Except that you neglect the collective bargaining aspect, whereby the insurance company can negotiate a lower rate for care than I would pay individually.
Taking that into account, and assuming I take average advantage of the health care services that you could, whatever loss seems worthwhile to me in that it simplifies my life and smooths out my cash flow. If I take more than average advantage of available health care, even if it's still all "routine" stuff, it can end up a win.
Some people are still getting royally screwed, and if they decided to either use their health care more or drop out of the programs, it would become more expensive for me, and less worthwhile.
essentially intentionally broken to prevent any reversion to the public domain.
(even in its original form) geared towards a period too long to make it useful for SL to make much of an effort to help you enforce.
Copyrights benefit the game if the public domain (or an in-game version thereof) is enhanced at a reasonable point in time in the future. Otherwise, copyrights are a bad bargain.
SL can surely construct a licensing scheme whereby you are permitted to use their service to distribute your creations on a monopoly basis for a set period of time (I'm thinking months), after which you grant rights to anyone on said service to freely use it within the scope of that service. No violation of copyrights, just licensing within the scope of the game.
Copyright (notwithstanding developments of the past 50ish years) is an agreement that a government (which SL is in this case) makes with people that they can benefit from their creations for a time in exchange for everyone eventually getting to benefit from the creation.
Commerce is not inherently petty. Commerce can motivate wonderful creations (such as SL itself). It can also motivate horrible acts.
I create some because I like it. I create more when I have financial interest in doing so.
Sounds like SL needs its own version of copyright. To encourage innovation in object creation, grant the creators limited monopolies on creating said objects, and then after the copyright expires CopyBot to your heart's content. They could enforce with code, or they could simply enforce with Terms of Service/Use, depending on their philosophical bent.
I guess Google's theory is it's not "evil" to take money from adult sites (even in exchange for directing traffic to them), but they'll be darned if they pay money to adult sites.
Check out the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online
on
Charles Darwin Online
·
· Score: 1
The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale has just launched the public beta of The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. It has about 25,000 pages worth of material now, much of it never previously published, and another 35,000 coming soon. The content may not be as appealing to the/. crowd, but having been a part of putting this together over the past couple years, I must say both the technology and the design are impressive. Instead of images of manuscripts, we have diplomatic transcriptions (i.e. text laid out in a fashion reflecting the layout of the manuscript, including strikeouts, spaces, and sometimes even drawings), rendered from XML. Where no edited version of the manuscript is available, we tranform the XML differently to produce a more readable version, and you can switch back and forth between the two. I could go on and on about it, but you'd be better of seeing for yourself.
One quasi-word: dtrace
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As much a fan of Linux as I am, I would dearly love to be able to dtrace to track down performance bottlenecks on my Oracle server.
I have a four-year-old with mild autism spectrum disorder. He's always watched a fair amount of TV. The interesting thing is he is a lot less mesmerized by TV than our friends' son who watches maybe an hour a day. That kid will zone out to anything that's on TV, even news. My son, on the other hand, is always talking with us about what he's seeing.
I'm not convinced that either paternal age or pre-school television viewing has increased substantially since the mid 1980s, especially at the rate of increase of autism diagnoses. I don't see why this is worth more investigation than thimerisol. They are probably both worth investigation.
The thing is, parenting is bloody difficult. We make all manner of decisions, some for our kids, some for ourselves, and are always balancing the risks we know of versus the benefits we know of. TV is one of the things that most parents turn to to make up for the fact that we don't live in societies with good communal support. It may not be the best decision if we have infinite resources available to us, but none of us do.
We vaccinate our kids because we don't want them sick. But if, as we do, you have reason to believe that there is even a slim chance that your vaccinations are actually doing your kids more harm than good, you're going to try to go a different direction. Fortunately, there are alternatives to thimerisol-preserved vaccines available to us, even if they require shots to spaced out.
I wish it all made a lot more sense. Everybody's guessing, some people have some math or some science to back it up, and sometimes those people disagree with each other. I'll do the best I can with the resources and information I can get, but ultimately I have more faith that God can help us than more studies. Correlation and causation questions aside, it certainly seems like my son's dramatic improvements over the past year have something to do with our prayers and the prayers of others. Pragmatically speaking, then, it's a course we will continue to pursue.
This is a variation on the Squeeze Machine that Temple Grandin developed for herself. Some types of autistics need/crave tactile stimulation. It can help them organize themselves, and even can be a form of pleasure. I know one fellow with Asperger's who said he loved it when people punched him in the gut.
As far as I can tell, the article and the Nova special are talking about different things. The former is about cell attractors, whereas the latter is about blood vessel growth. Important, but different, parts of the puzzle.
I am a Christian that believes in miraculous healing. I am reluctant to attribute all of the healing I see or hear about to miracles, but I have seen and heard enough to believe that it does happen. Instantaneous disappearance of symptoms, doctor-verified physiological changes, these things occur to people I know personally. These people have no discernible reason to lie. In some cases, if they lied about being healed, they'd be dead (unless of course they lied about being sick/injured in the first place, which I will admit is possible, but unlikely). Sure, some could be attributed to misdiagnoses, but it strains credibility (assuming you didn't start with the assumption that such healings were impossible) that all of them were just mistakes. I admit that I have not witnessed any instantaneous visible changes, and retain some skepticism of reports I have heard of such things.
Too many people, I believe, discount all of these things out of hand, purely from a philiosphical perspective. But theory is always subject to observation. Observation is, of course, flawed especially when psychological factors are involved, but I believe that observation strongly suggests that there is something to this healing thing. Accepting this as an empirical fact will lead to a host of philosophical questions, but this is the same thing that happens in the physical sciences all the time.
Some will attribute these things to the "mysterious power of the mind" or some other naturalistic, but unexplained phenomenon, and with them I would have an entirely different sort of conversation, far more than I could ever hope to encapsulate in a post. Some will discount these things because there have been so many hoaxes over the ages. But the hoaxes are perpetrated by people who have something to gain from the hoax, whereas the majority of the people I see and talk to, and even pray for, are ordinary people who have nothing to gain but getting better.
Regarding your question about not everyone being healed, a few points:
I don't ultimately know why, but not knowing the answer does not mean that there is no answer.
I have not been clearly miraculously healed myself, though I have repeatedly prayed for and had others pray for a number of physical problems. There have been a few occasions where a minor malady has lessened or disappeared due to prayer, but not in such a dramatic fashion that I would go telling a skeptic that I had been healed. There have been more occasions where I've prayed for others and they've reported more dramatic results, but I can only really tell my story. So, I wonder myself why others seem to get more healing than I do.
What I have heard suggested: There are a few factors that are said to limit the work of God. Most of them could be summed up in the category of "faith".
Why God is limited by faith is an interesting question, and another one that I don't have a definitive answer for. Let it suffice to say that I feel it is more easily understood when viewed as a relational question more than as a philosophical one.
Faith gets a bad rap because it is easily abused, but the same could be said for a multitude of ideas and institutions in a free society. I don't advocate blind faith, but I think blind skepticism is just as problematic.
The faith of which I speak is also not entirely with regards to the specific healing, but it is generally around belief that God is good and wants to do good things for us. This very faith allows one to trust that God will work good on their behalf, even if it's not the specific thing that they're asking for. Sometimes God won't do something we ask because it's not what we need (cue the Rolling Stones). Or sometimes God will do it later, after we have changed in such a way as to be ready.
Apart from the issue of faith, the other main factor that comes into play is the existence of other forces (both human and spiritual). God
Quite agreed. Sorry that in my brevity, I failed to elaborate, but my guess would be that the best you could hope to do in terms of time travel is send informationless energy, and probably without any hope of directing it anywhere--or anywhen for that matter.
Does anyone here appreciate the irony?
on
Adopt a [Chinese] Blog
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
China is a safe haven for all sorts of internet activity which is illegal and reprehensible here, I guess it's only fair that we return the favor.
I'm quite sure someone like Hawking will soon step in and say that though time travel of something is theoretically possible, that no intelligent being would be able to make the trip successfully because no information would be able to travel back in time.
We're not talking about F = ma. Going from 0 to 60 (in an ideal situation) requires the same amount of work, no matter how fast you accelerate, because slower acceleration requires applying the force over a longer distance. Therefore, the factors which make fast or slow acceleration vary in efficiency are things like wind resistance, rolling resistance, the power curve of the engine, etc.
Yeah, the company does have copyrights to the modifications Daimaou made, and any of those modifications, if separable in themselves such that no GPL-derivativeness remains, could be licensed however the company desires, but as long as the two are one, it must be licensed by GPL rules.
From TFA, Hugo Leuders of pro-patent CompTIA said:
"Recently, however, the benefits of the agreement have been obscured by special interests, working to muddy the waters and undermine the principles underlying the agreement: the fundamental role of intellectual property in the innovation lifecycle; the need to fairly protect and reward innovation, rather than encourage imitation and copying;..."
Seems to me that he's obscuring the fact that "imitation and copying" is an important part of most innovation. We'd never be where we are without it.
As an ignorant American, I found this description of the various EU institutions very helpful. Interesting to note that the Parliament can dismiss the Commission if it desires to do so, and it would be interesting to see this happen, or at least have the threat of it issued to enforce Parliament's request/demand.
Would use of video phones reduce the distraction? Since you're not visualizing, you don't have part of your brain imaging what the other person looks like, moreover they have visual cues as to whether they might need to shut up.
Patents are fine for genuine innovations, which this is. Especially since it's not software-based. It is an ingenious assembly, so for that we thank the inventor with the ability to profit from it (for only a few more years) without competition.
While perhaps ESR's understanding of cathedral-building is woefully incomplete, I think it was a good enough image to make his point. If you can think of something better that will fill out the argument more completely, you're welcome to do so. If he's a good bazaar participant, he'd be a fool not to pick up on a better competing image.
Slashdot Mirror
See wikipedia for more. Seebeck is the reverse effect.
Except that you neglect the collective bargaining aspect, whereby the insurance company can negotiate a lower rate for care than I would pay individually.
Taking that into account, and assuming I take average advantage of the health care services that you could, whatever loss seems worthwhile to me in that it simplifies my life and smooths out my cash flow. If I take more than average advantage of available health care, even if it's still all "routine" stuff, it can end up a win.
Some people are still getting royally screwed, and if they decided to either use their health care more or drop out of the programs, it would become more expensive for me, and less worthwhile.
The one on the books is:
Copyrights benefit the game if the public domain (or an in-game version thereof) is enhanced at a reasonable point in time in the future. Otherwise, copyrights are a bad bargain.
SL can surely construct a licensing scheme whereby you are permitted to use their service to distribute your creations on a monopoly basis for a set period of time (I'm thinking months), after which you grant rights to anyone on said service to freely use it within the scope of that service. No violation of copyrights, just licensing within the scope of the game.
Copyright (notwithstanding developments of the past 50ish years) is an agreement that a government (which SL is in this case) makes with people that they can benefit from their creations for a time in exchange for everyone eventually getting to benefit from the creation.
Commerce is not inherently petty. Commerce can motivate wonderful creations (such as SL itself). It can also motivate horrible acts.
I create some because I like it. I create more when I have financial interest in doing so.
Sounds like SL needs its own version of copyright. To encourage innovation in object creation, grant the creators limited monopolies on creating said objects, and then after the copyright expires CopyBot to your heart's content. They could enforce with code, or they could simply enforce with Terms of Service/Use, depending on their philosophical bent.
I guess Google's theory is it's not "evil" to take money from adult sites (even in exchange for directing traffic to them), but they'll be darned if they pay money to adult sites.
The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale has just launched the public beta of The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. It has about 25,000 pages worth of material now, much of it never previously published, and another 35,000 coming soon. The content may not be as appealing to the /. crowd, but having been a part of putting this together over the past couple years, I must say both the technology and the design are impressive. Instead of images of manuscripts, we have diplomatic transcriptions (i.e. text laid out in a fashion reflecting the layout of the manuscript, including strikeouts, spaces, and sometimes even drawings), rendered from XML. Where no edited version of the manuscript is available, we tranform the XML differently to produce a more readable version, and you can switch back and forth between the two. I could go on and on about it, but you'd be better of seeing for yourself.
As much a fan of Linux as I am, I would dearly love to be able to dtrace to track down performance bottlenecks on my Oracle server.
I have a four-year-old with mild autism spectrum disorder. He's always watched a fair amount of TV. The interesting thing is he is a lot less mesmerized by TV than our friends' son who watches maybe an hour a day. That kid will zone out to anything that's on TV, even news. My son, on the other hand, is always talking with us about what he's seeing.
I'm not convinced that either paternal age or pre-school television viewing has increased substantially since the mid 1980s, especially at the rate of increase of autism diagnoses. I don't see why this is worth more investigation than thimerisol. They are probably both worth investigation.
The thing is, parenting is bloody difficult. We make all manner of decisions, some for our kids, some for ourselves, and are always balancing the risks we know of versus the benefits we know of. TV is one of the things that most parents turn to to make up for the fact that we don't live in societies with good communal support. It may not be the best decision if we have infinite resources available to us, but none of us do.
We vaccinate our kids because we don't want them sick. But if, as we do, you have reason to believe that there is even a slim chance that your vaccinations are actually doing your kids more harm than good, you're going to try to go a different direction. Fortunately, there are alternatives to thimerisol-preserved vaccines available to us, even if they require shots to spaced out.
I wish it all made a lot more sense. Everybody's guessing, some people have some math or some science to back it up, and sometimes those people disagree with each other. I'll do the best I can with the resources and information I can get, but ultimately I have more faith that God can help us than more studies. Correlation and causation questions aside, it certainly seems like my son's dramatic improvements over the past year have something to do with our prayers and the prayers of others. Pragmatically speaking, then, it's a course we will continue to pursue.
This is a variation on the Squeeze Machine that Temple Grandin developed for herself. Some types of autistics need/crave tactile stimulation. It can help them organize themselves, and even can be a form of pleasure. I know one fellow with Asperger's who said he loved it when people punched him in the gut.
Well put! It's all about the monopoly, or lack thereof.
That would be like having two incompatible versions of HTML and having to choose your browser based on site.
Oh, you mean like it has been in the past, and sometimes is even now?
I use Firefox for most standards-based HTML sites, and IE for those sites which demand it
As far as I can tell, the article and the Nova special are talking about different things. The former is about cell attractors, whereas the latter is about blood vessel growth. Important, but different, parts of the puzzle.
I am a Christian that believes in miraculous healing. I am reluctant to attribute all of the healing I see or hear about to miracles, but I have seen and heard enough to believe that it does happen. Instantaneous disappearance of symptoms, doctor-verified physiological changes, these things occur to people I know personally. These people have no discernible reason to lie. In some cases, if they lied about being healed, they'd be dead (unless of course they lied about being sick/injured in the first place, which I will admit is possible, but unlikely). Sure, some could be attributed to misdiagnoses, but it strains credibility (assuming you didn't start with the assumption that such healings were impossible) that all of them were just mistakes. I admit that I have not witnessed any instantaneous visible changes, and retain some skepticism of reports I have heard of such things.
Too many people, I believe, discount all of these things out of hand, purely from a philiosphical perspective. But theory is always subject to observation. Observation is, of course, flawed especially when psychological factors are involved, but I believe that observation strongly suggests that there is something to this healing thing. Accepting this as an empirical fact will lead to a host of philosophical questions, but this is the same thing that happens in the physical sciences all the time.
Some will attribute these things to the "mysterious power of the mind" or some other naturalistic, but unexplained phenomenon, and with them I would have an entirely different sort of conversation, far more than I could ever hope to encapsulate in a post. Some will discount these things because there have been so many hoaxes over the ages. But the hoaxes are perpetrated by people who have something to gain from the hoax, whereas the majority of the people I see and talk to, and even pray for, are ordinary people who have nothing to gain but getting better.
Regarding your question about not everyone being healed, a few points:
What I have heard suggested: There are a few factors that are said to limit the work of God. Most of them could be summed up in the category of "faith".
Why God is limited by faith is an interesting question, and another one that I don't have a definitive answer for. Let it suffice to say that I feel it is more easily understood when viewed as a relational question more than as a philosophical one.
Faith gets a bad rap because it is easily abused, but the same could be said for a multitude of ideas and institutions in a free society. I don't advocate blind faith, but I think blind skepticism is just as problematic.
The faith of which I speak is also not entirely with regards to the specific healing, but it is generally around belief that God is good and wants to do good things for us. This very faith allows one to trust that God will work good on their behalf, even if it's not the specific thing that they're asking for. Sometimes God won't do something we ask because it's not what we need (cue the Rolling Stones). Or sometimes God will do it later, after we have changed in such a way as to be ready.
Apart from the issue of faith, the other main factor that comes into play is the existence of other forces (both human and spiritual). God
Quite agreed. Sorry that in my brevity, I failed to elaborate, but my guess would be that the best you could hope to do in terms of time travel is send informationless energy, and probably without any hope of directing it anywhere--or anywhen for that matter.
China is a safe haven for all sorts of internet activity which is illegal and reprehensible here, I guess it's only fair that we return the favor.
I'm quite sure someone like Hawking will soon step in and say that though time travel of something is theoretically possible, that no intelligent being would be able to make the trip successfully because no information would be able to travel back in time.
We're not talking about F = ma. Going from 0 to 60 (in an ideal situation) requires the same amount of work, no matter how fast you accelerate, because slower acceleration requires applying the force over a longer distance. Therefore, the factors which make fast or slow acceleration vary in efficiency are things like wind resistance, rolling resistance, the power curve of the engine, etc.
I first read the subject line and wondered how could "the f*ing article" fail?
Yeah, the company does have copyrights to the modifications Daimaou made, and any of those modifications, if separable in themselves such that no GPL-derivativeness remains, could be licensed however the company desires, but as long as the two are one, it must be licensed by GPL rules.
From TFA, Hugo Leuders of pro-patent CompTIA said:
Seems to me that he's obscuring the fact that "imitation and copying" is an important part of most innovation. We'd never be where we are without it.
As an ignorant American, I found this description of the various EU institutions very helpful. Interesting to note that the Parliament can dismiss the Commission if it desires to do so, and it would be interesting to see this happen, or at least have the threat of it issued to enforce Parliament's request/demand.
Would use of video phones reduce the distraction? Since you're not visualizing, you don't have part of your brain imaging what the other person looks like, moreover they have visual cues as to whether they might need to shut up.
Patents are fine for genuine innovations, which this is. Especially since it's not software-based. It is an ingenious assembly, so for that we thank the inventor with the ability to profit from it (for only a few more years) without competition.
While perhaps ESR's understanding of cathedral-building is woefully incomplete, I think it was a good enough image to make his point. If you can think of something better that will fill out the argument more completely, you're welcome to do so. If he's a good bazaar participant, he'd be a fool not to pick up on a better competing image.