We also have seen a rise in glorifying "anti-science." Whether it be from the "we don't vaccinate because we don't support big pharma so we use homeopathy instead" crowd or from the "evolution can't be true because in Genesis the bible says the Earth was created 6,000 years ago" crowd. Both sides put down scientists as elite, "intellectual" (in an attempt to turn that into a bad term), and part of the "status quo" that must be overturned. If these groups got their way, all scientific progress (at least in the US) would grind to a halt. So any pro-science person who hits celebrity status helps to push against the anti-science tide.
I'd rather people listen to Carl Sagan or Niel deGrasse Tyson for their scientific advice than Dr. Oz, Jenny McCarthy, Michele Bachmann, or any of the shockingly large numbers of anti-science politicians.
Talk about lost sales. This has the potential to produce a work of great art years before it is produced thus depriving the artist of income before he produces it!
Then again, copyright only covers infringement AFTER someone creates the work. There's a loophole in preemptive infringement.
That said, most primary and secondary CS teachers are way behind the times on lots of technology, and can often teach material that is no longer relevant.
One of my college computer science professors told our class something that stuck with me ever since. He said that what he was teaching us would be obsolete by the time we graduated, but the concepts behind it would endure. Sure enough, I don't use a line of specific code that he taught me - or even the language that we learned at the time - but knowing the basic concepts behind it means I can pick up new computer languages quickly.
There should be constant updates to Windows? This might work if you're a 5 person shop, but what if you're managing the IT resources of a 10,000 person company? Upgrading Windows means you need to make sure you're not breaking a business-critical application. If your Windows update will break this, you need to either 1) upgrade that application first, 2) migrate to a compatible application, or 3) somehow run this application in a VM. This might be a challenge if there is one application to consider, but when your organization gets large, there might be dozens of these applications to consider. Then there are employee training issues to consider. (Especially if you were moving to Windows 8's new UI.) The IT manager who just says "we're updating to the new version of Windows and too bad if it causes issues" will quickly find his users storming his office demanding answers as to why critical business systems don't work anymore. I suspect said IT manager would also quickly find himself searching for a new job.
I had to get Windows 8 with my new laptop. (There was no "Windows 7" option and I wasn't ready to make the Linux switch.) The first thing I did was to install Classic Start Menu on it to do away with the Metro User Interface. Now I have my laptop looking as similar as possible to Windows 7. There's no reason why this couldn't have been a built-in option except for the fact that someone at Microsoft thought "we need to have one UI across phones, tablets, desktops, and laptops!" There is NO reason to unify the UI like this. What works in a phone/tablet will be horrible on a desktop/laptop and vice versa. (Don't even get me started on Windows Server 2012 using a modified Metro look.)
Just as people have a right to offend, people who are offended have a right to protest what offends them. The difference is that the protests of that video would have consisted of angry posts online and boycotts, not shootings. Declaring you are offended and "fighting back" with words is fine. Fighting back by killing those who offend you isn't fine.
But what if you're selling a product that, because of lack of regulation, negatively impacts a competitor's product? You don't have to support it because YOUR customers aren't impacted. Your competitor might not even be able to track the cause back to your service, but if they do what will be the priority of fixing your product so that your competitor isn't impacted?
One might say that lawsuits would fix this, but what if it is Verizon or AT&T negatively impacting Some Tiny ISP? The tiny ISP isn't going to have the legal resources to battle with the giants and (without some kind of government intervention) might have to go out of business because the big boys don't care who they stomp on.
No, the argument would be more along the lines of: Amazon pays UPS to ship a package. UPS hands it over to the local post office to deliver. The local post office calls Amazon and tells them that Amazon can either pay them money directly or the package delivery will get purposefully slowed down. Meanwhile, packages from Local Post Office Shopping Dot Com - which competes with Amazon - gets instant free next day shipping without needing to pay anything because the local post office wants to promote their services above competing ones and drive up the price of competing services.
Some people believe, erroneously, that putting material on a public web site voids the copyright. However, in order for the web to work, clearly there must be some form of implicit licence when you put material on a public site or no-one would be allowed to lawfully download it so they can view it.
There's an implicit license that you can view the articles and download everything in the course of viewing the articles. Saving a copy for yourself (say by printing to PDF) would be valid fair use. So would quoting a section of the article and linking to it. However, copying the entire article and posting it without even giving the courtesy of attribution is bad form and major copyright infringement. (It could be considered plagiarism too if the posting made it look like he was the author given the lack of attribution, but I don't know if there are any criminal penalties for plagiarism.)
I (reasonably) suspect willful commercial infringement by someone who (IMO) has a broken moral compass and a natural talent for manipulating the justice system.
Not to mention a view of copyright that essentially says "Nobody can copy my stuff without my permission. Everyone else's stuff is fair game for me to copy, though, as I see fit."
Last I heard, it was already blowing up. Instead of rescinding the laws, however, they've doubled down and tried to make it mandatory for Google to link to them. In other words, they want to force Google to pay these sites and Google won't be able to drop them no matter what.
I intentionally steered clear of the "making fire" argument specifically because I know that there is some disagreement as to whether or not this is the reason why electricity isn't allowed. Some call completing the circuit "building" and thus prohibited under that category of work.
Years ago, I was actually religious enough that I did this myself. Today, I've scaled this back to simply not doing anything work-related. (No computers, phone, etc.) It's also morphed from a 100% religious observance to about 25% religious/75% forcing myself to take a break and spend quality time with my family.
The big question is how "small" are the quakes now and how long would the large one have taken had they not started fracking in that area?
If the small quakes cause property damage and the big quake would have taken place a couple thousand years from now, then I doubt that this would be considered a good trade-off.
I wouldn't blame them. People who use speakerphones and shout into them in public places are being rude, but aren't doing anything illegal.
Rudness =/= Illegal behavior
However, I'd consider listening in on phone conversations without a warrant because one of the parties may have been walking down a public street* to be illegal.
* Or in his car on a public street, or in a restaurant near a public street, or in a home/office near a public street, etc. All of which might not be in public places but apparently are "close enough" as far as the FBI is concerned.
This is interesting as Judaism has the reverse issue. There's no biblical prohibition against using electricity on Shabbat, but Orthodox Rabbis have decided that completing an electrical circuit is "work" -- which itself is prohibited - and thus using electricity is prohibited. (Conservative and Reform rabbis allow electricity use.) However, since non-Jews aren't held to this prohibition, Orthodox Jews can ask a non-Jew to perform an action (turn on a light, turn on the AC) that the Orthodox Jew himself wouldn't be allowed to do. Many times, it seems as though Orthodox rabbis take some new technology and try to deal with it by saying "This is like X which is prohibited in this manner" no matter how tenuous the comparison.
Just to add to your comment, during the pre-9/11 days, standing up to the terrorists risked injury or death. Sitting quietly virtually guaranteed you'd emerge unharmed.
The 9/11 terrorists exploited this mindset but that's a one time deal. If some terrorists were to try to take over a plane tomorrow, the passengers wouldn't just sit quietly since now sitting quietly equals certain death. When one option is certain death, fighting back is a better option even if you might die in the process.
If cocoa flavanols prove medically beneficial, we can figure out how to synthetically produce them in a dosed format. You might not be able to get health benefits by eating a chocolate bar, but perhaps one day your doctor will prescribe two flavanol pills every morning to treat your condition. This is how much of medicine functions. First, we notice something (in nature or lab produced) that has a beneficial effect. Next, we refine that substance and figure out a dosing system for it to maximize the effect and minimize any side effects.
Having knowledge about something and having technology are two different things (though the latter usually does rely on the former). An ancient people (Indian or from somewhere else) might have known that lightning was bolts of electricity and not The Great God Of Lightning smiting nonbelievers. However, developing the tools to turn knowledge of electricity into electrical power - even for one building (say, the ruler's palace) - wouldn't have been achievable by them. Not without leaving major traces.
As for how they learned about the layers of the atmosphere? Maybe some of them climbed a few tall mountains and noticed that the air near the top was different than the air at the bottom. Their "atmosphere layers" might not be the same as our atmosphere layers. You don't need to travel into space to figure out atmosphere layers.
Finally, I am thinking. And I think that it is much more likely that stories of the gods battling in flying chariots originated to explain why thunder booms than it is that an ancient society had advanced-style (or even early 20th century style) aircraft. What would they make the aircraft out of? Where would be the industry to support developing these planes? Is there any historical evidence of this? And no, one written account doesn't equal proof. Like I said in my original post, if it did then some early 20th century sci-fi could prove that we had spaceships in the early 1900s.
All that is happening here is that the text is being cherry-picked and interpreted in *just* the right way to "prove" that ancient Indians were actually plane-building-space-travelers with plastic surgery skills far beyond ours. And yet, this technology - and all evidence of it - vanished save for this one book. The level of technology that these claims say the ancient Indians had is extraordinary. As such, it'll take more than passages from a book to convince me that they had anywhere near it.
To some degree, I can accept "lost technology." A claim that the Indians had some metallurgical technique that was lost and rediscovered by Europeans? I can buy that. I'd still require proof, but I can accept that this might happen. Primitive glider-type airplanes developed by Indians thousands of years ago? This is getting more far fetched and requires more proof, but perhaps someone there made one glider that worked for one flight. Advanced planes with the capability for space-flight to other planets? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. If you want to prove this, you'll need a lot more than "it's written down in some text somewhere." (If written text counts as proof then a thousand years from now there will be proof that Americans had galaxy-wide space-flight capability in the 20th Century thanks to some sci-fi stories.)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Indians a thousand years ago having modern or even futuristic technology that was lost without a trace save for writing in one book (which might be open to interpretation) is *NOT* extraordinary proof.
A lot of supermarkets (at least near me) are also doing online ordering. You order and pay online, stop by the store, and pick up your groceries. (A store employee gathers them together for you.) For an extra fee, some grocery stores will even drive the groceries to you.
Not to mention that a "content providers pay for access" scheme would benefit large companies over small ones. maybe Netflix would be able to afford it, but would NEW_VIDEO_STARTUP with their disruptive technology?
Over time, the only options would be entrenched businesses. Technology would stagnate, prices would rise, and service would suffer.
And as for economics, in undeveloped countries, a large number of kids is economically advantageous, as they serve as a work force for whatever business the family is engaged in.
Not to mention the health care situation in undeveloped countries. In America, a baby born today has an excellent chance of reaching adulthood. In a developing country, that chance can be greatly reduced. If your baby only has a 1 in 10 chance of reaching adulthood, you need to have 10 kids just to make sure you have one surviving descendant. Improving health care in these countries eliminates the need for huge families.
Unfortunately, this need has become entrenched in religion - like many other things which were good ideas at the time. So it might take awhile for the "don't need huge families" to translate into "don't actually have huge families."
While you're eliminating all security flaws, make sure you take care of the PEBKAC problem. No matter how secure your OS and software, an insecure user will result in the system being compromised.
"What? Windows is calling me because my computer has viruses in it? Sure, I'll run this tool that this stranger-who-called-me told me to run to fix this."
"Ooh. Someone I've never talked to e-mailed me a file that contains naked photos of $CELEBRITY. Looks like I just need to disable my anti-virus and firewall first. No problem there. Those things were too annoying anyway."
First of all, "pumped up 4x4"? I drive a sedan. It comfortably seats 4 but is by no stretch of the imagination big.
Secondly, I did mention that this 15 minutes was a best case of "the next bus arrives just as I drop my son off." In the real world, this would likely never happen. First, we would need to wait for the initial bus. It looks like these run every 40 minutes. We might get lucky and arrive just in time to catch the bus or we might miss it and need to wait another 40 minutes. Let's split the difference and say we wait 20 minutes. Then, after dropping my son off, I'd need to wait for another bus that runs every 30 minutes. Again, I might miss it or just make it so let's add 15 minutes of waiting. Suddenly, that "only 15 minutes more" has turned into 50 minutes more. I could make a 20 minute car trip or a 70 minute bus ride. Add in the fact that my son needs to be dropped off for school 15 minutes before I need to be in to work and it should be clear why the bus just isn't an option for me.
Slashdot Mirror
We also have seen a rise in glorifying "anti-science." Whether it be from the "we don't vaccinate because we don't support big pharma so we use homeopathy instead" crowd or from the "evolution can't be true because in Genesis the bible says the Earth was created 6,000 years ago" crowd. Both sides put down scientists as elite, "intellectual" (in an attempt to turn that into a bad term), and part of the "status quo" that must be overturned. If these groups got their way, all scientific progress (at least in the US) would grind to a halt. So any pro-science person who hits celebrity status helps to push against the anti-science tide.
I'd rather people listen to Carl Sagan or Niel deGrasse Tyson for their scientific advice than Dr. Oz, Jenny McCarthy, Michele Bachmann, or any of the shockingly large numbers of anti-science politicians.
Talk about lost sales. This has the potential to produce a work of great art years before it is produced thus depriving the artist of income before he produces it!
Then again, copyright only covers infringement AFTER someone creates the work. There's a loophole in preemptive infringement.
One of my college computer science professors told our class something that stuck with me ever since. He said that what he was teaching us would be obsolete by the time we graduated, but the concepts behind it would endure. Sure enough, I don't use a line of specific code that he taught me - or even the language that we learned at the time - but knowing the basic concepts behind it means I can pick up new computer languages quickly.
There should be constant updates to Windows? This might work if you're a 5 person shop, but what if you're managing the IT resources of a 10,000 person company? Upgrading Windows means you need to make sure you're not breaking a business-critical application. If your Windows update will break this, you need to either 1) upgrade that application first, 2) migrate to a compatible application, or 3) somehow run this application in a VM. This might be a challenge if there is one application to consider, but when your organization gets large, there might be dozens of these applications to consider. Then there are employee training issues to consider. (Especially if you were moving to Windows 8's new UI.) The IT manager who just says "we're updating to the new version of Windows and too bad if it causes issues" will quickly find his users storming his office demanding answers as to why critical business systems don't work anymore. I suspect said IT manager would also quickly find himself searching for a new job.
I had to get Windows 8 with my new laptop. (There was no "Windows 7" option and I wasn't ready to make the Linux switch.) The first thing I did was to install Classic Start Menu on it to do away with the Metro User Interface. Now I have my laptop looking as similar as possible to Windows 7. There's no reason why this couldn't have been a built-in option except for the fact that someone at Microsoft thought "we need to have one UI across phones, tablets, desktops, and laptops!" There is NO reason to unify the UI like this. What works in a phone/tablet will be horrible on a desktop/laptop and vice versa. (Don't even get me started on Windows Server 2012 using a modified Metro look.)
Just as people have a right to offend, people who are offended have a right to protest what offends them. The difference is that the protests of that video would have consisted of angry posts online and boycotts, not shootings. Declaring you are offended and "fighting back" with words is fine. Fighting back by killing those who offend you isn't fine.
But what if you're selling a product that, because of lack of regulation, negatively impacts a competitor's product? You don't have to support it because YOUR customers aren't impacted. Your competitor might not even be able to track the cause back to your service, but if they do what will be the priority of fixing your product so that your competitor isn't impacted?
One might say that lawsuits would fix this, but what if it is Verizon or AT&T negatively impacting Some Tiny ISP? The tiny ISP isn't going to have the legal resources to battle with the giants and (without some kind of government intervention) might have to go out of business because the big boys don't care who they stomp on.
No, the argument would be more along the lines of: Amazon pays UPS to ship a package. UPS hands it over to the local post office to deliver. The local post office calls Amazon and tells them that Amazon can either pay them money directly or the package delivery will get purposefully slowed down. Meanwhile, packages from Local Post Office Shopping Dot Com - which competes with Amazon - gets instant free next day shipping without needing to pay anything because the local post office wants to promote their services above competing ones and drive up the price of competing services.
There's an implicit license that you can view the articles and download everything in the course of viewing the articles. Saving a copy for yourself (say by printing to PDF) would be valid fair use. So would quoting a section of the article and linking to it. However, copying the entire article and posting it without even giving the courtesy of attribution is bad form and major copyright infringement. (It could be considered plagiarism too if the posting made it look like he was the author given the lack of attribution, but I don't know if there are any criminal penalties for plagiarism.)
Not to mention a view of copyright that essentially says "Nobody can copy my stuff without my permission. Everyone else's stuff is fair game for me to copy, though, as I see fit."
Last I heard, it was already blowing up. Instead of rescinding the laws, however, they've doubled down and tried to make it mandatory for Google to link to them. In other words, they want to force Google to pay these sites and Google won't be able to drop them no matter what.
I intentionally steered clear of the "making fire" argument specifically because I know that there is some disagreement as to whether or not this is the reason why electricity isn't allowed. Some call completing the circuit "building" and thus prohibited under that category of work.
Years ago, I was actually religious enough that I did this myself. Today, I've scaled this back to simply not doing anything work-related. (No computers, phone, etc.) It's also morphed from a 100% religious observance to about 25% religious/75% forcing myself to take a break and spend quality time with my family.
The big question is how "small" are the quakes now and how long would the large one have taken had they not started fracking in that area?
If the small quakes cause property damage and the big quake would have taken place a couple thousand years from now, then I doubt that this would be considered a good trade-off.
I wouldn't blame them. People who use speakerphones and shout into them in public places are being rude, but aren't doing anything illegal.
Rudness =/= Illegal behavior
However, I'd consider listening in on phone conversations without a warrant because one of the parties may have been walking down a public street* to be illegal.
* Or in his car on a public street, or in a restaurant near a public street, or in a home/office near a public street, etc. All of which might not be in public places but apparently are "close enough" as far as the FBI is concerned.
This is interesting as Judaism has the reverse issue. There's no biblical prohibition against using electricity on Shabbat, but Orthodox Rabbis have decided that completing an electrical circuit is "work" -- which itself is prohibited - and thus using electricity is prohibited. (Conservative and Reform rabbis allow electricity use.) However, since non-Jews aren't held to this prohibition, Orthodox Jews can ask a non-Jew to perform an action (turn on a light, turn on the AC) that the Orthodox Jew himself wouldn't be allowed to do. Many times, it seems as though Orthodox rabbis take some new technology and try to deal with it by saying "This is like X which is prohibited in this manner" no matter how tenuous the comparison.
Just to add to your comment, during the pre-9/11 days, standing up to the terrorists risked injury or death. Sitting quietly virtually guaranteed you'd emerge unharmed.
The 9/11 terrorists exploited this mindset but that's a one time deal. If some terrorists were to try to take over a plane tomorrow, the passengers wouldn't just sit quietly since now sitting quietly equals certain death. When one option is certain death, fighting back is a better option even if you might die in the process.
If cocoa flavanols prove medically beneficial, we can figure out how to synthetically produce them in a dosed format. You might not be able to get health benefits by eating a chocolate bar, but perhaps one day your doctor will prescribe two flavanol pills every morning to treat your condition. This is how much of medicine functions. First, we notice something (in nature or lab produced) that has a beneficial effect. Next, we refine that substance and figure out a dosing system for it to maximize the effect and minimize any side effects.
Having knowledge about something and having technology are two different things (though the latter usually does rely on the former). An ancient people (Indian or from somewhere else) might have known that lightning was bolts of electricity and not The Great God Of Lightning smiting nonbelievers. However, developing the tools to turn knowledge of electricity into electrical power - even for one building (say, the ruler's palace) - wouldn't have been achievable by them. Not without leaving major traces.
As for how they learned about the layers of the atmosphere? Maybe some of them climbed a few tall mountains and noticed that the air near the top was different than the air at the bottom. Their "atmosphere layers" might not be the same as our atmosphere layers. You don't need to travel into space to figure out atmosphere layers.
Finally, I am thinking. And I think that it is much more likely that stories of the gods battling in flying chariots originated to explain why thunder booms than it is that an ancient society had advanced-style (or even early 20th century style) aircraft. What would they make the aircraft out of? Where would be the industry to support developing these planes? Is there any historical evidence of this? And no, one written account doesn't equal proof. Like I said in my original post, if it did then some early 20th century sci-fi could prove that we had spaceships in the early 1900s.
All that is happening here is that the text is being cherry-picked and interpreted in *just* the right way to "prove" that ancient Indians were actually plane-building-space-travelers with plastic surgery skills far beyond ours. And yet, this technology - and all evidence of it - vanished save for this one book. The level of technology that these claims say the ancient Indians had is extraordinary. As such, it'll take more than passages from a book to convince me that they had anywhere near it.
To some degree, I can accept "lost technology." A claim that the Indians had some metallurgical technique that was lost and rediscovered by Europeans? I can buy that. I'd still require proof, but I can accept that this might happen. Primitive glider-type airplanes developed by Indians thousands of years ago? This is getting more far fetched and requires more proof, but perhaps someone there made one glider that worked for one flight. Advanced planes with the capability for space-flight to other planets? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. If you want to prove this, you'll need a lot more than "it's written down in some text somewhere." (If written text counts as proof then a thousand years from now there will be proof that Americans had galaxy-wide space-flight capability in the 20th Century thanks to some sci-fi stories.)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Indians a thousand years ago having modern or even futuristic technology that was lost without a trace save for writing in one book (which might be open to interpretation) is *NOT* extraordinary proof.
A lot of supermarkets (at least near me) are also doing online ordering. You order and pay online, stop by the store, and pick up your groceries. (A store employee gathers them together for you.) For an extra fee, some grocery stores will even drive the groceries to you.
Not to mention that a "content providers pay for access" scheme would benefit large companies over small ones. maybe Netflix would be able to afford it, but would NEW_VIDEO_STARTUP with their disruptive technology?
Over time, the only options would be entrenched businesses. Technology would stagnate, prices would rise, and service would suffer.
Not to mention the health care situation in undeveloped countries. In America, a baby born today has an excellent chance of reaching adulthood. In a developing country, that chance can be greatly reduced. If your baby only has a 1 in 10 chance of reaching adulthood, you need to have 10 kids just to make sure you have one surviving descendant. Improving health care in these countries eliminates the need for huge families.
Unfortunately, this need has become entrenched in religion - like many other things which were good ideas at the time. So it might take awhile for the "don't need huge families" to translate into "don't actually have huge families."
While you're eliminating all security flaws, make sure you take care of the PEBKAC problem. No matter how secure your OS and software, an insecure user will result in the system being compromised.
"What? Windows is calling me because my computer has viruses in it? Sure, I'll run this tool that this stranger-who-called-me told me to run to fix this."
"Ooh. Someone I've never talked to e-mailed me a file that contains naked photos of $CELEBRITY. Looks like I just need to disable my anti-virus and firewall first. No problem there. Those things were too annoying anyway."
First of all, "pumped up 4x4"? I drive a sedan. It comfortably seats 4 but is by no stretch of the imagination big.
Secondly, I did mention that this 15 minutes was a best case of "the next bus arrives just as I drop my son off." In the real world, this would likely never happen. First, we would need to wait for the initial bus. It looks like these run every 40 minutes. We might get lucky and arrive just in time to catch the bus or we might miss it and need to wait another 40 minutes. Let's split the difference and say we wait 20 minutes. Then, after dropping my son off, I'd need to wait for another bus that runs every 30 minutes. Again, I might miss it or just make it so let's add 15 minutes of waiting. Suddenly, that "only 15 minutes more" has turned into 50 minutes more. I could make a 20 minute car trip or a 70 minute bus ride. Add in the fact that my son needs to be dropped off for school 15 minutes before I need to be in to work and it should be clear why the bus just isn't an option for me.