I described this situation to my extremely, doggedly, unabashedly non-technical wife
Did you say un-biased?
Of course you adequately described Adobe and the Government's positions too, right?
Wow, if you can convince your wife to let hime go, maybe Dimitry should hire you as his lawyer!
I was going to reply, but since you're an anonymous coward, I'll let your nom de plume speak for itself. Answer me with an account, and I'll rebut your argument. Otherwise I'll just accept your anonymity as proof that you have no argument worth defending.
What gives you the idea that there is a choice involved? Dmitry is entitled to his freedom regardless of his "fitness" to be a poster-boy.
Tell you what, why don't you go find a way to attract a big corporation's ire by "innocently" bending the DMCA's provisions, get yourself thrown in jail, and then declare yourself Official DMCA Poster Boy?
I had a hilarious argument with a woman at Comp USA one day. I was standing there picking out CDs and she was frantically hunting for an "audio" writable. I explained to her that there was no difference whatsoever, that the computer would see both CD's as the same object, and furthermore I had burned at that time dozens of audio CD's from "data" media with no problem. She simply disconnected her ability to think critically, denied everything I had said, and went on. People's ability to do this is sometimes truly amazing.
Well, sort of. It is rare, although perfectly legal, for a jury to, for example, decide that the law under which a defendent is being tried is unjust and therefore refuse to convict.
and
Things don't often go that far, primarily because citizens in our society (USA) are remarkably poorly educated about their rights and responsibilities as citizens.
Interesting. I think the cynical slashdotter will say that Dmitri is doomed, because the court will present the argument as thus: he broke the law, here's the law, he's a bad russian hacker, have at him.
However, I described this situation to my extremely, doggedly, unabashedly non-technical wife, and she immediately asked why Adobe didn't write Mr Sklyarov a check or at least give him a big fat pat on the back. So maybe if the issue is adequately explained to the jury by the EFF lawyers, there's some hope that this absurdity will be ended. It's quite the shame that we have to ruin someone's life to do so, however. I'm going to be making that issue plain to my elected representatives.
Yes, everybody knows that pi is not a random number. The question, "Are the digits of pi random?" is merely a short-hand way of asking, "Is there any way of distinguishing a sequence of digits from the expansion of pi from a random sequence of digits other than by comparing it to the digits of pi?"
NO NO NO! If the question is too short to fit on a bumper sticker, it cannot be profound or meaningful. Please! You're confusing the other readers.
If McVeigh had possessed the education and personal initiative necessary to do something constructive like study biology, he wouldn't have been a wastoid loser who sat around with his militia buddies and fantasized about changing the world by bombing a big building. Face it, if someone has the intelligence to understand how these things work, and has invested the time into learning the details, they are also highly likely to have the brains to realize that slaughtering a bunch of people is on the whole going to be counterproductive to their cause.
Just a few weeks before the OK City bombing, I remember reading an innocent little article in the newspaper about militias, which at the time viewed them more as little historically-minded groups keeping a 'tradition' alive. After the bombing, of course no one could view a militia as anything but a bunch of would-be insurrectionists. The negative publicity McVeigh created made sure that none of his issues would be heard by an unbiased ear. Instead, whenever someone starts talking about Waco or Ruby Ridge, I see the famous "fireman with scorched infant" picture that was plastered all over the newspapers. That's all that he managed to accomplish.
If a person with that level of education and initiative and money is also thoroughly insane, hopefully people will take notice before he gets too far out of control. I think it far more likely that the US government or others would use this type of attack on someone, as a switch from conventional warfare where you actually hang your ass on the line. Doing so would, again, be instantly obvious and a guarantee of mistrust from all other nations of the world. On the whole, I don't lose a lot of sleep worrying about bioterrorism. The intelligence and means are difficult to come by, the results are almost always going to be unexpected. A nation actually practicing bio-warfare would always be at risk having the virus backfire and spread through their own population. Doing so would also practically guarantee a nuclear war. Imagine Saddam Hussein released a plague into Europe. The safest way to stop it would be to sterilize the source, would it not? I don't think even Saddam is quite that nuts.
Dimitry broke a law plain and simple, and it wasn't to make some sort of statement, he didnt' release his product open source, he was doing it to make money. I'm sorry but/. needs a better martyr then this.
What, do you want someone who's pure of heart and humble? Does it matter why he was doing it? Yes, he committed what is now technically a crime. Did he hurt someone? Did he take their property away from them?
If it's not one of those two, then we need to evaluate the law that calls this a crime. What he did was give a speech in public pointing out the flaws in a poor encryption scheme. It was for this activity that he was arrested.
It flat-out does not matter if he was doing it for the "public good" or not. He was doing what in recent times was common and well within his rights. Those rights have been taken away, and it's time for us to reclaim them. Right now the DMCA is being used sparingly, against people who appear for one reason or another to be disreputable (2600, 16-year old norwegiean hackers, russian "hackers") but there will come a time when the public impression has been made that figuring stuff out is bad. Just like there are millions of clueless morons who will insist that imbibing a chemical not approved by the government is bad, because they've had a special image painted on their brains by the government and the press, that drug users are inherently evil people.
Once the image is successfully painted, then ordinary US citizens (not foreigners or unfortunate minorities) can be prosecuted for compiling their own CD's, or using "the product" in a manner not defined by the manufacturer. It'll take time. The DMCA is the first step.
The guy gave a speech on how software he helped develop (and was being sold by his employer in Russia, which last I checked isn't subject to US law). He gave no specifics, merely made it clear that Adobe's copy protection is virtually nonexistent.
But Dmitri was stealing morsels of food from the quivering lips of the emaciated children of Adobe's employees, whilst cruelly taunting them as he forked it down. I saw him doing it!! The bastard!!!
Re:What to do? COUNTERSUE FOR WRONGFUL ARREST!
on
Adobe Backs Down
·
· Score: 1
they manage to get out of this as the good guys.
But, they don't. Everyone with half a brain can see what they've done here. I for one am going to continue to avoid adobe's entire product line.
Crichton's Ian Malcolm is ranting about how the park system is too complex, how the science and technology involved is beyond current understanding- thus it's inevitable that something will fail, because "shit happens."
That guy is in every Crichton novel I've ever read, starting with the Andromeda Strain. He's got a set of cookie-cutters that he stamps them out of. I've only read about 4 Chricton novels because after that I think I had heard everything he had to say.
I've always loved reading the man pages with the disclaimer that this information is totally out of date and may not be relevant anymore at all. It enhances my sense of confidence that someone, somewhere, knows how it all works. Even if I never will.
the program's author Dr Kai-Uwe Sattler, and the University of Magdeburg which employs him, were on the end of a stiff letter from a legal firm demanding they stop using the KIllustrator name as it damaged the reputation of Adobe's similarly named product, Illustrator. Worse still the lawyers demanded that the University pay $2000 to cover their costs
Hey neighbor, I was driving past your house and saw that your kids were playing hookey, so I menaced them with a knife and they ran back to school. That'll be $50 for services rendered.
Big if, isn't that? You're not weighing the consequences very intelligently. If it just happens to be so that we can saturate every square inch of the country with camera coverage, and then have enough intelligent processing to track down 'offenders' and nail them, then we also have the power to track down voters and observe who went to the polls when, and perform blood purges accordingly. Sounds like a big if, too. It's entirely possible, and it's a power I'd rather find my government in possession of. It is I who should be tracking their movements, not the other way around.
I don't find that my life is made unbearable by crime. I am far more likely to be hit by a clueless moron behind the wheel of a car than I am to be mugged and thrown in the trunk of a car by some masked bandit.
Speaking of which, how well do these cameras work over a wide-brimmed hat? I'm quite sure as word of this gets out a new fashion trend will erupt. It wouldn't take much to fool one of these. After all, it's not like you have to have a verified identity to walk down the street. You just have to have one that's not on their list to find.
Really, don't imagine for a second that your safety is more important to me than my liberty. I'm more than willing to get out of your way to ensure the former, but I will be insistent, to the point of violence, to ensure the latter. It's not necessary, in my opinion, to push to this extreme, and the pushback against surveilance will probably cause more problems than you think it's going to solve.
As long as this information does not include security-sensitive information (e.g. credit card numbers), then what is the issue? I don't really care who knows my credit history, I have nothing to hide there
I keep seeing these posts warning of corporate invasion of privacy but I can't really see the downside...
You could have your identity stolen, a bunch of credit cards opened in your name, and a bunch of shit charged up with them, and then have to spend years and years proving that it wasn't you, and dealing with the increased daily aggravation in your life, and have bloodsucking leaches (er, lawyers) calling you all day long, and creditors wanting to know where their money is, and be forced to move to another address to avoid a lot of the nonsense, and not be able to buy a house or car for three or six years, and so on and so forth. But other than that, there really is no downside to having all of your vital details blabbed to whoever wants them, and there's nothing ethically wrong with a company you do business with selling that data and making money off of it even though it's your data and not theirs and you provided it to them with some implied level of trust and were not informed that you became a source of revenue to them in more than one way.
Just ask Radio Shack employees how their customers feel about that kind of thing. I'm sure they've got a lot of interesting stories to tell.
The real universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's likely stranger than we can imagine. When we limit ourselves by myths and fantasies of our own concoction, we blind ourselves to the true wonders of the cosmos. People put a plug in the aperature of their imagination by answering important, difficult questions with convenient yet phony myths. They then accuse the skeptics looking around the edges of the plug of being unimaginative.
Hence why we no longer believe newtonian physics to be accurate.
They're perfectly accurate. Just not as accurate, or as encompassing, as Einsteinian physics. It's a matter of what tool you want to use. A nail can be pounded into concrete with the head of another nail, if you have the time and patience. Or you can use a hammer. Or you can use your forehead. But you will probably get the best results with the hammer.
These kind of articles remind me of the futile
medieval debates on how many angels can dance
on a head of a pin
Of course, the real futility of the argument is that there is no way to demonstrate the existence of angels, let alone count their numbers. Subatomic particles, however, leave visible tracks in the cloud chambers of particle accelerators. Though it's impratical to count them, it's not impossible, and their behavior, while it is inherently uncertain, is not entirely random, and can be predicted to a degree.
And every year some discovery shatters that belief in a given discipline.
When our beliefs were based on religious dogma or vaporous philosophies, this was true. Aristotelian and Platonic notions of the laws of physics were basically pulled from their collective rectums. Opposing beliefs were frowned upon in principle, and dismissed because they were not of the correct origin. When the tools of science were re-introduced, many of these fundamental myths and misconceptions were easily debunked. This process continues today. Because science is a self-correcting process, sometimes an erronous conclusion will get introduced through the application of experiment and research, and persist until it is debunked. But more frequently what happens is a previous model or theory is expanded rather than exploded. Newton's gravitational laws are still valid. Einstein's General Relativity is just a more detailed model and a lot more complex to use. The Moon shot was calculated using Newtonian physics, I seem to recall. There was no need for the precision of Einstein's equations.
Stephen Hawking speculates in his Brief History of Time that we are approaching a complete model of physics. He points out that this was believed also 100 years ago and was false. However it is not valid to say that this will always be false. The laws of physics appear to be stable and have not been measurably changed or revoked. What has changed is the level of detail and precision with which we can measure them.
There are a huge number of people who subscribe as you apparently do to the idea that science doesn't really know anything because it keeps changing the rules. This often leads to the absurd conclusion that there are no real limits to what we can do, and someday warp drive and time travel and all manner of other things will be possible. There is also a tendancy to generalize "scientists" as this amorphous mass of people who all know each other and speak with a single voice. The real proof lies in your ability to absorb and critically analyze what you see in front of you. If you aren't capable or willing to do that, prepare to remain ignorant, and prepare for legions of people to tell you how wrong you are. Science is really just the application of logical discipline to the observation of facts. A non-scientist such as myself is just as capable of discovering fallacies in the analysis, if I'm willing to take the extra effort to do so. Having done that, and read this article, I can say with some certainty that I buy the conclusion. It's a well-presented conclusion. Despite the amount of math, the premises are simple:
A computer performs calculations by changing the state of bits which represent its data
The limiting factors of such a device are the maximum rate of change, the maximum amount of storage, and the maximum speed of data transmission between the components
Those things being equal for all computers, the maximum capabilities of a computer are limited by the speed of light and the density of matter.
A discovery that any one of the underlying physical laws were untrue would indeed be a revolution in physics. However, the last such revolution was remarkable only because it was the first time someone applied a consistent procedure of observation and experiment to said laws. That consistent procedure now only leads to expanded, more detailed laws of physics, not different ones.
I just didn't like the way he trash talked one observation while relying on the "inherent truths" of another.
If it were "Moore's Theory of Computational Progress" and some sort of cause were assigned to why microprocessing power must double every eighteen months, it would be like a law of physics. But without a cause, it remains just an observation of what has happened so far, not what must happen. A nuclear war, or a worldwide strike (or alien abduction) of microprocessor engineers would interrupt the steady progress of Moore's Law.
Goodwin's law was an observation, that if Nazis were mentioned, the S/N ratio of the thread was doomed to drop to 0, and not recover. Not an act of censorship.
It's usually a valid observation. Comparing your opponent to Hitler in the post WWII era is usually like a 17th-Century New Englander calling a hated rival a "witch." It evokes powerful fears in people and paints an unreasonably ugly picture. It's an ad hominem attack with a nuclear warhead. However, what a lot of dorks started to do was take the approach that any argument which tangentially mentioned Nazis or Hitler was automatically invalid, without taking the extra effort themselves of demonstrating why. That's as intellectually sloppy and logically invalid as an ad hominem attack.
Just picture Bush and Gore debating last year, and instead of responding to each other's positions with arguments of their own, they just stood there and said: "You're wrong. You're just attacking my character. You don't know what you're talking about" (of course, since I didn't watch them, for all I know that's exactly what they did). There's a rule in writing called show, don't tell.
When some Godwin-Nazi (heh!) comes up and says "Godwin's law! You lose!" it's irritating but I've noticed the only kind of closure it brings to the thread is to draw a bunch of ire down on the Godwin-Nazi, rather than on the original user of the Nazi or Hitler analogy. In a an amusing way, Godwin's law has become recursive. It now seems that any thread where it gets mentioned becomes a meaningless flame-war.
Sheesh. Another anonymous coward. As for your argument: sez you. What 'real world' do you have special access to that I do not? As I understand it the original impetus for the FCC was to bring some order to the airwaves. I believe a major incident leading up to that was the sinking of the Titanic, during which emergency message traffic was lost in the wash of clever little 'hi there' messages sent back and forth by the well-to-do who monopolized the radio men on the ship. At any rate the result was that the airwaves, not being owned (or in fact ownable) by anyone, were therefore public property, and one's right to monopolize them was given to them by the public's assent. Take away that assent and you lose your FCC license.
The point, which you utterly and completely failed to get, was that we allow the radio stations to exist, but we do not have to. We could have chaos in their place. The means by which a radio station achieves their position as a supplier of transmitted signals is socialistic in nature. It is a government-granted monopoly on a frequency of the airwaves, and it's probably best that it remains in the purview of the government for the reasons I've outlined above. So I find it amusing that asking that radio station to transmit something that remotely coincides with the public's interest is painted "socialism" with all the implications thereof, which are supposed to be so repugnant to good red-blooded Americans. Or at least all those who have surrendered their faculty for independent thought to the mindless majority.
And where did you get the 'Ayn Rand' shit? I've seen probably a dozen people on/. now who, whenever their actual argument holds little to no weight, haul out the 'You are a Randite drone living in a fantasy world' bludgeon and beat their opponent about the face and neck with it. All I've managed to gather from this is that Rand is no longer as popular as she was in the '70s. I wouldn't know whether her work was valid or not since I've never fucking read it, but you wouldn't know that that either, Mr. Ad Hominem who posts anonymously, would you?
I know it doesn't matter, because you're an anonymous pantywaste, but I thought I'd respond to your ill-formed argument anyway. A patent is granted for the sole purpose of encouraging innovation. Patent abuse is when someone takes an obvious solution to a common problem and patents it. That would be using the government's power to enforce a single company's control over an industry. What is your definition of socialism, then?
Slashdot Mirror
Did you say un-biased?
Of course you adequately described Adobe and the Government's positions too, right?
Wow, if you can convince your wife to let hime go, maybe Dimitry should hire you as his lawyer!
I was going to reply, but since you're an anonymous coward, I'll let your nom de plume speak for itself. Answer me with an account, and I'll rebut your argument. Otherwise I'll just accept your anonymity as proof that you have no argument worth defending.
Tell you what, why don't you go find a way to attract a big corporation's ire by "innocently" bending the DMCA's provisions, get yourself thrown in jail, and then declare yourself Official DMCA Poster Boy?
I had a hilarious argument with a woman at Comp USA one day. I was standing there picking out CDs and she was frantically hunting for an "audio" writable. I explained to her that there was no difference whatsoever, that the computer would see both CD's as the same object, and furthermore I had burned at that time dozens of audio CD's from "data" media with no problem. She simply disconnected her ability to think critically, denied everything I had said, and went on. People's ability to do this is sometimes truly amazing.
and
Things don't often go that far, primarily because citizens in our society (USA) are remarkably poorly educated about their rights and responsibilities as citizens.
Interesting. I think the cynical slashdotter will say that Dmitri is doomed, because the court will present the argument as thus: he broke the law, here's the law, he's a bad russian hacker, have at him.
However, I described this situation to my extremely, doggedly, unabashedly non-technical wife, and she immediately asked why Adobe didn't write Mr Sklyarov a check or at least give him a big fat pat on the back. So maybe if the issue is adequately explained to the jury by the EFF lawyers, there's some hope that this absurdity will be ended. It's quite the shame that we have to ruin someone's life to do so, however. I'm going to be making that issue plain to my elected representatives.
I think it was Faraday who, when asked of what use was his mucking around with electricty, replied "Of what use is a new-born child?"
Enough said.
NO NO NO! If the question is too short to fit on a bumper sticker, it cannot be profound or meaningful. Please! You're confusing the other readers.
If McVeigh had possessed the education and personal initiative necessary to do something constructive like study biology, he wouldn't have been a wastoid loser who sat around with his militia buddies and fantasized about changing the world by bombing a big building. Face it, if someone has the intelligence to understand how these things work, and has invested the time into learning the details, they are also highly likely to have the brains to realize that slaughtering a bunch of people is on the whole going to be counterproductive to their cause.
Just a few weeks before the OK City bombing, I remember reading an innocent little article in the newspaper about militias, which at the time viewed them more as little historically-minded groups keeping a 'tradition' alive. After the bombing, of course no one could view a militia as anything but a bunch of would-be insurrectionists. The negative publicity McVeigh created made sure that none of his issues would be heard by an unbiased ear. Instead, whenever someone starts talking about Waco or Ruby Ridge, I see the famous "fireman with scorched infant" picture that was plastered all over the newspapers. That's all that he managed to accomplish.
If a person with that level of education and initiative and money is also thoroughly insane, hopefully people will take notice before he gets too far out of control. I think it far more likely that the US government or others would use this type of attack on someone, as a switch from conventional warfare where you actually hang your ass on the line. Doing so would, again, be instantly obvious and a guarantee of mistrust from all other nations of the world. On the whole, I don't lose a lot of sleep worrying about bioterrorism. The intelligence and means are difficult to come by, the results are almost always going to be unexpected. A nation actually practicing bio-warfare would always be at risk having the virus backfire and spread through their own population. Doing so would also practically guarantee a nuclear war. Imagine Saddam Hussein released a plague into Europe. The safest way to stop it would be to sterilize the source, would it not? I don't think even Saddam is quite that nuts.
What, do you want someone who's pure of heart and humble? Does it matter why he was doing it? Yes, he committed what is now technically a crime. Did he hurt someone? Did he take their property away from them?
If it's not one of those two, then we need to evaluate the law that calls this a crime. What he did was give a speech in public pointing out the flaws in a poor encryption scheme. It was for this activity that he was arrested.
It flat-out does not matter if he was doing it for the "public good" or not. He was doing what in recent times was common and well within his rights. Those rights have been taken away, and it's time for us to reclaim them. Right now the DMCA is being used sparingly, against people who appear for one reason or another to be disreputable (2600, 16-year old norwegiean hackers, russian "hackers") but there will come a time when the public impression has been made that figuring stuff out is bad. Just like there are millions of clueless morons who will insist that imbibing a chemical not approved by the government is bad, because they've had a special image painted on their brains by the government and the press, that drug users are inherently evil people.
Once the image is successfully painted, then ordinary US citizens (not foreigners or unfortunate minorities) can be prosecuted for compiling their own CD's, or using "the product" in a manner not defined by the manufacturer. It'll take time. The DMCA is the first step.
But Dmitri was stealing morsels of food from the quivering lips of the emaciated children of Adobe's employees, whilst cruelly taunting them as he forked it down. I saw him doing it!! The bastard!!!
But, they don't. Everyone with half a brain can see what they've done here. I for one am going to continue to avoid adobe's entire product line.
That guy is in every Crichton novel I've ever read, starting with the Andromeda Strain. He's got a set of cookie-cutters that he stamps them out of. I've only read about 4 Chricton novels because after that I think I had heard everything he had to say.
I've always loved reading the man pages with the disclaimer that this information is totally out of date and may not be relevant anymore at all. It enhances my sense of confidence that someone, somewhere, knows how it all works. Even if I never will.
the program's author Dr Kai-Uwe Sattler, and the University of Magdeburg which employs him, were on the end of a stiff letter from a legal firm demanding they stop using the KIllustrator name as it damaged the reputation of Adobe's similarly named product, Illustrator. Worse still the lawyers demanded that the University pay $2000 to cover their costs
Hey neighbor, I was driving past your house and saw that your kids were playing hookey, so I menaced them with a knife and they ran back to school. That'll be $50 for services rendered.
I belive that would be tolerated about one time. More than one would result in a massive lawsuit by the victim in question.
I don't find that my life is made unbearable by crime. I am far more likely to be hit by a clueless moron behind the wheel of a car than I am to be mugged and thrown in the trunk of a car by some masked bandit.
Speaking of which, how well do these cameras work over a wide-brimmed hat? I'm quite sure as word of this gets out a new fashion trend will erupt. It wouldn't take much to fool one of these. After all, it's not like you have to have a verified identity to walk down the street. You just have to have one that's not on their list to find.
Really, don't imagine for a second that your safety is more important to me than my liberty. I'm more than willing to get out of your way to ensure the former, but I will be insistent, to the point of violence, to ensure the latter. It's not necessary, in my opinion, to push to this extreme, and the pushback against surveilance will probably cause more problems than you think it's going to solve.
I keep seeing these posts warning of corporate invasion of privacy but I can't really see the downside...
You could have your identity stolen, a bunch of credit cards opened in your name, and a bunch of shit charged up with them, and then have to spend years and years proving that it wasn't you, and dealing with the increased daily aggravation in your life, and have bloodsucking leaches (er, lawyers) calling you all day long, and creditors wanting to know where their money is, and be forced to move to another address to avoid a lot of the nonsense, and not be able to buy a house or car for three or six years, and so on and so forth. But other than that, there really is no downside to having all of your vital details blabbed to whoever wants them, and there's nothing ethically wrong with a company you do business with selling that data and making money off of it even though it's your data and not theirs and you provided it to them with some implied level of trust and were not informed that you became a source of revenue to them in more than one way.
Just ask Radio Shack employees how their customers feel about that kind of thing. I'm sure they've got a lot of interesting stories to tell.
The real universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's likely stranger than we can imagine. When we limit ourselves by myths and fantasies of our own concoction, we blind ourselves to the true wonders of the cosmos. People put a plug in the aperature of their imagination by answering important, difficult questions with convenient yet phony myths. They then accuse the skeptics looking around the edges of the plug of being unimaginative.
Is one which assumes the existence of that which it attempts to prove.
They're perfectly accurate. Just not as accurate, or as encompassing, as Einsteinian physics. It's a matter of what tool you want to use. A nail can be pounded into concrete with the head of another nail, if you have the time and patience. Or you can use a hammer. Or you can use your forehead. But you will probably get the best results with the hammer.
medieval debates on how many angels can dance
on a head of a pin
Of course, the real futility of the argument is that there is no way to demonstrate the existence of angels, let alone count their numbers. Subatomic particles, however, leave visible tracks in the cloud chambers of particle accelerators. Though it's impratical to count them, it's not impossible, and their behavior, while it is inherently uncertain, is not entirely random, and can be predicted to a degree.
When our beliefs were based on religious dogma or vaporous philosophies, this was true. Aristotelian and Platonic notions of the laws of physics were basically pulled from their collective rectums. Opposing beliefs were frowned upon in principle, and dismissed because they were not of the correct origin. When the tools of science were re-introduced, many of these fundamental myths and misconceptions were easily debunked. This process continues today. Because science is a self-correcting process, sometimes an erronous conclusion will get introduced through the application of experiment and research, and persist until it is debunked. But more frequently what happens is a previous model or theory is expanded rather than exploded. Newton's gravitational laws are still valid. Einstein's General Relativity is just a more detailed model and a lot more complex to use. The Moon shot was calculated using Newtonian physics, I seem to recall. There was no need for the precision of Einstein's equations.
Stephen Hawking speculates in his Brief History of Time that we are approaching a complete model of physics. He points out that this was believed also 100 years ago and was false. However it is not valid to say that this will always be false. The laws of physics appear to be stable and have not been measurably changed or revoked. What has changed is the level of detail and precision with which we can measure them.
There are a huge number of people who subscribe as you apparently do to the idea that science doesn't really know anything because it keeps changing the rules. This often leads to the absurd conclusion that there are no real limits to what we can do, and someday warp drive and time travel and all manner of other things will be possible. There is also a tendancy to generalize "scientists" as this amorphous mass of people who all know each other and speak with a single voice. The real proof lies in your ability to absorb and critically analyze what you see in front of you. If you aren't capable or willing to do that, prepare to remain ignorant, and prepare for legions of people to tell you how wrong you are. Science is really just the application of logical discipline to the observation of facts. A non-scientist such as myself is just as capable of discovering fallacies in the analysis, if I'm willing to take the extra effort to do so. Having done that, and read this article, I can say with some certainty that I buy the conclusion. It's a well-presented conclusion. Despite the amount of math, the premises are simple:
A discovery that any one of the underlying physical laws were untrue would indeed be a revolution in physics. However, the last such revolution was remarkable only because it was the first time someone applied a consistent procedure of observation and experiment to said laws. That consistent procedure now only leads to expanded, more detailed laws of physics, not different ones.
If it were "Moore's Theory of Computational Progress" and some sort of cause were assigned to why microprocessing power must double every eighteen months, it would be like a law of physics. But without a cause, it remains just an observation of what has happened so far, not what must happen. A nuclear war, or a worldwide strike (or alien abduction) of microprocessor engineers would interrupt the steady progress of Moore's Law.
It's usually a valid observation. Comparing your opponent to Hitler in the post WWII era is usually like a 17th-Century New Englander calling a hated rival a "witch." It evokes powerful fears in people and paints an unreasonably ugly picture. It's an ad hominem attack with a nuclear warhead. However, what a lot of dorks started to do was take the approach that any argument which tangentially mentioned Nazis or Hitler was automatically invalid, without taking the extra effort themselves of demonstrating why. That's as intellectually sloppy and logically invalid as an ad hominem attack.
Just picture Bush and Gore debating last year, and instead of responding to each other's positions with arguments of their own, they just stood there and said: "You're wrong. You're just attacking my character. You don't know what you're talking about" (of course, since I didn't watch them, for all I know that's exactly what they did). There's a rule in writing called show, don't tell.
When some Godwin-Nazi (heh!) comes up and says "Godwin's law! You lose!" it's irritating but I've noticed the only kind of closure it brings to the thread is to draw a bunch of ire down on the Godwin-Nazi, rather than on the original user of the Nazi or Hitler analogy. In a an amusing way, Godwin's law has become recursive. It now seems that any thread where it gets mentioned becomes a meaningless flame-war.
Sheesh. Another anonymous coward. As for your argument: sez you. What 'real world' do you have special access to that I do not? As I understand it the original impetus for the FCC was to bring some order to the airwaves. I believe a major incident leading up to that was the sinking of the Titanic, during which emergency message traffic was lost in the wash of clever little 'hi there' messages sent back and forth by the well-to-do who monopolized the radio men on the ship. At any rate the result was that the airwaves, not being owned (or in fact ownable) by anyone, were therefore public property, and one's right to monopolize them was given to them by the public's assent. Take away that assent and you lose your FCC license.
/. now who, whenever their actual argument holds little to no weight, haul out the 'You are a Randite drone living in a fantasy world' bludgeon and beat their opponent about the face and neck with it. All I've managed to gather from this is that Rand is no longer as popular as she was in the '70s. I wouldn't know whether her work was valid or not since I've never fucking read it, but you wouldn't know that that either, Mr. Ad Hominem who posts anonymously, would you?
The point, which you utterly and completely failed to get, was that we allow the radio stations to exist, but we do not have to. We could have chaos in their place. The means by which a radio station achieves their position as a supplier of transmitted signals is socialistic in nature. It is a government-granted monopoly on a frequency of the airwaves, and it's probably best that it remains in the purview of the government for the reasons I've outlined above. So I find it amusing that asking that radio station to transmit something that remotely coincides with the public's interest is painted "socialism" with all the implications thereof, which are supposed to be so repugnant to good red-blooded Americans. Or at least all those who have surrendered their faculty for independent thought to the mindless majority.
And where did you get the 'Ayn Rand' shit? I've seen probably a dozen people on
I know it doesn't matter, because you're an anonymous pantywaste, but I thought I'd respond to your ill-formed argument anyway. A patent is granted for the sole purpose of encouraging innovation. Patent abuse is when someone takes an obvious solution to a common problem and patents it. That would be using the government's power to enforce a single company's control over an industry. What is your definition of socialism, then?