The proper function of government is not to pick market winners and losers, but to look out for the common interests of the people. Most can agree that an open, freely competitive environment has a better chance at meeting our common interests than a closed, noncompetitive environment. (The catastrophic history of communism, alone, should be evidence enough of the truth of this proposition.)
Do we have an open, freely competitive market for telecommunications services in the US? The answer is clearly, no. We have a marginally competitive market composed of government-granted monopolies.
The problem isn't that we have "too much" government regulation. Without a grant of monopoly -- a government regulation -- the network operators wouldn't have a network to operate in the first place. The problem is we have the wrong kind of regulations. The government shouldn't be granting monopolies in the first place. Rather, it should be setting interoperability standards and requirements that keep the market as open and freely competitive as possible.
Seen in this light, then, these bills are a welcome addition. They at least set a standard for openness and nondiscrimination, which is a good thing for a government to be doing.
When I buy low-end PCs from Dell, I always order whatever Windows machine is on sale. Windows has great support for CD/DVD drives, and that really helps with accurately reading my LiveCDs. Now that we have Wubi, Windows is an even better OS for boot-installing Linux.
Say what you will about Microsoft, they DO have some great software out there and they are the most popular OS on the planet. So, why not just go with what they're good at, and be happy?
No doubt this is hugely a matter of personal preference, but after using a glossy screen for 3 years, my preference is definitely for glossy. True, one must get used to positioning the screen to avoid reflections, but this becomes automatic very quickly. The experience of a glossy screen is far easier on my eyes, and the higher contrast feels much more like reading on paper.
For the record, I'm officially over the hill, and have used glasses all my adult life.
The government builds and operates the interstate highway system for the common benefit of all. It's not much of a stretch to see the advantages of them building and operating a public data network, too.
As a bonus for the security-minded, if the government operated the public network, they wouldn't have to go cap-in-hand to the private sector for permission to monitor traffic. There are cameras on all the major highway intersections, and no one complains. The same could be done for a data network.
Governments aren't as cost-effective as private enterprise, but they have the terrific advantage of operating more in the public eye. For a public resource, this is an extremely valuable characteristic.
The fact is, telecom doesn't operate in a free market, so almost none of the normal arguments for letting private enterprise take the lead are valid. Competition doesn't truly exist, so corporations are free to invent ever more resourceful ways to make us pay more for less.
At the very least, a publicly-run network would be more responsive to ordinary users who at least have a vote. As it stands now, we really are at the telecomm's mercy.
In this interesting interview with ACM Queue, Mary Lou Jepsen (the founding Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop Per Child) notes that CPU power is not the key value proposition of an ultra-light PC, it's how fast one can turn the CPU on and off to conserve power.
The entire software application stack is moving to a rich-but-thin client architecture. Even with the puny CPU and RAM the OLPC XO affords, I can edit my documents, spreadsheets, and email on Google Apps, upload my comments to Slashdot, read e-books, listen to music, etc. I do need a PC with more horsepower for my thick-client apps. But for on-the-go, I'd rather save the weight and battery life.
Frankly, none of the UMPC darlings I've seen and used -- the Eee PC included -- is as functional as the OLPC XO. The dual screen makes it possible to go from the subway tunnel to direct sunlight without skipping a beat. Try that with any other laptop. The XO feels like the first truly portable, mobile PC.
An excellent question! What, exactly, is he paying for?
1. He is paying for a connection from his LAN to the ISP. This connection is 6Mbps.
2. He is paying to have his packets forwarded from his ISP and the rest of the Internet. The speed of THIS forwarding depends on the combined throughput of the particular route taken by his packets.
3. He is NOT paying for a guaranteed 6Mbps endpoint-to-endpoint connection. When his 6Mbps of torrent traffic gets to the ISP, his packets HAVE TO SHARE with all the other ISP customers who need forwarding to the Internet at that moment, thank you very much.
The only way to get the guaranteed, fixed bandwidth you're describing is to run a fixed connection between the end-points. Nobody wants to run a zillion cables everywhere, so we converge our traffic into shared, common backbones.
The fairness problem happens when we get to the shared portions of the network. Since the bandwidth footprint of a bittorrent client is up to 1,000 times larger than a web client, the torrents always win the competition for the shared resource.
None of us should have a problem with protocol-based traffic shaping. This is generally not a neutrality issue. Not all applications have the same performance requirements. For example, I can live with a delay in showing an image on a web page, but I can't live with a delay in passing a VoIP packet.
Traffic shaping could be a neutrality issue when wholesaling is involved.
Yes, it is your torrent client's fault. Because a torrent client is on 24/7 and opens up hundreds of connections at a time, it grabs an unfair proportion of the bandwidth. By contrast, a web browser only opens 2-4 connections at a time, and once it has completed fetching the page, it disconnects.
One thing I rarely read in these kinds of discussion is the importance of the principle of balance of power. In my mind, the checks and balances placed on the power of government is the true genius of democracy, American-style. That we have three very independent branches of government makes it possible for self-regulation. It is the lack of balance that makes warrantless wiretapping improper.
I'm not convinced that it ought to be the judicial branch that balances the executive power in this particular case, however. If people in the Executive branch are spying against Americans, I would think that Congress would be a better choice, given the essentially political nature of the activity (what legal issues would be at stake in deciding whether person 'A' ought to be spied upon? It's a political question, not a legal one.)
Nevertheless, SOME balance is an absolute necessity.
In Virginia, it appears that the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) is responsible for licensing private investigators. They provide a Private Security Services Business Directory Search form at http://www.dcjs.virginia.gov/ps/directory/businessSearch.cfm. In my search, I could not find "Media Sentry" anywhere in their database.
1. Ask for the company's DCJS license number or request a copy of the DCJS license.
2. Verify the validity of a DCJS license for their own protection.
3. Be provided with a written agreement that includes scope and cost of services.
4. Report possible unlicensed activity to DCJS. Anonymous complaints are accepted.
5. Contact the DCJS to obtain complaint information @ http://www.dcjs.virginia.gov/privatesecurity
However, I do not know if Media Sentry has operated in Virginia. If someone can show me that they have done so, I will be more than happy to issue a complaint.
Hey, some pretty good insights, here. You've convinced me that saying Sugar is "for kids" is not quite on the mark. I guess I would amend it to something like, "Sugar is for people who may never have used a computer before (and may not be able to read yet)". In short, it's a beginner's interface.
I also agree that the Journal is far from perfect -- a complaint that I could levy against a lot of the software on the G1G1 XO, actually -- but I can see where they're trying to go with it, which is admirable.
Everyone repeat after me, "It's an education project, not a laptop project."
I have watched several children play around with my XO, and not once has any of them ever asked me how to start or stop an activity using the Sugar UI. Truly, it is a brilliantly simple interface.
Frankly, the Journal is one of the very best parts of the whole thing. The XO remembers everything you do, automatically. You don't have to hit "save" when you've finished writing something, or deal with "files" and "folders" -- kids have no concept of such abstractions. You just use the durn thing, and it records everything for you, silently and efficiently. When you want to go back to what you were doing, you go to your Journal, and bingo, there it is. One click, and you're back in the saddle.
The key point here is to remember that Sugar is for kids. If you want an adult interface, you can install XFCE or your adult-sized distro of choice. Since it's just a standard Linux box, it's really easy to explore.
In "Math You Can't Use", Ben Klemens makes the point that the software development market is divided almost evenly into three segments: retail, consulting, and in-house. Software patents as currently defined and enforced benefit the first group, retail, but hurt the other two because they do not have the same market dynamics at all.
Patents are an artificial market force created to prevent certain kinds of unfair practices in a centralized, controlled-distribution market. Applied to a decentralized and distributed market such as that for free and open source software, patents create the nightmare scenario of an exponential increase in legal exposure as developers build upon each other's work.
The answer, then, isn't to do away with patents, but to tweak them so they make economic sense again.
Here is Chapter 5 of "Math You Can't Use", and it is well worth reading.
I just purchased the book and am looking forward to reading the rest. A very interesting work.
Let me join in with those who have mentioned the value of modeling your processes as opposed to merely documenting them. A model is a testable representation of your processes. You can take the output of a model and prove that the system it describes is consistent and complete. The information you put into a model can be reused, analyzed, transformed, and distributed where it's needed. Documentation only gives value to the (very few) people who will actually take the time to read them.
Regarding tools, I'm a big fan of Enterprise Architect because it is inexpensive but comprehensive. Contrary to some of the advice in this thread, I don't think much of Visio as a modeling tool. It's really for drawing pretty pictures, not making models. Microsoft has some very nice modeling features built into Visual Studio, I believe, so if you're into Microsoft, try those tools instead.
My take on the research was that natural selection was shown to have less "creative power" than has been thought; natural selection is more constrained, and less variable. This makes the case for random mutation as the engine of change harder to maintain. The chance that a potentially beneficial, but rare, mutation will make its way into the population is now lower.
Personally, I remain unconvinced that a random generator (mutation) hooked up to a filter (natural selection) can create an entirely new system, regardless of how many generations are allowed. Whenever the random generator creates a bunch of outlier conditions, they will just get filtered out of consideration, so it is unlikely that truly new forms will arise in this manner.
I think the evidence points towards some kind of self-organizing principles being at work in the creation of new systems. I am speaking of entirely natural causes here, nothing supernatural. The evidence seems to be that life is "designed to design", and is far more complicated than can be explained by the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection alone.
If your project is object oriented, you may be able to get your UML modeling tool to import the code and visualize the classes. When you do this, you'll probably get a HUGE diagram that seems just as unwieldy as looking at the code. The trick is to apply a filter to the model, so you're not overwhelmed with detail. Your UML tool should be able to do that for you.
I recommend focusing on all interface classes first. This can give you a remarkably sane picture of a system, and will help you divide up the code into more conceptually meaningful chunks.
The tool I use is Enterprise Architect, which does quite a lot of heavy lifting yet is still inexpensive enough for me to own a personal copy.
There's not much conceptual distance (and virtually no technical distance) between data-mining for copyright violations and data-mining for security violations.
Maybe NSA plans to let AT&T use a portion of whatever mining tool they've got up in those secret data rooms as payback? Or, maybe AT&T saw what NSA put into those secret rooms, and figured, "oh, so that's how you can filter the entire Internet."
I belong to the Presbyterian church, whose organization of assemblies of governing bodies ("presbyteries") is the model for our system of representative State and Federal bodies (cf. Presyterian Polity).
I have been at a General Assembly (the top-level assembly of representatives) where thousands of voting members were in attendance. The group was able to easily conduct its business without any computer technology. As is done in Congress, the docket was determined before the meeting began. Each issue was allotted a fixed amount of time for presentation of arguments, questions, and counter-arguments. The various sides to the debate put their best people forward to argue their case, so it wasn't 4,000 people all trying to talk. Voting members were issued hand-held voting placards, which were small cardboard signs on a stick about 1 foot long. When a vote was called, members raised their placards to indicate yea or nay. It was very easy to see. If the vote was close, the individual votes were counted. If not, the motion was simply declared for the majority.
If 4,000 people can discuss and vote without any computer assistance whatsoever, we should be able to easily accommodate 10,000 people in Congress. The current capitol building could be used for ceremonial purposes, and a new, more utilitarian building could be built to do the day-to-day business.
The CC FAQ says this about how to properly accrediting a work:...the proper way of accrediting your use of a work when you're making a verbatim use is: (1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work; (2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify; (3) the title of the Work; and (4) the Uniform Resource Identifier for the work if specified by the author and/or licensor.
I guess the takeaway here is that part of "keeping intact any copyright notices" should be making a copy of the original CC license for your records. Not a bad point.
The architecture of a plan to entrap is now compete:
1. Register images with the copyright office
2. Assign CC licenses to them and post to Flickr
3. Wait a sufficient amount of time for people to pick them up (optional tactic: promote them like crazy under an alias)
4. Revoke the CC license
5. As the fish start jumping into the barrel, go get gun.... er, lawyer.
6. Start with companies that didn't use the attribution: bang
7. Whoever's left over, make them show when and how they got the image and that it was under CC-licensing at the time. If they can't prove it, bang.
IANAL, but Step 4 seems incorrect. It wouldn't affect anyone who had acquired the images in steps 1-3. Those people have a permanent, non-revokeable license. My understanding what that a CC licensee can only revoke future use, not past use.
...never in the history of the world has even a single atom of matter or molecule of neurotransmitter ever been seen to behave counter to the laws of science.
Religion is opium, because its sole purpose is to make thinking unnecessary...
You are not fairly representing the argument for faith.
Faith is the end-product of thinking. It is simply what one concludes about the meaning of life, based on the evidence one sees. It is metaphysics, not physics.
Faith doesn't have a "purpose" in any of the senses you're using here. It is not some kind of philosophical tool that one hauls out when science fails to adequately explain the physical world. Faith is what comes after all the facts have been presented.
Slashdot Mirror
The proper function of government is not to pick market winners and losers, but to look out for the common interests of the people. Most can agree that an open, freely competitive environment has a better chance at meeting our common interests than a closed, noncompetitive environment. (The catastrophic history of communism, alone, should be evidence enough of the truth of this proposition.)
Do we have an open, freely competitive market for telecommunications services in the US? The answer is clearly, no. We have a marginally competitive market composed of government-granted monopolies.
The problem isn't that we have "too much" government regulation. Without a grant of monopoly -- a government regulation -- the network operators wouldn't have a network to operate in the first place. The problem is we have the wrong kind of regulations. The government shouldn't be granting monopolies in the first place. Rather, it should be setting interoperability standards and requirements that keep the market as open and freely competitive as possible.
Seen in this light, then, these bills are a welcome addition. They at least set a standard for openness and nondiscrimination, which is a good thing for a government to be doing.
When I buy low-end PCs from Dell, I always order whatever Windows machine is on sale. Windows has great support for CD/DVD drives, and that really helps with accurately reading my LiveCDs. Now that we have Wubi, Windows is an even better OS for boot-installing Linux.
Say what you will about Microsoft, they DO have some great software out there and they are the most popular OS on the planet. So, why not just go with what they're good at, and be happy?
No doubt this is hugely a matter of personal preference, but after using a glossy screen for 3 years, my preference is definitely for glossy. True, one must get used to positioning the screen to avoid reflections, but this becomes automatic very quickly. The experience of a glossy screen is far easier on my eyes, and the higher contrast feels much more like reading on paper.
For the record, I'm officially over the hill, and have used glasses all my adult life.
The government builds and operates the interstate highway system for the common benefit of all. It's not much of a stretch to see the advantages of them building and operating a public data network, too.
As a bonus for the security-minded, if the government operated the public network, they wouldn't have to go cap-in-hand to the private sector for permission to monitor traffic. There are cameras on all the major highway intersections, and no one complains. The same could be done for a data network.
Governments aren't as cost-effective as private enterprise, but they have the terrific advantage of operating more in the public eye. For a public resource, this is an extremely valuable characteristic.
The fact is, telecom doesn't operate in a free market, so almost none of the normal arguments for letting private enterprise take the lead are valid. Competition doesn't truly exist, so corporations are free to invent ever more resourceful ways to make us pay more for less.
At the very least, a publicly-run network would be more responsive to ordinary users who at least have a vote. As it stands now, we really are at the telecomm's mercy.
In this interesting interview with ACM Queue, Mary Lou Jepsen (the founding Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop Per Child) notes that CPU power is not the key value proposition of an ultra-light PC, it's how fast one can turn the CPU on and off to conserve power.
The entire software application stack is moving to a rich-but-thin client architecture. Even with the puny CPU and RAM the OLPC XO affords, I can edit my documents, spreadsheets, and email on Google Apps, upload my comments to Slashdot, read e-books, listen to music, etc. I do need a PC with more horsepower for my thick-client apps. But for on-the-go, I'd rather save the weight and battery life.
Frankly, none of the UMPC darlings I've seen and used -- the Eee PC included -- is as functional as the OLPC XO. The dual screen makes it possible to go from the subway tunnel to direct sunlight without skipping a beat. Try that with any other laptop. The XO feels like the first truly portable, mobile PC.
An excellent question! What, exactly, is he paying for?
1. He is paying for a connection from his LAN to the ISP. This connection is 6Mbps.
2. He is paying to have his packets forwarded from his ISP and the rest of the Internet. The speed of THIS forwarding depends on the combined throughput of the particular route taken by his packets.
3. He is NOT paying for a guaranteed 6Mbps endpoint-to-endpoint connection. When his 6Mbps of torrent traffic gets to the ISP, his packets HAVE TO SHARE with all the other ISP customers who need forwarding to the Internet at that moment, thank you very much.
The only way to get the guaranteed, fixed bandwidth you're describing is to run a fixed connection between the end-points. Nobody wants to run a zillion cables everywhere, so we converge our traffic into shared, common backbones.
The fairness problem happens when we get to the shared portions of the network. Since the bandwidth footprint of a bittorrent client is up to 1,000 times larger than a web client, the torrents always win the competition for the shared resource.
None of us should have a problem with protocol-based traffic shaping. This is generally not a neutrality issue. Not all applications have the same performance requirements. For example, I can live with a delay in showing an image on a web page, but I can't live with a delay in passing a VoIP packet.
Traffic shaping could be a neutrality issue when wholesaling is involved.
Yes, it is your torrent client's fault. Because a torrent client is on 24/7 and opens up hundreds of connections at a time, it grabs an unfair proportion of the bandwidth. By contrast, a web browser only opens 2-4 connections at a time, and once it has completed fetching the page, it disconnects.
See http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080327-one-technical-key-to-net-neutrality-solving-tcp-congestion.html
One thing I rarely read in these kinds of discussion is the importance of the principle of balance of power. In my mind, the checks and balances placed on the power of government is the true genius of democracy, American-style. That we have three very independent branches of government makes it possible for self-regulation. It is the lack of balance that makes warrantless wiretapping improper.
I'm not convinced that it ought to be the judicial branch that balances the executive power in this particular case, however. If people in the Executive branch are spying against Americans, I would think that Congress would be a better choice, given the essentially political nature of the activity (what legal issues would be at stake in deciding whether person 'A' ought to be spied upon? It's a political question, not a legal one.)
Nevertheless, SOME balance is an absolute necessity.
In Virginia, it appears that the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) is responsible for licensing private investigators. They provide a Private Security Services Business Directory Search form at http://www.dcjs.virginia.gov/ps/directory/businessSearch.cfm. In my search, I could not find "Media Sentry" anywhere in their database.
According to the Private Investigators Association of Virginia ( http://www.piava.org/directory_info.shtml ), Consumers should always:
1. Ask for the company's DCJS license number or request a copy of the DCJS license.
2. Verify the validity of a DCJS license for their own protection.
3. Be provided with a written agreement that includes scope and cost of services.
4. Report possible unlicensed activity to DCJS. Anonymous complaints are accepted.
5. Contact the DCJS to obtain complaint information @ http://www.dcjs.virginia.gov/privatesecurity
However, I do not know if Media Sentry has operated in Virginia. If someone can show me that they have done so, I will be more than happy to issue a complaint.
7. Variable type: With an ebook reader, you can zoom the font size to suit your needs and/or abilities. Invaluable.
Hey, some pretty good insights, here. You've convinced me that saying Sugar is "for kids" is not quite on the mark. I guess I would amend it to something like, "Sugar is for people who may never have used a computer before (and may not be able to read yet)". In short, it's a beginner's interface.
I also agree that the Journal is far from perfect -- a complaint that I could levy against a lot of the software on the G1G1 XO, actually -- but I can see where they're trying to go with it, which is admirable.
Thanks for the comments.
Everyone repeat after me, "It's an education project, not a laptop project."
I have watched several children play around with my XO, and not once has any of them ever asked me how to start or stop an activity using the Sugar UI. Truly, it is a brilliantly simple interface.
Frankly, the Journal is one of the very best parts of the whole thing. The XO remembers everything you do, automatically. You don't have to hit "save" when you've finished writing something, or deal with "files" and "folders" -- kids have no concept of such abstractions. You just use the durn thing, and it records everything for you, silently and efficiently. When you want to go back to what you were doing, you go to your Journal, and bingo, there it is. One click, and you're back in the saddle.
The key point here is to remember that Sugar is for kids. If you want an adult interface, you can install XFCE or your adult-sized distro of choice. Since it's just a standard Linux box, it's really easy to explore.
In "Math You Can't Use", Ben Klemens makes the point that the software development market is divided almost evenly into three segments: retail, consulting, and in-house. Software patents as currently defined and enforced benefit the first group, retail, but hurt the other two because they do not have the same market dynamics at all.
Patents are an artificial market force created to prevent certain kinds of unfair practices in a centralized, controlled-distribution market. Applied to a decentralized and distributed market such as that for free and open source software, patents create the nightmare scenario of an exponential increase in legal exposure as developers build upon each other's work.
The answer, then, isn't to do away with patents, but to tweak them so they make economic sense again.
Here is Chapter 5 of "Math You Can't Use", and it is well worth reading.
I just purchased the book and am looking forward to reading the rest. A very interesting work.
Let me join in with those who have mentioned the value of modeling your processes as opposed to merely documenting them. A model is a testable representation of your processes. You can take the output of a model and prove that the system it describes is consistent and complete. The information you put into a model can be reused, analyzed, transformed, and distributed where it's needed. Documentation only gives value to the (very few) people who will actually take the time to read them.
In terms of what notation to use for process modeling, you can't go far wrong using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Using a standard like this will save you tons of time and effort. There's no need to reinvent that particular wheel.
Regarding tools, I'm a big fan of Enterprise Architect because it is inexpensive but comprehensive. Contrary to some of the advice in this thread, I don't think much of Visio as a modeling tool. It's really for drawing pretty pictures, not making models. Microsoft has some very nice modeling features built into Visual Studio, I believe, so if you're into Microsoft, try those tools instead.
Best of luck.
My take on the research was that natural selection was shown to have less "creative power" than has been thought; natural selection is more constrained, and less variable. This makes the case for random mutation as the engine of change harder to maintain. The chance that a potentially beneficial, but rare, mutation will make its way into the population is now lower.
Personally, I remain unconvinced that a random generator (mutation) hooked up to a filter (natural selection) can create an entirely new system, regardless of how many generations are allowed. Whenever the random generator creates a bunch of outlier conditions, they will just get filtered out of consideration, so it is unlikely that truly new forms will arise in this manner.
I think the evidence points towards some kind of self-organizing principles being at work in the creation of new systems. I am speaking of entirely natural causes here, nothing supernatural. The evidence seems to be that life is "designed to design", and is far more complicated than can be explained by the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection alone.
If your project is object oriented, you may be able to get your UML modeling tool to import the code and visualize the classes. When you do this, you'll probably get a HUGE diagram that seems just as unwieldy as looking at the code. The trick is to apply a filter to the model, so you're not overwhelmed with detail. Your UML tool should be able to do that for you.
I recommend focusing on all interface classes first. This can give you a remarkably sane picture of a system, and will help you divide up the code into more conceptually meaningful chunks.
The tool I use is Enterprise Architect, which does quite a lot of heavy lifting yet is still inexpensive enough for me to own a personal copy.
There's not much conceptual distance (and virtually no technical distance) between data-mining for copyright violations and data-mining for security violations.
Maybe NSA plans to let AT&T use a portion of whatever mining tool they've got up in those secret data rooms as payback? Or, maybe AT&T saw what NSA put into those secret rooms, and figured, "oh, so that's how you can filter the entire Internet."
Acid2 tests a particular interpretation of how the standards should be implemented.
Jobs and his crew have given us a beautiful device but an ugly product. It is completely locked into its two vendors, and is not a good value.
I hate vendor lock-in. I hate being told how I can use something I bought. It's mine. I paid for it. I've earned the right to control it.
If a vendor wants my business, he needs to EARN it.
I belong to the Presbyterian church, whose organization of assemblies of governing bodies ("presbyteries") is the model for our system of representative State and Federal bodies (cf. Presyterian Polity).
I have been at a General Assembly (the top-level assembly of representatives) where thousands of voting members were in attendance. The group was able to easily conduct its business without any computer technology. As is done in Congress, the docket was determined before the meeting began. Each issue was allotted a fixed amount of time for presentation of arguments, questions, and counter-arguments. The various sides to the debate put their best people forward to argue their case, so it wasn't 4,000 people all trying to talk. Voting members were issued hand-held voting placards, which were small cardboard signs on a stick about 1 foot long. When a vote was called, members raised their placards to indicate yea or nay. It was very easy to see. If the vote was close, the individual votes were counted. If not, the motion was simply declared for the majority.
If 4,000 people can discuss and vote without any computer assistance whatsoever, we should be able to easily accommodate 10,000 people in Congress. The current capitol building could be used for ceremonial purposes, and a new, more utilitarian building could be built to do the day-to-day business.
It certainly could be done.
The CC FAQ says this about how to properly accrediting a work: ...the proper way of accrediting your use of a work when you're making a verbatim use is: (1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work; (2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify; (3) the title of the Work; and (4) the Uniform Resource Identifier for the work if specified by the author and/or licensor.
I guess the takeaway here is that part of "keeping intact any copyright notices" should be making a copy of the original CC license for your records. Not a bad point.
IANAL, but Step 4 seems incorrect. It wouldn't affect anyone who had acquired the images in steps 1-3. Those people have a permanent, non-revokeable license. My understanding what that a CC licensee can only revoke future use, not past use.
Prove it.
You are not fairly representing the argument for faith.
Faith is the end-product of thinking. It is simply what one concludes about the meaning of life, based on the evidence one sees. It is metaphysics, not physics.
Faith doesn't have a "purpose" in any of the senses you're using here. It is not some kind of philosophical tool that one hauls out when science fails to adequately explain the physical world. Faith is what comes after all the facts have been presented.