Wow, that was one of my favorites. I actually
remember waking up in a dark room one morning after a night of playing it. Still half asleep,
I thought I was in the dungeon. I screamed and my mom freaked.
Any game that can give you nightmares is a Great game.
The problem is not so much that some invention
or method or software get protection, it that they all get the same amount of protection. Inventions should receive protection in proportion to the uniqueness or cleverness of the invention and amount of effort expended.
Things like Amazon's one click method aren't very clever or original and shouldn't receive much (if any protection). However, if someone were to come along and produce a cold-fusion device, this would be a wonderful thing, and the creators work should be protected. In reality, most patents today are just examples of someone winning the engineering race, and giving them a 20 year monopoly isn't fair to those who could engineer the same thing without much effort.
We should be working toward a peer review process to determine what amount of time is fair.
I suspect that companies would realize that most of the patents they're getting for ridiculous "inventions" wouldn't be worth the time to file once the process is in place.
Patent protection for important advances is just. Patent protection for simple engineering is unfair to other engineers who could have easily developed the same thing.
Hey, you may be on to something. Take a look at this: (on their products page)
"By boosting the speed, range and reliability of copper, carriers can offer affordable, same day provisioning of DS3+ services (45 Mbps symmetrical transport) to virtually any copper fed Remote Terminal (RT) cabinet or Multi Tenant Unit (MTU)."
These speeds are not too a particular house, but to RT's and MTU's. In other words, to places like office buildings.
Further down:
"Additionally, transforming multiple copper pairs into a DS3 backhaul to bring the power of the fiber backbone to the final rural mile will make universal broadband service a reality sooner than anyone could have imagined."
"Multiple copper pairs into a backhaul" -- So it sounds like they are taking a bundle of between 25 and 50 and turning it into a 45 to 155 mbps link.
Still, this is pretty good. Right now, you get nearly a T1 (1.544 mbps) worth of speed out of 50 wires (25 56K modems). So 45 - 155 mbps is a big improvement.
That may sound a bit silly, but there is some truth to it. In over 95% of the places where cable is available, the local goverment has created, by law, a local monopoly through the franchise system. Basically, they authorize one and only one provider of cable service in a particular area. Im my case, its Time-Warner. Now why would a local government not allow others to come in and compete to offer service? Because they get a cut of the GROSS the cable company makes. Thats right, not the profit, but the gross. Again, in my case, its 5% right off the top. Its something like a mofia protection racket. The company pays 5% to the government, and the government insures that there won't be any pesky competition.
The big showers coming up are going to be due to the leonids around November 18-19. Scientists have developed methods that allow for the accurate prediction of showers and storms for these meteors by looking at the perturbations of dust trails.
Vast amout of literature, indeed! Here are two more: Personality Theory and Social Planning Theory. You can add these to the two you gave, which are basically examples of Utilitarianism and the Labor Theory. Check this paper out for more.
As to your comment: "If you read it carefully, you'll see that copyright is supposed to strike a balance, contrary to your absolute view on intellectual property..."
Well, copyright is supposed to do many things, depending on the degree to which you subscribe to each of the four theories listed above. Obviously it depends on the theory being used. Perhaps in your thesis you should make this clear.
If I subscribe only to the Labor Theory, for example, what am I to balance it with? Really, you assume too much.
And so what if the paper is contrary to my supposed "absolute views"? This sounds a lot like an appeal to authority - the weakest arguement of them all! If I show you a paper that claims that copyright should be absolute, should you adopt that view? Of course not. Its very anti-intellectual to simply accept a view because some authority (even an academic authority) propounds it.
"The real argument against copyright is the expression you use yourself : artificial scarcity. You may remember that communists wanted to create artificial abundance of things that were naturaly scarce. You want artificial scarcity out of things that are naturaly abundant. This is doomed to be proven as inefficient."
How is a creative work "naturally abundant?" Without people to create it, it doesn't exist at all. Copyright promotes an abundance of creative works. Without copyright, you would have a natural scarcity.
"Your reasoning is based on a concept of intellectual property which leaves out one of the two reasons of its very existence."
Oh, there are exactly two reasons are there? I submit that your reasoning is based on a concept of intellectual property that is unnecessarily restrictive. You say "the two reasons" when you really mean "two reasons I agree with."
This is why it is difficult to reason with people like you. You barely finish your first sentence and you've already taken your subjective values concerning property rights and tried to turn them into universal values.
Lets also consider what you mean by "high prices."
What is "high?" Perhaps high to you is "beyond the level that is needed to sustain the productions of new works of art." Okay, so what is the level? The truth is all you can do is guess. Maybe there are too few restrictions on copying to "get people to produce works of art." How do we know the price isn't too low? Perhaps DVD's should be twice as much. You have no idea, yet I bet if you had the power, your guess as to the "right" price would come in on the low side. And it would be on the low side because of the simple equation: "I cant afford a DVD -> they are evil and charging too much!"
And what is an "artificial scarcity?" I use two of three bedrooms in my house. Am I creating an "artificial scarcity" by keeping the door locked and not letting strangers in to use the extra room? Do I have the right to create this "artificial scarcity"?
Your use of the terms "artificial scarcity" and "high prices" are examples of abstractions used to obscure the issue.
Finally,
"the whining about DVD prices sounds a lot less petty than it does according to you."
Oh, it is petty whining. Its entertainment for God's sake. People don't need DVD's to survive.
"One of the factors that that lead to the great depression in the '30s was having no government intervention in the economy"
Wow. The leftists writing the textbooks can be very proud of you.
One of the factors that that lead to the great depression in the '30s was having no government intervention in the economy.
This is completely at odds with history. What about the "easy money" policies of the FED? What about the fact that the depression of the 30's was accompanied by one of the most economically activist governments in US history? Consider the many other recessions that were much shorter:
1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893 and a stock exchange panic in 1907, recessions in 1910 and 1913, and another panic in 1914 preceding World War I where the government did much less. Now consider the great depression with its much more activist government: it lasted more than ten years and took a world war to finally get us out of it. Thats a big arguement against government intervention.
This myth about how government intervention "saved us" from the great depression has to stop. The depression was needlessly prolonged by government intervention.
Yes, its that simple. You will hear a great deal about social goods or justice or morality or how some price is "unreasonably high". It is nothing but an elaborate (often self) deception. The logic in the end is the same. They want what someone else has created. If they can't get it at the the price they want, this makes the owner evil.
It is very difficult to reason with such people. There is an almost reflexive connection between their wants/feelings and judgements about what is right or wrong. The thinking very much resembles that of the religious zealot or homophobe. For them, the unconfortable feeling they get when they think of such things is enough to provoke a judgement that such things are wrong. There is no reasoning that goes on.
Take the example of "unreasonable price." Just how is anyone supposed to determine logically what a reasonable price is? Is there some formula? No. "unreasonable price" is just a synonym for "I don't like the price" or "I feel the price it too high."
My favorite is when people invoke the idea of a "social good." Again, most of the time, "social good" is just a synonym for "my good." In the end, they really mean "less good for them, more good for me." Really, how could it mean anything else? Values are ultimately subjective. How can anyone be in a position to determine objectively what is a "social good"? People who invoke the term "social good" really have no choice but to use their own values in deciding what is a social good and what isn't. For me, allowing people to charge what they what for what they make on the priciple that they are not slaves to society is a "social good." Others think this is incorrect. How can we decide objectively who is right? We can't.
In the end issues of right and wrong come down to subjective judgement and personal value systems. I just wish people would be honest with me and themselves about where their own ideas of right and wrong come from and not hide behind elaborate abstractions like "social good."
We can discuss how it is we can get what we each want. Some will conclude that giving people the right to charge what they wish for what they create, in the end, will provide most of us with what we want. Other's will conclude that outright theft is the easiest way. Others will be somewhere in between. Its starts with people being honest with themselves.
So, the answer to the question is:
People can't charge what they want because other people don't like it. They are even willing to get violent about it (they hide behind the abstrations "illegal" and "law" and get professional thugs called "police" who have guns and batons to do their dirty work).
Here is an interesting PDF I found describing
firearm deaths in the US. It breaks down by sex, gender, race, and type of death.
Some results are expected -- like men are more
likely to be involved. Others are unexpected -- suicide makes up for more than half of the deaths rather than murder.
Nearly always, the circuits that evolve are smaller than those that are designed by an engineer. Here, the gates of an FPGA appear analogous to genes. It seems that these experiments with FPGA's might have predicted fewer human genes. I wonder what else these experiments might predict is going on in humans.
These FPGA's have odd failure modes. Is there a connection with certain human diseases?
Before you try to educate someone else, start with yourself! The light/dark pattern thats seen with the experiment you describe is nothing more than an interference pattern created when the monochromatic and coherent light reflects off the surface of the object you're looking at and strikes your retina.
With this information, we can make a good guess at what a monitors resolution "ought" to be.
Take the sine of 1/60º and multiply this by the aproximate distance from the monitor.
At 3 feet, you get about 0.0105 inches. So you need about 100 pixels per inch. Thats 10,000 per square inch.
A 17" monitor is about 13"x10", so a resolution of 1300x1000 should do the trick at 3 feet.
Also, notice the qualifications I made
A 17" monitor...
...at 3 feet.
This shows that the statement:
"The
human eye can see aliasing artifacts at resolution up to and even beyond 4000x4000, so obviously 1600x1200 is not sufficient.
is meaningless without knowing the viewing distance.
But even knowing the viewing distance still gets us no where. Notice the ought above in quotes. No matter what the resolution of the monitor, there exists textures that will cause aliasing unless other steps are taken. Outline of a proof:
1) Cast one ray from the virtual eye (POV) through each pixel of the screen onto a surface parallel to the screen, but some distance away in the virtual world.
2) Where the cast rays meet the surface, find the texture element of the surface at this intersection and color it white.
3) Color the rest of the texture elements black.
It should be obvious that the surface viewed at this distance with this texture and without anti-aliasing will appear totally white. It should also be obvious that for any resolution we can create a texture that will cause this effect.
"
As far as I can recall, free lending libraries were invented in Philadelphia, by Ben Franklin."
Benjamin Franklin actually started a subscription library. People paid to use it.
"Sadly, this idea that common people can't think for themselves is still too common, we've all heard too much about governments that won't
allow their citizens to browse certain auction sites because they may contain disturbing historical artifacts."
Hell, you have the entire Internet at your disposal and didn't bother even to do a simple search on "Benjamin Franklin library."
I wonder, do you consider yourself one of the "common people?"
"Hi. I'm recovering from a recent apendectomy to save my life. Before the operation, I would have paid anything -- I thought I was the most valuable
thing on the planet. Now, however, I think my life is only worth $5000 while my doctor says $10000. I really think he's giving me too much credit. "
Or:
"I am a plutocratic [programmer] trying to make enough money to buy a fifth Lexus. Myself and a couple of other blood-sucking leeches had the idea of kitting
out a [web site] with fancy-schmancy computerised bells and whistles so that we can jack up our already stratospheric fees into the ionosphere. We don't
really have a clue about [making a profit], so we thought we'd ask a bunch of [consumers] what they'd like, and more importantly, be prepared to pay for.
Meanwhile, malnourished kids and the homeless? Fuck 'em."
Get this straight: we are not each others' slaves. You were not born to be a slave to your fellow man. I was not born to be a slave to my fellow man. Doctors don't become doctors so they can be your personal nose wiper. If you don't wany to pay a doctor for medical help and advice, then go to medical school and you won't have to.
The fact is, you don't know jack crap. How many lives have you saved? Probably zero.
This habit of villainizing people who want something in return for what they do for others is just plain evil.
WHERE IS YOUR SENSE OF RECIPROCITY? Are you telling me that you wouldn't give a man who saved your life a Lexus is you could? Would you even give a "Thank you"?
The truth is, you probably wouldn't do anything if you could help it. People like you are the very reason people ask for money for what they do instead of accepting a vague promise to recipricate some time in the future. When you give money in return for a service, that person has some reasonable chance of being able to get something in return for what they did for you. When people say, "Hey, thanks. I'll have to help you out some day" they really mean, "thanks sucker."
I don't write this to be cynical. This is just the way it is. The fact is, paying someone for something they have made for you or done for you is the most sincere way you can tell them "thanks."
This is all about typical American greed. All Americans care about are profits that they end up spending on themselves and their greedy corporations reflect this.
Americans spend over 460 BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR just on leisure! This is not necessary!
Compare this to the 168 million dollars the US gave to help fight AIDS in Africa.
Americans can
obviously afford to do more. There's no reason why Americans should get to drive their expensive cars, buy their expensive clothes, and play Quake on via a cable modem, at the expense of the rest of the world. The only solution is to force Americans to do their fair share. Perhaps the United Nations can help. Americans will not give up what they ought to unless forced somehow. The rest of the world is suffering while Americans live well!
Americans must be MADE to be more altruistic!
Your imperialistic military is the only thing stopping the rest of the world from coming to America to take its fair share!
So the next time you greedy Americans are buying your latest DVD, or a hamburger, or a new CD player for your car, think about all the people dying so you can have a little fun!
I hope your guilty conscience doesn't ruin the next movie you go out and see.
Re:...but will it keep up with the upgrades?
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 1
"a couple different reasons why they won't have to. Ballistic missiles follow a parabolic course...It's a signature that the computer can pick up. "
I'm not sure exactly what is used to spot
ICBM's but I don't think this is it. Contrary to popular opinion, objects in free-fall don't follow parabala's -- they follow elipses. A parabola is inadequate a curve when describing
the motion of an object moving freely at these scales. An ICBM in free-fall would follow the same
curve as anything else moving freely -- an elipse.
Secondly, an ICBM spends some of its time not moving freely, but under thrust. This means that there are many different curves an ICBM may follow.
It seems like there must be something other than identifying parabolic motion as a "signature" when it comes to spotting ICBMs.
Sure, a three-year-old can make a variable shift
that takes one cycle. In fact, EVERY boolean
circuit can be made to run in one cycle.
What most three-year-olds don't realize is how long they have to make that one cycle.
It may not be obvious to someone who's had one
semester of logic design that the speed of a
boolean circuit in real silicon isn't just a
function of its depth. Issues like fan-out and trying to implement the circuit on a plane, etc. end up killing you for larger circuits. A naive,
two-level circuit, though it has minimal depth,
isn't necessarily the fastest in real silicon.
Consider something as simple as the parity fuction. It can be shown that a boolean circuit
of constant depth implementing the parity function grows exponentially with the
number of inputs. This is a big problem in that
your inputs will be forced to each drive an ever
increasing number of gates as the number of bits
increases. At some point you have to alter the
electrical characteristics of the circuit (ends
up making it slower) or add drivers (ends up slower).
Suppose instead you allow the depth of the circuit to increase. Now the number of gates you
need grows linear with the number of inputs rather than as 2^n. It gets even better. Every
doubling of the number of inputs only adds one
more level to the depth of the circuit.
Exercise for the reader: in what way does the
arrangement of the drivers added to the first circuit resemble the arrangement of the gates of
the second circuit?
What bothers me the most is the contemtuous tone
you used in replying to cperciva. He didn't deserve it.
It may be enough to force companies to disclose
some of the methods they use to maintain their
level of control of the market. Forcing
Microsoft to reveal that they alter file
structures to limit competition or hide system
calls may create enough consumer anger to force
them to make some changes or open up standards.
Right now most of these techniques are known just
to IT folks.
Well, there was the memo circulated by Democrat
lawyer Mark Herron on Nov 15 coaching Democrats
on how to get ballots by overseas personel
rejected. It certainly seems like at least one Democrat was "try[ing] to get them invalidated."
Also, keep in mind that many of the ballots
without a postmark arrived before the election so
they could not have been sent after the election.
What should be done with these?
The Democrats want it both ways -- flexibility
when counting ballots that favor them, and
inflexibility when it favors the Republicans.
Slashdot Mirror
Any game that can give you nightmares is a Great game.
Things like Amazon's one click method aren't very clever or original and shouldn't receive much (if any protection). However, if someone were to come along and produce a cold-fusion device, this would be a wonderful thing, and the creators work should be protected. In reality, most patents today are just examples of someone winning the engineering race, and giving them a 20 year monopoly isn't fair to those who could engineer the same thing without much effort.
We should be working toward a peer review process to determine what amount of time is fair. I suspect that companies would realize that most of the patents they're getting for ridiculous "inventions" wouldn't be worth the time to file once the process is in place.
Patent protection for important advances is just. Patent protection for simple engineering is unfair to other engineers who could have easily developed the same thing.
"By boosting the speed, range and reliability of copper, carriers can offer affordable, same day provisioning of DS3+ services (45 Mbps symmetrical transport) to virtually any copper fed Remote Terminal (RT) cabinet or Multi Tenant Unit (MTU)."
These speeds are not too a particular house, but to RT's and MTU's. In other words, to places like office buildings.
Further down:
"Additionally, transforming multiple copper pairs into a DS3 backhaul to bring the power of the fiber backbone to the final rural mile will make universal broadband service a reality sooner than anyone could have imagined."
"Multiple copper pairs into a backhaul" -- So it sounds like they are taking a bundle of between 25 and 50 and turning it into a 45 to 155 mbps link.
Still, this is pretty good. Right now, you get nearly a T1 (1.544 mbps) worth of speed out of 50 wires (25 56K modems). So 45 - 155 mbps is a big improvement.
That may sound a bit silly, but there is some truth to it. In over 95% of the places where cable is available, the local goverment has created, by law, a local monopoly through the franchise system. Basically, they authorize one and only one provider of cable service in a particular area. Im my case, its Time-Warner. Now why would a local government not allow others to come in and compete to offer service? Because they get a cut of the GROSS the cable company makes. Thats right, not the profit, but the gross. Again, in my case, its 5% right off the top. Its something like a mofia protection racket. The company pays 5% to the government, and the government insures that there won't be any pesky competition.
Check out this link to the Armagh observatory.
The method they use successfully predicted the peak to within about 5 minutes last year.
The estimates for the Americas this year are 2500 per hour and something like 30,000 per hour at peak in 2002!
As to your comment: "If you read it carefully, you'll see that copyright is supposed to strike a balance, contrary to your absolute view on intellectual property..."
Well, copyright is supposed to do many things, depending on the degree to which you subscribe to each of the four theories listed above. Obviously it depends on the theory being used. Perhaps in your thesis you should make this clear. If I subscribe only to the Labor Theory, for example, what am I to balance it with? Really, you assume too much.
And so what if the paper is contrary to my supposed "absolute views"? This sounds a lot like an appeal to authority - the weakest arguement of them all! If I show you a paper that claims that copyright should be absolute, should you adopt that view? Of course not. Its very anti-intellectual to simply accept a view because some authority (even an academic authority) propounds it.
How is a creative work "naturally abundant?" Without people to create it, it doesn't exist at all. Copyright promotes an abundance of creative works. Without copyright, you would have a natural scarcity.
Oh, there are exactly two reasons are there? I submit that your reasoning is based on a concept of intellectual property that is unnecessarily restrictive. You say "the two reasons" when you really mean "two reasons I agree with."
This is why it is difficult to reason with people like you. You barely finish your first sentence and you've already taken your subjective values concerning property rights and tried to turn them into universal values.
Lets also consider what you mean by "high prices." What is "high?" Perhaps high to you is "beyond the level that is needed to sustain the productions of new works of art." Okay, so what is the level? The truth is all you can do is guess. Maybe there are too few restrictions on copying to "get people to produce works of art." How do we know the price isn't too low? Perhaps DVD's should be twice as much. You have no idea, yet I bet if you had the power, your guess as to the "right" price would come in on the low side. And it would be on the low side because of the simple equation: "I cant afford a DVD -> they are evil and charging too much!"
And what is an "artificial scarcity?" I use two of three bedrooms in my house. Am I creating an "artificial scarcity" by keeping the door locked and not letting strangers in to use the extra room? Do I have the right to create this "artificial scarcity"?
Your use of the terms "artificial scarcity" and "high prices" are examples of abstractions used to obscure the issue.
Finally,
"the whining about DVD prices sounds a lot less petty than it does according to you."
Oh, it is petty whining. Its entertainment for God's sake. People don't need DVD's to survive.
"One of the factors that that lead to the great depression in the '30s was having no government intervention in the economy" Wow. The leftists writing the textbooks can be very proud of you.
This is completely at odds with history. What about the "easy money" policies of the FED? What about the fact that the depression of the 30's was accompanied by one of the most economically activist governments in US history? Consider the many other recessions that were much shorter: 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893 and a stock exchange panic in 1907, recessions in 1910 and 1913, and another panic in 1914 preceding World War I where the government did much less. Now consider the great depression with its much more activist government: it lasted more than ten years and took a world war to finally get us out of it. Thats a big arguement against government intervention.
This myth about how government intervention "saved us" from the great depression has to stop. The depression was needlessly prolonged by government intervention.
Yes, its that simple. You will hear a great deal about social goods or justice or morality or how some price is "unreasonably high". It is nothing but an elaborate (often self) deception. The logic in the end is the same. They want what someone else has created. If they can't get it at the the price they want, this makes the owner evil.
It is very difficult to reason with such people. There is an almost reflexive connection between their wants/feelings and judgements about what is right or wrong. The thinking very much resembles that of the religious zealot or homophobe. For them, the unconfortable feeling they get when they think of such things is enough to provoke a judgement that such things are wrong. There is no reasoning that goes on.
Take the example of "unreasonable price." Just how is anyone supposed to determine logically what a reasonable price is? Is there some formula? No. "unreasonable price" is just a synonym for "I don't like the price" or "I feel the price it too high."
My favorite is when people invoke the idea of a "social good." Again, most of the time, "social good" is just a synonym for "my good." In the end, they really mean "less good for them, more good for me." Really, how could it mean anything else? Values are ultimately subjective. How can anyone be in a position to determine objectively what is a "social good"? People who invoke the term "social good" really have no choice but to use their own values in deciding what is a social good and what isn't. For me, allowing people to charge what they what for what they make on the priciple that they are not slaves to society is a "social good." Others think this is incorrect. How can we decide objectively who is right? We can't. In the end issues of right and wrong come down to subjective judgement and personal value systems. I just wish people would be honest with me and themselves about where their own ideas of right and wrong come from and not hide behind elaborate abstractions like "social good."
We can discuss how it is we can get what we each want. Some will conclude that giving people the right to charge what they wish for what they create, in the end, will provide most of us with what we want. Other's will conclude that outright theft is the easiest way. Others will be somewhere in between. Its starts with people being honest with themselves.
So, the answer to the question is:
People can't charge what they want because other people don't like it. They are even willing to get violent about it (they hide behind the abstrations "illegal" and "law" and get professional thugs called "police" who have guns and batons to do their dirty work).
Some results are expected -- like men are more likely to be involved. Others are unexpected -- suicide makes up for more than half of the deaths rather than murder.
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ade.html
Nearly always, the circuits that evolve are smaller than those that are designed by an engineer. Here, the gates of an FPGA appear analogous to genes. It seems that these experiments with FPGA's might have predicted fewer human genes. I wonder what else these experiments might predict is going on in humans.
These FPGA's have odd failure modes. Is there a connection with certain human diseases?
Before you try to educate someone else, start with yourself! The light/dark pattern thats seen with the experiment you describe is nothing more than an interference pattern created when the monochromatic and coherent light reflects off the surface of the object you're looking at and strikes your retina.
For a more complete description, take a look at:
http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserioi.htm#ioiscs0
Now, as far as eye resolution goes:
"For an eye with 20/20 vision, the angular resolution is 1 arcminute (1/60th of a degree)"
With this information, we can make a good guess at what a monitors resolution "ought" to be.
Take the sine of 1/60º and multiply this by the aproximate distance from the monitor.
At 3 feet, you get about 0.0105 inches. So you need about 100 pixels per inch. Thats 10,000 per square inch.
A 17" monitor is about 13"x10", so a resolution of 1300x1000 should do the trick at 3 feet.
Also, notice the qualifications I made
A 17" monitor...
This shows that the statement: "The human eye can see aliasing artifacts at resolution up to and even beyond 4000x4000, so obviously 1600x1200 is not sufficient.
is meaningless without knowing the viewing distance.
But even knowing the viewing distance still gets us no where. Notice the ought above in quotes. No matter what the resolution of the monitor, there exists textures that will cause aliasing unless other steps are taken. Outline of a proof:
1) Cast one ray from the virtual eye (POV) through each pixel of the screen onto a surface parallel to the screen, but some distance away in the virtual world.
2) Where the cast rays meet the surface, find the texture element of the surface at this intersection and color it white.
3) Color the rest of the texture elements black.
It should be obvious that the surface viewed at this distance with this texture and without anti-aliasing will appear totally white. It should also be obvious that for any resolution we can create a texture that will cause this effect.
Benjamin Franklin actually started a subscription library. People paid to use it.
"Sadly, this idea that common people can't think for themselves is still too common, we've all heard too much about governments that won't allow their citizens to browse certain auction sites because they may contain disturbing historical artifacts."
Hell, you have the entire Internet at your disposal and didn't bother even to do a simple search on "Benjamin Franklin library." I wonder, do you consider yourself one of the "common people?"
"God" is said to speak in many languages. Jesus spoke the now dead language Aramaic.
Or:
"I am a plutocratic [programmer] trying to make enough money to buy a fifth Lexus. Myself and a couple of other blood-sucking leeches had the idea of kitting out a [web site] with fancy-schmancy computerised bells and whistles so that we can jack up our already stratospheric fees into the ionosphere. We don't really have a clue about [making a profit], so we thought we'd ask a bunch of [consumers] what they'd like, and more importantly, be prepared to pay for. Meanwhile, malnourished kids and the homeless? Fuck 'em."
Get this straight: we are not each others' slaves. You were not born to be a slave to your fellow man. I was not born to be a slave to my fellow man. Doctors don't become doctors so they can be your personal nose wiper. If you don't wany to pay a doctor for medical help and advice, then go to medical school and you won't have to.
The fact is, you don't know jack crap. How many lives have you saved? Probably zero.
This habit of villainizing people who want something in return for what they do for others is just plain evil.
WHERE IS YOUR SENSE OF RECIPROCITY? Are you telling me that you wouldn't give a man who saved your life a Lexus is you could? Would you even give a "Thank you"?
The truth is, you probably wouldn't do anything if you could help it. People like you are the very reason people ask for money for what they do instead of accepting a vague promise to recipricate some time in the future. When you give money in return for a service, that person has some reasonable chance of being able to get something in return for what they did for you. When people say, "Hey, thanks. I'll have to help you out some day" they really mean, "thanks sucker."
I don't write this to be cynical. This is just the way it is. The fact is, paying someone for something they have made for you or done for you is the most sincere way you can tell them "thanks."
Americans spend over 460 BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR just on leisure! This is not necessary!
Compare this to the 168 million dollars the US gave to help fight AIDS in Africa.
Americans can obviously afford to do more. There's no reason why Americans should get to drive their expensive cars, buy their expensive clothes, and play Quake on via a cable modem, at the expense of the rest of the world. The only solution is to force Americans to do their fair share. Perhaps the United Nations can help. Americans will not give up what they ought to unless forced somehow. The rest of the world is suffering while Americans live well!
Americans must be MADE to be more altruistic!
Your imperialistic military is the only thing stopping the rest of the world from coming to America to take its fair share!
So the next time you greedy Americans are buying your latest DVD, or a hamburger, or a new CD player for your car, think about all the people dying so you can have a little fun!
I hope your guilty conscience doesn't ruin the next movie you go out and see.
I'm not sure exactly what is used to spot ICBM's but I don't think this is it. Contrary to popular opinion, objects in free-fall don't follow parabala's -- they follow elipses. A parabola is inadequate a curve when describing the motion of an object moving freely at these scales. An ICBM in free-fall would follow the same curve as anything else moving freely -- an elipse.
Secondly, an ICBM spends some of its time not moving freely, but under thrust. This means that there are many different curves an ICBM may follow.
It seems like there must be something other than identifying parabolic motion as a "signature" when it comes to spotting ICBMs.
(1)Remove a ceiling tile
(2)Toss a piece of meat up there
(3)Replace ceiling tile
The Bill of Rights describes restrictions on the Federal Government's power -- not individuals and not corporations.
It may not be obvious to someone who's had one semester of logic design that the speed of a boolean circuit in real silicon isn't just a function of its depth. Issues like fan-out and trying to implement the circuit on a plane, etc. end up killing you for larger circuits. A naive, two-level circuit, though it has minimal depth, isn't necessarily the fastest in real silicon.
Consider something as simple as the parity fuction. It can be shown that a boolean circuit of constant depth implementing the parity function grows exponentially with the number of inputs. This is a big problem in that your inputs will be forced to each drive an ever increasing number of gates as the number of bits increases. At some point you have to alter the electrical characteristics of the circuit (ends up making it slower) or add drivers (ends up slower).
Suppose instead you allow the depth of the circuit to increase. Now the number of gates you need grows linear with the number of inputs rather than as 2^n. It gets even better. Every doubling of the number of inputs only adds one more level to the depth of the circuit.
Exercise for the reader: in what way does the arrangement of the drivers added to the first circuit resemble the arrangement of the gates of the second circuit?
What bothers me the most is the contemtuous tone you used in replying to cperciva. He didn't deserve it.
It may be enough to force companies to disclose some of the methods they use to maintain their level of control of the market. Forcing Microsoft to reveal that they alter file structures to limit competition or hide system calls may create enough consumer anger to force them to make some changes or open up standards. Right now most of these techniques are known just to IT folks.
"We ain't got no shelter-ree-nees" -- Moe Syzlak "Lets burn down the observatory so this never happens again!"
Well, there was the memo circulated by Democrat lawyer Mark Herron on Nov 15 coaching Democrats on how to get ballots by overseas personel rejected. It certainly seems like at least one Democrat was "try[ing] to get them invalidated."
Also, keep in mind that many of the ballots without a postmark arrived before the election so they could not have been sent after the election. What should be done with these?
The Democrats want it both ways -- flexibility when counting ballots that favor them, and inflexibility when it favors the Republicans.