Why do I think Ken Ham will "win" this debate? Well, not because I think Ken will prove conclusively that Evolution is wrong and Creationism is right. I don't believe that at all. Evolution has a ton of evidence supporting it and Ken would have to pull out an Everest-sized mountain of hard evidence (*not* coming from "the Bible says...") to even come close to proving Creationism.
The reason Ken will "win" is because when Creationists "debunking" Evolution, they don't require proof. They spew a talking point or three and then declare victory. Those supporting Evolution, however, are careful to lay out all of the facts and supporting evidence. This takes more time than spewing talking points. Ken will rattle off a dozen talking points and Bill will only have time to tackle one or two. Of course, given enough time, he could refute every talking point Ken Ham spews, but I'm sure Ken can toss out the talking points faster than Bill Nye can refute them merely because refuting with evidence takes more time than making a baseless accusation.
So unless Ken speaks in slow-motion and Bill Nye channels an auctioneer, Ken Ham will "win" the debate.
somebody who has to change their route at the last minute and get to an exit from the opposite lane
If we take this concept to the "ideal", you shouldn't have drivers cutting over at the last minute because they didn't realize their exit was there. You will have your destination programmed in, your car will move over when it is time to, and will make the exit without driving across multiple lanes and possibly causing accidents.
I see nothing wrong with this ideal of everyone having a self-driving car. I do, however, see a problem with the government requiring (and possibly tracking) vehicle to vehicle communication. Maybe setting some standards so that we don't get Toyotas only talking to Toyotas while Fords only talk to Fords, but not requiring it or having it set up in such a way that they can monitor it "for our safety."
I need to get a new laptop and, for various reasons, Windows 8 is the OS I'm going to wind up with. The first thing I'm going to do is install Classic Shell, Start8, or one of the other third party tools to get my "normal Windows" start menu/desktop setup back.
Because storing your private/confidential information in a cloud is a stupid idea, because you don't really have control over your data.
Not to get off-track, but this is exactly why I'm opposed to the Bill Gates Foundation-backed InBloom. They are taking data from students (including names, addresses, medical information, test scores, etc) and uploading it to an Amazon Cloud Server for schools to access. Because "the cloud" has never been hacked and companies never sell access to valuable data to third parties, right? (And, no, you're not allowed to opt your child out of the InBloom data upload. Parents have been told we have no say in the matter.)
As an addendum, that was with movies. Games, arguably, have a lower "shelf life" than movies do. You might purchase the DVD or Blu-Ray of a movie from 1989, but you aren't likely to purchase a copy of a game from 1989.
Exactly. Even if it comes down to earning money on works, long copyrights don't make sense. For example, here's a list of movies released 25 years ago in 1989 by US box office results: http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=1989,1989 Obviously, some of those (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) might still be making the companies some money while others (Fletch Lives) probably aren't. Even the movies making money are probably not making huge amounts.
Of the 3,166 titles that IMDB lists, how many are still actively making a decent amount of money for the companies that own them? If it is a small fraction, then why are we holding back Public Domain status on the vast majority just so a few movies can draw in a couple more bucks?
Are there sensors that can measure height? If so, you can really mess with them by hanging the badge from the ceiling. "Employee seems to enjoy clinging to the ceiling for the entire workday."
Employee report #27135: "Employee arrived in the office, turned on their computer, and then crammed himself into a small drawer in his desk for the duration of the work day. He didn't move during this time except to climb out for meetings. Employee emerged from his desk at the end of the day."
Employee report #27136: "After speaking with four other employees in an energetic fashion regarding the new tracking systems, these employees went to the restroom and proceeded to flush themselves down the toilet. It might be worth noting that, following this, unknown individuals sent e-mails from these employees computers insulting their managers, most of HR, and the company executives. These unknown individuals then noted that the flushed employees had quit. As the unknown individuals didn't seem to be wearing tracking badges, it is not known what happened to them next. They either left or are living in the ventilation ducts."
And actually, for those of us who have trouble remembering faces and names, this could be even more dangerous. If someone comes up to me and starts acting like they know me, my default response is "they know you and you can't remember them... act like you remember them until you actually do." This would only be reinforced by them bringing up topics that only people close to me might know (wife's name, kids' names, etc.). Using this false familiarity, they could keep me guessing and off balance enough to get information from me that I might not otherwise give to a stranger. Information that could be used against me in some manner. (For example, if I'm going on vacation soon - which would be the perfect time to rob my house.)
To clarify my original post, I'd definitely be against this for privacy reasons. (Of course, if the face matches against a FaceBook profile that is available to anyone to read, complete with tons of photos, then it's less of a privacy issue and more of a "lock your Facebook page down" issue.) However, I can see where the technology behind it could be applied to good use. I'd be all for a "snap a photo, associate a name, and keep it in a local account" version of this. You could even keep it on a cloud server tied to a user's account (so you wouldn't need to store the images locally and you wouldn't "forget" everyone if your device broke).
On the other hand, no more seeing someone, forgetting their name, having them strike up a conversation with you, and then having to dig through your memory to try to remember who they are (failing miserably) while acting like you know exactly who they are.
I'd add that Amazon stubbornly refuses to release a Prime app for Android. They have for iOS and Kindle Android, but no general Android. While their streaming selection might be somewhat competitive with Netflix at times (what one lacks the other sometimes has), I'm limited with Prime. I can watch Netflix via my Roku box, our Android tablets, computers, or even our phones. Amazon Prime, we can only watch via our Roku box (with a worse interface than Netflix) and on our computers. Were Amazon to release their Prime video streaming app for Android, it might mean we'd watch more videos that way.
That $140,000 is per instance of copyright infringement. Even though they are lumping the cases together, they are still claiming that each John Doe engaged in at least one instance of copyright infringement.
What this does do is increase the costs of the person suing for copyright infringement. Before they needed to file one case against 100 John Does, argue their case, collect the 100 names, and then send the "settle or else" threat letters. If this ruling gets applied to all cases, they will need to file 100 different cases - each against 1 John Doe. In each case, they will need to present evidence to get the name and then send their settlement letters. The costs involved just skyrocketed to the point that suing people for non-commercial file sharing (as opposed to, say, selling movies to people online when you don't have the permission to) will be a money-losing proposition.
The law is horrible in many ways. The three that stand out to me:
1) Municipalities are allowed to engage in broadband efforts ONLY if 9 out of 10 homes in a census block have no broadband. This means that the big ISPs can wire up 11% of homes and call it a day. The other 89%? Too bad, but you guys aren't profitable enough to care about.
2) Satellite and mobile is counted as broadband. Never mind that satellite would be hideously expensive or that mobile can have tiny caps compared to wired broadband. In fact, it doesn't matter if the ISP is going to charge you $200 a month for 1GB of access. That's considered available access and you can't launch a municipal broadband effort.
3) This bill was literally written by the big ISPs who don't want competition from Google Fiber and municipal broadband. So the cries of "this will increase competition" are out-and-out lies. This is all about protecting the profits of the big ISPs by preventing municipalities from serving the non-served. The ISPs are afraid that, if municipalities are able to do this by themselves, they won't give lots of cash to Verizon, etc to build and run out networks. (Which those ISPs can then pocket, not build the networks, and lobby to keep them from having to uphold their end of the deal.)
Let's say that the best case scenario happens and they're actually able to do this. You've now got chat bots functioning as long-dead people chatting away with living people. So far so good. Of course, the technology to do this would be impressive and would attract the attention of "the big boys." How long before they get bought out by Facebook or Google (or some other company)? How much longer after that until the chat bots get monetized? Perhaps by increasing the likelihood that a chat bot would mention a specific brand name instead of a general product that the formerly living person was interested in or perhaps by just blurting out random product callouts. Even if the monetization doesn't happen, how long until the entire project is folded into some other group and the chat bots get shut down for good?
Even if they manage to do this, I don't see this lasting for long enough for many of the participants to actually die and be "resurrected" as chat bots.
The only good thing with IE in regards to this is you can use conditional comments to make your code work in IE (or even in a specific version of IE) while leaving your "good for all other browsers" code clean of IE-fixes. Of course, it would be better if IE worked as nicely as Chrome or Firefox, but since that's not an option (especially for old versions), at least there are conditional comments.
Not to Godwin this thread, but I see the same thing with people referencing Nazis or The Holocaust. Whenever someone wants to refer to someone as being bad, they call them a Nazi. Obama is doing X that the GOP doesn't like? Call him a Nazi. The GOP advances policy Y that the Democrats don't like? Say that this is the Holocaust all over again. It's all rhetoric, of course. Neither side is really marching people en masse to their deaths. Neither side wants to see the obliteration of an entire group of people by violent means. However, Nazi and Holocaust are universally recognized as "Very Bad Things" and if you can tie something to those in people's minds, you can gather opposition to them. It's abusing the memory of those horrible events for political gain. In the process, it weakens the memory of how bad they were and polarizes the debate into an "us vs. them" mentality with no room for compromise.
I don't think that represents the mentality of society as a whole. Just the media, because their financial incentive is to lock in an audience by tailoring their message.
The sooner we realize that's poison to civic discourse, the faster we'll get back on track to a functioning democracy.
Which is even sadder because the media, if properly done, can be an effective check on government power and corruption. Fighting these requires people to be informed. The government's obviously not going to inform us of their abuses so we need someone else to. The media SHOULD be finding abuses like these and bringing them to light. Instead, we get an interview with a member of Congress on the subject of the NSA cut short because there's "breaking news" about Bieber. Unless he had just revealed that he's an alien from another planet - complete with iron-clad proof - those priorities were seriously out of whack.
We NEED the media for society to function in a healthy manner. We just need the media to act properly and they for the most part aren't. There might be pockets of actual journalism left, but they are increasingly being pushed aside by OMG BIEBER journalism and "We'll skew the facts to fit your already established political views so you don't need to think" journalism.
Any designer who tried to argue with me that their page *needed* to be 1920 pixels wide would get a long-winded diatribe about mobile devices and responsive design. It's fine if your page stops growing at 1920 pixels, but you can't expect a tablet or mobile user to fit in 1920 pixels. If your solution is "let them pinch and zoom" then you're going to lose mobile users who are a fast growing segment. Instead, your site should use CSS Media Queries to reconfigure the page depending on the size of the user's display. If done properly, you can resize the browser from desktop size to mobile size and see the transition take place. (Try it with The Boston Globe's website.)
The problem isn't all CO2. Of course, if we somehow magically removed all CO2 from our atmosphere we'd have horrible consequences. The problem is that there are vast stores of carbon that have been sequestered out of the atmosphere in the form of coal and oil. We're taking that carbon and putting it back into the atmosphere (as CO2) in massive amounts. The plants can't consume the CO2 as quickly as we burn it and even if they did, that's not taking the CO2 out of the system. You don't introduce a massive amount of something into the climate without having repercussions.
Nobody's saying that we should remove ALL CO2 from the atmosphere. Just that we shouldn't be pushing so much of it into the atmosphere from underground (*not* in the atmosphere for millions of years) sources. Just because it's natural for some to be there doesn't mean a ton more will have no consequences.
Easy to say right now. Harder to say if you are the one who is facing someone who has access to the DNS records of all of your websites (and has locked you out) or (even worse) a mugger with a gun pointed at you.
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Why do I think Ken Ham will "win" this debate? Well, not because I think Ken will prove conclusively that Evolution is wrong and Creationism is right. I don't believe that at all. Evolution has a ton of evidence supporting it and Ken would have to pull out an Everest-sized mountain of hard evidence (*not* coming from "the Bible says...") to even come close to proving Creationism.
The reason Ken will "win" is because when Creationists "debunking" Evolution, they don't require proof. They spew a talking point or three and then declare victory. Those supporting Evolution, however, are careful to lay out all of the facts and supporting evidence. This takes more time than spewing talking points. Ken will rattle off a dozen talking points and Bill will only have time to tackle one or two. Of course, given enough time, he could refute every talking point Ken Ham spews, but I'm sure Ken can toss out the talking points faster than Bill Nye can refute them merely because refuting with evidence takes more time than making a baseless accusation.
So unless Ken speaks in slow-motion and Bill Nye channels an auctioneer, Ken Ham will "win" the debate.
If we take this concept to the "ideal", you shouldn't have drivers cutting over at the last minute because they didn't realize their exit was there. You will have your destination programmed in, your car will move over when it is time to, and will make the exit without driving across multiple lanes and possibly causing accidents.
I see nothing wrong with this ideal of everyone having a self-driving car. I do, however, see a problem with the government requiring (and possibly tracking) vehicle to vehicle communication. Maybe setting some standards so that we don't get Toyotas only talking to Toyotas while Fords only talk to Fords, but not requiring it or having it set up in such a way that they can monitor it "for our safety."
You never cause the car in front of you to have an accident. Always wait until you pass that car and THEN make it have an accident.
I need to get a new laptop and, for various reasons, Windows 8 is the OS I'm going to wind up with. The first thing I'm going to do is install Classic Shell, Start8, or one of the other third party tools to get my "normal Windows" start menu/desktop setup back.
Not to get off-track, but this is exactly why I'm opposed to the Bill Gates Foundation-backed InBloom. They are taking data from students (including names, addresses, medical information, test scores, etc) and uploading it to an Amazon Cloud Server for schools to access. Because "the cloud" has never been hacked and companies never sell access to valuable data to third parties, right? (And, no, you're not allowed to opt your child out of the InBloom data upload. Parents have been told we have no say in the matter.)
As an addendum, that was with movies. Games, arguably, have a lower "shelf life" than movies do. You might purchase the DVD or Blu-Ray of a movie from 1989, but you aren't likely to purchase a copy of a game from 1989.
Exactly. Even if it comes down to earning money on works, long copyrights don't make sense. For example, here's a list of movies released 25 years ago in 1989 by US box office results: http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=1989,1989 Obviously, some of those (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) might still be making the companies some money while others (Fletch Lives) probably aren't. Even the movies making money are probably not making huge amounts.
Of the 3,166 titles that IMDB lists, how many are still actively making a decent amount of money for the companies that own them? If it is a small fraction, then why are we holding back Public Domain status on the vast majority just so a few movies can draw in a couple more bucks?
Are there sensors that can measure height? If so, you can really mess with them by hanging the badge from the ceiling. "Employee seems to enjoy clinging to the ceiling for the entire workday."
I can see the reports now:
Employee report #27135: "Employee arrived in the office, turned on their computer, and then crammed himself into a small drawer in his desk for the duration of the work day. He didn't move during this time except to climb out for meetings. Employee emerged from his desk at the end of the day."
Employee report #27136: "After speaking with four other employees in an energetic fashion regarding the new tracking systems, these employees went to the restroom and proceeded to flush themselves down the toilet. It might be worth noting that, following this, unknown individuals sent e-mails from these employees computers insulting their managers, most of HR, and the company executives. These unknown individuals then noted that the flushed employees had quit. As the unknown individuals didn't seem to be wearing tracking badges, it is not known what happened to them next. They either left or are living in the ventilation ducts."
And actually, for those of us who have trouble remembering faces and names, this could be even more dangerous. If someone comes up to me and starts acting like they know me, my default response is "they know you and you can't remember them... act like you remember them until you actually do." This would only be reinforced by them bringing up topics that only people close to me might know (wife's name, kids' names, etc.). Using this false familiarity, they could keep me guessing and off balance enough to get information from me that I might not otherwise give to a stranger. Information that could be used against me in some manner. (For example, if I'm going on vacation soon - which would be the perfect time to rob my house.)
To clarify my original post, I'd definitely be against this for privacy reasons. (Of course, if the face matches against a FaceBook profile that is available to anyone to read, complete with tons of photos, then it's less of a privacy issue and more of a "lock your Facebook page down" issue.) However, I can see where the technology behind it could be applied to good use. I'd be all for a "snap a photo, associate a name, and keep it in a local account" version of this. You could even keep it on a cloud server tied to a user's account (so you wouldn't need to store the images locally and you wouldn't "forget" everyone if your device broke).
On one hand, the potential for abuse is huge.
On the other hand, no more seeing someone, forgetting their name, having them strike up a conversation with you, and then having to dig through your memory to try to remember who they are (failing miserably) while acting like you know exactly who they are.
I'd add that Amazon stubbornly refuses to release a Prime app for Android. They have for iOS and Kindle Android, but no general Android. While their streaming selection might be somewhat competitive with Netflix at times (what one lacks the other sometimes has), I'm limited with Prime. I can watch Netflix via my Roku box, our Android tablets, computers, or even our phones. Amazon Prime, we can only watch via our Roku box (with a worse interface than Netflix) and on our computers. Were Amazon to release their Prime video streaming app for Android, it might mean we'd watch more videos that way.
He could bring David Cameron's administration down with two words... Ok, not two. Six.
"Don't you think he looks tired?"
Worked for Harriet Jones.
If you're replying to a post about a Time Lord's Charter, you're supposed to say "I say we take off and EXTERMINATE the entire site from orbit."
That $140,000 is per instance of copyright infringement. Even though they are lumping the cases together, they are still claiming that each John Doe engaged in at least one instance of copyright infringement.
What this does do is increase the costs of the person suing for copyright infringement. Before they needed to file one case against 100 John Does, argue their case, collect the 100 names, and then send the "settle or else" threat letters. If this ruling gets applied to all cases, they will need to file 100 different cases - each against 1 John Doe. In each case, they will need to present evidence to get the name and then send their settlement letters. The costs involved just skyrocketed to the point that suing people for non-commercial file sharing (as opposed to, say, selling movies to people online when you don't have the permission to) will be a money-losing proposition.
The law is horrible in many ways. The three that stand out to me:
1) Municipalities are allowed to engage in broadband efforts ONLY if 9 out of 10 homes in a census block have no broadband. This means that the big ISPs can wire up 11% of homes and call it a day. The other 89%? Too bad, but you guys aren't profitable enough to care about.
2) Satellite and mobile is counted as broadband. Never mind that satellite would be hideously expensive or that mobile can have tiny caps compared to wired broadband. In fact, it doesn't matter if the ISP is going to charge you $200 a month for 1GB of access. That's considered available access and you can't launch a municipal broadband effort.
3) This bill was literally written by the big ISPs who don't want competition from Google Fiber and municipal broadband. So the cries of "this will increase competition" are out-and-out lies. This is all about protecting the profits of the big ISPs by preventing municipalities from serving the non-served. The ISPs are afraid that, if municipalities are able to do this by themselves, they won't give lots of cash to Verizon, etc to build and run out networks. (Which those ISPs can then pocket, not build the networks, and lobby to keep them from having to uphold their end of the deal.)
Let's say that the best case scenario happens and they're actually able to do this. You've now got chat bots functioning as long-dead people chatting away with living people. So far so good. Of course, the technology to do this would be impressive and would attract the attention of "the big boys." How long before they get bought out by Facebook or Google (or some other company)? How much longer after that until the chat bots get monetized? Perhaps by increasing the likelihood that a chat bot would mention a specific brand name instead of a general product that the formerly living person was interested in or perhaps by just blurting out random product callouts. Even if the monetization doesn't happen, how long until the entire project is folded into some other group and the chat bots get shut down for good?
Even if they manage to do this, I don't see this lasting for long enough for many of the participants to actually die and be "resurrected" as chat bots.
The only good thing with IE in regards to this is you can use conditional comments to make your code work in IE (or even in a specific version of IE) while leaving your "good for all other browsers" code clean of IE-fixes. Of course, it would be better if IE worked as nicely as Chrome or Firefox, but since that's not an option (especially for old versions), at least there are conditional comments.
Not to Godwin this thread, but I see the same thing with people referencing Nazis or The Holocaust. Whenever someone wants to refer to someone as being bad, they call them a Nazi. Obama is doing X that the GOP doesn't like? Call him a Nazi. The GOP advances policy Y that the Democrats don't like? Say that this is the Holocaust all over again. It's all rhetoric, of course. Neither side is really marching people en masse to their deaths. Neither side wants to see the obliteration of an entire group of people by violent means. However, Nazi and Holocaust are universally recognized as "Very Bad Things" and if you can tie something to those in people's minds, you can gather opposition to them. It's abusing the memory of those horrible events for political gain. In the process, it weakens the memory of how bad they were and polarizes the debate into an "us vs. them" mentality with no room for compromise.
Which is even sadder because the media, if properly done, can be an effective check on government power and corruption. Fighting these requires people to be informed. The government's obviously not going to inform us of their abuses so we need someone else to. The media SHOULD be finding abuses like these and bringing them to light. Instead, we get an interview with a member of Congress on the subject of the NSA cut short because there's "breaking news" about Bieber. Unless he had just revealed that he's an alien from another planet - complete with iron-clad proof - those priorities were seriously out of whack.
We NEED the media for society to function in a healthy manner. We just need the media to act properly and they for the most part aren't. There might be pockets of actual journalism left, but they are increasingly being pushed aside by OMG BIEBER journalism and "We'll skew the facts to fit your already established political views so you don't need to think" journalism.
Any designer who tried to argue with me that their page *needed* to be 1920 pixels wide would get a long-winded diatribe about mobile devices and responsive design. It's fine if your page stops growing at 1920 pixels, but you can't expect a tablet or mobile user to fit in 1920 pixels. If your solution is "let them pinch and zoom" then you're going to lose mobile users who are a fast growing segment. Instead, your site should use CSS Media Queries to reconfigure the page depending on the size of the user's display. If done properly, you can resize the browser from desktop size to mobile size and see the transition take place. (Try it with The Boston Globe's website.)
The problem isn't all CO2. Of course, if we somehow magically removed all CO2 from our atmosphere we'd have horrible consequences. The problem is that there are vast stores of carbon that have been sequestered out of the atmosphere in the form of coal and oil. We're taking that carbon and putting it back into the atmosphere (as CO2) in massive amounts. The plants can't consume the CO2 as quickly as we burn it and even if they did, that's not taking the CO2 out of the system. You don't introduce a massive amount of something into the climate without having repercussions.
Nobody's saying that we should remove ALL CO2 from the atmosphere. Just that we shouldn't be pushing so much of it into the atmosphere from underground (*not* in the atmosphere for millions of years) sources. Just because it's natural for some to be there doesn't mean a ton more will have no consequences.
And frames. We need to add more frames. If we don't use lots of frames, how will people tell where the various sections of our website are?
Easy to say right now. Harder to say if you are the one who is facing someone who has access to the DNS records of all of your websites (and has locked you out) or (even worse) a mugger with a gun pointed at you.