"The problem with this argument is that if 90% of baseball bats/knives/guns/cars were used for murders(or anything illegal), then these items would be illegal too."
Well, as evidenced by my commute this morning I'm pretty sure that more than 90% of cars are used illegally to speed.
The problem with outlawing tools and other art is that it makes monkeys out of all of us.
Well, actually they use tools too, so it makes us less than monkeys.
"In the event that the company wants to go public at a later date, they usually provide rescission offers to these investors, which allow them to cash before the risky public offering.
Most rescission offers are optional, and in the event that the investor declines they will sign an additional waiver that says they are going along for the ride."
So, basically they have to offer to buy back the shares at cost since they were unregistered, okay then not much to this then. Nobody is being forced to sell shares back and the accounting mistake is being corrected.
People make mistakes in companies like this all the time and they sometimes cost a lot more money than this one might.
As long as nobody is forcing the employees to sell back the shares, then I don't see the big problem here. Just register the shares and move on... of course does this effect the per share ipo price, where those shares not considered in the valuation?
"The Outer Space Treaty (the one prohibiting nations from claiming pieces of offworld real estate might trump that."
And my death ray will trump the outer space treaty.
Treaties and law only happen when people don't want to fight, usually when all things are equal and there are plentiful resources. I think people will be respectful of earth laws as long as they still live on earth or intend to return some day. When people live in remote habitable places, most likely in other solar systems with habitable biospheres, then there will be no reason to follow earth laws unless earth can enforce them.
"Strange, I thought free meant you didn't have to pay for it. 'Free' does not necessarily mean open source."
Free as in freedom. To be free of cost, doesn't just mean cash. Free to use, free to innovate, free to copy, free to acquire.
Many seem to think that freedom to choose means the choice between budweiser and heinekin, but free is being able to brew your own and share it with your friends or sell it if you choose.
" I agree in theory, but in practice a vote libertarian is a vote for Bush. Just ask anybody who voted for Nader in 2000"
I voted for Nader and I'm very happy that Al Gore was never president. I'll be voting for Michael Badnarik this time around, precisely because I don't want to waste my vote on either of the Publicrats.
Oh and to those who are wondering why in hell a libertarian would vote for a socialist like nader... he was just more honest and trustworthy than anyone else at the time. I won't be giving him another vote though, it is too important now to fight the authoritarians with everything we've got.
To those that are in swing states, I'll concede it may be marginally better to vote for the lesser of two evils, but for the rest of us should vote for our future.
Come on at least you could have found a story where someone on the ground was actually injured, in the first picture that you linked to the SUV that the plane crashed into looked barely damaged.
Flying small aircraft is a danger for people in the aircraft, not much for those on the ground.
Re:Changed the view of the US?
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"I'd agree with you, and am a big fan of that notion, but the problem is that Microsoft keeps the large majority of their reserves as cash. Which just fucks everything up. They need to start investing/spending."
Cash "equivalents" probably, which include investments in other publicly traded companies. But regardless that cash is definately not just sitting around. It is being used to finance millions of americans spending.
The real problem is that with the concentration of wealth, even the middle class are going into increasing amounts of debt. So, while they aren't leading a lower material standard of living than they otherwise would, they are increasingly becoming indebted to the rich. This sets up an environment where the rich, mostly through corporations and government, exercise undo control over people's lives. This cycle of control has been seen many times before in history and will increasingly become a form of feudalism and slavery.
not a problem, just a requirement. I often send email messages back and forth like IM only the emails show up in my inbox instead of the message body being displayed inline like IM is. So, this wouldn't be much greater than a typical email back and forth conversation.
But you could also just use direct end to end smtp, so that you could modify the email client to start sending direct smtp to the client's host once the initial email handshake was made for IMing.
this would all be very doable and relatively simple, probably just need to narrow down the options a bit and do it, and far more likely than any other alternatives that are being proposed.
Go ahead and read http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/impp-charter.htm l
"Instant messaging differs from email primarily by requiring relatively short delivery latency guarantees and, typically, less robust transport service. In addition, instant messaging includes the notion of presence information so authorized users can determine if their correspondents are available."
I disagree with the first part. There is no assumption that email will be delayed, it is assumed that email will be delivered as soon as possible, this is no different than IM. And if you simply add a standard announcement mechanism, such as the manual email message "are you there" to which you could add an automated responce "yes" which could also contain client information for direct smtp.
Simply, it is foolish to artificially disjoin instant messaging from email when email already provides a globally addressable identifier which can be easily reused.
"What we really need is a ubiquitous standard like SMTP, for IM. That way, any person can start up their own service, and everyone else could still get the messages."
Just use SMTP for transport. Put an extension in the header. And code up an IM like client for reading them in an IM window instead of an inbox format. That way anyone can send Instant email messages and if the person does not have a IM enabled client then it will be received as regular email. Treat buddy lists as a seperate service and protocol that can be integrated in the client.
IM is just a specialized email service and should not be a completely seperate and unique protocol. Buddy lists are seperate, but could be treated in a decentralized way by just enabling a ping/ announce messaging for people on your buddy lists.
IM is just email with a different user interface. The only difference as far as protocols is concerned is the content of the messages, otherwise the addressing and content packaging are the same.
IM is just an old aol marketing trick and not a unique technology. Email is already a compatible and open protocol, which just lacks a suitable user interface for IM like interaction. The problem being that nearly everyone is using web mail accounts controlled by the very same people that use IM as a proprietary tool for controlling their users. They have no interest in making their user interfaces for email compatible with IM like interaction.
So far the thrust of open source efforts have been at either making a compatible AOL/MSN/Yahoo compatible client or at replacing IM with an open protocol. In the first case this is a mistake because these companies can block access at will to any clients that "hack" into their proprietary system, so any pursuit along those lines will only be allowed in so far as it doesn't contradict any of their business objectives. The latter approach is a waste of time, since the infrastructure for email is already in place and could be more easily expanded upon rather than trying to reinvent an entire communications architecture from scratch and trying to get people to use it. People are already using email and it provides all the facilities for addressing and transport of messages. All that is lacking would be to agree to a standard header field that could be used for IM format.
Sure there are other parts of the IM experience that are lacking from standard email, such as buddy lists and such, but I contend that these should be considered as seperate services. Or could easily be layered on top of email, for instance, an autoreply could be built into the client for messages with certain header values and from certain people, thus providing a pingability for buddy lists...
"IPv4 is also in trouble in this area, and IPv6 is waiting in the wings to take over. However, NAT seems to be good enough in stretching out single IP addresses to multiple computers so I don't know if we'll ever be forced to convert over."
Although I agree essentially with what you say, I think far too many people don't realize that "good enough" will be at the cost of future economic and internet growth. There are many potentially very profitable communications, collaborative and gaming applications that are currently being restrained by IP address scarcity.
Globally addressable numeric addresses enable end to end communication. What we lose when using NAT is simplicity. Simplicity is what would enable more communications applications to become practicle. As it is now, when using NAT, either the application software or user needs to do extra work either setting up a static route or discovering a route through a NAT. It should be clear that this unnecessary complexity imposed by the artificial scarcity of IP addresses limits the broader practicality of direct (most efficient) end-to-end video, voice and data communications over IP.
Sure, there are some companies that profit from the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, but this is akin to the rise in gas prices, which raises oil company profits, but at the expense of a far greater number of people and companies that would have otherwise benefited from the increase of commerce that results when energy and transportation costs go down.
Comunication cost and ease of communication are fundamental economic drivers. When communication is easier and cheaper, the economy as a whole will be better. Replacing IPv4 with IPv6 means communication would be both easier and cheaper(as long as the rollout costs don't get out of hand).
I thought i remembered an article about some strands reaching 20 cm long:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/8018/8018notw5. ht ml
The important part of this article was the part where they "still fall far short of the ideal predicted values" So, already at 20 cm there is divergence with the predicted values... sure maybe these are just correctable defects, but if we need many kilometers of this stuff to be perfect, then I'd say we would be talking about at least many decades to master the techniques needed for space elevator construction, that is if it is at all possible.
"Elevator 2010, a challenge for a 250 kg climber to climb a 16 km tether"
How about something possibly a bit more realistic, like a 250kg climber climbing a 50 meter tether.
The problem that I have with the space elevator fanatics is that they are setting goals well in advance of the science and engineering which usually leads to disillusionment and could scare away investors in what is a promising area of development. Carbon nanotubules hold great promise, but it is still just promise until they can be manufactured in suffient lengths and with sufficient ease to be practical for any use let alone a space elevator.
If carbon nanotubules are going to be useful, we will see them used as building materials for much smallers things first. Perhaps as robotic tendons, or longer bridge spans, weaved into lighter armor for vehicles... I could think of many important applications which could use shorter easier to make lengths of nanotubules and would provide the neccessary experience to determine if a space elevator might be practical.
"It's frustrating when we clearly see that the laws are just bendable..."
shit are you serious? The realization that the laws are bendable is the only thing that keeps me relatively sane. Otherwise your going to be drinking a lot of hemlock there, Socrates.
"It's still ridiculous that the judge doesn't have enough brains to toss the case right out. The numeric address space belongs to NAC, a domain name (if registered) belongs to the plaintiff."
Well, unless ip addresses continue to be assigned by a central authority based upon network topology, then the internet is done. So hopefully it is determined that neither NAC nor the plaintiff own the IP addresses. Besides, the IP address is just a number... anyone could decide to use it, but nobody is forced to route to you.
If he had just said that he was running Windows and crashed losing all his data, then he would have probably been believed. Although then he might have lost his phd for being stupid anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem with this argument is that if 90% of baseball bats/knives/guns/cars were used for murders(or anything illegal), then these items would be illegal too."
Well, as evidenced by my commute this morning I'm pretty sure that more than 90% of cars are used illegally to speed.
The problem with outlawing tools and other art is that it makes monkeys out of all of us.
Well, actually they use tools too, so it makes us less than monkeys.
"In the event that the company wants to go public at a later date, they usually provide rescission offers to these investors, which allow them to cash before the risky public offering.
Most rescission offers are optional, and in the event that the investor declines they will sign an additional waiver that says they are going along for the ride."
So, basically they have to offer to buy back the shares at cost since they were unregistered, okay then not much to this then. Nobody is being forced to sell shares back and the accounting mistake is being corrected.
People make mistakes in companies like this all the time and they sometimes cost a lot more money than this one might.
As long as nobody is forcing the employees to sell back the shares, then I don't see the big problem here. Just register the shares and move on... of course does this effect the per share ipo price, where those shares not considered in the valuation?
"Half the college experience."
That means kegs and girls, for those of you in high school.
"The Outer Space Treaty (the one prohibiting nations from claiming pieces of offworld real estate might trump that."
And my death ray will trump the outer space treaty.
Treaties and law only happen when people don't want to fight, usually when all things are equal and there are plentiful resources. I think people will be respectful of earth laws as long as they still live on earth or intend to return some day. When people live in remote habitable places, most likely in other solar systems with habitable biospheres, then there will be no reason to follow earth laws unless earth can enforce them.
"but a take-home receipt opens up the possibility for coercion, offers no benefits, and gives no additional freedom."
well said.
"Strange, I thought free meant you didn't have to pay for it. 'Free' does not necessarily mean open source."
Free as in freedom. To be free of cost, doesn't just mean cash. Free to use, free to innovate, free to copy, free to acquire.
Many seem to think that freedom to choose means the choice between budweiser and heinekin, but free is being able to brew your own and share it with your friends or sell it if you choose.
" I agree in theory, but in practice a vote libertarian is a vote for Bush. Just ask anybody who voted for Nader in 2000"
I voted for Nader and I'm very happy that Al Gore was never president. I'll be voting for Michael Badnarik this time around, precisely because I don't want to waste my vote on either of the Publicrats.
Oh and to those who are wondering why in hell a libertarian would vote for a socialist like nader... he was just more honest and trustworthy than anyone else at the time. I won't be giving him another vote though, it is too important now to fight the authoritarians with everything we've got.
To those that are in swing states, I'll concede it may be marginally better to vote for the lesser of two evils, but for the rest of us should vote for our future.
Come on at least you could have found a story where someone on the ground was actually injured, in the first picture that you linked to the SUV that the plane crashed into looked barely damaged.
Flying small aircraft is a danger for people in the aircraft, not much for those on the ground.
"There was no need to make it any easier to get certified. Less expensive would be nice, but not easier in any other sense."
Hmm... funny how you don't seem to connect the two.
OLED that isn't vaporware:
http://www.emagin.com/svga3d.htm
"I'd agree with you, and am a big fan of that notion, but the problem is that Microsoft keeps the large majority of their reserves as cash. Which just fucks everything up. They need to start investing/spending."
Cash "equivalents" probably, which include investments in other publicly traded companies. But regardless that cash is definately not just sitting around. It is being used to finance millions of americans spending.
The real problem is that with the concentration of wealth, even the middle class are going into increasing amounts of debt. So, while they aren't leading a lower material standard of living than they otherwise would, they are increasingly becoming indebted to the rich. This sets up an environment where the rich, mostly through corporations and government, exercise undo control over people's lives. This cycle of control has been seen many times before in history and will increasingly become a form of feudalism and slavery.
not a problem, just a requirement. I often send email messages back and forth like IM only the emails show up in my inbox instead of the message body being displayed inline like IM is. So, this wouldn't be much greater than a typical email back and forth conversation.
m l
But you could also just use direct end to end smtp, so that you could modify the email client to start sending direct smtp to the client's host once the initial email handshake was made for IMing.
this would all be very doable and relatively simple, probably just need to narrow down the options a bit and do it, and far more likely than any other alternatives that are being proposed.
Go ahead and read http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/impp-charter.ht
"Instant messaging differs from email primarily by requiring relatively short delivery latency guarantees and, typically, less robust transport service. In addition, instant messaging includes the notion of presence information so authorized users can determine if their correspondents are available."
I disagree with the first part. There is no assumption that email will be delayed, it is assumed that email will be delivered as soon as possible, this is no different than IM. And if you simply add a standard announcement mechanism, such as the manual email message "are you there" to which you could add an automated responce "yes" which could also contain client information for direct smtp.
Simply, it is foolish to artificially disjoin instant messaging from email when email already provides a globally addressable identifier which can be easily reused.
"What we really need is a ubiquitous standard like SMTP, for IM. That way, any person can start up their own service, and everyone else could still get the messages."
Just use SMTP for transport. Put an extension in the header. And code up an IM like client for reading them in an IM window instead of an inbox format. That way anyone can send Instant email messages and if the person does not have a IM enabled client then it will be received as regular email. Treat buddy lists as a seperate service and protocol that can be integrated in the client.
IM is just a specialized email service and should not be a completely seperate and unique protocol. Buddy lists are seperate, but could be treated in a decentralized way by just enabling a ping/ announce messaging for people on your buddy lists.
IM is just email with a different user interface. The only difference as far as protocols is concerned is the content of the messages, otherwise the addressing and content packaging are the same.
IM is just an old aol marketing trick and not a unique technology. Email is already a compatible and open protocol, which just lacks a suitable user interface for IM like interaction. The problem being that nearly everyone is using web mail accounts controlled by the very same people that use IM as a proprietary tool for controlling their users. They have no interest in making their user interfaces for email compatible with IM like interaction.
So far the thrust of open source efforts have been at either making a compatible AOL/MSN/Yahoo compatible client or at replacing IM with an open protocol. In the first case this is a mistake because these companies can block access at will to any clients that "hack" into their proprietary system, so any pursuit along those lines will only be allowed in so far as it doesn't contradict any of their business objectives. The latter approach is a waste of time, since the infrastructure for email is already in place and could be more easily expanded upon rather than trying to reinvent an entire communications architecture from scratch and trying to get people to use it. People are already using email and it provides all the facilities for addressing and transport of messages. All that is lacking would be to agree to a standard header field that could be used for IM format.
Sure there are other parts of the IM experience that are lacking from standard email, such as buddy lists and such, but I contend that these should be considered as seperate services. Or could easily be layered on top of email, for instance, an autoreply could be built into the client for messages with certain header values and from certain people, thus providing a pingability for buddy lists...
This would best be done as a mozilla project.
"On 9/11 the terrorists succeeded in replacing it with "what can we do to best cover our ass."
We did that to ourselves, terrorists can only kill people.
"It seems slashdot has been turing into angry, leftist politics for nerds nowadays."
Come on what about us angry libertarians? Don't we count anymore? Or are we considered left wing these days? I tend to lose track of the name calling.
" Far, far too much of the current US debate is all about ad hominem attacks. It never seems to matter what anyone says anymore.."
You are just saying that because you are trying to sound smart.
"IPv4 is also in trouble in this area, and IPv6 is waiting in the wings to take over. However, NAT seems to be good enough in stretching out single IP addresses to multiple computers so I don't know if we'll ever be forced to convert over."
Although I agree essentially with what you say, I think far too many people don't realize that "good enough" will be at the cost of future economic and internet growth. There are many potentially very profitable communications, collaborative and gaming applications that are currently being restrained by IP address scarcity.
Globally addressable numeric addresses enable end to end communication. What we lose when using NAT is simplicity. Simplicity is what would enable more communications applications to become practicle. As it is now, when using NAT, either the application software or user needs to do extra work either setting up a static route or discovering a route through a NAT. It should be clear that this unnecessary complexity imposed by the artificial scarcity of IP addresses limits the broader practicality of direct (most efficient) end-to-end video, voice and data communications over IP.
Sure, there are some companies that profit from the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, but this is akin to the rise in gas prices, which raises oil company profits, but at the expense of a far greater number of people and companies that would have otherwise benefited from the increase of commerce that results when energy and transportation costs go down.
Comunication cost and ease of communication are fundamental economic drivers. When communication is easier and cheaper, the economy as a whole will be better. Replacing IPv4 with IPv6 means communication would be both easier and cheaper(as long as the rollout costs don't get out of hand).
I thought i remembered an article about some strands reaching 20 cm long:
. ht ml
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/8018/8018notw5
The important part of this article was the part where they "still fall far short of the ideal predicted values" So, already at 20 cm there is divergence with the predicted values... sure maybe these are just correctable defects, but if we need many kilometers of this stuff to be perfect, then I'd say we would be talking about at least many decades to master the techniques needed for space elevator construction, that is if it is at all possible.
"Elevator 2010, a challenge for a 250 kg climber to climb a 16 km tether"
How about something possibly a bit more realistic, like a 250kg climber climbing a 50 meter tether.
The problem that I have with the space elevator fanatics is that they are setting goals well in advance of the science and engineering which usually leads to disillusionment and could scare away investors in what is a promising area of development. Carbon nanotubules hold great promise, but it is still just promise until they can be manufactured in suffient lengths and with sufficient ease to be practical for any use let alone a space elevator.
If carbon nanotubules are going to be useful, we will see them used as building materials for much smallers things first. Perhaps as robotic tendons, or longer bridge spans, weaved into lighter armor for vehicles... I could think of many important applications which could use shorter easier to make lengths of nanotubules and would provide the neccessary experience to determine if a space elevator might be practical.
Sometimes small steps are big.
"It's frustrating when we clearly see that the laws are just bendable..."
shit are you serious? The realization that the laws are bendable is the only thing that keeps me relatively sane. Otherwise your going to be drinking a lot of hemlock there, Socrates.
"It's still ridiculous that the judge doesn't have enough brains to toss the case right out. The numeric address space belongs to NAC, a domain name (if registered) belongs to the plaintiff."
Well, unless ip addresses continue to be assigned by a central authority based upon network topology, then the internet is done. So hopefully it is determined that neither NAC nor the plaintiff own the IP addresses. Besides, the IP address is just a number... anyone could decide to use it, but nobody is forced to route to you.
I also, would like to make it as clear as possible that I am in fact me. Just in case there was any residual doubt.
"what if u only had to read one standardised privacy EULA in you life time"
m l
Well this is a type of End User License Agreement: http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.ht
"because space was running out on his computer"
If he had just said that he was running Windows and crashed losing all his data, then he would have probably been believed. Although then he might have lost his phd for being stupid anyway.