I know it is popular criticize IE, but when you compare later versions of Netscape (version 4 or so) IE was much better. Arguably there wasn't a free Windows browser that was better than IE until Firefox 1.0 which was released 7 years later . If you look at the browser usage statistics, IE didn't take substantial numbers of users away from Netscape (despite being bundled with the OS and free) until it became better. It didn't have any serious competition until Firefox 1.0 came along. Being bundled with Windows certainly didn't hurt IE, but when talking about why IE became successful, you need to compare IE 4/5 with Netscape 4, not Firefox.
In many cultures, intellectual property doesn't expire the way it does in western cultures. If you "own" a story, it doesn't matter if you created the story, your grandparent created the story, or if it was originally created 1000 years ago; the story still belongs to you, and you have the right to stop others from using it. I don't know how their traditional law handles language, but it is quite possible that it is owned by the leaders of the community.
Do we side with the Mapuche because they are against microsoft, or against the Mapuche because they are attempting to protect their intellectual property?
Seriously though, while it seems absurd that a people claim to "own" their language, many non-western cultures have a much stronger sense of intellectual property. Many cultures recognize dances, songs, stories and even names as property, to extend this to their language is not much of a stretch. That said, it doesn't cost Microsoft anything to pull support for their language, while it would put native speakers of the Mapuche language at a significant disadvantage.
I am not sure what the law is in the US, but at least in Australia, it is irrelevant what it is in fact, it only matters what it is in law. For example: Somebody imports heroin knowing it was heroin - guilty of importing heroin Somebody imports heroin thinking it was baking soda - not guilty (although it might be difficult to prove they didn't know it was heroin) Somebody imports baking soda thinking it was heroin - guilty of attempting to import heroin. Somebody imports baking soda thinking baking soda is illegal - not guilty (there isn't a crime to be guilty of)
As for the pedophile being an innocent victim of this sting - I truely hope you are not being serious. How do you "accidentally" start talking to a 13 year old and try to convince her to fuck you?
I think that is precisely the problem. We have had tens of thousands of scientists working over 40 years on this "theory", and they have not advanced our knowlege of physics one iota. What it has done is consume tens of thousands of scientist-years which could have been spent developing other theories that are testable and falsafiable. What some people are even more concerned about is tens of thousands of scientists spending another 40 years working on a theory that adds nothing to the scientific discourse.
Can you prove that Intelligent Design can never be tested? (actually Intelligent design would be a lot easier to test than any of the proposals for string theory: Just create a bunch of earth-like words in similar to earth positions in their gallaxy, chemical composition, etc. Leave them for 6-8 billion years, and see if anything developed.)
Anyway, it isn't me who is saying that string theory can't be tested, it is string theorists. String theory has been around for 40 years, and there is still no way to test it.
How is the statement "I believe that the universe is made up of wobbling wrinkles of spacetime that we will never be able to detect or control" more scientific than "I believe god guided the development of live in a way that is impossible to detect or control"? They are both meaningless statements from a scientific perspective.
Not only is there no way to test string theory at the moment, string theorists cannot even concieve of a way to test it in the future. As others have stated, the only tests people have thought of involve energy levels similar to that of the entire universe, to effect a change on an atomic scale. So we have a "theory" that doesn't make any predictions, and cannot be tested. In that way it is very similar to "Intelligent Design" which also doesn't make any predictions, and cannot be tested. If ID isn't science, why is string theory?
They could always just call up the other side and ask them. I imagine the conversation would go something like this:
<ring> USA: Hi? USSR: Hey, USSR here. Sorry to bother you, but are you guys sneakily launching a bunch of Nukes at us? USA: Err.. No, not at all. USSR: Great, thanks. <click>... <ring> USA: Hello? USSR: USSR again. Are you sure you aren't launching a strike, or are you just saying it. USA: You got me! Yeah, we did launch a strike. I fooled you at first though didn't I? USSR: Heh. yeah. That was pretty sneaky.
iTunes can handle any video Quicktime can. You can even instruct iTunes to convert this video to an H264 that recent iPods can play. As far as I am aware, this has been the case for as long as iPods have been able to play video. Ripping DVDs is still illegal in the USA which is Apple's biggest market. If you do the ripping, you can add the DivX (or another quicktime supported format/codec) of a DVD to iTunes.
The most common format of punch cards had 80 columns of 12 holes... and a surface area of about 155cm^2, and a thickness of 0.018cm, giving a bit density of about 345bits per cm^3 5MB of punch cards would come to about 0.12 m^3
As for them not being re-writable, from what I have heard from US elections recently, I wouldn't be so sure.
Well the point is for a patent to be valid, it must fully describe the process. A patent can't say: take A and B, do C to it, then apply our secret formula D.
The most convincing evidence against most of the massive government conspiricy theories is: how can an entity suddenly perform a massive cover-up operation so competently, when they manage to screw up everything else they do?
A nitpick: Patents and trade secrets are opposite. Patents are protected (for a short time) because the inventor told other people the process. Trade secrets are protected because the inventor hasn't told anyone the process.
Another example is the results if you search for Nagasaki on google.com compared to google.co.jp In Japan, people know of it as a city, while people outside of Japan generally only know of it as the second victim of the nuke.
The problem with studies into things like that is the effect of piracy is very nebulous. While it is unlikely Adobe loses a sale if a 13 year old "software collector" downloads photoshop, there is a reasonable chance that they lost a sale to a 30 year old hobbiest photographerwho does the same. The music situation is similarly difficult to pin down. While I have bought many CDs of artists that I have first been introduced from downloads, there are many albums that I have been content to have downloaded MP3s of. Would I have bought them otherwise? Maybe, maybe not. In the hight of the original napster, CD sales were very large and "pirates" argued that the CD sales were being fed by the napster downloads. Music downloads have continued to rise, while CD sales have collapsed, however today "pirates" claim that the low CD sales are caused by the labels not releasing any good music. It doesn't take much of a brain to see the problem with that argument.
The other problem with such studies are their credibility. Would you believe the results of a study that was funded by the RIAA (or even a copyright friendly government.) A study conducted by a group like downhillbattle.org or the FSF would have the same level of credibility (remember the adage 'Just because you agree with a statement, does not make it true). Ultimately, any study conducted would be hailed by interest groups that agreed with the outcome and ignored by interest groups that did not. Leaving everyone right back where they started, just angrier.
What was the nationality, race and religion of the dude who setup the oklahoma bombing? What colour skin do IRA members have? The organization that has been responsible for the most suicide bombings (the tamil tigers) is a non-religious group.
While it is convenient for some to portray certain religions or races as being connected to "terrorism", the simplistic attitude causes much more harm than good.
The Hudson's Bay Company (the oldest corporation in North America at approx 335 years) was recently bought by an american billionare, so it isn't unheard of for old corporation to be bought by young upstarts. I completely agree though that this rumour is ludicrous.
That is a very common situation, I am amazed that Apple did not anticipate that problem, and implement a command line, solely for that purpose. I had a similar problem with linux the other day. I didn't want the light or noise (not to mention the power drain) associated with starting my linux machine so I left it off. For some reason, I was unable to do anything with it. It was completely unresponsive. This is completely unacceptable.
ps. There was one obvious solution to the touchscreen/lightning ball issue: turn off the lightning ball.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not much for lawsuits, but I hope the radio station that put on this stunt makes significant remedy to the lady's family
Well at least they should give her three kids a wii.
Curiously IE was the first browser to support PNG alpha channel.
I know it is popular criticize IE, but when you compare later versions of Netscape (version 4 or so) IE was much better. Arguably there wasn't a free Windows browser that was better than IE until Firefox 1.0 which was released 7 years later . If you look at the browser usage statistics, IE didn't take substantial numbers of users away from Netscape (despite being bundled with the OS and free) until it became better. It didn't have any serious competition until Firefox 1.0 came along.
Being bundled with Windows certainly didn't hurt IE, but when talking about why IE became successful, you need to compare IE 4/5 with Netscape 4, not Firefox.
In many cultures, intellectual property doesn't expire the way it does in western cultures. If you "own" a story, it doesn't matter if you created the story, your grandparent created the story, or if it was originally created 1000 years ago; the story still belongs to you, and you have the right to stop others from using it. I don't know how their traditional law handles language, but it is quite possible that it is owned by the leaders of the community.
Do we side with the Mapuche because they are against microsoft, or against the Mapuche because they are attempting to protect their intellectual property?
Seriously though, while it seems absurd that a people claim to "own" their language, many non-western cultures have a much stronger sense of intellectual property. Many cultures recognize dances, songs, stories and even names as property, to extend this to their language is not much of a stretch. That said, it doesn't cost Microsoft anything to pull support for their language, while it would put native speakers of the Mapuche language at a significant disadvantage.
I am not sure what the law is in the US, but at least in Australia, it is irrelevant what it is in fact, it only matters what it is in law.
For example:
Somebody imports heroin knowing it was heroin - guilty of importing heroin
Somebody imports heroin thinking it was baking soda - not guilty (although it might be difficult to prove they didn't know it was heroin)
Somebody imports baking soda thinking it was heroin - guilty of attempting to import heroin.
Somebody imports baking soda thinking baking soda is illegal - not guilty (there isn't a crime to be guilty of)
As for the pedophile being an innocent victim of this sting - I truely hope you are not being serious. How do you "accidentally" start talking to a 13 year old and try to convince her to fuck you?
I think that is precisely the problem. We have had tens of thousands of scientists working over 40 years on this "theory", and they have not advanced our knowlege of physics one iota. What it has done is consume tens of thousands of scientist-years which could have been spent developing other theories that are testable and falsafiable. What some people are even more concerned about is tens of thousands of scientists spending another 40 years working on a theory that adds nothing to the scientific discourse.
Can you prove that Intelligent Design can never be tested? (actually Intelligent design would be a lot easier to test than any of the proposals for string theory: Just create a bunch of earth-like words in similar to earth positions in their gallaxy, chemical composition, etc. Leave them for 6-8 billion years, and see if anything developed.)
Anyway, it isn't me who is saying that string theory can't be tested, it is string theorists. String theory has been around for 40 years, and there is still no way to test it.
How is the statement "I believe that the universe is made up of wobbling wrinkles of spacetime that we will never be able to detect or control" more scientific than "I believe god guided the development of live in a way that is impossible to detect or control"? They are both meaningless statements from a scientific perspective.
Not only is there no way to test string theory at the moment, string theorists cannot even concieve of a way to test it in the future. As others have stated, the only tests people have thought of involve energy levels similar to that of the entire universe, to effect a change on an atomic scale.
So we have a "theory" that doesn't make any predictions, and cannot be tested. In that way it is very similar to "Intelligent Design" which also doesn't make any predictions, and cannot be tested. If ID isn't science, why is string theory?
They could always just call up the other side and ask them. I imagine the conversation would go something like this:
...
<ring>
USA: Hi?
USSR: Hey, USSR here. Sorry to bother you, but are you guys sneakily launching a bunch of Nukes at us?
USA: Err.. No, not at all.
USSR: Great, thanks.
<click>
<ring>
USA: Hello?
USSR: USSR again. Are you sure you aren't launching a strike, or are you just saying it.
USA: You got me! Yeah, we did launch a strike. I fooled you at first though didn't I?
USSR: Heh. yeah. That was pretty sneaky.
iTunes can handle any video Quicktime can. You can even instruct iTunes to convert this video to an H264 that recent iPods can play. As far as I am aware, this has been the case for as long as iPods have been able to play video.
Ripping DVDs is still illegal in the USA which is Apple's biggest market. If you do the ripping, you can add the DivX (or another quicktime supported format/codec) of a DVD to iTunes.
The most common format of punch cards had 80 columns of 12 holes... and a surface area of about 155cm^2, and a thickness of 0.018cm, giving a bit density of about 345bits per cm^3
5MB of punch cards would come to about 0.12 m^3
As for them not being re-writable, from what I have heard from US elections recently, I wouldn't be so sure.
Well the point is for a patent to be valid, it must fully describe the process. A patent can't say: take A and B, do C to it, then apply our secret formula D.
The most convincing evidence against most of the massive government conspiricy theories is: how can an entity suddenly perform a massive cover-up operation so competently, when they manage to screw up everything else they do?
A nitpick: Patents and trade secrets are opposite. Patents are protected (for a short time) because the inventor told other people the process. Trade secrets are protected because the inventor hasn't told anyone the process.
Well I know all my thinking takes place in my pants.
Well, it is 2006 and it hasn't happened yet.
uhh... from the summary: "Vancouver, Canada"
Canada is still a separate country from the US. Which is to say: the US isn't catching up.
Bah, who cares about first dates? I'd pay the money for 50 third dates.
Another example is the results if you search for Nagasaki on google.com compared to google.co.jp
In Japan, people know of it as a city, while people outside of Japan generally only know of it as the second victim of the nuke.
The problem with studies into things like that is the effect of piracy is very nebulous. While it is unlikely Adobe loses a sale if a 13 year old "software collector" downloads photoshop, there is a reasonable chance that they lost a sale to a 30 year old hobbiest photographerwho does the same. The music situation is similarly difficult to pin down. While I have bought many CDs of artists that I have first been introduced from downloads, there are many albums that I have been content to have downloaded MP3s of. Would I have bought them otherwise? Maybe, maybe not. In the hight of the original napster, CD sales were very large and "pirates" argued that the CD sales were being fed by the napster downloads. Music downloads have continued to rise, while CD sales have collapsed, however today "pirates" claim that the low CD sales are caused by the labels not releasing any good music. It doesn't take much of a brain to see the problem with that argument.
The other problem with such studies are their credibility. Would you believe the results of a study that was funded by the RIAA (or even a copyright friendly government.) A study conducted by a group like downhillbattle.org or the FSF would have the same level of credibility (remember the adage 'Just because you agree with a statement, does not make it true). Ultimately, any study conducted would be hailed by interest groups that agreed with the outcome and ignored by interest groups that did not. Leaving everyone right back where they started, just angrier.
What was the nationality, race and religion of the dude who setup the oklahoma bombing? What colour skin do IRA members have? The organization that has been responsible for the most suicide bombings (the tamil tigers) is a non-religious group.
While it is convenient for some to portray certain religions or races as being connected to "terrorism", the simplistic attitude causes much more harm than good.
The Hudson's Bay Company (the oldest corporation in North America at approx 335 years) was recently bought by an american billionare, so it isn't unheard of for old corporation to be bought by young upstarts. I completely agree though that this rumour is ludicrous.
A Jail for all programs? I am no free software advocate, but that seems pretty extreme! Can't you give them a warning, or at least probation?
That is a very common situation, I am amazed that Apple did not anticipate that problem, and implement a command line, solely for that purpose.
I had a similar problem with linux the other day. I didn't want the light or noise (not to mention the power drain) associated with starting my linux machine so I left it off. For some reason, I was unable to do anything with it. It was completely unresponsive. This is completely unacceptable.
ps. There was one obvious solution to the touchscreen/lightning ball issue: turn off the lightning ball.