People are wrong that ID doesn't have any falsifiable hypotheses. It is, itself one big falsifiable hypothesis.
If life were intelligently designed, it would by definition have been designed intelligently. Stupid random leftover useless cruft like appendixes and remnents of tail skeleton would not be present, especially in any species singled out for special attention. And boy, human eyes and noses could sure be a hell of a lot better than they are.
The only conclusion we can come to based on the scientific evidence is that if life was designed, it must have have been designed by a flawed being, either a stupid one or a lazy one or a malevolent one (or some combination of these).
Well, not even delving into the fact that corporations are legally "persons" (what do you think "incorporate" means?)...
Some real live human person at that corporation clicked "ok" to send those emails (because they wanted the money the corporation was paying them, but still certainly of their own free will).
The question therefore just devolves that person's rights.
You're still right that they don't have the right to post their trash on your property, though there are some intriguing questions about political leaflets and neighborhood newspapers of "general circulation" (which is usually where DBA notices are required to be posted because they are assumed to go to the "general public").
Ummm, yes, but the information Deep Throat revealed either was, or could easily have been, classified.
In which case revealing it would have been a crime.
It's a crime I'm happy to forgive him, but that doesn't change the fact that revealing secret information (whether classified or even just a corporate trade secret) is typically or at least frequently criminal.
News flash! Creative commons does nothing to prevent you from being sued. It might (N.B. might) help you win your case, but you can still quite easily be sued.
There's also the cost. A Prius is a great
alternative for a hybrid car, but what the manufacturer doesn't want to tell you when you're buying it is that the batteries only last about 6-8 years, and then they cost $10,000 to replace.
You're correct, other than there being considerable in-use evidence to not prove, but strongly suggest, that the batteries will usually last the life of the car (10-15 years at least), and the fact that the battery pack costs on the order of $3000, assuming you don't buy a salvaged one.
Let's see... that would be... the Russian and Chinese Revolutions.
Yes, it was a long time ago, and they had other reasons for it too, but they did manage to kill more people that any of the religious factions ever have in history.
Mind you, I'm in agreement with the basic sentiment, but I think you need to modify it somewhat: this is yet another problem that wouldn't exist without *fanatisicm".
Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Unlike many of the other amendments, this one doesn't even say "Congress shall not"... it's a blanket prohibition of violation of privacy.
Here's the short (wildly over-simplistic, not to mention just plain wrong) answer: going upwards from below iron in the periodic table you get energy from fusion, and above iron you lose it. Going downwards from above iron in the periodic table you get energy from fission and below iron you lose it.
So, no, you can't get perpetual motion. You just end up with iron.
I can't believe they forgot about the [adjective] beam from [movie title]. It was so awesome when it [past tense verb] the [noun]!
Anyone that thinks that the [adjective] beam from [TV series] was superior clearly has [disgusting substance] for brains.
The [adjective] coolness of my choice is [superlative].
But I suppose the [adjective] beam from [book title] was really the winner. If they'd only made that into a [visual medium], it would *so* beat all the other choices.
It's not the *thing* that you stole, it's the right to copy it that you stole with no intention of returning it.
That *right* itself is currently a legal form of property. Taking that right and using it without renumeration is stealing. Sorry if you don't agree. Not only aren't you planning on returning it, it's logically impossible. Once a copy is made, the right to make that copy is gone forever, even if you destroy the copy.
Hmmm. I just noticed that that wording of the 5th amendment is: "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Strangely, I see no prohibition against private property being taken for *private* use (with or without just compensation).
Well, Einstein doesn't have to be wrong about special relativity, but if he's right, then he's wrong about the universe being causal. I, personally, have no real problem with that idea, but it bothers some people.
It doesn't matter *how* you get information or matter from point A to point B at a speed faster than light. As soon as you can do this, you violate causality, and you have all the negative effects of time travel whether or not you get to have the fun. In a world where FTL is possible, effect can cause cause rather than the other way around.
Well, as a professional software developer and architect (and software manager), allow me to opine that coming up with the detailed specification of what a program is supposed to do is 90% of the work in any programming task.
Actually, I'll go further than that, it's 90% of the work in most engineering tasks.
The fact that it's relatively uninventive (though a lot of work) to come up with a light bulb given the specification: "make light using electricity" doesn't mean that it shouldn't have been patentable. Simply thinking of using electricity to make light was pretty inventive at the time. Indeed, one might say that it was the only crucial inventive step actually made by Edison in this case. All the rest was just grunt work (mostly done by flunkies).
Anyway, One-Click is a bad example, because almost everyone I've heard talk about this (aside from the Patent Office:-) thinks it shouldn't have been a patent in the first place. So of course it fails numerous tests for obviousness, even bad ones.
I think you're missing the point. The resulting photos don't *have* to be as good a professional photos.
The person taking and editing the photo has to *think* that they are just as good (or close enough that it isn't worth the money to hire the pro). And the vast majority of people are fucking arrogant and have no taste.
It remains to be seen whether professionals can survive on income only from that tiny minority of people that actually *have* taste.
Wow, do you really think that those items consitute 5.6% of the cost of Windows?
If you were to remove those and subtract off a reasonable proportion of the cost that corresponds to the fraction of Windows' source code that implements those features, I'd be surprised if you'd even get a 1p rebate.
Mind you, I'm counting the fact that most of those apps are just shells around OS components that you'd be sad to lose for other reasons (the help system would go away, for example, if you removed the HTML parsing part of IE's codebase, and that's entirely reasonable because help is an inherently HTML-like function). For another example, do you really want to lose Windows' DirectShow API (and the myriads of 3rd party apps that use it) along with Media Player?
The basic issue then becomes "what is the question"?
Asking "How do I let my customers buy with one click?" isn't the question, because by itself that's not a useful thing to do. That's just a statement of the solution in question form.
The real questions are things like: "How to I get more impulse purchases?", "How to I make it easier for my customers to order stuff?", "How do I obfuscate how much the user is purchasing in order to trick them into ordering more?", and "How do I make my ordering system more efficient for my operational needs?".
I'm not sure that 1-click is the most obvious solution to any of these *real* questions.
Even assuming you disagree with this assessment in this case, surely it's obvious:-) that most cases aren't this straightforward.
Also, you've just made the court battles all that much more expensive, because not only do you have to fight over the claims of the patent and the prior art, but you have to fight over whether the right questions were asked and whether the answers were sufficiently similar to the invention that it must have been "obvious".
I just tried a random book at Amazon and Bookfinder (The Time Travelers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger).
On Amazon, the book came up in 2 seconds, price new was $9.25, with used options down to $6.29. Also, I got a cover image, reviews, publishing information, comments from other readers, and free shipping with a $25 purchase. My name, address, and credit card information were on file.
On Bookfinder, it took ~30 seconds to come up with only used selections, the cheapest of which was $12.55. No additional information was provided. Shipping was $3.49 and it shipped within 2-3 days. The best shipping deal, BTW, was $3.49 for the first book, and $1.49 per additional book. Buying the book required registering for some random bookseller's website, and typing in a bunch of information.
To be fair, once I got to the actual reseller's website (alibris.com, not the actual seller, which was some outfit in Georgia), I did receive some reasonable, but minimal information about the book.
Call me a perfectly irrational geek if you want, but I'd buy from Amazon.
Yes, in some cases I might be able to find a deal there... But we're talking about a bestseller here, not some obscure Golden Age pulp, and there weren't even any new copies available, much less at a bargain price. My time is worth a lot more (this posting notwithstanding).
I think people are mostly offended by how much *better* they could have done this job without totalitarianism, Communism, and frankly nowadays fascism.
The main reason they succeeded at what they did was the influx of foreign capital and technology. Agriculture by peasant is a completely losing proposition, barely able to sustain itself, and completely unable to advance beyond subsistance.
This is going to sound crass and unpopular, but a couple of mega-agro-corps would have done them a lot more good.
Come on, people, at least have some consistency. First you complain that authors aren't motivated by copyrights > their lifespan, then you complain that copyrights are all owned by corporations.
The value of the copyright to the corporation is the integrated expected future value of all revenues derived from the copyright.
The longer the copyright lasts, the greater the value.
Now, whether or not you think that the aforementioned corporations are paying a reasonable percentage of this expected future value to artists, you have to agree that increasing the value of the copyright in the future increases its value today, which at least has the hope of increasing (or at least avoiding decreasing) the payments to the artists.
It happens, though, that there isn't a law against offering to distribute copyrighted material. There is only a law against actual distribution.
In the drug case there *is* a law against possession with the intent to sell.
In this case, RIAA was claiming that offering to distribute was illegal (ok, a tort) under a statute that doesn't prohibit what was actually done.
In fact, Napster didn't even offer to distribute it, they mentioned that there was someone somewhere that told them they were offering to distribute (without even having knowledge that the statement was actually true). Imagine that being illegal WRT drugs...
Am I the only one that thinks that "tax must be included in advertised prices" laws are evil and anti-democratic?
People should have it shoved in their face *every damn time they make a purchase* how much money the blood-sucking government leeches are taking from them.
Otherwise, it's *way* too easy for these kinds of taxes to become totally hidden from public scrutiny and awareness.
With income taxes, you are forced to be aware of them when you file, with registration fees, they are typically listed right there, etc., etc.
In the US, the same is true of sales taxes, by and large. The only exception I can think of is gas taxes, which are only sporadically posted, but I think that's evil too.
Yes, it's extra work for buyers, but that's part of democracy. If you stop *thinking* about what your government is doing, you stop having any true voice in it.
It's quite hilarious, isn't it, how the law doesn't say: All advertised prices must be followed by the notice "includes $xxx GST"?
Slashdot Mirror
If life were intelligently designed, it would by definition have been designed intelligently. Stupid random leftover useless cruft like appendixes and remnents of tail skeleton would not be present, especially in any species singled out for special attention. And boy, human eyes and noses could sure be a hell of a lot better than they are.
The only conclusion we can come to based on the scientific evidence is that if life was designed, it must have have been designed by a flawed being, either a stupid one or a lazy one or a malevolent one (or some combination of these).
Some real live human person at that corporation clicked "ok" to send those emails (because they wanted the money the corporation was paying them, but still certainly of their own free will).
The question therefore just devolves that person's rights.
You're still right that they don't have the right to post their trash on your property, though there are some intriguing questions about political leaflets and neighborhood newspapers of "general circulation" (which is usually where DBA notices are required to be posted because they are assumed to go to the "general public").
In which case revealing it would have been a crime.
It's a crime I'm happy to forgive him, but that doesn't change the fact that revealing secret information (whether classified or even just a corporate trade secret) is typically or at least frequently criminal.
Ok, ok, so they're only getting 239980/240000 of the way there. 99.992% is pretty close, you must admit.
News flash! Creative commons does nothing to prevent you from being sued. It might (N.B. might) help you win your case, but you can still quite easily be sued.
You're correct, other than there being considerable in-use evidence to not prove, but strongly suggest, that the batteries will usually last the life of the car (10-15 years at least), and the fact that the battery pack costs on the order of $3000, assuming you don't buy a salvaged one.
Yes, it was a long time ago, and they had other reasons for it too, but they did manage to kill more people that any of the religious factions ever have in history.
Mind you, I'm in agreement with the basic sentiment, but I think you need to modify it somewhat: this is yet another problem that wouldn't exist without *fanatisicm".
I'm not that surprised that a British newspaper would use a term in a way that is consistent with a meaning shown in the Oxford English Dictionary.
How about:
Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Unlike many of the other amendments, this one doesn't even say "Congress shall not"... it's a blanket prohibition of violation of privacy.
So, no, you can't get perpetual motion. You just end up with iron.
Anyone that thinks that the [adjective] beam from [TV series] was superior clearly has [disgusting substance] for brains.
The [adjective] coolness of my choice is [superlative].
But I suppose the [adjective] beam from [book title] was really the winner. If they'd only made that into a [visual medium], it would *so* beat all the other choices.
Argue with that.
You aren't, but neither am I required to receive it without such certification. Regardless of the spam problem.
But, no, this is Slashdot, and that phrasing would tend to make people think that unauthorized copying of music is wrong...
That *right* itself is currently a legal form of property. Taking that right and using it without renumeration is stealing. Sorry if you don't agree. Not only aren't you planning on returning it, it's logically impossible. Once a copy is made, the right to make that copy is gone forever, even if you destroy the copy.
Perhaps it's a little more like arson, then...
Strangely, I see no prohibition against private property being taken for *private* use (with or without just compensation).
Too bad there isn't a "-1 Nitpicking" moderation.
It doesn't matter *how* you get information or matter from point A to point B at a speed faster than light. As soon as you can do this, you violate causality, and you have all the negative effects of time travel whether or not you get to have the fun. In a world where FTL is possible, effect can cause cause rather than the other way around.
A reasonable description of this effect can be found at: http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/ 000089.html
Actually, I'll go further than that, it's 90% of the work in most engineering tasks.
The fact that it's relatively uninventive (though a lot of work) to come up with a light bulb given the specification: "make light using electricity" doesn't mean that it shouldn't have been patentable. Simply thinking of using electricity to make light was pretty inventive at the time. Indeed, one might say that it was the only crucial inventive step actually made by Edison in this case. All the rest was just grunt work (mostly done by flunkies).
Anyway, One-Click is a bad example, because almost everyone I've heard talk about this (aside from the Patent Office :-) thinks it shouldn't have been a patent in the first place. So of course it fails numerous tests for obviousness, even bad ones.
The person taking and editing the photo has to *think* that they are just as good (or close enough that it isn't worth the money to hire the pro). And the vast majority of people are fucking arrogant and have no taste.
It remains to be seen whether professionals can survive on income only from that tiny minority of people that actually *have* taste.
If you were to remove those and subtract off a reasonable proportion of the cost that corresponds to the fraction of Windows' source code that implements those features, I'd be surprised if you'd even get a 1p rebate.
Mind you, I'm counting the fact that most of those apps are just shells around OS components that you'd be sad to lose for other reasons (the help system would go away, for example, if you removed the HTML parsing part of IE's codebase, and that's entirely reasonable because help is an inherently HTML-like function). For another example, do you really want to lose Windows' DirectShow API (and the myriads of 3rd party apps that use it) along with Media Player?
Asking "How do I let my customers buy with one click?" isn't the question, because by itself that's not a useful thing to do. That's just a statement of the solution in question form.
The real questions are things like: "How to I get more impulse purchases?", "How to I make it easier for my customers to order stuff?", "How do I obfuscate how much the user is purchasing in order to trick them into ordering more?", and "How do I make my ordering system more efficient for my operational needs?".
I'm not sure that 1-click is the most obvious solution to any of these *real* questions.
Even assuming you disagree with this assessment in this case, surely it's obvious :-) that most cases aren't this straightforward.
Also, you've just made the court battles all that much more expensive, because not only do you have to fight over the claims of the patent and the prior art, but you have to fight over whether the right questions were asked and whether the answers were sufficiently similar to the invention that it must have been "obvious".
On Amazon, the book came up in 2 seconds, price new was $9.25, with used options down to $6.29. Also, I got a cover image, reviews, publishing information, comments from other readers, and free shipping with a $25 purchase. My name, address, and credit card information were on file.
On Bookfinder, it took ~30 seconds to come up with only used selections, the cheapest of which was $12.55. No additional information was provided. Shipping was $3.49 and it shipped within 2-3 days. The best shipping deal, BTW, was $3.49 for the first book, and $1.49 per additional book. Buying the book required registering for some random bookseller's website, and typing in a bunch of information.
To be fair, once I got to the actual reseller's website (alibris.com, not the actual seller, which was some outfit in Georgia), I did receive some reasonable, but minimal information about the book.
Call me a perfectly irrational geek if you want, but I'd buy from Amazon.
Yes, in some cases I might be able to find a deal there... But we're talking about a bestseller here, not some obscure Golden Age pulp, and there weren't even any new copies available, much less at a bargain price. My time is worth a lot more (this posting notwithstanding).
The main reason they succeeded at what they did was the influx of foreign capital and technology. Agriculture by peasant is a completely losing proposition, barely able to sustain itself, and completely unable to advance beyond subsistance.
This is going to sound crass and unpopular, but a couple of mega-agro-corps would have done them a lot more good.
The value of the copyright to the corporation is the integrated expected future value of all revenues derived from the copyright.
The longer the copyright lasts, the greater the value.
Now, whether or not you think that the aforementioned corporations are paying a reasonable percentage of this expected future value to artists, you have to agree that increasing the value of the copyright in the future increases its value today, which at least has the hope of increasing (or at least avoiding decreasing) the payments to the artists.
In the drug case there *is* a law against possession with the intent to sell.
In this case, RIAA was claiming that offering to distribute was illegal (ok, a tort) under a statute that doesn't prohibit what was actually done.
In fact, Napster didn't even offer to distribute it, they mentioned that there was someone somewhere that told them they were offering to distribute (without even having knowledge that the statement was actually true). Imagine that being illegal WRT drugs...
People should have it shoved in their face *every damn time they make a purchase* how much money the blood-sucking government leeches are taking from them.
Otherwise, it's *way* too easy for these kinds of taxes to become totally hidden from public scrutiny and awareness.
With income taxes, you are forced to be aware of them when you file, with registration fees, they are typically listed right there, etc., etc.
In the US, the same is true of sales taxes, by and large. The only exception I can think of is gas taxes, which are only sporadically posted, but I think that's evil too.
Yes, it's extra work for buyers, but that's part of democracy. If you stop *thinking* about what your government is doing, you stop having any true voice in it.
It's quite hilarious, isn't it, how the law doesn't say: All advertised prices must be followed by the notice "includes $xxx GST"?
Not.