The W3C is not the only standards body out there. In this case, the standard comes from the WhatWG. This is not some proprietary, ill-conceived hack. Please RTA.
It's only spyware if you classify every other web browser as spyware because they let you follow links and redirects. This standard adds no new privacy or "spyware" implications than already exist. Today, when I click a link that a site owner has decided to track, I get redirected to some tracking mechanism, which logs what I'm doing, and then sends me on my way to where I want to go. A slightly awkward approach uses hidden images on pages to log my page view. All this does is standardize the approach by making it efficient and giving the user the option of opting out by instructing their browser not to honor them. How can you possibly see this as spyware or a new privacy problem? Sites are already tracking the links you click. They're just doing it poorly through kludgy redirect mechanisms that force you to wait while you get bounced around. Plus, you can't opt out! With this standard, the browser can do the "ping" behind the scenes, and it does it only with your consent.
Mozilla team is pulling an IE (implementing their own extensions... read the blog...
WHATWG != Mozilla
Mozilla is attempting an implementation of a standard set by an independent standards body. No, they're not the W3C, but like you pseudo-quoted out of context, "w3c doesn't have to make all the rules."
1. There will be people that still cannot afford to send their children to school, even with that tax break. Families below the poverty line were not paying enough in taxes to send their own children to school. More likely, the burden of schooling their children was shared more by middle- and upper-class households who pay more in taxes.
2. There will be families who decide to keep the tax break and use the money for things like food, shelter and heat, instead of schooling their child.
Threaten parents with jail all you want, but either way, the result is that there will be more children without adequate schooling in the US. These children will grow up without the knowledge and skills to succeed, and will consequently have to rely increasingly upon aid programs such as welfare.
One way to avoid that situation is to guarantee every child a minimum level of education using tax dollars. In other words: public school systems and minimum requirements/standards for those systems to follow.
No one can prove that mutations that happen in evolution are caused by god or by natural means.
It actually can be "proven" (i.e. a model or a theory completely explaining the process in a manner that is entirely consistent with all other aspects of our understanding of the universe) how a radiation-induced mutation occurs. "Radiation" as a whole is fairly well understood, and the mechanism where radiation damages DNA to cause a mutation is well understood as well. We don't necessarily have a camera capable of watching a single event where a single quanta of radiation causes a single DNA mutation that causes a demonstrable instance of speciation, but you don't need to build an MRI machine the size of the earth to tell that there's molten rock inside.
Those things we can fit into our models. We can come up with theories explaining it, and we can test them and see that our models do a great job of explaining what's going on.
However, we can't, through this process, prove or disprove that some God-like entity is working "behind the scenes" to orchestrate all of this in a manner that also just happens to fit our models. The goal of science is to explain the observed universe. Since most definitions of God insist that God isn't bound by the same natural laws that govern our universe (and consequently our theories for how the universe works), it's a bit difficult to work God into the equation.
I say that alot of evidence and data has been captured, but not enough to concretely say that it's a fact
Why not? Do you have experimental data that invalidates the theory? Or are you just aware of cases where you just can't imagine how it happened? There's plenty of evidence and data to support the theory, and zero evidence disproving it. A bunch of "wow, I just can't believe it!" cases isn't a reason to disprove a scientific theory. If you have some sort of experimental data that could not be explained by evolutionary theory (we're not talking about belief here--again, this is science, not faith), then that needs to be investigated. Science regularly deals in situations that are non-obvious to the layperson. Scientists themselves are frequently surprised by what their theories ultimately predict, but when those theories are tested and the non-obvious situations experimentally verified, at some point you just have to accept the data sitting in front of you.
you must present BOTH Intelligent Design and Evolution because those qare the two prevailing theories.
The former is not a scientific theory and consequently it has no place in a science class. If you want to present information that casts doubt on a scientific theory in a science classroom, you need to do it in a way that's consistent with scientific principles and methodology. You can't go through the fossil record in a biology class, point out significant climate changes and the ways that the various species seemed to adapt to those changes (or go extinct), and then wrap it all up with, "Or maybe some magical God being waved His hands and just made it happen because he didn't like the way they smelled." If you want to present an alternative to a scientific theory, you either need to attack it from a scientific angle, or present it outside of a scientific context. I have no problem if someone wants to start up a philosophy class in public schools and make this one of their points of study.
I do not understand why the Intelligent Design theory is being dismissed as the Chrisitian right's agenda only.
It is the Christian Right that is pushing for Intelligent Design in public schools. You're right though: the concept of ID isn't Christian-specific. It is, however, rooted in religion. You can't have governments sponsoring (without scientific evidence) the existence of a supernatural force (God or otherwise) in science classes without sound scientific basis. The judge here found that there was no scientific basis, and that
This makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons, but it just takes us back to the "what is the purpose of DNS?" argument that will never be won.
DNS was expected to provide a label for a hierarchy of administrative domains on the Internet. From a purely technical perspective, it makes no sense to transfer the name of your administrative domain to some other schmoe. In fact, given that URIs and other persistent identifiers like message IDs and X.500 suffixes incorporate DNS domains, you generally do not want your existing identifiers to be abused or collided with.
In the OID world, we have the same sort of situation. OIDs are assigned hierarchically, but right up front, the rule is: OIDs are not re-usable and not re-issuable. Which is fine, because they're just numbers and carry no value.
Unfortunately, the economics of DNS are such that DNS labels do carry value. Until we eliminate cases where people want to type a product name ".com", or cases where the hostname in the URL is equivalent to a store front, DNS labels will always have value, and no one will ever support a proposal to make them non-transferrable (or non-reusable).
I think it's a great idea, though. I shouldn't have to be so paranoid about my DNS domains being accidentally lost due to a late payment (or a mistake on either side), and immediately snatched up by the companies that are watching every registered DNS domain (because if it had value to someone once, it probably has enough value that could be exploited by turning it into a "search portal").
The current state of things is really crappy and any effort to fix it would be nice.
Let me preface by saying this differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It is usually a crime to willfully sell stolen goods. It's not normally a crime to sell something if you didn't know it was stolen. That's the criminal aspect.
Copyright infringement and theft-related things like conversion are civil torts. Torts do not normally require that you commit the act willfully for you to be liable for it. A person committing copyright infringement without realizing it is still liable for direct infringement and, if there are damages, they will have to pay those damages. Similarly, if someone sells you a stolen radio, and you're caught with it, that radio will be taken away from you without compensation.
At first glance, this seems remarkably unfair, punishing someone who didn't know they were doing something wrong, but remember:
a) Damages in civil torts are not there to punish the offender, they're there to ensure the victim is compensated. Whether or not you did it on purpose doesn't matter: the victim was still damaged. You caused the damage, and even though you didn't realize it, it's still the fair thing for you to compensate the victim.
b) If you can prove that someone else sold you that stolen radio and it was reasonable for you to believe it was legitimate, or that someone else gave you the copyrighted work and didn't tell you what was in it and that caused you to (reasonably) commit infringement without realizing it, you can always haul their butt into court along with you. They will pay damages, not you. It will all work out in the end.
The old system still works, but we know it won't work forever, and we know we need to change it.
I don't think that belief is unanimously held. IPv4, as originally envisioned, was doomed when IP growth skyrocketed. But today's IPv4 deployments are dramatically different. Networks and organizations have evolved to the scarcity of IPv4 addresses and other IPv4 shortcomings by adopting technologies such as NAT.
The reason businesses and providers haven't abandoned IPv4 is because there's no reason to yet. In the future, the capabilities of future network protocols like IPv6 will make it attractive to support IPv6, and at some point someone will ask the question, "Is there any point continuing to support IPv4 anymore?" But while we continue finding inexpensive ways to keep IPv4 working smoothly, we're not going to be investing in a big IPv6 migration. There's no incentive.
I completely agree. I may have expressed that a little too subtly in my original post. I take issue with the overuse of titles with "engineer" or "technician" in them. It's kind of insulting to people that are actually Professional Engineers and have had to work hard to get there. Now any Joe Scriptkiddie out of high school can have a title with the word "engineer" in it and the general public will consider them peers of any PE.
Call them programmers or analysts.
Now, that's not to say that there might actually be semi-legitimate "software engineers" that have earned that title, but since there is no PE certification for a title such as this, I'm a little skeptical of its use either way.
While I agree in principle, holding coders accountable might still be possible.
"Software Engineers" are among an emerging class of "engineer" that doesn't need a professional engineering certification.
Architects are held personally accountable for the safety of their designs. The firm can do all they want to rush the architect, but you can bet that the architect won't be signing his/her name to the finished product unless he/she is confident that the design is safe and sound.
The same applies to most engineering professions. Structural engineers in particular are on the hook when their structure collapses and kills people. There is a very clear trail leading back to the point in the design where the fault occurred. Negligent engineers have paid hefty fines and/or gone to prison for these types of failures.
Unfortunately, mapping that degree of attention to software development is a little trickier. Most software bugs don't kill people. There are also orders of magnitude more developers than there are proper engineers. Is it appropriate to require certification and hold each one personally accountable for their code?
It might be appropriate to adopt a two-tier certification standard for these types of things. An uncertified product is a product not signed off by certified software engineers. A certified product has had every line of code personally vouched-for by a certified software engineer. Certified products would not be permitted to dodge liability, and the vendor and the engineer would, to some degree, share the blame for failures. Every software product sold would be required to prominently indicate whether it was an "uncertified" product, without any warranty, etc., or a "certified" product, with certain guarantees provided by law.
(This could conceivably allow for a rating system of sorts. If each serious bug could be tracked back to the software engineer that let it through, one could establish a metric that you could use to determine if an engineer is "good" or "bad".)
It goes without saying that certified products would be considerably (an order of magnitude?) more expensive, and possibly prohibitively so for the consumer market. For that reason, I'm not sure any of this is really practical, except perhaps on an enterprise level.
I actually agree with you, but there's a difference between a lack of benefit, and a benefit in the other direction.
Any DC-powered device like this is going to require a power adapter. Choosing a voltage for that power adapter matters very little to the cost of the adapter. The preferred DC voltage of the device thus becomes the deciding factor. The manufacturers have no incentive to standardize because there's no benefit at all. They still have to build/buy/ship an adapter with their device, so they're going to go with a DC voltage that lets them do that as cheaply as they can. If they all decide to standardize, but still have to ship adapters, their costs are going to go up a little bit, since conforming to a DC standard is going to be slightly more expensive than selecting a DC voltage that works best/most cheaply with their product.
The original poster was suggesting that the reason actually went beyond that: they preferred not to standardize because they were benefiting more from the sale of the adapter. While that might be true, I suspect the simple *lack* of benefit is probably more widespread.
If a standard were to emerge, however, and manufacturers could reduce the cost of their products by making the AC adapter an *option*, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to do that. You're selling the same product for significantly less than a competitor, because your customer has his own DC power supply. You can't do that if you don't adopt the standard.
But again, there's still the chicken-and-the-egg problem. None of this speculation means anything until we find a way to actually get a standard to emerge.
I was suggesting a building-local DC conversion, and suggested that this could be "in addition" to AC. Either modify outlets to incorporate both in one socket, or use a separate socket, and make it apparent what each type of socket supports. People will adapt.
If you're suggesting that manufacturers will be loathe to adopt a power standard because they could make more money exploiting the lack of one, I'm not sure that policy would be in the manufacturers' best interests. We're not talking about razor blades for a shaver here, where it's indisputable that it's in their best interests to keep their razor designs proprietary.
Consider that if there were enough consumers that were adopting this power standard, manufacturers would realize that they could drop their AC adapter from the product, eliminate its cost (but keep its markup, if they wanted), and easily undercut the competition, who still clings to the sales of their AC adapters. The consumers have it better, because even if this manufacturer increases its profit margin, it's still cheaper for them all around, because it's going to be cheaper to have a standards-based DC power infrastructure than it is to individually purchase an AC power adapter for every device they use.
It's possible that I'm missing something here, but the economics of this approach just don't seem to make sense from the manufacturer's perspective.
Of course, we still have the chicken-and-the-egg problem, but I'm not really convinced this is a significant contributor to it.
I suspect the lack of a DC standard has more to do with the lack of benefit, not necessarily the income from selling chargers. If you're the manufacturer of a DC-powered device today, you've already come to terms with the fact that you'll need to bundle an AC adapter with it. That's already going to be part of your cost. Since the selection of a DC voltage for your adapter impacts the ultimate cost of the adapter very little, the design of your device therefore drives the selection of a DC voltage. If you can build your device cheapest using 9VDC, then that's what your adapter should provide.
On the other hand, if there were a DC standard in place that would allow manufacturers to AVOID having to provide an adapter, suddenly it becomes cheaper for them to consider building their device to this standard, as opposed to bundling an adapter. They may be able to build the device cheapest at 9VDC, but they can make it work with the standard for only a little more (but still less than the cost of an adapter). The economics make that situation more desirable for everyone.
What's missing is (a) the standard, and (b) the infrastructure, either in the form of power outlets in the wall (or inductive devices like this on your desk) and/or multi-port adapters optimized for that standard DC voltage.
IMO, what we need is a single standard for power distribution that caters to the device, not dozens of adapters that are a slave to a single 120VAC standard.
Most small electric devices operate off of DC power, so no matter what, you have to have an adapter to convert AC power to DC. Since you have to have the adapter anyway, it doesn't really matter what DC voltage you go with, so you pick whatever's going to be cheapest for the situation. Consequently, we have all sorts of DC power requirements.
What might help the situation is for someone to come up with a standard for power outlets that use a standardized DC voltage in addition to AC. Or maybe a handful of voltages. Different contacts could provide your DC voltage(s), in conjunction with your AC voltage.
Device manufacturers could then target those standardized voltages and spend less money on adapters.
I agree, to an extent. It makes no economic sense to shoot for as perfect-as-possible for all software. The reason we have minimum standards for other industries, such as as automobiles, is because a defect in an automobile can kill people.
But what we have today is practically anarchy. There's no way of telling if a product will work properly, or will work at all, and software vendors are allowed to get away with that.
A middle ground here might be forced labeling. Require software vendors to place a label that, in a standard fashion, describes how safe the software is, whether it is guaranteed to work as labeled and advertised, and maybe something about the known defects it has, or estimated failure rate. Don't let the vendor hide this in the fine print. And then hold them to it with legal measures.
That way, if a piece of software is targeted for home use, the labeling should make it clear that it's going to have significant defects, and will fail at a high rate. You might have a more expensive variant for office use, with fewer defects. And then you might have a stripped down, very expensive version intended for critical applications, in hospitals or infrastructure. The end user can then choose which one they want to buy, and instead of feeding a market where the customer buys the cheapest product because they think all products are buggy, they can buy the product that meets their needs, with the assurance that they will have legal recourse if the product fails to meet the expectations indicated by labeling.
Google Print should just ban the listing of books by authors from the Author's Guild. Presumably the guild has some sort of process where the authors got all irritated by what they thought Google Print was doing, and got the guild to organize a lawsuit.
If Google comes out and says it's going to *ban* the listing of all of these authors' books, maybe they'll stop and wonder if it might not actually be a bad thing after all. Plus, the less vocal members of the guild that actually realize this is a good thing for them will now have a reason to get all upset and vocal: they're about to be banned from having their books indexed by the world's biggest search engine!
Now, in all seriousness, the effect of what Google is doing certainly amounts to fair use (the potential buyer of the book just sees enough of a snippet to allow them to realize this is or is not a book they're looking for). But their methods could easily be construed as infringement of copyright; they have to make a complete digital copy of a book they do not own. Their intentions don't matter here, except to influence how large the damages (actual or statutory) should be.
Since the RIAA isn't going after downloaders here, but people sharing, a theoretical cap on damages could be the cost of the album (one lost sale) multipled by the number of people that downloaded the song.
But US copyright law gives the RIAA the option of pursuing statutory damages instead: anywhere from $200 to $150,000 per title, depending on whether the infringer knew it was infringing, etc.
Plus the infringer has their own attorneys fees to deal with (and possibly RIAA's if the court agrees). That's why settlement is more desirable than taking it to trial. Consider the number of songs the average sharer actually shares, and multiply it by the $200 minimum, and it's quickly apparent that you're at their mercy.
Is all of this right? Is it just? I won't comment on that.
Tort law is one of those things that isn't intended to punish the person causing the harm, but to compensate the person that was harmed. Consequently, we have lots of situations where a seemingly innocent mistake on one person's part can end up with them paying significant damages to someone else. "But I didn't know!" It doesn't matter.
To put it another way, if it can be proved that infringement of someone's copyright was done, the law is set up to make sure that person is compensated. It doesn't matter of the person causing the harm knew, or intended it to happen.
I personally hate this, since it allows for a completely innocent mistake or accident to completely ruin someone's life, if the damage they caused was significant enough. (Some of this is balanced a bit by the requirement that the person being harmed wasn't negligent in allowing the harm. Driving around in a billion-dollar car made of diamonds, and then suing someone into bankruptcy for dinging your car door, probably wouldn't go over well, for example.) I'd favor, for example, penalizing the person if they knowingly or intentionally caused the harm, else compensate the victim out of a fund built from taxes.
But IANAL, and it's possible that this approach to torts is reasonable once you get at the heart of things.
The fuel you put in has to come out in some form. The whole thing about combustion is liberating some of the energy from the fuel by chemically altering it. The chemical components exhausted by the engine will be the same chemical components that went into it. Engine fuel is made primarily of hydrocarbons. This means, a bunch of carbon atoms and a bunch more of hydrogen atoms. Mix in some atmosphere (primarily nitrogen and oxygen), combust, and exhaust.
Primarily, exhaust is composed of air (primarily nitrogen), unburned fuel, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Even assuming that we could increase the percentage of fuel burned (to suggest that only 35% of fuel is burned is clearly erroneous), you still have NOx, CO and CO2 to deal with. How are these emissions reduced to zero? If they are reduced to zero, what happened to all of the carbon that we started with? I suspect the article was using some definition of "polluting emissions" that was not properly defined.
Further, the article made the absurd statement that the tailpipe was cold to the touch, and even went on to suggest that this meant there was no exhaust. This is completely ridiculous. The fuel doesn't just disappear when it's burned. This box doesn't convert an internal combustion engine into a nuclear reactor capable of converting the fuel's mass into energy. The elemental components of the fuel MUST be exhausted somehow. And since an internal combustion engine works through combustion, that exhaust is going to be hot.
I also see comments suggesting that this device works on some sort of "spare" or "unused" energy to perform the electrolysis. This is also a bit ridiculous. Alternators do not pull a fixed amount of mechanical energy out of the engine, converting the unused electricity into heat. They vary their load depending on the electrical needs of the vehicle. Turn your lights on even in a brand new BMW, and you will notice an effect on the engine. (Air conditioning is a bit different, since the compressor uses mechanical energy from the engine, not electrical energy out of the alternator.) You have to make the engine work HARDER in order to electrolize water.
Now, this technology COULD still work in the following way:
1. It MAY, by injecting hydrogen, allow the fuel to burn more completely.
2. By burning more completely, less unburned fuel is released as part of the exhaust. Less hydrocarbons means less smog, and less "pollution". But you have other emissions, such as CO2 and CO to deal with.
3. By burning more completely, more fuel is used to drive the vehicle, increasing fuel efficiency. However, there's no way any modern vehicle is burning less than 90% of its fuel. Modern engines are designed specifically to maximize the amount of fuel burned. More likely, your engine is burning over 99% of its fuel already. In order to get a 30% increase in your fuel economy, you're going to need to burn 129% of your fuel. Clearly that's ridiculous.
So while this technology may not ultimately be entirely snake oil, there are so many ridiculous claims in the article that I can't take the core claims very seriously.
Finally, this has nothing to do with creating a hydrogen-powered car. If an engine produced more energy from the burning of hydrogen than required to electrolize it, we could power our civilization with water.
Replying to myself, I did just note another post that said he sold this to someone in another state, which I didn't realize. This could potentially make the crime a federal one, and subject to federal laws. So nevermind.
Though you didn't specify which "congress" you were talking about, I should point out (for the benefit of other readers) that these laws are not defined at the federal level.
For the most part, any laws related to theft, or receiving/selling stolen goods, are defined at the locality (or perhaps state) level in the US. To put it another way, while most localities will have similar laws in this regard (you're only guilty of selling stolen property if you had reason to believe it was stolen), they're not guaranteed to be identical. Some localities may treat this situation differently.
It implies no such thing. It's a perfectly legitimate way of expressing precision. Everyone wants "100%", but what does that mean? 100% could be someone thinking 95% was acceptable, but they're just rounding up to the nearest 5%. When you're dealing with actual statistics, fixing bugs, and intending to produce as near-perfect a product as possible, you deal in terms such as this.
It would have probably been clearer for some readers for me to say 99.9%, as you suggest. I apologize.
I don't appreciate the name-calling. Please grow up.
Slashdot Mirror
The W3C is not the only standards body out there. In this case, the standard comes from the WhatWG. This is not some proprietary, ill-conceived hack. Please RTA.
It's only spyware if you classify every other web browser as spyware because they let you follow links and redirects. This standard adds no new privacy or "spyware" implications than already exist. Today, when I click a link that a site owner has decided to track, I get redirected to some tracking mechanism, which logs what I'm doing, and then sends me on my way to where I want to go. A slightly awkward approach uses hidden images on pages to log my page view. All this does is standardize the approach by making it efficient and giving the user the option of opting out by instructing their browser not to honor them. How can you possibly see this as spyware or a new privacy problem? Sites are already tracking the links you click. They're just doing it poorly through kludgy redirect mechanisms that force you to wait while you get bounced around. Plus, you can't opt out! With this standard, the browser can do the "ping" behind the scenes, and it does it only with your consent.
Mozilla team is pulling an IE (implementing their own extensions... read the blog...
WHATWG != Mozilla
Mozilla is attempting an implementation of a standard set by an independent standards body. No, they're not the W3C, but like you pseudo-quoted out of context, "w3c doesn't have to make all the rules."
What problem does this solve? I can create an tag today pointing to a 3rd-party page. That page can log your request, redirect you, whatever. That's how things work today. What security benefit do you get when you cripple "ping" like this? To actually see a (dubious) security benefit, you'd have to do the same thing for regular links, but then your browser will be limited to browsing pages on one site at a time, since you can't follow links to another site.
I still see two problems with this approach:
1. There will be people that still cannot afford to send their children to school, even with that tax break. Families below the poverty line were not paying enough in taxes to send their own children to school. More likely, the burden of schooling their children was shared more by middle- and upper-class households who pay more in taxes.
2. There will be families who decide to keep the tax break and use the money for things like food, shelter and heat, instead of schooling their child.
Threaten parents with jail all you want, but either way, the result is that there will be more children without adequate schooling in the US. These children will grow up without the knowledge and skills to succeed, and will consequently have to rely increasingly upon aid programs such as welfare.
One way to avoid that situation is to guarantee every child a minimum level of education using tax dollars. In other words: public school systems and minimum requirements/standards for those systems to follow.
No one can prove that mutations that happen in evolution are caused by god or by natural means.
It actually can be "proven" (i.e. a model or a theory completely explaining the process in a manner that is entirely consistent with all other aspects of our understanding of the universe) how a radiation-induced mutation occurs. "Radiation" as a whole is fairly well understood, and the mechanism where radiation damages DNA to cause a mutation is well understood as well. We don't necessarily have a camera capable of watching a single event where a single quanta of radiation causes a single DNA mutation that causes a demonstrable instance of speciation, but you don't need to build an MRI machine the size of the earth to tell that there's molten rock inside.
Those things we can fit into our models. We can come up with theories explaining it, and we can test them and see that our models do a great job of explaining what's going on.
However, we can't, through this process, prove or disprove that some God-like entity is working "behind the scenes" to orchestrate all of this in a manner that also just happens to fit our models. The goal of science is to explain the observed universe. Since most definitions of God insist that God isn't bound by the same natural laws that govern our universe (and consequently our theories for how the universe works), it's a bit difficult to work God into the equation.
I say that alot of evidence and data has been captured, but not enough to concretely say that it's a fact
Why not? Do you have experimental data that invalidates the theory? Or are you just aware of cases where you just can't imagine how it happened? There's plenty of evidence and data to support the theory, and zero evidence disproving it. A bunch of "wow, I just can't believe it!" cases isn't a reason to disprove a scientific theory. If you have some sort of experimental data that could not be explained by evolutionary theory (we're not talking about belief here--again, this is science, not faith), then that needs to be investigated. Science regularly deals in situations that are non-obvious to the layperson. Scientists themselves are frequently surprised by what their theories ultimately predict, but when those theories are tested and the non-obvious situations experimentally verified, at some point you just have to accept the data sitting in front of you.
you must present BOTH Intelligent Design and Evolution because those qare the two prevailing theories.
The former is not a scientific theory and consequently it has no place in a science class. If you want to present information that casts doubt on a scientific theory in a science classroom, you need to do it in a way that's consistent with scientific principles and methodology. You can't go through the fossil record in a biology class, point out significant climate changes and the ways that the various species seemed to adapt to those changes (or go extinct), and then wrap it all up with, "Or maybe some magical God being waved His hands and just made it happen because he didn't like the way they smelled." If you want to present an alternative to a scientific theory, you either need to attack it from a scientific angle, or present it outside of a scientific context. I have no problem if someone wants to start up a philosophy class in public schools and make this one of their points of study.
I do not understand why the Intelligent Design theory is being dismissed as the Chrisitian right's agenda only.
It is the Christian Right that is pushing for Intelligent Design in public schools. You're right though: the concept of ID isn't Christian-specific. It is, however, rooted in religion. You can't have governments sponsoring (without scientific evidence) the existence of a supernatural force (God or otherwise) in science classes without sound scientific basis. The judge here found that there was no scientific basis, and that
This makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons, but it just takes us back to the "what is the purpose of DNS?" argument that will never be won.
DNS was expected to provide a label for a hierarchy of administrative domains on the Internet. From a purely technical perspective, it makes no sense to transfer the name of your administrative domain to some other schmoe. In fact, given that URIs and other persistent identifiers like message IDs and X.500 suffixes incorporate DNS domains, you generally do not want your existing identifiers to be abused or collided with.
In the OID world, we have the same sort of situation. OIDs are assigned hierarchically, but right up front, the rule is: OIDs are not re-usable and not re-issuable. Which is fine, because they're just numbers and carry no value.
Unfortunately, the economics of DNS are such that DNS labels do carry value. Until we eliminate cases where people want to type a product name ".com", or cases where the hostname in the URL is equivalent to a store front, DNS labels will always have value, and no one will ever support a proposal to make them non-transferrable (or non-reusable).
I think it's a great idea, though. I shouldn't have to be so paranoid about my DNS domains being accidentally lost due to a late payment (or a mistake on either side), and immediately snatched up by the companies that are watching every registered DNS domain (because if it had value to someone once, it probably has enough value that could be exploited by turning it into a "search portal").
The current state of things is really crappy and any effort to fix it would be nice.
Let me preface by saying this differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It is usually a crime to willfully sell stolen goods. It's not normally a crime to sell something if you didn't know it was stolen. That's the criminal aspect.
Copyright infringement and theft-related things like conversion are civil torts. Torts do not normally require that you commit the act willfully for you to be liable for it. A person committing copyright infringement without realizing it is still liable for direct infringement and, if there are damages, they will have to pay those damages. Similarly, if someone sells you a stolen radio, and you're caught with it, that radio will be taken away from you without compensation.
At first glance, this seems remarkably unfair, punishing someone who didn't know they were doing something wrong, but remember:
a) Damages in civil torts are not there to punish the offender, they're there to ensure the victim is compensated. Whether or not you did it on purpose doesn't matter: the victim was still damaged. You caused the damage, and even though you didn't realize it, it's still the fair thing for you to compensate the victim.
b) If you can prove that someone else sold you that stolen radio and it was reasonable for you to believe it was legitimate, or that someone else gave you the copyrighted work and didn't tell you what was in it and that caused you to (reasonably) commit infringement without realizing it, you can always haul their butt into court along with you. They will pay damages, not you. It will all work out in the end.
The old system still works, but we know it won't work forever, and we know we need to change it.
I don't think that belief is unanimously held. IPv4, as originally envisioned, was doomed when IP growth skyrocketed. But today's IPv4 deployments are dramatically different. Networks and organizations have evolved to the scarcity of IPv4 addresses and other IPv4 shortcomings by adopting technologies such as NAT.
The reason businesses and providers haven't abandoned IPv4 is because there's no reason to yet. In the future, the capabilities of future network protocols like IPv6 will make it attractive to support IPv6, and at some point someone will ask the question, "Is there any point continuing to support IPv4 anymore?" But while we continue finding inexpensive ways to keep IPv4 working smoothly, we're not going to be investing in a big IPv6 migration. There's no incentive.
I completely agree. I may have expressed that a little too subtly in my original post. I take issue with the overuse of titles with "engineer" or "technician" in them. It's kind of insulting to people that are actually Professional Engineers and have had to work hard to get there. Now any Joe Scriptkiddie out of high school can have a title with the word "engineer" in it and the general public will consider them peers of any PE.
Call them programmers or analysts.
Now, that's not to say that there might actually be semi-legitimate "software engineers" that have earned that title, but since there is no PE certification for a title such as this, I'm a little skeptical of its use either way.
But in the future...
While I agree in principle, holding coders accountable might still be possible.
"Software Engineers" are among an emerging class of "engineer" that doesn't need a professional engineering certification.
Architects are held personally accountable for the safety of their designs. The firm can do all they want to rush the architect, but you can bet that the architect won't be signing his/her name to the finished product unless he/she is confident that the design is safe and sound.
The same applies to most engineering professions. Structural engineers in particular are on the hook when their structure collapses and kills people. There is a very clear trail leading back to the point in the design where the fault occurred. Negligent engineers have paid hefty fines and/or gone to prison for these types of failures.
Unfortunately, mapping that degree of attention to software development is a little trickier. Most software bugs don't kill people. There are also orders of magnitude more developers than there are proper engineers. Is it appropriate to require certification and hold each one personally accountable for their code?
It might be appropriate to adopt a two-tier certification standard for these types of things. An uncertified product is a product not signed off by certified software engineers. A certified product has had every line of code personally vouched-for by a certified software engineer. Certified products would not be permitted to dodge liability, and the vendor and the engineer would, to some degree, share the blame for failures. Every software product sold would be required to prominently indicate whether it was an "uncertified" product, without any warranty, etc., or a "certified" product, with certain guarantees provided by law.
(This could conceivably allow for a rating system of sorts. If each serious bug could be tracked back to the software engineer that let it through, one could establish a metric that you could use to determine if an engineer is "good" or "bad".)
It goes without saying that certified products would be considerably (an order of magnitude?) more expensive, and possibly prohibitively so for the consumer market. For that reason, I'm not sure any of this is really practical, except perhaps on an enterprise level.
I actually agree with you, but there's a difference between a lack of benefit, and a benefit in the other direction.
Any DC-powered device like this is going to require a power adapter. Choosing a voltage for that power adapter matters very little to the cost of the adapter. The preferred DC voltage of the device thus becomes the deciding factor. The manufacturers have no incentive to standardize because there's no benefit at all. They still have to build/buy/ship an adapter with their device, so they're going to go with a DC voltage that lets them do that as cheaply as they can. If they all decide to standardize, but still have to ship adapters, their costs are going to go up a little bit, since conforming to a DC standard is going to be slightly more expensive than selecting a DC voltage that works best/most cheaply with their product.
The original poster was suggesting that the reason actually went beyond that: they preferred not to standardize because they were benefiting more from the sale of the adapter. While that might be true, I suspect the simple *lack* of benefit is probably more widespread.
If a standard were to emerge, however, and manufacturers could reduce the cost of their products by making the AC adapter an *option*, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to do that. You're selling the same product for significantly less than a competitor, because your customer has his own DC power supply. You can't do that if you don't adopt the standard.
But again, there's still the chicken-and-the-egg problem. None of this speculation means anything until we find a way to actually get a standard to emerge.
I was suggesting a building-local DC conversion, and suggested that this could be "in addition" to AC. Either modify outlets to incorporate both in one socket, or use a separate socket, and make it apparent what each type of socket supports. People will adapt.
If you're suggesting that manufacturers will be loathe to adopt a power standard because they could make more money exploiting the lack of one, I'm not sure that policy would be in the manufacturers' best interests. We're not talking about razor blades for a shaver here, where it's indisputable that it's in their best interests to keep their razor designs proprietary.
Consider that if there were enough consumers that were adopting this power standard, manufacturers would realize that they could drop their AC adapter from the product, eliminate its cost (but keep its markup, if they wanted), and easily undercut the competition, who still clings to the sales of their AC adapters. The consumers have it better, because even if this manufacturer increases its profit margin, it's still cheaper for them all around, because it's going to be cheaper to have a standards-based DC power infrastructure than it is to individually purchase an AC power adapter for every device they use.
It's possible that I'm missing something here, but the economics of this approach just don't seem to make sense from the manufacturer's perspective.
Of course, we still have the chicken-and-the-egg problem, but I'm not really convinced this is a significant contributor to it.
I suspect the lack of a DC standard has more to do with the lack of benefit, not necessarily the income from selling chargers. If you're the manufacturer of a DC-powered device today, you've already come to terms with the fact that you'll need to bundle an AC adapter with it. That's already going to be part of your cost. Since the selection of a DC voltage for your adapter impacts the ultimate cost of the adapter very little, the design of your device therefore drives the selection of a DC voltage. If you can build your device cheapest using 9VDC, then that's what your adapter should provide.
On the other hand, if there were a DC standard in place that would allow manufacturers to AVOID having to provide an adapter, suddenly it becomes cheaper for them to consider building their device to this standard, as opposed to bundling an adapter. They may be able to build the device cheapest at 9VDC, but they can make it work with the standard for only a little more (but still less than the cost of an adapter). The economics make that situation more desirable for everyone.
What's missing is (a) the standard, and (b) the infrastructure, either in the form of power outlets in the wall (or inductive devices like this on your desk) and/or multi-port adapters optimized for that standard DC voltage.
IMO, what we need is a single standard for power distribution that caters to the device, not dozens of adapters that are a slave to a single 120VAC standard.
Most small electric devices operate off of DC power, so no matter what, you have to have an adapter to convert AC power to DC. Since you have to have the adapter anyway, it doesn't really matter what DC voltage you go with, so you pick whatever's going to be cheapest for the situation. Consequently, we have all sorts of DC power requirements.
What might help the situation is for someone to come up with a standard for power outlets that use a standardized DC voltage in addition to AC. Or maybe a handful of voltages. Different contacts could provide your DC voltage(s), in conjunction with your AC voltage.
Device manufacturers could then target those standardized voltages and spend less money on adapters.
I agree, to an extent. It makes no economic sense to shoot for as perfect-as-possible for all software. The reason we have minimum standards for other industries, such as as automobiles, is because a defect in an automobile can kill people.
But what we have today is practically anarchy. There's no way of telling if a product will work properly, or will work at all, and software vendors are allowed to get away with that.
A middle ground here might be forced labeling. Require software vendors to place a label that, in a standard fashion, describes how safe the software is, whether it is guaranteed to work as labeled and advertised, and maybe something about the known defects it has, or estimated failure rate. Don't let the vendor hide this in the fine print. And then hold them to it with legal measures.
That way, if a piece of software is targeted for home use, the labeling should make it clear that it's going to have significant defects, and will fail at a high rate. You might have a more expensive variant for office use, with fewer defects. And then you might have a stripped down, very expensive version intended for critical applications, in hospitals or infrastructure. The end user can then choose which one they want to buy, and instead of feeding a market where the customer buys the cheapest product because they think all products are buggy, they can buy the product that meets their needs, with the assurance that they will have legal recourse if the product fails to meet the expectations indicated by labeling.
If a god did it, and you tried to repeat the act, people would scream, "Don't play God!"
But if aliens can do it, then it's practically a God-given mandate to one-up them.
Google Print should just ban the listing of books by authors from the Author's Guild. Presumably the guild has some sort of process where the authors got all irritated by what they thought Google Print was doing, and got the guild to organize a lawsuit.
If Google comes out and says it's going to *ban* the listing of all of these authors' books, maybe they'll stop and wonder if it might not actually be a bad thing after all. Plus, the less vocal members of the guild that actually realize this is a good thing for them will now have a reason to get all upset and vocal: they're about to be banned from having their books indexed by the world's biggest search engine!
Now, in all seriousness, the effect of what Google is doing certainly amounts to fair use (the potential buyer of the book just sees enough of a snippet to allow them to realize this is or is not a book they're looking for). But their methods could easily be construed as infringement of copyright; they have to make a complete digital copy of a book they do not own. Their intentions don't matter here, except to influence how large the damages (actual or statutory) should be.
So where are the "significant damage" here?
Isn't that the big question?
Since the RIAA isn't going after downloaders here, but people sharing, a theoretical cap on damages could be the cost of the album (one lost sale) multipled by the number of people that downloaded the song.
But US copyright law gives the RIAA the option of pursuing statutory damages instead: anywhere from $200 to $150,000 per title, depending on whether the infringer knew it was infringing, etc.
Plus the infringer has their own attorneys fees to deal with (and possibly RIAA's if the court agrees). That's why settlement is more desirable than taking it to trial. Consider the number of songs the average sharer actually shares, and multiply it by the $200 minimum, and it's quickly apparent that you're at their mercy.
Is all of this right? Is it just? I won't comment on that.
Unfortunately, in the US, it's not that easy.
Tort law is one of those things that isn't intended to punish the person causing the harm, but to compensate the person that was harmed. Consequently, we have lots of situations where a seemingly innocent mistake on one person's part can end up with them paying significant damages to someone else. "But I didn't know!" It doesn't matter.
To put it another way, if it can be proved that infringement of someone's copyright was done, the law is set up to make sure that person is compensated. It doesn't matter of the person causing the harm knew, or intended it to happen.
I personally hate this, since it allows for a completely innocent mistake or accident to completely ruin someone's life, if the damage they caused was significant enough. (Some of this is balanced a bit by the requirement that the person being harmed wasn't negligent in allowing the harm. Driving around in a billion-dollar car made of diamonds, and then suing someone into bankruptcy for dinging your car door, probably wouldn't go over well, for example.) I'd favor, for example, penalizing the person if they knowingly or intentionally caused the harm, else compensate the victim out of a fund built from taxes.
But IANAL, and it's possible that this approach to torts is reasonable once you get at the heart of things.
The fuel you put in has to come out in some form. The whole thing about combustion is liberating some of the energy from the fuel by chemically altering it. The chemical components exhausted by the engine will be the same chemical components that went into it. Engine fuel is made primarily of hydrocarbons. This means, a bunch of carbon atoms and a bunch more of hydrogen atoms. Mix in some atmosphere (primarily nitrogen and oxygen), combust, and exhaust.
Primarily, exhaust is composed of air (primarily nitrogen), unburned fuel, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Even assuming that we could increase the percentage of fuel burned (to suggest that only 35% of fuel is burned is clearly erroneous), you still have NOx, CO and CO2 to deal with. How are these emissions reduced to zero? If they are reduced to zero, what happened to all of the carbon that we started with? I suspect the article was using some definition of "polluting emissions" that was not properly defined.
Further, the article made the absurd statement that the tailpipe was cold to the touch, and even went on to suggest that this meant there was no exhaust. This is completely ridiculous. The fuel doesn't just disappear when it's burned. This box doesn't convert an internal combustion engine into a nuclear reactor capable of converting the fuel's mass into energy. The elemental components of the fuel MUST be exhausted somehow. And since an internal combustion engine works through combustion, that exhaust is going to be hot.
I also see comments suggesting that this device works on some sort of "spare" or "unused" energy to perform the electrolysis. This is also a bit ridiculous. Alternators do not pull a fixed amount of mechanical energy out of the engine, converting the unused electricity into heat. They vary their load depending on the electrical needs of the vehicle. Turn your lights on even in a brand new BMW, and you will notice an effect on the engine. (Air conditioning is a bit different, since the compressor uses mechanical energy from the engine, not electrical energy out of the alternator.) You have to make the engine work HARDER in order to electrolize water.
Now, this technology COULD still work in the following way:
1. It MAY, by injecting hydrogen, allow the fuel to burn more completely.
2. By burning more completely, less unburned fuel is released as part of the exhaust. Less hydrocarbons means less smog, and less "pollution". But you have other emissions, such as CO2 and CO to deal with.
3. By burning more completely, more fuel is used to drive the vehicle, increasing fuel efficiency. However, there's no way any modern vehicle is burning less than 90% of its fuel. Modern engines are designed specifically to maximize the amount of fuel burned. More likely, your engine is burning over 99% of its fuel already. In order to get a 30% increase in your fuel economy, you're going to need to burn 129% of your fuel. Clearly that's ridiculous.
So while this technology may not ultimately be entirely snake oil, there are so many ridiculous claims in the article that I can't take the core claims very seriously.
Finally, this has nothing to do with creating a hydrogen-powered car. If an engine produced more energy from the burning of hydrogen than required to electrolize it, we could power our civilization with water.
Replying to myself, I did just note another post that said he sold this to someone in another state, which I didn't realize. This could potentially make the crime a federal one, and subject to federal laws. So nevermind.
Though you didn't specify which "congress" you were talking about, I should point out (for the benefit of other readers) that these laws are not defined at the federal level.
For the most part, any laws related to theft, or receiving/selling stolen goods, are defined at the locality (or perhaps state) level in the US. To put it another way, while most localities will have similar laws in this regard (you're only guilty of selling stolen property if you had reason to believe it was stolen), they're not guaranteed to be identical. Some localities may treat this situation differently.
It implies no such thing. It's a perfectly legitimate way of expressing precision. Everyone wants "100%", but what does that mean? 100% could be someone thinking 95% was acceptable, but they're just rounding up to the nearest 5%. When you're dealing with actual statistics, fixing bugs, and intending to produce as near-perfect a product as possible, you deal in terms such as this.
It would have probably been clearer for some readers for me to say 99.9%, as you suggest. I apologize.
I don't appreciate the name-calling. Please grow up.