A good example of this is how Bartlett's conservative supreme court nominee (on the West Wing) No, that would be a bad example, as it is entirely fictitious. It's completely immaterial whether it mirrors reality in any way, as it does nothing to bolster any arguments about real things--- which is the purpose of an example.
Please, people, don't get any of your legal education from TV. I work with TV writers. They are definitely not scholars in any sense of the word. They will create plot devices that brazenly ignore the law of the land, the laws of human behavior, and/or the laws of physics if it'll move the story forward.
I really hope that this isn't truly a "new" discovery.
It's not. This guy was an amateur looking at the problem a decade ago. Geez, not THAT guy again. His observations on what causes that stuff are spot on, but his proposed solutions show a complete inability to understand the concept of scaling as it applies to traffic. He notes that by keeping a larger interval in front of him, the "wave" disappears. Well no shit. Doing that simulates a small pocket of uncongested freeway. This pocket is created at the (small) expense of the cars behind him. You can't have everyone leave a larger interval because that would require the road to be carrying fewer cars. The waves are caused by too many cars too close together. no amount of driving "tricks" is going to increase the car-to-car interval without actually reducing traffic density.
Commendable effort, but it's further proof of what my father (an engineer) has always said about engineers "Never ask an engineer to solve a problem outside his area of expertise. You'll get the most plausible sounding wrong answer you've ever heard."
Read the actual link I provided (that the guy tried to trash without reading it). It's about 2 written pages. And I don't want to rehash it. Just as well you didn't because it makes no fucking sense. You've completely abstracted something that is better suited to analogy.
complete drying up of AIDS research (who the hell wants to spend their life researching or fund researching it if there is not money in it?)
Get real. Most privately funded research money is looking for better pills to grow hair, induce erections, mimic a good night's rest, or make people feel happy when they're not. There's just not a hell of a big market for AIDS drugs. There are far more limp dicks with big wallets than there are gay men and IV drug users.
Worse, most of the "revolutionary" ideas since then have either been evolutionary dead ends like NUMA and ccNUMA or have taken absurdly long to catch on like touch screens, which first appeared commercially in the early 80s, but outside of POS systems and PDAs/smartphones, are still almost nonexistent in the marketplace. Touch screens haven't caught on much because they're only useful for very narrow applications. You can't exert fine control when your freakin' FINGER is covering the pointer, plus you can't hold your arm up in front of you for very long. This pretty much limits touch screens to self-serve kiosk applications and (to some degree) PDA phones.
Having no software patents at all would still be a massive improvement over what we currently have. And we don't know how to build a better system. How about this -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=430698&cid=22190456 It's an idiotic idea. It completely buggers the economic incentive to invest in R&D to develop truly ingenious innovations. The market is not all-wise and all-knowing, and continuous profits from holding a patent would go to giant megacorps while small time R&D guys who couldn't afford to bid on their own inventions would see one relatively small lump sum up front. Take, for example, the Breathe-Right strip. The guy who invented that has made quite a bit of money on it. How much do you think the patent would have made at auction, before the market in general even knew it wanted such a product!
I'm kind of surprised that the US didn't go with more digits back in the early days of computerization - the early 70s in the case of this stuff. You have to understand the history of the SSN. It was never intended to be a personal identity number (beyond, of course, the application of the Social Security), but once the federal government started using it as a taxpayer and military ID number it became the de facto standard. The Social Security Administration has always been quite adamant that it is not a general ID number, and that if it is requested, you should demand to know which law requires its use. This is great in principle, but unless of course legislation is passed forbidding its use outside of the specific federal uses it's intended, it will remain the predominant ID number simply because it is the only unique, verifiable, nationally issued number available.
I don't know anyone who looks like their passport photo. As long as you're the right gender and have the right skin color, you can probably get away with a surprising number of other differences. Not to mention that a photo is not worth any more than the rigor with which they check it. Are you fucking serious? I would assume that an official trying to help you re-animate a dead identity would perhaps scrutinize the photo a bit closer than, say, a DHS dolt at a window at the airport processing eight hundred people a day. News flash! Government employees are not all copies of the same model robot with identical programming! They think! They reason! They apply varying degrees of effort depending on the importance of the task!
If you're planning on getting into RPG (again) please *do* check out the alternatives of which I listed some above. They deserve to be considered as a RPG gaming system. Over the years my group has used D&D (various editions), GURPS, Palladium, Deadlands, Runequest, Everway, Merps--- you name it, we probably played it. They run the gamut from absurdly abstracted (Everway) to overly realistic (GURPS). Personally, my favorite was Dealands, but probably only because my first character was a harrowed huckster made under the 1ed. rules (drew 2 jokers for character history to get that harrowed trait!). Currently we're running D&D 3.5e and it's perfectly satisfactory. D20 system is pretty good about staying out of the way of the roleplaying, and everyone is already quite familiar with the D&D world. Frankly, I don't quite get what people's damage with D&D 3e and 3.5e is. Most of the complaints I've read are about how it either a) doesn't prevent bad players from playing badly and abusing the system, or b) how the new edition has buggered some favorite thing (more often than not an exploit favored by bad players!). The system seems to work just fine for a reasonable group of mature players. Perhaps the group I play with is unusual in that regard.
Then again, the group I play d&d with consists of 2 guys who have been practicing martial arts for years, a guy who is almost six and a half feet tall and works as a security guard, and a guy who was on the varsity track team. Kinda defies the stereotype there.
Yeah, the group I play with is similar. Non-nerds grow up and realize that games are fun, plus old-timey nerds develop "defenses" against persecution. I think it happens fairly often as young nerds grow older, though. I was picked on in high school for being a nerd, and that had more than a little to do with my choice to join the Army. I don't get picked on anymore. By anyone. It must be the haircut.
A hundred watts, that's all good and well, but what does it have to do with zipping huge files? Or am I reading impaired? No, you're reading fine. The problem is that ScuttleMonkey (or whomever wrote the headline) is a fucking illiterate moron. They used the verb "to zip" to mean "send", when it has no such meaning in regular speech. Now, it's usually acceptable to bend meanings for words and use their context as a clue, but in this case the verb "to zip" already has a common meaning in the computer world (i.e. to compress using the ZIP format developed by Phil Katz), so it's contextual meaning is overridden by its common meaning.
This is not news. This is not stuff that matters. Why on earth is this on the front page??? "Editors" who aren't True Nerds but rather just technophilic Normals probably has a lot to do with it. The dupes, hoaxes, and ridiculously wrong headlines don't point to an exceptionally bright nor diligent crew. That's probably only half of it, though. I have in mind an imaginary scene from a Slashdot staff meeting with their corporate bosses...
Boss in Pressed Jeans: "We think that you should appeal to ALL nerds, even the ones that watch reality TV, don't read, are proud they don't 'know computers', don't know ASCII from ANSI, think assembly language is the bad English found in instructions written in China, or think video of a man getting hit in the nuts is the pinnacle of humor."
Slashdot Chimp/Editor: " Are those like... y'know... really nerds at all?"
BiPJ: "If appealing to them will increase page hits, I say they're definitely nerds."
SC/E: "Boss is always right! Monkey press button, get paycheck!"
Sadly, I'm probably only slightly off reality. You might ask "why do you keep coming back?" Isn't it obvious? I like complaining.
A cartoon spinoff is news for nerds? Not even a science fiction cartoon?
The reason this bugs me is the last two stories I submitted were rejected. One about DARPA's oblique flying wing called Switchblade, and one about active sonic boom suppression on Gulfstream's supersonic business jet.
But a cartoon spinoff is more news worthy? The problem is that the "editors" here aren't actually real nerds, they're just idiots who think they're nerds because they know how to log in to a linux box and once bought caffeine soap off ThinkGeek. It was better when it was Hemos and Taco, who could actually claim the nerd title legitimately. Now, we have a bunch of trained chimps, little more than tech dilletantes. Press that button, monkey, press that button! Ooook! Oook! Story about cartoon! Me like cartoons! Front page! Flying DiAPRA switchblade? No switchblades in baby's diaper! No!
Software's just an implementation like anything else - gears, pulleys, etc. The more our economy and innovation tends toward information-based research, the more patents *should* be novel algorithms and such. That has nothing at all to do with the quality of the software patents now being approved, but it doesn't mean that an invention that is implemented in software is inherently bad.
You're missing the point. The problem with software patents is that the way they're currently implemented, they apply to the result rather than a particular method of achieving that result. You cannot patent all engines that harness the motive power of steam, but you can patent a particular means of doing so. Likewise, you should not be able to patent all methods of selling someone an item using only one button, but alas, you apparently can. That's bullcrap. The patent should be on the specific means Amazon uses to do so, and it should also have to pass a test of obviousness, i.e. if any software developer was asked to develop such a system, the would-be patent should not be among the first things he thinks of.
Apologies for being somewhat OT here, but the difference between human rights law in general and the US constitution is an important one and I think it important not to blur the difference.
See, the trouble there is that the ICESCR isn't about rights, it's about socialism. A right that imposes a obligation on others isn't classically a right. ICESCR is full of "rights" like the right to paid vacations, welfare, social insurance, and "health".
We are cheering the fact that MORE lawyers are being created. What will happen when they finish with the RIAA? We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lawyers. Then, we've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then comes the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
What is WITH this founding fathers cult? Can't you trust logic and argumentation, must you invoke a bunch of ancients as some kind of semi-divine authority to back your opinions up? If you like, I can bring up a long, tangential debate based solely on the principles the founding fathers espoused. The appeal to their authority assumes a working knowledge of their positions and arguments. It used to be that this was fairly common knowledge among the educated in the US, so invoking them was a "shortcut", if you will, to referencing everything from The Federalist Papers, to the US Constitution, to Common Sense.
Not infallible, just very very wise compared to modern people. They had plenty of issues, not the least of which were moral perspectives that have been proven dead wrong (slavery for instance). Do you have another example, perhaps one that isn't completely wrong? The founding fathers were completely against slavery. The trouble was, they were starting from within a very fucked up system and had no chance of succeeding if they proposed sweeping away all the institutions everyone was used to (contrast with the 1917 Russian revolution, where exactly that was done, and reflect upon the death and suffering that led to). Instead, what they did was set up a logical framework within which despicable institutions like slavery couldn't survive. In fact, in 1784 Jefferson came within one vote of prohibiting slavery in the any future state that joined the Union. This would have left only a small pocket of slavery--- basically Virginia, Maryland, N & S Carolina, and Georgia--- and would have prevented the Civil War. So really, how can you claim to know anything about their moral perspectives when you got that one so horribly wrong?
if the US government had been willing to take a stance a decade ago, real progress could have been made by this point. Trouble is, you can't conclusively prove that either.
A very large number of business jurisdictions tax businesses based on their owned property. Indeed, do people not remember how the Los Angeles County Assessor tried to tax Hughes Electronics (DirecTV) on the value of its satellites back in 2001?
I think Heinlein had the solution to that (he used it for real property). You declare a value, you pay taxes based on that, and anybody can force you to sell it to them at that price. No good. You'd end up with a few giant media conglomerates using their metric assloads of money to buy up all the IP of little guys, because Joe Schmoe with his Amusing Novel can only afford to pay so much in taxes, and the declared value associated with that would never be enough to price it out of MegaMedia Inc's range. The more they buy, the more money they make. Repeat until everything is owned by MegaMedia or the IRS.
For similar reasons, the same thing would happen with real property. Compulsion to sell is a Bad Thing. Heinlein was making an interesting point about taxation, not suggesting anything that would actually work.
No the real question would be how much would you have to pay for that comment you just wrote. Because you have that piece of IP assigned to you you now have to pay say a $.01 tax to keep that registered to you. No, he's not proposing a tax on things people specifically want to retain copyright to. You're conflating the current system (automatic) with the proposed system (pay tax or get no copyright). I suppose perhaps you're making a joke, but it's hard to tell due to the complete lack of humor therein.
This is kind of a blow to the pro-nuclear power constituency Except that it isn't. If you, the submitter, or the Slashdot "editors" had RTFA, you'd have realized that the reactors shut down because of the blackout, not the other way around. The blackout was caused by switching equipment. The circuit being broken, the reactors had no place to dump their power output, so they automatically shut off. That's what is supposed to happen. Nothing nuclear to see here, move along.
There are serious questions regarding the safety of immunizations, especially regarding thimerosal preservatives. You oughtta not get your science education from bad TV shows like Eli Stone.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, people, don't get any of your legal education from TV. I work with TV writers. They are definitely not scholars in any sense of the word. They will create plot devices that brazenly ignore the law of the land, the laws of human behavior, and/or the laws of physics if it'll move the story forward.
Commendable effort, but it's further proof of what my father (an engineer) has always said about engineers "Never ask an engineer to solve a problem outside his area of expertise. You'll get the most plausible sounding wrong answer you've ever heard."
complete drying up of AIDS research (who the hell wants to spend their life researching or fund researching it if there is not money in it?)
Get real. Most privately funded research money is looking for better pills to grow hair, induce erections, mimic a good night's rest, or make people feel happy when they're not. There's just not a hell of a big market for AIDS drugs. There are far more limp dicks with big wallets than there are gay men and IV drug users.Without immature pedantry, every Slashdot story would have, at most, 5 posts. Who modded this funny? It's fucking insightful!
Yeah, the group I play with is similar. Non-nerds grow up and realize that games are fun, plus old-timey nerds develop "defenses" against persecution. I think it happens fairly often as young nerds grow older, though. I was picked on in high school for being a nerd, and that had more than a little to do with my choice to join the Army. I don't get picked on anymore. By anyone. It must be the haircut.
Boss in Pressed Jeans: "We think that you should appeal to ALL nerds, even the ones that watch reality TV, don't read, are proud they don't 'know computers', don't know ASCII from ANSI, think assembly language is the bad English found in instructions written in China, or think video of a man getting hit in the nuts is the pinnacle of humor."
Slashdot Chimp/Editor: " Are those like... y'know... really nerds at all?"
BiPJ: "If appealing to them will increase page hits, I say they're definitely nerds."
SC/E: "Boss is always right! Monkey press button, get paycheck!"
Sadly, I'm probably only slightly off reality. You might ask "why do you keep coming back?" Isn't it obvious? I like complaining.
The reason this bugs me is the last two stories I submitted were rejected. One about DARPA's oblique flying wing called Switchblade, and one about active sonic boom suppression on Gulfstream's supersonic business jet.
But a cartoon spinoff is more news worthy? The problem is that the "editors" here aren't actually real nerds, they're just idiots who think they're nerds because they know how to log in to a linux box and once bought caffeine soap off ThinkGeek. It was better when it was Hemos and Taco, who could actually claim the nerd title legitimately. Now, we have a bunch of trained chimps, little more than tech dilletantes. Press that button, monkey, press that button! Ooook! Oook! Story about cartoon! Me like cartoons! Front page! Flying DiAPRA switchblade? No switchblades in baby's diaper! No!
Software's just an implementation like anything else - gears, pulleys, etc. The more our economy and innovation tends toward information-based research, the more patents *should* be novel algorithms and such. That has nothing at all to do with the quality of the software patents now being approved, but it doesn't mean that an invention that is implemented in software is inherently bad.
You're missing the point. The problem with software patents is that the way they're currently implemented, they apply to the result rather than a particular method of achieving that result. You cannot patent all engines that harness the motive power of steam, but you can patent a particular means of doing so. Likewise, you should not be able to patent all methods of selling someone an item using only one button, but alas, you apparently can. That's bullcrap. The patent should be on the specific means Amazon uses to do so, and it should also have to pass a test of obviousness, i.e. if any software developer was asked to develop such a system, the would-be patent should not be among the first things he thinks of.Apologies for being somewhat OT here, but the difference between human rights law in general and the US constitution is an important one and I think it important not to blur the difference.
See, the trouble there is that the ICESCR isn't about rights, it's about socialism. A right that imposes a obligation on others isn't classically a right. ICESCR is full of "rights" like the right to paid vacations, welfare, social insurance, and "health".What will happen when they finish with the RIAA? We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lawyers. Then, we've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then comes the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
For similar reasons, the same thing would happen with real property. Compulsion to sell is a Bad Thing. Heinlein was making an interesting point about taxation, not suggesting anything that would actually work.