If it were a normal distribution, the World Trade Centre attack would be an aberration, orders of magnitude bigger than typical terrorist attacks. There would be no need to preempt such attacks.
The fact that there is a significant chance of subsequent large terrorist attacks is not only statistically true regardless of scaling laws, it is also common sense. Applying a normal distribution in the way you imply would just be statistical nonsense.
The observation of scale invariance in this kind of data tells you nothing about the short term relationship between low level and high level attacks. Physicists really shouldn't be doing statistics...
Anyway I hold to Jefferson and Madison's opinion that the US was meant to have a FEW enumerated powers, while most of the powers remained with the Member States. Just like the modern EU.
Are you kidding? The EU is regulating everything from the curvature of bananas to the price of cell phone roaming. In the US, there is at least a common understanding of what the federal government should be able to do, even if people quibble about the meaning. In the EU, anything goes and the process is totally out of control.
From a Tea Party Republican's perspective, "meaningful" health care reform would entail eliminating Medicare and Medicaid, freeing all employers from having to pay health care benefits, and all insurance companies from having to pay claims.
And that would be bad... why?
Reasonable health care need not be expensive; it's a bunch of basic techniques, basic drugs, and basic preventive care that--together with healthy living--will likely let you live to a ripe old age.
What makes health care expensive is that people want an unlimited supply of the latest drugs, surgical techniques, and gadgets, in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable just a tiny bit longer. In addition, they live under the illusion that health care is totally safe.
Sorry, but a heart or liver transplant is not a basic human right, it's a luxury that only the riches people on the planet can afford. And going to the doctor or hospital always entails a significant risk of getting worse. And it doesn't make sense to bankrupt our economy because people are unwilling to accept that.
Yeah, he's a nut. Nevertheless, I think the commerce clause has been over-used. I think we'd be a lot better off if more things were decided and handled at the state level, from paying for your own damned bridges to who can marry and how you get people health care. The federal government has more than enough other means to encourage states to do the right thing without mandating this.
What happened to the Germans [after WWI] was quite unfair,
I'm not sure it was unfair. Germany was a militaristic power not satisfied with the status quo and bent on dominating Europe. That's why it had the capacity to wage WWI in the first place. Europe mainly wanted to demilitarize Germany and demanded reparations for the damage that Germany had done. If Germany's goal had been to right the wrong of colonialism, it would have been good, but all Germany wanted was its own cut.
and there's a good case that Hitler wouldn't have found the necessary public support (he got elected) were there not so much anti-everyone sentiment,
Hitler only got a minority of the vote. What put him over the top in parliament were the votes of the Christian party (essentially same party that's in power now in Germany). The Christian party was fervently anti-Communist, dubious about democracy, and liked Hitler's party program of traditional Christian values and family values (sound familiar?); they voted for Hitler in parliament after Hitler made a deal with the Vatican. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, I know, but it's all there:
The wars against the Native Americans? Spectacularly successful.
Yeah, Britain and Spain sure did exterminate the Native Americans, albeit mostly through disease, not war. The US government then spent the last 200+ years trying to cope with the broken societies that those colonial powers left behind, and trying to get new European immigrants under control.
Not getting into pointless wars, like the one in Iraq, helps save lives, too.
I was against the war: Bush lied and the war was extremely expensive. But Saddam Hussein murdered many times more people in the decade prior to the US invasion than the entire Iraq cost, including Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. On the whole, the US war in Iraq probably saved lots of lives.
If your solution includes generating an exponentially large graph from a small problem, then you don't have an efficient algorithm for solving the problem, no matter whether you use real ants or simulated ants.
That's a 3 axis device. For some 3D printing technologies, 3 axes are enough, but for milling, you need at least a 5 axis device for reasonable 3D fabrication.
There is no type of exclusive right that prevents use of software, once you legally possess a copy
That's incorrect: patents and laws related to cryptography can prevent use of software even if you obtained the source code legally. But it's also besides the point.
You still haven't made any argument that Oracle has given you a license to use their patents under the GPL v2.
Oracle provided software under the GPL, which grants certain privileges of modification and redistribution.... When the originator of a product issues any kind of license/grant of rights, the issuer is bound to allow the recipient to exercise the rights they have licensed the right to exercise.... Oracle is bound only to allow you to exercise the rights that were granted to you by the license.
Yes, and the license says at the very beginning:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
So, Oracle gives the software to you and tells you that you may "copy, distribute, and modify" it under the terms of the GPL, and that is exactly what you may do. You don't get any explicit license to use the software, nor does the license restrict how you can use the software, it simply doesn't have a bearing on that at all.
One of the terms is that if someone imposes conditions on you that conflict with the GPL--say, related to patents--you have to stop distributing. That's fine, it doesn't make the license meaningless. After all, you can certainly use the software, and you can even redistribute it as long as nobody actually sues you and has a court impose restrictions on you.
Those are the terms of the GPL. How, according to you, does any of that imply that Oracle grants you any kind of license to their patents?
And where do you think the GPL v2 gives these "explicit and implicit permissions"? I don't see any place.
In fact, the GPL explicitly says that all the permissions it gives you are related to "copying, distribution and modification", not actually using the software.
If they released as GPL, their patent claims become invalid for derivative works of *that* (and none other) release.
"Release as GPL" are meaningless weasel words. What they did is give you some software and tell you that *you* can redistribute it under the terms of the GPL. How does that impose any terms or conditions on them?
When you give your customer your product, and as patent holder you give them a license (the GPL) that allows them to distribute it freely, modify, and redistribute freely, you do not enumerate which exclusive rights you are licensing.
You're not "licensing" any rights at all. Oracle is giving the software to you and saying that you can redistribute it under the terms of the GPL, provided you can comply with those terms. One of the requirements that the GPL imposes on you is that you sublicense any patents you hold to people who receive the software from you.
But this licensing requirement doesn't exist for Oracle. Oracle wasn't bound by the terms of the GPL when they gave you the software; they don't need a license to distribute the software under the GPL because they already own the software.
One could imply, that the GPL as an agreement confers all license required by the grantor to the grantee, in order for the grantee to be able to exercise the rights the grantor claims to grant.
Yes, but you still erroneously believe that you received the software from Oracle under the terms of the GPL; you did not. Oracle imposes the terms of the GPL on you (which trigger when you redistribute the software), but Oracle itself doesn't have to comply with those terms because they did not receive the software under the GPL. The GPL terms only apply to people who received the software under the GPL.
Oracle is not bound by the terms of the GPL since they hold there copyright to the entire source. So, I'm not sure why people think that theGPL gives then any patent protection from Oracle.
Will you just stop with the irrelevant drivel and just answer my question? You said:
In China, internet traffic which has been deemed by the party as "unharmonious" is essentially completely blocked and even attempting to use those services can lead to jail time.
Sorry, but I think you're making up the second part. So, I want to know (1) where it says in the Chinese penal code that circumventing the firewall is punishable by jail, and (2) I would like to know of some examples of people who have bene jailed merely for circumventing the firewall.
Absolutely not true. VLC (and other media players) will open AVIs (and other formats) from Safari just fine.
Yeah, but they won't play *in* Safari, while Apple's preferred formats will.
Which have fuck-all to do with Safari.
Scripts are content that I download from the web, and I can't use them on the iPad, not because of any technical issues, but simply because Apple doesn't allow it.
That's not what they are doing at all. They aren't supporting Flash because it is crap on handhelds, not because Apple has any desire whatsoever to tell you what you can or cannot run on your hardware.
Bullshit. Apple has been denying applications that can run Flash natively.
No, it's not a lie. The competitors are out there and they are good and inexpensive, but it's going to take a while for Apple's temporary monopoly to erode because the market hasn't reached equillibrium again.
I asked if it is so bad then why have I had problems with Apple's competitors' product but not Apple's products?
Well, since you evidently can't figure it out: (1) bad software engineering doesn't necessarily translate into more crashes or reinstalls, and (2) maybe the competitors are using bad software engineering practices too.
Not for iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Apple has managed to get a temporary (legal) monopoly by attracting developers to its app store early. Eventually that will change.
How stupid can you get?
Yeah, how stupid can you get?
I never said Apple's engineering was bad
No, but I said that, and you responded with something totally irrelevant about reinstalling Windows. Hence my question: what does reinstalling Windows have to do with Apple's bad software engineering?
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If it were a normal distribution, the World Trade Centre attack would be an aberration, orders of magnitude bigger than typical terrorist attacks. There would be no need to preempt such attacks.
The fact that there is a significant chance of subsequent large terrorist attacks is not only statistically true regardless of scaling laws, it is also common sense. Applying a normal distribution in the way you imply would just be statistical nonsense.
The observation of scale invariance in this kind of data tells you nothing about the short term relationship between low level and high level attacks. Physicists really shouldn't be doing statistics...
Anyway I hold to Jefferson and Madison's opinion that the US was meant to have a FEW enumerated powers, while most of the powers remained with the Member States. Just like the modern EU.
Are you kidding? The EU is regulating everything from the curvature of bananas to the price of cell phone roaming. In the US, there is at least a common understanding of what the federal government should be able to do, even if people quibble about the meaning. In the EU, anything goes and the process is totally out of control.
When they quite literally have you by your life,
Only if you're the kind of fool who still thinks that medicine can magically save you from death.
From a Tea Party Republican's perspective, "meaningful" health care reform would entail eliminating Medicare and Medicaid, freeing all employers from having to pay health care benefits, and all insurance companies from having to pay claims.
And that would be bad... why?
Reasonable health care need not be expensive; it's a bunch of basic techniques, basic drugs, and basic preventive care that--together with healthy living--will likely let you live to a ripe old age.
What makes health care expensive is that people want an unlimited supply of the latest drugs, surgical techniques, and gadgets, in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable just a tiny bit longer. In addition, they live under the illusion that health care is totally safe.
Sorry, but a heart or liver transplant is not a basic human right, it's a luxury that only the riches people on the planet can afford. And going to the doctor or hospital always entails a significant risk of getting worse. And it doesn't make sense to bankrupt our economy because people are unwilling to accept that.
Yeah, he's a nut. Nevertheless, I think the commerce clause has been over-used. I think we'd be a lot better off if more things were decided and handled at the state level, from paying for your own damned bridges to who can marry and how you get people health care. The federal government has more than enough other means to encourage states to do the right thing without mandating this.
Well, gay couples can get eggs from egg donors.
And for other species, you can often use an egg from a related species.
What happened to the Germans [after WWI] was quite unfair,
I'm not sure it was unfair. Germany was a militaristic power not satisfied with the status quo and bent on dominating Europe. That's why it had the capacity to wage WWI in the first place. Europe mainly wanted to demilitarize Germany and demanded reparations for the damage that Germany had done. If Germany's goal had been to right the wrong of colonialism, it would have been good, but all Germany wanted was its own cut.
and there's a good case that Hitler wouldn't have found the necessary public support (he got elected) were there not so much anti-everyone sentiment,
Hitler only got a minority of the vote. What put him over the top in parliament were the votes of the Christian party (essentially same party that's in power now in Germany). The Christian party was fervently anti-Communist, dubious about democracy, and liked Hitler's party program of traditional Christian values and family values (sound familiar?); they voted for Hitler in parliament after Hitler made a deal with the Vatican. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, I know, but it's all there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erm%C3%A4chtigungsgesetz
The wars against the Native Americans? Spectacularly successful.
Yeah, Britain and Spain sure did exterminate the Native Americans, albeit mostly through disease, not war. The US government then spent the last 200+ years trying to cope with the broken societies that those colonial powers left behind, and trying to get new European immigrants under control.
Not getting into pointless wars, like the one in Iraq, helps save lives, too.
I was against the war: Bush lied and the war was extremely expensive. But Saddam Hussein murdered many times more people in the decade prior to the US invasion than the entire Iraq cost, including Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. On the whole, the US war in Iraq probably saved lots of lives.
If your solution includes generating an exponentially large graph from a small problem, then you don't have an efficient algorithm for solving the problem, no matter whether you use real ants or simulated ants.
That's a 3 axis device. For some 3D printing technologies, 3 axes are enough, but for milling, you need at least a 5 axis device for reasonable 3D fabrication.
There is no type of exclusive right that prevents use of software, once you legally possess a copy
That's incorrect: patents and laws related to cryptography can prevent use of software even if you obtained the source code legally. But it's also besides the point.
You still haven't made any argument that Oracle has given you a license to use their patents under the GPL v2.
Oracle provided software under the GPL, which grants certain privileges of modification and redistribution. ... When the originator of a product issues any kind of license/grant of rights, the issuer is bound to allow the recipient to exercise the rights they have licensed the right to exercise. ... Oracle is bound only to allow you to exercise the rights that were granted to you by the license.
Yes, and the license says at the very beginning:
So, Oracle gives the software to you and tells you that you may "copy, distribute, and modify" it under the terms of the GPL, and that is exactly what you may do. You don't get any explicit license to use the software, nor does the license restrict how you can use the software, it simply doesn't have a bearing on that at all.
One of the terms is that if someone imposes conditions on you that conflict with the GPL--say, related to patents--you have to stop distributing. That's fine, it doesn't make the license meaningless. After all, you can certainly use the software, and you can even redistribute it as long as nobody actually sues you and has a court impose restrictions on you.
Those are the terms of the GPL. How, according to you, does any of that imply that Oracle grants you any kind of license to their patents?
And where do you think the GPL v2 gives these "explicit and implicit permissions"? I don't see any place.
In fact, the GPL explicitly says that all the permissions it gives you are related to "copying, distribution and modification", not actually using the software.
If they released as GPL, their patent claims become invalid for derivative works of *that* (and none other) release.
"Release as GPL" are meaningless weasel words. What they did is give you some software and tell you that *you* can redistribute it under the terms of the GPL. How does that impose any terms or conditions on them?
When you give your customer your product, and as patent holder you give them a license (the GPL) that allows them to distribute it freely, modify, and redistribute freely, you do not enumerate which exclusive rights you are licensing.
You're not "licensing" any rights at all. Oracle is giving the software to you and saying that you can redistribute it under the terms of the GPL, provided you can comply with those terms. One of the requirements that the GPL imposes on you is that you sublicense any patents you hold to people who receive the software from you.
But this licensing requirement doesn't exist for Oracle. Oracle wasn't bound by the terms of the GPL when they gave you the software; they don't need a license to distribute the software under the GPL because they already own the software.
One could imply, that the GPL as an agreement confers all license required by the grantor to the grantee, in order for the grantee to be able to exercise the rights the grantor claims to grant.
Yes, but you still erroneously believe that you received the software from Oracle under the terms of the GPL; you did not. Oracle imposes the terms of the GPL on you (which trigger when you redistribute the software), but Oracle itself doesn't have to comply with those terms because they did not receive the software under the GPL. The GPL terms only apply to people who received the software under the GPL.
Oracle is not bound by the terms of the GPL since they hold there copyright to the entire source. So, I'm not sure why people think that theGPL gives then any patent protection from Oracle.
Will you just stop with the irrelevant drivel and just answer my question? You said:
Sorry, but I think you're making up the second part. So, I want to know (1) where it says in the Chinese penal code that circumventing the firewall is punishable by jail, and (2) I would like to know of some examples of people who have bene jailed merely for circumventing the firewall.
Absolutely not true. VLC (and other media players) will open AVIs (and other formats) from Safari just fine.
Yeah, but they won't play *in* Safari, while Apple's preferred formats will.
Which have fuck-all to do with Safari.
Scripts are content that I download from the web, and I can't use them on the iPad, not because of any technical issues, but simply because Apple doesn't allow it.
That's not what they are doing at all. They aren't supporting Flash because it is crap on handhelds, not because Apple has any desire whatsoever to tell you what you can or cannot run on your hardware.
Bullshit. Apple has been denying applications that can run Flash natively.
So this is a lie:
No, it's not a lie. The competitors are out there and they are good and inexpensive, but it's going to take a while for Apple's temporary monopoly to erode because the market hasn't reached equillibrium again.
I asked if it is so bad then why have I had problems with Apple's competitors' product but not Apple's products?
Well, since you evidently can't figure it out: (1) bad software engineering doesn't necessarily translate into more crashes or reinstalls, and (2) maybe the competitors are using bad software engineering practices too.
VLC, among others, is available for iOS.
Yup, as a stand-alone app, not as an integrated media player.
As for scripting languages... what exactly did you have in mind?
Gosh, like the kinds of things Apple keeps denying: Lua, Python, tons of other things.
You're right about Flash though. I'm amused that you seem to be stating this as though it's a bad thing.
What is a "bad thing" is that Apple tries to tell me what software I can run on my hardware.
The fact that ActiveX doesn't run on iPhone/iPad is Microsoft's choice.
The fact that Flash and various scripting languages don't run on it is because Apple disallows it.
As if there's not a competitive market now.
Not for iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Apple has managed to get a temporary (legal) monopoly by attracting developers to its app store early. Eventually that will change.
How stupid can you get?
Yeah, how stupid can you get?
I never said Apple's engineering was bad
No, but I said that, and you responded with something totally irrelevant about reinstalling Windows. Hence my question: what does reinstalling Windows have to do with Apple's bad software engineering?
Now as much as I don't like Apple, I must say that Apple is free to enter and to not enter into contracts as they please.
Not if they are part of a monopoly or oligopoly.