So if I claim it is my theory that you are a dimwit that would be better off if I had power of attorney for you, and you claimed otherwise would it be wrong to striking one down over the other? Regardless of what evidence you might have that you are capable of running your own life?
Hmm.. I see possibilities here.
I will consider creationism a valid scientific theory when somebody presents a version of it that is written in clear, unambiguous language coupled with predictions that can be logically inferred from the language that can be checked, and will fail if the theory is incorrect. Anything short of that, and creationism is pure conjecture with no scientific value whatsoever and giving it any sort of attention as part of science education would be just as wrong as presenting the existence of Santa Claus as a valid theory worthy of consideration.
The First Amendment has nothing to do with this. Nobody is prohibiting the free exercise of religion with this ruling, merely making them do so outside school.
The problem with this sticker is that it applies only to evolution, not to any of the thousands of other theories people are presented with at school. So it implicitly treats evolution as if it is not as accepted by the scientific community as the rest of them, thereby implying that religious claims about creationism and intelligent designs may have more claim to validity than they have.
That is what the judge had a problem with - not the text of the sticker by itself, but singling out evolution.
Your suggestions are fair, as long as no theories are singled out as "suspect" just because they are controversial with people that are unable to come up with valid criticism.
The problem is not that people are looking at evolution with a critical eye, but when this is being used to a) make evolution look suspect compared with all the other theories that students are expected to accept without question, and b) to promote the idea that if evolution isn't 100% undeniable and irrefutable no matter what, then somehow magically creationism/intelligent design is a valid, well supported theory worthy of consideration.
Since I fully expect the odd creationist to pop out of the woodwork at this time (this isn't directed at the poster I'm replying to personally): If creationsts were to a) provide a clear, unambiguous statement about what they believe, and b) provide a series of unambiguous predictions that can be logically inferred from the theory that will hold true if the theory is valid and fail if the theory is not valid, for instance in the form of outcomes of experiments, or in the forms of specific observations, then I would have no objections to that being presented to students as long as it would be covered together with a discussion of what important predictions of creationism and evolution have been met and which have failed.
The reason I'd consider that is because it would be a good training in science criticism - as opposed to the typical creationist method of using principles of science to cast doubt on evolution while expecting creationism to be taken on faith with no scientific scrutiny.
I am happy to accept that I am just a savage animal, just like the rest of humanity, you included. Humanities actions, particularly in the name of religion should be demonstration enough of that point.
I am also happy to be an atheist and live my life to the fullest and to choose to live ethically and without hatred of my own free will and choice instead of because I feel forced to or compelled to by the belief in a deity that could strike me down or send me to hell to burn in eternity if I make the wrong choices.
Living up to your potential under threat of punishment if you don't, or under the fantasy of a heavenly reward (or bribe) is not virtue, it is cowardice.
And as much as you might like to think, few atheists believe life is all about surviving and procreating. If you bothered to open your mind you might see that instead most of us believe life is there to make the most of it because we don't believe there'll be a second chance. I have no reason to believe there will be anything more for me after death, so if I am to fulfill my potential and make a mark on the world, I must do it by living my life well. Contrast that to most religions, who preach that as long as you live a life worthy of getting you into paradise you'll have eternity, or who preach reincarnations and implicit second chances.
My life is full enough that I don't need a deity to justify my existence or the existence of the world or as an alibi for my actions any more than I need Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
The judge did not complain about the contents of the stickers, but that the use of it only for evolution implied that evolution should be viewed as less certain than other theories. Singling evolution while students gets everything else presented without any "disclaimers" is what gets "evolutionists" upset.
What if it wasn't evolution that was singled out, but anything related to chemistry? It would seem ridiculous to everyone - why should I question theories of chemistry any more than I should those of physics? The only point of those stickers is to make people doubt evolution by pretending that there are more reasons to doubt it - in fact enough reasons to doubt it to warrant a specific warning from the school board - than any of the large number of other theories they are presented with.
(why is it only in the US this ever even becomes an issue? if anybody suggests putting creationism/intelligent design in school books here in Europe, they usually get ridiculed and ignored, even in countries like Norway where Christianity is the official religion and taught in schools)
Kyoto was a starting point, not the goal. As the US behaviour has shown, it was a fairly optimistic starting point. Trying to go further right away would have been counterproductive as it wouldn't have had a snowballs chance in hell of actually being supported by enough countries.
Complaining that something isn't effective because it doesn't do enough isn't exactly a good reason to reject it - it's a good reason to adopt it AND push for going further.
The problem with your suggestion is that the DC current needs to come from somewhere. Countries with cheap energy like Iceland and Norway have a good basis for exporting hydrogen simply because of low electricity prices.
No, you did not do the test he suggested. He suggested doing JPG compression and undoing the final RLE stage and THEN running zip on the result. As he pointed out, due to the RLE encoding most compressors will do badly on a standard jpeg image.
If A was released prior to B patenting the technique, then yes, the patent claim can be challenged as it was invalid in the first place.
And you're wrong - A's program doesn't get any "protection" if B retains its patent. If B's patent is invalidated because A's program is prior art, then nobody else can raise patent claims either unless they have valid prior art to both A and B, in which case B's patent will still be invalid and not give A any protection.
Honestly. No sense of culture:) It sets the background (the border is 53280 or 0xD020) to blue of course. Not that it makes much sense seeing as it's the default anyway.
The difference is in the level of harm. It is extremely hard to prevent the making of pipe bombs because it is so simple, but the risk to the public from people making them with the intent of using them makes the case that the benefit to the public of attempting to control and deter them is worthwhile. Contrary to a P2P app, it is also relatively straightforward to determine what is a pipe bomb and what isn't.
In the case of a "P2P" app (what is P2P anyway? Felten's code is just a trivial client-server example similar to what you can find in most textbooks on network programming, but I guess P2P sounds better these days) they are so trivial to make and so hard to police and the concept is so wide (is an FTP server a P2P application? What about a web server - with WebDav it has the same capabilities as Felten's clients?) that any attempt to ban them would either fail because it is too narrow and easy to work around or too wide and would catch a plethora of network services that are in common use.
Combine that with a worst case scenario of making it easier to do something that isn't inherently illegal (copying files) but that MAY hurt copyright holders if you break another law by copying copyrighted material without a license and it's worthwhile asking questions about whether the public is in any way served by attempts to outlaw P2P applications.
Doesn't make any sense unless you're claiming that the "stupid rich" group is so large that it's more money to be made out of ignoring the "mainstream" demand for things like veggie burgers.
What that tells me is that this "mainstream" demand for veggie burgers isn't particularly large, in fact is quite small. It's not as if this is a market that is hard to get into for small manufacturers. There is no big bad monopoly that controls supply.
Hence it's completely unreasonable to explain the high price based on demand from one segment of the market place making manufacturers ignore another - if the demand had truly been there, and manufacturing costs are actualy low, the low barrier to entry into the market means there would have been a lot of competition driving prices down.
I'm not sure I agree with you about the changes to the FotR storyline, though I'm a bit ambivalent about the movie - on one hand it did give me a new appreciation for parts of the books, on the other hand they were sufficiently different not to really satisfy me.
As for the Wizard of Earthsea I really don't think it would translate well to a movie "more or less as written" - the story is too "simple", and so much is driven by Le Guin's descriptions, which is a problem because it would often translate into very visually heavy scenes that should convey much but probably won't because the viewer of a movie won't get time to digest them unless you "fill in" material outside the plot to give you an excuse to spend more time on the visuals without boring the viewer.
It was a problem for LoTR as well, though in that case compounded because of the many digressions that are hard to weave into a visual retelling of the story without massively confusing the viewer, that resulted in some scenes having to be pushed aside to give enough time for the scenes that are important to the main plot.
The worst part about Earthsea isn't that they've changed the plot, but that they appear to have done lots of changes that have no reasons grounded in the story. Changing the colour of the characters for instance, can hardly be anything but a result of spineless writers and marketing people (if I want to be nice) or racism (if I want to be cynical about it). Other changes sounds like they are entirely ratings driven as opposed to driven by a need to fill in or translate the story into a form that works on the screen.
Hearing what you want is fine. Feeling or interpreting a written word the way you want is fine.
What always pisses me off is when people try to take THEIR intepretation of a work and try to pass it off as the authors intent. It is arrogant, disrespectful, and it is usually an attempt of lending authority to their particular interpretation without having to provide any proper justification.
I don't mind teachers etc. getting people to think about how a work can be interpreted or considering alternative interpretations from the authors, but they should be bloody careful about assuming they have a clue about what the author intended just from the work, because without a direct statement from the author about it they are likely to be guessing and likely to be completely wrong.
In fact, I think it would have been a very useful excercise in interpreting literature to first discuss the work and then introduce a text from the authors explaining what was intended, and try to figure out why the members of the group have come up with wildly different interpretations from the author. I think that would teach people a lot about how quickly the assumptions that people make when communicating break down horribly...
You over-simplify the way VOIP-POTS gateways work quite a bit. It's not like you'd set up gateways in every local calling area. You'd likely just set up gateways in really high traffic areas, or covering big regions and negotiate interchange agreements with the local carriers. Now, while that reduce the hardware costs, it's still expensive since you'll be paying part of your per minute charges to the carriers you pass traffic on to.
Most companies offering cheap long distance to consumers - whether via VOIP or access numbers - just make their money routing calls to carriers based on who's offering the lowest prices at the moment anyway. Few of them have much in the way of infrastructure, though some will build out as and when they get sufficient volume in certain areas.
How often these days do you hear AOL referred to as America OnLine?
They've consciously stuck to AOL in most contexts for a long time, and in the UK at least that is what most users recognise them as. I don't think many users in Europe at least think of AOL as any more USA centric than other US owned services sold here.
Yes and no, the US started out as a confederation, but as soon as the constitution was ratified the US became a federation.
The Articles of Confederation established an extremely loose confederation with less integration than even pre-Maastricht treaty EU (or the EC as would have been the correct name at the time). The confederation established for instance had no power to enforce it's decision on the states, and no means of sanctions or power to enforce a common policy on taxation, nor a common legal framework. By the time of the civil war, the US had a well established, though still weak, federal government.
The US was able to go straight to a federation to a large extent because the states wielded limited power to start with, and felt the need for extensive cooperation, and ran into significant limits of the confederation.
Confederations have existed for a long time, but the EU is different because of the sheer scale, and because it is arising from mature, well established democracies with strong governments instead of weak feudal states or early stage democracies.
It's worth taking note, though, that Congress as a result of the Articles of Confederation in many ways mirrored the structure of the EU Council - it was a unicameral legislature with representatives appointed by the state legislatures and number of delegates weighted by size. As such the EU already have a more representative system than pre-Constitution US by having gradually delegated more and more power to the EU parliament.
I think that the way things are moving, a federation will happen at some point, but that will be far off (as in several decades at least) because it will require the national governments to accept a massive reorganisation in favor of the EU parliament and commission (EU's "cabinet"), and away from the council and the national governments to have any chance of getting support of their electorates.
So let me rephrase: Either you reevaluate your view so that it is actually in line with reality and makes sense, or you can go on being a pigheaded moron who insist on holding on to views that make no sense just because you don't feel like facing the facts.
No, his solution is to transfer the power from the Council, which consists of the sitting cabinets of the member countries, to the directly elected EU parliament.
It would have a profound impact, because the Council's make up depends on election systems that in many important countries favors the large established parties, followed up by the process of choosing the cabinets, which means that the Council is highly unrepresentative of the general political landscape in the EU.
The Council is an artefact of the EU being a union of countries that are not subordinate to the union and where the executive power of the countries are each held by the cabinets - it isn't designed to be a democratic institution. It is designed to be a way for member governments to agree on common policy.
Leaving patent legislation up to the member states wouldn't really solve anything - it would mean companies would face the cost of dealing with different policies in 25 different countries, and it would mean open source projects would have to deal with 25 potentially different approaches.
You miss the point that the EU is not a country. It is a union of countries, which is still something fairly new. As a result the EU has a lot of parallel power structures: national parliaments, the council (consisting of ministers of the member countries) which represents the interests of the governments of the member states, the comission (appointed by the national parliaments) which is the EU's executive branch - like a cabinet of sorts, and the EU parliament which is the closest you get to a "federal" government.
Since the EU is a union of countries, not of subordinate states, many decisions which in a federation like the US would be taken by the parliament is taken by the council as representatives of their respective governments.
It's a result of the problems of getting a lot of different sovereign governments to agree on how to give up power.
As EU matures and integrates tighter, hopefully the parliament will manage to wrestle more power away from the Council as the justification for the power of the Council will become smaller, but that's not going to come easy.
I don't have anything against external Christmas lights. What I DO have a great deal against is the general tackiness of most of the lights people use. WHY do somebody think that rapidly blinking lights are nice? WHY do they have to be in every color known to man? WHY are flashing Santa's ok while the same people often would never consider a garden gnome? For some reason people seem to consider Christmas decorations a license to lose all sense of taste.
The most annoying bit is the flashing - why is it that it always have to be rapid enough to be annoying? If I were to hang up any Christmast light display that switches on and off I'd want it to be slow and calming, not look like you're trying to bring punters to the newest strip joint in town.
Then you need to reevaluet your view. In this case it provides security by being information that is tied to the identity and not the general design of the card, embedded in the image by a process that is hard to duplicate.
The fact that the information is "general" and "known" is entirely irrelevant. It could have been anything, as long as that "anything" is printed in a readable way elsewhere on the card or otherwise is available to whoever is checking the card, but there is no point in creating a "password" or similar and then have to print that on the card as well when the date of birth is already on there.
It is "security data" ONLY by virtue of being used as a digital watermark in a way that makes it harder to replace images, since you'd need to have an image with the right watermark in order to avoid detection.
It's not "secret". It's there to make it harder to tamper with the license by doing stuff like replacing the picture - you'd now also need to be able to place the right watermark on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. I see possibilities here.
I will consider creationism a valid scientific theory when somebody presents a version of it that is written in clear, unambiguous language coupled with predictions that can be logically inferred from the language that can be checked, and will fail if the theory is incorrect. Anything short of that, and creationism is pure conjecture with no scientific value whatsoever and giving it any sort of attention as part of science education would be just as wrong as presenting the existence of Santa Claus as a valid theory worthy of consideration.
The problem with this sticker is that it applies only to evolution, not to any of the thousands of other theories people are presented with at school. So it implicitly treats evolution as if it is not as accepted by the scientific community as the rest of them, thereby implying that religious claims about creationism and intelligent designs may have more claim to validity than they have.
That is what the judge had a problem with - not the text of the sticker by itself, but singling out evolution.
The problem is not that people are looking at evolution with a critical eye, but when this is being used to a) make evolution look suspect compared with all the other theories that students are expected to accept without question, and b) to promote the idea that if evolution isn't 100% undeniable and irrefutable no matter what, then somehow magically creationism/intelligent design is a valid, well supported theory worthy of consideration.
Since I fully expect the odd creationist to pop out of the woodwork at this time (this isn't directed at the poster I'm replying to personally): If creationsts were to a) provide a clear, unambiguous statement about what they believe, and b) provide a series of unambiguous predictions that can be logically inferred from the theory that will hold true if the theory is valid and fail if the theory is not valid, for instance in the form of outcomes of experiments, or in the forms of specific observations, then I would have no objections to that being presented to students as long as it would be covered together with a discussion of what important predictions of creationism and evolution have been met and which have failed.
The reason I'd consider that is because it would be a good training in science criticism - as opposed to the typical creationist method of using principles of science to cast doubt on evolution while expecting creationism to be taken on faith with no scientific scrutiny.
I am also happy to be an atheist and live my life to the fullest and to choose to live ethically and without hatred of my own free will and choice instead of because I feel forced to or compelled to by the belief in a deity that could strike me down or send me to hell to burn in eternity if I make the wrong choices.
Living up to your potential under threat of punishment if you don't, or under the fantasy of a heavenly reward (or bribe) is not virtue, it is cowardice.
And as much as you might like to think, few atheists believe life is all about surviving and procreating. If you bothered to open your mind you might see that instead most of us believe life is there to make the most of it because we don't believe there'll be a second chance. I have no reason to believe there will be anything more for me after death, so if I am to fulfill my potential and make a mark on the world, I must do it by living my life well. Contrast that to most religions, who preach that as long as you live a life worthy of getting you into paradise you'll have eternity, or who preach reincarnations and implicit second chances.
My life is full enough that I don't need a deity to justify my existence or the existence of the world or as an alibi for my actions any more than I need Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
What if it wasn't evolution that was singled out, but anything related to chemistry? It would seem ridiculous to everyone - why should I question theories of chemistry any more than I should those of physics? The only point of those stickers is to make people doubt evolution by pretending that there are more reasons to doubt it - in fact enough reasons to doubt it to warrant a specific warning from the school board - than any of the large number of other theories they are presented with.
(why is it only in the US this ever even becomes an issue? if anybody suggests putting creationism/intelligent design in school books here in Europe, they usually get ridiculed and ignored, even in countries like Norway where Christianity is the official religion and taught in schools)
Complaining that something isn't effective because it doesn't do enough isn't exactly a good reason to reject it - it's a good reason to adopt it AND push for going further.
The problem with your suggestion is that the DC current needs to come from somewhere. Countries with cheap energy like Iceland and Norway have a good basis for exporting hydrogen simply because of low electricity prices.
No, you did not do the test he suggested. He suggested doing JPG compression and undoing the final RLE stage and THEN running zip on the result. As he pointed out, due to the RLE encoding most compressors will do badly on a standard jpeg image.
And you're wrong - A's program doesn't get any "protection" if B retains its patent. If B's patent is invalidated because A's program is prior art, then nobody else can raise patent claims either unless they have valid prior art to both A and B, in which case B's patent will still be invalid and not give A any protection.
Honestly. No sense of culture :) It sets the background (the border is 53280 or 0xD020) to blue of course. Not that it makes much sense seeing as it's the default anyway.
In the case of a "P2P" app (what is P2P anyway? Felten's code is just a trivial client-server example similar to what you can find in most textbooks on network programming, but I guess P2P sounds better these days) they are so trivial to make and so hard to police and the concept is so wide (is an FTP server a P2P application? What about a web server - with WebDav it has the same capabilities as Felten's clients?) that any attempt to ban them would either fail because it is too narrow and easy to work around or too wide and would catch a plethora of network services that are in common use.
Combine that with a worst case scenario of making it easier to do something that isn't inherently illegal (copying files) but that MAY hurt copyright holders if you break another law by copying copyrighted material without a license and it's worthwhile asking questions about whether the public is in any way served by attempts to outlaw P2P applications.
What that tells me is that this "mainstream" demand for veggie burgers isn't particularly large, in fact is quite small. It's not as if this is a market that is hard to get into for small manufacturers. There is no big bad monopoly that controls supply.
Hence it's completely unreasonable to explain the high price based on demand from one segment of the market place making manufacturers ignore another - if the demand had truly been there, and manufacturing costs are actualy low, the low barrier to entry into the market means there would have been a lot of competition driving prices down.
As for the Wizard of Earthsea I really don't think it would translate well to a movie "more or less as written" - the story is too "simple", and so much is driven by Le Guin's descriptions, which is a problem because it would often translate into very visually heavy scenes that should convey much but probably won't because the viewer of a movie won't get time to digest them unless you "fill in" material outside the plot to give you an excuse to spend more time on the visuals without boring the viewer.
It was a problem for LoTR as well, though in that case compounded because of the many digressions that are hard to weave into a visual retelling of the story without massively confusing the viewer, that resulted in some scenes having to be pushed aside to give enough time for the scenes that are important to the main plot.
The worst part about Earthsea isn't that they've changed the plot, but that they appear to have done lots of changes that have no reasons grounded in the story. Changing the colour of the characters for instance, can hardly be anything but a result of spineless writers and marketing people (if I want to be nice) or racism (if I want to be cynical about it). Other changes sounds like they are entirely ratings driven as opposed to driven by a need to fill in or translate the story into a form that works on the screen.
What always pisses me off is when people try to take THEIR intepretation of a work and try to pass it off as the authors intent. It is arrogant, disrespectful, and it is usually an attempt of lending authority to their particular interpretation without having to provide any proper justification.
I don't mind teachers etc. getting people to think about how a work can be interpreted or considering alternative interpretations from the authors, but they should be bloody careful about assuming they have a clue about what the author intended just from the work, because without a direct statement from the author about it they are likely to be guessing and likely to be completely wrong.
In fact, I think it would have been a very useful excercise in interpreting literature to first discuss the work and then introduce a text from the authors explaining what was intended, and try to figure out why the members of the group have come up with wildly different interpretations from the author. I think that would teach people a lot about how quickly the assumptions that people make when communicating break down horribly...
Alltheweb is owned by Overture, which is a subsidiary of Yahoo...
Altavista is owned by Yahoo.
Most companies offering cheap long distance to consumers - whether via VOIP or access numbers - just make their money routing calls to carriers based on who's offering the lowest prices at the moment anyway. Few of them have much in the way of infrastructure, though some will build out as and when they get sufficient volume in certain areas.
They've consciously stuck to AOL in most contexts for a long time, and in the UK at least that is what most users recognise them as. I don't think many users in Europe at least think of AOL as any more USA centric than other US owned services sold here.
The Articles of Confederation established an extremely loose confederation with less integration than even pre-Maastricht treaty EU (or the EC as would have been the correct name at the time). The confederation established for instance had no power to enforce it's decision on the states, and no means of sanctions or power to enforce a common policy on taxation, nor a common legal framework. By the time of the civil war, the US had a well established, though still weak, federal government.
The US was able to go straight to a federation to a large extent because the states wielded limited power to start with, and felt the need for extensive cooperation, and ran into significant limits of the confederation.
Confederations have existed for a long time, but the EU is different because of the sheer scale, and because it is arising from mature, well established democracies with strong governments instead of weak feudal states or early stage democracies.
It's worth taking note, though, that Congress as a result of the Articles of Confederation in many ways mirrored the structure of the EU Council - it was a unicameral legislature with representatives appointed by the state legislatures and number of delegates weighted by size. As such the EU already have a more representative system than pre-Constitution US by having gradually delegated more and more power to the EU parliament.
I think that the way things are moving, a federation will happen at some point, but that will be far off (as in several decades at least) because it will require the national governments to accept a massive reorganisation in favor of the EU parliament and commission (EU's "cabinet"), and away from the council and the national governments to have any chance of getting support of their electorates.
So let me rephrase: Either you reevaluate your view so that it is actually in line with reality and makes sense, or you can go on being a pigheaded moron who insist on holding on to views that make no sense just because you don't feel like facing the facts.
It would have a profound impact, because the Council's make up depends on election systems that in many important countries favors the large established parties, followed up by the process of choosing the cabinets, which means that the Council is highly unrepresentative of the general political landscape in the EU.
The Council is an artefact of the EU being a union of countries that are not subordinate to the union and where the executive power of the countries are each held by the cabinets - it isn't designed to be a democratic institution. It is designed to be a way for member governments to agree on common policy.
Leaving patent legislation up to the member states wouldn't really solve anything - it would mean companies would face the cost of dealing with different policies in 25 different countries, and it would mean open source projects would have to deal with 25 potentially different approaches.
Since the EU is a union of countries, not of subordinate states, many decisions which in a federation like the US would be taken by the parliament is taken by the council as representatives of their respective governments.
It's a result of the problems of getting a lot of different sovereign governments to agree on how to give up power.
As EU matures and integrates tighter, hopefully the parliament will manage to wrestle more power away from the Council as the justification for the power of the Council will become smaller, but that's not going to come easy.
The most annoying bit is the flashing - why is it that it always have to be rapid enough to be annoying? If I were to hang up any Christmast light display that switches on and off I'd want it to be slow and calming, not look like you're trying to bring punters to the newest strip joint in town.
The fact that the information is "general" and "known" is entirely irrelevant. It could have been anything, as long as that "anything" is printed in a readable way elsewhere on the card or otherwise is available to whoever is checking the card, but there is no point in creating a "password" or similar and then have to print that on the card as well when the date of birth is already on there.
It is "security data" ONLY by virtue of being used as a digital watermark in a way that makes it harder to replace images, since you'd need to have an image with the right watermark in order to avoid detection.
It's not "secret". It's there to make it harder to tamper with the license by doing stuff like replacing the picture - you'd now also need to be able to place the right watermark on it.