The reason people are suspect when they criticize the overwhelming evidence that exists right now is because there are substantial political and corporate interests that support framing it as uncertain or as a debate.
The "evidence" that exists is that it has been getting a bit warmer; few people disagree with that. The "debate" is about what that means. Is it going to continue to get warmer? Is there anything we can do about it? Should we? What are the costs?
There are a lot of people who like to confuse the little bit of scientific fact we have with issues of extrapolation, prediction, and policy. That is not science, it is just dishonesty.
All you would need to make it look smoother is diagonal, corner, and rounded blocks. There are maybe 64 or 128 different types of those, so less than a byte per block.
In terms of graphics, it wouldn't be so hard to make surfaces a little bit more varied. Why the blockiness in Minecraft? Why not give people roundish and triangular things to play around with too?
Yes, and I think that subtlety is a bad idea and creates the wrong incentives. A court shouldn't opine on how important something is to me, or how much it costs me to replace something. Companies should be responsible for the service they provide, but they shouldn't be responsible for unusually high damages because you can't be away from work, and neither should I be penalized if my time is more flexible.
It's good when businesses are held responsible for failing to provide the service their customers are paying for.
However, it sucks that the court thinks you only deserve compensation when it is for something "essential" and if you were dumb enough not to get an alternative yourself ahead of time.
but privacy (in all its forms) is a basic requirement of mental health, the human psyche demands it.
Citation?
I don't see why a commercial entity should have the right to publish a "dossier" (the search results) on a person against their will (as opposed to without their prior consent).
It's called "free speech". Yeah, and lots of people don't like it.
The most common one handed input device is The Twiddler; you can hold it and type at the same time.
Another one-handed input method is Half-Qwerty; it's been stuck in patent limbo for a couple of decades, and the inventor basically killed off the mobile market for the device, but the patent is expiring.
Easy2Key seems exceptionally badly designed from an ergonomic point of view. Also, spending months getting good at a patented input method is stupid, because if he stops making the device, you're in trouble.
Don't bet that financial reform helps; it may make things worse. In the US, running is expensive, but at least you can do it as an independent candidate. Here in Germany, nominally, running for office is cheap, but no independent candidate has ever been elected to German parliament. If you aren't part of one of the party machines, you don't have a chance. Furthermore, many seats in parliament are just given away by parties to their political cronies. You get an electrician without a college education trying to regulate the Internet, for example. The German system was recently declared unconstitutional by the German court because it was so non-transparent, but it doesn't seem to have gotten fixed.
If there is a better system, I think people would sure like to know about it...
You should check European news some time. People are thrown in jail for breaking into computer systems and copyright violations all the time.
Under a new proposal, cyberattacks are supposed to get a minimum of 2 years in prison in the entire EU (Google Translate).
At least in the US people complain about it and it's news. Here in Germany, most people don't give a damn and the "public" media and media conglomerates don't even report it much.
Change your name and you'll be instantly forgotten. What people who say they want a "right to be forgotten" is a right to control specific information about the: hide the bad, keep the good. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
AI assumes that you can take published facts, dump them in a black box, and assume that the output is going to be intelligent
That was the assumption in the 1970's and 1980's (expert systems), and mostly just because of technical limitations.
These days, most AI researchers are pretty convinced that learning, experimentation, and probably embodiment are an essential part of building a working AI system.
I don't get it: you agreed with me on pretty much every point: Germany is conservative and hence rejects cloning. The only thing that you could possibly take offense to is that German conservatism is rooted in Catholicism. If that's your belief and objection, frankly, you don't know anything about German politics.
Either way, I'm done with this.
Me too. You're obviously both uneducated and a lout.
Last time around, Dotcom also seems to have been legally safe, in theory. Yet, US prosecutors still managed to wreck his business. I'd be surprised if this technical detail would stop them.
Everybody who connects to the Internet already pays for their bandwidth to the ISP, effectively in proportion to what they use. If there is a lot of traffic coming from Google, then both Orange's customers pay for their individual usage, and Google pays wherever they hook up to the Internet. At some level, Orange has a peering arrangement, and if there are traffic imbalances, they negotiate with their partners, who then pass on the cost to Google and their customers. Trying to extort additional payments from specific large companies just because ISPs can should not be permitted. They're effectively saying "nice business you have built there, wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to it".
I suppose one shouldn't feel too unhappy about it. Although it is unfair and should be criminal, it sort of balances out the world a little by compensating for barriers to entry created by large companies (e.g., patent portfolios and cross licensing, etc.).
Germany is one of the countries that is most radically opposed to human cloning. Usually, the aversion is justified with "Germany's Nazi past", but it's really just the Catholic church and its hangups about reproduction. So: wrong country to be discussing this.
What "political reality"? Out of all the silly objections people have raised to FOSS, I have never heard that seriously used in parliament. You're creating an issue that simply hasn't existed before.
Some of the rationale I've read from him suggests it was more in the "harm reduction" category, allowing scholars who were being discriminated against in 3rd world countries access to 1st world research.
Except that JSTOR would hardly have been a good target for that; most of its content is obscure and old, and they are nowhere near done scanning. The net effect of his actions would have been giving "3rd world countries" a nearly useless and incomplete collection of papers and greatly complicate further scanning and publishing of old journals. The content that matters, recent science and engineering, as well as most classical literature, is already effectively available freely.
The real civil disobedience that has been happening since long before Swartz ever appeared on the scene. Tens of thousands of academics have been putting up their papers on their personal web sites for years, and Citeseer and Google Scholar picking up those papers. And most academic publishers have long since acquiesced to this (many of them officially), because they'd be committing suicide if they tried to raise a stink about it.
The idea that one cannot legitimately protest the law without suffering for it is an oddly puritanical myth that needs to be debunked.
Of course, it's nice if one performs civil disobedience for a righteous cause, the cause is recognized as righteous, a groundswell of public opinion motivates legislators to change the law, and you aren't punished. But that is not a high probability event.
Realistically, you have to expect that if you break the law publicly, prosecutors will find you, charge you, and attempt to punish you to the maximum extent of the law. And you can't fault the legal system for doing its job either. A system in which prosecutors decline to prosecute out of their own personal political or social preferences is arbitrary and dangerous.
Poverty is defined as 60% of the median income. 60% of US median income is about $19000. Middle class is the class from somewhat below to somewhat above the median. That would place the middle classes of Germany, Finland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey near or below the US poverty line.
Slashdot Mirror
You use "the tipping points" and "the impacts" as if they were scientific certainty. In fact, they are just speculation at this point.
The "evidence" that exists is that it has been getting a bit warmer; few people disagree with that. The "debate" is about what that means. Is it going to continue to get warmer? Is there anything we can do about it? Should we? What are the costs?
There are a lot of people who like to confuse the little bit of scientific fact we have with issues of extrapolation, prediction, and policy. That is not science, it is just dishonesty.
All you would need to make it look smoother is diagonal, corner, and rounded blocks. There are maybe 64 or 128 different types of those, so less than a byte per block.
individual Lego blocks still come in a variety of shapes other than rectangular.
In terms of graphics, it wouldn't be so hard to make surfaces a little bit more varied. Why the blockiness in Minecraft? Why not give people roundish and triangular things to play around with too?
Yes, and I think that subtlety is a bad idea and creates the wrong incentives. A court shouldn't opine on how important something is to me, or how much it costs me to replace something. Companies should be responsible for the service they provide, but they shouldn't be responsible for unusually high damages because you can't be away from work, and neither should I be penalized if my time is more flexible.
140 character messages, 5 second video clips, and iOS-only.
It's good when businesses are held responsible for failing to provide the service their customers are paying for.
However, it sucks that the court thinks you only deserve compensation when it is for something "essential" and if you were dumb enough not to get an alternative yourself ahead of time.
Citation?
It's called "free speech". Yeah, and lots of people don't like it.
The most common one handed input device is The Twiddler; you can hold it and type at the same time.
Another one-handed input method is Half-Qwerty; it's been stuck in patent limbo for a couple of decades, and the inventor basically killed off the mobile market for the device, but the patent is expiring.
Easy2Key seems exceptionally badly designed from an ergonomic point of view. Also, spending months getting good at a patented input method is stupid, because if he stops making the device, you're in trouble.
Don't bet that financial reform helps; it may make things worse. In the US, running is expensive, but at least you can do it as an independent candidate. Here in Germany, nominally, running for office is cheap, but no independent candidate has ever been elected to German parliament. If you aren't part of one of the party machines, you don't have a chance. Furthermore, many seats in parliament are just given away by parties to their political cronies. You get an electrician without a college education trying to regulate the Internet, for example. The German system was recently declared unconstitutional by the German court because it was so non-transparent, but it doesn't seem to have gotten fixed.
If there is a better system, I think people would sure like to know about it...
If you're living in the EU and you believe that, you're a bloody fool.
You should check European news some time. People are thrown in jail for breaking into computer systems and copyright violations all the time.
Under a new proposal, cyberattacks are supposed to get a minimum of 2 years in prison in the entire EU (Google Translate).
At least in the US people complain about it and it's news. Here in Germany, most people don't give a damn and the "public" media and media conglomerates don't even report it much.
Change your name and you'll be instantly forgotten. What people who say they want a "right to be forgotten" is a right to control specific information about the: hide the bad, keep the good. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
That's true, except when the "expert" is a futurist or a huckster.
That was the assumption in the 1970's and 1980's (expert systems), and mostly just because of technical limitations.
These days, most AI researchers are pretty convinced that learning, experimentation, and probably embodiment are an essential part of building a working AI system.
I don't get it: you agreed with me on pretty much every point: Germany is conservative and hence rejects cloning. The only thing that you could possibly take offense to is that German conservatism is rooted in Catholicism. If that's your belief and objection, frankly, you don't know anything about German politics.
Me too. You're obviously both uneducated and a lout.
Last time around, Dotcom also seems to have been legally safe, in theory. Yet, US prosecutors still managed to wreck his business. I'd be surprised if this technical detail would stop them.
Your Dunning-Kruger problem is that you apparently believe you can read and write English... how else could one explain such a complete non-sequitur?
Everybody who connects to the Internet already pays for their bandwidth to the ISP, effectively in proportion to what they use. If there is a lot of traffic coming from Google, then both Orange's customers pay for their individual usage, and Google pays wherever they hook up to the Internet. At some level, Orange has a peering arrangement, and if there are traffic imbalances, they negotiate with their partners, who then pass on the cost to Google and their customers. Trying to extort additional payments from specific large companies just because ISPs can should not be permitted. They're effectively saying "nice business you have built there, wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to it".
I suppose one shouldn't feel too unhappy about it. Although it is unfair and should be criminal, it sort of balances out the world a little by compensating for barriers to entry created by large companies (e.g., patent portfolios and cross licensing, etc.).
Germany is one of the countries that is most radically opposed to human cloning. Usually, the aversion is justified with "Germany's Nazi past", but it's really just the Catholic church and its hangups about reproduction. So: wrong country to be discussing this.
What "political reality"? Out of all the silly objections people have raised to FOSS, I have never heard that seriously used in parliament. You're creating an issue that simply hasn't existed before.
Except that JSTOR would hardly have been a good target for that; most of its content is obscure and old, and they are nowhere near done scanning. The net effect of his actions would have been giving "3rd world countries" a nearly useless and incomplete collection of papers and greatly complicate further scanning and publishing of old journals. The content that matters, recent science and engineering, as well as most classical literature, is already effectively available freely.
The real civil disobedience that has been happening since long before Swartz ever appeared on the scene. Tens of thousands of academics have been putting up their papers on their personal web sites for years, and Citeseer and Google Scholar picking up those papers. And most academic publishers have long since acquiesced to this (many of them officially), because they'd be committing suicide if they tried to raise a stink about it.
Of course, it's nice if one performs civil disobedience for a righteous cause, the cause is recognized as righteous, a groundswell of public opinion motivates legislators to change the law, and you aren't punished. But that is not a high probability event.
Realistically, you have to expect that if you break the law publicly, prosecutors will find you, charge you, and attempt to punish you to the maximum extent of the law. And you can't fault the legal system for doing its job either. A system in which prosecutors decline to prosecute out of their own personal political or social preferences is arbitrary and dangerous.
Check yourself if you don't believe me. Here's the median equivalized disposable household incomes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
Poverty is defined as 60% of the median income. 60% of US median income is about $19000. Middle class is the class from somewhat below to somewhat above the median. That would place the middle classes of Germany, Finland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey near or below the US poverty line.