self-sustaining lunar colony. The moon severely lacks in carbon and nitrogen. You need both to replenish lost atmosphere. For complete self-sustenance you also need a source of carbon to form a chemical supply chain. This is also not possible. So you would have to at least import those two elements in sizeable quantities.
The people who have challenged the german law are going after the EU directive next, as far as I know. Will be interesting to see what comes out of that. Apart from that, EU directives have to be implemented in national law, and that implementation has to work within the framework set down in the ruling at issue. The Constitutional Court has made it pretty clear that it has the last word in such matters, even if the EU is involved.
Hehe, indeed. Been saying for a long time that the Verfassungsschutz should at least monitor certain politicians that keep proposing unconstitutional laws. And I am not talking about out fringe parties here...
I think our legal system works pretty well, as demonstrated by this ruling. However, we have a problem with political culture. It is as you described. Our politicians seem more and more prone to implement draconic laws only to have them struck down by the court. It seems as if they either willfuly neglect to check for conformity with the constitution before implementing a law, simply don't care for it, or are too inept. I think we can rule out the last one, as the checks would be done by legal professionals in the ministries, so they probably stopped caring. That is a disturbing development.
You certainly got a point there, and I don't think there is the one, perfect method to choosing experts - That's why you don't listen to just one of them, but rather to a couple, so you get a view of differing opinions in the field. Or both sides bring in "their" experts - which of course will be pre-selected to emphasize on the position of each side. I guess there is no way to absolutely rule out bias in the information presented to the judges, but in practise, the system mostly works. As you said, freakin' hard to be a judge. I have great respect for the judges of the BVerfG, they seem to manage pretty well to reach informed, reasonable judgements.