Sure, I see your point on that, but the punishment might be at least vaguely related to the scope of the costs incurred just as a reality check. I agree that prison is partly about future harm, but that's harder to guess at objectively.
Also, i want to add a big "oops" for not R-ingTFA to realize the case was about fraud more than spam.
Seems like the courts could come up with some estimate of costs imposed by spamming -- how many hours do how many people spend "hitting delete" or installing and maintaining spam filters; what's the cost of the bandwidth needed to carry it nationwide. Then figure out what proportion of that this spammer was responsible for, and you have an estimate of how much value he stole from people.
I wonder if they're thinking that some people who are running XP without a license, and worried about getting caught, will buy a copy of this and leave it on the shelf unopened. If they're caught, they're guilty of having the wrong version running, but they do have something. Maybe under some legal systems that's a help? That would let Microsoft generate some revenue, and introduce people by baby steps to the idea of buying licenses.
Any porn you download will pop up in pretty much every search you do on your own system, just like it does on google, because they'll copy the entire dictionary into their metadata fields.
I guess we'll need "don't index" flags for files that we know are maliciously mismetadated.
But I'm not claiming that Robinson's book proves anything -- it certainly proved nothing to me. It just expressed an idea well and got me to thinking. We have to look for evidence for and against an idea in the real world, where things are of course a lot messier than in fictional tinkertoy worlds.
I'm astonished that someone would be astonished by the fact that people get ideas from literature. I get the sense that you disapprove of it for some reason, but I can't fathom why. Is there something fictional about an idea if a writer puts it in the mouth of a fictional character?
I vote for expanding outwards; however that doesn't solve the Malthusian problem. If the earth's population was going to double in, say, 40 years, then we'd have 40 years to get 6 billion people set up in self-sustaining habitats in space. There's just not time.
Population expansion will happen among the few people who go off to settle Sedna or whatever, but we really can't rely on colonization to solve population pressure on Earth. Rockets are 'way more expensive than rubbers.
Well, we can't "muck up" mars since it's already dead or mostly dead. And we can't give up on earth and move to mars because, transportation costs aside, fixing mars' problems will be *way* more expensive then cleanup on earth.
Terraforming mars will always be a secondary hobby project for earthlings. And it seems silly to say "we should get our own house in order first" because 1) we'll never be perfect; that's no reason not to start other projects, and 2) there are billions of humans, so we can work on projects in parallel.
I think terraforming mars and cleaning up earth's environment are synergistic goals anyway; both will benefit from lessons learned in the other. Mars is a great testbed since it *can't* be mucked up any worse than it already is.
Kim Stanley Robinson's books about terraforming Mars got me more interested in ecology than any non-fiction book I've ever read. I think because ecological writers tend to have a hopeless anti-human perspective: we're a sinful blight upon the environment; we mess it up accidentally, and anything we try to do to fix it will probably go horribly wrong; best thing we can do is curl up and die. Robinson on the other hand paints an image of humans creatively taking responsibility for ecological problems and fixing them.
Hmm, but if the first planet we look at really closely has life, then it seems more likely that life is common. If life is common, and we have no right to steal planets from alien microbes, then we're pretty much stuck on earth, aren't we?
I say we domesticate these Martian rotini as Archimedean screws to extract the water for Mars' new human overlords.
>A good 80% of all humans live in poverty, with no hope of ever working their way out of it, and they probably don't care about what's on Mars.
80% of the world may be poor, by some definition of the word "poor", but certainly nothing like that percentage are so stricken by hunger that they aren't capable of thinking philosophically about the universe and the future of humanity. I think it's a bit insulting to characterize the people of the world that way.
Yes, I read this on their site, but I don't buy it. Yes, they're "active", spending money and effort and so forth, but Eros itself, as a physical thing, isn't improved. Kicking your feet and shouting "I want it" should not count as labor unless your feet are in a tub of heavy cream and you're trying to make butter. (And shouldn't it be that way? What purpose would be served in rewarding people with ownership of space resources, who do nothing but file paperwork on earth?)
I once had a really stressy job that was a few blocks away from a cathedral. I'd disappear once or twice a day and go sit in a pew for a while. I'm not a believer, but it was a beautiful, calm place where it's expected that people are going to sit without doing anything. Since then I've sort of wished that chapels came standard in office buildings like they do in hospitals.
Yes, I do want a space vehicle built by corporate America where profits make decisions before safety. Safety figures into profits -- an accident destroys valuable equipment, kills valuable employees and demoralizes others, hikes insurance rates, creates bad PR. Saying corporations only care about profit is like saying NASA only cares about its budget allocation. It's an oversimplification and insulting to people that chose careers in those sectors and who actually care about the work they're doing.
Corporations and bureaucracies both have to worry about their funding from year to year. It's funny to claim that corporations only care for profits, in the same article in which you ask readers to ask Congress to increase NASA's budget. The fact is any endeavor requires money.
Re:The Russians are making a MOCKERY of ISS.
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Sending a millionaire into space is IMO the most worthwhile thing the station is doing. The science is probably not worth what they're paying for it, but creating a market for space tourism will be one more source of funding for research that will lower launch costs and indirectly help science. ISS is there not for science but because it's *cool* to have a space station. While I agree it shouldn't have been built, tourism is a more honest use for it, and a good use in the long term I think.
Self-deteriorating paper could finally end the reign of piracy by selfish people who pay the artist *once* then continue enjoying the work *many times* over the course of *years*. Van Gogh's heirs ought to get a quarter every time I glance at a print of one of his paintings, and self-destructing paper might be a good way to approximate that.
What language feature isn't syntactic sugar? High level computer languages are all shorthands for machine language. It's all about making it easier to read and write. It's bizarre to criticize Jdk1.5 for adding one ounce of sugar to what's already a ton of sugar. These are all features that I thought were absurdly verbose when I first learned Java, so I'm pleased to see the changes.
What the f**k is this "k**b" s**t? "kerb"? "krab"? "knob"? Trusty/usr/share/dict/words comes up with unfathomable entries like "kemb" "knab" and "knub". Are any of these things knaughty?
Of course it's crappy thinking to say that if aliens are unproven, aliens don't exist. But in fact many people skeptical of alien cattle mutilations support SETI research, because they're open-minded on the question of aliens.
On the other hand it's also crappy thinking to say that if there is something unexplained going on, then the explanation is probably something Big that subverts the dominant paradigm and will make all those smug science people humble when they realize that an ordinary person had the answer that their billion dollar labs couldn't provide.
I think a lot of people feel intimidated by the inaccessibility of modern science so they're highly motivated to believe it's wrong about *something*. Hence the popularity of alternative medicine -- the evidence for it is sometimes questionable but the act of *choosing* it gives you more sense of control over your life and health, which may have more theraputic value than the pharmaceutical-plus-condescending-doctor combo could have provided.
"rotoscope" animation, whatever that means. It's this bizarre psychadelic thing about consciousness and dreaming, with a series of explanatory but sort of satirical monologues.
This film also portrays cartoon ethan hawke nipples, so it has a little something for everyone.
It didn't even get nominated in the animation category -- they must not have filled out the paperwork or something.
I *really* dug this movie. And I wasn't even stoned.
I've always felt ambivalent about space exploration -- I think it's where humanity needs to go, but so far only governments seem to be able to afford much, and I'm unfortunately a wild-eyed libertarian extremist.
Chinese moon mines are the perfect solution because I can sit back and criticize the terrible waste of someone else's money while secretly enjoying the footage and fantasizing about going to live in a rootin-tootin old west chinese moon mining camp boomtown. Will saloon doors ever stop swinging in a near-perfect vacuum?
I'd heard so much hype about Farscape, especially on Farscape, that we started renting the episodes on DVD. After watching the first couple episodes, we stopped renting episodes. Is it a) crap in the beginning but give it time it gets better, or b) just not to my tastes?
...and there's a loudspeaker counting down at the end as the "laser" powers up to destroy Our Heroes. I won't give away what happens just as the countdown is reaching 1. It's my own damn fault for subsidising this crap every time. I love written science fiction, and the $8 sci-fi-whore part of my brain can't seem to accept that movie makers mostly don't understand the genre.
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Also, i want to add a big "oops" for not R-ingTFA to realize the case was about fraud more than spam.
Seems like the courts could come up with some estimate of costs imposed by spamming -- how many hours do how many people spend "hitting delete" or installing and maintaining spam filters; what's the cost of the bandwidth needed to carry it nationwide. Then figure out what proportion of that this spammer was responsible for, and you have an estimate of how much value he stole from people.
I wonder if they're thinking that some people who are running XP without a license, and worried about getting caught, will buy a copy of this and leave it on the shelf unopened. If they're caught, they're guilty of having the wrong version running, but they do have something. Maybe under some legal systems that's a help? That would let Microsoft generate some revenue, and introduce people by baby steps to the idea of buying licenses.
Any porn you download will pop up in pretty much every search you do on your own system, just like it does on google, because they'll copy the entire dictionary into their metadata fields.
I guess we'll need "don't index" flags for files that we know are maliciously mismetadated.
But I'm not claiming that Robinson's book proves anything -- it certainly proved nothing to me. It just expressed an idea well and got me to thinking. We have to look for evidence for and against an idea in the real world, where things are of course a lot messier than in fictional tinkertoy worlds.
I'm astonished that someone would be astonished by the fact that people get ideas from literature. I get the sense that you disapprove of it for some reason, but I can't fathom why. Is there something fictional about an idea if a writer puts it in the mouth of a fictional character?
I vote for expanding outwards; however that doesn't solve the Malthusian problem. If the earth's population was going to double in, say, 40 years, then we'd have 40 years to get 6 billion people set up in self-sustaining habitats in space. There's just not time.
Population expansion will happen among the few people who go off to settle Sedna or whatever, but we really can't rely on colonization to solve population pressure on Earth. Rockets are 'way more expensive than rubbers.
Well, we can't "muck up" mars since it's already dead or mostly dead. And we can't give up on earth and move to mars because, transportation costs aside, fixing mars' problems will be *way* more expensive then cleanup on earth.
Terraforming mars will always be a secondary hobby project for earthlings. And it seems silly to say "we should get our own house in order first" because 1) we'll never be perfect; that's no reason not to start other projects, and 2) there are billions of humans, so we can work on projects in parallel.
I think terraforming mars and cleaning up earth's environment are synergistic goals anyway; both will benefit from lessons learned in the other. Mars is a great testbed since it *can't* be mucked up any worse than it already is.
Kim Stanley Robinson's books about terraforming Mars got me more interested in ecology than any non-fiction book I've ever read. I think because ecological writers tend to have a hopeless anti-human perspective: we're a sinful blight upon the environment; we mess it up accidentally, and anything we try to do to fix it will probably go horribly wrong; best thing we can do is curl up and die. Robinson on the other hand paints an image of humans creatively taking responsibility for ecological problems and fixing them.
Hmm, but if the first planet we look at really closely has life, then it seems more likely that life is common. If life is common, and we have no right to steal planets from alien microbes, then we're pretty much stuck on earth, aren't we?
I say we domesticate these Martian rotini as Archimedean screws to extract the water for Mars' new human overlords.
>A good 80% of all humans live in poverty, with no hope of ever working their way out of it, and they probably don't care about what's on Mars.
80% of the world may be poor, by some definition of the word "poor", but certainly nothing like that percentage are so stricken by hunger that they aren't capable of thinking philosophically about the universe and the future of humanity. I think it's a bit insulting to characterize the people of the world that way.
Yes, I read this on their site, but I don't buy it. Yes, they're "active", spending money and effort and so forth, but Eros itself, as a physical thing, isn't improved. Kicking your feet and shouting "I want it" should not count as labor unless your feet are in a tub of heavy cream and you're trying to make butter. (And shouldn't it be that way? What purpose would be served in rewarding people with ownership of space resources, who do nothing but file paperwork on earth?)
I don't see how Eros was improved by this guy filing papers in court.
I once had a really stressy job that was a few blocks away from a cathedral. I'd disappear once or twice a day and go sit in a pew for a while. I'm not a believer, but it was a beautiful, calm place where it's expected that people are going to sit without doing anything. Since then I've sort of wished that chapels came standard in office buildings like they do in hospitals.
Corporations and bureaucracies both have to worry about their funding from year to year. It's funny to claim that corporations only care for profits, in the same article in which you ask readers to ask Congress to increase NASA's budget. The fact is any endeavor requires money.
Sending a millionaire into space is IMO the most worthwhile thing the station is doing. The science is probably not worth what they're paying for it, but creating a market for space tourism will be one more source of funding for research that will lower launch costs and indirectly help science. ISS is there not for science but because it's *cool* to have a space station. While I agree it shouldn't have been built, tourism is a more honest use for it, and a good use in the long term I think.
Self-deteriorating paper could finally end the reign of piracy by selfish people who pay the artist *once* then continue enjoying the work *many times* over the course of *years*. Van Gogh's heirs ought to get a quarter every time I glance at a print of one of his paintings, and self-destructing paper might be a good way to approximate that.
What language feature isn't syntactic sugar? High level computer languages are all shorthands for machine language. It's all about making it easier to read and write. It's bizarre to criticize Jdk1.5 for adding one ounce of sugar to what's already a ton of sugar. These are all features that I thought were absurdly verbose when I first learned Java, so I'm pleased to see the changes.
What the f**k is this "k**b" s**t? "kerb"? "krab"? "knob"? Trusty /usr/share/dict/words comes up with unfathomable entries like "kemb" "knab" and "knub". Are any of these things knaughty?
Of course it's crappy thinking to say that if aliens are unproven, aliens don't exist. But in fact many people skeptical of alien cattle mutilations support SETI research, because they're open-minded on the question of aliens.
On the other hand it's also crappy thinking to say that if there is something unexplained going on, then the explanation is probably something Big that subverts the dominant paradigm and will make all those smug science people humble when they realize that an ordinary person had the answer that their billion dollar labs couldn't provide.
I think a lot of people feel intimidated by the inaccessibility of modern science so they're highly motivated to believe it's wrong about *something*. Hence the popularity of alternative medicine -- the evidence for it is sometimes questionable but the act of *choosing* it gives you more sense of control over your life and health, which may have more theraputic value than the pharmaceutical-plus-condescending-doctor combo could have provided.
"rotoscope" animation, whatever that means. It's this bizarre psychadelic thing about consciousness and dreaming, with a series of explanatory but sort of satirical monologues.
This film also portrays cartoon ethan hawke nipples, so it has a little something for everyone.
It didn't even get nominated in the animation category -- they must not have filled out the paperwork or something.
I *really* dug this movie. And I wasn't even stoned.
I'm getting worried about Perl 6 being too crufty, but I have to say I love Wall's writing style. "Disintertwingled" indeed. (p. 4)
Are there any studies that demonstrate that occasionally stumbling on adult content can damage a child? It seems far-fetched to me.
Chinese moon mines are the perfect solution because I can sit back and criticize the terrible waste of someone else's money while secretly enjoying the footage and fantasizing about going to live in a rootin-tootin old west chinese moon mining camp boomtown. Will saloon doors ever stop swinging in a near-perfect vacuum?
I'd heard so much hype about Farscape, especially on Farscape, that we started renting the episodes on DVD. After watching the first couple episodes, we stopped renting episodes. Is it a) crap in the beginning but give it time it gets better, or b) just not to my tastes?
...and there's a loudspeaker counting down at the end as the "laser" powers up to destroy Our Heroes. I won't give away what happens just as the countdown is reaching 1. It's my own damn fault for subsidising this crap every time. I love written science fiction, and the $8 sci-fi-whore part of my brain can't seem to accept that movie makers mostly don't understand the genre.