That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +5. The carbon stored in oil was locked up in plants and animals before it became oil - it wasn't ever all in the atmosphere at the same time. And it didn't suddenly all become oil at the same time either.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +4. The carbon stored in oil was all in the atmosphere at the same time before it became locked up in plants and animals.
Think. We're talking about the conditions when the oil we're digging up now was formed. The plants and animals it came from didn't appear overnight. It wasn't all carbon in the atmosphere one day, half of it in the biosphere the next. Life has been locking carbon into the crust since it appeared. I.e. the last time all the available carbon was simultaneously in the atmosphere was the end of the Hadean eon 4 billion years ago.
The suggestion that we can burn all the oil in the crust without regard for the consequences just because that carbon was in the atmosphere 4 billion years ago is moronic in the extreme.
Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like.
It would be like the conditions when life first started.
The surface temperature then was about 230 degrees C. The atmospheric pressure was high enough to allow liquid water despite the temperature. Does that sound attractive to you?
It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere.
Unless you believe in abiotic oil creation, we will not reach Venus scale Atmo.
That's only true if the sun's output is the same now as it was 3 billion years ago. But it's believed that the sun was 1/3 dimmer then. The fact is that we don't know what it might end up like. We do know it wouldn't be good for us.
The reality is that all co2 that is stored in oil comes from the athmosphere. Therefore even if we burned all of the oil in all of the earth's crust right now, we'd only recreate the athmospheric situation of the age of the dinosaurs, a time when animals roamed over more regions of the earth than they do today.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +5. The carbon stored in oil was locked up in plants and animals before it became oil - it wasn't ever all in the atmosphere at the same time. And it didn't suddenly all become oil at the same time either.
It would be perfectly liveable, and probably even more comfortable, for humans.
Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like. It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere. But that's beside the point. The question is not whether increased global temperatures would be liveable or comfortable. The question is whether the economic costs of adapting to the new conditions outweigh the costs of try to reduce or prevent the change.
I used to leave muscle cars in the dust at stoplights on my bike, however my 0-60 time was, roughly speaking, forever.
0-20 is probably a more important figure for around town driving. 0-60 is what you need for merging from full stop onto the highway.
Fair enough. 0-20 isn't really commonly stated. How does 0-30 suit you? 2000 Honda Insight: 3.4s. Now, I'm not sure what you (or the poster I replied to) consider to be a muscle car, but that's just slow. Check out this list. The Insight is not beating a Kia Rio or a Toyota Camry or even an H1 Hummer. The only way the Insight is winning off the line is if the other guy reacts slower. Yes, it's light. It also only has 80-odd hp, including the electric motor. It's power to weight ain't that good.
The low weight and the 990 CC engine with electric assist ensure that I am the one pulling away with spinning wheels at the lights leaving muscle cars in the dust.
Bullshit. Unless the other guy was asleep. 0-60 in 10.6s.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
The vast majority of Firefox users are running Windows. I don't see the lack of other platforms making much difference here.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
The factor you seem to be ignoring is that Firefox users are more likely to be early adopters. So I think they are more likely to at least try Chrome.
Interestingly, one of the linked blogs talks about how this could lead to more of Firefox being written in Javascript. I haven't done much non-web related Javascript programming, and I haven't really used those new frameworks, but it seems to me like application programming in Javascript is like trying to hammer a nail with the handle of a screwdriver. Sure, it might work, but there are much better tools for the job. What do you guys think?
Why do you think Javascript is so unsuitable? I've done a fair bit of application programming in Javascript and it's fine so long as you keep your code structured (so no different to Perl or even C in that regard).
Jailing the victim is asinine and a sure sign that the authorities are lazy and stupid themselves.
Most of these scams basically boil down to "give me $ and together we can steal/embezzle/defraud $$$". So the "victim" hands over $ and then the conman vanishes. But the "victim" willingly joined a conspiracy to commit a crime. Joining a conspiracy is often a crime in itself even if the "actual" crime never occurs. The scams usually present the crime as victimless (owner of the money deceased, no inheritors) or morally justified (money from an evil regime), but anyone with a minimal degree of honesty can still see that it is wrong.
How is this any different to saying that a girl that goes into a rough neighbourhood in a mini-skirt and is raped should also be jailed?
Totally different. The girl in the mini-skirt is totally innocent, the "victim" of these scams is usually not totally innocent. It's really no different than if I say to you "give me $50 so I can buy a lockpick and then we'll rob this house together" and then disappear with your $50.
Fortunately, not every country on this planet is subject to the DMCA.
Indeed. Unfortunately other countries seems to be following the US lead to varying degrees. Still, for the moment, reverse engineering is not illegal in many other countries. But I doubt that there is any country that does allow you to distribute someone else's work (modified or not) without their permission in the name of interoperability.
Writing a program that has the capabilities of altering another program can be legal under certain circumstances. Our copyright says specifically that you may reverse engineer software and change parts of it to "establish interoperability".
The DMCA section 103 permits reverse engineering to achieve interoperability. It allows you to reverse engineer someone else's code so that you can write a compatible application. It does not permit you to alter and then redistribute someone else's copyrighted code.
I think you might be wrong, in that the patch is just that - a patch. If you write a book, and I publish sonething telling people to skip chapters 3,5, and 9, and replace them with something I wrote in order to make the story flow better, then that's not illegal. Someone needs to have copies of both the book and the patch to have the modified version.
I'm not sure if your analogy is supposed to apply to UbiSoft or the crackers. In the crackers case it probably can't apply because they almost always distribute the entire executable. In UbiSoft's case they may also be distributing the entire executable, it's not uncommon. I don't know if they are or not. Even if they aren't, your analogy doesn't apply because they are still including code they don't own the copyright to. In terms of your analogy, UbiSoft published the original book. The crackers wrote the instructions to modify the book (but almost certainly distributed the final result, in breach of UbiSoft's copyright). But now UbiSoft have published their own set of instructions which include the cracker's changes. That's a breach of copyright in itself, even before those instructions have been applied to the original book.
They aren't "stealing" anything, the executable was theirs to begin with. If you spruce up my house with some fancy artwork it doesn't make it your house.
The crackers infringe UbiSoft's copyright when they distribute the patch, but that does not give UbiSoft the right to distribute the cracker's derived work. They are also infringing copyright. Or, if you prefer analogies, if I take a book you've written and modify it I cannot distribute my new version without your permission, but you cannot distribute my new version without me permission either - we both hold copyrights over the derived work.
According to a local story he was discharged without conviction because he didn't show criminal intent, rather he was he motivated by proving his abilities, and conviction would be unduly detrimental to his future prospects.
They made it sound like merging these two companies is somehow increasing the number of competitors in the market.
Previously, there were three big companies, EA, Activision, and Blizzard.* They were all competitors. Now, there are only two: EA and Activision-Blizzard. That does not benefit consumers. The already-existing cartel has just shrunk, moving even closer to a monopoly.
That would be true if Blizzard and Activision were competitors but they didn't actually have many competing titles. Blizzard really only has Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, and WoW. Activision doesn't really compete with any of those, except in the most general sense. I don't see this merger having any impact on consumers.
"no real motive for Nina to try to frame him by fleeing to Russia without her kids."
Except that several stories said that the children were in fact taken to Russia. So Nina would have fled to Russia and later reunited with her children. That is at least vaguely plausible, although the combination of physical evidence and Hans's strange actions point overwhelmingly to his guilt.
It was plausible that Nina might have fled to Russia, though if it were true then someone should have been able to dig up some evidence to support it. But that theory didn't explain the physical evidence. That's when people started claiming she was framing him and at that point it became a pretty weak theory, IMHO.
Arrogance? No, not even close. Did Hans kill his wife? Apparently. Was the jury given evidence that proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt? That is what the GP is arguing.
He's arguing that the jury was not given the evidence without actually knowing what evidence they saw. The jury say the evidence proved that Hans killed Nina beyond a reasonable doubt (not beyond a shadow of doubt). Subsequent events have shown that the jury was correct that Hans was the killer. To continue to argue that there was reasonable doubt when he was not in that courtroom, to continue to assert that he knows better than the jury is either arrogance or idiocy, take your pick. To me it sounds like arrogance.
It's not just semantics. GPL-advocates such as myself recognize the value of more permissive licenses such as the BSD license and the LGPL.
BSD-advocates often fail to understand why the GPL is so successful.
Yes, and it's really not complex: the BSD license doesn't promote (code) freedom, the GPL license does. The BSD license is designed for maximum freedom to use the code - anyone can use it for anything with only very minor restrictions. The GPL license is designed to ensure that the code stays free - it's more about spreading the philosophy of (code) freedom than letting users do whatever they want. That appeals to a lot of open source developers.
Except that they have been proven to be right in this particular case and yet the poster still claims they were wrong to convict. To claim that they were wrong despite having less evidence to go on and despite their verdict being vindicated, that is arrogance.
I think a lot of people here wanted to believe he was innocent
Sure, but that wasn't the reason why there was so much opposition to his conviction. People didn't (and still don't) seem to be able to grasp the difference between probably did it and have proven it beyond reasonable doubt. It's entirely consistent to believe that he did it and that he shouldn't have been convicted. Not because he's a big contributor to open-source, but because the standard for allowing the state to take away somebody's freedom and ability to vote for most of their life should be fucking high and his trial didn't meet it.
I disagree. "Reasonable doubt" is not the same as "proven beyond any doubt", which seems to be your position. Reasonable doubt is not a couple of far-fetched alternative theories coupled with totally unreasonable explanations for the evidence. The jurors saw a lot more evidence than you did. They got to watch Resier as he made his case. According to their comments any reasonable doubt was removed when he took the stand. You may disagree with their conclusions, despite the much smaller amount of evidence (all second hand) that you have access to, but the fact is that they got it right. For you to persist in claiming that they got it wrong is simply the height of arrogance.
Slashdot Mirror
...and spend half the funds for a tiny knitch market.
You meant "niche market", right? That's got to be the most horrific attempt at spelling niche I've seen.
The only decent game the guy's made in his life is Dungeon Keeper 1.
Um, Populous? Or is that before your time?
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +5. The carbon stored in oil was locked up in plants and animals before it became oil - it wasn't ever all in the atmosphere at the same time. And it didn't suddenly all become oil at the same time either.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +4. The carbon stored in oil was all in the atmosphere at the same time before it became locked up in plants and animals.
Think. We're talking about the conditions when the oil we're digging up now was formed. The plants and animals it came from didn't appear overnight. It wasn't all carbon in the atmosphere one day, half of it in the biosphere the next. Life has been locking carbon into the crust since it appeared. I.e. the last time all the available carbon was simultaneously in the atmosphere was the end of the Hadean eon 4 billion years ago.
The suggestion that we can burn all the oil in the crust without regard for the consequences just because that carbon was in the atmosphere 4 billion years ago is moronic in the extreme.
Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like.
It would be like the conditions when life first started.
The surface temperature then was about 230 degrees C. The atmospheric pressure was high enough to allow liquid water despite the temperature. Does that sound attractive to you?
It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere.
Unless you believe in abiotic oil creation, we will not reach Venus scale Atmo.
That's only true if the sun's output is the same now as it was 3 billion years ago. But it's believed that the sun was 1/3 dimmer then. The fact is that we don't know what it might end up like. We do know it wouldn't be good for us.
The reality is that all co2 that is stored in oil comes from the athmosphere. Therefore even if we burned all of the oil in all of the earth's crust right now, we'd only recreate the athmospheric situation of the age of the dinosaurs, a time when animals roamed over more regions of the earth than they do today.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +5. The carbon stored in oil was locked up in plants and animals before it became oil - it wasn't ever all in the atmosphere at the same time. And it didn't suddenly all become oil at the same time either.
It would be perfectly liveable, and probably even more comfortable, for humans.
Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like. It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere. But that's beside the point. The question is not whether increased global temperatures would be liveable or comfortable. The question is whether the economic costs of adapting to the new conditions outweigh the costs of try to reduce or prevent the change.
I used to leave muscle cars in the dust at stoplights on my bike, however my 0-60 time was, roughly speaking, forever.
0-20 is probably a more important figure for around town driving. 0-60 is what you need for merging from full stop onto the highway.
Fair enough. 0-20 isn't really commonly stated. How does 0-30 suit you? 2000 Honda Insight: 3.4s. Now, I'm not sure what you (or the poster I replied to) consider to be a muscle car, but that's just slow. Check out this list. The Insight is not beating a Kia Rio or a Toyota Camry or even an H1 Hummer. The only way the Insight is winning off the line is if the other guy reacts slower. Yes, it's light. It also only has 80-odd hp, including the electric motor. It's power to weight ain't that good.
The low weight and the 990 CC engine with electric assist ensure that I am the one pulling away with spinning wheels at the lights leaving muscle cars in the dust.
Bullshit. Unless the other guy was asleep. 0-60 in 10.6s.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
The vast majority of Firefox users are running Windows. I don't see the lack of other platforms making much difference here.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
The factor you seem to be ignoring is that Firefox users are more likely to be early adopters. So I think they are more likely to at least try Chrome.
Pics or it didn't happen
Here you go.
Time to sell short?
Last December the share price peaked at $715. Now it's $483. It may well fall further, but the best time to sell short was 9 months ago.
Interestingly, one of the linked blogs talks about how this could lead to more of Firefox being written in Javascript. I haven't done much non-web related Javascript programming, and I haven't really used those new frameworks, but it seems to me like application programming in Javascript is like trying to hammer a nail with the handle of a screwdriver. Sure, it might work, but there are much better tools for the job. What do you guys think?
Why do you think Javascript is so unsuitable? I've done a fair bit of application programming in Javascript and it's fine so long as you keep your code structured (so no different to Perl or even C in that regard).
Jailing the victim is asinine and a sure sign that the authorities are lazy and stupid themselves.
Most of these scams basically boil down to "give me $ and together we can steal/embezzle/defraud $$$". So the "victim" hands over $ and then the conman vanishes. But the "victim" willingly joined a conspiracy to commit a crime. Joining a conspiracy is often a crime in itself even if the "actual" crime never occurs. The scams usually present the crime as victimless (owner of the money deceased, no inheritors) or morally justified (money from an evil regime), but anyone with a minimal degree of honesty can still see that it is wrong.
How is this any different to saying that a girl that goes into a rough neighbourhood in a mini-skirt and is raped should also be jailed?
Totally different. The girl in the mini-skirt is totally innocent, the "victim" of these scams is usually not totally innocent. It's really no different than if I say to you "give me $50 so I can buy a lockpick and then we'll rob this house together" and then disappear with your $50.
One FUNDAMENTAL problem with this
... is that you didn't RTFA.
Winning an argument on the Internet is really hard...
Nope, winning an argument on the Internet is easy. Convincing your opponent that you've won is often impossible.
And that's not unique to the Internet either.
Fortunately, not every country on this planet is subject to the DMCA.
Indeed. Unfortunately other countries seems to be following the US lead to varying degrees. Still, for the moment, reverse engineering is not illegal in many other countries. But I doubt that there is any country that does allow you to distribute someone else's work (modified or not) without their permission in the name of interoperability.
It's actually not that easy.
Writing a program that has the capabilities of altering another program can be legal under certain circumstances. Our copyright says specifically that you may reverse engineer software and change parts of it to "establish interoperability".
The DMCA section 103 permits reverse engineering to achieve interoperability. It allows you to reverse engineer someone else's code so that you can write a compatible application. It does not permit you to alter and then redistribute someone else's copyrighted code.
I think you might be wrong, in that the patch is just that - a patch. If you write a book, and I publish sonething telling people to skip chapters 3,5, and 9, and replace them with something I wrote in order to make the story flow better, then that's not illegal. Someone needs to have copies of both the book and the patch to have the modified version.
I'm not sure if your analogy is supposed to apply to UbiSoft or the crackers. In the crackers case it probably can't apply because they almost always distribute the entire executable. In UbiSoft's case they may also be distributing the entire executable, it's not uncommon. I don't know if they are or not. Even if they aren't, your analogy doesn't apply because they are still including code they don't own the copyright to. In terms of your analogy, UbiSoft published the original book. The crackers wrote the instructions to modify the book (but almost certainly distributed the final result, in breach of UbiSoft's copyright). But now UbiSoft have published their own set of instructions which include the cracker's changes. That's a breach of copyright in itself, even before those instructions have been applied to the original book.
They aren't "stealing" anything, the executable was theirs to begin with. If you spruce up my house with some fancy artwork it doesn't make it your house.
The crackers infringe UbiSoft's copyright when they distribute the patch, but that does not give UbiSoft the right to distribute the cracker's derived work. They are also infringing copyright. Or, if you prefer analogies, if I take a book you've written and modify it I cannot distribute my new version without your permission, but you cannot distribute my new version without me permission either - we both hold copyrights over the derived work.
According to a local story he was discharged without conviction because he didn't show criminal intent, rather he was he motivated by proving his abilities, and conviction would be unduly detrimental to his future prospects.
Doesn't Blizzard bring in more than a billion in profits a year, by itself? What's Activision bringing to the table?
Blizzard made about $1.1B in revenue last year (not profit). What Activision is bringing to the table is revenue of $2.9B per year.
They made it sound like merging these two companies is somehow increasing the number of competitors in the market.
Previously, there were three big companies, EA, Activision, and Blizzard.* They were all competitors. Now, there are only two: EA and Activision-Blizzard. That does not benefit consumers. The already-existing cartel has just shrunk, moving even closer to a monopoly.
That would be true if Blizzard and Activision were competitors but they didn't actually have many competing titles. Blizzard really only has Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, and WoW. Activision doesn't really compete with any of those, except in the most general sense. I don't see this merger having any impact on consumers.
"no real motive for Nina to try to frame him by fleeing to Russia without her kids."
Except that several stories said that the children were in fact taken to Russia. So Nina would have fled to Russia and later reunited with her children. That is at least vaguely plausible, although the combination of physical evidence and Hans's strange actions point overwhelmingly to his guilt.
It was plausible that Nina might have fled to Russia, though if it were true then someone should have been able to dig up some evidence to support it. But that theory didn't explain the physical evidence. That's when people started claiming she was framing him and at that point it became a pretty weak theory, IMHO.
Arrogance? No, not even close. Did Hans kill his wife? Apparently. Was the jury given evidence that proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt? That is what the GP is arguing.
He's arguing that the jury was not given the evidence without actually knowing what evidence they saw. The jury say the evidence proved that Hans killed Nina beyond a reasonable doubt (not beyond a shadow of doubt). Subsequent events have shown that the jury was correct that Hans was the killer. To continue to argue that there was reasonable doubt when he was not in that courtroom, to continue to assert that he knows better than the jury is either arrogance or idiocy, take your pick. To me it sounds like arrogance.
It's not just semantics. GPL-advocates such as myself recognize the value of more permissive licenses such as the BSD license and the LGPL.
BSD-advocates often fail to understand why the GPL is so successful.
Yes, and it's really not complex: the BSD license doesn't promote (code) freedom, the GPL license does. The BSD license is designed for maximum freedom to use the code - anyone can use it for anything with only very minor restrictions. The GPL license is designed to ensure that the code stays free - it's more about spreading the philosophy of (code) freedom than letting users do whatever they want. That appeals to a lot of open source developers.
Except that they have been proven to be right in this particular case and yet the poster still claims they were wrong to convict. To claim that they were wrong despite having less evidence to go on and despite their verdict being vindicated, that is arrogance.
I think a lot of people here wanted to believe he was innocent
Sure, but that wasn't the reason why there was so much opposition to his conviction. People didn't (and still don't) seem to be able to grasp the difference between probably did it and have proven it beyond reasonable doubt. It's entirely consistent to believe that he did it and that he shouldn't have been convicted. Not because he's a big contributor to open-source, but because the standard for allowing the state to take away somebody's freedom and ability to vote for most of their life should be fucking high and his trial didn't meet it.
I disagree. "Reasonable doubt" is not the same as "proven beyond any doubt", which seems to be your position. Reasonable doubt is not a couple of far-fetched alternative theories coupled with totally unreasonable explanations for the evidence. The jurors saw a lot more evidence than you did. They got to watch Resier as he made his case. According to their comments any reasonable doubt was removed when he took the stand. You may disagree with their conclusions, despite the much smaller amount of evidence (all second hand) that you have access to, but the fact is that they got it right. For you to persist in claiming that they got it wrong is simply the height of arrogance.