That's not quite true. What *is* true is that there are certain things that they have all decided to "de-emphasize". Whether they decided independently or in collusion is something we don't know, but the effect is about the same. OTOH, there are areas where they disagree, also. And the truth of the material seems to be of only minor concern.
If you think "Gamergate" was a major incident in this area, you need to open your eyes. Most of it is more power or money oriented. (And there are reasons why many of the groups could have come to the same decisions independently, but that this happened is no more provable than that it didn't.)
OK, then make them criminally liable for criminal posts. They shouldn't be able to have it both ways. Either they don't censor, or they are liable for posted content. Since they are clearly censoring, they should be liable. Since the aren't being properly prosecuted, harsh public criticism is a lot less than they deserve.
They should pay costs and damages for every false claim of infringement. Since they don't I'd be happy to see them bankrupt, or worse.
They recklessly abuse the legal system to disadvantage those weaker them themselves. This means I don't believe they deserve ANY protection from the legal system. They are intentionally undermining the legal system of the US for their own profit. If the constitution didn't define it so carefully I'd call that treason.
How about every time they ask Google to take down a link, all search results linking to their sites are downgraded until the prove the link was infringing.
After all, they're asking Google to do extra work, they should pay for it somehow.
Congress didn't write the law, congress just passed it. It was written by the media companies. (In this case, IIRC, the RIAA companies...though the evidence was third hand.)
That said, every single elected official, whether representative, senator, or president, who voted in favor of, or signed, the DMCA committed malfeasance. If I knew more about the wording of the laws I'd probably be able to assert also conspiracy to commit malfeasance (which is itself a felony). That they were not prosecuted is only another example of the corruption of the US government. I doubt that there is any legal means to take corrective steps.
Depends on your definition of "successful". I can definitely say that when systemd appeared on my system I started having problems I'd never had before. I can't positively say that systemd was the cause, and even if I could I'm not sure it would matter to your definition of "successful". To me it matters enough that if BSD could handle ext4 file systems I would have likely started dual booting to BSD in preparation for a migration. It matters enough that I've started seriously considering reformatting one of my large partitions to some file system that both BSD and Linux can handle.
P.S.: I *AM* considering using a linux distribution that doesn't include systemd, but so far I haven't reached a decision, partially because this is a decision with long term consequences, and many applications (e.g. KDE) have said they are going to start requiring systemd, so a different OS might be a better choice.
What are the best choices? I've found systemd booting to be a minor, but continual, nuisance. It's a lot slower than sysv-init was, and doesn't seem to have ANY advantages.
I seem to have worked through most of the major problems I've had with it, but this does not make me a fan. It also makes me worry about the problems I haven't yet encountered, but which I've read reports of from others. (They were *probably* early bugs, but their severity causes me to doubt the quality of error checking that is being followed.)
That's untrue. Apple has done significant things to forwards technology. It's true they were all aimed at the aggrandization of Apple, and often at making it a walled garden, but the Macintosh was a significant step forwards. Apple also did significant work in increasing the density of floppy disks. Etc.
That said, I have sufficient problems with their EULA that I refuse to use them. But to deny that they have contributed significant technological progress is to close your eyes and go la-la-la.
I haven't looked at my most recent modem, but on my prior modem the lights were labeled and informative. OTOH, the place it's installed I'd have a hard time if I needed to see them...which I did, occasionally, on the previous modem.
Those were all imported into an environment that was prepared for them to flourish. (You left out various other species that were transported to places prepared for them to thrive.)
But you're talking about moving microbes to a place that has a different chemical composition, different air pressure, different day length, different tides, different.... If there's any competition then it should be at a distinct disadvantage, and would probably be food.
If local life already exists there is almost no chance that life imported from Earth would be better adapted to local conditions. Worrying about it is probably silly. It might not even have the same chirality, and it would certainly be expecting a different radiation budget from its sun. Also the proportion of gases in the atmosphere would just about certainly be different. (Gravity probably doesn't matter, but air pressure might.)
I'll agree that Capitalism is broken, but what's a decent replacement system. Remember, you don't only need to consider the ideal outcome, but also it's instabilities. E.g., bureaucracy tends to shift into despotism and Aristocracy. Democracy is unstable between Dictatorship and Anarchy. Socialism tends to convert into Monarchy (as do dictatorships). Etc.
Now Capitalism is an incomplete system, needing a host system to be parasitic upon, but it can parasitise multiple hosts. It can easily embed itself into Democracies, Republics, Socialisms, and Monarchy. With a little work it can embed itself into Dictatorships. Etc.
I don't have a good answer, do you feel you have?
P.S.: I didn't mention Communism, because there has never been a successful Communism at larger than the village level, and those weren't based on Marxism, but usually on some Christian sect (among the ones I know of). And those were unstable, rarely lasting two generations without converting to a different form, though often the conversion was relatively benign.
I'm not even arguing against your conclusions here, though I do disagree, I'm arguing against your argument, which is incoherent. If I step through it carefully each piece seems to make sense, but the rules of deduction are not clear, and, at a guess, could be "I know what conclusion I want, so head in that direction.".
I'm reminded of a story about Euler who once when asked to prove a statement said "To the true mathematician it is intuitively obvious that e to the pi i equals minus one". (Well, actually he said it in French, which I don't speak, and he was referring to symbols drawn on the blackboard, which I can't type into Slashdot's Unicode ignoring system.) His statement turned out to be true, but his proof was a bit lacking. You'd need to prove to me that your conclusion was true to get me to accept it, and your proof is a bit lacking.
I think you misunderstand things. IIUC, *an* asteroid will almost never collide with another, but asteroids collide all the time. It's the birthday paradox again.
OTOH, changing the orbit from low eccentricity to an earth-crosser is a major encounter, and would almost never happen...but a slight orbital change that IS reasonable could set things up so that resonance with various planets could amplify the orbital change over time. Changing it into an earth-crosser is, of course, still wildly improbable. Which is why I considered it reasonable to be confident that the danger was minuscule.
All that said, I am not an astronomer, and I don't think most astronomers would have an informed opinion.
Sorry, but that's NOT certain. They estimate that they've cataloged MOST dangerous asteroids, but dangerous asteroids have previously only been detected on approach, and not because they were small.
IIRC, the last time I checked the list the estimated that they had cataloged over 99% of all earth-crossing asteroids. But they didn't provided even an estimated level of certainty. And collisions can, at any time, cause an asteroid to alter it's orbit. And they aren't checked that frequently.
So certainty is not a reasonable evaluation. Confidence, perhaps.
While the CMB may be without spin, there are giant voids that appear to only exist in one direction. Saying "the universe is isotopic" implies that it's the same in all directions, and if there are giant voids in only one direction, then that's clearly false.
Now to state that the CMB is without direction inherent in it may well be a true statement, and it sounds much closer to what they actually showed. That, itself, is an interesting statement, and may well be true. The step from there to "the universe is without direction" appears false. Which is an interesting result, and may be significant. Somehow if cosmic inflation happened it allowed minor variations to be expanded into significant variations. (This has been proposed before as one of the reasons for believing in inflation.) But this would appear to imply that the CMB was set at a time before inflation. (I don't know whether this is standard theory or a new result.)
I could accept that the boundaries were seen as arbitrary (but others question that). What I can't accept is that this implies that nationalism is irrational. I will grant that extreme nationalism is irrational, but moderate nationalism is quite defensible. E.g., the value of the currency you buy things with is what you can buy with it. And the currency is "guaranteed" by the government. (I.e., "Pay your tax bill in our officially recognized currency, or we'll steal your property, and possibly your life.".) This gives the currency value to those living in the country, regardless of how arbitrary its borders. Now if actions are taken that depress the "things you can buy without a given amount of currency" it disadvantages everyone living in that country.
Now as to whether such groups should exist, one would need to come up with an alternative (organization?) to replace them. One thing that every government does is claim the exclusive right (which it may delegate) to certain uses of force within it's boundaries. This function tends to decrease the level of violence within the society, and is thus desirable. Whether it comes at too high a cost is a legitimate question, but needs to be answered directly rather than just have an answer assumed. Governments may also do other things, but I am not aware of any other function that is claimed by all governments. Not even taxation. I am aware that this makes some "criminal gangs" count as governments, and I believe that this is correct. In history such gangs have frequently morphed into governments during periods of the decay of wider governments. See China and Warlords for one example.
There have been many cases where the people outsourced to were incompetent. Many of those companies survived to reverse their decision...of course they needed to hire a new IT department. And sometimes that appeared to be the intent.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite true. What *is* true is that there are certain things that they have all decided to "de-emphasize". Whether they decided independently or in collusion is something we don't know, but the effect is about the same. OTOH, there are areas where they disagree, also. And the truth of the material seems to be of only minor concern.
If you think "Gamergate" was a major incident in this area, you need to open your eyes. Most of it is more power or money oriented. (And there are reasons why many of the groups could have come to the same decisions independently, but that this happened is no more provable than that it didn't.)
OK, then make them criminally liable for criminal posts. They shouldn't be able to have it both ways. Either they don't censor, or they are liable for posted content. Since they are clearly censoring, they should be liable. Since the aren't being properly prosecuted, harsh public criticism is a lot less than they deserve.
They should pay costs and damages for every false claim of infringement. Since they don't I'd be happy to see them bankrupt, or worse.
They recklessly abuse the legal system to disadvantage those weaker them themselves. This means I don't believe they deserve ANY protection from the legal system. They are intentionally undermining the legal system of the US for their own profit. If the constitution didn't define it so carefully I'd call that treason.
Personally, I find it easier to just have nothing to do with *AA media.
If "piracy" did them any harm, I'd be all in favor of it. As it is I consider it a bad idea that helps keep them popular.
Yes, but I believe that unless the business has assets in your country(?) there is no means of enforcing a payment.
I could easily be wrong, as I've never tried.
How about every time they ask Google to take down a link, all search results linking to their sites are downgraded until the prove the link was infringing.
After all, they're asking Google to do extra work, they should pay for it somehow.
Congress didn't write the law, congress just passed it. It was written by the media companies. (In this case, IIRC, the RIAA companies...though the evidence was third hand.)
That said, every single elected official, whether representative, senator, or president, who voted in favor of, or signed, the DMCA committed malfeasance. If I knew more about the wording of the laws I'd probably be able to assert also conspiracy to commit malfeasance (which is itself a felony). That they were not prosecuted is only another example of the corruption of the US government. I doubt that there is any legal means to take corrective steps.
Depends on your definition of "successful". I can definitely say that when systemd appeared on my system I started having problems I'd never had before. I can't positively say that systemd was the cause, and even if I could I'm not sure it would matter to your definition of "successful". To me it matters enough that if BSD could handle ext4 file systems I would have likely started dual booting to BSD in preparation for a migration. It matters enough that I've started seriously considering reformatting one of my large partitions to some file system that both BSD and Linux can handle.
P.S.: I *AM* considering using a linux distribution that doesn't include systemd, but so far I haven't reached a decision, partially because this is a decision with long term consequences, and many applications (e.g. KDE) have said they are going to start requiring systemd, so a different OS might be a better choice.
What are the best choices? I've found systemd booting to be a minor, but continual, nuisance. It's a lot slower than sysv-init was, and doesn't seem to have ANY advantages.
I seem to have worked through most of the major problems I've had with it, but this does not make me a fan. It also makes me worry about the problems I haven't yet encountered, but which I've read reports of from others. (They were *probably* early bugs, but their severity causes me to doubt the quality of error checking that is being followed.)
That's untrue. Apple has done significant things to forwards technology. It's true they were all aimed at the aggrandization of Apple, and often at making it a walled garden, but the Macintosh was a significant step forwards. Apple also did significant work in increasing the density of floppy disks. Etc.
That said, I have sufficient problems with their EULA that I refuse to use them. But to deny that they have contributed significant technological progress is to close your eyes and go la-la-la.
I haven't looked at my most recent modem, but on my prior modem the lights were labeled and informative. OTOH, the place it's installed I'd have a hard time if I needed to see them...which I did, occasionally, on the previous modem.
Did you notice the report that disabling the lights made the thing stop working?
Sometimes I think manufacturers go out of their way to be annoying.
The microbes that lead to the oxygen catastrophe were already adapted to the local environment.
Those were all imported into an environment that was prepared for them to flourish. (You left out various other species that were transported to places prepared for them to thrive.)
But you're talking about moving microbes to a place that has a different chemical composition, different air pressure, different day length, different tides, different.... If there's any competition then it should be at a distinct disadvantage, and would probably be food.
The freight bill for plants and animals is a lot higher than for microbes.
If local life already exists there is almost no chance that life imported from Earth would be better adapted to local conditions. Worrying about it is probably silly. It might not even have the same chirality, and it would certainly be expecting a different radiation budget from its sun. Also the proportion of gases in the atmosphere would just about certainly be different. (Gravity probably doesn't matter, but air pressure might.)
I'll agree that Capitalism is broken, but what's a decent replacement system. Remember, you don't only need to consider the ideal outcome, but also it's instabilities. E.g., bureaucracy tends to shift into despotism and Aristocracy. Democracy is unstable between Dictatorship and Anarchy. Socialism tends to convert into Monarchy (as do dictatorships). Etc.
Now Capitalism is an incomplete system, needing a host system to be parasitic upon, but it can parasitise multiple hosts. It can easily embed itself into Democracies, Republics, Socialisms, and Monarchy. With a little work it can embed itself into Dictatorships. Etc.
I don't have a good answer, do you feel you have?
P.S.: I didn't mention Communism, because there has never been a successful Communism at larger than the village level, and those weren't based on Marxism, but usually on some Christian sect (among the ones I know of). And those were unstable, rarely lasting two generations without converting to a different form, though often the conversion was relatively benign.
Well, I think you think you are making sense.
I'm not even arguing against your conclusions here, though I do disagree, I'm arguing against your argument, which is incoherent. If I step through it carefully each piece seems to make sense, but the rules of deduction are not clear, and, at a guess, could be "I know what conclusion I want, so head in that direction.".
I'm reminded of a story about Euler who once when asked to prove a statement said "To the true mathematician it is intuitively obvious that e to the pi i equals minus one". (Well, actually he said it in French, which I don't speak, and he was referring to symbols drawn on the blackboard, which I can't type into Slashdot's Unicode ignoring system.) His statement turned out to be true, but his proof was a bit lacking. You'd need to prove to me that your conclusion was true to get me to accept it, and your proof is a bit lacking.
I think you misunderstand things. IIUC, *an* asteroid will almost never collide with another, but asteroids collide all the time. It's the birthday paradox again.
OTOH, changing the orbit from low eccentricity to an earth-crosser is a major encounter, and would almost never happen...but a slight orbital change that IS reasonable could set things up so that resonance with various planets could amplify the orbital change over time. Changing it into an earth-crosser is, of course, still wildly improbable. Which is why I considered it reasonable to be confident that the danger was minuscule.
All that said, I am not an astronomer, and I don't think most astronomers would have an informed opinion.
You look. In the directions where you don't see stars, you say there's a void. (It's a bit more complicated, but that's the general approach.)
Sorry, but that's NOT certain. They estimate that they've cataloged MOST dangerous asteroids, but dangerous asteroids have previously only been detected on approach, and not because they were small.
IIRC, the last time I checked the list the estimated that they had cataloged over 99% of all earth-crossing asteroids. But they didn't provided even an estimated level of certainty. And collisions can, at any time, cause an asteroid to alter it's orbit. And they aren't checked that frequently.
So certainty is not a reasonable evaluation. Confidence, perhaps.
While the CMB may be without spin, there are giant voids that appear to only exist in one direction. Saying "the universe is isotopic" implies that it's the same in all directions, and if there are giant voids in only one direction, then that's clearly false.
Now to state that the CMB is without direction inherent in it may well be a true statement, and it sounds much closer to what they actually showed. That, itself, is an interesting statement, and may well be true. The step from there to "the universe is without direction" appears false. Which is an interesting result, and may be significant. Somehow if cosmic inflation happened it allowed minor variations to be expanded into significant variations. (This has been proposed before as one of the reasons for believing in inflation.) But this would appear to imply that the CMB was set at a time before inflation. (I don't know whether this is standard theory or a new result.)
I could accept that the boundaries were seen as arbitrary (but others question that). What I can't accept is that this implies that nationalism is irrational. I will grant that extreme nationalism is irrational, but moderate nationalism is quite defensible. E.g., the value of the currency you buy things with is what you can buy with it. And the currency is "guaranteed" by the government. (I.e., "Pay your tax bill in our officially recognized currency, or we'll steal your property, and possibly your life.".) This gives the currency value to those living in the country, regardless of how arbitrary its borders. Now if actions are taken that depress the "things you can buy without a given amount of currency" it disadvantages everyone living in that country.
Now as to whether such groups should exist, one would need to come up with an alternative (organization?) to replace them. One thing that every government does is claim the exclusive right (which it may delegate) to certain uses of force within it's boundaries. This function tends to decrease the level of violence within the society, and is thus desirable. Whether it comes at too high a cost is a legitimate question, but needs to be answered directly rather than just have an answer assumed. Governments may also do other things, but I am not aware of any other function that is claimed by all governments. Not even taxation. I am aware that this makes some "criminal gangs" count as governments, and I believe that this is correct. In history such gangs have frequently morphed into governments during periods of the decay of wider governments. See China and Warlords for one example.
There have been many cases where the people outsourced to were incompetent. Many of those companies survived to reverse their decision...of course they needed to hire a new IT department. And sometimes that appeared to be the intent.
I don't think you understand how hospitals operate at all. The time delay is likely to be measured in decades and lives.