A shovel and a horse are tangible objects, and more importantly outside the scope of copyright. While a book and phonorecording are tangible media, copyright applies to the intangibles
Well yes, that's exactly the freakin' point of 109a: the intangible content of the pages is covered by copyright, but the stack of paper carrying the particular instance of that intangible content is a tangible object, that may be traded, lent, or sold just like any ordinary object (e.g. a horse or shovel). 109a clarifies that copyright covers only the right to make copies (be they duplicates or public performances or whatever). It draws the line clearly and unmistakably, so as to disabuse those who would claim that a book is still their property by virtue of them holding copyright on the words printed therein of their foolish supposition.
But without a powerful army of "our" own to fight the current standing army, I fear "our" army would be _severely_ out matched.
Thing is, in the event of any such uprising, you can probably count on a sizable portion of the military siding with you. Seriously, have you never talked to anyone in the military? They despise the freakin' government.
No, corn subsidies are a concession to the corn farmers. The fact that the subsidies make HFCS a cheaper alternative to tariff-laden sugar is just a happy accident.
Market cap is simply share price * number of shares. It's a rough yardstick as to what the public perception of the value of the company is. It actually says nothing about who owns the shares, what their revenue is, or how much equity they could draw on.
...bing is a search interface with a pretty photo behind it. Yahoo would be an easy call, they need the money and they're a whole lot better in terms of basic trustworthiness as a promise-delivering company.
uh.... Yahoo signed a deal with MS back in July '09 to abandon their search engine and use Bing instead.
I think I'm missing something. They make it harder to use their search engine because they're not as good as Google yet? To what end? I mean, that's make sense if they were doing a closed beta or something, but if this is open to all, why wouldn't they make it easily accessible?
I suspect he's alluding to the fact that up to OS9, multitasking was cooperative only, and that while OSX has preemptive multitasking, the kernel from which this capability is derived was not written by Apple.
Dirty bomb, sure. Single stage fission bomb? Not a chance in hell. Without the fusion, you get a tiny bomb that blows uranium chunks. Taking it apart and making a single stage weapon from scratch is more complicated than packing wads of C4 around a couple of subcritical clods of uranium.
Trouble is, he was after nuclear weapons, and the hilarious part is that while the command structure of the Iraqi military was trying to convince Saddam that yes, they were moving towards that goal, they were also doing their best to show Blix and company that they weren't!
OK, so the same two guys who asserted that nuclear war would cause nuclear winter in the 80's... still say it now. This is not a surprise.
I link to the actual article which has the scientists explaining why it hasn't been debunked (at least in their expert opinions)
They don't explain why it hasn't been debunked. Their sole reference to any debunking is the following:
People have several incorrect impressions about nuclear winter. One is that the climatic effects were disproved; this is just not true
They don't actually address the points the debunkers make (e.g. Krakatoa), they simply continue to assert that the assumptions behind their model are correct and (by extension) the debunkers' claims that they basically stacked the deck in favor of their hypothesis aren't. Freeman Dyson said of their original work in the 80's: "It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight."
Now, the same two guys are back again, and they're not only saying they've always been right, but their latest experiments, which plug more detailed versions of their same questionable assumptions into more sophisticated computer models, say the consequences are even worse than they first thought.
to say that the cycle could not have been broken at some point by men of good will is inaccurate. To say that such men did not exist in 1910s Europe is also incorrect.
To say that men of good will were in any position to affect that cycle is laughable.... because if they were, they would have
which will in effect change the law by setting precedence.
Precedent. Setting precedent. "Precedence" is the state of something being ahead of something else. If the something in question is the very first, there is nothing for it to be ahead of, and subsequently it is called the precedent.
You do realize that the democrats and the republicans were both called the democratic-republicans at one point
Yeah, between 1800 and 1824, when they were a collection of Jeffersonian states-rights folks opposing the federalists. The origin of our two big parties is little more than an exercise in trivia. What they stand for changes every 30 years or so. Once upon a time, Democrats were the pro-slavery party to the Republican abolitionists. It's all just history now.
Thing is, it's all moot anyway. Both parties are seemingly in a competition to see who can bend over backwards to the most business interests, preferably while spending more federal money at the same time. Once upon a time, one party could claim to be more smaller government centric, and another could claim to be a champion of individual freedom, and their assertions would have some merit. Now? They just bicker over whose turn it is to fuck us all in the ass and give Goldman-Sachs* more cash.
* Interesting Goldman-Sachs fact: they were a key player in the "investment trust" bubble in the 20's that led to the crash of 1929. They formed more subsidiary investment trust companies than any other entity, and were quite fortunate that they chose to divest themselves of their majority shareholdings in those trusts at the top of the market.... basically they walked away with everyone's money in 1929, leaving everyone else holding the (empty) bag. Nice to see that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
we already have the means to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet if the wrong kind of fight breaks out.
unless the actual goal is to kill everyone and everyone is in on the plan and cooperates, we don't have the means to kill everyone. Things like the "peace activist" line about having enough "bombs" to "destroy the earth (x) times over" are hyperbole. The planet is extremely large, and we are extremely small in comparison. Humans are ridiculously adaptable. There are too many of us spread out over too large an area for us to do much beyond temporarily stall technological advancement, much less throw us into the stone age or oblivion.
This doesn't really affect Drake's equation at all. Drake's equation is already a ridiculous load of hooey. It's simply splitting a single unknowable question mark into a handful of smaller, unknowable question marks. Even assuming an estimated number could be plugged in to any of the terms, the unknowns render that estimate moot, and even if they didn't, the equation is sensitive enough to small variances that the margin of error in any estimate will itself render the calculation pointless.
Drake's Equation is a thought experiment, not an actual useful mathematical calculation.
Also, if you have some free time, consider asking your congressperson to give the USCG more $$.
Better to ask them why we operate two navies, 1 and a half armies, and 2 3/4 air forces. Our military organization has gotten to its current state through idiotic "fiefdom building" rather than an actual analysis of what we need to conduct military operations efficiently.
Yeah, it'd be a shame if our country couldn't maintain a major component of our transportation network.....
Not comparable. The feds warned them for several years that the bridge was dangerous. Like all of our interstate highway system, maintenance and construction is the responsibility of the states. The bridge in question was the responsibility of the Minnesota DOT. Sure, if you left the GPS constellation in the care of the various states' DOT offices, we'd soon have no GPS... but they ain't fuckin' in charge of it, the Air Force is. The Air Force isn't going to pretend their satellites will magically last forever.
Differential GPS made selective availability useless as a security tool.
No, DGPS is only useful if you have some way of of taking the pseudo-random variable offset recorded by the fixed GPS at the known point and sending it to the GPS you've stuck in the nose of your cruise missile or whatever. SA was a perfectly useful security tool. The real problems with it were twofold: First, the commercial applications for full-accuracy GPS were just too great to keep them locked up. Second, the military had such a difficult time procuring useful GPS units capable of accessing the encrypted full-accuracy signal that they gave up and acknowledged that most ground troops were walking around using commercial GPS rather than than the god-awful issue units and that they might as well have full accuracy.
YES if your sitting next to a sold block of tritium
If you're sitting next to a solid block of Tritium, your largest problem is going to be hypothermia, as it'd be -257degC. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, a gas at STP.
Others here have already documented how ingestion of small amounts of Tritium (and the amounts available at the concentration discussed in the article are indeed quite small) is about the equivalent of a chest X-ray, so I will leave the above example of your ignorance of basic physics as proof enough that your opinion is likely based on speculation.
Also, comparing Tritium to Plutonium is pretty weak sauce as well. They are only alike in that they're both radioactive.
Of course the salient point about TMI is that even though it was a 98% meltdown (deformation of fuel rods due to excessive heat), the whole thing was 100% contained. The small amount of radiation leaked was because some genius after the fact thought it would be a good idea to vent the hydrogen bubble in the containment dome to the atmosphere, despite the fact that it contained Xenon-133 and Krypton-85.
Yeah, the movie was not so good, largely because they had to cram too many loose end tie-ups into 2 hours. Also, because that ass Whedon thought it'd be "edgy" or something to unnecessarily, unceremoniously, and inelegantly kill Wash. What the hell, man? The heroes are supposed to be essentially immortal, unless their death is a Sacrifice for the Greater Good. Just killing Wash like that was a complete failure to adhere to the principles of Good Storytelling.
Then how am I making calls over my data connection, not incurring plan minutes, by selecting "Use Google Voice" when I make outbound calls on my HTC Magic (Google G2)?
Oh bravo! By saving the lives of children you contribute to the problem... so how to solve this? cull the population down to a more manageable size. Now there's a solution that's not been tried before!
It is no more moral to maintain subsistence of the hungry through food programs so they can continue to be even hungrier in the future when there's more of them than it is to starve people to reduce their numbers. Bono and his tub-thumping for money to pour into "feed the hungry" programs is really more about Bono getting to stand in front of people and talk about something that makes him feel better about himself than it is about solving the real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
A shovel and a horse are tangible objects, and more importantly outside the scope of copyright. While a book and phonorecording are tangible media, copyright applies to the intangibles
Well yes, that's exactly the freakin' point of 109a: the intangible content of the pages is covered by copyright, but the stack of paper carrying the particular instance of that intangible content is a tangible object, that may be traded, lent, or sold just like any ordinary object (e.g. a horse or shovel). 109a clarifies that copyright covers only the right to make copies (be they duplicates or public performances or whatever). It draws the line clearly and unmistakably, so as to disabuse those who would claim that a book is still their property by virtue of them holding copyright on the words printed therein of their foolish supposition.
But without a powerful army of "our" own to fight the current standing army, I fear "our" army would be _severely_ out matched.
Thing is, in the event of any such uprising, you can probably count on a sizable portion of the military siding with you. Seriously, have you never talked to anyone in the military? They despise the freakin' government.
No, corn subsidies are a concession to the corn farmers. The fact that the subsidies make HFCS a cheaper alternative to tariff-laden sugar is just a happy accident.
Market cap is simply share price * number of shares. It's a rough yardstick as to what the public perception of the value of the company is. It actually says nothing about who owns the shares, what their revenue is, or how much equity they could draw on.
...bing is a search interface with a pretty photo behind it. Yahoo would be an easy call, they need the money and they're a whole lot better in terms of basic trustworthiness as a promise-delivering company.
uh.... Yahoo signed a deal with MS back in July '09 to abandon their search engine and use Bing instead.
I think I'm missing something. They make it harder to use their search engine because they're not as good as Google yet? To what end? I mean, that's make sense if they were doing a closed beta or something, but if this is open to all, why wouldn't they make it easily accessible?
I suspect he's alluding to the fact that up to OS9, multitasking was cooperative only, and that while OSX has preemptive multitasking, the kernel from which this capability is derived was not written by Apple.
Now if you could simulate a long persistence phosphor.
It's just not the same without a permanently burned-in login prompt
Meh. Helvetica on-screen isn't that good.
Dirty bomb, sure. Single stage fission bomb? Not a chance in hell. Without the fusion, you get a tiny bomb that blows uranium chunks. Taking it apart and making a single stage weapon from scratch is more complicated than packing wads of C4 around a couple of subcritical clods of uranium.
Trouble is, he was after nuclear weapons, and the hilarious part is that while the command structure of the Iraqi military was trying to convince Saddam that yes, they were moving towards that goal, they were also doing their best to show Blix and company that they weren't!
I link to the actual article which has the scientists explaining why it hasn't been debunked (at least in their expert opinions)
They don't explain why it hasn't been debunked. Their sole reference to any debunking is the following:
People have several incorrect impressions about nuclear winter. One is that the climatic effects were disproved; this is just not true
They don't actually address the points the debunkers make (e.g. Krakatoa), they simply continue to assert that the assumptions behind their model are correct and (by extension) the debunkers' claims that they basically stacked the deck in favor of their hypothesis aren't. Freeman Dyson said of their original work in the 80's: "It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight."
Now, the same two guys are back again, and they're not only saying they've always been right, but their latest experiments, which plug more detailed versions of their same questionable assumptions into more sophisticated computer models, say the consequences are even worse than they first thought.
to say that the cycle could not have been broken at some point by men of good will is inaccurate. To say that such men did not exist in 1910s Europe is also incorrect.
To say that men of good will were in any position to affect that cycle is laughable.... because if they were, they would have
which will in effect change the law by setting precedence.
Precedent. Setting precedent. "Precedence" is the state of something being ahead of something else. If the something in question is the very first, there is nothing for it to be ahead of, and subsequently it is called the precedent.
You do realize that the democrats and the republicans were both called the democratic-republicans at one point
Yeah, between 1800 and 1824, when they were a collection of Jeffersonian states-rights folks opposing the federalists. The origin of our two big parties is little more than an exercise in trivia. What they stand for changes every 30 years or so. Once upon a time, Democrats were the pro-slavery party to the Republican abolitionists. It's all just history now.
Thing is, it's all moot anyway. Both parties are seemingly in a competition to see who can bend over backwards to the most business interests, preferably while spending more federal money at the same time. Once upon a time, one party could claim to be more smaller government centric, and another could claim to be a champion of individual freedom, and their assertions would have some merit. Now? They just bicker over whose turn it is to fuck us all in the ass and give Goldman-Sachs* more cash.
* Interesting Goldman-Sachs fact: they were a key player in the "investment trust" bubble in the 20's that led to the crash of 1929. They formed more subsidiary investment trust companies than any other entity, and were quite fortunate that they chose to divest themselves of their majority shareholdings in those trusts at the top of the market.... basically they walked away with everyone's money in 1929, leaving everyone else holding the (empty) bag. Nice to see that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
we already have the means to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet if the wrong kind of fight breaks out.
unless the actual goal is to kill everyone and everyone is in on the plan and cooperates, we don't have the means to kill everyone. Things like the "peace activist" line about having enough "bombs" to "destroy the earth (x) times over" are hyperbole. The planet is extremely large, and we are extremely small in comparison. Humans are ridiculously adaptable. There are too many of us spread out over too large an area for us to do much beyond temporarily stall technological advancement, much less throw us into the stone age or oblivion.
This doesn't really affect Drake's equation at all. Drake's equation is already a ridiculous load of hooey. It's simply splitting a single unknowable question mark into a handful of smaller, unknowable question marks. Even assuming an estimated number could be plugged in to any of the terms, the unknowns render that estimate moot, and even if they didn't, the equation is sensitive enough to small variances that the margin of error in any estimate will itself render the calculation pointless.
Drake's Equation is a thought experiment, not an actual useful mathematical calculation.
Also, if you have some free time, consider asking your congressperson to give the USCG more $$.
Better to ask them why we operate two navies, 1 and a half armies, and 2 3/4 air forces. Our military organization has gotten to its current state through idiotic "fiefdom building" rather than an actual analysis of what we need to conduct military operations efficiently.
Yeah, it'd be a shame if our country couldn't maintain a major component of our transportation network.....
Not comparable. The feds warned them for several years that the bridge was dangerous. Like all of our interstate highway system, maintenance and construction is the responsibility of the states. The bridge in question was the responsibility of the Minnesota DOT. Sure, if you left the GPS constellation in the care of the various states' DOT offices, we'd soon have no GPS... but they ain't fuckin' in charge of it, the Air Force is. The Air Force isn't going to pretend their satellites will magically last forever.
Differential GPS made selective availability useless as a security tool.
No, DGPS is only useful if you have some way of of taking the pseudo-random variable offset recorded by the fixed GPS at the known point and sending it to the GPS you've stuck in the nose of your cruise missile or whatever. SA was a perfectly useful security tool. The real problems with it were twofold: First, the commercial applications for full-accuracy GPS were just too great to keep them locked up. Second, the military had such a difficult time procuring useful GPS units capable of accessing the encrypted full-accuracy signal that they gave up and acknowledged that most ground troops were walking around using commercial GPS rather than than the god-awful issue units and that they might as well have full accuracy.
YES if your sitting next to a sold block of tritium
If you're sitting next to a solid block of Tritium, your largest problem is going to be hypothermia, as it'd be -257degC. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, a gas at STP.
Others here have already documented how ingestion of small amounts of Tritium (and the amounts available at the concentration discussed in the article are indeed quite small) is about the equivalent of a chest X-ray, so I will leave the above example of your ignorance of basic physics as proof enough that your opinion is likely based on speculation.
Also, comparing Tritium to Plutonium is pretty weak sauce as well. They are only alike in that they're both radioactive.
Of course the salient point about TMI is that even though it was a 98% meltdown (deformation of fuel rods due to excessive heat), the whole thing was 100% contained. The small amount of radiation leaked was because some genius after the fact thought it would be a good idea to vent the hydrogen bubble in the containment dome to the atmosphere, despite the fact that it contained Xenon-133 and Krypton-85.
Yeah, the movie was not so good, largely because they had to cram too many loose end tie-ups into 2 hours. Also, because that ass Whedon thought it'd be "edgy" or something to unnecessarily, unceremoniously, and inelegantly kill Wash. What the hell, man? The heroes are supposed to be essentially immortal, unless their death is a Sacrifice for the Greater Good. Just killing Wash like that was a complete failure to adhere to the principles of Good Storytelling.
Then how am I making calls over my data connection, not incurring plan minutes, by selecting "Use Google Voice" when I make outbound calls on my HTC Magic (Google G2)?
Oh bravo! By saving the lives of children you contribute to the problem... so how to solve this? cull the population down to a more manageable size. Now there's a solution that's not been tried before!
It is no more moral to maintain subsistence of the hungry through food programs so they can continue to be even hungrier in the future when there's more of them than it is to starve people to reduce their numbers. Bono and his tub-thumping for money to pour into "feed the hungry" programs is really more about Bono getting to stand in front of people and talk about something that makes him feel better about himself than it is about solving the real problem.