Which is exactly why I have mine set to vibrate mode. The reality is, during a meeting, nobody gives a shit what kind of music I like. Cell phone use is intrusive enough without the addition of "look how cool I am" ring tones.
The problem with all this is that a large portion of the country that consumes a lot of power is in areas that don't get enough sunlight per year to be efficient.
I see this all the time. Please tell me why an alternative energy source has to be able to replace 100% of electricity to be viable? No, solar can't do it all. Neither can wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or biofuel. Or nuclear. Or coal for that matter. But if we can get solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear and biofuel to each pick up 5% or 10% of our energy needs then there is a 25% to 50% reduction in fossil fuel consumption.
Every single/. article about alternative energy gets posts from people dissing it because it can't do it all. Where did this requirement come from? Is single-sourcing all of our energy even desirable? Is it possible? Where does this stupid meme keep coming from?
In short the problem is not that the spimmers are saying the things they are saying. It is that they are forcing you to listen. Which is a bad thing.
In most cases, I think the problem is both. The vast majority, if not all, of the SPAM I get is fraudulent.
For example, here's an "OEM software" SPAM. The from header says it's from Hotmail, but the Received headers show that that's a lie. It was actually sent from an swbell.net DSL line. The included URL resolves to four different IP address es at four different Chinese network providers. Their web page has an FAQ with some interesting caveats "There are no discounts for our prices nor can you resell our software. The software we offer cannot be resold." Eh? "The software is shipped from Eastern Europe." and my favorite "Be aware that you will not be able to register the software with the manufacturer. Some of these products cannot be updated on-line." Now why would that be? I could be wrong, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is a counterfeiting ring, not an OEM software ring.
Next up is some sort of weird herbal suppliment that does who knows what. Everything according to the web page. Which is a domain registered in Texas, but served out of Jilin prov. in China. Advertised in a SPAM with a From: in an Indonesian domain and sourced from an IP in Shanghai. Nothing suspicious there!
Next up, online pharmacy. Email has a From: of a company in San Diego. Actually received from a Korean IP address. The URL in the mail is a domain registered to an address in NYC, but is being served from China (Is there a trend here?) That URL redirects to a Russian domain being served from the same Chinese netblock as the first domain. In some cases they are claiming generic versions of drugs I'm 99% certain are patented (and hence don't have legit generic versions) such as "Zenegra (Generic Viagra) and ViagraTR both consist of 100 mg of sildenafil citrate.". Uh huh. Once again, dollars to donuts that's counterfeit as well.
And a few winning lotter notices (fraud) nigerian scams (fraud) porn sites (curiously one of the less fraudulent things) phishing (scam) etc. Which is why I find all of this amazing. These places take credit cards, which means if anybody in the govt. actually gave a shit they could follow the money and bust some of these crooks. How hard would it be to set up a bunch of credit cards / bank accounts, use them at these clearly fraudulent sites, and go arrest the person who ends up with the money? It's like fraud is now business as usual here in the USA, from big fish like Ebbers and Lay down to middle fish like SCOXE to little crooks like the spammers.
And by coincidence, I'm contesting a mystery $9.95 charge on my CC I never made this month. The first time I've ever had a bogus charge show up.
Although I can't say the whole ChoicePoint thing is a suprise. After all, the entire purpose of their business is to sell that information. It's not good business to turn away customers, now is it? Oh sure, they probably turn away the most egregious crooks who show up. But their business is to sell your information to whoever want to pay for it.
But if the behaviour of that system is opaque, what to conclude from a history of tossing 60 heads and 60 tails ? Nothing.
Actually, there is a method for learning useful things based upon the observed behavior of a system. It isn't actually necessary to fully understand the inner working of a system to be able to make predictions. This method is sometimes referred to as "statistics". Ever heard of it?
Once again, you confuse specifics with averages. Making accurate predictions of specific behavior does normally require accurate knowledge of the system. But making accurate predictions of the average behavior does not. I'm pretty sure mankind figured out the seasons (average behavior) long before mankind figured out the nature of the system which drives the seasons (the tilt of the Earth in relationship to the Sun.)
Global warming doomsayers act as if they KNOW what the long terms odds are. Well, they don't.
Boosters of Social Security privatization act as if they KNOW what the long term odds are. Well, they don't.
They extrapolate short term trends into the future. Fine, but if they cannot extrapolate a trend three days out, why are they amazed when we don't trust their predictions decades out?
Can you not see that you are confusing the ability to predict a specific outcome with the ability to predict an average? Do you really think that long-term climate researchers are doing the same thing as weather forcasters but on a longer scale? Predicting the specific weather tomorrow is not the same as predicting the average weather 10 years from now. Just as predicting the specific outcome of a coin toss is not the same as predicting the average outcome of 100 coin tosses. Just as predicting the specific movement of the Dow Jones tomorrow is not the same as predicting it's average movement over the next 10 years.
I'm sure you have no problem accepting the latter two examples. Yet somehow, you don't accept the first. Is this an intentional effort on your part to decieve yourself? Not trying to troll. I'm really curious why otherwise intelligent people fail to comprehend that weather != climate.
The problem I see with using python as a modding language is that it makes it very difficult to enforce safety in mods. It'd be nice if the modding language was sandboxed so that you could download a mod and know it won't format your hard drive.
Yeah, that's one of Python's shortcomings I think. There is the 'rexec' module which is meant to do this, but it apparently it has unspecified holes in it. The 'pickle' module has similar flaws. You could do some neat RPC stuff passing around picked objects, but only at the risk of introducing security holes. Oh well.
anyone on the conservative or Republican side of the spectrum is a greedy, money grubbing liar
I wouldn't say anyone one the conservative side of the spectrum fits that description. Hell, I'm fairly conservative on a number of topics as are quite a few of my friends. But the handful of people running the Republican party right now are in fact greedy, money grubbing liars.
And one of their hallmarks is using arguments which are known logical fallacies. Since you seem to be doing the same thing, I'll address them.
1. In the last 15 years, the majority of most of these scientist's time has been spend under a Democratic president;
There is nothing in the article relating to 15 years. I would probably classify this as "Unrepresentative Sample". You clearly chose 15 as it is the largest number for which your statement is true. Change that number to 5 years, or 20 years, and the opposite is true.
2. The "Union of Concerned Scientists" has been a liberal activist organization blah blah
This is simply an ad hominem attack. Good for emotional appeal, but logicially it's meaningless.
3. Most scientists in FWS reported no such pressure;
Does this even try to advocate anything?
I mean, economic development is always bad, and any edict on "endangered species", no matter how shaky, is always good, right?
And a perfect example of a straw man argument. No body is actually claiming that economic development is always bad. Well, except for the neo-cons when they want to beat up a straw man so they can feel superior.
All of that, and no where in your post is there anything which could actually be considered a reasonable argument that either a) political pressure is not being applied or b) it's OK that political pressure is being applied. Just the usual cloud of fallacies trying to obscure the actual issue at hand.
Still, I suppose it is good to acknowledge that the enemy may surprise us by taking a low-tech approach
It would actually suprise you that some guy living in a cave in Afghanistan or a bombed out house in Fallujah would not have access to a computer? You're kidding right?
Interesting. I checked out that model. By the time I added the cheapest components the vendor had to make it roughly equivalent to a $499 Mac Mini it rang up at $728. For a system that isn't really going to be any faster (1.7GHz Celeron vs 1.25 GHz G4) or have better graphics. And is almost literally twice the size (160 cubic inches versus 85). And don't even start on the wireless. $129 for 802.11 and bluetooth on the Mac, versus $139 each on the PC! Start adding extras like the slot-loading super drive, 80GB, 512MB, etc and I can buy the Mac for $903 verus $1,280 for the PC.
Given that OSX is Unix, and runs X11 programs (meaning that in fact most Linux software can be easily ported to OSX). And the Mac Mini cheaper and half the size of the PC you mentioned. And yet the Apple is 'meh' but you think the PC is cool? Why? I'm totally dumbfounded, even as a long-time Linux user.
This token allows you to use a full password, not only a PIN code as most smartcards do, and you can install your own certificates on it.
For the security paranoid, the maximum key size is only 1024 bits, which may be considered a little low in some applications.
For the security paranoid, it is the first feature which is the weakness here. There is no keypad on the card itself to enter the PIN, correct? You enter your PIN via your regular keyboard, correct? So if somebody has 0w3n3d your workstation, they can read your PIN when you type it and then ask your smartcard to perform as many authentications as they want. All without your knowledge. If you could be sure your workstation was secure, you wouldn't need the token in the first place.
See the Cypak card mentioned below. THAT is how a smart card should work. I hadn't heard of them before, but I'll have to do some research.
Sure, Internet2 is 'members only'. But I think it's safe to say that most if not all of the members have standard commodity connections as well. So anything you can get to from I2 you can get to from the regular Internet, just at a reduced speed. There might be a small number of exceptions, but in general it's true. Being on I2 only affects the path taken by the traffic. It doesn't affect what's reachable.
I suspect the MPAA wants to be a member more so they can go to the member meetings and make a stink. Keep an eye on things from the inside so to speak.
[snip]if you believe how he tells it, he was involved in every national security crisis in the past 30 years and if it wasn't for him, by golly, we'd all be doomed. He almost single-handedly saves the day every time![/snip]
Ok, stop bashing on the guy just because he disagreed with Bush and was asked to leave. I see alot of this, if your not with us, your against us posts about people who disagree with Bush.
I think you'll find that ad hominem attacks are probably one of, if not the, most commonly used responses by the neo-cons. You see it literally every day. The fact that it is in fact considered a logical fallacy doesn't seem to bother them, as I suppose it works.
I think the argument is that a patent protects the concept (i.e., the algorithm or "flow chart"), whereas copyright only protects the implementation. Somebody could avoid copyright infringement by recreating the same algorithm in a different programming language.
Except that patents were never meant to protect ideas (a synonym for concept BTW). And technically they still don't. Because the reality is that coming up with an idea for a program is maybe 1% of the work involved with bringing a program to market. If somebody else is willing and able to redo the 99% which is the actual writing/debugging/polishing why should they owe anybody anything?
In the software world, ideas are a dime a dozen. Anybody can sit around over a couple of beers and scribble some ideas down on the proverbial napkin. It's easy. Now, actually writing the code and making the idea work, that's where the value is. I have a big problem with the idea that the folks who do the work in the latter half owe anything to the folks who came up with the 'idea'.
According to a number of people on thee forums I shouldn't be able to make money at what I do, I should just hand my work over to IBM or some other jugernaught so that they can run me into the ground. For some reason I just dont agree with that.
Do you really write software and not copyright it? That is the appropriate protection for software. You will find very few people around here who actually advocate the elimination of copyrights. After all, it's copyright protection which gives the GPL teeth.
The question the pro-patent crowd needs to answer is why is copyright insufficient? Why do you need additional protection above and beyond the protection automatically granted to software?
There's a point to an online argument where it gets old.
For you, that point appears to be the second anybody calls you on your bullshit. Face it, you lied about the basis for the study and you can't deal with the fact that I called you on it.
you see it's just complete bullshit. It was a statistical analysis, extrapolated from 63 (yes, sixty three, and a biased sample of 63 at that) death certificates,
Wow. I'm impressed at your ability to look right at facts and not see them. The results are from "we derived a target sample size of 4300 individuals. We assumed that every household had seven individuals, and a sample of 30 clusters of 30 households each was chosen." The death certificates were "sought to ensure that a large fraction of the reported deaths were not fabrications". Which they did. But they are most certainly not the basis for the number of deaths. To claim the results are based on 63 death certificates when in fact they are based on interviews with nearly 1,000 households representing over 5,000 people is, in your words, "bullshit".
every other estimate made everywhere else is an order or two of magnitude lower. in conjunction with the 95% confidence interval, even with their data massaging, ranges from 8000 to 192,000. means something very interesting. The estimates which are two orders of magnitude less (i.e. only 1,000 people killed) are almost certainly wrong. Which isn't suprising. You'd have to be truly stupid to believe that more of our soldiers have died than Iraqi's. It also means that the estimates which are one order of magnitude less (i.e. 10,000 deaths) have an extremely low chance (less than 5%) of being correct.
And never mind that their estimate excludes Fallujah which had so many deaths they excluded it as a statistical outlier. If they "massaged" their data, they made it more conservative by not including Fallujah.
Humanity's capacity for self delusion is depressing.
As you yourself have demonstrated. Thanks for playing!
It must be that all of us who voted for Bush are short-sighted idiots. Well yes, that does seem to be the problem.
What more can you, the elite,
Who exactly are these "elite" that you disparage? East-coast born Yale graduates like the Bush clan? Or do you really believe the silly myth that they are down-home ranchers from Texas?
childishly thinking that low taxes What's childish and "short-sighted" is the total disregard for the spiraling debt. But if you think loading up your kids with literally tens of thousands of dollars in debt (current debt is currently roughly $25K for every man, woman and child in America) is a good idea don't be surprised if people call you short-sighted.
limited government Now this is the real kicker. I love it when Republicans throw out this chestnut. Has a Republican president ever reduced the size or scope of the federal government? Sure, they are more than happy to ax the budget on programs they don't like. But I'm pretty sure every time I look the government as a whole is bigger, has more laws, is spending more money, and taking a larger and more intrusive interest in my personal life. The fact is that the neo-cons running things love big government with big budgets and big power. If you actually gave a shit about limited government you would not be voting Republican.
an aggressive offense against terrorism Oh, is that what we are calling the invasion of Iraq now? I suppose you are one of the gullible people who actually thinks Hussein was even partially responsible for 9/11. Even the administration has stopped claiming that. They still do like to imply that the war in Iraq is somehow related to terrorism though. They also still like to imply that Iraq had WMD, although as during the debates Bush will, if cornered, admit that they did not have WMD.
I do think that reasonable people can disagree. However, I don't think the people who support the neo-con's are reasonable. The amount of hypocrisy and deceit which comes out of the neo-cons and the Republican party is unbelievable. After listening to them, watching their actions, and seeing the gulf between the two I have no option but to conclude that their supporters are gullible, stupid and short-sighted. Sorry. Sucks to be you.
You are parodying the lefties here and not being serious, I presume? That is, making fun of the fact that most scientists who claim that 'global warming' is a threat are being paid by governments to do 'global warming' research and would be out of a job if they didn't keep claiming that it's a big threat?
First, many of them are simply studying climate in general. They are not "global warming" researchers at all, it's just that that's what their work keeps pointing at. So to claim that their funding is based on global warming being a threat is simply false. Many of them had their jobs long before global warming became a hot issue. And they will continue to have jobs if/when global warming stops being a hot issue.
Second, to dismiss a scientist simply because they are paid by somebody is to basically dismiss all science. Or do you prefer to trust the views of all the un-employed scientists out there?
You should be thankful they used an open-source browser friendly technique. They could have just as easily wrapped the images in ActiveX or maybe Java in such a way that the data is never cached in an accessible form. The only way to get the image would then be screen-capture (made even harder if they used the graphics card buffer, but maybe that's overkill)
If they went this route, it most certainly would be impossible for me to print the images since I wouldn't be using the service. I actually rather like it when companies make their proprietary DRM crap Windows-only because it makes it really easy for me to boycott it.
I was always under the impression that safety standards required the brakes to be able to overpower the engine and stop the car even with the accelerator floored. But from looking at the web site for the car in question, it looks like there are a million ways from Sunday for the car's CPU to take away your braking control:
The braking system was designed according to very strict specifications. Vel Satis is equipped with ABS, emergency brake assist and EBD electronic brake distribution, as well as the latest in driver assistance systems such as the ESP electronic stability programme fitted as standard, complementing Renault's patented trigonal-type multilink rear suspension.
Slashdot Mirror
Your session timed out I'm afraid. What exactly were you trying to link to? Curious minds want to know.
Which is exactly why I have mine set to vibrate mode. The reality is, during a meeting, nobody gives a shit what kind of music I like. Cell phone use is intrusive enough without the addition of "look how cool I am" ring tones.
The problem with all this is that a large portion of the country that consumes a lot of power is in areas that don't get enough sunlight per year to be efficient.
/. article about alternative energy gets posts from people dissing it because it can't do it all. Where did this requirement come from? Is single-sourcing all of our energy even desirable? Is it possible? Where does this stupid meme keep coming from?
I see this all the time. Please tell me why an alternative energy source has to be able to replace 100% of electricity to be viable? No, solar can't do it all. Neither can wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or biofuel. Or nuclear. Or coal for that matter. But if we can get solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear and biofuel to each pick up 5% or 10% of our energy needs then there is a 25% to 50% reduction in fossil fuel consumption.
Every single
In short the problem is not that the spimmers are saying the things they are saying. It is that they are forcing you to listen. Which is a bad thing.
In most cases, I think the problem is both. The vast majority, if not all, of the SPAM I get is fraudulent.
For example, here's an "OEM software" SPAM. The from header says it's from Hotmail, but the Received headers show that that's a lie. It was actually sent from an swbell.net DSL line. The included URL resolves to four different IP address es at four different Chinese network providers. Their web page has an FAQ with some interesting caveats "There are no discounts for our prices nor can you resell our software. The software we offer cannot be resold." Eh? "The software is shipped from Eastern Europe." and my favorite "Be aware that you will not be able to register the software with the manufacturer. Some of these products cannot be updated on-line." Now why would that be? I could be wrong, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is a counterfeiting ring, not an OEM software ring.
Next up is some sort of weird herbal suppliment that does who knows what. Everything according to the web page. Which is a domain registered in Texas, but served out of Jilin prov. in China. Advertised in a SPAM with a From: in an Indonesian domain and sourced from an IP in Shanghai. Nothing suspicious there!
Next up, online pharmacy. Email has a From: of a company in San Diego. Actually received from a Korean IP address. The URL in the mail is a domain registered to an address in NYC, but is being served from China (Is there a trend here?) That URL redirects to a Russian domain being served from the same Chinese netblock as the first domain. In some cases they are claiming generic versions of drugs I'm 99% certain are patented (and hence don't have legit generic versions) such as "Zenegra (Generic Viagra) and ViagraTR both consist of 100 mg of sildenafil citrate.". Uh huh. Once again, dollars to donuts that's counterfeit as well.
And a few winning lotter notices (fraud) nigerian scams (fraud) porn sites (curiously one of the less fraudulent things) phishing (scam) etc. Which is why I find all of this amazing. These places take credit cards, which means if anybody in the govt. actually gave a shit they could follow the money and bust some of these crooks. How hard would it be to set up a bunch of credit cards / bank accounts, use them at these clearly fraudulent sites, and go arrest the person who ends up with the money? It's like fraud is now business as usual here in the USA, from big fish like Ebbers and Lay down to middle fish like SCOXE to little crooks like the spammers.
And by coincidence, I'm contesting a mystery $9.95 charge on my CC I never made this month. The first time I've ever had a bogus charge show up.
Although I can't say the whole ChoicePoint thing is a suprise. After all, the entire purpose of their business is to sell that information. It's not good business to turn away customers, now is it? Oh sure, they probably turn away the most egregious crooks who show up. But their business is to sell your information to whoever want to pay for it.
But if the behaviour of that system is opaque, what to conclude from a history of tossing 60 heads and 60 tails ? Nothing.
Actually, there is a method for learning useful things based upon the observed behavior of a system. It isn't actually necessary to fully understand the inner working of a system to be able to make predictions. This method is sometimes referred to as "statistics". Ever heard of it?
Once again, you confuse specifics with averages. Making accurate predictions of specific behavior does normally require accurate knowledge of the system. But making accurate predictions of the average behavior does not. I'm pretty sure mankind figured out the seasons (average behavior) long before mankind figured out the nature of the system which drives the seasons (the tilt of the Earth in relationship to the Sun.)
Global warming doomsayers act as if they KNOW what the long terms odds are. Well, they don't.
Boosters of Social Security privatization act as if they KNOW what the long term odds are. Well, they don't.
They extrapolate short term trends into the future. Fine, but if they cannot extrapolate a trend three days out, why are they amazed when we don't trust their predictions decades out?
Can you not see that you are confusing the ability to predict a specific outcome with the ability to predict an average? Do you really think that long-term climate researchers are doing the same thing as weather forcasters but on a longer scale? Predicting the specific weather tomorrow is not the same as predicting the average weather 10 years from now. Just as predicting the specific outcome of a coin toss is not the same as predicting the average outcome of 100 coin tosses. Just as predicting the specific movement of the Dow Jones tomorrow is not the same as predicting it's average movement over the next 10 years.
I'm sure you have no problem accepting the latter two examples. Yet somehow, you don't accept the first. Is this an intentional effort on your part to decieve yourself? Not trying to troll. I'm really curious why otherwise intelligent people fail to comprehend that weather != climate.
The problem I see with using python as a modding language is that it makes it very difficult to enforce safety in mods. It'd be nice if the modding language was sandboxed so that you could download a mod and know it won't format your hard drive.
Yeah, that's one of Python's shortcomings I think. There is the 'rexec' module which is meant to do this, but it apparently it has unspecified holes in it. The 'pickle' module has similar flaws. You could do some neat RPC stuff passing around picked objects, but only at the risk of introducing security holes. Oh well.
anyone on the conservative or Republican side of the spectrum is a greedy, money grubbing liar
I wouldn't say anyone one the conservative side of the spectrum fits that description. Hell, I'm fairly conservative on a number of topics as are quite a few of my friends. But the handful of people running the Republican party right now are in fact greedy, money grubbing liars.
And one of their hallmarks is using arguments which are known logical fallacies. Since you seem to be doing the same thing, I'll address them.
1. In the last 15 years, the majority of most of these scientist's time has been spend under a Democratic president;
There is nothing in the article relating to 15 years. I would probably classify this as "Unrepresentative Sample". You clearly chose 15 as it is the largest number for which your statement is true. Change that number to 5 years, or 20 years, and the opposite is true.
2. The "Union of Concerned Scientists" has been a liberal activist organization blah blah
This is simply an ad hominem attack. Good for emotional appeal, but logicially it's meaningless.
3. Most scientists in FWS reported no such pressure;
Does this even try to advocate anything?
I mean, economic development is always bad, and any edict on "endangered species", no matter how shaky, is always good, right?
And a perfect example of a straw man argument. No body is actually claiming that economic development is always bad. Well, except for the neo-cons when they want to beat up a straw man so they can feel superior.
All of that, and no where in your post is there anything which could actually be considered a reasonable argument that either a) political pressure is not being applied or b) it's OK that political pressure is being applied. Just the usual cloud of fallacies trying to obscure the actual issue at hand.
Still, I suppose it is good to acknowledge that the enemy may surprise us by taking a low-tech approach
It would actually suprise you that some guy living in a cave in Afghanistan or a bombed out house in Fallujah would not have access to a computer? You're kidding right?
Interesting. I checked out that model. By the time I added the cheapest components the vendor had to make it roughly equivalent to a $499 Mac Mini it rang up at $728. For a system that isn't really going to be any faster (1.7GHz Celeron vs 1.25 GHz G4) or have better graphics. And is almost literally twice the size (160 cubic inches versus 85). And don't even start on the wireless. $129 for 802.11 and bluetooth on the Mac, versus $139 each on the PC! Start adding extras like the slot-loading super drive, 80GB, 512MB, etc and I can buy the Mac for $903 verus $1,280 for the PC.
Given that OSX is Unix, and runs X11 programs (meaning that in fact most Linux software can be easily ported to OSX). And the Mac Mini cheaper and half the size of the PC you mentioned. And yet the Apple is 'meh' but you think the PC is cool? Why? I'm totally dumbfounded, even as a long-time Linux user.
This token allows you to use a full password, not only a PIN code as most smartcards do, and you can install your own certificates on it.
For the security paranoid, the maximum key size is only 1024 bits, which may be considered a little low in some applications.
For the security paranoid, it is the first feature which is the weakness here. There is no keypad on the card itself to enter the PIN, correct? You enter your PIN via your regular keyboard, correct? So if somebody has 0w3n3d your workstation, they can read your PIN when you type it and then ask your smartcard to perform as many authentications as they want. All without your knowledge. If you could be sure your workstation was secure, you wouldn't need the token in the first place.
See the Cypak card mentioned below. THAT is how a smart card should work. I hadn't heard of them before, but I'll have to do some research.
Sure, Internet2 is 'members only'. But I think it's safe to say that most if not all of the members have standard commodity connections as well. So anything you can get to from I2 you can get to from the regular Internet, just at a reduced speed. There might be a small number of exceptions, but in general it's true. Being on I2 only affects the path taken by the traffic. It doesn't affect what's reachable.
I suspect the MPAA wants to be a member more so they can go to the member meetings and make a stink. Keep an eye on things from the inside so to speak.
[snip]if you believe how he tells it, he was involved in every national security crisis in the past 30 years and if it wasn't for him, by golly, we'd all be doomed. He almost single-handedly saves the day every time![/snip]
Ok, stop bashing on the guy just because he disagreed with Bush and was asked to leave. I see alot of this, if your not with us, your against us posts about people who disagree with Bush.
I think you'll find that ad hominem attacks are probably one of, if not the, most commonly used responses by the neo-cons. You see it literally every day. The fact that it is in fact considered a logical fallacy doesn't seem to bother them, as I suppose it works.
I think the argument is that a patent protects the concept (i.e., the algorithm or "flow chart"), whereas copyright only protects the implementation. Somebody could avoid copyright infringement by recreating the same algorithm in a different programming language.
Except that patents were never meant to protect ideas (a synonym for concept BTW). And technically they still don't. Because the reality is that coming up with an idea for a program is maybe 1% of the work involved with bringing a program to market. If somebody else is willing and able to redo the 99% which is the actual writing/debugging/polishing why should they owe anybody anything?
In the software world, ideas are a dime a dozen. Anybody can sit around over a couple of beers and scribble some ideas down on the proverbial napkin. It's easy. Now, actually writing the code and making the idea work, that's where the value is. I have a big problem with the idea that the folks who do the work in the latter half owe anything to the folks who came up with the 'idea'.
According to a number of people on thee forums I shouldn't be able to make money at what I do, I should just hand my work over to IBM or some other jugernaught so that they can run me into the ground. For some reason I just dont agree with that.
Do you really write software and not copyright it? That is the appropriate protection for software. You will find very few people around here who actually advocate the elimination of copyrights. After all, it's copyright protection which gives the GPL teeth.
The question the pro-patent crowd needs to answer is why is copyright insufficient? Why do you need additional protection above and beyond the protection automatically granted to software?
There's a point to an online argument where it gets old.
For you, that point appears to be the second anybody calls you on your bullshit. Face it, you lied about the basis for the study and you can't deal with the fact that I called you on it.
You are so wrong it would take week to explain how much. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid, toots. It'll all be over and done with soon.
Hmmm. No facts. No quotes. Name calling. Quite the educated response. You sure changed my mind!
you see it's just complete bullshit. It was a statistical analysis, extrapolated from 63 (yes, sixty three, and a biased sample of 63 at that) death certificates,
Wow. I'm impressed at your ability to look right at facts and not see them. The results are from "we derived a target sample size of 4300 individuals. We assumed that every household had seven individuals, and a sample of 30 clusters of 30 households each was chosen." The death certificates were "sought to ensure that a large fraction of the reported deaths were not fabrications". Which they did. But they are most certainly not the basis for the number of deaths. To claim the results are based on 63 death certificates when in fact they are based on interviews with nearly 1,000 households representing over 5,000 people is, in your words, "bullshit".
every other estimate made everywhere else is an order or two of magnitude lower. in conjunction with the 95% confidence interval, even with their data massaging, ranges from 8000 to 192,000. means something very interesting. The estimates which are two orders of magnitude less (i.e. only 1,000 people killed) are almost certainly wrong. Which isn't suprising. You'd have to be truly stupid to believe that more of our soldiers have died than Iraqi's. It also means that the estimates which are one order of magnitude less (i.e. 10,000 deaths) have an extremely low chance (less than 5%) of being correct.
And never mind that their estimate excludes Fallujah which had so many deaths they excluded it as a statistical outlier. If they "massaged" their data, they made it more conservative by not including Fallujah.
Humanity's capacity for self delusion is depressing.
As you yourself have demonstrated. Thanks for playing!
It must be that all of us who voted for Bush are short-sighted idiots.
Well yes, that does seem to be the problem.
What more can you, the elite,
Who exactly are these "elite" that you disparage? East-coast born Yale graduates like the Bush clan? Or do you really believe the silly myth that they are down-home ranchers from Texas?
childishly thinking that low taxes
What's childish and "short-sighted" is the total disregard for the spiraling debt. But if you think loading up your kids with literally tens of thousands of dollars in debt (current debt is currently roughly $25K for every man, woman and child in America) is a good idea don't be surprised if people call you short-sighted.
limited government
Now this is the real kicker. I love it when Republicans throw out this chestnut. Has a Republican president ever reduced the size or scope of the federal government? Sure, they are more than happy to ax the budget on programs they don't like. But I'm pretty sure every time I look the government as a whole is bigger, has more laws, is spending more money, and taking a larger and more intrusive interest in my personal life. The fact is that the neo-cons running things love big government with big budgets and big power. If you actually gave a shit about limited government you would not be voting Republican.
an aggressive offense against terrorism
Oh, is that what we are calling the invasion of Iraq now? I suppose you are one of the gullible people who actually thinks Hussein was even partially responsible for 9/11. Even the administration has stopped claiming that. They still do like to imply that the war in Iraq is somehow related to terrorism though. They also still like to imply that Iraq had WMD, although as during the debates Bush will, if cornered, admit that they did not have WMD.
I do think that reasonable people can disagree. However, I don't think the people who support the neo-con's are reasonable. The amount of hypocrisy and deceit which comes out of the neo-cons and the Republican party is unbelievable. After listening to them, watching their actions, and seeing the gulf between the two I have no option but to conclude that their supporters are gullible, stupid and short-sighted. Sorry. Sucks to be you.
You are parodying the lefties here and not being serious, I presume? That is, making fun of the fact that most scientists who claim that 'global warming' is a threat are being paid by governments to do 'global warming' research and would be out of a job if they didn't keep claiming that it's a big threat?
First, many of them are simply studying climate in general. They are not "global warming" researchers at all, it's just that that's what their work keeps pointing at. So to claim that their funding is based on global warming being a threat is simply false. Many of them had their jobs long before global warming became a hot issue. And they will continue to have jobs if/when global warming stops being a hot issue.
Second, to dismiss a scientist simply because they are paid by somebody is to basically dismiss all science. Or do you prefer to trust the views of all the un-employed scientists out there?
Touche. Not that RFID's would help. There is a difference between a counterfeit ID (where RFID's might help) and a fraudulently obtained ID.
I remember hearing that at least some of them were using fake ID's. I may well be wrong about that though.
Been watching much Fox News lately?
You should be thankful they used an open-source browser friendly technique. They could have just as easily wrapped the images in ActiveX or maybe Java in such a way that the data is never cached in an accessible form. The only way to get the image would then be screen-capture (made even harder if they used the graphics card buffer, but maybe that's overkill)
If they went this route, it most certainly would be impossible for me to print the images since I wouldn't be using the service. I actually rather like it when companies make their proprietary DRM crap Windows-only because it makes it really easy for me to boycott it.
I was always under the impression that safety standards required the brakes to be able to overpower the engine and stop the car even with the accelerator floored. But from looking at the web site for the car in question, it looks like there are a million ways from Sunday for the car's CPU to take away your braking control:
The braking system was designed according to very strict specifications. Vel Satis is equipped with ABS, emergency brake assist and EBD electronic brake distribution, as well as the latest in driver assistance systems such as the ESP electronic stability programme fitted as standard, complementing Renault's patented trigonal-type multilink rear suspension.