If that's true, then I accept that as making a *big* difference. That it *is* true is something that I'm much less than certain of. In this case "choosing" to join would need to mean that it was an uncoerced choice. I.e., that one was not coerced into signing a contract to join the ASCAP/BMI/etc. in order to be allowed to work. My information, which is decades old..and was hearsay even when new, was that it was NOT an uncoerced choice. So far I haven't encountered anything to cause me to doubt this, but I haven't been checking and don't have high certainty.
OTOH, if I were so convinced, I'm not sure what my response would be. I know that Joan Baez, e.g., has copyrighted folk-songs which are essentially the same as versions that were circulating before her copyright. I don't know what changes she made, or how to discover just where here copyrights end. As such, I don't really feel that she has any right to other than a performance copyright. But she has them listed in her songbook. I doubt that she would be the one choosing whether to prosecute or not.
In point of fact, I generally consider most copyrights in the field of music to be land grabs. This is largely based on my preference for traditional versions...and their forced destruction by copyright lawyers. Can you understand embrace, extend, exterminate? Let's consider Cinderella. In this case one can still go back to several pre-1905 versions of the story, and note that most of the elements were already present. And since the evidence is plain and widely disseminated the traditional version is likely to continue to be available. No consider the dangers inherent in doing a remake of this traditional story today. PROVE that you haven't infringed on Walt Disney, Inc. In traditional music the situation is worse, as there is no widely disseminated traditional form. Each village had it's own dialect of songs. Now prove that your new variant is based on one of these songs rather than on a copyright version that is in some way similar. I submit that the only way to be certain of winning is to be able to field 2-3 lawyers and researchers for each one of theirs. Notice that I didn't mention justice or originality? I don't believe that either is involved. Not given our current laws.
Basically, I suppose that I am strongly prejudiced against any party that initiates a suit in the copyright or patent arenas. Patent more than copyright, but music copyrights are essentially as bad as software patents. They shouldn't be, but various court decisions over the years have caused them to be so. The standard for "innovation" is ridiculously low (not high, it's low that is the problem), and this has resulted in copyrights being issued based on as small a portion as one measure of music. (I hope that this isn't typical, but it has happened.)
If copyrights still expired in a sane amount of time then this would be less of a problem, but the Mickey Mouse protection organization has ensured that there is no sanity in copyright expiration. 17 years is a bit long, but a sane amount of time. Especially in a mature field such as music. Author's life + 70 years is bonkers.
What makes you think the musicians ever see a dime? Every time someone's had enough muscle to insist on an accountant going over the books they've discovered massive fraud.
Actually, that's too strong. That should be "Every time I've ever heard of that someone's had enough muscle..."
Fair use doesn't apply here. They aren't only performing small excerpts. (There are other possible criteria, but I don't think they meet those, either. E.g., this isn't done for the purpose of dramatic criticism or satire.)
That doesn't make it fair, honest, just, reasonable, or non-abusive. Merely probably legal. Using laws that were bought and paid for (so how can you call it abuse...doing this is why [one of the reasons] they paid for the law).
I think you don't understand how the courts have described "derivitave work" when it comes to music. The worst possible scenario for musicians is for more things to ahave copyrights held by groups whose only creativity is in legal manuvers and abuse of ethics.
How is it different? Why do you assert that it isn't the same people? They're doing the same kinds of things, using the same kinds of tools. I.e., legal threats based on unjust laws.
Also, why, even if they aren't the same people, shouldn't I think equally bad things about them? And why not also blame the RIAA? Even if the companies that they represent have a different front in this particular instance, that doesn't mean that I should let them off the hook for blame. If nothing else, they purchased the law that this abuse is based on. Also, they established the climate where this kind of thing is considered "good business practice".
You ASSERT that it isn't the RIAA. To me they look like the same group of people. Until I see a significant distinction, then I'm not going to differentiate.
And you *have* noticed how wildly successful Tex and Metafont have been... Well, they have been important, but not in comparison with the Mac. Tex is still difficult to master. (For that matter so is LaTex...even when you add in the various GUI tools.)
The Mac made fonts easy. That was more important than the technically superior approach taken by Tex. Yes, once people have bothered to learn Tex, they appear to like it a LOT!!, but this doesn't mean that most people would have ever bothered to learn.
Actually, I'm fairly certain that eventually word processors would have started to handle multiple fonts, but even that's not clear. Apple's switching to typefaces caused a restructuring of the printer industry, and of the CRT industry. Remember shadow-mask tubes? They produced the clearest and sharpest text available...but they could only handle one font at one size. I'm sure that daisy-wheel would have eventually been replaced by dot-matrix...but would the printers have accepted anything other than ascii? The ImageWriter, and then the LaserWriter changed printing more than we can easily grasp. It could well have been that the ability to handle multiple-fonts would have been relegated to "super-high end" printers until the ability to print images became important. That's a 10-20 year delay. (The importance of printing images might have developed more slowly if it weren't an easy extension of existing capabilities. Marketing can drive technology.)
1) robotic? Not really. A telefactor, or waldo. 2) non-lethal? Not really. Less lethal, probably. Certainly more given to torture via electrical burns. 3) honest? Depends on what you mean. Possibly less likely to accept bribes, at least on the scene. In any other way? Why would you think that? 4) human nature? Yep. In full force. And unmitigated by any sympathy that seeing someone writhing in agony might inspire. 5) human weaknesses? Some yes, some no. Depends on just what you're thinking of.
All in all, a truly inspiringly evil idea. Not just bad.
Armed with a taser isn't being "without weapons", it's being armed with a "torture until done" weapon. That's a part of the reason why people react so strongly against them. They will *probably* not kill a person chosen at random. They *WILL* inclict torture on them. How badly depends partially on where they hit. So does the presence or absence of permanent disability.
In principle, I agree with you. Unfortunately, in the particular case of the RIAA, appearing to be legal is merely camouflage. They break laws when convenient, if it looks like they won't get caught. If they're caught, they engage in a spirited fight to throw the blame onto someone else.
I'm not sure that the MPAA is quite as bad here. They haven't been caught anywhere near as often, so they may, possibly, adhere closer to the letter of the law. Possibly.
True, if you build a monolithic binary package it will run on almost every linux. Of course, then it's a LOT larger... still, that isn't as much a consideration as it used to be.
There is one problem though: dependencies. Different distros support different versions of different libraries. This is significant enough that a deb made for Ubuntu won't necessarily run on Debian Etch or Debian Lenny. And conversely. Even mixing packages between Etch and Lenny (stable and testing) is problematic. I often run a few Lenny packages on Etch, but if it ever starts to be a problem, I'd better be ready to do a full upgrade.
So... if you want to use any feature that's under development, you're going to get lots of problems trying to just package a binary. Packaging a source is much safer, but even there you can run into problems. Basically you need someone to build a package on each system that you are targeting. Otherwise you can't be sure that it will work. (Yes, it will "probably work", but that's not good enough for a commercial product. And if it's a commercial product then you probably don't want to be distributing source anyway.)
OTOH, you could just build for, say, Red Hat7.0, Ubuntu7.06, and then test for install on, say, Mandrake, etc. Then you say: "This program is for xxx and xxx, but is also known to install on xxx, xxx, xxx, and xxx." (If it installs, it will probably work, but this isn't guaranteed. I've got a copy of CivilizationCTP that I can install on my current system, but won't work unless I go back to a 2.4 partition. It's not the transition to 2.6, as it handled that, but sometime later some change was made in some system library that broke it. [I know that it has to do with the SDL libraries...but I'm not sure just what changed.) Still, there was a period of time when it would run under Debian testing (Etch), and the breaking was sudden (as the SDL libraries changed).
Now if Loki were still in business, what should they do? SDL was in transition, and the new SDL wasn't stable yet. (At that time numerous SDL programs experienced a brief [around a week?] surge of instability, and it wasn't known to anybody but the developers [if them] how it would end. Everything MIGHT have been reverted.) Well, that was the testing distribution...but testing is, perhaps, the most widely used distribution on desktops. (Well, perhaps not right now. The last I checked Etch and Lenny are still pretty much the same, so there's not much incentive to change.)
As I understand: In evolutionary time the neurons came first. Then some of the neurons evolved into "light spots", a photo-detector. (Note that there was originally no lens and only one photo-detector in any "chunk" of tissue. FAIK there might have been one per body, or one per body segment, so some such.) From this it's been studied and it's a fairly short number of mutations to an image-forming eye.
If you want to think that way, consider the utility of breathing and drinking through the same tube. Breathing and speaking are obviously connected, but *drinking*?? eating??
For that matter there are many problems in basic chordate design that would be quite unlikely to evolve again anywhere. It was just "good enough", and then it evolved via patches rather than re-writes. (I also suspect that neurons are quite inefficient. We just don't understand them well enough to realize just HOW inefficient. But there were better than the competition, and they've been patched to a fair-thee-well over the succeeding millenia. So the basic design probably can't be patched to be much better. Then there's the mammalian eye, with it's retina behind the nerves that pick up the signal. CCDs are much better, but they didn't evolve. (OTOH, it's patched remarkably well. Just recently they appear to have found light-pipes to funnel light through the nerves to the retina.)
Everything that we understand well enough, we could have designed in a better way. But the patching and the optimization of the designs are remarkable. (Just like evolutionary theory predicted!) And there are lots of "clever bits" that we don't yet understand.
Still, the long and the short of this is: Aliens would not be like us in any detail. They might have approximately the same form...say as close as an orangutang is, but only by an exceedingly wild chance. (I.e., E.T. is about as humanoid as one can expect EVER to find...but a lot more humanoid than should be expected even if we were to know that the aliens had descended from a primate equivalent on their homeworld.)
The person to whom I was referring was called to the scene from the SF Bay area. He went as a volunteer, but he was given time-off to do it by Kaiser. He was called in as a communications coordinator. I wouldn't have exptected him to be closely exposed to fumes, asbestos, etc., but he said that he was.
I'm sure that the people that you are describing also existed. I'm not certain into which category the volunteers in the film fell. OTOH, even those who were there officially (i.e., not as volunteers) have not received adequate follow-up coverage once the publicity died down. (To the extent that I know, better that those depicted in the film, but not adequate.)
When I was in my twenties, I'm fairly certain that my health insurance would have been less than $200/month. Of course that was quite awhile ago. The HMOs were just getting started. Fortunately I was covered independently, first as a military dependent (I believe that coverage has been dropped, but I'm not certain), then under my father's job coverage through my years in college. Then I was employed. I've never had any trouble.
But I know a few doctors, and Michael Moore is essentially right. He overstates his case at times, and I'm reasonably convinced that everyone in the film knew they were being filmed, and why, so it's definitely a propaganda piece. (He doesn't hide that. When I watched it I noted his expressive use of a cynical expression, when he clearly means the opposite.) But he's essentially correct.
I'm sure that a single payer system that's worse than our current system could be devised, and we may see that happen. This doesn't mean that it couldn't be done well, or that many countries haven't done it well. From what I've heard, they generally have. And were I a Canadian, I wouldn't want to visit the US without a prepaid insurance that was guaranteed by a company that was subject to Canadian laws. Still, I suspect that as being one of the staged conversations...as in "everybody had a script and knew their lines". In other cases I suspect that he just shot a lot of footage and was selective about what ended up on the cutting room floor. And he's still correct.
Think of it as a docudrama. It's partially a documentary, and partially a drama. But the basic facts behind it are true. I know a 9-11 worker, and he has been sick since then. In his case I don't believe that his insurance has been cut off, and he works (or worked?) at Kaiser. I don't see him much anymore for totally unrelated reasons...so I don't know his exact status. I don't believe that he was as sick as anyone that was depicted in the movie. But he's still sick, and it's not clear that he will ever be well again. And he's not getting a whole lot of support. He's not complaining, but I'm not sure he would if he knew he were dying. He's rather close-mouthed.
The problem is, with the invention of the atomic bomb, et. seq., we have entered an unstable state. Though my instinct is to play conservative, given my reading of the current geo-political state we have a expectable duration as a species measurable in a small finite number of years. I put it at on the close order of two decades (with large error bars).
Given this, it becomes urgent to do SOMETHING that will move us to a state that has a longer expected duration. This means taking risks that would, in other circumstances, be quite reckless. This means pushing AI, nano-technology, space-travel, and experimental biology. Space travel seems like the most likely solution, once we achieve it. The problem is that it's a very difficult problem, as there is a need for self-sufficient colonies to avoid the existential risk problem. Preferably mobile self-sufficient colonies that can subsist in areas with very poor sunlight (i.e., starlight) for multiple centuries. (We're talking about a SLOW rate of dispersion, to save energy.) They would probably need to move slowly enough to scavange from bodies in the Oort cloud and beyond. How this could be financed is a real question.
Nano-technology would be an enabling technology here, as well as a constant threat. But it's potentially so useful, that I can't imagine avoiding it.
AI is a potential alternate way of surviving. If large organizations were controlled by AIs that had socially benevolent goals, then the existential risks would decline VERY significantly. Unfortunately, AIs that had goals taht were not socially benevolent could be another quick route to extinction.
Biology here is a bit of a question mark. It could certainly pose an existential risk, but it already does. And it might be necessary for self-sufficient space colonies. So it might be that you can't get to your desired destination without passing this goal post.
As such, I must say that: 1) We are already in a state of existential risk 2) Advanced biology might make things more threatening, but it may be a necessary step to advancing past the heightened existential risk.
It is well known that FLOSS has fewer bugs per 1000 lines of source code. The bloat that went into Vista brought in plenty of bugs to be sure. Key differences between Linux and M$ stuff:... What you say is true if you carefully select the FOSS project. It's not, by any means, true of all FOSS code. Also, bloat is exceptionally vague. You would be more believable if you were to cite something in particular, like DRM.
Given those few edits, I agree with you. Note that DRM is all new code, and as such is at the start of it's life-cycle, which is the time when most bugs are found. An argument could be made that in a couple of years, when processors speed up and bugs are worked out, that Vista will be a good choice. Technically. (I switched to Linux over EULA issues, not over technical issues. At the time that I switched Linux was clearly inferior as a desktop system...and I switched anyway because I read the MSWind(le) 2000 EULA.
And I usually won't look at the code. (I'm not a C hacker, except in extremis.) But I *have* filed bug reports. (They weren't all dupes.) And I've even once or twice filed a bug fix.
So it happens, at different levels with different people. Some people are more motivated than others. Some more energetic.
OTOH, if the code were closed, and there were a decent way to report bugs, then the results would have been NEARLY as good. But I've never encountered a closed source product that had a decent way to report bugs. Something about closing the source seems to automatically close other parts of the project, even when there's no good reason that there should be a connection. (Or perhaps it's just that people don't like to hear about mistakes. There are certainly many FOSS projects that don't have decent bug reporting methods.)
Perhaps a part of the problem is: When you are attacked by a bot-net, all you know is the packets you have received. Any application or OS information that these contain could easily be forged.
It *would* be nice to know. This doesn't mean that reliable knowledge is available.
To an extent, it's not surprising. We don't understand why people become criminals (when the economics are against it), so we don't know how to rehabilitate them.
The ones that we know how to deal with (i.e., they were in it for the money, and this had the most postive payoff that they could find) we also don't chose to deal with properly. The big criminals we give token punishments for at "gentlemen's clubs", the small ones we ensure that they have no other way to earn a livelihood. In neither case is there an attempt to convince them that they have made a mistake...except in getting caught. Or in playing politics so poorly that they became the fall-guy.
Still, when society ATTEMPTED rehabilitation, society was a safer place. And there were fewer criminals, overall.
So even though we don't know how to actually rehabilitate someone, we still ought to try. It makes society better for the rest of us.
Companies don't usually start as evil. Even MS, when it was small, was only evil in a small way. I can remember a time when I though of MS dominating the computer industry as an improvement over IBM dominating it. And for a time it was.
The problem is that having *ANY* company dominate is inherently evil. "The purpose of power is power." (I don't remember who I'm quoting, but they appear to have "stared into the abyss".)
This is why the GPL is such a good thing. It acts to disperse power, without eliminating it. (BSD also disperses power, but only at the cost of eliminating it.) This allows collective power to act. You still need "centers of power", but they can be transient and dispensable. (I have my doubts about both SourceForge and the FSF based around their accumulation of power in a non-dispensable way. I accept that their [current] intentions are good...but what happens after a change of management? Still, that's why I support the GPL rather than one of the other licenses. A changed management can't lock out anyone who plays by the rules of the GPL.
Google...Google is attempting to avoid corruption. It's not at all certain that they are being successful, but they *are* making a good-faith attempt. They don't deserve being bad-mouthed. I'm not sure that they deserve to be trusted, either.
Why is it that conservatives aren't just "mistaken" or "misguided," or just "wrong," but idiots who can't be trusted to know what's in their own best interests? I give. Why? I observe it to be true, but I don't know why. P.S.: I don't think much more highly of the Democrats...but at least they're ashamed of acting like tyrants. (Not that they don't do it, just that they try to hide it, and try to make it someone else's fault.)
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If that's true, then I accept that as making a *big* difference. That it *is* true is something that I'm much less than certain of. In this case "choosing" to join would need to mean that it was an uncoerced choice. I.e., that one was not coerced into signing a contract to join the ASCAP/BMI/etc. in order to be allowed to work. My information, which is decades old..and was hearsay even when new, was that it was NOT an uncoerced choice. So far I haven't encountered anything to cause me to doubt this, but I haven't been checking and don't have high certainty.
OTOH, if I were so convinced, I'm not sure what my response would be. I know that Joan Baez, e.g., has copyrighted folk-songs which are essentially the same as versions that were circulating before her copyright. I don't know what changes she made, or how to discover just where here copyrights end. As such, I don't really feel that she has any right to other than a performance copyright. But she has them listed in her songbook. I doubt that she would be the one choosing whether to prosecute or not.
In point of fact, I generally consider most copyrights in the field of music to be land grabs. This is largely based on my preference for traditional versions...and their forced destruction by copyright lawyers. Can you understand embrace, extend, exterminate? Let's consider Cinderella. In this case one can still go back to several pre-1905 versions of the story, and note that most of the elements were already present. And since the evidence is plain and widely disseminated the traditional version is likely to continue to be available. No consider the dangers inherent in doing a remake of this traditional story today. PROVE that you haven't infringed on Walt Disney, Inc. In traditional music the situation is worse, as there is no widely disseminated traditional form. Each village had it's own dialect of songs. Now prove that your new variant is based on one of these songs rather than on a copyright version that is in some way similar. I submit that the only way to be certain of winning is to be able to field 2-3 lawyers and researchers for each one of theirs. Notice that I didn't mention justice or originality? I don't believe that either is involved. Not given our current laws.
Basically, I suppose that I am strongly prejudiced against any party that initiates a suit in the copyright or patent arenas. Patent more than copyright, but music copyrights are essentially as bad as software patents. They shouldn't be, but various court decisions over the years have caused them to be so. The standard for "innovation" is ridiculously low (not high, it's low that is the problem), and this has resulted in copyrights being issued based on as small a portion as one measure of music. (I hope that this isn't typical, but it has happened.)
If copyrights still expired in a sane amount of time then this would be less of a problem, but the Mickey Mouse protection organization has ensured that there is no sanity in copyright expiration. 17 years is a bit long, but a sane amount of time. Especially in a mature field such as music. Author's life + 70 years is bonkers.
What makes you think the musicians ever see a dime? Every time someone's had enough muscle to insist on an accountant going over the books they've discovered massive fraud.
..."
Actually, that's too strong. That should be "Every time I've ever heard of that someone's had enough muscle
It's probably too difficult to get at anyone who isn't a secretary or a janitor.
Fair use doesn't apply here. They aren't only performing small excerpts. (There are other possible criteria, but I don't think they meet those, either. E.g., this isn't done for the purpose of dramatic criticism or satire.)
That doesn't make it fair, honest, just, reasonable, or non-abusive. Merely probably legal. Using laws that were bought and paid for (so how can you call it abuse...doing this is why [one of the reasons] they paid for the law).
I think you don't understand how the courts have described "derivitave work" when it comes to music. The worst possible scenario for musicians is for more things to ahave copyrights held by groups whose only creativity is in legal manuvers and abuse of ethics.
How is it different? Why do you assert that it isn't the same people? They're doing the same kinds of things, using the same kinds of tools. I.e., legal threats based on unjust laws.
Also, why, even if they aren't the same people, shouldn't I think equally bad things about them? And why not also blame the RIAA? Even if the companies that they represent have a different front in this particular instance, that doesn't mean that I should let them off the hook for blame. If nothing else, they purchased the law that this abuse is based on. Also, they established the climate where this kind of thing is considered "good business practice".
You ASSERT that it isn't the RIAA. To me they look like the same group of people. Until I see a significant distinction, then I'm not going to differentiate.
And you *have* noticed how wildly successful Tex and Metafont have been...
Well, they have been important, but not in comparison with the Mac. Tex is still difficult to master. (For that matter so is LaTex...even when you add in the various GUI tools.)
The Mac made fonts easy. That was more important than the technically superior approach taken by Tex. Yes, once people have bothered to learn Tex, they appear to like it a LOT!!, but this doesn't mean that most people would have ever bothered to learn.
Actually, I'm fairly certain that eventually word processors would have started to handle multiple fonts, but even that's not clear. Apple's switching to typefaces caused a restructuring of the printer industry, and of the CRT industry. Remember shadow-mask tubes? They produced the clearest and sharpest text available...but they could only handle one font at one size. I'm sure that daisy-wheel would have eventually been replaced by dot-matrix...but would the printers have accepted anything other than ascii? The ImageWriter, and then the LaserWriter changed printing more than we can easily grasp. It could well have been that the ability to handle multiple-fonts would have been relegated to "super-high end" printers until the ability to print images became important. That's a 10-20 year delay. (The importance of printing images might have developed more slowly if it weren't an easy extension of existing capabilities. Marketing can drive technology.)
1) robotic? Not really. A telefactor, or waldo.
2) non-lethal? Not really. Less lethal, probably. Certainly more given to torture via electrical burns.
3) honest? Depends on what you mean. Possibly less likely to accept bribes, at least on the scene. In any other way? Why would you think that?
4) human nature? Yep. In full force. And unmitigated by any sympathy that seeing someone writhing in agony might inspire.
5) human weaknesses? Some yes, some no. Depends on just what you're thinking of.
All in all, a truly inspiringly evil idea. Not just bad.
Armed with a taser isn't being "without weapons", it's being armed with a "torture until done" weapon. That's a part of the reason why people react so strongly against them. They will *probably* not kill a person chosen at random. They *WILL* inclict torture on them. How badly depends partially on where they hit. So does the presence or absence of permanent disability.
I believe this is called "hiring the fox to guard the henhouse".
In principle, I agree with you. Unfortunately, in the particular case of the RIAA, appearing to be legal is merely camouflage. They break laws when convenient, if it looks like they won't get caught. If they're caught, they engage in a spirited fight to throw the blame onto someone else.
I'm not sure that the MPAA is quite as bad here. They haven't been caught anywhere near as often, so they may, possibly, adhere closer to the letter of the law. Possibly.
True, if you build a monolithic binary package it will run on almost every linux. Of course, then it's a LOT larger... still, that isn't as much a consideration as it used to be.
There is one problem though: dependencies.
Different distros support different versions of different libraries. This is significant enough that a deb made for Ubuntu won't necessarily run on Debian Etch or Debian Lenny. And conversely. Even mixing packages between Etch and Lenny (stable and testing) is problematic. I often run a few Lenny packages on Etch, but if it ever starts to be a problem, I'd better be ready to do a full upgrade.
So... if you want to use any feature that's under development, you're going to get lots of problems trying to just package a binary. Packaging a source is much safer, but even there you can run into problems. Basically you need someone to build a package on each system that you are targeting. Otherwise you can't be sure that it will work. (Yes, it will "probably work", but that's not good enough for a commercial product. And if it's a commercial product then you probably don't want to be distributing source anyway.)
OTOH, you could just build for, say, Red Hat7.0, Ubuntu7.06, and then test for install on, say, Mandrake, etc. Then you say: "This program is for xxx and xxx, but is also known to install on xxx, xxx, xxx, and xxx." (If it installs, it will probably work, but this isn't guaranteed. I've got a copy of CivilizationCTP that I can install on my current system, but won't work unless I go back to a 2.4 partition. It's not the transition to 2.6, as it handled that, but sometime later some change was made in some system library that broke it. [I know that it has to do with the SDL libraries...but I'm not sure just what changed.) Still, there was a period of time when it would run under Debian testing (Etch), and the breaking was sudden (as the SDL libraries changed).
Now if Loki were still in business, what should they do? SDL was in transition, and the new SDL wasn't stable yet. (At that time numerous SDL programs experienced a brief [around a week?] surge of instability, and it wasn't known to anybody but the developers [if them] how it would end. Everything MIGHT have been reverted.)
Well, that was the testing distribution...but testing is, perhaps, the most widely used distribution on desktops. (Well, perhaps not right now. The last I checked Etch and Lenny are still pretty much the same, so there's not much incentive to change.)
As I understand:
In evolutionary time the neurons came first. Then some of the neurons evolved into "light spots", a photo-detector. (Note that there was originally no lens and only one photo-detector in any "chunk" of tissue. FAIK there might have been one per body, or one per body segment, so some such.) From this it's been studied and it's a fairly short number of mutations to an image-forming eye.
If you want to think that way, consider the utility of breathing and drinking through the same tube. Breathing and speaking are obviously connected, but *drinking*?? eating??
For that matter there are many problems in basic chordate design that would be quite unlikely to evolve again anywhere. It was just "good enough", and then it evolved via patches rather than re-writes. (I also suspect that neurons are quite inefficient. We just don't understand them well enough to realize just HOW inefficient. But there were better than the competition, and they've been patched to a fair-thee-well over the succeeding millenia. So the basic design probably can't be patched to be much better. Then there's the mammalian eye, with it's retina behind the nerves that pick up the signal. CCDs are much better, but they didn't evolve. (OTOH, it's patched remarkably well. Just recently they appear to have found light-pipes to funnel light through the nerves to the retina.)
Everything that we understand well enough, we could have designed in a better way. But the patching and the optimization of the designs are remarkable. (Just like evolutionary theory predicted!) And there are lots of "clever bits" that we don't yet understand.
Still, the long and the short of this is: Aliens would not be like us in any detail. They might have approximately the same form...say as close as an orangutang is, but only by an exceedingly wild chance. (I.e., E.T. is about as humanoid as one can expect EVER to find...but a lot more humanoid than should be expected even if we were to know that the aliens had descended from a primate equivalent on their homeworld.)
The person to whom I was referring was called to the scene from the SF Bay area. He went as a volunteer, but he was given time-off to do it by Kaiser. He was called in as a communications coordinator. I wouldn't have exptected him to be closely exposed to fumes, asbestos, etc., but he said that he was.
I'm sure that the people that you are describing also existed. I'm not certain into which category the volunteers in the film fell. OTOH, even those who were there officially (i.e., not as volunteers) have not received adequate follow-up coverage once the publicity died down. (To the extent that I know, better that those depicted in the film, but not adequate.)
When I was in my twenties, I'm fairly certain that my health insurance would have been less than $200/month. Of course that was quite awhile ago. The HMOs were just getting started. Fortunately I was covered independently, first as a military dependent (I believe that coverage has been dropped, but I'm not certain), then under my father's job coverage through my years in college. Then I was employed. I've never had any trouble.
But I know a few doctors, and Michael Moore is essentially right. He overstates his case at times, and I'm reasonably convinced that everyone in the film knew they were being filmed, and why, so it's definitely a propaganda piece. (He doesn't hide that. When I watched it I noted his expressive use of a cynical expression, when he clearly means the opposite.) But he's essentially correct.
I'm sure that a single payer system that's worse than our current system could be devised, and we may see that happen. This doesn't mean that it couldn't be done well, or that many countries haven't done it well. From what I've heard, they generally have. And were I a Canadian, I wouldn't want to visit the US without a prepaid insurance that was guaranteed by a company that was subject to Canadian laws. Still, I suspect that as being one of the staged conversations...as in "everybody had a script and knew their lines". In other cases I suspect that he just shot a lot of footage and was selective about what ended up on the cutting room floor. And he's still correct.
Think of it as a docudrama. It's partially a documentary, and partially a drama. But the basic facts behind it are true. I know a 9-11 worker, and he has been sick since then. In his case I don't believe that his insurance has been cut off, and he works (or worked?) at Kaiser. I don't see him much anymore for totally unrelated reasons...so I don't know his exact status. I don't believe that he was as sick as anyone that was depicted in the movie. But he's still sick, and it's not clear that he will ever be well again. And he's not getting a whole lot of support. He's not complaining, but I'm not sure he would if he knew he were dying. He's rather close-mouthed.
The problem is, with the invention of the atomic bomb, et. seq., we have entered an unstable state. Though my instinct is to play conservative, given my reading of the current geo-political state we have a expectable duration as a species measurable in a small finite number of years. I put it at on the close order of two decades (with large error bars).
Given this, it becomes urgent to do SOMETHING that will move us to a state that has a longer expected duration. This means taking risks that would, in other circumstances, be quite reckless. This means pushing AI, nano-technology, space-travel, and experimental biology. Space travel seems like the most likely solution, once we achieve it. The problem is that it's a very difficult problem, as there is a need for self-sufficient colonies to avoid the existential risk problem. Preferably mobile self-sufficient colonies that can subsist in areas with very poor sunlight (i.e., starlight) for multiple centuries. (We're talking about a SLOW rate of dispersion, to save energy.) They would probably need to move slowly enough to scavange from bodies in the Oort cloud and beyond. How this could be financed is a real question.
Nano-technology would be an enabling technology here, as well as a constant threat. But it's potentially so useful, that I can't imagine avoiding it.
AI is a potential alternate way of surviving. If large organizations were controlled by AIs that had socially benevolent goals, then the existential risks would decline VERY significantly. Unfortunately, AIs that had goals taht were not socially benevolent could be another quick route to extinction.
Biology here is a bit of a question mark. It could certainly pose an existential risk, but it already does. And it might be necessary for self-sufficient space colonies. So it might be that you can't get to your desired destination without passing this goal post.
As such, I must say that:
1) We are already in a state of existential risk
2) Advanced biology might make things more threatening, but it may be a necessary step to advancing past the heightened existential risk.
Given those few edits, I agree with you. Note that DRM is all new code, and as such is at the start of it's life-cycle, which is the time when most bugs are found. An argument could be made that in a couple of years, when processors speed up and bugs are worked out, that Vista will be a good choice. Technically. (I switched to Linux over EULA issues, not over technical issues. At the time that I switched Linux was clearly inferior as a desktop system...and I switched anyway because I read the MSWind(le) 2000 EULA.
And I usually won't look at the code. (I'm not a C hacker, except in extremis.) But I *have* filed bug reports. (They weren't all dupes.) And I've even once or twice filed a bug fix.
So it happens, at different levels with different people. Some people are more motivated than others. Some more energetic.
OTOH, if the code were closed, and there were a decent way to report bugs, then the results would have been NEARLY as good. But I've never encountered a closed source product that had a decent way to report bugs. Something about closing the source seems to automatically close other parts of the project, even when there's no good reason that there should be a connection. (Or perhaps it's just that people don't like to hear about mistakes. There are certainly many FOSS projects that don't have decent bug reporting methods.)
Perhaps a part of the problem is:
When you are attacked by a bot-net, all you know is the packets you have received. Any application or OS information that these contain could easily be forged.
It *would* be nice to know. This doesn't mean that reliable knowledge is available.
To an extent, it's not surprising. We don't understand why people become criminals (when the economics are against it), so we don't know how to rehabilitate them.
The ones that we know how to deal with (i.e., they were in it for the money, and this had the most postive payoff that they could find) we also don't chose to deal with properly. The big criminals we give token punishments for at "gentlemen's clubs", the small ones we ensure that they have no other way to earn a livelihood. In neither case is there an attempt to convince them that they have made a mistake...except in getting caught. Or in playing politics so poorly that they became the fall-guy.
Still, when society ATTEMPTED rehabilitation, society was a safer place. And there were fewer criminals, overall.
So even though we don't know how to actually rehabilitate someone, we still ought to try. It makes society better for the rest of us.
Google isn't *currently* the evil company ...
Companies don't usually start as evil. Even MS, when it was small, was only evil in a small way. I can remember a time when I though of MS dominating the computer industry as an improvement over IBM dominating it. And for a time it was.
The problem is that having *ANY* company dominate is inherently evil. "The purpose of power is power." (I don't remember who I'm quoting, but they appear to have "stared into the abyss".)
This is why the GPL is such a good thing. It acts to disperse power, without eliminating it. (BSD also disperses power, but only at the cost of eliminating it.) This allows collective power to act. You still need "centers of power", but they can be transient and dispensable. (I have my doubts about both SourceForge and the FSF based around their accumulation of power in a non-dispensable way. I accept that their [current] intentions are good...but what happens after a change of management? Still, that's why I support the GPL rather than one of the other licenses. A changed management can't lock out anyone who plays by the rules of the GPL.
Google...Google is attempting to avoid corruption. It's not at all certain that they are being successful, but they *are* making a good-faith attempt. They don't deserve being bad-mouthed. I'm not sure that they deserve to be trusted, either.
P.S.: I don't think much more highly of the Democrats...but at least they're ashamed of acting like tyrants. (Not that they don't do it, just that they try to hide it, and try to make it someone else's fault.)
When you ACTUALLY look at piracy ... someone from one of the studio's will leak a copy before the copy protection is ever put on.
Well....I'm overstating the case. I've only seen a few cases where that mode of transmission has been proven.