What do you think is out there that's so important?
Space. Elbow room. Infinite amounts of it.
All the elements of the periodic table are on Earth too, you know
Not necessarily... there may exist natural elements in other environments that are not found anywhere in this solar system. All we know is that for the elements we've discovered so far, there are no gaps. There may also be previously undiscovered isotopes of elements that we do know about.
There's nothing out there that we don't have on Earth.
This is provably false. Several previously unknown minerals were discovered on the moon, for instance.
And don't give me this tired, feeble "because it's there" nonsense.
It's only nonsense if you have no spirit of adventure. How sad for you.
The limits of physics and our engineering are also "there".
Citation please.
I don't see anyone rooting for life extension, but we should choose to do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Kennedy said almost word-for-word the exact same thing about going to the moon in the sixties. I'm not sure if that was deliberate or not.
While all you need is photons going into your eyes to *SEE*, you need actual contrast in order to visually perceive and recognize what it is that you are actually seeing (which is crucial for reading). Emissive displays can easily produce the necessary amount of contrast that makes reading easy to do, but when in room that is otherwise too dark to read in, it effectively amounts to trying to read while, as I said above, staring into a flashlight. While turning down the brightness on the display may help alleviate that particular problem, it creates another - lowering the contrast, which reduces your ability to visually process whatever it is you are looking at, and in a darkenned room, where the display is the only real source of light, any illumination from the display is still going to feel like trying to read while looking directly at a light bulb. Even if it's not actually uncomfortable because it's not bright enough to be, it's also then not going to be presenting enough contrast to your eyes for you to easily read what you are seeing. Admittedly, all of this may just be a technical limitation on current designs of emissive displays, and not an inherent flaw in an emissive concept, but owing to the fact that it is not present at all in passive displays, there's reasonable cause to suspect that emissive displays might just be a dead end in that regard.
But as things sit right now, with an emissive display, and when in a room that is otherwise too dark to read in, you have to choose between getting a headache from looking at a bright display, or getting a headache from trying to read something that doesn't present enough contrast.
In the end, the best thing to do is just turn on a light... and if you have another source of light anyways, then the backlight on the display is just so much wasted energy.
How often do you hear the notion that self-illuminating displays cause eye-strain? (Actually "eye-strain" is most likely a misinterpretation of what is actually physiologically going on, but it's still descriptive enough to give a general idea of where the problem actually lies.)
The problem is not unique to myself... not remotely.
Yes, of course... but to typically get it at a level that is suitable, you end up reducing contrast to below the level it would have otherwise appeared on a normal printed page, and given that the visual center of our brains depends heavily on contrast to identify shapes, one might as well just be trying to read a normal book in low light. While not actually being bad for your eyes directly, it's a pretty fast way to get a migraine.
The applications are indeed very far reaching... from having things that look like full motion paintings (think "Harry Potter"), to changing the pattern on the wallpaper in your house, to changing the colors of the clothes that you are wearing, all at a push of a button.
Is it stupid to have to turn a light on to see at all?
You'd normally need a light to read a real book anyways, how is needing a light to read something on a different surface any different?
Maybe you like having tons of photons projected directly into your eyes, when your pupils are mostly dilated to accommodate reflect the total amount of light visible to you (which actually doesn't tend to average to much if the room is otherwise too dark to be able to read anything that isn't actually glowing, so your pupils are generally more dilated than they might need to be), but not everybody likes trying to read while staring into a flashlight.
Make it large enough to handle textbook content presented at a readable size (typically letter-sized pages), and I'd be all over it, as long as it allowed me to upload my own pdf's to it, and, perhaps no less important, as long as it wasn't priced ridiculously high. And yeah, I know there's some e-ink readers oout there with displays nearly that big, but the current state of affairs with eink displays totally blows. Page refreshes are so slow that I'd rather carry 20 lbs worth of textbooks than try to use an eink reader for anything other than the reading of fiction.
A 14" screen would be ideal... although with a respectable resolution, a 10-11" one might also be able to suffice.
... there's absolutely nothing in this ruling that actually prohibits UBB... it only prohibits charging more than the amount that was agreed to. Simply put, once a customer has used up the bandwidth that they've paid for in a money, they will have to go and buy more.
It cuts out the suprise bills at the end when you find out just how much bandwidth you really used last month, but it doesn't really stop ISP's from charging consumers based on how much bandwidth they actually use, or, more specifically, they intend to use.
In your comment, I found myself tripping over 'etrine', 'brleay', and 'soinlwn', parsing them as mostly nonsense without rereading the enitre sentence more slowly (actually, I had initially parsed 'brleay' as 'barley'). I didn't slow down even slightly for any of the other words. Not sure what that says about me...
Yes, but they are garnering attention under a name that *VERY* heavily implies that they aren't interested in working within it at all. There's a saying about "good intentions"... and a less than desirable conclusion. Are you familiar with it?
Anyways, I remain resolute in the belief that going with a name specifically designed to gather attention *because* it is... well... outrageous, since I can't really think of a better term... sort of reminds me of a child who acts up deliberately to gather attention, even though what they might really want attention for is perfectly innocent.
That, I believe, may be the sanest answer I've heard to address this matter out of any response to my previous remarks (I'm still shocked as hell that it didn't get modded as troll or flamebait, by the way.. it may be my honest opinion, but I was sure it would be thought of as deliberately trying to push people's buttons).
Notwithstanding, I believe that the system can be changed by working within it. Sure, there are exceptions to this (most profoundly in matters involving human or civil rights), but for something like copyright, it should be entirely possible to effect positive change by using the existing system to reform itself, rather than resorting to disregarding the portions of it we don't agree with, no matter how stupid we might believe them to be.
From what I've heard about the pirate party, they are, in fact, advocating some principles I believe in myself... however, they could have accomplished the exact same ends by calling themselves the "Freedom Party", which could put a far more positive spin on what they appear to be trying to accomplish. In the end, however, a name like "pirate party" still seems to reflect a measure of immaturity, and with that, connotes an inability or unpreparedness to fully accept the responsibilities for all of their decisions and their actions.
How would that be deliberately wrecking the value of the account?
He would be announcing that he is leaving the company (true). He would be announcing that phonedog would be taking over ownership of the account (true). He would be saying he would be opening a personal account (true), and finally, and most importantly, he would not be compelling anybody to follow him... simply advising them that *IF* they wished to continue to do so, they would need to follow his new account, since he would no longer be personally commanding that one. He would not be deliberately sabotaging anything... and people who want to follow the company could continue to follow the phonedog account.
Such a name would unambiguously state their agenda, and firmly represents their platform in a positive manner, rather than sounding like a childish plea to gather attention because their platform doesn't have sufficient merit to gather interest on its own.
Wearing "pirate" as a badge of honor gets literally less than zero respect from me (and just shy of wholehearted contempt), because I believe that copyright holder's interests should be preserved, and not disrespected. As the whole point of being a pirate is to practice the latter, I find no reason to respect their attempt at reappropriating the term as a positive thing. One might as well be, in my view, reappropriating a term like "embezzler", for example.
Lest you believe me to be some copyright corporation's paid shill, allow me to say that with absolutely no less fervor or enthusiasm, I laud the creation and utilization of copyrighted works that the authors have chosen to make freely available, and I wholeheartedly endorse the notion that a consumer should be free to do with, for their own personal use, whatever they might happen to want to do with an authorized copy of a copyrighted work. I loathe the notion that copyright is virtually eternal in the USA... the point of copyright is that it is supposed to be for a limited time, and in my own personal opinion, I believe it should be closer to about 15 years, rather than the something like 90 odd years that I think it's at right now. I consider laws like the DMCA to be an abomination because they decimate consumer freedoms without offering them anything in exchange. When people choose to make copies for other people, however, for any reason that is not explicitly exempted by fair use guidelines (which copyright holders implicitly agree to when they utilize copyright in the first place, since that is part of copyright law), they tread on the copyright holder's lawfully granted rights, and I firmly draw the line there... and I'm just not likely to sympathize with them.
Well... traditionally, how a party is named usually reflects their agenda in some way.
As I have no interest in furthering the cause of piracy (I refer to media piracy, specifically), I don't see any point in voting for them.
Now, I'm aware that's not their actual agenda (probably... they don't actually deny it anywhere that I've seen) , but, like I said... I think that they need to grow up and live in the real world. People that not only show a lack of any effort to present themselves as outwardly respectable, but appear to be going out of their way to present themselves as rebellious and disrespectful of cultural norms, barring civil and human rights issues, are not terribly likely to get much respect from me... nor from, what I would imagine, a good portion of our society.
... who thinks that a name like 'Pirate Party' sounds like some sort of childish joke. They might have serious intentions, but I could no more bring myself to take them seriously than I could one called the "purple polka dot clowns party".
Even at best, to try to take the name at face value, their naming suggests they are advocating something that is strongly associated with disobedience and anarchy.
They need to grow up, IMO.
(This post is probably going to get modded as a troll, but it's still my honest opinion.)
"Once you become aware".... you see, that's the tricky bit.
My point is that *ANY* record of something might potentially be called on as evidence for the activity in the future by a possible court case whose purposes you might not even necessarily imagine, and an intelligent person is always going to be aware of this. So let's say a person openly admits to a policy of always destroying confidential data once they have finished with it. They do this for sake of securing their own privacy, so that the records are not seen or utilized by other arbitrary people, not specifically to prevent their use in a court of law. But then if this person should ever do anything that isn't actually illegal, but might be ethically questionable, and then destroys evidence of their participation in it, they instantly are breaking the law at that point because they must be aware that it could be called upon in some hypothetically upcoming court case against them?
I trust you can see the absurdity behind this.... and what it invariably means for privacy and anonymity online.
So if I were to say that I routinely always destroy certain confidential records that are my own property after I've read them *SPECIFICALLY* to prevent the eventuality that their contents might ever be used to incriminate me, and I go to court and they order me to turn over such records, again, bearing in mind here that preventing self-incrimination is the *SOLE* reason for doing this, am I going to be liable for willful destruction of evidence?
It's probably less about "I didn't know it was evidence" and more along the lines of you can pry my passwords from my cold, dead, brain... and that's assuming that you could ever extract the data from it.
To some people, they view keeping information that they did not deem fit to share with the general public already as confidential to be even more important than their own liberty.
Obviously, if a person is willing to do something that could get them thrown into jail, then whatever that thing is must be more important to them than their own freedom. One might very well consider that to be an indication of insanity or instability, but bear in mind that people who are going through a rough divorce are rarely in entirely sound states of mind anyways. Regardless, being thrown in jail won't change how inaccessible the data would be after deleting it, and even a person who has been incarcerated for doing so might very well find some satisfaction in that (in fact, the only way they really would not is if they had made a sincere attempt to delete the data, and while in prison discovered that their efforts to render the data as inaccessible were actually futile).
Prior art in the context of patents always refers to something that actually existed previously. This keeps people from patenting things that other people patented long ago, where the patents have expired. Something being in a work of fiction won't cut it as an example of "prior art".
It may, however, make it qualify as "obvious".... particularly if the fictional work is popular.
Unless I'm mistaken, your recommendation amounts to the notion that computer programmers should never get married to somebody who likes their job and doesn't want to relocate.
While some might consider the option to live apart, at that point you are splitting the family income... and having to not only pay a mortgage where you used to live, but also the cost to rent a place at your new location as well, which isn't economically advantageous overall.
Slashdot Mirror
Space. Elbow room. Infinite amounts of it.
Not necessarily... there may exist natural elements in other environments that are not found anywhere in this solar system. All we know is that for the elements we've discovered so far, there are no gaps. There may also be previously undiscovered isotopes of elements that we do know about.
This is provably false. Several previously unknown minerals were discovered on the moon, for instance.
It's only nonsense if you have no spirit of adventure. How sad for you.
Citation please.
Kennedy said almost word-for-word the exact same thing about going to the moon in the sixties. I'm not sure if that was deliberate or not.
While all you need is photons going into your eyes to *SEE*, you need actual contrast in order to visually perceive and recognize what it is that you are actually seeing (which is crucial for reading). Emissive displays can easily produce the necessary amount of contrast that makes reading easy to do, but when in room that is otherwise too dark to read in, it effectively amounts to trying to read while, as I said above, staring into a flashlight. While turning down the brightness on the display may help alleviate that particular problem, it creates another - lowering the contrast, which reduces your ability to visually process whatever it is you are looking at, and in a darkenned room, where the display is the only real source of light, any illumination from the display is still going to feel like trying to read while looking directly at a light bulb. Even if it's not actually uncomfortable because it's not bright enough to be, it's also then not going to be presenting enough contrast to your eyes for you to easily read what you are seeing. Admittedly, all of this may just be a technical limitation on current designs of emissive displays, and not an inherent flaw in an emissive concept, but owing to the fact that it is not present at all in passive displays, there's reasonable cause to suspect that emissive displays might just be a dead end in that regard.
But as things sit right now, with an emissive display, and when in a room that is otherwise too dark to read in, you have to choose between getting a headache from looking at a bright display, or getting a headache from trying to read something that doesn't present enough contrast.
In the end, the best thing to do is just turn on a light... and if you have another source of light anyways, then the backlight on the display is just so much wasted energy.
The problem is not unique to myself... not remotely.
Yes, of course... but to typically get it at a level that is suitable, you end up reducing contrast to below the level it would have otherwise appeared on a normal printed page, and given that the visual center of our brains depends heavily on contrast to identify shapes, one might as well just be trying to read a normal book in low light. While not actually being bad for your eyes directly, it's a pretty fast way to get a migraine.
The applications are indeed very far reaching... from having things that look like full motion paintings (think "Harry Potter"), to changing the pattern on the wallpaper in your house, to changing the colors of the clothes that you are wearing, all at a push of a button.
Is it stupid to have to turn a light on to see at all?
You'd normally need a light to read a real book anyways, how is needing a light to read something on a different surface any different?
Maybe you like having tons of photons projected directly into your eyes, when your pupils are mostly dilated to accommodate reflect the total amount of light visible to you (which actually doesn't tend to average to much if the room is otherwise too dark to be able to read anything that isn't actually glowing, so your pupils are generally more dilated than they might need to be), but not everybody likes trying to read while staring into a flashlight.
Make it large enough to handle textbook content presented at a readable size (typically letter-sized pages), and I'd be all over it, as long as it allowed me to upload my own pdf's to it, and, perhaps no less important, as long as it wasn't priced ridiculously high. And yeah, I know there's some e-ink readers oout there with displays nearly that big, but the current state of affairs with eink displays totally blows. Page refreshes are so slow that I'd rather carry 20 lbs worth of textbooks than try to use an eink reader for anything other than the reading of fiction.
A 14" screen would be ideal... although with a respectable resolution, a 10-11" one might also be able to suffice.
s/paid for in a money/paid for in a month/
It cuts out the suprise bills at the end when you find out just how much bandwidth you really used last month, but it doesn't really stop ISP's from charging consumers based on how much bandwidth they actually use, or, more specifically, they intend to use.
In your comment, I found myself tripping over 'etrine', 'brleay', and 'soinlwn', parsing them as mostly nonsense without rereading the enitre sentence more slowly (actually, I had initially parsed 'brleay' as 'barley'). I didn't slow down even slightly for any of the other words. Not sure what that says about me...
Yes, but they are garnering attention under a name that *VERY* heavily implies that they aren't interested in working within it at all. There's a saying about "good intentions"... and a less than desirable conclusion. Are you familiar with it?
Anyways, I remain resolute in the belief that going with a name specifically designed to gather attention *because* it is... well... outrageous, since I can't really think of a better term... sort of reminds me of a child who acts up deliberately to gather attention, even though what they might really want attention for is perfectly innocent.
That, I believe, may be the sanest answer I've heard to address this matter out of any response to my previous remarks (I'm still shocked as hell that it didn't get modded as troll or flamebait, by the way.. it may be my honest opinion, but I was sure it would be thought of as deliberately trying to push people's buttons).
Notwithstanding, I believe that the system can be changed by working within it. Sure, there are exceptions to this (most profoundly in matters involving human or civil rights), but for something like copyright, it should be entirely possible to effect positive change by using the existing system to reform itself, rather than resorting to disregarding the portions of it we don't agree with, no matter how stupid we might believe them to be.
From what I've heard about the pirate party, they are, in fact, advocating some principles I believe in myself... however, they could have accomplished the exact same ends by calling themselves the "Freedom Party", which could put a far more positive spin on what they appear to be trying to accomplish. In the end, however, a name like "pirate party" still seems to reflect a measure of immaturity, and with that, connotes an inability or unpreparedness to fully accept the responsibilities for all of their decisions and their actions.
That remark could potentially constitute libel.
It much less risky from a litigation point of view to simply tweet the first part of what you said... literally everything before the apostrophe.
How would that be deliberately wrecking the value of the account?
He would be announcing that he is leaving the company (true). He would be announcing that phonedog would be taking over ownership of the account (true). He would be saying he would be opening a personal account (true), and finally, and most importantly, he would not be compelling anybody to follow him... simply advising them that *IF* they wished to continue to do so, they would need to follow his new account, since he would no longer be personally commanding that one. He would not be deliberately sabotaging anything... and people who want to follow the company could continue to follow the phonedog account.
Then why not call themselves the Freedom Party?
Such a name would unambiguously state their agenda, and firmly represents their platform in a positive manner, rather than sounding like a childish plea to gather attention because their platform doesn't have sufficient merit to gather interest on its own.
Wearing "pirate" as a badge of honor gets literally less than zero respect from me (and just shy of wholehearted contempt), because I believe that copyright holder's interests should be preserved, and not disrespected. As the whole point of being a pirate is to practice the latter, I find no reason to respect their attempt at reappropriating the term as a positive thing. One might as well be, in my view, reappropriating a term like "embezzler", for example.
Lest you believe me to be some copyright corporation's paid shill, allow me to say that with absolutely no less fervor or enthusiasm, I laud the creation and utilization of copyrighted works that the authors have chosen to make freely available, and I wholeheartedly endorse the notion that a consumer should be free to do with, for their own personal use, whatever they might happen to want to do with an authorized copy of a copyrighted work. I loathe the notion that copyright is virtually eternal in the USA... the point of copyright is that it is supposed to be for a limited time, and in my own personal opinion, I believe it should be closer to about 15 years, rather than the something like 90 odd years that I think it's at right now. I consider laws like the DMCA to be an abomination because they decimate consumer freedoms without offering them anything in exchange. When people choose to make copies for other people, however, for any reason that is not explicitly exempted by fair use guidelines (which copyright holders implicitly agree to when they utilize copyright in the first place, since that is part of copyright law), they tread on the copyright holder's lawfully granted rights, and I firmly draw the line there... and I'm just not likely to sympathize with them.
Well... traditionally, how a party is named usually reflects their agenda in some way.
As I have no interest in furthering the cause of piracy (I refer to media piracy, specifically), I don't see any point in voting for them.
Now, I'm aware that's not their actual agenda (probably... they don't actually deny it anywhere that I've seen) , but, like I said... I think that they need to grow up and live in the real world. People that not only show a lack of any effort to present themselves as outwardly respectable, but appear to be going out of their way to present themselves as rebellious and disrespectful of cultural norms, barring civil and human rights issues, are not terribly likely to get much respect from me... nor from, what I would imagine, a good portion of our society.
Even at best, to try to take the name at face value, their naming suggests they are advocating something that is strongly associated with disobedience and anarchy.
They need to grow up, IMO.
(This post is probably going to get modded as a troll, but it's still my honest opinion.)
"Once you become aware".... you see, that's the tricky bit.
My point is that *ANY* record of something might potentially be called on as evidence for the activity in the future by a possible court case whose purposes you might not even necessarily imagine, and an intelligent person is always going to be aware of this. So let's say a person openly admits to a policy of always destroying confidential data once they have finished with it. They do this for sake of securing their own privacy, so that the records are not seen or utilized by other arbitrary people, not specifically to prevent their use in a court of law. But then if this person should ever do anything that isn't actually illegal, but might be ethically questionable, and then destroys evidence of their participation in it, they instantly are breaking the law at that point because they must be aware that it could be called upon in some hypothetically upcoming court case against them?
I trust you can see the absurdity behind this.... and what it invariably means for privacy and anonymity online.
So if I were to say that I routinely always destroy certain confidential records that are my own property after I've read them *SPECIFICALLY* to prevent the eventuality that their contents might ever be used to incriminate me, and I go to court and they order me to turn over such records, again, bearing in mind here that preventing self-incrimination is the *SOLE* reason for doing this, am I going to be liable for willful destruction of evidence?
To some people, they view keeping information that they did not deem fit to share with the general public already as confidential to be even more important than their own liberty.
Obviously, if a person is willing to do something that could get them thrown into jail, then whatever that thing is must be more important to them than their own freedom. One might very well consider that to be an indication of insanity or instability, but bear in mind that people who are going through a rough divorce are rarely in entirely sound states of mind anyways. Regardless, being thrown in jail won't change how inaccessible the data would be after deleting it, and even a person who has been incarcerated for doing so might very well find some satisfaction in that (in fact, the only way they really would not is if they had made a sincere attempt to delete the data, and while in prison discovered that their efforts to render the data as inaccessible were actually futile).
Prior art in the context of patents always refers to something that actually existed previously. This keeps people from patenting things that other people patented long ago, where the patents have expired. Something being in a work of fiction won't cut it as an example of "prior art".
It may, however, make it qualify as "obvious".... particularly if the fictional work is popular.
And, of course, once it's already too late, they still won't change because it won't actually help anyways.
Unless I'm mistaken, your recommendation amounts to the notion that computer programmers should never get married to somebody who likes their job and doesn't want to relocate.
While some might consider the option to live apart, at that point you are splitting the family income... and having to not only pay a mortgage where you used to live, but also the cost to rent a place at your new location as well, which isn't economically advantageous overall.