Not very likely, since copyright on logos and trademarks would also expire, for example the Windows or Apple logo. Imagine that everyone would be able to create a 100% clone of any given product after 5 years! They should create categories instead. 10 years seems to be so much more reasonable.
Trademarks can expire very rapidly; they only protect while the mark is being actively used and defended. They're also always non-functional in all respects other than to identify the company doing the selling or product being sold. Because they're always non-functional, they're not a problem unless you're insisting on confusing consumers (generally a scummy thing to do!)
Other forms of IP have problems though: with patents the problem has been that far too many obvious things have been patented and it's gumming everything up, and with copyrights the problem is the validity span is ridiculous. Normalizing copyright terms down to the same length as for patents would help a lot (yes, some people who have been living off work from long ago for a long time would get screwed, but they're really outliers) and so also would raising the bar for what is patentable to the equivalent for what it is with physical items. The law shouldn't protect rent-seeking idleness or patent-trolling.
Americans especially need to accept the fact that the less you eat the longer you live... except that you must eat the right things, the right nutrients that does a body good.
And you've still got to be lucky as well as good. There are many things that can kill you even if you don't overeat (e.g., hungry alligators!) and there are plenty of diseases that don't normally kill but do make your life truly miserable. (Osteoarthritis is a classic example, both common and awkward to treat.)
Agreed. It also assumes that latency is faster than a typical satellite Internet connection.
So why are you considering it at all? Or is it something that's being sold to someone else? After all, why would every product or service be suitable for everyone...
Oh, yes, I see... the prevailing scientific "consensus" should be the only thing that is allowed in a discussion of public policy. Is that your contention? Think carefully about your answer - that has been tried in the past.
Sigh.
It's not easy to overturn a consensus. It never was, nor would it be reasonable to expect it to be so in the future. The best way tends to be to assemble evidence that the consensus is demonstrably wrong and that your proposed alternative is less wrong. Scientists are usually (but not universally) happy to change their minds about things if you provide good evidence. The trick is that you really do need to provide good evidence.
What are you up against? Well, the basic physics of CO2, CH4 and H2O vapor in the atmosphere has been pretty well established for over a century; the higher the levels of those gases, the more the atmosphere retains the sun's heat. I wouldn't recommend attacking that, as you can check it pretty easily. It's also the case that levels of CO2 have been measured as increasing at multiple geographically distributed sites pointing in the other direction; something is increasing it (and hence increasing the amount of energy retained, which in turn increases the temperature somewhere). The real questions are what are the consequences and what are the causes?
The consequences are difficult to predict, as the atmosphere and oceans are a furiously complex non-linear system, but increased average global storminess is at least likely, and more worryingly, shifts in where the local climate zones for the most productive crop-lands are located is a distinct possibility (which could be really bad; history says that that sort of thing triggers huge wars). Nobody knows where the trigger levels for such changes are, but given what's at stake you can understand people being rather worried.
On the causes side, it doesn't look like it is volcanoes that are spewing all that CO2 out (vulcanologists keep fairly close tabs on that sort of thing) so the big candidates are discharging clathrates, melting permafrost, or human activity (there's a lot of people burning fossil fuels). We hope it's not the clathrates, because there's precisely nothing we can do about those. There does seem to be quite a bit of gas emission from permafrost, but that's probably a feedback triggered by something else. The simplest reasonable option for the rise in levels of atmospheric CO2 is due to human activity, as we know for sure that there's been a lot of that. (I've heard it argued that global temperature rises could be due to changes in solar activity, but the argument runs into the problem that temperatures have been rising through a whole solar cycle; if that was a major cause/trigger, you'd expect temperate patterns to correlate with solar activity patterns much more strongly.)
In short, if you want to argue against the AGW hypothesis, feel free but realize that there's a great deal of unrelated lines of evidence that point to it being highly believable; the bar to disproving it is set very high.
Which brings us to the other question: why are you so keen on trying to disprove something with so much evidence in its favor? That's a genuinely difficult task you've picked for yourself there. Is it because you like to challenge every consensus? Or that you don't like the moral consequences of AGW if is true? Or is it just because someone you trust (or who is paying you) told you to think that? Only the second of those gets any respect from me (the first would just mark you out as a social leper, and the third would make you a patsy or shill) and then only minimally much: it's morally consistent but still would make you an asshole.
Before you go jumping up and down in indignation, remember this: the majority of climate scientists would very much like for this problem to go away. They're worried about possible outcomes, some of which are quite dire (historical and archeological evidence says that climate change is not good for civilization) and changes to the nature of the economy now are favored tools because they're believed to be the cheapest way of avoiding the worst.
Apple will argue that since it's a UK company, they should be using.co.uk and not.com. Apple's billions of dollars... err... "Justice Points" will surely help in any legal battle.
Wouldn't help against what is still a large company that's been openly and "notoriously" using the brand; it's their stock-ticker symbol for goodness' sake. It would take a phenomenal amount of money to move them, the courts wouldn't help move a large company out of the way for a new product with no brand penetration, and you can bet that ITV would demand that as cash, which would have Apple's shareholders in a fury. ("You're blowing how much on a domain name???")
The impression I've found from working in open source over the years is that the GPL (especially as interpreted by the FSF) is all about the letter of the license, and not the spirit. Since I won't drink that particular Kool Aid, I avoid the GPL. I don't develop for code-bases that use it; if there's a bug that affects me, I just shrug and try to find some other solution. (The LGPL is OK, but I won't actively select it for my own projects.)
But what libraries do they share? What configurations? If the Reader DLL plugs into both, an install is going to need a reboot (because of how Windows locks loaded libraries).
Being an American corporation, aren't Oracle legally bound to making as much money as possible? Such a company cannot go to court unless it is deemed profitable to do so; the CEO could be in real trouble otherwise.
That's an oversimplification of the fiduciary responsibility rules. While yes, a company (and its board) should seek to generate plenty of profits, it doesn't have to use a monotonically-increasing measure; it can use something that will take some time to pay off and it can take risks (indeed, handling complex risks is pretty much the whole point of having companies at all). What's more, it's really hard to bring a court case just on the basis that the board made a mistake; the main recourse that shareholders have is really just to elect a new board.
Where fiduciary responsibility really kicks in is when there is a clear financial responsibility and the option to act directly against it. The classic example is where the company (or some part of it) has been put up for sale; at that point, the board has to advertise properly and take the best offer available. FR means that the chairman can't just sell at a knock-down price to a golfing buddy. FR means that the board has to act in the interests of the owners, not against them, but it doesn't mean that the board is forced to always act in a formally-predictable way.
Of course, some on Wall Street would like FR to mean that the company should always seek to increase the value of its stock over any measured time period — after all, that would make it so much easier for the traders to make their targets and get their fat bonuses made fatter — but that really just shows how dysfunctional Wall St really is...
anything even remotely serious will have zero-based arrays; java falls under the 'serious' category
That's very much not true (the classic counterexample being Fortran, which is definitely a serious language) but Java nonetheless has zero-based indexes.
You Americans should take some tips from the French, minus the beheading and all that.
Don't be too quick to discard beheading as a method of dealing with the members of the elite, though there are other highly effective methods as well. (The real down-side of such actions is that there's a real chance of ending up with something like the Reign of Terror.)
And we can't magically undo the post-WWII population bulge at all.
Yes we can! Just form death squads to go around and kill off all those surplus grandparents. Problem solved! As a bonus, you'd be making plenty of work for people in the funerary business too.
(Not that I'd want to live anywhere that did that, of course, but it is a simple-to-solve issue from a technical perspective.)
If they found a machine had a dodgy resistor and was over-irradiating people, I suspect this discovery would be classified secret for 'national security' reasons. You'd never hear about it. Maybe it already happened.
They'd also be desperate to keep it secret from their own goons, since they'd be the ones getting most exposure. (Yes, they're further from the machine than when you're standing inside it, but they're near it for much longer than passengers are, day after day.)
Is it illegal to talk about [using lethal force], learn about it or have a political opinion about this law ?
No, but it's illegal to incite other people to kill. Yes, there's a complex boundary here, but there's no reason that any country has to let a foreign citizen come in and incite law-breaking. (Was that what he was planning to do? I dunno...)
While I am all for this type of legislature, I have to ask myself, on what authority do the FEDS have to make this law? I'm not sure how I see this falling into the interstate commerce clause? I mean, a person works in his state....money paid to him in a state in which he is responsible for state taxes, etc.
And the server is in another state.
The law isn't about regulating the server (a third party) but rather the employer and employee, who are most certainly in the same state for the purposes of the law.
Your employer has no business seeing who your friends are, who your banks are, what your account balances are, which cable package you subscribe, to, what book you ordered from Barnes and Noble or Amazon, what your viewing history is on Youtube and Netflix, etc.
Your employer usually wants to know what one of your bank accounts is so that they can pay you. (They might not be very keen on this part, but all but the most rabid scum recognize that failing to pay is a good way to encourage employees to seek employment elsewhere and bring lawsuits.)
But the core problem in this case really boils down to one woman and her arbitrary and inconsistent management of the borders.
Aided and abetted (and forced) by the insistence by the Treasury that every single part of the government, every last agency, save as much money as humanly possible and then some...
Ugh. Why people think this is somehow better than collapse interpretations I'll never know. I have a very hard time accepting that my coffee mug, while just sitting on my desk, is (as many worlds interpretations insist) spawning zillions of universes near continuously is positively ridiculous.
I think it might be easier to just have a single quantum reality. That coffee mug is a quantum object, though we only know its quantum state very roughly, so roughly that it looks like a classically-described object. There is no decoherence, no picking of universes. There are just quantum interactions: in the case of a "decoherence event", you've just got a quantum interaction between one relatively-well determined quantum entity (the experiment) and a much larger undetermined quantum entity (the rest of the universe).
Of course, this does mean that reality is not at all what we thought it was...
I've never understood how some people can be so dogmatically sure about the existence of an objective reality.
There's no need to have an objective reality, but having one makes so many other things much easier (like why would I even bother discussing this with you if you don't really exist?) Think of it like a (very useful!) working hypothesis.
The way it is talking about the TSA might tend to give that impression.
Last I checked, the TSA was required to allow people to opt out of the full-body scanners, period. She shouldn't have even needed to produce documentation about the medical implant. The only places I'm aware of where you can't opt out except with medical documentation are the UK and Australia (who somehow manage to out-fascist even the 'States).
I don't know about Australia, but they're only deployed at a small number of airports in the UK. The security fascists run into problems here because the machines are expensive and slow (by comparison with a traditional magnetic detector) and there isn't anything like the same security-industrial complex here to push things through against very tight budget constraints.
All these Randians will expect the US Government to rescue them when their ship goes tits up. Perhaps the best answer is for the US Coastguard to quote them to provide emergency services - 35% of turnover?
The usual procedure is to rescue the people off it, and let the boat sink into the deep ocean. If it's not US registered or in US territorial waters, why would the coastguard have any obligation to do more than that?
Author is missing the elephant in the room. He's thinking Facebook exists to serve its users at all. It doesn't. The users aren't the customers, they're the product. Facebook treats its users like a meat plant treats its cattle: Just well enough that they make a good product.
FB's users aren't even the product. They're the raw material, the ingredients to be ground up and mashed together into product. The product is the pattern of links between things.
If humans will last for 10 million years, it's highly improbable that you and I would happen to be in the first ~0.05% of human history, with significantly lower odds if our population explodes with colonies on other planets during that time.
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that you're a representative sample with no selection bias. Moreover, if that's our destiny then there's still got to be someone who lives before that time; why not us?
Of course, neither is it at all conclusive.
I admire your talent for understatement. It's not just an inconclusive argument, it's specious BS.
There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens.
What we actually know is very simple: it's a very big universe so it would be downright spooky if there's no other intelligent life out there at all though they could be a long way away, and nobody appears to be trying to talk to us in a way that we can detect with current technology. That leaves a lot of room for speculation, some of which is more informed than other parts (e.g., we might be starting to get close to an approximate count on the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy; I'd guess that will be nailed down fairly well within the next few decades).
Of course, if there really is no other intelligent life anywhere in the universe, then we're living inside a stageshow put on for the benefit of Earth. I've read a number of sci-fi stories where this was a premise, and they were usually deeply paranoid...
Slashdot Mirror
Not very likely, since copyright on logos and trademarks would also expire, for example the Windows or Apple logo. Imagine that everyone would be able to create a 100% clone of any given product after 5 years! They should create categories instead. 10 years seems to be so much more reasonable.
Trademarks can expire very rapidly; they only protect while the mark is being actively used and defended. They're also always non-functional in all respects other than to identify the company doing the selling or product being sold. Because they're always non-functional, they're not a problem unless you're insisting on confusing consumers (generally a scummy thing to do!)
Other forms of IP have problems though: with patents the problem has been that far too many obvious things have been patented and it's gumming everything up, and with copyrights the problem is the validity span is ridiculous. Normalizing copyright terms down to the same length as for patents would help a lot (yes, some people who have been living off work from long ago for a long time would get screwed, but they're really outliers) and so also would raising the bar for what is patentable to the equivalent for what it is with physical items. The law shouldn't protect rent-seeking idleness or patent-trolling.
Americans especially need to accept the fact that the less you eat the longer you live... except that you must eat the right things, the right nutrients that does a body good.
And you've still got to be lucky as well as good. There are many things that can kill you even if you don't overeat (e.g., hungry alligators!) and there are plenty of diseases that don't normally kill but do make your life truly miserable. (Osteoarthritis is a classic example, both common and awkward to treat.)
Cloud assumes bandwidth is free
Agreed. It also assumes that latency is faster than a typical satellite Internet connection.
So why are you considering it at all? Or is it something that's being sold to someone else? After all, why would every product or service be suitable for everyone...
Oh, yes, I see... the prevailing scientific "consensus" should be the only thing that is allowed in a discussion of public policy. Is that your contention? Think carefully about your answer - that has been tried in the past.
Sigh.
It's not easy to overturn a consensus. It never was, nor would it be reasonable to expect it to be so in the future. The best way tends to be to assemble evidence that the consensus is demonstrably wrong and that your proposed alternative is less wrong. Scientists are usually (but not universally) happy to change their minds about things if you provide good evidence. The trick is that you really do need to provide good evidence.
What are you up against? Well, the basic physics of CO2, CH4 and H2O vapor in the atmosphere has been pretty well established for over a century; the higher the levels of those gases, the more the atmosphere retains the sun's heat. I wouldn't recommend attacking that, as you can check it pretty easily. It's also the case that levels of CO2 have been measured as increasing at multiple geographically distributed sites pointing in the other direction; something is increasing it (and hence increasing the amount of energy retained, which in turn increases the temperature somewhere). The real questions are what are the consequences and what are the causes?
The consequences are difficult to predict, as the atmosphere and oceans are a furiously complex non-linear system, but increased average global storminess is at least likely, and more worryingly, shifts in where the local climate zones for the most productive crop-lands are located is a distinct possibility (which could be really bad; history says that that sort of thing triggers huge wars). Nobody knows where the trigger levels for such changes are, but given what's at stake you can understand people being rather worried.
On the causes side, it doesn't look like it is volcanoes that are spewing all that CO2 out (vulcanologists keep fairly close tabs on that sort of thing) so the big candidates are discharging clathrates, melting permafrost, or human activity (there's a lot of people burning fossil fuels). We hope it's not the clathrates, because there's precisely nothing we can do about those. There does seem to be quite a bit of gas emission from permafrost, but that's probably a feedback triggered by something else. The simplest reasonable option for the rise in levels of atmospheric CO2 is due to human activity, as we know for sure that there's been a lot of that. (I've heard it argued that global temperature rises could be due to changes in solar activity, but the argument runs into the problem that temperatures have been rising through a whole solar cycle; if that was a major cause/trigger, you'd expect temperate patterns to correlate with solar activity patterns much more strongly.)
In short, if you want to argue against the AGW hypothesis, feel free but realize that there's a great deal of unrelated lines of evidence that point to it being highly believable; the bar to disproving it is set very high.
Which brings us to the other question: why are you so keen on trying to disprove something with so much evidence in its favor? That's a genuinely difficult task you've picked for yourself there. Is it because you like to challenge every consensus? Or that you don't like the moral consequences of AGW if is true? Or is it just because someone you trust (or who is paying you) told you to think that? Only the second of those gets any respect from me (the first would just mark you out as a social leper, and the third would make you a patsy or shill) and then only minimally much: it's morally consistent but still would make you an asshole.
Before you go jumping up and down in indignation, remember this: the majority of climate scientists would very much like for this problem to go away. They're worried about possible outcomes, some of which are quite dire (historical and archeological evidence says that climate change is not good for civilization) and changes to the nature of the economy now are favored tools because they're believed to be the cheapest way of avoiding the worst.
Apple will argue that since it's a UK company, they should be using .co.uk and not .com. Apple's billions of dollars... err... "Justice Points" will surely help in any legal battle.
Wouldn't help against what is still a large company that's been openly and "notoriously" using the brand; it's their stock-ticker symbol for goodness' sake. It would take a phenomenal amount of money to move them, the courts wouldn't help move a large company out of the way for a new product with no brand penetration, and you can bet that ITV would demand that as cash, which would have Apple's shareholders in a fury. ("You're blowing how much on a domain name???")
No, but it does seem to go against the spirit.
The impression I've found from working in open source over the years is that the GPL (especially as interpreted by the FSF) is all about the letter of the license, and not the spirit. Since I won't drink that particular Kool Aid, I avoid the GPL. I don't develop for code-bases that use it; if there's a bug that affects me, I just shrug and try to find some other solution. (The LGPL is OK, but I won't actively select it for my own projects.)
Why not Jennifer Anniston?
Remember, the hole is for corrupt politicians. Wouldn't want to have to leave one of those out in order to put in a minor actress.
But what libraries do they share? What configurations? If the Reader DLL plugs into both, an install is going to need a reboot (because of how Windows locks loaded libraries).
Being an American corporation, aren't Oracle legally bound to making as much money as possible? Such a company cannot go to court unless it is deemed profitable to do so; the CEO could be in real trouble otherwise.
That's an oversimplification of the fiduciary responsibility rules. While yes, a company (and its board) should seek to generate plenty of profits, it doesn't have to use a monotonically-increasing measure; it can use something that will take some time to pay off and it can take risks (indeed, handling complex risks is pretty much the whole point of having companies at all). What's more, it's really hard to bring a court case just on the basis that the board made a mistake; the main recourse that shareholders have is really just to elect a new board.
Where fiduciary responsibility really kicks in is when there is a clear financial responsibility and the option to act directly against it. The classic example is where the company (or some part of it) has been put up for sale; at that point, the board has to advertise properly and take the best offer available. FR means that the chairman can't just sell at a knock-down price to a golfing buddy. FR means that the board has to act in the interests of the owners, not against them, but it doesn't mean that the board is forced to always act in a formally-predictable way.
Of course, some on Wall Street would like FR to mean that the company should always seek to increase the value of its stock over any measured time period — after all, that would make it so much easier for the traders to make their targets and get their fat bonuses made fatter — but that really just shows how dysfunctional Wall St really is...
anything even remotely serious will have zero-based arrays; java falls under the 'serious' category
That's very much not true (the classic counterexample being Fortran, which is definitely a serious language) but Java nonetheless has zero-based indexes.
You Americans should take some tips from the French, minus the beheading and all that.
Don't be too quick to discard beheading as a method of dealing with the members of the elite, though there are other highly effective methods as well. (The real down-side of such actions is that there's a real chance of ending up with something like the Reign of Terror.)
And we can't magically undo the post-WWII population bulge at all.
Yes we can! Just form death squads to go around and kill off all those surplus grandparents. Problem solved! As a bonus, you'd be making plenty of work for people in the funerary business too.
(Not that I'd want to live anywhere that did that, of course, but it is a simple-to-solve issue from a technical perspective.)
If they found a machine had a dodgy resistor and was over-irradiating people, I suspect this discovery would be classified secret for 'national security' reasons. You'd never hear about it. Maybe it already happened.
They'd also be desperate to keep it secret from their own goons, since they'd be the ones getting most exposure. (Yes, they're further from the machine than when you're standing inside it, but they're near it for much longer than passengers are, day after day.)
Is it illegal to talk about [using lethal force], learn about it or have a political opinion about this law ?
No, but it's illegal to incite other people to kill. Yes, there's a complex boundary here, but there's no reason that any country has to let a foreign citizen come in and incite law-breaking. (Was that what he was planning to do? I dunno...)
While I am all for this type of legislature, I have to ask myself, on what authority do the FEDS have to make this law? I'm not sure how I see this falling into the interstate commerce clause? I mean, a person works in his state....money paid to him in a state in which he is responsible for state taxes, etc.
And the server is in another state.
The law isn't about regulating the server (a third party) but rather the employer and employee, who are most certainly in the same state for the purposes of the law.
Your employer has no business seeing who your friends are, who your banks are,
what your account balances are, which cable package you subscribe, to,
what book you ordered from Barnes and Noble or Amazon,
what your viewing history is on Youtube and Netflix, etc.
Your employer usually wants to know what one of your bank accounts is so that they can pay you. (They might not be very keen on this part, but all but the most rabid scum recognize that failing to pay is a good way to encourage employees to seek employment elsewhere and bring lawsuits.)
But the core problem in this case really boils down to one woman and her arbitrary and inconsistent management of the borders.
Aided and abetted (and forced) by the insistence by the Treasury that every single part of the government, every last agency, save as much money as humanly possible and then some...
The question is, which universe do you inhabit?
Ugh. Why people think this is somehow better than collapse interpretations I'll never know. I have a very hard time accepting that my coffee mug, while just sitting on my desk, is (as many worlds interpretations insist) spawning zillions of universes near continuously is positively ridiculous.
I think it might be easier to just have a single quantum reality. That coffee mug is a quantum object, though we only know its quantum state very roughly, so roughly that it looks like a classically-described object. There is no decoherence, no picking of universes. There are just quantum interactions: in the case of a "decoherence event", you've just got a quantum interaction between one relatively-well determined quantum entity (the experiment) and a much larger undetermined quantum entity (the rest of the universe).
Of course, this does mean that reality is not at all what we thought it was...
I've never understood how some people can be so dogmatically sure about the existence of an objective reality.
There's no need to have an objective reality, but having one makes so many other things much easier (like why would I even bother discussing this with you if you don't really exist?) Think of it like a (very useful!) working hypothesis.
Was this in the United States?
The way it is talking about the TSA might tend to give that impression.
Last I checked, the TSA was required to allow people to opt out of the full-body scanners, period. She shouldn't have even needed to produce documentation about the medical implant. The only places I'm aware of where you can't opt out except with medical documentation are the UK and Australia (who somehow manage to out-fascist even the 'States).
I don't know about Australia, but they're only deployed at a small number of airports in the UK. The security fascists run into problems here because the machines are expensive and slow (by comparison with a traditional magnetic detector) and there isn't anything like the same security-industrial complex here to push things through against very tight budget constraints.
Puny MPAA!
All these Randians will expect the US Government to rescue them when their ship goes tits up. Perhaps the best answer is for the US Coastguard to quote them to provide emergency services - 35% of turnover?
The usual procedure is to rescue the people off it, and let the boat sink into the deep ocean. If it's not US registered or in US territorial waters, why would the coastguard have any obligation to do more than that?
Author is missing the elephant in the room. He's thinking Facebook exists to serve its users at all. It doesn't. The users aren't the customers, they're the product. Facebook treats its users like a meat plant treats its cattle: Just well enough that they make a good product.
FB's users aren't even the product. They're the raw material, the ingredients to be ground up and mashed together into product. The product is the pattern of links between things.
Why would anyone think that sea aliens would do such a thing, when there are Selkies about?
If humans will last for 10 million years, it's highly improbable that you and I would happen to be in the first ~0.05% of human history, with significantly lower odds if our population explodes with colonies on other planets during that time.
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that you're a representative sample with no selection bias. Moreover, if that's our destiny then there's still got to be someone who lives before that time; why not us?
Of course, neither is it at all conclusive.
I admire your talent for understatement. It's not just an inconclusive argument, it's specious BS.
There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens.
What we actually know is very simple: it's a very big universe so it would be downright spooky if there's no other intelligent life out there at all though they could be a long way away, and nobody appears to be trying to talk to us in a way that we can detect with current technology. That leaves a lot of room for speculation, some of which is more informed than other parts (e.g., we might be starting to get close to an approximate count on the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy; I'd guess that will be nailed down fairly well within the next few decades).
Of course, if there really is no other intelligent life anywhere in the universe, then we're living inside a stageshow put on for the benefit of Earth. I've read a number of sci-fi stories where this was a premise, and they were usually deeply paranoid...