I don't select the node tool on purpose, but it does keep happening. (I *like* being easily to slip into the node tool, but when I'm working with straight lines it does cause me to need a lot of undos.)
Rotation snapping with cntrl! Yay!! I really appreciate knowing that. (It's also nice that the snap angle is adjustable.)
Tiled clones? I saw that, and couldn't figure out what it meant. It never occurred to me that that was the name of what I had been thinking of as replication. Whee!!!
(Now I've got to either remember all this, or figure out where to find it in the manual.)
The only significant remaining problem that I have is that sometimes a drawing won't print on my printer unless I turn it into a pdf. I don't know where the fault for that one lies, as I never try to print svg's from any other program. (I frequently care significantly about the absolute size of pieces. If I rescale, I often need to adjust the sized of different pieces differently to allow for tolerance in putting the pieces together. Paper isn't of zero width, so many designs only work for a certain weight of paper. Inkscape maintains the absolute size, Firefox or "Image Viewer" rescale it to fit the available area. So I end up only printing from Inkscape...but sometimes, almost unpredictably, Inkscape won't print, unless I first convert the document into a pdf.)
??? I don't think you understand the problem. Legally nobody has the right to run even a thread over your property unless the city provides them with an easement. So the physical layer is a natural monopoly.
Do you know who owns the land on which the streets are situated? It's not usually the city, it's usually the property owners on either side of the street. But the city owns the street itself, and grants easements to those who run physical connections under the street. You don't want lots of different companies digging up the street all the time...it happens too much anyway. So you carefully limit who is allowed an easement.
However, when I say a straight line object, I mean an object that won't turn into a curved object when I manipulate it (unless I convert it into a path) on the analogy of the polygon object. Another nice feature this object could have would be the ability to snap to degrees of rotation (say in 5 degree increments) when, perhaps, the shift key was held down. (90, 45, and 30 degree increments are the most commonly used, though, so perhaps 5 degrees is overfine control. 15 degrees would make things easy to manage, though, and one could use the rotation tool to get more precise control.)
Another thing that would be useful would be a replication tool, which would allow one to specify n copies of the selected object offset by so much, rotated so much, and scaled so much. I often draw things that depend on parts being radially symmetric through a varying number of angles.
Rather than add vector graphics to The Gimp, I think it would be better to add bit-map frames to Inkscape. They could even invoke The Gimp to edit them.
I agree totally, however, about the ability to handle multi-page files, and about the need to not have them all in RAM. But I'd like the ability to lay them out on a grid rather then just sequentially. And to display the current page, and it's eight neighbors, simultaneously. (Yeah, that would need to be an option. One page at a time is a better default.) N.B.: This does require managing automatic bleeding from one page onto it's neighbors.
Inkscape also does quite well on geometrically oriented line drawings. (I *do* wish they had a "straight line" object, though. One can fake it, but it's a continuing nuisance.)
Also, it would be nice to be able to adjust the editing *on the fly* to nudge selected points by one point, or some fraction thereof. One can do it with the toolbar rotating dials (forget the proper name for that widget), but it's inconvenient. And if I depend on the program to align two lines, I seem to get an offset, so I need to adjust things by had at a high resolution. So there are lots of pieces that need polish.
The big annoyance, though, is that sometimes, unpredictably, the drawings won't print. I've never figured out the reason, though I did find that if you save them as a pdf, the pdf prints fine. Annoying. And it would be nice if the screen displayed printer margins, as I'm continually having to guess and fudge as to how close to the edge I can work.
Still, it's a VERY good program. (I tried it a year ago and just about gave up on it, but the current version is much better. I hope the new version is better yet.)
P.S.: Did someone say you could do animation with Inkscape? (Well, I think they actually said SVG, which isn't quite the same thing, but I can hope.)
Yeah. The town I live in. (Well, the town next door.) This was first heard as a rumor, and given a minor weighting. Then I observed it personally. Now I won't buy from either.
No, I'm not going to tell you where I live.
P.S.: Yes, they do still have stores in the area. But they're five times further away than either the stores they drove out of business or the stores they closed within a year of driving out the competition.
No, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy's enemy. He may well also be your enemy.
Consider a scene from WWII. Finland. The Nazi's are supporting the valiant Finns against the Russian invader. The US is as war with the Nazi's and a (weak) ally of both Finland and Russia. Who's our friend here? Well, the Finns are. Anyone else?
I'm not sure. I think cable and phone wire hookups are also natural monopoly...but that they should be owned by government at the local level. Water needs either government regulation or ownership at the state or larger level (depends on the source of the water as well as the destination). Sewer should be owned by government at the local level, with pollution regulations at the local, state AND federal level.
N.B.: I didn't mention phone service or ISPs, merely the physical layer. The higher levels should be competitive. And I'm not certain that the government should never ban competition. I have a hard time thinking of when they should, but this doesn't mean it shouldn't ever happen.
Ditto. I don't particularly like Amazon. But they aren't any worse than Barnes & Noble with their "move into an area, kill off the local book stores, and then leave" policy. Quite like WalMart, now that I think of it. I won't buy from either of them anymore.
Amazon at least doesn't use hit-and-run tactics. Sometimes I'll buy from them. (But I still don't like what they've done to the small book stores, and I abominate the Kindle, with it's "erase it after you've bought it" technology. [Yeah, they had "good reason" to use it on 1984. But they built it into the machine that they could, and that's unforgivable.])
You referenced the Wikipedia. Here is a part of what it has to say:
There has been speculation that with the advent of global warming the passage may become clear enough of ice to again permit safe commercial shipping for at least part of the year. On August 21, 2007, the Northwest Passage became open to ships without the need of an icebreaker. According to Nalan Koc of the Norwegian Polar Institute this is the first time it has been clear since they began keeping records in 1972.[4][13] The Northwest Passage opened again on August 25, 2008.[14]
About Amundsen is says:
Amundsen expedition Main article: Roald Amundsen
The Northwest Passage was not conquered by sea until 1906, when the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had sailed just in time to escape creditors seeking to stop the expedition, completed a three-year voyage in the converted 47-ton herring boat Gjøa. At the end of this trip, he walked into the city of Eagle, Alaska, and sent a telegram announcing his success. Although his chosen east–west route, via the Rae Strait, contained young ice and thus was navigable, some of the waterways were extremely shallow making the route commercially impractical.
Note that he didn't traverse the North-West passage by ship, but rather by a boat. At that date a Herring boat would be a relatively small boat. (Well, compared to a ship.) This would mean that it could go through very shallow water. As it took him three years, I'd wager that he was frozen in during parts of the trip. This isn't what I mean by a North-West Passage, though I grant that he did make the trip by water.
However, it's also worth noticing that the Arctic Ocean has always had open water during the summers, so any vessel that could endure being frozen in the ice over winter, spring, and fall has always had a route. True, it's a chancy route, and most that try it will die, but it's an existing route. (You've got to gamble that when the ice breaks up in summer, you'll be near enough to the edge of a flow to get loose.)
As I said, this isn't what I mean by a North-West passage. And this isn't what the cruise liners mean either.
This is much closer to what I mean:
2008 sealift
On November 28, 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the Canadian Coast Guard confirmed the first commercial ship sailed through the Northwest Passage. In September 2008, the MV Camilla Desgagnés, owned by Desgagnés Transarctik Inc. and, along with the Arctic Cooperative, is part of Nunavut Sealift and Supply Incorporated (NSSI),[54] transported cargo from Montreal to the hamlets of Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, Gjoa Haven and Taloyoak. A member of the crew is reported to have claimed that "there was no ice whatsoever". Shipping from the east is to resume in the fall of 2009.[55] Although sealift is an annual feature of the Canadian Arctic this is the first time that the western communities have been serviced from the east. The western portion of the Canadian Arctic is normally supplied by Northern Transportation Company Limited (NTCL) from Hay River. The eastern portion by NNSI and NTCL from Churchill and Montreal.[56][57]
CO2 is a relatively persistent pollutant. Methane recycles more quickly.
OTOH, the CO2 window is practically closed, and the methane one is still open. Perhaps at this time methane *is* more significant. I don't know, and I doubt that the engineers you consulted know either. But you're right to the extent that you accept that both are important. And that the laws aren't written to optimize climatic impact. (We probably *couldn't* write the laws that way, but we could certainly come a lot closer than we have.)
OTOH, if you go back 40 years, CO2 was considerably the more significant pollutant.
Well, there are always new pieces being added to the models, and those pieces haven't been tested, so the model as a whole hasn't been tested.
Yeah, it's a silly objection. But if you want a factual objection, you need to go in the direction of silly.
What was left out is that some models have been proven wrong!! Horrors!! Yet is happens all the time. Somebody produces a new model and it's tested against the current best model, and one of them is better than the other. If it didn't happen, I'd have suspicions about the science in general rather than about one cluster of researchers.
(OTOH, as I said earlier, my signpost is the ice melting. It's independently measurable by several different parties, and has been independently measured. And even distant observers can see that it's real. E.g., just recently an icebreaker became the first ship to ever navigate the North-West passage. And shipping lines take it seriously enough that they're making plans for a cruise ship to go along that route in a few years. Now that's readily observable evidence.)
The one I find convincing is the melting of the ice. It's a crude kind of measure, lacking in detail, but any explanation that doesn't account for that is obviously unacceptable.
The North-West passage is currently open to ice-breakers, and it is projected to be open to normal passenger liners soon. This doesn't give me many data points, but the ones it give are irrefutable.
If you go back far enough, there aren't any people to survive.
To be moderately serious, people are tropical apes. People can survive much warmer weather. It's not at all clear that the same is true of civilization. If sea levels rise, coastal cities will have problems, but not as much as the folk living in low-lying internal areas. Like the San Joaquin Valley, the Mississippi Valley, central South America, central Siberia (is that the Volga? I can't keep my Asiatic rivers straight), Around the Caspian Sea, and on islands. That's just a top of my head list of places where people live that have in past times been under water. Probably Greenland melting wouldn't be enough to submerge all of them. Most of Antarctica would. And I probably missed a lot.
OTOH, it would solve the problems in Israel. Being underwater would do that. (Well, it wouldn't ALL be under water. Probably places with names like "The Golan Heights" would be out of water. And as I recall, Jerusalem itself is also on high ground. But it would be an island. (Probably a rather largish island, but an island. Could be that 1/3 of Israel would remain above sea level.) And the Suez would stop being a Canal. Most of the Sinai desert would be under water. So would the Nile Valley. the Yangtze Valley, the Ganges Valley, etc.
Actually, large sections of India heading under water might threaten civilization all by itself. They've got nuclear weapons, and they'd be rather desperate. (China would be a lot less desperate. They've got lots of unseated land. Not currently arable, but I'm sure that the increased water surface would increase rainfall everywhere. [No, I didn't model this assumption.])
That's a theory, and not the only one. Seeing something in a documentary isn't proof. Many "documentaries" are fictions arguing for a particular fact. This isn't reprehensible if they are clear about what they're doing, but they should almost never be accepted as fact. In this case probably at the time the documentary was made that was the only respectable theory, or at least so dominant that it was reasonable to ignore competing theories. But times change, and I believe that now the two respectable competing theories argue origin from protozoa vs. from largely inorganic processes (starting with larger chunks of organics). (All current theories derive the origin via a mixture of organic and inorganic processes...but they vary a lot on the details. E.g., one theory finds the origin in subduction trenches.)
So don't set your mind in stone based on a current belief at any one time. What that is is a measure of probability based on known current information, and that changes over time.
Abusing it is illegal. Evil is something different from and almost independent to illegal.
If you were to claim that the evil resided in the court that granted them the monopoly, I might consider the argument. Then I'd need to check and see whether Google had ever requested the monopoly, or suggested it to the Author's Guild (the name of the suing party).
In this case Google was offered and accepted a monopoly on a particular kind of breaking the law. The only way it was able to get this was by breaking the law in the first place. I.e., by taking advantage of it's large size and ability to hire good lawyers. Since it's illegal, I'm sure they didn't put the Author's Guild up to suing them, but perhaps they did suggest converting it into a class action? I don't know.
Any monopoly should be presumed to be immoral. There are be special cases* where they aren't, but that should be the default presumption. This one is actively immoral, i.e., evil. It explicitly prohibits others from doing as Google now has permission to do. And Google has, I believe, negotiated signed contracts with various libraries forbidding any other company to scan their books.
Now if Google were to make the information available to others freely, then I would agree that this wasn't actively immoral. In fact I'd consider it actively good, as I consider the GutenPrint project. They don't. They aren't grossly evil, because they aren't (currently) charging extortionate prices for it. But they are setting themselves into a position where they can in the future. I don't think evil is too strong a word. If you don't like it, I'd be satisfied in this case with replacing it with "actively immoral in intent and deed".
* These "special cases" would require that the entity with the monopoly not have taken any measures "outside the normal course of business" to ensure that it was granted a monopoly. And that it not disadvantage any potential competitors using the monopoly as leverage. Neither of these appear to be true of Google, much less both of them.
As I've heard it, the agreements with at least some of the libraries forbid any other company from also scanning the books. If this is wrong, I'd like to know it. I believe that Harvard was one of the libraries that negotiated an exclusive deal with Google.
P.S.: Google's scanning of the books that were still in copyright though out of print was breaking the law. They were sued by a group which did not represent the majority of the authors involved, and wrangled it into a legal monopoly on scanning out of print books that are still in copyright. It's still illegal for anyone else to do that. If they want to try, they'd better have better lawyers than Google does, as one can expect them to defend their court decreed monopoly.
China is not and never has been communist. Neither has any other major country in the world. Don't believe the PR releases. Communism is so totally unworkable that no country has ever implemented it. (It can work at a village level, with a great deal of effort, and usually requires a charismatic leader even then.)
Mao was a Chinese Emperor, and Stalin was a modern Ivan the Terrible. Both were totalitarian states. Neither was communist.
Current China is reminiscent of the war-lords that occasionally came between the emperors, but modern communications and mobility have given that a brand new look. However the Chinese have long been mercantile. Don't be surprised to find that they still are. Even Chinese immigrants to foreign countries tend to establish businesses.
Predicting where China will go from here is more difficult. The current crop of "war lords" are much more centralized (due to the better communications), and it's quite plausible that China will next segue into an oligarchy. Note that "war lord" isn't a very accurate description of the current government. Much less than Chinese Empire was for Mao's regime. In fact, my only reason for using the term is that in the past China has oscillated between an Empire and a war-lord based feudalistic anarchy.
And what about Russia? It looks like Russia is now on the way to being ruled by a secret society. Previously I think that's only happened in fiction. I suspect that, again, increased communication is paving the way for an altered social structure.
It's not overgenerous to artists at all. The artists get very little of that money.
If the artists DID get the money, then I'd agree that it was not only overgenerous, but ridiculously absurdly overgenerous. There are only a small finite number of musical measures. (In this context, musical further constrains the set of sounds to those that people can learn to enjoy reasonably easily.) I can't put an exact number on it, and it probably varies through the population anyway. I don't know what the number is, but a random number generator and a computer could probably plow through them in less than five years. So just generate every possible musical measure and publish them all on the web. Register the ones that people download more than once.
You now own the copyright to every possible measure. (Some of them will be invalid, as someone else has previously registered them.) The Supreme Court has held (in a case, I believe, against the Beatles) that as little as one measure in a song is enough to determine a copyright violation.
You are basically right, but be sure to maintain your anonymity.
I agree with you about the copyright theft 100%, and possibly a bit more. My protest, however, has taken the form of refusing to purchase works supporting either the RIAA or the MPAA. This is a legal protest, probably because it's ineffective. Since you are Canadian, perhaps the tax of recordable media is sufficient to justify some of your actions in the eyes of the courts. As I recall the decisions have been mixed and limited.
My objections to your actions are practical rather than moral. I consider the illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted works much more moral than bribing legislators to extend the term of the copyright, and all those who benefit from such a crime are accessories in the crime. But don't expect any court to support this opinion.
Actually, yes, it *is* a legal requirement that MS not claim to invent what they haven't invented. Unfortunately, this is never enforced with the applicable punishment. (Rarely against individuals. I've never heard of it being enforced against a company.)
Not precisely. By their deeds you shall know them.
So far Google has usually been fair, and often good. Apple has usually had quality hardware, and often quality software.
But please remember that Google has wrangled a monopoly on the scanning and supplying of out of print books. It's got a few limitations, but it's basically a monopoly. This is evil in and of itself, and contains the potential for a lot more evil.
So you can't count on Google to "Do no evil". A slogan isn't a business plan, and Google is a corporation. Also remember that even if you trust today's management (and they appear almost trustworthy), you don't know who their successors will be.
I think I'll give Chromium a skip for now, until things clarify. That's a pretty strange mixture of Open and Closed they're offering, and I'm just going to keep my distance until matters clarify. (I'd say it again a different way, but the redundancy might start getting too repetitious.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
I don't select the node tool on purpose, but it does keep happening. (I *like* being easily to slip into the node tool, but when I'm working with straight lines it does cause me to need a lot of undos.)
Rotation snapping with cntrl! Yay!! I really appreciate knowing that. (It's also nice that the snap angle is adjustable.)
Tiled clones? I saw that, and couldn't figure out what it meant. It never occurred to me that that was the name of what I had been thinking of as replication. Whee!!!
(Now I've got to either remember all this, or figure out where to find it in the manual.)
The only significant remaining problem that I have is that sometimes a drawing won't print on my printer unless I turn it into a pdf. I don't know where the fault for that one lies, as I never try to print svg's from any other program. (I frequently care significantly about the absolute size of pieces. If I rescale, I often need to adjust the sized of different pieces differently to allow for tolerance in putting the pieces together. Paper isn't of zero width, so many designs only work for a certain weight of paper. Inkscape maintains the absolute size, Firefox or "Image Viewer" rescale it to fit the available area. So I end up only printing from Inkscape...but sometimes, almost unpredictably, Inkscape won't print, unless I first convert the document into a pdf.)
??? I don't think you understand the problem. Legally nobody has the right to run even a thread over your property unless the city provides them with an easement. So the physical layer is a natural monopoly.
Do you know who owns the land on which the streets are situated? It's not usually the city, it's usually the property owners on either side of the street. But the city owns the street itself, and grants easements to those who run physical connections under the street. You don't want lots of different companies digging up the street all the time...it happens too much anyway. So you carefully limit who is allowed an easement.
I haven't used the new release yet.
However, when I say a straight line object, I mean an object that won't turn into a curved object when I manipulate it (unless I convert it into a path) on the analogy of the polygon object. Another nice feature this object could have would be the ability to snap to degrees of rotation (say in 5 degree increments) when, perhaps, the shift key was held down. (90, 45, and 30 degree increments are the most commonly used, though, so perhaps 5 degrees is overfine control. 15 degrees would make things easy to manage, though, and one could use the rotation tool to get more precise control.)
Another thing that would be useful would be a replication tool, which would allow one to specify n copies of the selected object offset by so much, rotated so much, and scaled so much. I often draw things that depend on parts being radially symmetric through a varying number of angles.
Rather than add vector graphics to The Gimp, I think it would be better to add bit-map frames to Inkscape. They could even invoke The Gimp to edit them.
I agree totally, however, about the ability to handle multi-page files, and about the need to not have them all in RAM. But I'd like the ability to lay them out on a grid rather then just sequentially. And to display the current page, and it's eight neighbors, simultaneously. (Yeah, that would need to be an option. One page at a time is a better default.) N.B.: This does require managing automatic bleeding from one page onto it's neighbors.
Inkscape also does quite well on geometrically oriented line drawings. (I *do* wish they had a "straight line" object, though. One can fake it, but it's a continuing nuisance.)
Also, it would be nice to be able to adjust the editing *on the fly* to nudge selected points by one point, or some fraction thereof. One can do it with the toolbar rotating dials (forget the proper name for that widget), but it's inconvenient. And if I depend on the program to align two lines, I seem to get an offset, so I need to adjust things by had at a high resolution. So there are lots of pieces that need polish.
The big annoyance, though, is that sometimes, unpredictably, the drawings won't print. I've never figured out the reason, though I did find that if you save them as a pdf, the pdf prints fine. Annoying. And it would be nice if the screen displayed printer margins, as I'm continually having to guess and fudge as to how close to the edge I can work.
Still, it's a VERY good program. (I tried it a year ago and just about gave up on it, but the current version is much better. I hope the new version is better yet.)
P.S.: Did someone say you could do animation with Inkscape? (Well, I think they actually said SVG, which isn't quite the same thing, but I can hope.)
Yeah. The town I live in. (Well, the town next door.) This was first heard as a rumor, and given a minor weighting. Then I observed it personally. Now I won't buy from either.
No, I'm not going to tell you where I live.
P.S.: Yes, they do still have stores in the area. But they're five times further away than either the stores they drove out of business or the stores they closed within a year of driving out the competition.
No, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy's enemy. He may well also be your enemy.
Consider a scene from WWII. Finland. The Nazi's are supporting the valiant Finns against the Russian invader. The US is as war with the Nazi's and a (weak) ally of both Finland and Russia. Who's our friend here? Well, the Finns are. Anyone else?
I'm not sure. I think cable and phone wire hookups are also natural monopoly...but that they should be owned by government at the local level. Water needs either government regulation or ownership at the state or larger level (depends on the source of the water as well as the destination). Sewer should be owned by government at the local level, with pollution regulations at the local, state AND federal level.
N.B.: I didn't mention phone service or ISPs, merely the physical layer. The higher levels should be competitive. And I'm not certain that the government should never ban competition. I have a hard time thinking of when they should, but this doesn't mean it shouldn't ever happen.
Ditto. I don't particularly like Amazon. But they aren't any worse than Barnes & Noble with their "move into an area, kill off the local book stores, and then leave" policy. Quite like WalMart, now that I think of it. I won't buy from either of them anymore.
Amazon at least doesn't use hit-and-run tactics. Sometimes I'll buy from them. (But I still don't like what they've done to the small book stores, and I abominate the Kindle, with it's "erase it after you've bought it" technology. [Yeah, they had "good reason" to use it on 1984. But they built it into the machine that they could, and that's unforgivable.])
You referenced the Wikipedia. Here is a part of what it has to say:
There has been speculation that with the advent of global warming the passage may become clear enough of ice to again permit safe commercial shipping for at least part of the year. On August 21, 2007, the Northwest Passage became open to ships without the need of an icebreaker. According to Nalan Koc of the Norwegian Polar Institute this is the first time it has been clear since they began keeping records in 1972.[4][13] The Northwest Passage opened again on August 25, 2008.[14]
About Amundsen is says:
Amundsen expedition
Main article: Roald Amundsen
The Northwest Passage was not conquered by sea until 1906, when the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had sailed just in time to escape creditors seeking to stop the expedition, completed a three-year voyage in the converted 47-ton herring boat Gjøa. At the end of this trip, he walked into the city of Eagle, Alaska, and sent a telegram announcing his success. Although his chosen east–west route, via the Rae Strait, contained young ice and thus was navigable, some of the waterways were extremely shallow making the route commercially impractical.
Note that he didn't traverse the North-West passage by ship, but rather by a boat. At that date a Herring boat would be a relatively small boat. (Well, compared to a ship.) This would mean that it could go through very shallow water. As it took him three years, I'd wager that he was frozen in during parts of the trip. This isn't what I mean by a North-West Passage, though I grant that he did make the trip by water.
However, it's also worth noticing that the Arctic Ocean has always had open water during the summers, so any vessel that could endure being frozen in the ice over winter, spring, and fall has always had a route. True, it's a chancy route, and most that try it will die, but it's an existing route. (You've got to gamble that when the ice breaks up in summer, you'll be near enough to the edge of a flow to get loose.)
As I said, this isn't what I mean by a North-West passage. And this isn't what the cruise liners mean either.
This is much closer to what I mean:
2008 sealift
On November 28, 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the Canadian Coast Guard confirmed the first commercial ship sailed through the Northwest Passage. In September 2008, the MV Camilla Desgagnés, owned by Desgagnés Transarctik Inc. and, along with the Arctic Cooperative, is part of Nunavut Sealift and Supply Incorporated (NSSI),[54] transported cargo from Montreal to the hamlets of Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, Gjoa Haven and Taloyoak. A member of the crew is reported to have claimed that "there was no ice whatsoever". Shipping from the east is to resume in the fall of 2009.[55] Although sealift is an annual feature of the Canadian Arctic this is the first time that the western communities have been serviced from the east. The western portion of the Canadian Arctic is normally supplied by Northern Transportation Company Limited (NTCL) from Hay River. The eastern portion by NNSI and NTCL from Churchill and Montreal.[56][57]
CO2 is a relatively persistent pollutant. Methane recycles more quickly.
OTOH, the CO2 window is practically closed, and the methane one is still open. Perhaps at this time methane *is* more significant. I don't know, and I doubt that the engineers you consulted know either. But you're right to the extent that you accept that both are important. And that the laws aren't written to optimize climatic impact. (We probably *couldn't* write the laws that way, but we could certainly come a lot closer than we have.)
OTOH, if you go back 40 years, CO2 was considerably the more significant pollutant.
Well, there are always new pieces being added to the models, and those pieces haven't been tested, so the model as a whole hasn't been tested.
Yeah, it's a silly objection. But if you want a factual objection, you need to go in the direction of silly.
What was left out is that some models have been proven wrong!! Horrors!! Yet is happens all the time. Somebody produces a new model and it's tested against the current best model, and one of them is better than the other. If it didn't happen, I'd have suspicions about the science in general rather than about one cluster of researchers.
(OTOH, as I said earlier, my signpost is the ice melting. It's independently measurable by several different parties, and has been independently measured. And even distant observers can see that it's real. E.g., just recently an icebreaker became the first ship to ever navigate the North-West passage. And shipping lines take it seriously enough that they're making plans for a cruise ship to go along that route in a few years. Now that's readily observable evidence.)
The one I find convincing is the melting of the ice. It's a crude kind of measure, lacking in detail, but any explanation that doesn't account for that is obviously unacceptable.
The North-West passage is currently open to ice-breakers, and it is projected to be open to normal passenger liners soon. This doesn't give me many data points, but the ones it give are irrefutable.
If you go back far enough, there aren't any people to survive.
To be moderately serious, people are tropical apes. People can survive much warmer weather. It's not at all clear that the same is true of civilization. If sea levels rise, coastal cities will have problems, but not as much as the folk living in low-lying internal areas. Like the San Joaquin Valley, the Mississippi Valley, central South America, central Siberia (is that the Volga? I can't keep my Asiatic rivers straight), Around the Caspian Sea, and on islands. That's just a top of my head list of places where people live that have in past times been under water. Probably Greenland melting wouldn't be enough to submerge all of them. Most of Antarctica would. And I probably missed a lot.
OTOH, it would solve the problems in Israel. Being underwater would do that. (Well, it wouldn't ALL be under water. Probably places with names like "The Golan Heights" would be out of water. And as I recall, Jerusalem itself is also on high ground. But it would be an island. (Probably a rather largish island, but an island. Could be that 1/3 of Israel would remain above sea level.) And the Suez would stop being a Canal. Most of the Sinai desert would be under water. So would the Nile Valley. the Yangtze Valley, the Ganges Valley, etc.
Actually, large sections of India heading under water might threaten civilization all by itself. They've got nuclear weapons, and they'd be rather desperate. (China would be a lot less desperate. They've got lots of unseated land. Not currently arable, but I'm sure that the increased water surface would increase rainfall everywhere. [No, I didn't model this assumption.])
That's a theory, and not the only one. Seeing something in a documentary isn't proof. Many "documentaries" are fictions arguing for a particular fact. This isn't reprehensible if they are clear about what they're doing, but they should almost never be accepted as fact. In this case probably at the time the documentary was made that was the only respectable theory, or at least so dominant that it was reasonable to ignore competing theories. But times change, and I believe that now the two respectable competing theories argue origin from protozoa vs. from largely inorganic processes (starting with larger chunks of organics). (All current theories derive the origin via a mixture of organic and inorganic processes...but they vary a lot on the details. E.g., one theory finds the origin in subduction trenches.)
So don't set your mind in stone based on a current belief at any one time. What that is is a measure of probability based on known current information, and that changes over time.
That's ok. Apple contracts are agreed to be tried under California law.
I didn't say Google was grossly evil. There are clearly worse organizations. You left out the MPAA and the RIAA, which are also worse than Google.
But Google is still acting in an evil manner (with apparently evil ends).
Abusing it is illegal. Evil is something different from and almost independent to illegal.
If you were to claim that the evil resided in the court that granted them the monopoly, I might consider the argument. Then I'd need to check and see whether Google had ever requested the monopoly, or suggested it to the Author's Guild (the name of the suing party).
In this case Google was offered and accepted a monopoly on a particular kind of breaking the law. The only way it was able to get this was by breaking the law in the first place. I.e., by taking advantage of it's large size and ability to hire good lawyers. Since it's illegal, I'm sure they didn't put the Author's Guild up to suing them, but perhaps they did suggest converting it into a class action? I don't know.
Any monopoly should be presumed to be immoral. There are be special cases* where they aren't, but that should be the default presumption. This one is actively immoral, i.e., evil. It explicitly prohibits others from doing as Google now has permission to do. And Google has, I believe, negotiated signed contracts with various libraries forbidding any other company to scan their books.
Now if Google were to make the information available to others freely, then I would agree that this wasn't actively immoral. In fact I'd consider it actively good, as I consider the GutenPrint project. They don't. They aren't grossly evil, because they aren't (currently) charging extortionate prices for it. But they are setting themselves into a position where they can in the future. I don't think evil is too strong a word. If you don't like it, I'd be satisfied in this case with replacing it with "actively immoral in intent and deed".
* These "special cases" would require that the entity with the monopoly not have taken any measures "outside the normal course of business" to ensure that it was granted a monopoly. And that it not disadvantage any potential competitors using the monopoly as leverage. Neither of these appear to be true of Google, much less both of them.
As I've heard it, the agreements with at least some of the libraries forbid any other company from also scanning the books. If this is wrong, I'd like to know it. I believe that Harvard was one of the libraries that negotiated an exclusive deal with Google.
P.S.: Google's scanning of the books that were still in copyright though out of print was breaking the law. They were sued by a group which did not represent the majority of the authors involved, and wrangled it into a legal monopoly on scanning out of print books that are still in copyright. It's still illegal for anyone else to do that. If they want to try, they'd better have better lawyers than Google does, as one can expect them to defend their court decreed monopoly.
China is not and never has been communist. Neither has any other major country in the world. Don't believe the PR releases. Communism is so totally unworkable that no country has ever implemented it. (It can work at a village level, with a great deal of effort, and usually requires a charismatic leader even then.)
Mao was a Chinese Emperor, and Stalin was a modern Ivan the Terrible. Both were totalitarian states. Neither was communist.
Current China is reminiscent of the war-lords that occasionally came between the emperors, but modern communications and mobility have given that a brand new look. However the Chinese have long been mercantile. Don't be surprised to find that they still are. Even Chinese immigrants to foreign countries tend to establish businesses.
Predicting where China will go from here is more difficult. The current crop of "war lords" are much more centralized (due to the better communications), and it's quite plausible that China will next segue into an oligarchy. Note that "war lord" isn't a very accurate description of the current government. Much less than Chinese Empire was for Mao's regime. In fact, my only reason for using the term is that in the past China has oscillated between an Empire and a war-lord based feudalistic anarchy.
And what about Russia? It looks like Russia is now on the way to being ruled by a secret society. Previously I think that's only happened in fiction. I suspect that, again, increased communication is paving the way for an altered social structure.
It's not overgenerous to artists at all. The artists get very little of that money.
If the artists DID get the money, then I'd agree that it was not only overgenerous, but ridiculously absurdly overgenerous. There are only a small finite number of musical measures. (In this context, musical further constrains the set of sounds to those that people can learn to enjoy reasonably easily.) I can't put an exact number on it, and it probably varies through the population anyway. I don't know what the number is, but a random number generator and a computer could probably plow through them in less than five years. So just generate every possible musical measure and publish them all on the web. Register the ones that people download more than once.
You now own the copyright to every possible measure. (Some of them will be invalid, as someone else has previously registered them.) The Supreme Court has held (in a case, I believe, against the Beatles) that as little as one measure in a song is enough to determine a copyright violation.
THIS IS ABSURD!!!
You are basically right, but be sure to maintain your anonymity.
I agree with you about the copyright theft 100%, and possibly a bit more. My protest, however, has taken the form of refusing to purchase works supporting either the RIAA or the MPAA. This is a legal protest, probably because it's ineffective. Since you are Canadian, perhaps the tax of recordable media is sufficient to justify some of your actions in the eyes of the courts. As I recall the decisions have been mixed and limited.
My objections to your actions are practical rather than moral. I consider the illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted works much more moral than bribing legislators to extend the term of the copyright, and all those who benefit from such a crime are accessories in the crime. But don't expect any court to support this opinion.
Actually, yes, it *is* a legal requirement that MS not claim to invent what they haven't invented. Unfortunately, this is never enforced with the applicable punishment. (Rarely against individuals. I've never heard of it being enforced against a company.)
Not precisely. By their deeds you shall know them.
So far Google has usually been fair, and often good. Apple has usually had quality hardware, and often quality software.
But please remember that Google has wrangled a monopoly on the scanning and supplying of out of print books. It's got a few limitations, but it's basically a monopoly. This is evil in and of itself, and contains the potential for a lot more evil.
So you can't count on Google to "Do no evil". A slogan isn't a business plan, and Google is a corporation. Also remember that even if you trust today's management (and they appear almost trustworthy), you don't know who their successors will be.
I think I'll give Chromium a skip for now, until things clarify. That's a pretty strange mixture of Open and Closed they're offering, and I'm just going to keep my distance until matters clarify. (I'd say it again a different way, but the redundancy might start getting too repetitious.)
I haven't heard that it runs on Ubuntu, even if you are so foolish as to install the .NET emulation (mono).
I suppose it might be a good example of what portable means to MS, but I don't know that it's even that. It seems supremely ignorable in this context.