to justify further restrictions on P2P software. I'm sure they will be able to twist this attack into some type of political message to show that the P2P community is just a bunch of cracking criminals which need to be stopped.
I should probably point out here that the DMCA is an American law, not a British one.
The invocation of the DMCA as an extension of the WIPO Copyright treaty seems tenuous at best. If it *is* proven to be valid, both the DMCA and WIPO could effectively nullify each other (everyone's copyright laws are valid everywhere -- WTF?)
We all already know that the DMCA is insidious and evil. The interesting part of the story comes in the fact that a British lawfirm is trying enforce an undeclared British copyright by using an American law.
The sort of people who oppose this sort of payola are powerless to stop it, as that would require them to bribe some politicians themselves. A sort of insidious catch-22.
We could vote 'em out of office, but that didn't work too well either last year. The new ones quickly became just as evil and corrupt as the old ones.
In future news, every top-level administrator of the EPA will be fired in 2008, following the inauguration of the new president.
Seriously. For the EPA to do something this monumentally stupid, the entire agency deserves to be disbanded, considering that their actions have been completely and entirely contrary to their stated mission.
Similarly, cellular broadband isn't a half-bad solution for rural areas, considering that you don't have to worry about overloading individual towers (which are both ubiquitous and cheap)
The economics of wireless telecom are so much more favorable that developing nations without an established telecom infrastructure are skipping landlines entirely, and installing cell towers all over the place instead.
Although I don't want to jump into a flame war, you've made one assumption that isn't quite correct.
Health Care in the US doesn't operate as a "free market" as you describe it. Due to the manner in which HMOs and Insurance companies operate, the cost of healthcare for someone who is "uninsured" is astronomically inflated.
Similarly, a HMO is in many ways, a privately-owned socialized healthcare system. Because your HMO provider is generally dictated to you by your employer, there's not a whole lot of competition going on. As a result, you're left with the operational inefficiencies of a closed system, combined with the amoral greed of a profit-earning corporation trying to maximize its revenue, while minimizing its expenses.
The "free market" is a mathematical ideology that only exists on paper. It's a reliable guideline for commodity markets, but not much else. In the sphere of consumer goods, it's still a decent approximation, and does drive innovation and reduce prices to an extent (although there are many other factors involved).
The system, however, breaks down entirely for essential public services, as consumers have few (or no) options to choose from, and the process of switching providers can prove to be difficult. Subsequently, utility companies are heavily regulated, and various schemes have been attempted to introduce competition to these spheres, some of which have been successful (energy, virtual mobile carriers, number portability), some of which have had little impact either way (UK Network Rail), and others which have largely failed (3rd-party local phone service/DSL).
If we're not going to do Socialized healthcare for the reasons you outline, we at least need to make sure that the "market" is operating properly. Right now, it's most definitely not. If we fix the system, we might even be able to find a way to make sure that the helplessly poor aren't left out to die, without compromising the integrity of the market.
Could a "free market" do better? Perhaps, and a cursory glance at the economics of it seem to indicate that it would, although we've got very little experience to go by, and the current system sure as hell isn't a free market.
No, but the current system is horribly, horribly broken.
The laws of economics pretty clearly state that socialized medicine will *never* be the most efficient system.
However, experience has shown us that it establishes an acceptable baseline, and generally works a whole lot better than the system currently in place in the US. According to the statistics, America's not doing so well at the moment.
Socialized medicine might not be the best answer, but it is one possible solution. Anybody defending the current system in the US needs their head examined (ho, ho, irony!). There's no free-market capitalism to speak of, and the HMOs are little more than the corporate equivalent of a socialized health system (but operate at miserable levels of efficiency, and tend to royally screw their customers). It's also rare to be able to choose your HMO.
Natural selection can be easily verified in a laboratory setting, with reproducible results. Keep nuking bacteria, and eventually you'll wind up with a population that is more resilient to the doses of radiation that you're giving them. We can also statistically observe which DNA sequences are advantageous/disadvantageous. The evidence for natural selection is extensive and largely unambiguous.
Evolution is part of the larger picture, and isn't really possible to test or reproduce, as it explains the consequences of natural selection. "Proving" evolution requires lots of indirect/consequential/incomplete evidence, and the extensive use of statistics (which helps indicate trends and correlations, but can't actually *prove* anything) to interpolate/extrapolate what evidence we have.
It follows from logic that if species breed randomly, and the mutation doesn't greatly affect an organism's ability to reproduce, the short-term effects of natural selection won't propagate to the long-term, which leaves us with a paradoxical situation wherein Natural Selection is required for evolution to occur, but that the population dynamics associated with natural selection simultaneously prevent long-term evolution from occurring.
The significance of this study is that we now have some evidence that the "species breed randomly" assumption might not necessarily have been a good one.
As always, further study on the matter should be pursued.
I've never really understood how the "gay bomb" would have actually been all that effective as a weapon.
* Enemy soldiers less stressed out, because they're finally "getting some" * Enemy soldiers more visible thanks to brightly colored uniforms * Collapse of the Iraqi porn industry * Improved aesthetics at enemy bases * Iraqi literary and theatrical output increased tenfold
On the other hand, although there would be no casualties, friendly-fire incidents would create an administrative nightmare.
A better summary of TFA: The three most recent high-profile Open-Source acquisitions were massively overvalued (20x+ annual revenue). If you're not being offered at least an order of magnitude more than what your company is actually worth, you aren't trying hard enough.
Of course, if $100mil is the best offer, I'd still take it;-)
Over the past few decades, most US firms have found it beneficial to decouple development from manufacturing. Consequently, intellectual property rights must be respected and protected, in order to prevent the manufacturing firms from raping the R&D guys.
In the current US economy, we do have a legitimate need for a good patent system given these circumstances. It also does have various other beneficial effects, as it makes it considerably easier for small/new companies to develop and market products that would otherwise require considerable infrastructure to manufacture.
Whether or not the current patent system is good or not is another debate entirely, although I'm personally of the opinion that it needs to be seriously reformed to better balance the needs of the patent holders with consumers, cut down on the number of junk patents being filed, prevent exorbitant licensing fees, etc....
You start off sounding like a very reasonable person, and then end with that.
You have faith in something you cannot prove. Like the existence of a god.
There is tons of evidence for evolution and none against it so no "faith" is required. Or is gravity an article of faith too, because you never know, one day something might fall upwards?!
Not necessarily. Although I really do hate to give the fundies any ammunition, evolution is still very much a theory, and will always remain as such.
We currently have overwhelming evidence to support short-term evolution, and experiments are easy enough to carry out on bacteria and single-cell organisms that one can witness it firsthand. I can easily and empirically state that by exposing bacteria to increasing doses of radiation, that I am reducing the population to only include specimens that are resilient to these conditions. The experiment is easily reproducible, and supports Darwin's "survival of the fittest" hypothesis to a T. Given that I can repeat the experiment, and that the results are easily verifiable, there's very little faith involved. It's still a theory, but we have piles of evidence, and recorded observations every step of the way.
On the other hand, extrapolating that result in the long-term is difficult, and can not be proven or witnessed first-hand. The only evidence we have to support evolution over the long-term is indirect, and potentially ambiguous. Although we can collect more and more evidence, and reduce the ambiguities, there is still the off chance that we're wrong. Although we can observe the results of X number of years worth of evolutionary processes, we are unable to directly reproduce the reaction itself, and therefore cannot unambiguously say that dinosaur fossils are nothing more than a practical joke being played on us by the Magratheans.
Accepting evolution does require a "leap of faith," although we can continue to gather evidence to support our theory, and make that leap a tiny bit smaller. Although Occam's Razor does tend to apply to most situations, it cannot be used to prove anything.
Any scientist that does not acknowledge a certain degree of uncertainty or ambiguity in his results cannot be taken seriously. Established scientific principles have been proven "wrong" enough times that scientists should know better. Heck -- the idea of uncertainty is the cornerstone of modern physics, and took physicists several hundred years to fully come to grips with.
These statements don't necessarily apply to mathematics, given that numbers are an arbitrarily-defined abstract system, and there are certain statements that can be unambiguously "proven" within our definitions. Physical science, on the other hand, largely consists of interpreting and extrapolating physical observations.
So, no. Evolution cannot be proven, although we can point to the piles of evidence, and ask you to draw your own conclusions.
Much in the same way, religious types can just as easily point out that there is no possible scientific explanation for the human consciousness.
Although I'm no fan of the Bush administration by any stretch of the imagination, I imagine that they're blaming their own actions on what is a relatively standard practice.
Every tape backup operator I've ever encountered recycles backup tapes to some degree. Granted, this shouldn't be done as to destroy a considerable portion of historical data that was marked to be preserved/archived, but the sort of tape backups that one keeps around to prevent against a system crash are very routinely recycled, given the prohibitively high cost of purchasing a new set of tapes every time you do a backup.
Of course, I do imagine that malice is somehow involved, but that the backup operator is almost definitely not at fault here.
I don't think you could seriously argue that the second amendment covers cannons, mortars, bombs, and landmines.
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms." implies personal firearms.... not the sort that would be solely used in large-scale warfare.
Landmines, on the other hand, would seem to fall into the same category as handguns, as the victim more often than not has no idea that his opponent is armed, or that he's even in danger. I fail to see a reason for those to exist.
Although I do respect the founding fathers' intention of keeping the population armed so that the people have a "last resort" should the government cease to act in the interests of the general populace, I'm just not sure that a ban on concealed weapons would violate that purpose.
Handguns strike me as "murder weapons" and "weapons to be used in self-defense against other handgun-toting criminals". Larger weapons scare me a lot less, since the unpredictability element is mostly gone.
Personally, I'm waiting for them to start cutting the corners off of our paper.
(The urban legend goes that the production company behind BSG liked the series, but thought that it was too expensive for what it was, and instructed the director to "cut some corners." Not being too happy with this, the director subsequently told his props manager to cut the corners off of every square and rectangular object he could find in his inventory. Oddly enough, this added to the "futuristic" appearance of the props)
I think you're missing the point. As long as a reasonably good seal is maintained (which is usually the case), the drink "packet" will deform as the drink is consumed instead of letting air to fill the void left by the liquid.
Gravity doesn't even factor into the equation, although getting the last few drops out could prove to be frustrating..
Wouldn't be surprising (although you mostyly see IEC leads these days), but it also shouldn't lead to stray voltage within the laptop itself. Just the DC converter.
Yeah..... couldn't you just as easily contact a translator via. radio/speakerphone? This seems like a rather expensive/unnecessary device to be carrying around.
1) It seems as if it's UK only. American ones come with the ground prong on the plug
Not possible. A UK socket physically *requires* that a ground pin be present. The ground pin is a bit longer than the live/neutral pins, and is used to open a "shutter" blocking the live/neutral holes when the plug is inserted. When the longer ground pin is inserted, the shutter opens, allowing the plug to be fully inserted.
As an additional safety precaution, every plug is also fitted with a 13A fuse, and all domestic circuits fitted with the connector described above are *explicitly* rated to operate at up to 13 amps. (Additionally every single wall socket also has an individual on/off switch)
The UK/Ireland wiring standard is arguably the safest in the world, and makes the North American NEMA standard seem primitive and dangerous by comparison, as outlets are not shuttered, circuits do not have an explicit amperage rating, and no ground pin is required.
(There's also an older 15A British standard that's still used in some former British colonies and dimmable theatre installations that lacks the fuse and shutter mechanism, and is electrically compatible with the "new" standard with the use of an adapter, despite lacking the newer standard's safety features)
Mind you, the ground pin doesn't actually have to be connected to anything, nor would one expect it to on a laptop, considering that no grounding is possible when the laptop's running off of battery power, nor should AC power ever even enter the laptop's chassis.
Sounds like either Dell screwed up the design, or CNet installed carpeting in their UK office.
I have two young boys (age 1 and age 3) who like to watch me play nearly any videogame I throw in (they're big fans of the Katamari series)
If what the video game-opponents are saying is true, and kids really do subconsciously model their behavior based upon what they see in games, your kids are going to have some hilarious tendencies when they're older.
Slashdot Mirror
"In this post-1/21 world....."
We must never forget!
I should probably point out here that the DMCA is an American law, not a British one.
The invocation of the DMCA as an extension of the WIPO Copyright treaty seems tenuous at best. If it *is* proven to be valid, both the DMCA and WIPO could effectively nullify each other (everyone's copyright laws are valid everywhere -- WTF?)
We all already know that the DMCA is insidious and evil. The interesting part of the story comes in the fact that a British lawfirm is trying enforce an undeclared British copyright by using an American law.
It's even partially responsible for the fact that the pound is tanking, even compared to the already-pathetic US dollar.
Once Bush gets his second round of suicidal tax cuts, I'm sure things will even themselves out....
Do you mean to say that this volcano is spewing sheep?
The sort of people who oppose this sort of payola are powerless to stop it, as that would require them to bribe some politicians themselves. A sort of insidious catch-22.
We could vote 'em out of office, but that didn't work too well either last year. The new ones quickly became just as evil and corrupt as the old ones.
Sigh.
In future news, every top-level administrator of the EPA will be fired in 2008, following the inauguration of the new president.
Seriously. For the EPA to do something this monumentally stupid, the entire agency deserves to be disbanded, considering that their actions have been completely and entirely contrary to their stated mission.
Similarly, cellular broadband isn't a half-bad solution for rural areas, considering that you don't have to worry about overloading individual towers (which are both ubiquitous and cheap)
The economics of wireless telecom are so much more favorable that developing nations without an established telecom infrastructure are skipping landlines entirely, and installing cell towers all over the place instead.
Although I don't want to jump into a flame war, you've made one assumption that isn't quite correct.
Health Care in the US doesn't operate as a "free market" as you describe it. Due to the manner in which HMOs and Insurance companies operate, the cost of healthcare for someone who is "uninsured" is astronomically inflated.
Similarly, a HMO is in many ways, a privately-owned socialized healthcare system. Because your HMO provider is generally dictated to you by your employer, there's not a whole lot of competition going on. As a result, you're left with the operational inefficiencies of a closed system, combined with the amoral greed of a profit-earning corporation trying to maximize its revenue, while minimizing its expenses.
The "free market" is a mathematical ideology that only exists on paper. It's a reliable guideline for commodity markets, but not much else. In the sphere of consumer goods, it's still a decent approximation, and does drive innovation and reduce prices to an extent (although there are many other factors involved).
The system, however, breaks down entirely for essential public services, as consumers have few (or no) options to choose from, and the process of switching providers can prove to be difficult. Subsequently, utility companies are heavily regulated, and various schemes have been attempted to introduce competition to these spheres, some of which have been successful (energy, virtual mobile carriers, number portability), some of which have had little impact either way (UK Network Rail), and others which have largely failed (3rd-party local phone service/DSL).
If we're not going to do Socialized healthcare for the reasons you outline, we at least need to make sure that the "market" is operating properly. Right now, it's most definitely not. If we fix the system, we might even be able to find a way to make sure that the helplessly poor aren't left out to die, without compromising the integrity of the market.
Is Socialized Healthcare a good idea? Perhaps. It's been tried in quite a few places, the people who have it seem to like it, and the numbers tend to indicate that people living under such systems are generally healthier. The issue of cost is perhaps overblown -- the US spends 15% of its GDP (expected to reach 20% in 2015) on healthcare. In the UK, the NHS budget works out to a bit over £1700 per person ($3400 USD), while the average health insurance policy in the US costs over $4200.
Could a "free market" do better? Perhaps, and a cursory glance at the economics of it seem to indicate that it would, although we've got very little experience to go by, and the current system sure as hell isn't a free market.
No, but the current system is horribly, horribly broken.
The laws of economics pretty clearly state that socialized medicine will *never* be the most efficient system.
However, experience has shown us that it establishes an acceptable baseline, and generally works a whole lot better than the system currently in place in the US. According to the statistics, America's not doing so well at the moment.
Socialized medicine might not be the best answer, but it is one possible solution. Anybody defending the current system in the US needs their head examined (ho, ho, irony!). There's no free-market capitalism to speak of, and the HMOs are little more than the corporate equivalent of a socialized health system (but operate at miserable levels of efficiency, and tend to royally screw their customers). It's also rare to be able to choose your HMO.
Freedom and capitalism, my ass.
Natural selection can be easily verified in a laboratory setting, with reproducible results. Keep nuking bacteria, and eventually you'll wind up with a population that is more resilient to the doses of radiation that you're giving them. We can also statistically observe which DNA sequences are advantageous/disadvantageous. The evidence for natural selection is extensive and largely unambiguous.
Evolution is part of the larger picture, and isn't really possible to test or reproduce, as it explains the consequences of natural selection. "Proving" evolution requires lots of indirect/consequential/incomplete evidence, and the extensive use of statistics (which helps indicate trends and correlations, but can't actually *prove* anything) to interpolate/extrapolate what evidence we have.
It follows from logic that if species breed randomly, and the mutation doesn't greatly affect an organism's ability to reproduce, the short-term effects of natural selection won't propagate to the long-term, which leaves us with a paradoxical situation wherein Natural Selection is required for evolution to occur, but that the population dynamics associated with natural selection simultaneously prevent long-term evolution from occurring.
The significance of this study is that we now have some evidence that the "species breed randomly" assumption might not necessarily have been a good one.
As always, further study on the matter should be pursued.
I've never really understood how the "gay bomb" would have actually been all that effective as a weapon.
* Enemy soldiers less stressed out, because they're finally "getting some"
* Enemy soldiers more visible thanks to brightly colored uniforms
* Collapse of the Iraqi porn industry
* Improved aesthetics at enemy bases
* Iraqi literary and theatrical output increased tenfold
On the other hand, although there would be no casualties, friendly-fire incidents would create an administrative nightmare.
A better summary of TFA: The three most recent high-profile Open-Source acquisitions were massively overvalued (20x+ annual revenue). If you're not being offered at least an order of magnitude more than what your company is actually worth, you aren't trying hard enough.
;-)
Of course, if $100mil is the best offer, I'd still take it
Perhaps.
Over the past few decades, most US firms have found it beneficial to decouple development from manufacturing. Consequently, intellectual property rights must be respected and protected, in order to prevent the manufacturing firms from raping the R&D guys.
In the current US economy, we do have a legitimate need for a good patent system given these circumstances. It also does have various other beneficial effects, as it makes it considerably easier for small/new companies to develop and market products that would otherwise require considerable infrastructure to manufacture.
Whether or not the current patent system is good or not is another debate entirely, although I'm personally of the opinion that it needs to be seriously reformed to better balance the needs of the patent holders with consumers, cut down on the number of junk patents being filed, prevent exorbitant licensing fees, etc....
Not necessarily. Although I really do hate to give the fundies any ammunition, evolution is still very much a theory, and will always remain as such.
We currently have overwhelming evidence to support short-term evolution, and experiments are easy enough to carry out on bacteria and single-cell organisms that one can witness it firsthand. I can easily and empirically state that by exposing bacteria to increasing doses of radiation, that I am reducing the population to only include specimens that are resilient to these conditions. The experiment is easily reproducible, and supports Darwin's "survival of the fittest" hypothesis to a T. Given that I can repeat the experiment, and that the results are easily verifiable, there's very little faith involved. It's still a theory, but we have piles of evidence, and recorded observations every step of the way.
On the other hand, extrapolating that result in the long-term is difficult, and can not be proven or witnessed first-hand. The only evidence we have to support evolution over the long-term is indirect, and potentially ambiguous. Although we can collect more and more evidence, and reduce the ambiguities, there is still the off chance that we're wrong. Although we can observe the results of X number of years worth of evolutionary processes, we are unable to directly reproduce the reaction itself, and therefore cannot unambiguously say that dinosaur fossils are nothing more than a practical joke being played on us by the Magratheans.
Accepting evolution does require a "leap of faith," although we can continue to gather evidence to support our theory, and make that leap a tiny bit smaller. Although Occam's Razor does tend to apply to most situations, it cannot be used to prove anything.
Any scientist that does not acknowledge a certain degree of uncertainty or ambiguity in his results cannot be taken seriously. Established scientific principles have been proven "wrong" enough times that scientists should know better. Heck -- the idea of uncertainty is the cornerstone of modern physics, and took physicists several hundred years to fully come to grips with.
These statements don't necessarily apply to mathematics, given that numbers are an arbitrarily-defined abstract system, and there are certain statements that can be unambiguously "proven" within our definitions. Physical science, on the other hand, largely consists of interpreting and extrapolating physical observations.
So, no. Evolution cannot be proven, although we can point to the piles of evidence, and ask you to draw your own conclusions.
Much in the same way, religious types can just as easily point out that there is no possible scientific explanation for the human consciousness.
Although I'm no fan of the Bush administration by any stretch of the imagination, I imagine that they're blaming their own actions on what is a relatively standard practice.
Every tape backup operator I've ever encountered recycles backup tapes to some degree. Granted, this shouldn't be done as to destroy a considerable portion of historical data that was marked to be preserved/archived, but the sort of tape backups that one keeps around to prevent against a system crash are very routinely recycled, given the prohibitively high cost of purchasing a new set of tapes every time you do a backup.
Of course, I do imagine that malice is somehow involved, but that the backup operator is almost definitely not at fault here.
And also where did they "borrow" an industrial robot? (and then get permission to use it as a toy?)
You don't exactly see them sitting out on the street every day....
I don't think you could seriously argue that the second amendment covers cannons, mortars, bombs, and landmines.
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms." implies personal firearms.... not the sort that would be solely used in large-scale warfare.
Landmines, on the other hand, would seem to fall into the same category as handguns, as the victim more often than not has no idea that his opponent is armed, or that he's even in danger. I fail to see a reason for those to exist.
Although I do respect the founding fathers' intention of keeping the population armed so that the people have a "last resort" should the government cease to act in the interests of the general populace, I'm just not sure that a ban on concealed weapons would violate that purpose.
Handguns strike me as "murder weapons" and "weapons to be used in self-defense against other handgun-toting criminals". Larger weapons scare me a lot less, since the unpredictability element is mostly gone.
Personally, I'm waiting for them to start cutting the corners off of our paper.
(The urban legend goes that the production company behind BSG liked the series, but thought that it was too expensive for what it was, and instructed the director to "cut some corners." Not being too happy with this, the director subsequently told his props manager to cut the corners off of every square and rectangular object he could find in his inventory. Oddly enough, this added to the "futuristic" appearance of the props)
I think you're missing the point. As long as a reasonably good seal is maintained (which is usually the case), the drink "packet" will deform as the drink is consumed instead of letting air to fill the void left by the liquid.
Gravity doesn't even factor into the equation, although getting the last few drops out could prove to be frustrating..
Wouldn't be surprising (although you mostyly see IEC leads these days), but it also shouldn't lead to stray voltage within the laptop itself. Just the DC converter.
Yeah..... couldn't you just as easily contact a translator via. radio/speakerphone? This seems like a rather expensive/unnecessary device to be carrying around.
Not possible. A UK socket physically *requires* that a ground pin be present. The ground pin is a bit longer than the live/neutral pins, and is used to open a "shutter" blocking the live/neutral holes when the plug is inserted. When the longer ground pin is inserted, the shutter opens, allowing the plug to be fully inserted.
As an additional safety precaution, every plug is also fitted with a 13A fuse, and all domestic circuits fitted with the connector described above are *explicitly* rated to operate at up to 13 amps. (Additionally every single wall socket also has an individual on/off switch)
The UK/Ireland wiring standard is arguably the safest in the world, and makes the North American NEMA standard seem primitive and dangerous by comparison, as outlets are not shuttered, circuits do not have an explicit amperage rating, and no ground pin is required.
(There's also an older 15A British standard that's still used in some former British colonies and dimmable theatre installations that lacks the fuse and shutter mechanism, and is electrically compatible with the "new" standard with the use of an adapter, despite lacking the newer standard's safety features)
Mind you, the ground pin doesn't actually have to be connected to anything, nor would one expect it to on a laptop, considering that no grounding is possible when the laptop's running off of battery power, nor should AC power ever even enter the laptop's chassis.
Sounds like either Dell screwed up the design, or CNet installed carpeting in their UK office.
Wait..... a Microsoft-user up on a high horse, criticizing Apple???
Now I've seen everything.
If what the video game-opponents are saying is true, and kids really do subconsciously model their behavior based upon what they see in games, your kids are going to have some hilarious tendencies when they're older.
Here's an interesting thought:
Who has the lowest UID*Age on slashdot?