Google did release all of Android Honycomb that was GPL'd. In particular the Kernel, and a few other userland tools. However, everything that makes Andrioid Android, and not just another linux distro is licensed under the Apache license which allows for proprietary modifications. This includes the Dalvik VM, the Harmony Java libraries, and the Android APIs. Google was perfectly with the law to not release this code, not to mention the fact that they wrote half of it themselves.
This has already been discussed ad'nausem on Slashdot, so there is no excuse for this misinformation to be moderated up. I swear only idiots that hardly read the site get moderation points anymore.
I am not certain what happens if they don't put things back after receiving a counternotice. I would hope that this incurs the same liability.
In both situations what they gain by following the take-down notice and counter-notice is limitation from liability. In the first case it is limitation from liability for damages claimed by the copyright-holder, as you said. In the second case it is limitation from liability for damages claimed by the person who posted the content. Regardless of whether they act on the counter-notice or not they still have protection from copyright infringement liabilities.
For example, if I pay for hosting which has uptime guarantees, and my content is taken down, then I could argue that the host violated their contract and owes me money. The DMCA says that the host is protected from such claims provided that the takedown was performed in good faith based on a valid take-down notice, and that the restore the content when presented with a valid counter-notice.
However, if you are using a service like YouTube which you don't pay for and whose terms of service allow them to remove content at any time for any reason, then you have no grounds on which to claim damages to begin with. Therefore, YouTube really doesn't need protection from liabilities that never existed to begin with. Their choice to act on counter-notices or not is purely a business decision(it is a little more work, but creates good-will with their users if they do), not a legal one.
Oh, and one other point, back in the situation where you are paying for hosting and have a legitimate claim for damages. If the copyright holder notifies the host that they are planning to request an injunction on the posting of the material (just planning, they don't have to have one issued yet, or even have filed for one), then the host can ignore your counter-notice and will still not be liable for the damages caused to you.
In British English, the proper conjugation is to treat companies and other organizations as plural. A google search for the submitter, ardmhacha, gives results which are all related to Ireland. Thus he was writing correctly.
Sorry, everything I said is incorrect. The Fedora 17 was just a typo, I meant 16. More importantly I got my information from a post on another site, which turned out to be false. I'm sorry that this got moderated up, while the corrections did not.
Yes, and more importantly, the main story is that they are planning on building them all along I-5, this is just the first one. So people with other Teslas models will have to wait a few more months before they can get from SF to LA. OMG electric cars are a failure !!1!1!
Every post that slashdot has accepted from thecarchick driving traffic to thegreencarreport has been full of misinformation and FUD. You would think that slashdot might get tired of being played for fools but apparently not.
I've about had it with this site. I swear that this is the only reason I have had to visit slashdot the last several years. I should just admit that it is a harmful habit and leave.
They do have a machine for making plastics, and there is nothing wrong with using wood in a sustainable culture, if you do so at a replaceable rate.
And there is no plan for how to construct that construction kit in the first place.
There doesn't need to be. The goal isn't to bootstrap civilization after it has collapsed. It is to find the smallest set of machines needed to recreate themselves, and thus allow civilization at say 1930's level to be maintained in as small of economy as possible.
The mechanical issues with the problem you describe are resolved by a means of delegating your vote, and have been talked about ad nauseum in political science, but I can't seem to think of the correct term for it (kept falsely remembering single transferable vote), but that isn't the same thing.
The idea is that everyone has a single vote for all issues in legislature. But for the majority of subjects, you won't have the time, interest, or knowledge to directly participate so by default your vote is delegated to an elected representative. If you strongly disagree with them on some issue, but again don't have time to directly participate, you can instead delegate your votes on that entire issue to another representative. Finally, for issues in which you do have enough interest to participate directly, you can vote directly.
This way you still have representation all the time, and are thus not drown out by busybodies with nothing better to do, but you don't have to sit back and accept misrepresentation on your behalf.
Whether it would work or not is a whole other issue. For certain, pure democracy doesn't create freedom. Adequate checks and balances create freedom, and voting is just one of those checks and balances. You would still need a balanced government, but this form of representation may be more effective than existing forms.
No they aren't. They are providing a shortcut into their search, just like Firefox keywords, or the many !codes in duckduckgo, or even the I'm feeling luck search.
What does Silk buy you? Both the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire have only WiFi connectivity, not 3G, so it isn't compensating for low-speed connection. Both have dual core 1 GHz processors, and if you can't render a webpage quickly with that, then something is seriously wrong. The original Nook Color with a single core 800 MHz could handle browsing just fine, although flash was somewhat slow.
So the only thing you gain by delegating some processing to a third party is battery life, but the Nook Tablet already has a longer battery life estimate than the Kindle Fire anyway. So what's the advantage?
The summary is a troll (as is typical for slashdot). Gnome 2 is still included in Fedora 17. The only difference is that if you have selected Gnome 3 for your desktop (which is default), and GPU acceleration isn't working, it will now fallback to unaccelerated Gnome 3 rather than Gnome 2. Regardless of your opinion of Gnome 3, this just makes sense; it would be much more confusing to get a completely different desktop than you were expecting just because your video drivers got borked. Not to mention it is wasteful to have to install Gnome 2 as a fallback if you want to use Gnome 3.
Yeah, I don't get that either. When I was single I would've signed up for a one-way trip to Mars, or a year-long stay in Antartica, or whatever in a heartbeat. Now, I wouldn't even take a job with lots of travel unless she is okay with it. Why create strong emotional bonds with someone only to turn around and not see them for years?
But in a similarly thousands of military men keep popping out kids during "war time" knowing they will likely be redeployed shortly and won't see them for years, if ever. Why would you do that? Why would you put that kind of burden on your wife? Why intentionally create children if you aren't going be there to support them and enjoy them. I just don't get it.
This just demonstrates the one niche that 3D printing is good at. We have been using 3D printing for prototyping for years, and they work great for that. You get an object that is good enough for a one-off prototype without the expense of casting or milling. But they are worthless for producing anything that needs to last, or have any sort of structural strength.
"Haters" don't hate 3D printing for what it is good for, they hate the hype surrounding it saying it will revolutionize manufacturing and will quickly improve to the point where home users can make things as good as professional manufacturing can. That's just not going to happen.
Yeah, for those who want to do something similar, it is easy to setup mailhost software to redirect any mail with a certain prefix to a single account, for example traced.companyname@example.com, would all get sent to traced@example.com. You get the benefit of tracking where folks got your email from without having to have a catch-all account.
Also some free email providers are already setup to work this way. For example mail sent to myname+slashdot@gmail.com will go to myname@gmail.com. Some poorly written sites don't allow +'s in email addresses, though, so if you are configuring your own server, you may want to use period or underscore instead.
If we start reprocessing our fuel using techniques that the French have been using since the 70's then the majority of our waste will be recycled. If we further start using modern reprocessing systems (like breeder reactors), then the majority of the waste that is left will also be recycled.
Then for what is left, the Yucca Mountain storage plan is capable of safely storing nuclear waste for hundreds (if not thousands) of years with no maintenance. You add in a little bit of maintenance and we can safely store the waste indefinitely.
Compare that to coal where we have no practical means for collecting let alone storing all the pollution which they create. And whose pollution is causing much more immediate problems. And whose normal operation causes far more more deaths per MWh than nuclear. Building more coal plants is what is insane.
All genes have tons of variants, and these variants had to be introduced into the population at some time. Evolution doesn't need to for traits to be introduced due to environmental pressures in order to work; they are introduced at random by mutations. So whether the trait was introduced before or after the dumping of PCBs began really isn't that interesting as it is just a matter of chance, and doesn't prove anything about evolution. The interesting part is that it occurred at all.
These fish couldn't be selected for their immunity to PCBs if some of them hadn't already obtained the trait in some manner to begin with, and selection is an integral part of evolution. Thus arguing that this is "just" selection and not evolution is making a distinction without a difference.
In 2008 the FCC mandated an emergency alert system for cell phones, which would send a text message to everyone in the affected region. This is being rolled out now but isn't yet ready nation-wide.
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation, and describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of RamÃn Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.
I figured the only way I was going to be able to clear the backlog of good games available for the last generation was to skip this one:) The extended duration of this generation is throwing a wrench into that plan though, as I'm going to be out of games in the next year or so. But I don't really want to buy a current gen console only a year or two before the next gen comes out, so I'm hoping indie PC games will fill the gap.
Whenever I research this, I come back to the "galactic rotation problem" as the most solid evidence.
That isn't the most solid evidence. It was just the first evidence, and if it was the only evidence then Dark Matter would not be preferred over the idea of a modified gravitational theory. Since then there have been two major additional forms of evidence for dark matter. The first is gravitational lensing.
According to General Relativity, mass bends bends light that passes by it. We have measured this effect before with objects of known mass, and the predictions of GR are dead on. Astronomers have looked at how strongly light is bent when passing by large galaxies, and used this to compute the mass of the galaxy. The numbers they get are much greater than the mass of the visible material, and more importantly match up very closely with the estimates of dark matter mass obtained by looking at rotational curves.
The most outstanding evidence of this is from the Bullet Cluster. Here two galaxies had passed through each other, and you can see how the different types of matter were slowed down by different amounts depending on how likely they were to collide. The gas clouds were slowed the most, and the large structures (stars, etc) slowed down less. But if you look at the gravitational lensing, you see that there is a big chunk of non-visible mass that was not slowed down by the collision at all. This is exactly what you would expect to see if the galaxies contained non-baryonic dark matter, and can't be explained by modified gravity at all.
The second major evidence is the cosmic microwave background radiation. I don't pretend to understand this, and thus won't try to expound, except to note that the ratio of baryonic matter to non-baryonic matter found using the CMBR also agrees with the dark matter estimates found using galaxy rotation curves and gravitational lensing.
So we have three drastically different ways of indirectly measuring the same thing, and they all come up with the same result. That is pretty strong evidence in my book.
How long do we have to put up with the notion of "Dark Matter"?
My guess is quite a long time, because it is almost certainly correct. Hopefully though, we will have direct evidence of dark matter with the next few decades, which should make it less annoying:)
Permits are necessary for many things. The purpose of the park system is to preserve land for the enjoyment of people, however different people would like to enjoy it in ways that are not compatible. That doesn't mean that all these activities can't be supported, it just means that they can't all happen at the same place and/or time. People who want to enjoy peace and quiet in the forest will be disturbed by people riding ATVs, or a huge film crew. People who want to swim in a lake and those who want to fish in it will have to do so in different parts of the lake. People who want to fish/hunt will ruin things for others if too many of them are allowed to do so (or not enough if there is a lack of natural predators).
The entire premise of the park system is to restrict what people do with the land. Sometimes this can be handled with static rules, other times the restrictions only need to be temporal in nature; you can take you big film crew out there, but need let the park service know when/where in advance to let people know to avoid that area. You can hold a big event, but only in areas that will not be damaged by the additional impact, and when no-one else is using the area. In both cases, the organizer either needs to agree in advance to pay all fines incurred by the group, or pay a nominal fee since more policing of the area will be necessary. In situations where there is history of abuse, requiring a refundable security-deposit or insurance bond might be entirely appropriate.
In this case, it does sound like the park administrators are abusing permits intended for large crews by applying it to individuals, but that doesn't mean that permits are never needed.
Not quite. The law states that the service provider is not liable for copyright infringement if they were not aware of it, and respond to take-down notices. Furthermore, they are also not liable for any damages caused by a take-down performed in good faith, provided they respond to counter notices within 14 days.
However, if they are offering are a free service which make no guarantees about availability of your content, then they can take anything down at anytime, and you have no basis to claim damages. Thus they can ignore counter notices whenever they want, as they don't need immunity again non-existent liabilities.
Furthermore, the parent was on the right track about the lawsuit: 17 USC (g)(2)(C):
(2) Exception. - Paragraph (1) shall not apply with respect to material residing at the direction of a subscriber of the service provider on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider that is removed, or to which access is disabled by the service provider, pursuant to a notice provided under subsection (c)(1)(C), unless the service provider - (C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection(c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider's system or network.
So if the ISP receives notice that the accusing party is seeking an injunction (not exactly the same thing as filing a civil lawsuit, but they usually go together), then they can choose to ignore the counter notice, and will still not be liable for any damages, even if their contract with their customer would normally entitled the customer to damages.
I invent the hypothetical cold fusion device, and rather than making a massive profit off it, I decide to release it to the masses entirely for free, with a patent on the technology to protect it from being used by others from making some obscene profit off of the device. FRAND makes the value effectively $0.
If you chose to giving it away for free then you aren't making any money off it anyway, and no other company can either since they have to compete with you, so what exactly is the problem?
Let's play another game...let's say I take the plans for this cold fusion device to GMC and Ford. Ford offers me a million bucks to license the product to them. GMC offers me ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. Whats the fair-market valuation of this license?
You are correct, having a monopoly on an idea has more worth than being one of many licensees. Similarly having a monopoly on trade to Asia was far more lucrative than having to compete for those sales. Having a monopoly on telephone market was far more lucrative than having to compete for it. And yet when you allow competition, the total market is always larger than when it was controlled by a monopoly.
What GMC and Ford are offering isn't the value of the invention, it is the value of holding a monopoly on said invention, and if you really had an invention that big, you would be a fool to offer an exclusive patent to any company (other than one you own). You will make far more money by pitting them against each other to drive down costs and improve quality thus increasing the market size, while you reap the royalties from both.
In this exact example...such an invention, if it is even possible, would be worth trillions upon trillions of dollars. The inventor DESERVES to reap the insane rewards of such an invention.
No they don't. No one has a natural right to restrict the flow of ideas and hold back progress. Copyright and Patents exist for the sole purpose of promoting the useful arts and sciences, and any befit they provide to inventors is a means to an end not an end into itself. They should thus provide sufficient rewards, not insane ones.
FRAND benefits society, not the people wo make the contributions to society in developing new technologies.
No it benefits both, it just does so without introducing horrible market imbalances. You get to make your money, you don't get to create an empire.
Lets say, in the realms of pure hypothetical bullshitting, that tomorrow I come out with a working cold fusion reactor that costs $50 for any dumb schmuck to build, is entirely clean/green technology, and effectively costs nothing to operate. To put a number on it, let's say that I invested $1M to bring my idea to fruition. What the fuck, pray tell, is a "reasonable" licensing cost for this technology?
You do effectively. In the current system you would sit down and figure out how many of these things you think you can sell, and set the markup on them to allow you to recoup your investment costs, and make some profit. The amount of profit would be set according to what the market could bear in the lack of competition. Say you want a huge profit and decide at $10,000. Then you start building and selling the thing.
If later someone wants to license the patent, and you demand $1billion per item in royalties, then that is clearly not reasonable. You yourself have declared the "worth" of your patents as limited to the retail cost - production costs, otherwise you wouldn't be selling at that price. Given licensing set at your mark-up price, you will still make the same amount of money regardless of whether you are building the device or someone else is. Furthermore, if someone else can make it cheaper or better, allowing them to do so is a net gain to society, and you still get paid.
It is a bit more difficult when you aren't producing a product yet, but there are still reasonable bounds. Asking more per device than your entire sunk costs is clearly unreasonable. Asking enough to start making profit after say 1/10 of the predicted market has been sold isn't. If anyone disagrees with it, the onus is on them to prove it.
FRAND isn't about some philosophical determination of the true value of things. Pricing is largely set by patent holders in the context of market forces, just like real world items are today. It just can't be discriminatory.
The government does not decide the price under FRAND terms. Instead it is a well established (although inherently fuzzy) legal term that basically means that pricing cannot be anti-competitive. The patent holder determines the license price and terms according to those restrictions.
Things that violate FRAND principles: * refusing to license patents altogether. * requiring others to buy patents in bundles * charging some companies far more than others, all other things being equal. * demanding stricter terms requirements on some companies, all other things being equal. * placing demands in your license prohibiting the use of competitor technology * requiring steep discounts on reciprocal patent licensing in order to license your patents. * charging more for your patents than the cost of the devices which you produce using those patents
Things that are okay under FRAND: * Offering volume licensing discounts * Offering patent bundles under reasonable discounts * Requiring compliance to a reasonable standards or test suite
Of course, the courts are the final word on FRAND matters (just like fair use or any other inherently fuzzy legal term), but in the US, they usually give the patent holder a fair amount of latitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Google did release all of Android Honycomb that was GPL'd. In particular the Kernel, and a few other userland tools. However, everything that makes Andrioid Android, and not just another linux distro is licensed under the Apache license which allows for proprietary modifications. This includes the Dalvik VM, the Harmony Java libraries, and the Android APIs. Google was perfectly with the law to not release this code, not to mention the fact that they wrote half of it themselves.
This has already been discussed ad'nausem on Slashdot, so there is no excuse for this misinformation to be moderated up. I swear only idiots that hardly read the site get moderation points anymore.
I am not certain what happens if they don't put things back after receiving a counternotice. I would hope that this incurs the same liability.
In both situations what they gain by following the take-down notice and counter-notice is limitation from liability. In the first case it is limitation from liability for damages claimed by the copyright-holder, as you said. In the second case it is limitation from liability for damages claimed by the person who posted the content. Regardless of whether they act on the counter-notice or not they still have protection from copyright infringement liabilities.
For example, if I pay for hosting which has uptime guarantees, and my content is taken down, then I could argue that the host violated their contract and owes me money. The DMCA says that the host is protected from such claims provided that the takedown was performed in good faith based on a valid take-down notice, and that the restore the content when presented with a valid counter-notice.
However, if you are using a service like YouTube which you don't pay for and whose terms of service allow them to remove content at any time for any reason, then you have no grounds on which to claim damages to begin with. Therefore, YouTube really doesn't need protection from liabilities that never existed to begin with. Their choice to act on counter-notices or not is purely a business decision(it is a little more work, but creates good-will with their users if they do), not a legal one.
Oh, and one other point, back in the situation where you are paying for hosting and have a legitimate claim for damages. If the copyright holder notifies the host that they are planning to request an injunction on the posting of the material (just planning, they don't have to have one issued yet, or even have filed for one), then the host can ignore your counter-notice and will still not be liable for the damages caused to you.
In British English, the proper conjugation is to treat companies and other organizations as plural. A google search for the submitter, ardmhacha, gives results which are all related to Ireland. Thus he was writing correctly.
Sorry, everything I said is incorrect. The Fedora 17 was just a typo, I meant 16. More importantly I got my information from a post on another site, which turned out to be false. I'm sorry that this got moderated up, while the corrections did not.
Yes, and more importantly, the main story is that they are planning on building them all along I-5, this is just the first one. So people with other Teslas models will have to wait a few more months before they can get from SF to LA. OMG electric cars are a failure !!1!1!
Every post that slashdot has accepted from thecarchick driving traffic to thegreencarreport has been full of misinformation and FUD. You would think that slashdot might get tired of being played for fools but apparently not.
I've about had it with this site. I swear that this is the only reason I have had to visit slashdot the last several years. I should just admit that it is a harmful habit and leave.
No other metals/materials, no glass, no plastics,
They do have a machine for making plastics, and there is nothing wrong with using wood in a sustainable culture, if you do so at a replaceable rate.
And there is no plan for how to construct that construction kit in the first place.
There doesn't need to be. The goal isn't to bootstrap civilization after it has collapsed. It is to find the smallest set of machines needed to recreate themselves, and thus allow civilization at say 1930's level to be maintained in as small of economy as possible.
The mechanical issues with the problem you describe are resolved by a means of delegating your vote, and have been talked about ad nauseum in political science, but I can't seem to think of the correct term for it (kept falsely remembering single transferable vote), but that isn't the same thing.
The idea is that everyone has a single vote for all issues in legislature. But for the majority of subjects, you won't have the time, interest, or knowledge to directly participate so by default your vote is delegated to an elected representative. If you strongly disagree with them on some issue, but again don't have time to directly participate, you can instead delegate your votes on that entire issue to another representative. Finally, for issues in which you do have enough interest to participate directly, you can vote directly.
This way you still have representation all the time, and are thus not drown out by busybodies with nothing better to do, but you don't have to sit back and accept misrepresentation on your behalf.
Whether it would work or not is a whole other issue. For certain, pure democracy doesn't create freedom. Adequate checks and balances create freedom, and voting is just one of those checks and balances. You would still need a balanced government, but this form of representation may be more effective than existing forms.
The same thing you would have to do with tons of other CMS systems that use opaque numbers for users/articles rather than something more friendly.
No they aren't. They are providing a shortcut into their search, just like Firefox keywords, or the many !codes in duckduckgo, or even the I'm feeling luck search.
What does Silk buy you? Both the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire have only WiFi connectivity, not 3G, so it isn't compensating for low-speed connection. Both have dual core 1 GHz processors, and if you can't render a webpage quickly with that, then something is seriously wrong. The original Nook Color with a single core 800 MHz could handle browsing just fine, although flash was somewhat slow.
So the only thing you gain by delegating some processing to a third party is battery life, but the Nook Tablet already has a longer battery life estimate than the Kindle Fire anyway. So what's the advantage?
The summary is a troll (as is typical for slashdot). Gnome 2 is still included in Fedora 17. The only difference is that if you have selected Gnome 3 for your desktop (which is default), and GPU acceleration isn't working, it will now fallback to unaccelerated Gnome 3 rather than Gnome 2. Regardless of your opinion of Gnome 3, this just makes sense; it would be much more confusing to get a completely different desktop than you were expecting just because your video drivers got borked. Not to mention it is wasteful to have to install Gnome 2 as a fallback if you want to use Gnome 3.
Yeah, I don't get that either. When I was single I would've signed up for a one-way trip to Mars, or a year-long stay in Antartica, or whatever in a heartbeat. Now, I wouldn't even take a job with lots of travel unless she is okay with it. Why create strong emotional bonds with someone only to turn around and not see them for years?
But in a similarly thousands of military men keep popping out kids during "war time" knowing they will likely be redeployed shortly and won't see them for years, if ever. Why would you do that? Why would you put that kind of burden on your wife? Why intentionally create children if you aren't going be there to support them and enjoy them. I just don't get it.
This just demonstrates the one niche that 3D printing is good at. We have been using 3D printing for prototyping for years, and they work great for that. You get an object that is good enough for a one-off prototype without the expense of casting or milling. But they are worthless for producing anything that needs to last, or have any sort of structural strength.
"Haters" don't hate 3D printing for what it is good for, they hate the hype surrounding it saying it will revolutionize manufacturing and will quickly improve to the point where home users can make things as good as professional manufacturing can. That's just not going to happen.
Yeah, for those who want to do something similar, it is easy to setup mailhost software to redirect any mail with a certain prefix to a single account, for example traced.companyname@example.com, would all get sent to traced@example.com. You get the benefit of tracking where folks got your email from without having to have a catch-all account.
Also some free email providers are already setup to work this way. For example mail sent to myname+slashdot@gmail.com will go to myname@gmail.com. Some poorly written sites don't allow +'s in email addresses, though, so if you are configuring your own server, you may want to use period or underscore instead.
If we start reprocessing our fuel using techniques that the French have been using since the 70's then the majority of our waste will be recycled. If we further start using modern reprocessing systems (like breeder reactors), then the majority of the waste that is left will also be recycled.
Then for what is left, the Yucca Mountain storage plan is capable of safely storing nuclear waste for hundreds (if not thousands) of years with no maintenance. You add in a little bit of maintenance and we can safely store the waste indefinitely.
Compare that to coal where we have no practical means for collecting let alone storing all the pollution which they create. And whose pollution is causing much more immediate problems. And whose normal operation causes far more more deaths per MWh than nuclear. Building more coal plants is what is insane.
All genes have tons of variants, and these variants had to be introduced into the population at some time. Evolution doesn't need to for traits to be introduced due to environmental pressures in order to work; they are introduced at random by mutations. So whether the trait was introduced before or after the dumping of PCBs began really isn't that interesting as it is just a matter of chance, and doesn't prove anything about evolution. The interesting part is that it occurred at all.
These fish couldn't be selected for their immunity to PCBs if some of them hadn't already obtained the trait in some manner to begin with, and selection is an integral part of evolution. Thus arguing that this is "just" selection and not evolution is making a distinction without a difference.
In 2008 the FCC mandated an emergency alert system for cell phones, which would send a text message to everyone in the affected region. This is being rolled out now but isn't yet ready nation-wide.
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation, and describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of RamÃn Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.
I figured the only way I was going to be able to clear the backlog of good games available for the last generation was to skip this one :) The extended duration of this generation is throwing a wrench into that plan though, as I'm going to be out of games in the next year or so. But I don't really want to buy a current gen console only a year or two before the next gen comes out, so I'm hoping indie PC games will fill the gap.
Whenever I research this, I come back to the "galactic rotation problem" as the most solid evidence.
That isn't the most solid evidence. It was just the first evidence, and if it was the only evidence then Dark Matter would not be preferred over the idea of a modified gravitational theory. Since then there have been two major additional forms of evidence for dark matter. The first is gravitational lensing.
According to General Relativity, mass bends bends light that passes by it. We have measured this effect before with objects of known mass, and the predictions of GR are dead on. Astronomers have looked at how strongly light is bent when passing by large galaxies, and used this to compute the mass of the galaxy. The numbers they get are much greater than the mass of the visible material, and more importantly match up very closely with the estimates of dark matter mass obtained by looking at rotational curves.
The most outstanding evidence of this is from the Bullet Cluster. Here two galaxies had passed through each other, and you can see how the different types of matter were slowed down by different amounts depending on how likely they were to collide. The gas clouds were slowed the most, and the large structures (stars, etc) slowed down less. But if you look at the gravitational lensing, you see that there is a big chunk of non-visible mass that was not slowed down by the collision at all. This is exactly what you would expect to see if the galaxies contained non-baryonic dark matter, and can't be explained by modified gravity at all.
The second major evidence is the cosmic microwave background radiation. I don't pretend to understand this, and thus won't try to expound, except to note that the ratio of baryonic matter to non-baryonic matter found using the CMBR also agrees with the dark matter estimates found using galaxy rotation curves and gravitational lensing.
So we have three drastically different ways of indirectly measuring the same thing, and they all come up with the same result. That is pretty strong evidence in my book.
How long do we have to put up with the notion of "Dark Matter"?
My guess is quite a long time, because it is almost certainly correct. Hopefully though, we will have direct evidence of dark matter with the next few decades, which should make it less annoying :)
Permits are necessary for many things. The purpose of the park system is to preserve land for the enjoyment of people, however different people would like to enjoy it in ways that are not compatible. That doesn't mean that all these activities can't be supported, it just means that they can't all happen at the same place and/or time. People who want to enjoy peace and quiet in the forest will be disturbed by people riding ATVs, or a huge film crew. People who want to swim in a lake and those who want to fish in it will have to do so in different parts of the lake. People who want to fish/hunt will ruin things for others if too many of them are allowed to do so (or not enough if there is a lack of natural predators).
The entire premise of the park system is to restrict what people do with the land. Sometimes this can be handled with static rules, other times the restrictions only need to be temporal in nature; you can take you big film crew out there, but need let the park service know when/where in advance to let people know to avoid that area. You can hold a big event, but only in areas that will not be damaged by the additional impact, and when no-one else is using the area. In both cases, the organizer either needs to agree in advance to pay all fines incurred by the group, or pay a nominal fee since more policing of the area will be necessary. In situations where there is history of abuse, requiring a refundable security-deposit or insurance bond might be entirely appropriate.
In this case, it does sound like the park administrators are abusing permits intended for large crews by applying it to individuals, but that doesn't mean that permits are never needed.
Not quite. The law states that the service provider is not liable for copyright infringement if they were not aware of it, and respond to take-down notices. Furthermore, they are also not liable for any damages caused by a take-down performed in good faith, provided they respond to counter notices within 14 days.
However, if they are offering are a free service which make no guarantees about availability of your content, then they can take anything down at anytime, and you have no basis to claim damages. Thus they can ignore counter notices whenever they want, as they don't need immunity again non-existent liabilities.
Furthermore, the parent was on the right track about the lawsuit: 17 USC (g)(2)(C):
(2) Exception. - Paragraph (1) shall not apply with respect to material residing at the direction of a subscriber of the service provider on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider that is removed, or to which access is disabled by the service provider, pursuant to a notice provided under subsection (c)(1)(C), unless the service provider -
(C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection(c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider's system or network.
So if the ISP receives notice that the accusing party is seeking an injunction (not exactly the same thing as filing a civil lawsuit, but they usually go together), then they can choose to ignore the counter notice, and will still not be liable for any damages, even if their contract with their customer would normally entitled the customer to damages.
I invent the hypothetical cold fusion device, and rather than making a massive profit off it, I decide to release it to the masses entirely for free, with a patent on the technology to protect it from being used by others from making some obscene profit off of the device. FRAND makes the value effectively $0.
If you chose to giving it away for free then you aren't making any money off it anyway, and no other company can either since they have to compete with you, so what exactly is the problem?
Let's play another game...let's say I take the plans for this cold fusion device to GMC and Ford. Ford offers me a million bucks to license the product to them. GMC offers me ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. Whats the fair-market valuation of this license?
You are correct, having a monopoly on an idea has more worth than being one of many licensees. Similarly having a monopoly on trade to Asia was far more lucrative than having to compete for those sales. Having a monopoly on telephone market was far more lucrative than having to compete for it. And yet when you allow competition, the total market is always larger than when it was controlled by a monopoly.
What GMC and Ford are offering isn't the value of the invention, it is the value of holding a monopoly on said invention, and if you really had an invention that big, you would be a fool to offer an exclusive patent to any company (other than one you own). You will make far more money by pitting them against each other to drive down costs and improve quality thus increasing the market size, while you reap the royalties from both.
In this exact example...such an invention, if it is even possible, would be worth trillions upon trillions of dollars. The inventor DESERVES to reap the insane rewards of such an invention.
No they don't. No one has a natural right to restrict the flow of ideas and hold back progress. Copyright and Patents exist for the sole purpose of promoting the useful arts and sciences, and any befit they provide to inventors is a means to an end not an end into itself. They should thus provide sufficient rewards, not insane ones.
FRAND benefits society, not the people wo make the contributions to society in developing new technologies.
No it benefits both, it just does so without introducing horrible market imbalances. You get to make your money, you don't get to create an empire.
Lets say, in the realms of pure hypothetical bullshitting, that tomorrow I come out with a working cold fusion reactor that costs $50 for any dumb schmuck to build, is entirely clean/green technology, and effectively costs nothing to operate. To put a number on it, let's say that I invested $1M to bring my idea to fruition. What the fuck, pray tell, is a "reasonable" licensing cost for this technology?
You do effectively. In the current system you would sit down and figure out how many of these things you think you can sell, and set the markup on them to allow you to recoup your investment costs, and make some profit. The amount of profit would be set according to what the market could bear in the lack of competition. Say you want a huge profit and decide at $10,000. Then you start building and selling the thing.
If later someone wants to license the patent, and you demand $1billion per item in royalties, then that is clearly not reasonable. You yourself have declared the "worth" of your patents as limited to the retail cost - production costs, otherwise you wouldn't be selling at that price. Given licensing set at your mark-up price, you will still make the same amount of money regardless of whether you are building the device or someone else is. Furthermore, if someone else can make it cheaper or better, allowing them to do so is a net gain to society, and you still get paid.
It is a bit more difficult when you aren't producing a product yet, but there are still reasonable bounds. Asking more per device than your entire sunk costs is clearly unreasonable. Asking enough to start making profit after say 1/10 of the predicted market has been sold isn't. If anyone disagrees with it, the onus is on them to prove it.
FRAND isn't about some philosophical determination of the true value of things. Pricing is largely set by patent holders in the context of market forces, just like real world items are today. It just can't be discriminatory.
The government does not decide the price under FRAND terms. Instead it is a well established (although inherently fuzzy) legal term that basically means that pricing cannot be anti-competitive. The patent holder determines the license price and terms according to those restrictions.
Things that violate FRAND principles:
* refusing to license patents altogether.
* requiring others to buy patents in bundles
* charging some companies far more than others, all other things being equal.
* demanding stricter terms requirements on some companies, all other things being equal.
* placing demands in your license prohibiting the use of competitor technology
* requiring steep discounts on reciprocal patent licensing in order to license your patents.
* charging more for your patents than the cost of the devices which you produce using those patents
Things that are okay under FRAND:
* Offering volume licensing discounts
* Offering patent bundles under reasonable discounts
* Requiring compliance to a reasonable standards or test suite
Of course, the courts are the final word on FRAND matters (just like fair use or any other inherently fuzzy legal term), but in the US, they usually give the patent holder a fair amount of latitude.