Absolutely. The only difference between one language to another would be exactly how you produce an informative fail. In C, as you say, you return some sort of failure code. In a lot of higher level languages you throw an exception. There is nothing in this code that is innovative or spectacular. It's the kind of range check function that programmers have been implementing for decades.
Actually, even in C chances are you'd have thrown an exception or setjmp/longjmp. The only really distinct thing about this code was the format of the message.
Other than that you might as well try to patent a basic "for (i = 0; i limit; i++)" loop. SLAP!
Yeah, why are we ignoring the many companies that have failed either because they failed to adapt or underwent gross negligence. I have a feeling that the CEOs of the major banks in the US have actively harmed every human on Earth. Ballmer has merely failed to maintain a near-monopoly status in a highly transient industry.
Harming people isn't one of the things that Forbes concerns itself with.
[insert stock phrase about companies exist to make money here].
OK, let me paint another target on myself for all the knee-jerkers to reflexively pelt with garbage.
As a creator, I am not totally against the idea of patentable software concepts - provided that the concept in question is actually unique and not just a "done-this-forever" + "On the Internet" type of patent. It has to actually be a new and novel concept.
However, even in cases like that, the traditional patent terms are not a good idea. As a user and a designer of other people's ideas, 17 years is whole geological ages where effectively no one else can build on an idea if the patent-holder won't license on affordable terms. I'd go for a maximum software patent lifespan of 5 years, non-renewable. If you can't retire wealthy off that, your idea probably wasn't worth patenting and in any event it's time you got off your lazy royalty-collecting butt and thought up some new ideas.
Or at least that used to be my opinion back when technology wasn't quite so accelerated, our definition of affordable licensing wasn't what we can buy on a Wal-Mart salary, open-source wasn't a factor, and the major players weren't all using patent portfolios as blunt objects to assault people with. Maybe I should just grab a torch and pitchfork and do some knee-jerking myself.
To do what? Download the pirated copies so they don't have to watch the unskippable content?
Exactly my thought. And it is disingenuous to call these "government warnings" when they are really industry warnings. My warning to the industry is: "you are losing me".
Well, you could always buy-and-rip and skip the pirating. Ironically, the [i]really[/i] illegal part is probably the ripping. But the best way to make people break the law is to make laws that deserve to be broken.
Speaking of which, wasn't the "FBI Warning" itself determined to be illegal?
Something was taken. The income that would have otherwise been realized from a legitimate purchase.
So if I bake my own bread using the same recipe as the bakery in my neighborhood, I'm stealing from the bakery? Sorry, no. Something can be stolen only if it's material and you had it in the first place. Things you might get in fantasy parallel universe don't count.
That has to be one of the worst analogies of all time.
If you made your own movie using someone else's movie as a model (recipe), it would make sense, but if you're just copying someone else's movie, that's not the same thing. For what it's worth, someone actually did do something like that. They copied a John MacDonald novel, changed a few names and republished it. They got sued for infringement and lost. Recipes are generally copyrighted as well, although I've never heard of anyone actually getting taken to the cleaners over copying recipes. Using recipes, however, is completely different from copying them.
I do not in any way, shape or form condone most of the obnoxious schemes and practices implemented or proposed by the so-called "MAFIAA", or various publishers, distributors, and so forth. All I'm saying is that people shouldn't be such weasels about how they justify copyright infringement.
A copyright is literally the "right to copy". It is an acknowledgement that an intangible expression has value - that it required an effort on someone's part to produce and that they have therefore been granted control over its distribution. Given a monopoly, if you prefer. This is important, because otherwise the only way to protect the work in question would be to keep it hidden and under limited access.
A better analogy might be if I created a machine that could manufacture pearls out of thin air infinitely and forever. My machine is secure and not "copyrighted". But I have a mandate to distribute the pearls. How much - if anything - I get paid for doing so is not actually what's at issue. But let's say I have agreed to sell these perls for 2 cents each.
Now suppose that my "pearl warehouse" has a door in it that people can go in and get pearls without paying for them. No real loss, is it? After all, more pearls will appear and the warehouse never gets any emptier. Still, most people would consider that as being theft. After all, the pearls themselves are tangible objects, unlike the bits and bytes of a datastream. Just to shut up the nitpickers, let me also declare that if you hit one of these magic pearls with a hammer it will split into 2 identical pearls, so once you have a pearl, you never need invade the actual warehouse again.
And it's true. I haven't lost anything, really. And if I had granted a couple of fat guys the license to drive off with truck loads of pearls and sell them by the road and they were jacking up the price to $10 each, but they lost out on their fat markup because people were slipping into the warehouse behind them, well, boo-hoo for them, right?
Screw them. That's a totally different problem. It's their problem and I don't care.
What's more important is that if I don't get enough pairs of pennies, I have to go out and get a "real" job because nobody has invented a machine that makes pizza and beer out of thin air, so I have to actually pay for my essentials. If I have a "real" job, I'll fall into bed at the end of each day dead-tired and not have any spare energy to work on my gold nugget-making machine.
What? You say I should get up off my lazy ass and do it anyway because it's good for me to be industrious? For Free? What are you, some kind of Commie Socialist?
I don't like what's being done in the media industries any more than most people here do. I also don't think that just because I invented a pearl-making machine 250 years ago that my descendants should be able to freeload off my hard work. In fact, I don't think that just because I created one pearl-making machine that therefore I never need be
Your points are correct, but piracy of media is NOT theft. Theft implies something was taken, piracy (in this sense) is copyright infringement.
Something was taken. The income that would have otherwise been realized from a legitimate purchase. "Copyright infringement" is merely the legal definition of that kind of theft and covers both the income that would be realized (if any - since you can copyright something and give it away a la GNU), plus the theft of the rightsholder's legal grant to determine who (in a general way) will be permitted a copy.
It's still stealing, and using a less stark name for it doesn't make it any less theft in absolute terms any more than the difference between lifting a pack of gum is less "theft" than boosting a Porsche.
If by his underwear you mean a colossal Penning trap capable of storing 3oz of antimatter, yes indeed! The brilliance of this evil scientist plot is it will only cost trillions of dollars and take at the very least several decades to fulfill -- so it will easily slip right under the radar.
No I didn't. For one thing, that doubles the amount of mass involved, multiplying the explosive effect. Show some restraint!
He's a physicist. That means he should have developed a process whereby he can flip over 50% of the water molecules into an anti-matter state under the influence of a catalytic reaction induced by 2 AA batteries and a single grain of table salt. I think Isaac Asimov wrote a story to that effect once.
Snarfiness aside, that's how terrorists got to be more scary than the Evil Empire. The more we learn about the Universe, the more powerful the levers we learn how to pull are. A single person these days can wreak more havoc than an entire barbarian horde used to.
Considering that their eBook reader runs a version of it...
Or used to. They made it hacker-resistant with the December OS updates...
No, B&N hoped it would be hacker-resistant, but the XDA devs released updates to their rooting methods (like ManualNooter) pretty quickly.
That's why I said hacker-resistant rather than hacker-proof. If I can hack by inserting a bootable card and cycling power, that's an easy hack. If I have to spend a lot of time, go through several complicated steps, risk damaging my normal Nook account and config info and/or reset the device to originally-shipped factory conditions, that's a whole arena. One I don't like.
He was probably going to blow up CERN the fracking wanker.
No. He was planning on developing a process whereby 100% of the mass in a 3oz. bottle of distilled water could be converted to energy. Should be roughly enough to blow up a plane, all the surrounding planes, the airport and a good size chunk of surrounding city.
The activating mechanism, of course, fits in his underwear.
Then why didn't it solve the problem when it had a chance and before legislation had to be involved?
If the free market can solve all problems why do so many go unsolved for so long?
Because state governments would not let them. Jim Crow Laws were exactly that: Laws passed by state governments.
Separate facilities for whites and non-whites didn't exist because the business owners wanted them necessarily (though I'm sure there were some who did want them). They existed because the various state governments mandated it.
The free market was not allowed to function because of government coercion.
There is no such thing as a "free market". Everyone meddles in the market. Even if the market started out free, it's not a stable system and typically degenerates into cartels and monopolies thanks to the natural tendency of people - meaning customers - to "go with a winner", thus creating positive feedback systems that enlarge the few at the expense of the many. It's no more realistic to expect "the market" to be virtuous than it is to expect that in a truly communal society the state will wither away.
While in theory, bad products drive out good, people will put up with all sorts of abuse in reality just to deal with the devil they know.
So please stay on the line. You call is very important to us.
Considering that their eBook reader runs a version of it...
Or used to. They made it hacker-resistant with the December OS updates, which true to form were only officially listed as "contains various minor updates".
Quite the opposite. The less the term/phrase describes the product, the stronger the trademark. Thus, Apple is an excellent name for a computer company, but would probably be rejected if a fruit company tried to use it as a trademark
You are correct
(I am a lawyer)
And I am not, but I've read enough to know that the more unique the linkage, the better protection it has.
Actually, I believe that Apple is allowed to use that name by the Apple Corps, which permitted the use providing that Apple Computer didn't get involved in the Music business. It caused a certain amount of noise, as I recall when iTunes came to the market, since that was a potential violation of the agreement.
And the more specific trademark "Macintosh" was granted to Apple Computer by the Washington Apple Growers Association. So Apple wasn't the best choice for an illustration of how trademarks can be freely staked out.
that or he knew he was going to die soon, and just felt like causing MAD so we could all see what would happen.. in the end it wouldn't hurt him any.
Oh? He'd be seriously delusional if he thought he'd jump straight to Nirvana having pulled some of the stunts he did in that life. More likely come back as a caterpillar.
Everyone with a vehicle parked in a handicapped parking space is demonstrably handicapped in one way or another:
1. Physically - meaning that they actually need it for its intended purpose. 2. Mentally - meaning that they were too dim to heed the warning. 3. Morally - meaning that they're simply a selfish [CENSORED] who doesn't care that they're depriving someone else.
Most of the online courses fall short on the psychological aspects of teaching. They are little more than videotaped lectures with automated homework grading, and this model doesn't translate well to an online model.
.
If they really want to educate people, they're going to have to change their model to keep students motivated.
Until they do that, it'll still be just videotapes of college lectures.
Some classes are even worse. Locally, some genius in control of the educational system has managed to get Lower Prices Everyday[TM] for our tax dollars by converting foreign-language education into one massive online class.
I may not be very sociable, but I still understand the importance of 2-way channels when learning foreign languages. A lot of people don't actually "hear" what they think they're hearing. If they just keep repeating back the same faulty pronunciation to a computer, instead of improving, they simply reinforce their mistakes. I know more than one or 2 people who fail even when assisted by pattern-matching software. The software can only tell them that they're doing it wrong, but it's not intelligent enough to indicate the parts that need fixing or offer guidance.
The obvious American solution: Comcast buys Sony in a leveraged buyout. Execs get big bonuses. Provides metered services to Sony content and products at a rate slightly less ruinous than what they charge for competitors. Obligatory layoffs at Comcast and Sony. Comcast products are distributed with integral Sony rootkits and DRM.
Wait a couple of years. Comcast decides Sony is dead weight. Lays off more people, execs get big performance bonuses. Sells off Sony. Execs get big retention bonuses. Sony lays off more people. Execs collect big golden parachute bonuses. Execs Move on to new victimsxxxxx/pastures and collect big signing bonuses. Economy tanks due to unemployment. Sony can't sell to unemployed people. Sony declares bankruptcy, seeks government assistance... etc. etc. etc.
There is significant evidence that the earth's climate changed dramatically in the past, without any human intervention. So there is all kinds of historic evidence for climate change. The issue is how significant human activities are for climate change.
Yeah, that's kind of the Last Bastion, alright. Blame it on something/someone else.
No one ever definitively "proved" that smoking causes cancer, but these days even the most die-hard (no pun intended) smokers are usually willing to admit that they'd probably be better off if they didn't do it. Usually. Some people are so insecure that admitting being wrong is worse than even dying.
Just like in the case of lung cancer, the convenient upsurge in global temperatures in parallel with CO2 production makes more rational people start thinking that maybe there are better ways to do things. Just in case.
The only real reason I've ever seen for the vehement rejection of AGW ultimately seems to stem from a desperate need on the part of certain people to keep us addicted to oil. Many of these people are the same ones that loudly decry addiction to other substances (except maybe Oxycontin), but freeing ourselves from a dirty substance that's in limited supply and extensively controlled by foreign interests just doesn't sit with them.
People think of the term "evolution" as though it was some sort of steady march uphill. Guided, perhaps by some sort of intelligent design. BTW, did I miss the reference to the cartoon captioned "somewhere something went horribly wrong"?
Real evolution is simply change that adapts to circumstances. If you adapt too well though, you may actually end up extinct.
If anything, I'd say that human evolution is in an accelerated mode as we constantly tamper with our environment, our social systems, and our biology. We increase the breeding capabilities of some and decrease the breeding capabilities of others (you don't actually have to kill to pull someone out of the gene pool - that's just another myth of the "Nature red in tooth and claw" cult, which isn't true evolution. More of a justification to be a total bastard.
The very word "patent" means public. If you want to keep something secret, that's what Trade Secrets are all about. Granting a Letter Patent was supposed to mean that the art in question was published in a public venue where all and sundry could see it and benefit thereby. And a monopoly on its implementation for a set period of time so that the patent grantee would not lose out on making the idea public.
What they want is a system of secret monopolies. No thanks. We have enough problems with patents these days as it is.
Few things (short of a corporate change of personality) would drive me back into the arms of Amazon after what they've done in recent years, but a Windows-based Nook would be one of them. Bad enough that they've sucked all the fun out by making the Nooks root-resistant.
Then again, just because Microsoft invested in the Nook doesn't actually mean that they have immediate plans for a switchover. If what I hear is correct, they're making more money off Android-based phones than Windows phones these days.
Anything that redirects how energy flows affects local conditions. That's just basic Thermodynamics.
Scaling that up to be "climate change", however, is a bit of a stretch. While there are things that you can do that are catalytic in nature and therefore self-leveraging, such as chloroflourocarbons, a windmill isn't one of them. To get a serious effect on climate, you'd need a serious number of windmills.
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Absolutely. The only difference between one language to another would be exactly how you produce an informative fail. In C, as you say, you return some sort of failure code. In a lot of higher level languages you throw an exception. There is nothing in this code that is innovative or spectacular. It's the kind of range check function that programmers have been implementing for decades.
Actually, even in C chances are you'd have thrown an exception or setjmp/longjmp. The only really distinct thing about this code was the format of the message.
Other than that you might as well try to patent a basic "for (i = 0; i limit; i++)" loop. SLAP!
Yeah, why are we ignoring the many companies that have failed either because they failed to adapt or underwent gross negligence. I have a feeling that the CEOs of the major banks in the US have actively harmed every human on Earth. Ballmer has merely failed to maintain a near-monopoly status in a highly transient industry.
Harming people isn't one of the things that Forbes concerns itself with.
[insert stock phrase about companies exist to make money here].
OK, let me paint another target on myself for all the knee-jerkers to reflexively pelt with garbage.
As a creator, I am not totally against the idea of patentable software concepts - provided that the concept in question is actually unique and not just a "done-this-forever" + "On the Internet" type of patent. It has to actually be a new and novel concept.
However, even in cases like that, the traditional patent terms are not a good idea. As a user and a designer of other people's ideas, 17 years is whole geological ages where effectively no one else can build on an idea if the patent-holder won't license on affordable terms. I'd go for a maximum software patent lifespan of 5 years, non-renewable. If you can't retire wealthy off that, your idea probably wasn't worth patenting and in any event it's time you got off your lazy royalty-collecting butt and thought up some new ideas.
Or at least that used to be my opinion back when technology wasn't quite so accelerated, our definition of affordable licensing wasn't what we can buy on a Wal-Mart salary, open-source wasn't a factor, and the major players weren't all using patent portfolios as blunt objects to assault people with. Maybe I should just grab a torch and pitchfork and do some knee-jerking myself.
The Linux client cant open a database stored on a network drive. The Windows and OSX client can.
Sure it can. I've been doing it for years.
You can also put the database on a thumb drive and yank it out when you want it physically isolatable.
To do what? Download the pirated copies so they don't have to watch the unskippable content?
Exactly my thought. And it is disingenuous to call these "government warnings" when they are really industry warnings. My warning to the industry is: "you are losing me".
Well, you could always buy-and-rip and skip the pirating. Ironically, the [i]really[/i] illegal part is probably the ripping. But the best way to make people break the law is to make laws that deserve to be broken.
Speaking of which, wasn't the "FBI Warning" itself determined to be illegal?
Something was taken. The income that would have otherwise been realized from a legitimate purchase.
So if I bake my own bread using the same recipe as the bakery in my neighborhood, I'm stealing from the bakery? Sorry, no. Something can be stolen only if it's material and you had it in the first place. Things you might get in fantasy parallel universe don't count.
That has to be one of the worst analogies of all time.
If you made your own movie using someone else's movie as a model (recipe), it would make sense, but if you're just copying someone else's movie, that's not the same thing. For what it's worth, someone actually did do something like that. They copied a John MacDonald novel, changed a few names and republished it. They got sued for infringement and lost. Recipes are generally copyrighted as well, although I've never heard of anyone actually getting taken to the cleaners over copying recipes. Using recipes, however, is completely different from copying them.
I do not in any way, shape or form condone most of the obnoxious schemes and practices implemented or proposed by the so-called "MAFIAA", or various publishers, distributors, and so forth. All I'm saying is that people shouldn't be such weasels about how they justify copyright infringement.
A copyright is literally the "right to copy". It is an acknowledgement that an intangible expression has value - that it required an effort on someone's part to produce and that they have therefore been granted control over its distribution. Given a monopoly, if you prefer. This is important, because otherwise the only way to protect the work in question would be to keep it hidden and under limited access.
A better analogy might be if I created a machine that could manufacture pearls out of thin air infinitely and forever. My machine is secure and not "copyrighted". But I have a mandate to distribute the pearls. How much - if anything - I get paid for doing so is not actually what's at issue. But let's say I have agreed to sell these perls for 2 cents each.
Now suppose that my "pearl warehouse" has a door in it that people can go in and get pearls without paying for them. No real loss, is it? After all, more pearls will appear and the warehouse never gets any emptier. Still, most people would consider that as being theft. After all, the pearls themselves are tangible objects, unlike the bits and bytes of a datastream. Just to shut up the nitpickers, let me also declare that if you hit one of these magic pearls with a hammer it will split into 2 identical pearls, so once you have a pearl, you never need invade the actual warehouse again.
And it's true. I haven't lost anything, really. And if I had granted a couple of fat guys the license to drive off with truck loads of pearls and sell them by the road and they were jacking up the price to $10 each, but they lost out on their fat markup because people were slipping into the warehouse behind them, well, boo-hoo for them, right?
Screw them. That's a totally different problem. It's their problem and I don't care.
What's more important is that if I don't get enough pairs of pennies, I have to go out and get a "real" job because nobody has invented a machine that makes pizza and beer out of thin air, so I have to actually pay for my essentials. If I have a "real" job, I'll fall into bed at the end of each day dead-tired and not have any spare energy to work on my gold nugget-making machine.
What? You say I should get up off my lazy ass and do it anyway because it's good for me to be industrious? For Free? What are you, some kind of Commie Socialist?
I don't like what's being done in the media industries any more than most people here do. I also don't think that just because I invented a pearl-making machine 250 years ago that my descendants should be able to freeload off my hard work. In fact, I don't think that just because I created one pearl-making machine that therefore I never need be
Your points are correct, but piracy of media is NOT theft. Theft implies something was taken, piracy (in this sense) is copyright infringement.
Something was taken. The income that would have otherwise been realized from a legitimate purchase. "Copyright infringement" is merely the legal definition of that kind of theft and covers both the income that would be realized (if any - since you can copyright something and give it away a la GNU), plus the theft of the rightsholder's legal grant to determine who (in a general way) will be permitted a copy.
It's still stealing, and using a less stark name for it doesn't make it any less theft in absolute terms any more than the difference between lifting a pack of gum is less "theft" than boosting a Porsche.
Seriously? The unibomber was (in his mentally ill way) against science... he was sending bombs to scientists and engineers.
The "Uni" in Unabomber (sic) stood for Universities. The A was for airports. There's a third component, too, I think, but I can't recall it.
If by his underwear you mean a colossal Penning trap capable of storing 3oz of antimatter, yes indeed! The brilliance of this evil scientist plot is it will only cost trillions of dollars and take at the very least several decades to fulfill -- so it will easily slip right under the radar.
No I didn't. For one thing, that doubles the amount of mass involved, multiplying the explosive effect. Show some restraint!
He's a physicist. That means he should have developed a process whereby he can flip over 50% of the water molecules into an anti-matter state under the influence of a catalytic reaction induced by 2 AA batteries and a single grain of table salt. I think Isaac Asimov wrote a story to that effect once.
Snarfiness aside, that's how terrorists got to be more scary than the Evil Empire. The more we learn about the Universe, the more powerful the levers we learn how to pull are. A single person these days can wreak more havoc than an entire barbarian horde used to.
Considering that their eBook reader runs a version of it...
Or used to. They made it hacker-resistant with the December OS updates...
No, B&N hoped it would be hacker-resistant, but the XDA devs released updates to their rooting methods (like ManualNooter) pretty quickly.
That's why I said hacker-resistant rather than hacker-proof. If I can hack by inserting a bootable card and cycling power, that's an easy hack. If I have to spend a lot of time, go through several complicated steps, risk damaging my normal Nook account and config info and/or reset the device to originally-shipped factory conditions, that's a whole arena. One I don't like.
He was probably going to blow up CERN the fracking wanker.
No. He was planning on developing a process whereby 100% of the mass in a 3oz. bottle of distilled water could be converted to energy. Should be roughly enough to blow up a plane, all the surrounding planes, the airport and a good size chunk of surrounding city.
The activating mechanism, of course, fits in his underwear.
Then why didn't it solve the problem when it had a chance and before legislation had to be involved?
If the free market can solve all problems why do so many go unsolved for so long?
Because state governments would not let them. Jim Crow Laws were exactly that: Laws passed by state governments.
Separate facilities for whites and non-whites didn't exist because the business owners wanted them necessarily (though I'm sure there were some who did want them). They existed because the various state governments mandated it.
The free market was not allowed to function because of government coercion.
There is no such thing as a "free market". Everyone meddles in the market. Even if the market started out free, it's not a stable system and typically degenerates into cartels and monopolies thanks to the natural tendency of people - meaning customers - to "go with a winner", thus creating positive feedback systems that enlarge the few at the expense of the many. It's no more realistic to expect "the market" to be virtuous than it is to expect that in a truly communal society the state will wither away.
While in theory, bad products drive out good, people will put up with all sorts of abuse in reality just to deal with the devil they know.
So please stay on the line. You call is very important to us.
Considering that their eBook reader runs a version of it...
Or used to. They made it hacker-resistant with the December OS updates, which true to form were only officially listed as "contains various minor updates".
The next generation will probably run Windows.
That's because Linux is an OS used predominately by criminals to hack machines. I appluad Barnes and Noble for this responsible reaction.
Spoken like a true partisan hack!
Quite the opposite. The less the term/phrase describes the product, the stronger the trademark. Thus, Apple is an excellent name for a computer company, but would probably be rejected if a fruit company tried to use it as a trademark
You are correct
(I am a lawyer)
And I am not, but I've read enough to know that the more unique the linkage, the better protection it has.
Actually, I believe that Apple is allowed to use that name by the Apple Corps, which permitted the use providing that Apple Computer didn't get involved in the Music business. It caused a certain amount of noise, as I recall when iTunes came to the market, since that was a potential violation of the agreement.
And the more specific trademark "Macintosh" was granted to Apple Computer by the Washington Apple Growers Association. So Apple wasn't the best choice for an illustration of how trademarks can be freely staked out.
You think Nokia's board is dumb not to fire Elop if he's not acting in Nokia's best interests?
Why not? Plenty of other boards seem to be. And what happens when they do finally wise up? They send him flying on a golden parachute.
that or he knew he was going to die soon, and just felt like causing MAD so we could all see what would happen.. in the end it wouldn't hurt him any.
Oh? He'd be seriously delusional if he thought he'd jump straight to Nirvana having pulled some of the stunts he did in that life. More likely come back as a caterpillar.
Everyone with a vehicle parked in a handicapped parking space is demonstrably handicapped in one way or another:
1. Physically - meaning that they actually need it for its intended purpose.
2. Mentally - meaning that they were too dim to heed the warning.
3. Morally - meaning that they're simply a selfish [CENSORED] who doesn't care that they're depriving someone else.
Most of the online courses fall short on the psychological aspects of teaching. They are little more than videotaped lectures with automated homework grading, and this model doesn't translate well to an online model.
.
If they really want to educate people, they're going to have to change their model to keep students motivated.
Until they do that, it'll still be just videotapes of college lectures.
Some classes are even worse. Locally, some genius in control of the educational system has managed to get Lower Prices Everyday[TM] for our tax dollars by converting foreign-language education into one massive online class.
I may not be very sociable, but I still understand the importance of 2-way channels when learning foreign languages. A lot of people don't actually "hear" what they think they're hearing. If they just keep repeating back the same faulty pronunciation to a computer, instead of improving, they simply reinforce their mistakes. I know more than one or 2 people who fail even when assisted by pattern-matching software. The software can only tell them that they're doing it wrong, but it's not intelligent enough to indicate the parts that need fixing or offer guidance.
The obvious American solution: Comcast buys Sony in a leveraged buyout. Execs get big bonuses. Provides metered services to Sony content and products at a rate slightly less ruinous than what they charge for competitors. Obligatory layoffs at Comcast and Sony. Comcast products are distributed with integral Sony rootkits and DRM.
Wait a couple of years. Comcast decides Sony is dead weight. Lays off more people, execs get big performance bonuses. Sells off Sony. Execs get big retention bonuses. Sony lays off more people. Execs collect big golden parachute bonuses. Execs Move on to new victimsxxxxx/pastures and collect big signing bonuses. Economy tanks due to unemployment. Sony can't sell to unemployed people. Sony declares bankruptcy, seeks government assistance... etc. etc. etc.
Everyone will have prevented everyone else from selling anything.
And we'll all end up living in caves eating rats.
And paying Monsanto for the privilege thanks to the rats having mutated from ingesting Monsanto-proprietary DNA.
There is significant evidence that the earth's climate changed dramatically in the past, without any human intervention. So there is all kinds of historic evidence for climate change. The issue is how significant human activities are for climate change.
Yeah, that's kind of the Last Bastion, alright. Blame it on something/someone else.
No one ever definitively "proved" that smoking causes cancer, but these days even the most die-hard (no pun intended) smokers are usually willing to admit that they'd probably be better off if they didn't do it. Usually. Some people are so insecure that admitting being wrong is worse than even dying.
Just like in the case of lung cancer, the convenient upsurge in global temperatures in parallel with CO2 production makes more rational people start thinking that maybe there are better ways to do things. Just in case.
The only real reason I've ever seen for the vehement rejection of AGW ultimately seems to stem from a desperate need on the part of certain people to keep us addicted to oil. Many of these people are the same ones that loudly decry addiction to other substances (except maybe Oxycontin), but freeing ourselves from a dirty substance that's in limited supply and extensively controlled by foreign interests just doesn't sit with them.
People think of the term "evolution" as though it was some sort of steady march uphill. Guided, perhaps by some sort of intelligent design. BTW, did I miss the reference to the cartoon captioned "somewhere something went horribly wrong"?
Real evolution is simply change that adapts to circumstances. If you adapt too well though, you may actually end up extinct.
If anything, I'd say that human evolution is in an accelerated mode as we constantly tamper with our environment, our social systems, and our biology. We increase the breeding capabilities of some and decrease the breeding capabilities of others (you don't actually have to kill to pull someone out of the gene pool - that's just another myth of the "Nature red in tooth and claw" cult, which isn't true evolution. More of a justification to be a total bastard.
The very word "patent" means public. If you want to keep something secret, that's what Trade Secrets are all about. Granting a Letter Patent was supposed to mean that the art in question was published in a public venue where all and sundry could see it and benefit thereby. And a monopoly on its implementation for a set period of time so that the patent grantee would not lose out on making the idea public.
What they want is a system of secret monopolies. No thanks. We have enough problems with patents these days as it is.
Few things (short of a corporate change of personality) would drive me back into the arms of Amazon after what they've done in recent years, but a Windows-based Nook would be one of them. Bad enough that they've sucked all the fun out by making the Nooks root-resistant.
Then again, just because Microsoft invested in the Nook doesn't actually mean that they have immediate plans for a switchover. If what I hear is correct, they're making more money off Android-based phones than Windows phones these days.
Anything that redirects how energy flows affects local conditions. That's just basic Thermodynamics.
Scaling that up to be "climate change", however, is a bit of a stretch. While there are things that you can do that are catalytic in nature and therefore self-leveraging, such as chloroflourocarbons, a windmill isn't one of them. To get a serious effect on climate, you'd need a serious number of windmills.