Darryl Issa is an intelligent guy. He's also a well-educated guy.
Unfortunately, he's also a grandstanding, profoundly partisan hack who doesn't give a damn about facts, because he represents a redder-than-red district, so he only cares about getting more face time on Faux News...
There are only two signals you can send to your cable company: giving them money or not giving them money. When you keep giving them money, you are telling them that you approve of their behavior and wish them to continue.
Continuing to pay them for a service you don't think is worth the money is utter stupidity.
So, your proposed solution is that I either give up Internet access altogether, or switch to using my ILEC (which means giving up my VoIP landline) for access?
Purely symbolic personal actions are easy - as long as you don't care about self-harm.
The problem is that I have no other choices of ISP. This is not just my personal problem. It is a problem of US national policy. Depriving TW of my monthly fee won't accomplish ANYTHING useful. Changing national policy - making cable ISPs common carriers, being the most obviously useful immediate change - WILL. So I argue in favor of that change, because pursuing that change by publicly advocating it as a response to Comcast's bid to become an effective monopoly player in the US cable industry IS useful.
Denying Comcast's attempt to acquire TW would also be useful - but only in the short run. Making acceptance of common carrier status for their combined ISP business a condition for approval of their merger would be more useful, long-term.
Is English not your natal language? Because I thought I was pretty clear about being stuck in a local duopoly where the alternative is the ILEC - whose upstream limit on DSL is ~100 kbps.
So, basically, you're suggesting I trade a shit sandwich for diahrrea soup?
In terms of competition, verizon buying time-warner is a much bigger deal than the blocked attempt of at&t buying t-mobile. This purchase can't possibly be allowed to proceed.
I agree.
An earlier version of the NYT story quoted Comcast's CEO as stating the combined company would only control 30% of the US pay TV market - a claim which purposefully conflates cable MSOs with SATELLITE TV providers. The difference (and it is crucial) between those two delivery models is that virtually every member of Comcast's customer base, and the 8 million net subscribers they expect to acquire from TW also depend on their cable operator as their broadband ISP, whereas almost NONE of DirectTV's customers also use it for Internet service. There's an excellent reason for that: their satellite Internet service is VERY expensive, AND IT SUCKS. It's dogshit slow, monthly data transfer quotas are ludicrously tiny, it's unusably laggy for online gaming and VoIP service (plus, your uplink requires POTS), and rain- or snow-storms make it impossible to use altogether.
Nor, in all fairness, is TW anything approaching a model corporate citizen. This month TW raised my Internet access bill by $5, from $39.99 to $44.99. That's in excess of an 11% increase. Has TW's cost of providing service increased to my rural duopoloy increased by any even marginally-significant amount recently? Oh, HELL NO. That increase was shoved down my throat purely to pump up TW's stock price, SO THAT COMCAST WOULD HAVE TO PAY MORE FOR THE COMPANY. And, of course, Comcast will insist on additional ratepayer robbery to increase the stock price of the combined company, because increased, short-term shareholder return is the ONLY goal of capitalism.
But it probably gets Google the sats it needs for free.
If google can build it, but only the military can use the full resolution, it sounds like google is probably getting huge piles of money from the US Military.
The summary is completely wrong (surprise!)
Google is NOT building the satellite (note the singular) in question. It will merely be a customer of DigitalGlobe - one of many, including the US government.
Not that the US goverment needs DigitalGlobe's images. After all, the NSA has a fleet of its own satellites with far better image resolution capability than the DigitalGlobe effort.
Slushdot: come for the misleading summaries, stay for the uninformed commentary!
(I do have a doctorate in cosmology and I've a contention with what you've said: a black hole is not a singularity, whether by definition or otherwise. A "black hole" is simply a region in vacuum shrouded by an event horizon, and this situation occurs when a body is compressed enough that it lies entirely within its event horizon. In classical GR there are a few ways to get to this situation, with perhaps the most common being the collapse of a supermassive star. In classical GR there is also a singularity at the centre of the black hole, but a quantum theory of gravity would be expected to smear this out. What this does not imply is that a quantum theory of gravity would destroy the concept of a black hole entirely -- instead it seems very likely that in a quantum theory of gravity we would retain an event horizon, merely a somewhat "smeared" and non-absolute form of one (a distinction that would seem heartlessly academic to any poor sod falling into a hole). Hawking's conjecture, which is eerily similar to an equally unproven conjecture he advanced a few years back to "prove" that the information paradox was solved, is that ultimately there are no "black holes" because they are not an infinite state -- eventually they will dissipate, which immediately implies that their "event horizons" are actually apparent horizons. So far as this goes, it strikes me as eminently non-controversial.
Anyway, the concept of a singularity and a black hole are therefore rather distinct.)
I sit corrected.
However, I'd like to point out that nothing in your analysis validates wisnoskij's contention that the mass of a black hole has to be considered as existing entirely within this universe, therefore preventing it from acting as a "wormhole" to another one. As I understand it, whether the event horizon is actually a hard boundary or a more diffuse one, we don't currently have a solid cosmological model of what's "on the other side" of that boundary. AFAIK, Hawking's position on the issue of whether information is, in fact, lost once it passes an event horizon has evolved over the years, and his most recent thoughts are more conceptual arguments than mathematical models. (That's apparently more a factor of his increasing communications disability than necessarily a weakness in his logic, but still... I don't believe he's provided the math to back up his current mental model, yet.)
I'd be happy to have my grasp of the subject debunked by those who truly do understand the math involved. I make no claim whatsoever to that ability, myself - I just contend that wisnoskij was harumphing ex cathedra on the subject from the depths of his hat./p>
The problem with that is that black holes need the mass they suck in to exist.
The mass cannot both be in the black hole and shot out the other side into a new universe.
So unless you can come up with a theory that has black holes creating mass out of nothing, that is simply impossible.
Sorry, but you can't prove that contention. Period.
In the Standard Model, black holes are singularities. BY DEFINITION, the laws of physics as we observe and understand them break down in singularities. The SM can't explain what is going on inside a black hole, AND NEITHER CAN YOU.
Unless you have a doctorate in cosmology or astrophysics, you doubtless are profoundly unqualified even to have an OPINION on the topic... so, kindly STFU.
The article to which this piece points is an opinion piece. The author points out that Snowden's "latest revelations" may compromise current field operations and/or operatives.
The central problem with that claim is that SNOWDEN HAS MADE NO NEW REVELATIONS. *All* of the revelations from "Snowden" are actually revelations made by one or more of the journalists to whom Snowden gave copies of his stolen documents. All of them. Snowden himself has refused to reveal ANYTHING that THEY have not already published, on the grounds that he considers himself to be unqualified to properly strike the balance between preserving national security and revealing information that is clearly in the public interest. Instead, he has left it ENTIRELY up to the journalists to whom he gave the information to make those decisions.
It's not bad enough that these scumbags have a stranglehold on scientific research publishing. The primary website to which the summary points requires the reader to allow so many third-party scripts to run that I simply gave up on the article altogether.
Oh, and FUCK SLASHDOT for pointing me to such a piece-of-shit website in the first place.
In response to my comment about the Alienware M17X, roc97007 commented:
I've never even seen one, outside The Big Bang Theory.
A friend of mine who does process control automation for a living is working on his second (the first one was stolen from his truck). Gorgeous machine. Top-notch graphics performance, full-HD display, dual quad CPUs, 7200 rpm data drive and a 256 GB flash memory boot drive. POST to Windows 7 desktop in 3 seconds flat. And built like a tank. Plus a full 101-key keyboard, mad I/O, and cool, customizable lighting zones.
Weighs a ton and drinks a battery dry in 2.5 hours or so - but, man, what a beautiful muscle machine!
Posting to undo an inadvertently-incorrect moderation.
Still getting used to the "glide" feature on my Synoptics touchpad.
I meant to moderate VortexCortex's comment +1 Funny.
I suspect that even though the point that it feels far off has probably delayed reexamining the treaty, another big problem is it represents a rather significant can of worms that governments just do not want to deal with right now, not unless one of them has something significant to gain from it.
I suspect you're right.
That doesn't alter the fact that it's important to the future of the human race that the issue be addressed.
It's rather irrelevant what you think, Mr. Bigelow. There are currently international treaties banning any nation (and by extension any citizen of a nation) from claiming extraterrestrial territory. So bugger off and do something useful with your money.
There ARE current international treaties banning ownership of an extraterrestrial body. They're foolish and outdated, and they need to be amended. Bigelow is attempting to persuade the US government to begin negotiating that process.
I think Bigelow is a swine - but he's right about what it will take to give private capital the incentive to invest the blood and treasure necessary to colonize and exploit extraterrestrial resources. We're getting ever closer to the day when companies like SpaceX will be capable of creating conglomerates that possess the technology and financial resources to do exactly that - but they won't commit them until they see the possibility of getting sufficient return on their investment to make the risk worth taking.
I'm all for government funding - NASA, the ESA, and so on - for space exploration efforts. But we can't COLONIZE the Moon without first modifying the existing Moon Treaty. Nor can we conduct commercial operations (such as ice mining) without amending it, because that 50-year-old treaty prohibits them.
Anybody - including people you despise - can have a good idea. Ideas should be considered on their own merits, rather than being dismissed out of hand, simply because you dislike their source.
I've lived in one of his bigger "residence hotels". It was a hellhole. Cop cars day and night, shootings and stabbings, bloodstains on the carpet.
I understand Bob Hsieh, co-founder of Zappos, has bought up a big chunk of Fremont Street, and is steadily redeveloping it into a pretty decent area - but, five years ago, downtown Vegas was a complete slum. And Bigelow helped create that slum.
BTW - I think he's probably right about private property rights being the key to giving private capital the incentive needed to invest in colonizing and economically exploiting Luna. That, however, does not change who he is.
There is also Apple Corps Ltd, owned by the Beatles. There have been trademark disputes between Apple Inc and Apple Corp Ltd, none of which will affect you buying apples (the fruit)).
And Apple Computer was forced to negotiate a settlement with Apple Corps Ltd in every suit the Beatles' company filed. (They were all related to iTunes, which is all about music - and the Beatles worldwide trademark was established in 1968, so Apple Computers' conflicting mark had no legal leg to stand on.)
Trademarks are, for the most part, geographically limited, and apply fairly narrowly to the product or service to which the mark applies. Thus the Saturn automobile company, the Sega Saturn console, and Saturn Internet Services ALL had trademarks on the name Saturn. None of them conflicted with each other, because each represented a different category of product (cars vs. game consoles) or service (an ISP). Very few trademarks are global. Apple Computer is, and so is Apple Corps Ltd. The conflict arose when Apple Computer decided to get into the music business - and ran into a trademark the Beatles had established more than thirty years earlier. So Steve Jobs changed the service's name to iTunes, paid Apple Corps an undisclosed (but clearly substantial) amount of money, and signed a quitclaim agreement to make it all go away. Once that happened, negotiations began between Apple Corps and Apple Computer to make the Beatles' music available on iTunes - which it now is.
In other news, Shuttleworth over-fucking-reached in a major way. The EFF has set him straight. Let's hope he stays that way.
The aside was directed at the peanut gallery - not at you. (Your user number indicated that you ought to be familiar with the/. habit of responding to postings without having first read the article to which they refer. It's practically an article of faith around here. The notion that the gallery would bother to read a link posted within a comment is still less likely. Your research citation made it pretty clear that you're the exception that proves the rule.),/p>
Yes, it mentions the variation, which is what cause me to do a little searching to see the earliest documented reference I could find with minimal effort. I'm clearly not the expert you are on attribution. However, as a layperson, crediting Paul Mellon for a minimally reworded version of a phrase doesn't seem much better than crediting someone who bothered to use it for a book title.
Again, they're not the same quote. "I love it!" and "I'm lovin' it! (tm McDonalds) are not the same statement. They may well MEAN the same thing, but they are not the same quote.
I'm not a particular partisan of Mr. Mellon. If you can find an earlier citation for his exact statement, I'll happily acknowledge it. I'm equally sanguine about accepting that the "ain't" variant came first. My concern is with/.'s fortune file being RIFE with shit like this. Mis-attribution and non-attribution are equally bad things. The editors take a lot of heat for maladroit editing, but nobody (except me, and now thee) seems to have noticed that the fortune cookie database is as full of crap as the articles - and then some. It bothers me more than somewhat, and I thought it was overdue that someone pointed it out.
As it happens, that someone turned out to be yours truly.
Attribution can be tricky. You seem pretty sure that the original statement should be attributed to Paul Mellon, and mention it's from January, 1942.
What about this? http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19380705&id=ZysbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BE0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=1516,6094461
It's the July 5th, 1938 edition of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, specifically, a story entitled "Economics in Eight Words". The last line is "There ain't no such thing as free lunch". I assume that the difference of "There aint" vs "There's" and the missing "a" aren't terribly important. I have no idea if this is the first occurrence of it either.
If you read the reference I cited (pause for derisive laughter from the peanut gallery), you'll note that IT draws a distinction between the two formulations. Like Friedman with the more formal phraseology, Robert A. Heinlein is frequently credited with "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." In fact, he DID come up with the acronym TANSTAAFL (in his 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), which is now widely used, but, as you point out, he certainly didn't coin the parent observation.
So, yes, proper attribution can be obscure. But I still say that's NO excuse for obvious mis-attribution, and no excuse whatsoever for leaving out attribution of living authors' _bon mots_ altogether - especially when the source of those IS indisputable.
Slushdot's fortune cookies need a thorough overhaul.
Just as a for-instance, I keep seeing "There's no such thing as a free lunch" attributed to Milton Friedman. Phrase finder attributes the original statement to journalist Paul Mellon, in a January, 1942 editorial response to a speech by then-vice-President Henry Wallace. It notes that the phrase is associated with Friedman only because he appropriated it as the title of his 1975 book - but he would have been in grade school when Mellon's editorial was first published.
That's far from the only sin of mis-attribution (or, much worse, non-attribution) in the fortune database. I'm CONSTANTLY seeing quotes from Bill Griffith's fabulous Zippy the Pinhead strips (mostly Zippy's own non-sequiturs) show up without attribution to either Griffith (their actual author) or Zippy (his mouthpiece). The same is true of many great Steven Wright lines - and there have to be plenty of others whose authors I don't recognize.
Full disclosure: I'm a writer. Proper attribution is important to me. I'm known for the extent to which I research my work - which makes proper attribution all the more important from my perspective.
I've always enjoyed the movie Star Ship Troopers as a satire of fascism and chauvinism. I thought it conveyed the spirit of the book, if a bit skewed, quite well.
Oh, for criminy's sake! A "satire of fascism and chavinism" that "conveyed the spirit of the book"? Give to me a break.
The two things are ENTIRELY mutually exclusive. You can convey the spirit of Heinlein's final juvenile novel, or you can make a "satire of fascism and chauvinism", but you cannot do both. In fact, I'm reminded of Heinlein's own observation that, "A man may choose to follow the path of faith, or the path of reason. He cannot do both."
Starship Troopers, the novel, is a straightforward exposition of the process by which callow teenagers are transformed into trained soldiers. There's no trace of sexism in it, and no hint of fascism, either. (That Heinlein sets the story in a society in which an individual must serve the public for a period - remarks he made in response to interviews published over the years made it clear that he did not envision military service as the only option - before being granted the sovereign franchise does NOT amount to "fascism".) The movie, by contrast, discards every trace of what makes the book effective as a coming-of-age tale, replaces Heinlein's social model with a truly fascist one, and makes the military's leadership a clown college (Space marines using carbines against the Bugs? Really?), to boot. It has NOTHING to do with the book, besides sharing a title.
Slashdot Mirror
<RANT=ON>
... I simply DESPISE the locultion "(x) times smaller than." It's lazy, stupid writing, and it needs to die in a fire.
The proper way to phrase the concept would be "(suitable fraction) of the size of", as in "one third the size of".
<RANT=OFF>
cat_jesus noted:
In Hearing, GOP Chairman Issa Misnames African Country, Repeatedly Mispronounces ‘Ebola’ Issa also thinks he knows more about ebola than doctors at the CDC.
Darryl Issa is an intelligent guy. He's also a well-educated guy.
Unfortunately, he's also a grandstanding, profoundly partisan hack who doesn't give a damn about facts, because he represents a redder-than-red district, so he only cares about getting more face time on Faux News ...
swalve insisted;
There are only two signals you can send to your cable company: giving them money or not giving them money. When you keep giving them money, you are telling them that you approve of their behavior and wish them to continue. Continuing to pay them for a service you don't think is worth the money is utter stupidity.
So, your proposed solution is that I either give up Internet access altogether, or switch to using my ILEC (which means giving up my VoIP landline) for access?
Purely symbolic personal actions are easy - as long as you don't care about self-harm.
The problem is that I have no other choices of ISP. This is not just my personal problem. It is a problem of US national policy. Depriving TW of my monthly fee won't accomplish ANYTHING useful. Changing national policy - making cable ISPs common carriers, being the most obviously useful immediate change - WILL. So I argue in favor of that change, because pursuing that change by publicly advocating it as a response to Comcast's bid to become an effective monopoly player in the US cable industry IS useful.
Denying Comcast's attempt to acquire TW would also be useful - but only in the short run. Making acceptance of common carrier status for their combined ISP business a condition for approval of their merger would be more useful, long-term.
swalve sneered:
Then cancel your service.
Is English not your natal language? Because I thought I was pretty clear about being stuck in a local duopoly where the alternative is the ILEC - whose upstream limit on DSL is ~100 kbps.
So, basically, you're suggesting I trade a shit sandwich for diahrrea soup?
Kindly fuck the hell off and die.
TrekkieGod warned:
In terms of competition, verizon buying time-warner is a much bigger deal than the blocked attempt of at&t buying t-mobile. This purchase can't possibly be allowed to proceed.
I agree.
An earlier version of the NYT story quoted Comcast's CEO as stating the combined company would only control 30% of the US pay TV market - a claim which purposefully conflates cable MSOs with SATELLITE TV providers. The difference (and it is crucial) between those two delivery models is that virtually every member of Comcast's customer base, and the 8 million net subscribers they expect to acquire from TW also depend on their cable operator as their broadband ISP, whereas almost NONE of DirectTV's customers also use it for Internet service. There's an excellent reason for that: their satellite Internet service is VERY expensive, AND IT SUCKS. It's dogshit slow, monthly data transfer quotas are ludicrously tiny, it's unusably laggy for online gaming and VoIP service (plus, your uplink requires POTS), and rain- or snow-storms make it impossible to use altogether.
Still worse, Comcast has already been caught extorting money from Level 3 Communications to keep Netflix from being throttled, and it counts Netflix streams against customers' monthly data caps, but does not do the same for its own Xfinity app for the Xbox.
Nor, in all fairness, is TW anything approaching a model corporate citizen. This month TW raised my Internet access bill by $5, from $39.99 to $44.99. That's in excess of an 11% increase. Has TW's cost of providing service increased to my rural duopoloy increased by any even marginally-significant amount recently? Oh, HELL NO. That increase was shoved down my throat purely to pump up TW's stock price, SO THAT COMCAST WOULD HAVE TO PAY MORE FOR THE COMPANY. And, of course, Comcast will insist on additional ratepayer robbery to increase the stock price of the combined company, because increased, short-term shareholder return is the ONLY goal of capitalism.
Just ask any MBA.
This scumbaggery must not be allowed to spread.
icebike conjectured:
But it probably gets Google the sats it needs for free.
If google can build it, but only the military can use the full resolution, it sounds like google is probably getting huge piles of money from the US Military.
The summary is completely wrong (surprise!)
Google is NOT building the satellite (note the singular) in question. It will merely be a customer of DigitalGlobe - one of many, including the US government.
Not that the US goverment needs DigitalGlobe's images. After all, the NSA has a fleet of its own satellites with far better image resolution capability than the DigitalGlobe effort.
Slushdot: come for the misleading summaries, stay for the uninformed commentary!
wonkey_monkey pointed out:
I maintained:
In the Standard Model, black holes are singularities.
To which wonkey_monkey responded:
Really? I always that the presence of the singularity is what causes the black hole to be, but they're not actually one and the same.
Comological Doctor AC agrees here.
Thanks for calling my attention to his post.
An Anonymous Coward commented:
(I do have a doctorate in cosmology and I've a contention with what you've said: a black hole is not a singularity, whether by definition or otherwise. A "black hole" is simply a region in vacuum shrouded by an event horizon, and this situation occurs when a body is compressed enough that it lies entirely within its event horizon. In classical GR there are a few ways to get to this situation, with perhaps the most common being the collapse of a supermassive star. In classical GR there is also a singularity at the centre of the black hole, but a quantum theory of gravity would be expected to smear this out. What this does not imply is that a quantum theory of gravity would destroy the concept of a black hole entirely -- instead it seems very likely that in a quantum theory of gravity we would retain an event horizon, merely a somewhat "smeared" and non-absolute form of one (a distinction that would seem heartlessly academic to any poor sod falling into a hole). Hawking's conjecture, which is eerily similar to an equally unproven conjecture he advanced a few years back to "prove" that the information paradox was solved, is that ultimately there are no "black holes" because they are not an infinite state -- eventually they will dissipate, which immediately implies that their "event horizons" are actually apparent horizons. So far as this goes, it strikes me as eminently non-controversial.
Anyway, the concept of a singularity and a black hole are therefore rather distinct.)
I sit corrected.
However, I'd like to point out that nothing in your analysis validates wisnoskij's contention that the mass of a black hole has to be considered as existing entirely within this universe, therefore preventing it from acting as a "wormhole" to another one. As I understand it, whether the event horizon is actually a hard boundary or a more diffuse one, we don't currently have a solid cosmological model of what's "on the other side" of that boundary. AFAIK, Hawking's position on the issue of whether information is, in fact, lost once it passes an event horizon has evolved over the years, and his most recent thoughts are more conceptual arguments than mathematical models. (That's apparently more a factor of his increasing communications disability than necessarily a weakness in his logic, but still ... I don't believe he's provided the math to back up his current mental model, yet.)
I'd be happy to have my grasp of the subject debunked by those who truly do understand the math involved. I make no claim whatsoever to that ability, myself - I just contend that wisnoskij was harumphing ex cathedra on the subject from the depths of his hat./p>
wisnoskij blathered:
The problem with that is that black holes need the mass they suck in to exist.
The mass cannot both be in the black hole and shot out the other side into a new universe.
So unless you can come up with a theory that has black holes creating mass out of nothing, that is simply impossible.
Sorry, but you can't prove that contention. Period.
In the Standard Model, black holes are singularities. BY DEFINITION, the laws of physics as we observe and understand them break down in singularities. The SM can't explain what is going on inside a black hole, AND NEITHER CAN YOU.
Unless you have a doctorate in cosmology or astrophysics, you doubtless are profoundly unqualified even to have an OPINION on the topic ... so, kindly STFU.
Thank you.
The article to which this piece points is an opinion piece. The author points out that Snowden's "latest revelations" may compromise current field operations and/or operatives.
The central problem with that claim is that SNOWDEN HAS MADE NO NEW REVELATIONS. *All* of the revelations from "Snowden" are actually revelations made by one or more of the journalists to whom Snowden gave copies of his stolen documents. All of them. Snowden himself has refused to reveal ANYTHING that THEY have not already published, on the grounds that he considers himself to be unqualified to properly strike the balance between preserving national security and revealing information that is clearly in the public interest. Instead, he has left it ENTIRELY up to the journalists to whom he gave the information to make those decisions.
But don't take my word for it. Listen to the man himself.
Seriously.
It's not bad enough that these scumbags have a stranglehold on scientific research publishing. The primary website to which the summary points requires the reader to allow so many third-party scripts to run that I simply gave up on the article altogether.
Oh, and FUCK SLASHDOT for pointing me to such a piece-of-shit website in the first place.
an Anonymous Coward plaintively asked:
Will there ever be a President that I can respect?
Yes.
In response to my comment about the Alienware M17X, roc97007 commented:
I've never even seen one, outside The Big Bang Theory.
A friend of mine who does process control automation for a living is working on his second (the first one was stolen from his truck). Gorgeous machine. Top-notch graphics performance, full-HD display, dual quad CPUs, 7200 rpm data drive and a 256 GB flash memory boot drive. POST to Windows 7 desktop in 3 seconds flat. And built like a tank. Plus a full 101-key keyboard, mad I/O, and cool, customizable lighting zones.
Weighs a ton and drinks a battery dry in 2.5 hours or so - but, man, what a beautiful muscle machine!
Orthancstone observed:
There's nothing sexy about a laptop
You've obviously never driven an Alienware M17X.
Posting to undo an inadvertently-incorrect moderation. Still getting used to the "glide" feature on my Synoptics touchpad. I meant to moderate VortexCortex's comment +1 Funny.
jythie speculated:
I suspect that even though the point that it feels far off has probably delayed reexamining the treaty, another big problem is it represents a rather significant can of worms that governments just do not want to deal with right now, not unless one of them has something significant to gain from it.
I suspect you're right.
That doesn't alter the fact that it's important to the future of the human race that the issue be addressed.
newcastlejon remonstrated:
pigiron quipped:
The moon is a harsh mistress.
That's not a quip, it's the title of a book. A rather well-known one.
Yes it is. One I read the year it was published.
But pigiron was trying to be funny. (I think he succeeded, btw.) That makes his post a QUIP. From Goggle's search page for the term:
quip
/kwip/
noun
noun: quip; plural noun: quips
1.
a witty remark.
synonyms: joke, witty remark, witticism, jest, pun, bon mot, sally, pleasantry;
informal one-liner, gag, crack, wisecrack, funny
"the quip provoked a smile"
archaic
a verbal equivocation.
verb
verb: quip; 3rd person present: quips; past tense: quipped; past participle: quipped; gerund or present participle: quipping
1.
make a witty remark.
"“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she quipped"
synonyms: joke, jest, pun, sally;
MightyMartian sneered:
It's rather irrelevant what you think, Mr. Bigelow. There are currently international treaties banning any nation (and by extension any citizen of a nation) from claiming extraterrestrial territory. So bugger off and do something useful with your money.
There ARE current international treaties banning ownership of an extraterrestrial body. They're foolish and outdated, and they need to be amended. Bigelow is attempting to persuade the US government to begin negotiating that process.
I think Bigelow is a swine - but he's right about what it will take to give private capital the incentive to invest the blood and treasure necessary to colonize and exploit extraterrestrial resources. We're getting ever closer to the day when companies like SpaceX will be capable of creating conglomerates that possess the technology and financial resources to do exactly that - but they won't commit them until they see the possibility of getting sufficient return on their investment to make the risk worth taking.
I'm all for government funding - NASA, the ESA, and so on - for space exploration efforts. But we can't COLONIZE the Moon without first modifying the existing Moon Treaty. Nor can we conduct commercial operations (such as ice mining) without amending it, because that 50-year-old treaty prohibits them.
Anybody - including people you despise - can have a good idea. Ideas should be considered on their own merits, rather than being dismissed out of hand, simply because you dislike their source.
pigiron quipped:
The moon is a harsh mistress.
And Bob Bigelow is a slumlord.
I've lived in one of his bigger "residence hotels". It was a hellhole. Cop cars day and night, shootings and stabbings, bloodstains on the carpet.
I understand Bob Hsieh, co-founder of Zappos, has bought up a big chunk of Fremont Street, and is steadily redeveloping it into a pretty decent area - but, five years ago, downtown Vegas was a complete slum. And Bigelow helped create that slum.
BTW - I think he's probably right about private property rights being the key to giving private capital the incentive needed to invest in colonizing and economically exploiting Luna. That, however, does not change who he is.
Sesostris III noted:
There is also Apple Corps Ltd, owned by the Beatles. There have been trademark disputes between Apple Inc and Apple Corp Ltd, none of which will affect you buying apples (the fruit)).
And Apple Computer was forced to negotiate a settlement with Apple Corps Ltd in every suit the Beatles' company filed. (They were all related to iTunes, which is all about music - and the Beatles worldwide trademark was established in 1968, so Apple Computers' conflicting mark had no legal leg to stand on.)
Trademarks are, for the most part, geographically limited, and apply fairly narrowly to the product or service to which the mark applies. Thus the Saturn automobile company, the Sega Saturn console, and Saturn Internet Services ALL had trademarks on the name Saturn. None of them conflicted with each other, because each represented a different category of product (cars vs. game consoles) or service (an ISP). Very few trademarks are global. Apple Computer is, and so is Apple Corps Ltd. The conflict arose when Apple Computer decided to get into the music business - and ran into a trademark the Beatles had established more than thirty years earlier. So Steve Jobs changed the service's name to iTunes, paid Apple Corps an undisclosed (but clearly substantial) amount of money, and signed a quitclaim agreement to make it all go away. Once that happened, negotiations began between Apple Corps and Apple Computer to make the Beatles' music available on iTunes - which it now is.
In other news, Shuttleworth over-fucking-reached in a major way. The EFF has set him straight. Let's hope he stays that way.
Unless, y'know, he's gay.
krs440 stated:
Sorry, you lost me. I did read your reference.
The aside was directed at the peanut gallery - not at you. (Your user number indicated that you ought to be familiar with the /. habit of responding to postings without having first read the article to which they refer. It's practically an article of faith around here. The notion that the gallery would bother to read a link posted within a comment is still less likely. Your research citation made it pretty clear that you're the exception that proves the rule.),/p>
Yes, it mentions the variation, which is what cause me to do a little searching to see the earliest documented reference I could find with minimal effort. I'm clearly not the expert you are on attribution. However, as a layperson, crediting Paul Mellon for a minimally reworded version of a phrase doesn't seem much better than crediting someone who bothered to use it for a book title.
Again, they're not the same quote. "I love it!" and "I'm lovin' it! (tm McDonalds) are not the same statement. They may well MEAN the same thing, but they are not the same quote.
I'm not a particular partisan of Mr. Mellon. If you can find an earlier citation for his exact statement, I'll happily acknowledge it. I'm equally sanguine about accepting that the "ain't" variant came first. My concern is with /.'s fortune file being RIFE with shit like this. Mis-attribution and non-attribution are equally bad things. The editors take a lot of heat for maladroit editing, but nobody (except me, and now thee) seems to have noticed that the fortune cookie database is as full of crap as the articles - and then some. It bothers me more than somewhat, and I thought it was overdue that someone pointed it out.
As it happens, that someone turned out to be yours truly.
krs440 noted:
Attribution can be tricky. You seem pretty sure that the original statement should be attributed to Paul Mellon, and mention it's from January, 1942. What about this? http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19380705&id=ZysbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BE0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=1516,6094461 It's the July 5th, 1938 edition of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, specifically, a story entitled "Economics in Eight Words". The last line is "There ain't no such thing as free lunch". I assume that the difference of "There aint" vs "There's" and the missing "a" aren't terribly important. I have no idea if this is the first occurrence of it either.
If you read the reference I cited (pause for derisive laughter from the peanut gallery), you'll note that IT draws a distinction between the two formulations. Like Friedman with the more formal phraseology, Robert A. Heinlein is frequently credited with "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." In fact, he DID come up with the acronym TANSTAAFL (in his 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), which is now widely used, but, as you point out, he certainly didn't coin the parent observation.
So, yes, proper attribution can be obscure. But I still say that's NO excuse for obvious mis-attribution, and no excuse whatsoever for leaving out attribution of living authors' _bon mots_ altogether - especially when the source of those IS indisputable.
Slushdot's fortune cookies need a thorough overhaul.
Just as a for-instance, I keep seeing "There's no such thing as a free lunch" attributed to Milton Friedman. Phrase finder attributes the original statement to journalist Paul Mellon, in a January, 1942 editorial response to a speech by then-vice-President Henry Wallace. It notes that the phrase is associated with Friedman only because he appropriated it as the title of his 1975 book - but he would have been in grade school when Mellon's editorial was first published.
That's far from the only sin of mis-attribution (or, much worse, non-attribution) in the fortune database. I'm CONSTANTLY seeing quotes from Bill Griffith's fabulous Zippy the Pinhead strips (mostly Zippy's own non-sequiturs) show up without attribution to either Griffith (their actual author) or Zippy (his mouthpiece). The same is true of many great Steven Wright lines - and there have to be plenty of others whose authors I don't recognize.
Full disclosure: I'm a writer. Proper attribution is important to me. I'm known for the extent to which I research my work - which makes proper attribution all the more important from my perspective.
canadian_right confessed:
I've always enjoyed the movie Star Ship Troopers as a satire of fascism and chauvinism. I thought it conveyed the spirit of the book, if a bit skewed, quite well.
Oh, for criminy's sake! A "satire of fascism and chavinism" that "conveyed the spirit of the book"? Give to me a break.
The two things are ENTIRELY mutually exclusive. You can convey the spirit of Heinlein's final juvenile novel, or you can make a "satire of fascism and chauvinism", but you cannot do both. In fact, I'm reminded of Heinlein's own observation that, "A man may choose to follow the path of faith, or the path of reason. He cannot do both."
Starship Troopers, the novel, is a straightforward exposition of the process by which callow teenagers are transformed into trained soldiers. There's no trace of sexism in it, and no hint of fascism, either. (That Heinlein sets the story in a society in which an individual must serve the public for a period - remarks he made in response to interviews published over the years made it clear that he did not envision military service as the only option - before being granted the sovereign franchise does NOT amount to "fascism".) The movie, by contrast, discards every trace of what makes the book effective as a coming-of-age tale, replaces Heinlein's social model with a truly fascist one, and makes the military's leadership a clown college (Space marines using carbines against the Bugs? Really?), to boot. It has NOTHING to do with the book, besides sharing a title.
You, sir, are a ninnyhammer.
I suspect that being located inside the galactic bulge means the radioactive background level alone is liable to be pretty darned inimical to life.