When you play the law game, the argument of the form "Look, there's a definition of X in the dictionary, under which X didn't happen. Therefore, I didn't do X. Ha-ha! Got you!" works about as well as I've made it sound. You really don't get to pick definitions; you can do some limited advocacy if you can find some evidence, but you aren't going to get away with arguing that because one of the definitions of murder is "something very difficult or dangerous", you therefore didn't commit murder when you shot that guy that was annoying you, on the grounds that it was quite easy and involved no danger to you.
The DMCA is pretty clear on what it means by circumvention:
`(3) As used in this subsection--
`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
`(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
If you think you can convince a judge that this isn't textbook circumvention, hey, go for it. But saying it'd be an uphill battle is putting it lightly. Especially if you go in there claiming that it's somehow impossible for a "mere memory dump" to constitute circumvention, when it is clearly one of many types of transform wherein you put a protected work in one end, and get an unprotected work out the other.
(Do not confuse this post with DMCA advocacy. I strongly disagree with outlawing technologies and actions; I think the law in this area should merely concern itself with results. But I also think you can't fight against something you don't understand; you just make yourself sound like an idiot. You need to understand there is a distinction between what the laws says and what you wish it said. Understanding the DMCA better is a necessary step in fighting it.)
Unless this pledge is legally binding, I personally don't find it very reassuring.
I can not categorically tell you it is; IANAL and I only follow patent and IP law for fun.
But there is a doctrine of laches, which has been applied to patents before. The basic idea is that the person bringing the suit deliberately held the suit until the moment of maximum damage, rather than bring it when the grounds for the suit was discovered.
It has been successfully used as a defense against submarine patents, where the patent's enforcement was merely delayed. I would imagine that using a laches defense would be even stronger when the prosecution is on record as having pledged to not use the patent in litigation. It would take one asshole of a judge or one incompetently-presented argument to lose on that point.
It's worth reading the Wikipedia page; I'm not completely explaining why I think this would be covered all the more strongly, partially because, well, there's the Wikipedia page. It'd just be redundant of me.
Additionally, one could argue implied contract pretty successfully, too.
Last, and assuredly not least, my God, the PR disaster this would be. It's hard to imagine what 'infringement' would possibly be worth the PR disaster.
Contrary to popular belief, merely having a lot of lawyers does not buy you victory; that's just cynicism, not an informed belief. I really don't think Microsoft is going to be able to weasel out of this later.
Not from what I can see. SVG is basically as designed for static display of information as HTML now is. The same "hack" for dynamism is used for both, a Javascript-exposed DOM (or DOM exposed to some other language), and the same basic set of events are available to both.
From what I can see, it really wouldn't take a hell of a lot of work to merge XHTML and SVG into one specification with a richer layout model than XHTML currently has.
SVG gets you no new interactivity, just the ability to better display vector graphics. Nothing to sneeze at, but current SVG-browser apps are still going to use AJAX or whatever the HTML portion of the website is using for interactivity.
I agree with the grandparent that the whole stack needs fixing, but the most broken part right now is the stateless HTTP. All we need is for a browser to step up and offer a true, full socket object. Once people have settled into that, we can figure out how to make it more convenient, if there's even an obvious consensus.
If I could go back in time and choose between the XMLHttpRequest object or a Socket object, I'd take the latter. It's what people really want, they just don't really realize it yet.
Yes, it causes some new security problems, but ultimately, not really new ones; just allowing XMLHttpRequest at all really covered most of the security problems. (You'd certainly want to block the socket just to the originating server, though.)
I'd estimate a rock-solid service of this type to be tens of thousands of man-hours. The scaling and reliability issues are challenging. That includes significant maintenence and feature-addition, and isn't entirely programming either (art assets, etc.), and I'm not including testing in that count, which would probably push it up into the hundreds of thousands if you include stress testing with real beta customers, although Sony probably wouldn't be paying for that directly.
Buying that is not at all unreasonable. Sony isn't Microsoft, they aren't even Nintendo.
I don't think we actually know the release dates, and I'm certain that if you're seeing a concrete date, it's a guess based on what's been said to date.
If the system came out on Sept. 31, I'm pretty sure it would turn out that the real date of the launch titles would be... Sept. 31. Can't call them confirmed launch titles if they aren't out at launch.
That said, I'm not expecting it in Sept. I think something would have leaked out by now. Nintendo may be able to surprise us, the lowly customer, but you can't just waltz up to the retailers and say, "Hey, clear out some of the PSP space, here comes the Wii... tomorrow!" Or at least you couldn't expect good results from that.
It was a nice change of pace to see real special effects again, especially when the cherry-picker was run through the buildings. Dust, chunks everywhere, stuff that we still couldn't do CGI. See also the damage suffered by the vehicles on their little adventures.
Story sucked, but they had a well-above-average grasp of the advantanges and the disadvantages of CGI in special effects. It'll be a while yet before CGI can match the effects of T3.
For that, I fished it out of the bargain bin in WalMart one day.
There's a picture of the black hole "bending light", which, along with obviously being one of those light-studded track things like you see in a movie theatre, is completely impossible. The only thing that could bend light that is gravity, and gravity doesn't just effect light but nothing else. So, the guy shooting the laser would also be in a multi-thousand-G (conservatively) gravity field.
Not to mention the gravity is "mysteriously" only distorting the light that A: comes from the laser and then B: hits the cigar smoke being putatively used to allow use to see the "laser", leaving the real light in the scene used to take the picture mysteriously undistorted.
"Titor"'s physics weren't half as strong as the credulous time travel nutcases wanted to think it was, and despite deliberately constraining his story and mysteriously using multi-kilo-pixel camers to take his highly-JPG-compressed pictures still couldn't erase the obvious nature of the hoax to anyone who didn't desparately need to believe it.
(And that's not going into the future history based entirely on "There's this one ideology that turns out to completely correct"... uh-huh, like that's ever happened before.)
As a bit of art, kinda nifty. As a true time travel hoax, not so much.
Good: Updating "Skynet" to change itself into a virus that takes over all the computers on the planet for itself. Definitely more realistic than the "giant supercomputer" concept from the original movie's time.
Bad: Making the new Skynet's first action the nuking of every major population center on Earth.
Pop quiz, Hollywood: Where are most computers? By the people who use them.
Translation: Skynet's first action was to lobotomize itself, and almost certainly effectively destroy itself.
Skynet made a lot more sense placed far enough into the future where it might actually be able to run itself off of a relatively small handful of computers that might have the power of all modern computers combined, and for there to be purely-robotic factories sophisticated enough that if SkyNet took them over it might be able to bootstrap a Killer-Robot factory and industry. Neither of those two things are even close to plausible if you place Judgement Day in the present.
T4, unless it somehow retcons T3 at least 20 years into the future, isn't going to be a science fiction movie anymore, just a generic 50's-esque "Humanity against the Killer Robots!" movie. (Which, granted, the first two Terminators were, but they weren't generic.)
I've tried on several occasions to find what I figure must be an existing term, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to find the name of an argument fallacy just from the description. (Logical fallacies are much better covered and you can usually just browse down one of the many lists, but I've had a harder time finding the purely argument fallacies that aren't really logical fallacies. In this case, it's not a logical fallacy because both sides may be using impeccable logic, within their own chosen axioms.)
Complexity tends to increase exponentially, defeating any company's ability to manage it. That's why it's so important to try to minimize it. Something the consumer electronics industry is probably about to learn in a big way.
There's a reason even mighty Microsoft is making small noises about the fact that they're not sure that they, the largest software company in the world, will be able to produce another iteration of Windows-as-we-know-it after Vista... the complexity is defeating them.
By your standard, pretty anybody using software shouldn't.
For any two items with varying characteristics in multiple dimensions where neither is obviously worse or superior, the decision about which is "better" says more about the decision metric/weightings than the items being judged.
It's basically just a definition debate; once you accept a definition of "better", you almost immediately have your answer about which is better.
Defitition debates can be dry, but productive. Defitition debates where the participants don't realize they're in a definition debate, and argue as if their definition is some sort of universal, are boring and stupid.
Console vs. PC arguments tend to fall in the latter category.
I really gotta write up "definition debate" so I can just link to it.
I think the downside of the existence of flash memory is that embedded system companies are using it as a crutch instead of doing appropriate testing.
Eh, yes and no. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are, for better or worse, legitimately more complicated than DVD. Blu-ray requires an entire Java VM, after all, which is sort of cool, but also way more complicated than a DVD player needs to be.
What's more, of those obvious frauds I linked to, only one really got to be a big story; most of the rest non-blog readers will be ignorant of, even though they're about as well established as a proof of a lie or manipulation can possibly be.
The media is 100% untrustworthy on war reporting, and it's hard to see it as anything but deliberate. In other fields, they're still pretty untrustworthy, but it's more because of ignorance, I think. (Check out your local college's journalism cirriculum, then explain to me why a "journalist" is qualified to write about politics, science, police investigations, or any number of fields rich with traditions, philosophy, and/or technology.)
The difference between the media and blogs is mostly that one is on TV, and the media pretty much slants one way whereas on blogs you can find everything.
For instance, it "paints over" the problems of people who structurally use debts to pay back earlier debts.
Are you sure about that? There are a lot of smart/complex things they do with your credit score; it's more than just "have you paid your debts off".
I would not be at all surprised if they could pick up debt-shifting on your credit report. I certainly wouldn't bet my score that they don't.
Unless you've got better evidence than proof-by-assertion, I don't think you've got a very good point. The actuarial businesses tend to be ruthlessly pragmatic because being wrong is expensive in obvious ways. If the credit score was truly "useless", or had a negative value, they would not be using it.
It also ignores those who do not want/need to have debts at all, as they simply have no "history".... I'd argue that people in this situation are much better at keeping track of their money and spendings than those who have payed back debts everywhere.
In the context of giving Mr. X a loan, he's still an unknown quantity. But then, Mr. X isn't going to get a loan. A null quantity on a null event is not a problem.
In the context of looking for a job, the point of this article, I think I would be suitably semi-impressed by an older person, resident in the US all their life, with no credit at all. There are conditions on that. (A 40-year-old living in a rural area with a stable job and no mortgage would raise my eyebrow; mortgages can be a good investment and there's a world of difference between secured debt and unsecured debt. I might not want someone like that in a business position, although there are other positions where that would indicate good discipline. On the other hand, a 28-year-old deep in New York without any credit would be understandable.) Basically, it's up to the hiring person how to handle that, and "they might make a bad decision with the information!" is basically a constant, unaffected by the credit report itself.
Re:You make the assumption that greedy is a bad th
on
Reverse Off-Shoring
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Do you believe that everything valuable can, let alone should, have a price tag? If not, then either your premises are false even on your own terms or you're not addressing his point.
I have no idea what you're babbling about. I was just clarifying the point that "greed" is an easily-misunderstood word. Where you leap to the idea that "everything" should have a price tag or the entire idea of scarcity is beyond me. I've double-checked my post and the one I was replying to and I still can't find it.
(Did you miss a post in the sequence? I was replying to this, not anything else.)
Re:You make the assumption that greedy is a bad th
on
Reverse Off-Shoring
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You might want to say "greedy in the aggregate".
10 very nice people may invest in your company. If they can do better somewhere else, half of them may very nicely decide to invest somewhere else, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do, after all. (Everybody is all about how other people should make economically-poor decisions for the "greater good", a.k.a., "my benefit", but very few people really step up to the plate and deliberately select underperforming options when they have the choice. Non-zero, but few.)
In the aggregate, these otherwise nice people look incredibly greedy to the company they had the investment in, and the company feels incredible pressure to do better, in a way far out of proportion to the exertion of the investors.
Greed isn't an entirely inaccurate description of the results, but it may not describe motives; I have a hard time calling "investing in a 5% return instead of a 2% return" 'greed'. That's more like 'sensible', not 'greedy', and the opposite 'stupid'. (All else being equal of course, I'm ignoring the risk factors.) Besides, given that the economy isn't a zero-sum game (bolded because more people need to actually realize and internalize that) and that 2% vs 5% difference may very well be real if you're investing in a capital-producing company, it's not even necessarily a good decision for society to take the 2% either. That's the magic of capitalism and the market, to harness "greed" for the greater good of society.
Resource consumption. To have a technological civilization, you will consume resources. Resources which are still there; many mineral resources we've exploited are older than the dinosaurs. Therefore, nobody has beaten us to them.
Is it impossible that an intelligent civilization preceded us? Not entirely. But "they didn't use the resource because they had a pure-biological technology" is pretty unlikely (and might well also manifest itself in obvious ways in the genetic record) by very simple economic arguments (the same that explain why we are exploiting those resources), and "they replaced them for us" also involves some pretty unlikely assumptions.
About the only one that works, IMHO, is to believe the "ascension" scenario, that the reason why we don't see a lot of life in the universe is that intelligent live inevitably evolves to some sort of transcendent state that we still have no idea what it might be, and that such life might care enough to leave behind machines to harness centuries/millenia of solar power and careful set the planet back to the "original" state before destroying themselves with no trace. The latter part is theoretically possible, but the former is a pretty big assumption right now. On the one hand, it seems unlikely. On the other hand, right now all of the answers to the Fermi Paradox seem pretty unlikely, and at least one of them is true.
I know it's popular to say we'd never know, but I think we would know. We wouldn't have any artifacts, but there is other evidence of our existence that will survive millions or billions of years.
(On a similar note, I like to say this is Mother Earth's one crack at a fast-moving technological civilization, expanded on at that link. If we die, it will be immensely harder for anything to ever reach the levels we've reached, because we've taken all of the easy resources, and there's a time limit for resources to be re-created before the sun renders the planet uninhabitable. You might have time to have fresh oil reserves, but there's not much time for fresh mineral reserves.)
Show me where I can get a copy of V for Vendetta for $14.
Uh, Amazon.com? At least for me, the full screen DVD (that link) is $13.87. (If they're using differential pricing it may not show the same for you.) Free shipping if you add something else to get over $25.
Interesting, they charge $2 more for the widescreen. I've either never seen that before in brick & mortar stores, or never noticed.
Being skeptical is an approach to solving problems that should be encouraged on the world stage. People who use "skeptic" as an insult really miss the point in far too many ways.
Agreed, but I actually said that because of the opposite situation. I've seen self-proclaimed "skeptics" say that it doesn't matter what evidence in favor of some supernatural event you can produce, you won't convince them it's true.
That's not skepticism. A skeptic must be ready to adjust beliefs to future evidence at all times. I can't list the numerous religions I don't believe in or accept, but if one of them actually predicted some supernatural event correctly, like "the stars going out", I'd have to seriously reconsider, not reject the event.
Skepticism itself can become "just another -ism" if you get lazy about it.
(Note I'm not actually claiming a supernatural event has been proven; if you think I said that, please re-calibrate your English parser.)
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA is pretty clear on what it means by circumvention:
If you think you can convince a judge that this isn't textbook circumvention, hey, go for it. But saying it'd be an uphill battle is putting it lightly. Especially if you go in there claiming that it's somehow impossible for a "mere memory dump" to constitute circumvention, when it is clearly one of many types of transform wherein you put a protected work in one end, and get an unprotected work out the other.
(Do not confuse this post with DMCA advocacy. I strongly disagree with outlawing technologies and actions; I think the law in this area should merely concern itself with results. But I also think you can't fight against something you don't understand; you just make yourself sound like an idiot. You need to understand there is a distinction between what the laws says and what you wish it said. Understanding the DMCA better is a necessary step in fighting it.)
But there is a doctrine of laches, which has been applied to patents before. The basic idea is that the person bringing the suit deliberately held the suit until the moment of maximum damage, rather than bring it when the grounds for the suit was discovered.
It has been successfully used as a defense against submarine patents, where the patent's enforcement was merely delayed. I would imagine that using a laches defense would be even stronger when the prosecution is on record as having pledged to not use the patent in litigation. It would take one asshole of a judge or one incompetently-presented argument to lose on that point.
It's worth reading the Wikipedia page; I'm not completely explaining why I think this would be covered all the more strongly, partially because, well, there's the Wikipedia page. It'd just be redundant of me.
Additionally, one could argue implied contract pretty successfully, too.
Last, and assuredly not least, my God, the PR disaster this would be. It's hard to imagine what 'infringement' would possibly be worth the PR disaster.
Contrary to popular belief, merely having a lot of lawyers does not buy you victory; that's just cynicism, not an informed belief. I really don't think Microsoft is going to be able to weasel out of this later.
But he's not talking about assigning reputation to people, he's talking about assigning reputation to content.
There is a world of difference.
From what I can see, it really wouldn't take a hell of a lot of work to merge XHTML and SVG into one specification with a richer layout model than XHTML currently has.
SVG gets you no new interactivity, just the ability to better display vector graphics. Nothing to sneeze at, but current SVG-browser apps are still going to use AJAX or whatever the HTML portion of the website is using for interactivity.
I agree with the grandparent that the whole stack needs fixing, but the most broken part right now is the stateless HTTP. All we need is for a browser to step up and offer a true, full socket object. Once people have settled into that, we can figure out how to make it more convenient, if there's even an obvious consensus.
If I could go back in time and choose between the XMLHttpRequest object or a Socket object, I'd take the latter. It's what people really want, they just don't really realize it yet.
Yes, it causes some new security problems, but ultimately, not really new ones; just allowing XMLHttpRequest at all really covered most of the security problems. (You'd certainly want to block the socket just to the originating server, though.)
Buying that is not at all unreasonable. Sony isn't Microsoft, they aren't even Nintendo.
I don't think we actually know the release dates, and I'm certain that if you're seeing a concrete date, it's a guess based on what's been said to date.
If the system came out on Sept. 31, I'm pretty sure it would turn out that the real date of the launch titles would be... Sept. 31. Can't call them confirmed launch titles if they aren't out at launch.
That said, I'm not expecting it in Sept. I think something would have leaked out by now. Nintendo may be able to surprise us, the lowly customer, but you can't just waltz up to the retailers and say, "Hey, clear out some of the PSP space, here comes the Wii... tomorrow!" Or at least you couldn't expect good results from that.
Oh come on, everybody knows by now.
I actually liked it too, but not for the story.
It was a nice change of pace to see real special effects again, especially when the cherry-picker was run through the buildings. Dust, chunks everywhere, stuff that we still couldn't do CGI. See also the damage suffered by the vehicles on their little adventures.
Story sucked, but they had a well-above-average grasp of the advantanges and the disadvantages of CGI in special effects. It'll be a while yet before CGI can match the effects of T3.
For that, I fished it out of the bargain bin in WalMart one day.
No, it's not.
There's a picture of the black hole "bending light", which, along with obviously being one of those light-studded track things like you see in a movie theatre, is completely impossible. The only thing that could bend light that is gravity, and gravity doesn't just effect light but nothing else. So, the guy shooting the laser would also be in a multi-thousand-G (conservatively) gravity field.
Not to mention the gravity is "mysteriously" only distorting the light that A: comes from the laser and then B: hits the cigar smoke being putatively used to allow use to see the "laser", leaving the real light in the scene used to take the picture mysteriously undistorted.
"Titor"'s physics weren't half as strong as the credulous time travel nutcases wanted to think it was, and despite deliberately constraining his story and mysteriously using multi-kilo-pixel camers to take his highly-JPG-compressed pictures still couldn't erase the obvious nature of the hoax to anyone who didn't desparately need to believe it.
(And that's not going into the future history based entirely on "There's this one ideology that turns out to completely correct"... uh-huh, like that's ever happened before.)
As a bit of art, kinda nifty. As a true time travel hoax, not so much.
You missed my personal favorite "WTF?".
Good: Updating "Skynet" to change itself into a virus that takes over all the computers on the planet for itself. Definitely more realistic than the "giant supercomputer" concept from the original movie's time.
Bad: Making the new Skynet's first action the nuking of every major population center on Earth.
Pop quiz, Hollywood: Where are most computers? By the people who use them.
Translation: Skynet's first action was to lobotomize itself, and almost certainly effectively destroy itself.
Skynet made a lot more sense placed far enough into the future where it might actually be able to run itself off of a relatively small handful of computers that might have the power of all modern computers combined, and for there to be purely-robotic factories sophisticated enough that if SkyNet took them over it might be able to bootstrap a Killer-Robot factory and industry. Neither of those two things are even close to plausible if you place Judgement Day in the present.
T4, unless it somehow retcons T3 at least 20 years into the future, isn't going to be a science fiction movie anymore, just a generic 50's-esque "Humanity against the Killer Robots!" movie. (Which, granted, the first two Terminators were, but they weren't generic.)
Just FYI, that's actually the German "Eszett" or "scharfes S".
Just 'cause it's interesting, not intended as a correction.
Ah, thank you.
I've tried on several occasions to find what I figure must be an existing term, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to find the name of an argument fallacy just from the description. (Logical fallacies are much better covered and you can usually just browse down one of the many lists, but I've had a harder time finding the purely argument fallacies that aren't really logical fallacies. In this case, it's not a logical fallacy because both sides may be using impeccable logic, within their own chosen axioms.)
LOL! How utopian!
Complexity tends to increase exponentially, defeating any company's ability to manage it. That's why it's so important to try to minimize it. Something the consumer electronics industry is probably about to learn in a big way.
There's a reason even mighty Microsoft is making small noises about the fact that they're not sure that they, the largest software company in the world, will be able to produce another iteration of Windows-as-we-know-it after Vista... the complexity is defeating them.
By your standard, pretty anybody using software shouldn't.
For any two items with varying characteristics in multiple dimensions where neither is obviously worse or superior, the decision about which is "better" says more about the decision metric/weightings than the items being judged.
It's basically just a definition debate; once you accept a definition of "better", you almost immediately have your answer about which is better.
Defitition debates can be dry, but productive. Defitition debates where the participants don't realize they're in a definition debate, and argue as if their definition is some sort of universal, are boring and stupid.
Console vs. PC arguments tend to fall in the latter category.
I really gotta write up "definition debate" so I can just link to it.
Market not infinite. Film at 11.
I mean, the shit that passes for "unbiased" news lately is pretty freaky.
What's more, of those obvious frauds I linked to, only one really got to be a big story; most of the rest non-blog readers will be ignorant of, even though they're about as well established as a proof of a lie or manipulation can possibly be.
The media is 100% untrustworthy on war reporting, and it's hard to see it as anything but deliberate. In other fields, they're still pretty untrustworthy, but it's more because of ignorance, I think. (Check out your local college's journalism cirriculum, then explain to me why a "journalist" is qualified to write about politics, science, police investigations, or any number of fields rich with traditions, philosophy, and/or technology.)
The difference between the media and blogs is mostly that one is on TV, and the media pretty much slants one way whereas on blogs you can find everything.
I would not be at all surprised if they could pick up debt-shifting on your credit report. I certainly wouldn't bet my score that they don't.
Unless you've got better evidence than proof-by-assertion, I don't think you've got a very good point. The actuarial businesses tend to be ruthlessly pragmatic because being wrong is expensive in obvious ways. If the credit score was truly "useless", or had a negative value, they would not be using it.
In the context of giving Mr. X a loan, he's still an unknown quantity. But then, Mr. X isn't going to get a loan. A null quantity on a null event is not a problem.
In the context of looking for a job, the point of this article, I think I would be suitably semi-impressed by an older person, resident in the US all their life, with no credit at all. There are conditions on that. (A 40-year-old living in a rural area with a stable job and no mortgage would raise my eyebrow; mortgages can be a good investment and there's a world of difference between secured debt and unsecured debt. I might not want someone like that in a business position, although there are other positions where that would indicate good discipline. On the other hand, a 28-year-old deep in New York without any credit would be understandable.) Basically, it's up to the hiring person how to handle that, and "they might make a bad decision with the information!" is basically a constant, unaffected by the credit report itself.
(Did you miss a post in the sequence? I was replying to this, not anything else.)
You might want to say "greedy in the aggregate".
10 very nice people may invest in your company. If they can do better somewhere else, half of them may very nicely decide to invest somewhere else, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do, after all. (Everybody is all about how other people should make economically-poor decisions for the "greater good", a.k.a., "my benefit", but very few people really step up to the plate and deliberately select underperforming options when they have the choice. Non-zero, but few.)
In the aggregate, these otherwise nice people look incredibly greedy to the company they had the investment in, and the company feels incredible pressure to do better, in a way far out of proportion to the exertion of the investors.
Greed isn't an entirely inaccurate description of the results, but it may not describe motives; I have a hard time calling "investing in a 5% return instead of a 2% return" 'greed'. That's more like 'sensible', not 'greedy', and the opposite 'stupid'. (All else being equal of course, I'm ignoring the risk factors.) Besides, given that the economy isn't a zero-sum game (bolded because more people need to actually realize and internalize that) and that 2% vs 5% difference may very well be real if you're investing in a capital-producing company, it's not even necessarily a good decision for society to take the 2% either. That's the magic of capitalism and the market, to harness "greed" for the greater good of society.
Resource consumption. To have a technological civilization, you will consume resources. Resources which are still there; many mineral resources we've exploited are older than the dinosaurs. Therefore, nobody has beaten us to them.
Is it impossible that an intelligent civilization preceded us? Not entirely. But "they didn't use the resource because they had a pure-biological technology" is pretty unlikely (and might well also manifest itself in obvious ways in the genetic record) by very simple economic arguments (the same that explain why we are exploiting those resources), and "they replaced them for us" also involves some pretty unlikely assumptions.
About the only one that works, IMHO, is to believe the "ascension" scenario, that the reason why we don't see a lot of life in the universe is that intelligent live inevitably evolves to some sort of transcendent state that we still have no idea what it might be, and that such life might care enough to leave behind machines to harness centuries/millenia of solar power and careful set the planet back to the "original" state before destroying themselves with no trace. The latter part is theoretically possible, but the former is a pretty big assumption right now. On the one hand, it seems unlikely. On the other hand, right now all of the answers to the Fermi Paradox seem pretty unlikely, and at least one of them is true.
I know it's popular to say we'd never know, but I think we would know. We wouldn't have any artifacts, but there is other evidence of our existence that will survive millions or billions of years.
(On a similar note, I like to say this is Mother Earth's one crack at a fast-moving technological civilization, expanded on at that link. If we die, it will be immensely harder for anything to ever reach the levels we've reached, because we've taken all of the easy resources, and there's a time limit for resources to be re-created before the sun renders the planet uninhabitable. You might have time to have fresh oil reserves, but there's not much time for fresh mineral reserves.)
Interesting, they charge $2 more for the widescreen. I've either never seen that before in brick & mortar stores, or never noticed.
Nope, you fail. I said that I have seen skeptics declare that no evidence can possibly convince them.
That's not skepticism. That's dogma. Doesn't matter that it happens to be skepticism-ism dogma, still dogma.
I even warned you that I wasn't saying what you think I said!
That's not skepticism. A skeptic must be ready to adjust beliefs to future evidence at all times. I can't list the numerous religions I don't believe in or accept, but if one of them actually predicted some supernatural event correctly, like "the stars going out", I'd have to seriously reconsider, not reject the event.
Skepticism itself can become "just another -ism" if you get lazy about it.
(Note I'm not actually claiming a supernatural event has been proven; if you think I said that, please re-calibrate your English parser.)