That would be an axiom of TECHNOLOGY not science, and it is wrong in either case: e.g. we COULD use nuclear and chemical weapons in warfare but we CHOOSE not to by mutual agreement.
You do of course realize that the Canadian dollar has risen nearly 30% (and rising - its now $.84) against the Greenback since Bush took office don't you?
Further, since we are running a budget surplus and you a massive deficit this trend will continue. Eventually we will get back to point where we make fun of the US dollar being smaller (it was back in the 60's).:)
Although I agree with your sentiment your example of Toronto is totally off. Toronto has one of the WORST rail systems of any major city in the world (do not believe the hype that it has one of the best - that was 30 years ago and the city population - and size - has more than doubled since then). Only about 20% of the city is accessible by rail and a short walk with the rest accessible by bus (which are usually poorly airconditioned/heated). Admittedly most of the core downtown is accessible, but going to from Yonge to Ossington on the Queen Street car is a nightmare (as are any buses running down Eglinton).
Toronto needs to QUADRUPLE its rail infrastructure to reach the standards of a London/New York or Paris. The current public transit is HORRIBLE unless you live downtown or right on a subway line. I did fortunately have that situation for 3 years, but I have also lived and the Don Valley Parkway and Yorkmills which is 45 minutes by bus to the subway. Not very fun.
This reminds me of when MP3.com copied various CDs and converted them to a streamable format. You were able to access the songs if you could prove that you owned the CD and thus had copyright permission. The idea was to save you from having to upload a CD's worth of music to their servers, they merely checked that you HAD the CD and then gave you access to their streams.
They were found guilty and forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars IIRC, thus putting them out of business. The courts concluded that they didn't have permission to make the copies in the first place, so the fact that they checked for the users CD didn't matter at all.
I don't really see the difference in Google's case, they don't have permission to scan these books, even if their intentions are good, and they have safeguards in place.
In Ultima Underworld (which was released in 1992) if you ate a mushroom without having it be part of the worm soup you would get poisoned resulting in dizziness and impaired vision for a time.
The same effect occured if certain monsters bit you.
"This means that the wording or particular approach to a headline is that of the authors and usually the author (because they took the time to read/submit it) knows more about the subject material than I would anyway."
Thanks for pointing out everything that has been wrong with the Slashdot editors for the past few years.
"Just as important, officials and private experts say, the small rocket for astronauts would be at least 10 times as safe as the shuttle, whose odds of disaster are estimated at roughly 1 in 100."
So the odds of a shuttle flight ending in disaster are 1 in 10!?!?
We've had two shuttle disasters, which by their calculations would mean we've had 20 flights. Columbia's fateful flight was number 113, the current one is 114. That has odds of less than two percent of a disaster by my reckoning.
Some have moved on, but only to materialism which has _0_ ability to explain the experience of conciousness.
Lets do a little Gedanken expirement shall we?:
Let's say your conciousness IS reducible down to bits and bytes and you download it. Once you have downloaded your brain there is NOTHING stopping a third party from then copying the result to a SECOND computer. Can two entities share a conciousness and still be just like 'you'? Any answer other than 'No' is clearly absurd so something went wrong along the way during our experiment - i.e. our assumption that unique human conciousness is machine reducible. []
Sorry it just isn't that simple. If it were then why did the U.S. birthrate PLUMET when the pill was introduced?
Having studied birthrates and the third world I can tell you what some studies have said.
First of all most Women is poor countries DON'T HAVE FARMS. These isn't little house of the prairie where a bunch of little helpers go out and milk the cows. They live in poverty with very little to provide sustenance. These women have children by the bushels for numerous reasons, but one of the most striking is a concept called numeracy. They don't have it. It is the concept of how many children one has, e.g. only child, 2, 3 then stopping. When you ask a woman is sub-saharran Africa how many children she wants she will reply with something like - "as many as god gives me" or "I don't know what you mean, as many as will come".
What most studies find about lowering birthrates in the thirdworld is an insanely simple answer: empower women. When women become empowered they begin to feel they can control their environment and by extension their reproduction.
My point was that if an idea is suitably far-fetched by the time it is implemented then the patent will bu null and void and so it will be available to all.
The discussion was about pattents on inventions that are impossible with current technology.
If the invention is possible with current tech then this is exactly what patents are for. If you want to expand the discussion to include frivolous patents and obvious and non creative ideas etc. then that is a whole other argument, and not really related to this.
One thing you have to remember is that patents are for a LIMITED TIME. IIRC its something like 17 years in the US. If you patent an idea that is currently unimplimentable all you are doing is giving researches an angle to attack a problem and by the time a workable product comes out your patent will have expired.
Patenting future products is a VERY bad business model considering patents cost $1000/pop ish and you need to get one in pretty much every country around the world.
There is the enlightening story of the company that tried to patent a human genome that causes a debilitating disease (huntington's IIRC), they patented the process of discovering the gene in every country on earth - except Malta - whoops. Now there is a thriving business on Malta for checking for the gene.
Image patenting a future device like a teleporter right now. Think how much that would cost for world-wide rights. Now see how there isn't much to worry about for these types of filings.
The problem is that based on current law YOU are the criminal middle-man, and so is the torrent site you got the link from, and so are all the leeches of your seed.
Call your congressman and senator, get the law changed.
Interesting but it in no way contradicts what I said. One explanation is that young offenders would be affected by the longer sentences (sentence lengths were increased outside of 3 strikes) and when they got out would no longer be in the 14-17 category. The other more plausible explanation however, is that the reduction is a result of lower drug rates and poverty rates brought on by the Clinton expansion (as I mentioned). Note the slight uptick in 2000 as the economy slowed down again.
Actually the consesus seems to be that the increases in jail terms and the instituting of 3 strikes-and-you-are-out laws has been the main reason for the decrease.
Other factors are:
More intelligent policing, e.g. Gulliani's broken glass policy in New York.
Decreases in poverty due to an expanding economy over the Clinton years.
This of course has not been without cost: higher incarceraton rates, more tax money for jails / less for schools, inflexible sentencing (prison for life for stealing 3 video tapes?!?), etc.
Reason number one that you don't have a cordless phone is because you think people are going to break into your house and murder you, but you want a phone that will work for sure in such a case.
This is why you don't own a convenient cordless phone?
You do realize the odds of being home invaded are like 10 million to one.
Why don't you put 5 foot tall thick steal spikes on your lawn to protect against runaway cars that could crash into your living room (about as likely as a home invasion).
Where does it stop?
Get out of the bunker and live.
Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
Touche.:)
But buycheapsoftware's business model is somewhat unsustainable in that they GIVE you a piece of hardware in order for the software to qualify as OEM. All they are doing really is passing you industrial garbage (used or defective motherboards I assume) in order to be a valid OEM licensee.
This is a fairly sketchy practice that I assume MS would put a stop to if many businesses went this route.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be an axiom of TECHNOLOGY not science, and it is wrong in either case: e.g. we COULD use nuclear and chemical weapons in warfare but we CHOOSE not to by mutual agreement.
You do of course realize that the Canadian dollar has risen nearly 30% (and rising - its now $.84) against the Greenback since Bush took office don't you?
:)
Further, since we are running a budget surplus and you a massive deficit this trend will continue. Eventually we will get back to point where we make fun of the US dollar being smaller (it was back in the 60's).
Next I guess is Goo8le, then Goo9le, or Googl9.
Then I am not so sure, Go10gle? G10ogle? G0ogle?
How long can they keep this up???
Although I agree with your sentiment your example of Toronto is totally off. Toronto has one of the WORST rail systems of any major city in the world (do not believe the hype that it has one of the best - that was 30 years ago and the city population - and size - has more than doubled since then). Only about 20% of the city is accessible by rail and a short walk with the rest accessible by bus (which are usually poorly airconditioned/heated). Admittedly most of the core downtown is accessible, but going to from Yonge to Ossington on the Queen Street car is a nightmare (as are any buses running down Eglinton).
Toronto needs to QUADRUPLE its rail infrastructure to reach the standards of a London/New York or Paris. The current public transit is HORRIBLE unless you live downtown or right on a subway line. I did fortunately have that situation for 3 years, but I have also lived and the Don Valley Parkway and Yorkmills which is 45 minutes by bus to the subway. Not very fun.
This reminds me of when MP3.com copied various CDs and converted them to a streamable format. You were able to access the songs if you could prove that you owned the CD and thus had copyright permission. The idea was to save you from having to upload a CD's worth of music to their servers, they merely checked that you HAD the CD and then gave you access to their streams.
They were found guilty and forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars IIRC, thus putting them out of business. The courts concluded that they didn't have permission to make the copies in the first place, so the fact that they checked for the users CD didn't matter at all.
I don't really see the difference in Google's case, they don't have permission to scan these books, even if their intentions are good, and they have safeguards in place.
We will see what happens I guess.
The fourth paragraph of the BBC article says:
"There have been signs over the last two years that damage to the ozone layer has reduced, but a full recovery is not expected until around 2050."
Sounds like the same thing CNN is saying to me.
In Ultima Underworld (which was released in 1992) if you ate a mushroom without having it be part of the worm soup you would get poisoned resulting in dizziness and impaired vision for a time.
The same effect occured if certain monsters bit you.
"This means that the wording or particular approach to a headline is that of the authors and usually the author (because they took the time to read/submit it) knows more about the subject material than I would anyway."
Thanks for pointing out everything that has been wrong with the Slashdot editors for the past few years.
Apparently I couldn't tell "what in the sentence", but thanks for your eloquent response.
From the article:
"Just as important, officials and private experts say, the small rocket for astronauts would be at least 10 times as safe as the shuttle, whose odds of disaster are estimated at roughly 1 in 100."
So the odds of a shuttle flight ending in disaster are 1 in 10!?!?
We've had two shuttle disasters, which by their calculations would mean we've had 20 flights. Columbia's fateful flight was number 113, the current one is 114. That has odds of less than two percent of a disaster by my reckoning.
Where did they get their numbers?
Some have moved on, but only to materialism which has _0_ ability to explain the experience of conciousness.
Lets do a little Gedanken expirement shall we?:
Let's say your conciousness IS reducible down to bits and bytes and you download it. Once you have downloaded your brain there is NOTHING stopping a third party from then copying the result to a SECOND computer. Can two entities share a conciousness and still be just like 'you'? Any answer other than 'No' is clearly absurd so something went wrong along the way during our experiment - i.e. our assumption that unique human conciousness is machine reducible.
[]
Man did not evolve from Monkeys.
We both evolved from a common ancestor.
Why is this so hard for people to understand?
P.S. - it is not just DNA evidence that links us to apes. The fossil record is rather convincing on its own.
Sorry it just isn't that simple. If it were then why did the U.S. birthrate PLUMET when the pill was introduced?
Having studied birthrates and the third world I can tell you what some studies have said.
First of all most Women is poor countries DON'T HAVE FARMS. These isn't little house of the prairie where a bunch of little helpers go out and milk the cows. They live in poverty with very little to provide sustenance. These women have children by the bushels for numerous reasons, but one of the most striking is a concept called numeracy. They don't have it. It is the concept of how many children one has, e.g. only child, 2, 3 then stopping. When you ask a woman is sub-saharran Africa how many children she wants she will reply with something like - "as many as god gives me" or "I don't know what you mean, as many as will come".
What most studies find about lowering birthrates in the thirdworld is an insanely simple answer: empower women. When women become empowered they begin to feel they can control their environment and by extension their reproduction.
Not sure where you copied that list from but 'several' does not mean 7 anywhere I could find (or have ever heard of).
According to merriam-webster, 'several' is:
2a: more than one (several pleas) b : more than two but fewer than many (moved several inches) c chiefly dialect : being a great many
and for finality 'many' is:
being one of a large but indefinite number (many a man) (many another student)
I for one welcome our new Gamma Ray overlords.
Wouldn't about half the people (and half the animals etc.) on Earth be A-OK if this happened?
i.e. wouldn't the Earth itself be a rather good shield from this burst?
I think you missed my point. ;)
My point was that if an idea is suitably far-fetched by the time it is implemented then the patent will bu null and void and so it will be available to all.
The discussion was about pattents on inventions that are impossible with current technology.
If the invention is possible with current tech then this is exactly what patents are for. If you want to expand the discussion to include frivolous patents and obvious and non creative ideas etc. then that is a whole other argument, and not really related to this.
One thing you have to remember is that patents are for a LIMITED TIME. IIRC its something like 17 years in the US. If you patent an idea that is currently unimplimentable all you are doing is giving researches an angle to attack a problem and by the time a workable product comes out your patent will have expired.
Patenting future products is a VERY bad business model considering patents cost $1000/pop ish and you need to get one in pretty much every country around the world.
There is the enlightening story of the company that tried to patent a human genome that causes a debilitating disease (huntington's IIRC), they patented the process of discovering the gene in every country on earth - except Malta - whoops. Now there is a thriving business on Malta for checking for the gene.
Image patenting a future device like a teleporter right now. Think how much that would cost for world-wide rights. Now see how there isn't much to worry about for these types of filings.
The problem is that based on current law YOU are the criminal middle-man, and so is the torrent site you got the link from, and so are all the leeches of your seed.
Call your congressman and senator, get the law changed.
Can you change your name or something? It's way too easy to confuse with mine.
Interesting but it in no way contradicts what I said. One explanation is that young offenders would be affected by the longer sentences (sentence lengths were increased outside of 3 strikes) and when they got out would no longer be in the 14-17 category. The other more plausible explanation however, is that the reduction is a result of lower drug rates and poverty rates brought on by the Clinton expansion (as I mentioned). Note the slight uptick in 2000 as the economy slowed down again.
Actually the consesus seems to be that the increases in jail terms and the instituting of 3 strikes-and-you-are-out laws has been the main reason for the decrease.
Other factors are:
More intelligent policing, e.g. Gulliani's broken glass policy in New York.
Decreases in poverty due to an expanding economy over the Clinton years.
This of course has not been without cost: higher incarceraton rates, more tax money for jails / less for schools, inflexible sentencing (prison for life for stealing 3 video tapes?!?), etc.
Reason number one that you don't have a cordless phone is because you think people are going to break into your house and murder you, but you want a phone that will work for sure in such a case.
This is why you don't own a convenient cordless phone?
You do realize the odds of being home invaded are like 10 million to one.
Why don't you put 5 foot tall thick steal spikes on your lawn to protect against runaway cars that could crash into your living room (about as likely as a home invasion).
Where does it stop?
Get out of the bunker and live.
Touche. :)
But buycheapsoftware's business model is somewhat unsustainable in that they GIVE you a piece of hardware in order for the software to qualify as OEM. All they are doing really is passing you industrial garbage (used or defective motherboards I assume) in order to be a valid OEM licensee.
This is a fairly sketchy practice that I assume MS would put a stop to if many businesses went this route.