One could always argue that people who see you wearing the fake article may be misled to think you're wearing the genuine one, and so if the fake one is of inferior quality, they may decide not to buy that brand. Hypothethically speaking.
But you're rigth anyway, because current law prevents you from producing and selling an object similar to, for example, a "Tommy Hilfiger" one, *even* if the fake, say jacket, has "NOT a Tommy Hilfiger Jacket" in huge red lettering on it.
Sort of. But it's an interesting idea. The law *does* prevent them from stating that they've been raided, in certain situations anyway.
But does the same law have the power to force them to continue publishing signed lies ? That's what they'd be doing if they continued to claim that they have never been raided after they where indeed raided.
I don't know enough US-law to know the answer, but atleast it's not obvious that it wouldn't work.
I am actually happy everytime US law take another step towards insanity.
The thing about patent-law is, it's bad, but it's not bad - ENOUGH that normal average people are aware of it and have an opinion on the matter. The same is true for copyrigth-law, but there it's actually nearing the tipping-point, more and more people *have* heard of it and *are* critical of it, even though too many still accept the *AA-propaganda
So, every step in the direction of increased insanity is, in my opinion, a step towards toppling the entire system.
In this spirit -- I fully welcome the new idea of patenting the novel idea of fixing bugs. I only wished it would work, and companies would actually be forced to pay billions for licensing this novel idea. If it did, it'd hastend the demise of current patent-law.
You typically aquire software by doing something like the following:
Enter a shop. Pick a product from the shelves.
Walk to the counter. Say something like: "I'd like to buy this, please."
"That'll be $39.95, then, is that all ?"
Yes, thank you. Here you are. (cash changes hands)
Notice that at -NO- point was there any mention of any kind of license, any set of specific rigths, or anything of the sort. It was a plain and simple sale, just like buying an apple.
Now, even when you legally buy something, there's limits to what you can do with them, by law. For example, you cannot legally throw the apple at a police-man, and you cannot legally (wit a few narrow exceptions) make copies of the software you bought.
But anything not prevented by LAW, you can legally do. You only need a license if you want to do something *NOT* normally allowed by law. For example, the GPL licenses you to make copies and redistribute a piece of software, on certain terms, which is something you would normally be prevented from doing by law.
To use a piece of software though, you need to copy it into the RAM of the computer, possibly also onto the hard-disc of the computer. Some jurisdictions consider this *copying* to be illegal by copyrigth-law, which means you *do* need a license even to just use the software. Because you cannot use it without copying it. (into RAM if nothing else)
Other, more sane copyrigth-regimes, explicitly -ALLOW- such copying which is nessecary for the normal use of a product, without considering that copyrigth-infringement. In such jurisdictions you don't *need* a license for running the software in any damn way you please.
How do you figure ? A patent-troll is a company that produces no product and offers no service. They exist *only* to extract money by threathening with their patent-portofolio. As such, there is little chance that they'll be violating any of your patents. How could they when they literally don't do or produce *anything* ?
The principle you mention, a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction, works when two large companies, both with patents in eachothers fields clach. Microsoft certainly infringes IBM-patents, and vice versa, which means both of them will surely suffer if they figth it out, which means they probably won't.
This, however, doesn't apply to a patent-troll. It doesn't do or produce anything, so it also doesn't infringe anything.
Which is precisely the reason AC thinks they are MORE dangerous than companies like MS.
Think before you type. A patent-troll is usually defined as a company that makes no product and offers no service, instead existing *only* to extract money from other companies by threathening them with patents.
As such, owning a million patents will be no defense against a patent-troll whatsoever. Since they literally do nothing, there is little chance that they will be infringing any of your dear patents.
Tagging doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. There are infact lots of tourist-photos of grafitti in new-york tagged with "grafitti", so if you're looking for them, it's possible and indeed simple to find them. True enough there's also a million photos *NOT* tagged with "grafitti", but nevertheless with grafitti in the motive or even *as* the motive.
Claiming that manual tagging is useless because it's incomplete and inconsistent is like claiming that Google-search is useless because it is based on page-content, meta-information and linking, all of which is incomplete and inconsistent. That fails to be the case.
Bootup-time tend to be horrible too. Sometimes you want to take a picture *now* -- not 15 seconds from now when the camera finished booting. (ok, so that is sligthly exxagerating)
Particularily annoying in a small point-and-shoot camera because those are precisely the ones you bring to places where you *don't* want to spend a lot of time and effort taking photos.
My DSLR can take the first photo 0.2 seconds after you flick the thumb-switch for "on", which is essentially instant, you don't manage to put it to your face and compose a picture quicker than that anyway. The trigger-delay is 0.05s which is *almost* low enough to be completely unnoticeable. 0.01s would be ideal, but I'm guessing flipping up the mirror takes longer than that.
The point of the GP is that technology *cannot* distinguish offensive from non-offensive. It's flat-out impossible given human inventiveness.
Filtering bad-words don't work. Allowing only "good"-words don't work. Allowing only "innocent" items don't work. Blocking all communication works, but then why make it an online game at all ?
By your reasoning, since everyone breaks the speed limit they should change all the speed limits.
That is sligthly different. Most people agree with speed-limits. Most people even respect them, it is just that many have a tendency to sligthly stretch them on occasion. People have a tendency to push limits in general, that ain't really an argument for removing the limits. Though I did live in Germany for 4 years, which infact have no speed-limits at all on most of their highways, and it actually works pretty well, there are no more accidents than in other comparable countries *with* speed-limits. So perhaps.
If the police were able to check our cars and see how many times we've been over the speed limit, and we're talking 1 mph over the limit, we'd all be looking at fines well over what people are paying in RIAA protection money.
Oh-really ? First, the police subtracts a safety-factor, so at 1mph over the limit they generally won't pull you over at all. Second, even if they did, the fine for 1mph over the limit is low. Dunno about USA, in Norway it'd be the lowest bracket, $30 or something. Which is a small punishment for a small infraction. The statuory damages for sharing a single piece of music, on the other hand, is on the order of $5000, which is a *HUGE* fine, for something which most people would consider a similarily minor thing.
You are correct, everyone stretches the law sometimes. But the thing is, most of these small crimes come with correspondingly small punishments, and no private interest with the power to decide who gets investigated. That changes things, because it removes the extortion thing. When the RIAA comes knocking, and demands $10.000, or they'll hit you with a law-suit that could possibly cost you a million, you need to be financially *VERY* sound or *VERY* brave to figth it, *EVEN* if you're innocent and think there's a 90% chance of being judged innocent it's a loosing bet. (100% chance of losing $10K is preferable to 10% chance of losing a million)
If the risk was, as it is when you're speeding by 1mph or bringing 1 liter of beer to much into the country, that you could lose the case and be out a $50 fine, then it is a lot more reasonable for an average person to figth it.
To Norwegian ears th and ht in english appear virtually random. I guess my spelling is virtually random on the subject too. If there's a sensible rule to it I've yet to discover it, despite the fact that my english is generally quite good. Well, other than the fact that at the start of a word it's always "th" and never "ht". Feel free to enligthen (or enlighten) me.
Being an asshole about it may actually be a good way of raising awareness of these issues. It won't make you popular though.
Write a letter to the local school, and demand that they, in the interest of raising the children as law-abiding citizens, refrain from publically performing copyrigthed material at school-plays and similar.
If the courts are working correctly it's a requirement for the plaintiff (or prosecution) to prove that the defendent broke specific laws in specific ways.
Yeah. But this is nitpicking, and beside the point. Fact is, nearly *EVERYONE* who uses a computer is, infact, guilty of breaking copyrigth-law. Which means it's fairly likely that the overwhelming majority of the people accused by the RIAA are also guilty. If it can be proven in all cases is a different matter, and when not they should be aquitted, offcourse.
"Everyone" almost certainly includes the RIAA themselves. In certain cases "unclean hands" can be a perfectly valid defence.
But you're still nitpicking, arguing that in certain cases, with enormous risk and investment, you may be able to weasel out of it. This is true, but beside the point. The basic problem is that current law makes EVERYONE a criminal, and then leaves it up to, essentially, the mafia, to decide who are prosecuted. Most of the ones who are prosecuted will be guilty (because everyone are!), and most of them will suffer horribly.
It's perfectly possible for laws which have little popular support to be enforced both randomly and extremely. e.g. the "war on drugs".
It's perfectly possible, yes. But it is not desireable. Which is why I said we should remove such laws.
Yeah. It's another case of the same thing. You're thinking in terms of "likely to happen", and I do agree that naturally arising viruses with reverse chirality may be quite unlikely to happen. But in the extreme case -- life arose once, with *this* chirality. Assuming that chirality really is pretty much a random thing, there's no reason it couldn't arise again -- with oposite chirality by chance.
One earth there's the sligth problem that such life would then have to compete with existing life which has rather a lot of a head-start, which means it'd probably lose out, unless it had some kind of significant advantage in one area or the other.
As for needing to maintain HIV-particle-destruction in the body "indefinitely", that is true. But only for values of "indefinitely" up to a complete human life, which ain't that long really. And once you'd broken even, reached the point where new infections start falling, the job would get easier and easier year-by-year (because there'd be less and less carriers around)
Notice that I'm still not saying it'll be easy. I'm just saying "impossible" does not seem even close to justified to me.
Of course, creating reverse chirality people carries with it the risk that someone might create reverse chirality viruses, but I think its significant to note that that is essentially the only way viruses would ever be able to affect those people.
They could also, in principle anyway, arise naturally. One way-chirality viruses have afterall, so there's no reason reverse ones couldn't. Other than that there's currently no suitable hosts for them. But if a large fraction of humanity was infact reverse-chirality, then there'd be a large advantage for any virus that somehow *did* manage. Especially since those people would get an untrained immune-system. I don't know enough biology to be able to say anything sensible about the likelihood.
They would also have some fairly strong resistance to any bacterial infection that relies on nutrients in the host being of a specific chirality (which is a good percentage), at best any pathogen would have a significantly harder time in that environment, which is often enough to let an immune system win completely.
I was wondering about that -- are we ourselves dependant on the chirality of our food ? I.e. would a reverse-chirality human get nutrition-deficits if he ate only "normal"-chirality food ? What negative effects would missing out on the "good" bacteria/viruses have ?
The last I was aware, we don't actually test for HIV by detecting the Virus particles themselves, we test by detecting the presence of a certain class of antibodies the body creates in response to the Virus.
Ok, but if so, that means that the *body* somehow reliably detects the presence of the virus.
Another problem that you are forgetting is that HIV is an RNA reverse transciptase virus. It copies its genome into the DNA of the cells it infects. The virus can exist dormantly with no virus particles in the body at all, and then reemerge when the transcription of its genes is triggered.
Sure. But that is in a certain sense "OK" -- if there are no virus-particles in the body at all, then the virus is harmless. If all virus-particles that *do* exist in the body are systematically eradicated, it doesn't much matter if the DNA of the virus still exists -- it can't spread under those circumstances, and a virus that can't spread is gone after a maximum of one generation anyway.
I don't think we really disagree all that much. Probably it's just that my history of frequenting rec.arts.sf.science has given me a rather strict interpretation of "impossible". Tricky to eradicate HIV ? Certainly. A problem that won't be solved in the next 50 years ? Perfectly possible. Perhaps even likely. Impossible ? No way in hell !
It's different because there is an actual law against copyrigth-infringement, and most of the people threathened are actually guilty of breaking that law. Now, this doesn't make it rigth. It just means current copyrigth-law is bad law.
Copyrigth-law, as currently written, makes everyone a criminal. But only the ones that RIAA (or other large copyrigth-holders) choose to go after, get punished. Which means essentially, that *THEY* are the ones who decide, by criteria dictated by them, who gets punished and who not.
That's not how it's supposed to work; elected politicians are supposed to decide what is legal and what not. But by deciding that "everything" is illegal, they've efficiently handed the keys over to RIAA et al
"Everyone" is very sligthly pushing it, but it's not far from the truth. I was at a lecture about IT and law, and the professor asked those people who have ever willingly broken copyrigth-law to raise a hand. Literally 95% of all hands went up. IT-students have more reason and more expertise, so may be sligthly over-represented, but I'm willing to bet that 95% of current 25-year-olds are guilty of breaking copyrigth-law atleast once in the last year.
We should remove or change laws which we do not intend to uphold. Otherwise we hand over the power of defining de-facto law to those deciding what and whom to investigate. (because if everyone is guilty, by deciding to investigate someone you are de-facto deciding to punish that person)
I strongly suspect that curing AIDS at all may be impossible. It would take something on the order of 100% effective nanomachines that flood through the bloodstream killing all virus particles in the body, and searching through the genomes of all cells in the immune system and excising the HIV genome. That's how hard the problem is.
I agree the problem is tricky. But you're overstating it. Impossible is a huge word. Consider what we trivially do today that would certainly have been classified "impossible" 100 years ago.
You don't need to disassemble every last particle of a virus to effectively kill it. Having a vaccine of some sort (even the nanomachine-variant) that effectivly kills any and all HIV-virii in the bloodstream would be enough to prevent infection, would it not ? Changing the chirality of people would only help until someone changes the chirality of HIV. Which knowing human nature, someone *would* do. It'd be a lot easier than for humans, afterall...
There are a lot of steps a HIV-virus needs to go trough to be able to infect and reproduce. Stop even *one* of them from occuring and you've got either a cure or a vaccine, depending on which you prevent. HIV-virii are easily *detectable* in the bloodstream today, we've got reliable HIV-tests afterall. It's not *that* much of a stretch to imagine it's *POSSIBLE* (I didn't say easy!) to get from "reliable detect HIV" to "reliably destroy HIV"
Or somehow get infection-rates down under unity and see HIV disappear by itself. Which also won't help currently infected people, but which may be the most realistic "cure". We sure as hell know how to do it. It's not hard. Other than the part where you get 6 billion people to get with the program... Simple(r), quick(er), cheap(er) HIV-tests would help. As would less religious nutcrackery. One can dream, can't one ?
Yeah. But only in a noncompetitive market. There is *very* little treatment for N-1 companies to make in selling 'treatment programs' for a disease the moment the last company has a 'cure' on the market.
Which unfortunately doesn't match todays climate -- there is very little real competition on hard problems. Because the problems are hard enough that there simply isn't a lot of companies on the planet that can even hope to have a chance of solving them.
Aspirin and similar generic, easily-producable, unpatented (or patent expired) remedies can be made very very cheap, cheap enough to be in the "does not matter" category. At that point they're price-inelastic so it makes no sense to reduce prices further.
Or would you start buying (more than) twice as much aspirin if the price dropped to $3.50/80 ?
Reputation ain't as simple as "good" or "bad" and certainly cannot be reduced to a single numeric entity.
Horrible Slashdot Karma doesn't tell me anything about your tendency to keep promises, your financial stability, your ability to drive cars safely, or your education-level. It would however make me (sligthly) more skeptical of your ability to participate constructively in online debate.
But here's the thing, there are lots of statements about you (or anyone else) that are true -- and that would influence peoples judgement of you if they would know about them.
There's a reason credit-checks exist. Past performance is a good indication of future performance. (not perfect, but better than nothing!)
Currently we have almost no way of judging past performance online. Yeah, there's Google, and that certainly is used, but it's not really meant for this sort of thing and ain't very good at what it does.
Online, a lot of clues that are present in the real world are absent. We instinctively assign some level of trust to people we meet, for different purposes, based on a lot of variables, some of them we're aware of, others are subconscious.
You let your neighbour have your house-key to water the flower. But you wouldn't do that with *ANY* kind of neighbour.
You let someone babysite your kids. You let a friend borrow $50 'cos his credit-card is broken. You wouldn't to everyone, it's a matter of trust.
You trust someones judgement on some issue -- because you know that they are experts in the field and have a track-record of good judgement.
Being able to build trust in a pseudonym, and being able to prove that you are that pseudonym is very useful. It allows people to trust you who wouldn't otherwise.
To avoid abuse, it is nessecary that *you* have complete control over what aspects of your trust you share with which people and which companies.
So, what do you want to achieve ? World Domination offcourse ! *grin* No seriously, a million little small things, each of which may be unimportant, but the sum could be huge. Some examples used *today* include:
If you've got excellent reputation, Ebay-buyers generally won't mind paying first, getting the item(s) afterwards. This would be quite risky -- except you know that the seller has sold 471 things before on similar terms, and -zero- of his customers complained.
Hospitality-club use a trust-system to allow you to let complete strangers sleep over at your house, or vice versa, with a much reduced risk of any unwanted problems. Sure, *you* may not know this person, but it helps if 50 other people do -- especially if 5 of those are your friends.
Slashdot use a trust-metric to let people with a track-record of sane comments be sligthly more visible.
In a universally networked world (which we're rapidly approaching anyway) with strong trust-systems, you could stop a complete stranger on the street and ask to borrow his car -- and he'd actually consider it. He wouldn't know *you* but, he'd be able to know a lot *about* you -- if you choose to share it with him.
Everything is lossy anyway. The 44.1 Khz 16-bit sampling on the CD is lossy. It doesn't capture any information above 22.05 Khz, and it doesn't capture any detail smaller than 1:2^16 of max amplitude.
Lucikly, your ears are even more lossy, both in resolution and in frequency-response.
Sure. Short-term we could learn to do a lot of simple tasks better in parallell. Drawing the circle and square at the same time is hard, but it gets a lot easier even with just a few hours of practice.
Longer term, we'd *evolve* better handling of parallellism if it gave us significant survival-benefits (well, really reproductive-benefits, but you get the idea)
When we *do* manage many things at a time it is mostly by practicing them to the point where as much as possible about them become automatic, "muscle memory" (which isn't really, but atleast it's subconscious)
A trained driver can;
Change gears (manual)
Operate blinkers
Turn wheel
Adjust speed (gas or brake)
Check mirrors
Judge intentions, speed, curve of other trafficants
Observe yield-signs
More or less all simultaneously. But that is only possible because so much of it is automatic.
The newbie-driver thinks "I'm in second, third is *there*, revs are high, better shift, clutch in, gas out, shift, touch of gas, declutch", he may even be able to do it smoothly without the car jumping after a few tries. But he *won't* be able to have his full attention elsewhere while doing it.
The trained driver thinks at most "shift", oftentimes not even that. He is rarely consciously even aware of what gear he is running, the entire sequence of steps required to smoothly shift has been internalised as a single action, and even the invoking of that actions is on semi-automatic. (I realize many americans drive an automatic, I'm assuming a driver used to manual here)
What I'm saying is that, drawing a (rough!) circle is very easy for an adult. Drawing a rough rectangle is very easy too. So you'd expect to be able to do both *without* having to train it. Certainly any one of them taxes much less than half your mental capacity. Only that ain't so.
Nonsense. That'd be $10/month from for example dreamhost, and you'd get tons of other goodies included in the deal. (full shell-access, personal jabber-server, one included domain-registration, up to 3000 email-accounts, unlimited MySQL-databases and subversion-repositories (included in your disk-quota though) etc, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
One could always argue that people who see you wearing the fake article may be misled to think you're wearing the genuine one, and so if the fake one is of inferior quality, they may decide not to buy that brand. Hypothethically speaking.
But you're rigth anyway, because current law prevents you from producing and selling an object similar to, for example, a "Tommy Hilfiger" one, *even* if the fake, say jacket, has "NOT a Tommy Hilfiger Jacket" in huge red lettering on it.
Sort of. But it's an interesting idea. The law *does* prevent them from stating that they've been raided, in certain situations anyway.
But does the same law have the power to force them to continue publishing signed lies ? That's what they'd be doing if they continued to claim that they have never been raided after they where indeed raided.
I don't know enough US-law to know the answer, but atleast it's not obvious that it wouldn't work.
I am actually happy everytime US law take another step towards insanity.
The thing about patent-law is, it's bad, but it's not bad - ENOUGH that normal average people are aware of it and have an opinion on the matter. The same is true for copyrigth-law, but there it's actually nearing the tipping-point, more and more people *have* heard of it and *are* critical of it, even though too many still accept the *AA-propaganda
So, every step in the direction of increased insanity is, in my opinion, a step towards toppling the entire system.
In this spirit -- I fully welcome the new idea of patenting the novel idea of fixing bugs. I only wished it would work, and companies would actually be forced to pay billions for licensing this novel idea. If it did, it'd hastend the demise of current patent-law.
Yes I did. It depends on your jurisdiction.
You typically aquire software by doing something like the following:Notice that at -NO- point was there any mention of any kind of license, any set of specific rigths, or anything of the sort. It was a plain and simple sale, just like buying an apple.
Now, even when you legally buy something, there's limits to what you can do with them, by law. For example, you cannot legally throw the apple at a police-man, and you cannot legally (wit a few narrow exceptions) make copies of the software you bought.
But anything not prevented by LAW, you can legally do. You only need a license if you want to do something *NOT* normally allowed by law. For example, the GPL licenses you to make copies and redistribute a piece of software, on certain terms, which is something you would normally be prevented from doing by law.
To use a piece of software though, you need to copy it into the RAM of the computer, possibly also onto the hard-disc of the computer. Some jurisdictions consider this *copying* to be illegal by copyrigth-law, which means you *do* need a license even to just use the software. Because you cannot use it without copying it. (into RAM if nothing else)
Other, more sane copyrigth-regimes, explicitly -ALLOW- such copying which is nessecary for the normal use of a product, without considering that copyrigth-infringement. In such jurisdictions you don't *need* a license for running the software in any damn way you please.
How do you figure ? A patent-troll is a company that produces no product and offers no service. They exist *only* to extract money by threathening with their patent-portofolio. As such, there is little chance that they'll be violating any of your patents. How could they when they literally don't do or produce *anything* ?
The principle you mention, a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction, works when two large companies, both with patents in eachothers fields clach. Microsoft certainly infringes IBM-patents, and vice versa, which means both of them will surely suffer if they figth it out, which means they probably won't.
This, however, doesn't apply to a patent-troll. It doesn't do or produce anything, so it also doesn't infringe anything.
Which is precisely the reason AC thinks they are MORE dangerous than companies like MS.
Think before you type. A patent-troll is usually defined as a company that makes no product and offers no service, instead existing *only* to extract money from other companies by threathening them with patents. As such, owning a million patents will be no defense against a patent-troll whatsoever. Since they literally do nothing, there is little chance that they will be infringing any of your dear patents.
Tagging doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. There are infact lots of tourist-photos of grafitti in new-york tagged with "grafitti", so if you're looking for them, it's possible and indeed simple to find them. True enough there's also a million photos *NOT* tagged with "grafitti", but nevertheless with grafitti in the motive or even *as* the motive.
Claiming that manual tagging is useless because it's incomplete and inconsistent is like claiming that Google-search is useless because it is based on page-content, meta-information and linking, all of which is incomplete and inconsistent. That fails to be the case.
Bootup-time tend to be horrible too. Sometimes you want to take a picture *now* -- not 15 seconds from now when the camera finished booting. (ok, so that is sligthly exxagerating)
Particularily annoying in a small point-and-shoot camera because those are precisely the ones you bring to places where you *don't* want to spend a lot of time and effort taking photos.
My DSLR can take the first photo 0.2 seconds after you flick the thumb-switch for "on", which is essentially instant, you don't manage to put it to your face and compose a picture quicker than that anyway. The trigger-delay is 0.05s which is *almost* low enough to be completely unnoticeable. 0.01s would be ideal, but I'm guessing flipping up the mirror takes longer than that.
Got it. I'll try that. Seems that mostly it's ght and [^g]th ? (I realize there will be exceptions, there always is)
Way to miss the point.
The point of the GP is that technology *cannot* distinguish offensive from non-offensive. It's flat-out impossible given human inventiveness.
Filtering bad-words don't work. Allowing only "good"-words don't work. Allowing only "innocent" items don't work. Blocking all communication works, but then why make it an online game at all ?
If the robots could figth aproximately as effectively as the humans, there'd be no reason to put human beings on the battlefield at all.
By your reasoning, since everyone breaks the speed limit they should change all the speed limits.
That is sligthly different. Most people agree with speed-limits. Most people even respect them, it is just that many have a tendency to sligthly stretch them on occasion. People have a tendency to push limits in general, that ain't really an argument for removing the limits. Though I did live in Germany for 4 years, which infact have no speed-limits at all on most of their highways, and it actually works pretty well, there are no more accidents than in other comparable countries *with* speed-limits. So perhaps.
If the police were able to check our cars and see how many times we've been over the speed limit, and we're talking 1 mph over the limit, we'd all be looking at fines well over what people are paying in RIAA protection money.
Oh-really ? First, the police subtracts a safety-factor, so at 1mph over the limit they generally won't pull you over at all. Second, even if they did, the fine for 1mph over the limit is low. Dunno about USA, in Norway it'd be the lowest bracket, $30 or something. Which is a small punishment for a small infraction. The statuory damages for sharing a single piece of music, on the other hand, is on the order of $5000, which is a *HUGE* fine, for something which most people would consider a similarily minor thing.
You are correct, everyone stretches the law sometimes. But the thing is, most of these small crimes come with correspondingly small punishments, and no private interest with the power to decide who gets investigated. That changes things, because it removes the extortion thing. When the RIAA comes knocking, and demands $10.000, or they'll hit you with a law-suit that could possibly cost you a million, you need to be financially *VERY* sound or *VERY* brave to figth it, *EVEN* if you're innocent and think there's a 90% chance of being judged innocent it's a loosing bet. (100% chance of losing $10K is preferable to 10% chance of losing a million)
If the risk was, as it is when you're speeding by 1mph or bringing 1 liter of beer to much into the country, that you could lose the case and be out a $50 fine, then it is a lot more reasonable for an average person to figth it.
To Norwegian ears th and ht in english appear virtually random. I guess my spelling is virtually random on the subject too. If there's a sensible rule to it I've yet to discover it, despite the fact that my english is generally quite good. Well, other than the fact that at the start of a word it's always "th" and never "ht". Feel free to enligthen (or enlighten) me.
Being an asshole about it may actually be a good way of raising awareness of these issues. It won't make you popular though.
Write a letter to the local school, and demand that they, in the interest of raising the children as law-abiding citizens, refrain from publically performing copyrigthed material at school-plays and similar.
If the courts are working correctly it's a requirement for the plaintiff (or prosecution) to prove that the defendent broke specific laws in specific ways.
Yeah. But this is nitpicking, and beside the point. Fact is, nearly *EVERYONE* who uses a computer is, infact, guilty of breaking copyrigth-law. Which means it's fairly likely that the overwhelming majority of the people accused by the RIAA are also guilty. If it can be proven in all cases is a different matter, and when not they should be aquitted, offcourse.
"Everyone" almost certainly includes the RIAA themselves. In certain cases "unclean hands" can be a perfectly valid defence.
But you're still nitpicking, arguing that in certain cases, with enormous risk and investment, you may be able to weasel out of it. This is true, but beside the point. The basic problem is that current law makes EVERYONE a criminal, and then leaves it up to, essentially, the mafia, to decide who are prosecuted. Most of the ones who are prosecuted will be guilty (because everyone are!), and most of them will suffer horribly.
It's perfectly possible for laws which have little popular support to be enforced both randomly and extremely. e.g. the "war on drugs".
It's perfectly possible, yes. But it is not desireable. Which is why I said we should remove such laws.
Yeah. It's another case of the same thing. You're thinking in terms of "likely to happen", and I do agree that naturally arising viruses with reverse chirality may be quite unlikely to happen. But in the extreme case -- life arose once, with *this* chirality. Assuming that chirality really is pretty much a random thing, there's no reason it couldn't arise again -- with oposite chirality by chance.
One earth there's the sligth problem that such life would then have to compete with existing life which has rather a lot of a head-start, which means it'd probably lose out, unless it had some kind of significant advantage in one area or the other.
As for needing to maintain HIV-particle-destruction in the body "indefinitely", that is true. But only for values of "indefinitely" up to a complete human life, which ain't that long really. And once you'd broken even, reached the point where new infections start falling, the job would get easier and easier year-by-year (because there'd be less and less carriers around)
Notice that I'm still not saying it'll be easy. I'm just saying "impossible" does not seem even close to justified to me.
Of course, creating reverse chirality people carries with it the risk that someone might create reverse chirality viruses, but I think its significant to note that that is essentially the only way viruses would ever be able to affect those people.
They could also, in principle anyway, arise naturally. One way-chirality viruses have afterall, so there's no reason reverse ones couldn't. Other than that there's currently no suitable hosts for them. But if a large fraction of humanity was infact reverse-chirality, then there'd be a large advantage for any virus that somehow *did* manage. Especially since those people would get an untrained immune-system. I don't know enough biology to be able to say anything sensible about the likelihood.
They would also have some fairly strong resistance to any bacterial infection that relies on nutrients in the host being of a specific chirality (which is a good percentage), at best any pathogen would have a significantly harder time in that environment, which is often enough to let an immune system win completely.
I was wondering about that -- are we ourselves dependant on the chirality of our food ? I.e. would a reverse-chirality human get nutrition-deficits if he ate only "normal"-chirality food ? What negative effects would missing out on the "good" bacteria/viruses have ?The last I was aware, we don't actually test for HIV by detecting the Virus particles themselves, we test by detecting the presence of a certain class of antibodies the body creates in response to the Virus.
Ok, but if so, that means that the *body* somehow reliably detects the presence of the virus.
Another problem that you are forgetting is that HIV is an RNA reverse transciptase virus. It copies its genome into the DNA of the cells it infects. The virus can exist dormantly with no virus particles in the body at all, and then reemerge when the transcription of its genes is triggered.
Sure. But that is in a certain sense "OK" -- if there are no virus-particles in the body at all, then the virus is harmless. If all virus-particles that *do* exist in the body are systematically eradicated, it doesn't much matter if the DNA of the virus still exists -- it can't spread under those circumstances, and a virus that can't spread is gone after a maximum of one generation anyway.
I don't think we really disagree all that much. Probably it's just that my history of frequenting rec.arts.sf.science has given me a rather strict interpretation of "impossible". Tricky to eradicate HIV ? Certainly. A problem that won't be solved in the next 50 years ? Perfectly possible. Perhaps even likely. Impossible ? No way in hell !
It's different because there is an actual law against copyrigth-infringement, and most of the people threathened are actually guilty of breaking that law. Now, this doesn't make it rigth. It just means current copyrigth-law is bad law.
Copyrigth-law, as currently written, makes everyone a criminal. But only the ones that RIAA (or other large copyrigth-holders) choose to go after, get punished. Which means essentially, that *THEY* are the ones who decide, by criteria dictated by them, who gets punished and who not.
That's not how it's supposed to work; elected politicians are supposed to decide what is legal and what not. But by deciding that "everything" is illegal, they've efficiently handed the keys over to RIAA et al
"Everyone" is very sligthly pushing it, but it's not far from the truth. I was at a lecture about IT and law, and the professor asked those people who have ever willingly broken copyrigth-law to raise a hand. Literally 95% of all hands went up. IT-students have more reason and more expertise, so may be sligthly over-represented, but I'm willing to bet that 95% of current 25-year-olds are guilty of breaking copyrigth-law atleast once in the last year.
We should remove or change laws which we do not intend to uphold. Otherwise we hand over the power of defining de-facto law to those deciding what and whom to investigate. (because if everyone is guilty, by deciding to investigate someone you are de-facto deciding to punish that person)
I strongly suspect that curing AIDS at all may be impossible. It would take something on the order of 100% effective nanomachines that flood through the bloodstream killing all virus particles in the body, and searching through the genomes of all cells in the immune system and excising the HIV genome. That's how hard the problem is.
I agree the problem is tricky. But you're overstating it. Impossible is a huge word. Consider what we trivially do today that would certainly have been classified "impossible" 100 years ago.
You don't need to disassemble every last particle of a virus to effectively kill it. Having a vaccine of some sort (even the nanomachine-variant) that effectivly kills any and all HIV-virii in the bloodstream would be enough to prevent infection, would it not ? Changing the chirality of people would only help until someone changes the chirality of HIV. Which knowing human nature, someone *would* do. It'd be a lot easier than for humans, afterall...
There are a lot of steps a HIV-virus needs to go trough to be able to infect and reproduce. Stop even *one* of them from occuring and you've got either a cure or a vaccine, depending on which you prevent. HIV-virii are easily *detectable* in the bloodstream today, we've got reliable HIV-tests afterall. It's not *that* much of a stretch to imagine it's *POSSIBLE* (I didn't say easy!) to get from "reliable detect HIV" to "reliably destroy HIV"
Or somehow get infection-rates down under unity and see HIV disappear by itself. Which also won't help currently infected people, but which may be the most realistic "cure". We sure as hell know how to do it. It's not hard. Other than the part where you get 6 billion people to get with the program... Simple(r), quick(er), cheap(er) HIV-tests would help. As would less religious nutcrackery. One can dream, can't one ?
Yeah. But only in a noncompetitive market. There is *very* little treatment for N-1 companies to make in selling 'treatment programs' for a disease the moment the last company has a 'cure' on the market.
Which unfortunately doesn't match todays climate -- there is very little real competition on hard problems. Because the problems are hard enough that there simply isn't a lot of companies on the planet that can even hope to have a chance of solving them.
Aspirin and similar generic, easily-producable, unpatented (or patent expired) remedies can be made very very cheap, cheap enough to be in the "does not matter" category. At that point they're price-inelastic so it makes no sense to reduce prices further.
Or would you start buying (more than) twice as much aspirin if the price dropped to $3.50/80 ?
That's up to the buyer to decide, now isn't it ?
Reputation ain't as simple as "good" or "bad" and certainly cannot be reduced to a single numeric entity.
Horrible Slashdot Karma doesn't tell me anything about your tendency to keep promises, your financial stability, your ability to drive cars safely, or your education-level. It would however make me (sligthly) more skeptical of your ability to participate constructively in online debate.
But here's the thing, there are lots of statements about you (or anyone else) that are true -- and that would influence peoples judgement of you if they would know about them.
There's a reason credit-checks exist. Past performance is a good indication of future performance. (not perfect, but better than nothing!)
Currently we have almost no way of judging past performance online. Yeah, there's Google, and that certainly is used, but it's not really meant for this sort of thing and ain't very good at what it does.
Yes it matters. A lot.
Online, a lot of clues that are present in the real world are absent. We instinctively assign some level of trust to people we meet, for different purposes, based on a lot of variables, some of them we're aware of, others are subconscious.
You let your neighbour have your house-key to water the flower. But you wouldn't do that with *ANY* kind of neighbour.
You let someone babysite your kids. You let a friend borrow $50 'cos his credit-card is broken. You wouldn't to everyone, it's a matter of trust.
You trust someones judgement on some issue -- because you know that they are experts in the field and have a track-record of good judgement.
Being able to build trust in a pseudonym, and being able to prove that you are that pseudonym is very useful. It allows people to trust you who wouldn't otherwise.
To avoid abuse, it is nessecary that *you* have complete control over what aspects of your trust you share with which people and which companies.
So, what do you want to achieve ? World Domination offcourse ! *grin* No seriously, a million little small things, each of which may be unimportant, but the sum could be huge. Some examples used *today* include:
In a universally networked world (which we're rapidly approaching anyway) with strong trust-systems, you could stop a complete stranger on the street and ask to borrow his car -- and he'd actually consider it. He wouldn't know *you* but, he'd be able to know a lot *about* you -- if you choose to share it with him.
Lucikly, your ears are even more lossy, both in resolution and in frequency-response.
Sure. Short-term we could learn to do a lot of simple tasks better in parallell. Drawing the circle and square at the same time is hard, but it gets a lot easier even with just a few hours of practice.
Longer term, we'd *evolve* better handling of parallellism if it gave us significant survival-benefits (well, really reproductive-benefits, but you get the idea)
When we *do* manage many things at a time it is mostly by practicing them to the point where as much as possible about them become automatic, "muscle memory" (which isn't really, but atleast it's subconscious)
A trained driver can;
- Change gears (manual)
- Operate blinkers
- Turn wheel
- Adjust speed (gas or brake)
- Check mirrors
- Judge intentions, speed, curve of other trafficants
- Observe yield-signs
More or less all simultaneously. But that is only possible because so much of it is automatic.The newbie-driver thinks "I'm in second, third is *there*, revs are high, better shift, clutch in, gas out, shift, touch of gas, declutch", he may even be able to do it smoothly without the car jumping after a few tries. But he *won't* be able to have his full attention elsewhere while doing it.
The trained driver thinks at most "shift", oftentimes not even that. He is rarely consciously even aware of what gear he is running, the entire sequence of steps required to smoothly shift has been internalised as a single action, and even the invoking of that actions is on semi-automatic. (I realize many americans drive an automatic, I'm assuming a driver used to manual here)
What I'm saying is that, drawing a (rough!) circle is very easy for an adult. Drawing a rough rectangle is very easy too. So you'd expect to be able to do both *without* having to train it. Certainly any one of them taxes much less than half your mental capacity. Only that ain't so.
Nonsense. That'd be $10/month from for example dreamhost, and you'd get tons of other goodies included in the deal. (full shell-access, personal jabber-server, one included domain-registration, up to 3000 email-accounts, unlimited MySQL-databases and subversion-repositories (included in your disk-quota though) etc, etc, etc.