Does this mean that these cells were not harvested from an aborted fetus?
Here's the huge misconception about embryonic stem cells: They are not from aborted fetuses.
Embryonic stem cells from from blastocysts (on the order of 50-100 cells) that are derived from in vitro fertilization attempts where the fertilized eggs are to be discarded. It is one of those issues that has been clouded with talk of abortion (usually by opponents ESC research), and thus reasonable discussion is frequently overwhelmed by hysterical chatter that doesn't even relate to the topic.
If you are cool with IVF, then there is little reason to be upset about ESC research. If you aren't cool with ESC research, then it seems illogical to be ok with IVF. Abortion really does not enter into the discussion.
The GGP was partly correct. The act of bringing out a line of tools intending to compete with high-end professional tools, means they created a new, professional level line of tools. The GP suggests that the B&D you buy and the DeWalt you buy were the same, save for packaging. That is not true. That B&D Industrial failed as B&D Industrial is a testament to the poor image B&D has amongst professionals specifically, and the importance of image generally.
Should tell you something that the "controversial" claim is based on a Free Rpublic article. The guy who they are using as a reference, is pretty well established as one of the leading anti-global warming proponents. A selection of, Dr. Patrick Michaels _scholarly_ articles from his website at UVA: Michaels, P.J., and R.C. Balling, Jr. 1999. Global warming: The political science of exaggeration. Prometheus 1, 63-70. Hansen, J.E. and P.J. Michaels. 2000. AARST Science Policy Forum, New York. Social Epistemology 14:133-186 Michaels, P.J., and R.C. Balling, Jr. 2000. The Satanic Gases. Cato Books, Washington DC. 234 pp.
Additionally, his research interests on that UVA page (where he is the CATO Institute Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies) include:
The core issue over the next ten years will not be "How much will the climate warm?" but, rather, "Why did it warm so little?" My research also leads me to believe that the next decade will see the emergence of a paradigm of "robust earth," as opposed to the fashionable "fragility" concept. The papers listed below provide some evidence for these observations. It is entirely possible that human influence on the atmosphere is not necessarily deleterious and that it is simply another component of the dynamic planet.
Ok, so let's look at 'Tech Central Station,' the location hosting the article the free republic is referencing. Dr. Michaels articles on there include: Stepping up the Pressure:The all-out, last-ditch effort by global warming alarmists to find any excuse to compel the US to take action. Tip of the Iceberg:Yet another predictable distortion. Conjecture vs. Science: Are the editors of Science are more interested in conjecture than in firm scientific findings?
And, incidentally, as stated on the About TCS webpage, 'Tech Central Station' is published by DCI Group, LLC. And, DCI LLC is "top Republican lobby and PR firm associated with telemarketing company Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI and the direct-mail firm FYI Messaging. The DCI group publishes the website Tech Central Station and has close ties to the George W. Bush administration." according to Source watch.
This is pretty clearly an guy who does not buy into global warming as a concept, despite near universal agreement in the scientific community. To hear him proclaim 'no its not' arguments to scientific articles in both Nature and Science seems to carry rather little weight...particularly when he is publishing on a clearly partisan website. Write a Science/Nature (or hell PNAS, whatever) article refuting this, have it peer-reviewed and then there might be some reason to talk. Until that point, this is little more than personal ideaology posing as "science."
. But those cable/DSL lines are private property, paid for and owned by private companies.
Well, sort of as those lines have been subsidized by gov't involvement for decades. Rights-of-way grants, etc etc all to allow for universal access to the services. As a previous poster noted, the issue here is that telephone and cable lines tend towards a natural monopoly. Which is fine, but then allowing the line owners and the ISPs to be the same entity will thusly also tend toward monoploy. It seems to me that separating the two, regulating the line owners heavily and regulating the ISPs much less vigorously would be the best tactic. Though, if i'm nor mistaken that seems to be exactly the opposite of what this latest rule change does.
I would disagree with your limiting of law to tightly stated ideas, but that is really a semantic argument of little note. However, when you make the insinuate that ID is science under any conditions, I have a major beef.
For it to be actual science and to even be able to compete with evolution, it HAS to
It doesn't matter what follows the HAS to, ID is not in the realm of science. It is an origin of life question. Science does *not* touch that question, as there is simply no way to gather data on it. Evolution is not at odds with ID, they are on completely separate planes of existence. Evolution is an incredibly well-grounded theory about replicating organisms (or ideas/memes/whatever) adapting to an environment. ID is a guess as to "How did it all start?" You don't answer that question with 'evolution.' You answer it with whatever your personal belief is, and you don't worry about science disproving it anymore than you worry about science disproving your belief that ice cream is yummy.
Right. That must be why nearly noone used to get divorced at all when marriages were arranged and they only actually got to have sex *after* they were married.
Or perhaps it is that divorce is far more acceptable now than in those glorious bygone times of arranged marriage and socially accepted misogyny.
If and only if you use something, you should pay for it. That's seems like a no-brainer to me.
Welcome to society, we all pay for things we either don't use, or use far less than others. Roads. Schools. Police. Fire Departments. Paramedics. Military. TSA. Get over it, or go hole up in a log cabin and don't pay taxes.
Think about it, if you're at the grocery store and you want to buy ketchup, you're probably going to buy your favorite brand, but wouldn't you feel a little weird if that was the only brand of ketchup anyone carried?
Ok, waaay off the original topic here, but related to ketchup. There's a good reason why, when you say ketchup, the vast majority of people think 'heinz.' It's called "amplitude". Actually, to bring it back to the main topic, i suppose you can apply that concept to mp3 players as well.
From the ketchup article, amplitude is:
After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano," Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi.
So perhaps the ipod just has really good amplitude.
I agree with both your post, and the parent, but think the situation is even grayer. The parent posits that popups are too obtrusive to compare to newspapers, while you point out that adblock goes beyond popup blocking. I would argue that since (as many others have pointed out) adblock doesn't filter text ads a la google, that the situation is simply finding an appropriate compromise that website viewers find acceptable. We don't like popups, sure. But we also don't like flash ads or animated gifs, or even just garishly colored ads. Enough people have decided this that products exist to get rid of them. We have not, however, decided that google-style ads are enough of a nuisance for someone to make it easy to block them (which technically is probably trivial).
So really, Adblock makes is possible to read a newspaper with the ads that cross a certain barrier of annoyance (currently set ad banner-style ads and beyond) gone. It's really just evolution of "acceptable" advertising. Granted, this is somewhat unique in media because most forms do not allow the consumer such a level of control.
Why should you, as a taxpayer who doesn't give a rat's butt about advanced research in niche fields like Density Functional Theory, or 3+2 cyclizations, or Palladium catalyzed cross-coupling, be forced to pay for the infrastructure for the government to make this information available to you?
Because we live in a society. Because we understand that the point of research is not solely to have direct, obvious applications to everybody's life. Basic research benefits the society in many indirect ways, and this is something the vast majority of the population appreciates. That you, as a chemist don't, actually surprises me greatly. I wouldn't expect to have to give the laundry list of why basic research is good to a scientist.
I like this stuff but this is really information that should be on a subscription basis. If you like it, you'll subscribe to it and you'll fund it. If you don't like it, then you won't subscribe to it and it won't cost you any more money.
The effect of that is simply to reduce the number of research groups that can take advantage of the information. This is similar to the whole open-source software situation, in that by allowing more people to do more things through free access to information, you allow a tremendous amount of diversity in the field.
Mandatory subscription is the basis of government bloat. It then leads to graft, corruption, and money laundering.
I think you are reaching just a bit on that one. Public availability of gov't funded research == money laundering? C'mon. Does it kill baby seals and turn your children into homosexuals too?
Access to high level chemical and biological research material is hardly a basic service like education.
Debatable. Especially since a huge proportion of said research is supported in large part by gov't funds. NIH, NSF, NASA, Military, etc. etc. Even more especially since scientific research, by the nature of what it is, depends upon access to other research in the field.
But, as long as you bring it up, government funded and regulated education is a horrible scam. It's wasteful, it's ineffective, in many cases it repropagates complete falsehoods
Um, are you seriously calling public education a scam? Do you have a better alternative?
When you get right down to that, it's pretty irrational to think that there's no one out there who doesn't have every bit as much right to your house and physical property as you do. It's not their fault they weren't born into your life. Does their asserted right to your property mean that you should leave your door open to them?
That's a pretty silly rationalization, and quite unrelated to my point.
Reductio ad absurdum arguments don't hold water. Artistic expression is more inherently personal than any possession could be, and therefore is deserving of more protection than physical property under the law.
It is not reductio ad absurdum to point out that physical objects and ethereal ideas are inherently different. How personal a thing is does not enter into the discussion, how physical a thing is, though, matters quite a lot. How much a thing "deserves" protection, also is rather subjective, and unrelated to my point.
Which, to reiterate is: physical objects are, by their nature of existing as a single physical entity, different than ideas/thoughts/songs/rhyming couplets/ad slogans/etc. When I have a hammer, I have a hammer. If you take my hammer, I no longer have it, period. If you sing a song, and then I start singing it, you still have it. This physical/non-physical distinction is tremendously important, and is exactly what I described as being overlooked by many people. You can't treat the two things as the same. Ownership of physical objects is tied together with the scarcity of said objects. Once we have sci-fi duplicators, that may change, but until then phsyical ownership is inherently different than ownership of ideas. To quote Thomas Jefferson:
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
Having established that ideas (to reduce all creative expression to simple term) aren't like physical property, then it is not difficult to see that copyright is a tremendously artificial construction. Not an inherently bad one, but an artificial one. Look around at nature...property ownership occurs. It has to, since we are physical beings in a physical world. Find me a case of "idea ownership" outside the human construction. Good luck. It is even only in relatively recent human times that copyright existed.
Protection against the trivialization and/or defiling of one's life's work by someone who lacks an initial creative spark is one of the ideas inherent in the current system.
I'm not so convinced of that. In fact if you read Jefferson & Madison's discussions of the topic, they very pointedly say that the motivation is to act as encouragements.
Copyrights don't lock ideas up. The fact that a copyright exists does not preclude licensing.
That is just silly. Copyright is by definition, allowing others to do only what you want them to. That one of those things is "pay me money and ill let you do X" in no way changes the fact that copyright prevents the free distribution of ideas. It expressly locks the ideas up as much as the creator desires. You can't say a cage isn't confining just because it's a big cage (or you can buy your way out of it).
As for the rest of your post, does it not seem a little naive to think that rich, politically powerful copyright owners are going to let a "new system" crop up? Part of the problem with copyright now (IMHO) is that coporate entities are effectively immortal, and copyright was not designed with a lifes
It's another to think you have the right to absolutely any experience made possible by someone elses labor.
Actually, when you get right down to it, thinking you have a right to control what people do with "your" idea/song/invention is pretty irrational. It is only an artificial construct that allows this mode of thinking. Unfortunately, this idea has been so ingrained, that people think it is natural. It's not. We, as a society, have agreed that as an incentive to create more things, we will let creators have certain rights to their ethereal "ideas" for a certain period of time. While most of us agree this is probably a good trade-off, the balance inherent must be maintained...and it has been getting farther and farther out of whack.
It's pretty clear that even cross-cut shredders won't do the job. There are commerical ventures that charge by the volume of shredded paper for document reconstruction. Scan all the pieces (strip, cross-cut or confetti) and let imaging software piece them together. The slow step is taping the shreds to white paper for scanning. Seems that incineration, some beefy acid, or some kind of serious ink solvent would be needed to comply.
It's pretty easy to say something is obvious, after the fact. There have been plenty of "obvious" ideas, theories, hypotheses that have turned out to be just flat-out wrong. Pointing and laughing at studies that investigate questions someone considers obvious mostly just belies ignorance of how science works.
It has seemed obvious that lowering the legal BAC limit would decrease alcohol related automobile accidents. Except that it doesn't. It seems obvious that protein synthesis is catalyzed by proteins, as nearly every other biochemical reaction is. Except that it isn't, it's a ribozyme. In fact, the point about college kids drinking more than they think they do, that is actually very much up for debate. There are studies that show college kids perceptions of how much their peers drink is quite wrong on the overestimation side.
It is not difficult to rationalize observations after the fact, even reducing them to cliches. Problem is there are rationalizations and cliches that are simple, obvious, and completely opposite. Do opposite's attract, or do birds of a feather flock together?
The NYTimes separates the wheat from the chaff and that's what people will be paying for.
That's what the NYTimes hopes people will pay for. Except the Washington Post, LA Times, etc etc do about as good a job at pulling out the wheat as well...and they are still free.
I don't understand why prostitution is illegal, Selling is legal, f***ing is legal. So why isn't selling f***ing legal? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away? - George Carlin
And it becomes legal again if you just film it. Something's seriously f'ed up right there.
I am confused as to why people think other companies can't deliver on these specs.
Probably because it's taken many, many years for devices that are really in the same ballpark as an ipod to come out.
Apple always had a marketing dominance in the mp3 player sector, not a technological one.
I'd suggest the former is largely related to the latter. It's pretty well agreed upon that apple's engineering and design are stellar. Good/great design matters quite a bit more than a built-in radio.
Who cares if it's DRM'd, as long as you can listen to what you want when you want. The only major downside of DRM, if it's unobtrusive enough, is that you can't give away the music to others.
That's the thing, though...with DRM you can only *hope* that you can listen to what you want, when you want. You have agreed to let someone else have control over that decision. Boing-boing post explaining why that is, generally, a bad thing...and pointedly about preventing competition, not preventing piracy.
Calling the Ford, Lexus, and Honda Accord "environmentally friendly" hybrids is disingenuous. They aren't helping the gas problem whatsoever.
Depends on what you are comparing them to. Compared to a normal V6 Accord or non-hybrid Escape, they aren't so bad. Compared to a DX Civic, or somesuch, they aren't anything special. But realistically, someone who'd buy a V6 Accord isn't going to pick a Civic DX instead....they might, however, consider a hybrid Accord.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the huge misconception about embryonic stem cells: They are not from aborted fetuses.
Embryonic stem cells from from blastocysts (on the order of 50-100 cells) that are derived from in vitro fertilization attempts where the fertilized eggs are to be discarded. It is one of those issues that has been clouded with talk of abortion (usually by opponents ESC research), and thus reasonable discussion is frequently overwhelmed by hysterical chatter that doesn't even relate to the topic.
If you are cool with IVF, then there is little reason to be upset about ESC research. If you aren't cool with ESC research, then it seems illogical to be ok with IVF. Abortion really does not enter into the discussion.
-Ted
The GGP was partly correct. The act of bringing out a line of tools intending to compete with high-end professional tools, means they created a new, professional level line of tools. The GP suggests that the B&D you buy and the DeWalt you buy were the same, save for packaging. That is not true. That B&D Industrial failed as B&D Industrial is a testament to the poor image B&D has amongst professionals specifically, and the importance of image generally.
-Ted
Michaels, P.J., and R.C. Balling, Jr. 1999. Global warming: The political science of exaggeration. Prometheus 1, 63-70.
Hansen, J.E. and P.J. Michaels. 2000. AARST Science Policy Forum, New York. Social Epistemology 14:133-186
Michaels, P.J., and R.C. Balling, Jr. 2000. The Satanic Gases. Cato Books, Washington DC. 234 pp.
Additionally, his research interests on that UVA page (where he is the CATO Institute Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies) include:
The core issue over the next ten years will not be "How much will the climate warm?" but, rather, "Why did it warm so little?" My research also leads me to believe that the next decade will see the emergence of a paradigm of "robust earth," as opposed to the fashionable "fragility" concept. The papers listed below provide some evidence for these observations. It is entirely possible that human influence on the atmosphere is not necessarily deleterious and that it is simply another component of the dynamic planet.
Ok, so let's look at 'Tech Central Station,' the location hosting the article the free republic is referencing. Dr. Michaels articles on there include:
Stepping up the Pressure:The all-out, last-ditch effort by global warming alarmists to find any excuse to compel the US to take action.
Tip of the Iceberg:Yet another predictable distortion.
Conjecture vs. Science: Are the editors of Science are more interested in conjecture than in firm scientific findings?
And, incidentally, as stated on the About TCS webpage, 'Tech Central Station' is published by DCI Group, LLC. And, DCI LLC is "top Republican lobby and PR firm associated with telemarketing company Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI and the direct-mail firm FYI Messaging. The DCI group publishes the website Tech Central Station and has close ties to the George W. Bush administration." according to Source watch.
This is pretty clearly an guy who does not buy into global warming as a concept, despite near universal agreement in the scientific community. To hear him proclaim 'no its not' arguments to scientific articles in both Nature and Science seems to carry rather little weight...particularly when he is publishing on a clearly partisan website. Write a Science/Nature (or hell PNAS, whatever) article refuting this, have it peer-reviewed and then there might be some reason to talk. Until that point, this is little more than personal ideaology posing as "science."
-Ted
I think maybe you need some wardrobe help.
-Ted
It's not the size of your index, it's the results you get with it.
Right?
RIGHT?!?
-Ted
Well, sort of as those lines have been subsidized by gov't involvement for decades. Rights-of-way grants, etc etc all to allow for universal access to the services. As a previous poster noted, the issue here is that telephone and cable lines tend towards a natural monopoly. Which is fine, but then allowing the line owners and the ISPs to be the same entity will thusly also tend toward monoploy. It seems to me that separating the two, regulating the line owners heavily and regulating the ISPs much less vigorously would be the best tactic. Though, if i'm nor mistaken that seems to be exactly the opposite of what this latest rule change does.
-Ted
For it to be actual science and to even be able to compete with evolution, it HAS to
It doesn't matter what follows the HAS to, ID is not in the realm of science. It is an origin of life question. Science does *not* touch that question, as there is simply no way to gather data on it. Evolution is not at odds with ID, they are on completely separate planes of existence. Evolution is an incredibly well-grounded theory about replicating organisms (or ideas/memes/whatever) adapting to an environment. ID is a guess as to "How did it all start?" You don't answer that question with 'evolution.' You answer it with whatever your personal belief is, and you don't worry about science disproving it anymore than you worry about science disproving your belief that ice cream is yummy.
-Ted
login_sentry is an updated version of sshd_sentry:
r y
http://www.lumiere.net/~j/login_sentry/login_sent
-Ted
Or perhaps it is that divorce is far more acceptable now than in those glorious bygone times of arranged marriage and socially accepted misogyny.
-Ted
Welcome to society, we all pay for things we either don't use, or use far less than others. Roads. Schools. Police. Fire Departments. Paramedics. Military. TSA. Get over it, or go hole up in a log cabin and don't pay taxes.
-Ted
Really? A friend of mine told me that this guy once used iTunes and woke up in a bathtub of ice without one kidney.
-Ted
Ok, waaay off the original topic here, but related to ketchup. There's a good reason why, when you say ketchup, the vast majority of people think 'heinz.' It's called "amplitude". Actually, to bring it back to the main topic, i suppose you can apply that concept to mp3 players as well.
From the ketchup article, amplitude is:
After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano," Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi.
So perhaps the ipod just has really good amplitude.
-Ted
So really, Adblock makes is possible to read a newspaper with the ads that cross a certain barrier of annoyance (currently set ad banner-style ads and beyond) gone. It's really just evolution of "acceptable" advertising. Granted, this is somewhat unique in media because most forms do not allow the consumer such a level of control.
-Ted
Because we live in a society. Because we understand that the point of research is not solely to have direct, obvious applications to everybody's life. Basic research benefits the society in many indirect ways, and this is something the vast majority of the population appreciates. That you, as a chemist don't, actually surprises me greatly. I wouldn't expect to have to give the laundry list of why basic research is good to a scientist.
I like this stuff but this is really information that should be on a subscription basis. If you like it, you'll subscribe to it and you'll fund it. If you don't like it, then you won't subscribe to it and it won't cost you any more money.
The effect of that is simply to reduce the number of research groups that can take advantage of the information. This is similar to the whole open-source software situation, in that by allowing more people to do more things through free access to information, you allow a tremendous amount of diversity in the field.
Mandatory subscription is the basis of government bloat. It then leads to graft, corruption, and money laundering.
I think you are reaching just a bit on that one. Public availability of gov't funded research == money laundering? C'mon. Does it kill baby seals and turn your children into homosexuals too?
-Ted
Debatable. Especially since a huge proportion of said research is supported in large part by gov't funds. NIH, NSF, NASA, Military, etc. etc. Even more especially since scientific research, by the nature of what it is, depends upon access to other research in the field.
But, as long as you bring it up, government funded and regulated education is a horrible scam. It's wasteful, it's ineffective, in many cases it repropagates complete falsehoods
Um, are you seriously calling public education a scam? Do you have a better alternative?
-Ted
It's a perfectly cromulent quote.
That's a pretty silly rationalization, and quite unrelated to my point.
Reductio ad absurdum arguments don't hold water. Artistic expression is more inherently personal than any possession could be, and therefore is deserving of more protection than physical property under the law.
It is not reductio ad absurdum to point out that physical objects and ethereal ideas are inherently different. How personal a thing is does not enter into the discussion, how physical a thing is, though, matters quite a lot. How much a thing "deserves" protection, also is rather subjective, and unrelated to my point.
Which, to reiterate is: physical objects are, by their nature of existing as a single physical entity, different than ideas/thoughts/songs/rhyming couplets/ad slogans/etc. When I have a hammer, I have a hammer. If you take my hammer, I no longer have it, period. If you sing a song, and then I start singing it, you still have it. This physical/non-physical distinction is tremendously important, and is exactly what I described as being overlooked by many people. You can't treat the two things as the same. Ownership of physical objects is tied together with the scarcity of said objects. Once we have sci-fi duplicators, that may change, but until then phsyical ownership is inherently different than ownership of ideas. To quote Thomas Jefferson:
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
Having established that ideas (to reduce all creative expression to simple term) aren't like physical property, then it is not difficult to see that copyright is a tremendously artificial construction. Not an inherently bad one, but an artificial one. Look around at nature...property ownership occurs. It has to, since we are physical beings in a physical world. Find me a case of "idea ownership" outside the human construction. Good luck. It is even only in relatively recent human times that copyright existed.
Protection against the trivialization and/or defiling of one's life's work by someone who lacks an initial creative spark is one of the ideas inherent in the current system.
I'm not so convinced of that. In fact if you read Jefferson & Madison's discussions of the topic, they very pointedly say that the motivation is to act as encouragements.
Copyrights don't lock ideas up. The fact that a copyright exists does not preclude licensing.
That is just silly. Copyright is by definition, allowing others to do only what you want them to. That one of those things is "pay me money and ill let you do X" in no way changes the fact that copyright prevents the free distribution of ideas. It expressly locks the ideas up as much as the creator desires. You can't say a cage isn't confining just because it's a big cage (or you can buy your way out of it).
As for the rest of your post, does it not seem a little naive to think that rich, politically powerful copyright owners are going to let a "new system" crop up? Part of the problem with copyright now (IMHO) is that coporate entities are effectively immortal, and copyright was not designed with a lifes
Actually, when you get right down to it, thinking you have a right to control what people do with "your" idea/song/invention is pretty irrational. It is only an artificial construct that allows this mode of thinking. Unfortunately, this idea has been so ingrained, that people think it is natural. It's not. We, as a society, have agreed that as an incentive to create more things, we will let creators have certain rights to their ethereal "ideas" for a certain period of time. While most of us agree this is probably a good trade-off, the balance inherent must be maintained...and it has been getting farther and farther out of whack.
-Ted
-Ted
It has seemed obvious that lowering the legal BAC limit would decrease alcohol related automobile accidents. Except that it doesn't. It seems obvious that protein synthesis is catalyzed by proteins, as nearly every other biochemical reaction is. Except that it isn't, it's a ribozyme. In fact, the point about college kids drinking more than they think they do, that is actually very much up for debate. There are studies that show college kids perceptions of how much their peers drink is quite wrong on the overestimation side.
It is not difficult to rationalize observations after the fact, even reducing them to cliches. Problem is there are rationalizations and cliches that are simple, obvious, and completely opposite. Do opposite's attract, or do birds of a feather flock together?
-Ted
That's what the NYTimes hopes people will pay for. Except the Washington Post, LA Times, etc etc do about as good a job at pulling out the wheat as well...and they are still free.
-Ted
- George Carlin
And it becomes legal again if you just film it. Something's seriously f'ed up right there.
-Ted
Probably because it's taken many, many years for devices that are really in the same ballpark as an ipod to come out.
Apple always had a marketing dominance in the mp3 player sector, not a technological one.
I'd suggest the former is largely related to the latter. It's pretty well agreed upon that apple's engineering and design are stellar. Good/great design matters quite a bit more than a built-in radio.
-Ted
That's the thing, though...with DRM you can only *hope* that you can listen to what you want, when you want. You have agreed to let someone else have control over that decision. Boing-boing post explaining why that is, generally, a bad thing...and pointedly about preventing competition, not preventing piracy.
-Ted
Depends on what you are comparing them to. Compared to a normal V6 Accord or non-hybrid Escape, they aren't so bad. Compared to a DX Civic, or somesuch, they aren't anything special. But realistically, someone who'd buy a V6 Accord isn't going to pick a Civic DX instead....they might, however, consider a hybrid Accord.
-Ted