Learn some basic economics. If a senior executive of a company unloads a large amount of shares, the value WILL collapse regardless of underlying values because it creates fear of whether or not the executive knows something the market doesn't.
As for your assertion that they wouldn't diversify, that's bullshit. First of all, you are assuming that their only goal is growing wealth. If that was the case, AND as someone else said they were sure not only that Microsoft stock keep going up, but would outperform every single other investment opportunity available to them, then it would be rational for them not to diversify.
However, if they were sure of that, then they would be incompetent idiots, and shouldn't be running any company - there is always risk. Microsoft HQ could get bombed by a lunatic tomorrow, or Gates could die in a car crash, or any number of other blows to the company could devastate it's share price. There is ALWAYS risk, and not diversifying means you risk losing everything, whereas diversifying means that you are sacrificing some growth for safety.
Another important fact to consider is that high profile Microsoft execs like Ballmer and Gates can't simply sell on a whim. Due to their position, any significant sales requires SEC filings, and there are even restrictions as to WHEN they an sell. Which means that not diversifying severely limits their access to cash.
In your arguments you assume that their only target is growth. But what's the point of growth if they will be unable to spend any of the money?
NO company can continue to grow exponentially. If they held on to everything they would demonstrate that they had no business skills and shouldn't be managing a company the size of Microsoft in the first place.
They are diversifying, which is what ANYONE should do with their investments. And no, they are not telling you that cash is a better asset than MSFT - they are telling you that having 90%+ of your wealth tied up in shares you can't easily sell (because SEC regulations force them to disclose sales because of the size of their holdings and their positions in the management of the company) is highly risky.
If Gates or Ballmer wanted to jump into a venture tomorrow that had the potential of growing to ten times the size of Microsoft but required 30-40 billion USD of investment from them, they couldn't do it, even though Gates on paper is worth considerably more than that, because he wouldn't be able to unload his Microsoft shares without crippling the Microsoft share price.
If this was something extraordinary, if Ballmer had never sold Microsoft shares before, or didn't do it on a regular basis, THEN it would be worth taking note of. But these people have been selling Microsoft shares like clockwork for years.
Any publicly listed company has a DUTY to their shareholders to increase the shareholders investments as rapidly as possible. Microsofts' only justification for holding on to all the cash they do, for instance is that they claim to produce better shareholder value by reinvesting the money than by paying dividends.
But the main reason Microsoft ust keep stock options valuable is that they don't pay very well, and they compensate for that by diluting shares by issuing stock options regularly instead. As long as their share price keeps sky rocketing this is a good deal for everyone involved. However as soon as the share price is flat or falling, Microsoft massive stock options issuing risks causing further share price decline, and the low value of the stock options makes it less attractive for top people to work at Microsoft.
Their alternative if they can't sustain massive growth is increasing salaries and bonuses, and that will cut dramatically into their profit margins, which certainly will further damage their share price.
It's an extremely high risk strategy on their account - as long as they can grow, they look extremely good to investors. The moment they can't sustain it their problems will quickly multiply thanks to their dependence on rapid growth.
All of the top brass at Microsoft regularly sell off parts of their shares. Gates has been doing it for years, at a relatively regular pace.
The thing is, most of the upper management of Microsoft that have been with the company from early on have most of their wealth in Microsoft shares. The problem is that they have to sell it off slowly or they wouldn't manage to get a decent price for it.
Re:Lots of good info here...
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I, Spammer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
1% response rate is extremely unlikely. Normal direct (snail) mail tend to get response rates of 1-2%. Double opt in (where a verification message have been sent, and the user have responded to it to confirm they want to sign up) e-mail campaigns can easily get as low as 1 in 10.000 or 1 in 100.000 if the list is unqualified and not in the right target group. Spam would likely be much worse than that. So he's probably lying through his teeth.
Of course, as you suggest, he could be counting death threats as responses as well:-)
Still, with todays bandwidth prices, and an estimate of 10kb per e-mail, if he's sending 10 million messages an hour, he'd be sending around 100GB an hour at around $50 an hour (likely less, given the volumes and since it's mail traffic where he doesn't need to pay a premium for low latency connectivity). A product with a reasonable markup and he might be able to recoup the cost of those 10 million messages with a single sale, possibly even making a nice profit.
And that's why asking people not to buy from spammers won't be enough to get them out of business.
Re:But Robotics Must Precede AI
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AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The thing is robots can "easily" be simulated. There are lot of mechanical complexities that can be ignored if you simply let your AI's interact with a simulate environment instead of a real one.
"Body first, mind second" sounds nice, but without reproduction and a mechanism for evolution you're not doing anything but creating an environment for your AI to interact with - you're not creating the pressures that caused evolution of intelligence in nature. So why go through the trouble of mechanics when you can simulate environments that are much simpler and easier both to interact with and to understand?
sex.com is a big money maker. The $65 million were awarded based on expected revenue from operating the site from it was stolen. Alexa lists it as the 1669th largest site in the world based on traffic (Slashdot is at 1029th at the moment), and that doesn't take into accounts the partnerships they have for providing pay per click search engine listings to many of the larger search engines for adult searches.
Something you have copyright on isn't yours. It's something you have been granted a temporary monopoly on the commercial exploitation on as an incentive from the government for commercial support to advance science, art and culture and to foster innovation.
Copyright law is entirely separate from property law, and as such "intellectual property" as a term is an attempt to sell the concept of copyright as a property right to lessen the outcry over the continuous attack on fair use and the public domain.
Don't you understand you just nulled your own argument? GM food is saving lives because the excess found in industrialized nations is not being distributed. This means that if we can get the local farmers in troubled areas to use GM crops, then they will produce more food for their family and surrounding areas. Then the trouble (and money required) to move all this extra food around won't be required.
The claim I debunked wasn't that GM can reduce starvation, but that it had already saved more than a billion lives. That is simply nonsense. As for GM's possibility to save life, I'll address that as well:
Sure, GM can provide higher yields. However, typically yields are compared with highly technologically intensive production methods that require large capital investment. Second, most GM research is currently being done by corporations that have no interest in helping starving farmers - Monsanto, for instance is infamous for it's licensing and it's work on ensuring that farmers are prevented from replanting grains from their crops, which is a vital part of most third world agriculture.
So while GM could possibly reduce starvation, it won't do so without massive capital investments. People who have the capital to do large scale farming and buying all their seeds aren't starving in the first place.
I'd also like to point out that the problem isn't that it's somehow a big problem to move all this food around - that's being done all the time. The food transport required would be on the orders of a few percent of the food export taking place on a regular basis. Nor is it an issue of money - Europe and the US spends huge amounts stockpiling surplus food and destroying it after having poured billions into subsidies every year.
The issue is that it would affect prices and demand worldwide, and the west isn't willing to risk that effect on their economy. That effect would be just as real if the third world suddenly managed to increase their food production dramatically, and would likely be met with protectionist trade restrictions, as it always have in the past when jobs in the industrialized countries might be at stake.
Again, the argument collapses on itself. That food would've saved thousands of lives but, on account of greed and politics, was denied. Even if it was later accepted, people died in its delay. And that is not acceptable in my book.
So you would rather that millions die next year because Zimbabwe loses the majority of it's income from exports and are unable to cover the costs of other vital things like medicine, healthcare and foods that aren't suitable for production there?
Accepting the unmilled grain would have have destroyed their only major livelihood for years to come, and that applies to the other countries who also protested.
Greed had nothing to do with it. Survival has. Destroying their own economy would cause far more long term deaths than a few days of stalling.
In either case, the original claim was that the food was rejected due to claims that GM food was "poison", which is blatantly wrong. Regardless of whether you agree with the economical argument or not, the fact is that the protests from Zimbabwe and other countries against receiving unmilled grain was ONLY made on the basis of the threat to their agricultural exports once their crops recover.
Dr. Borlog, the scientist who invented GM food, has saved an estimated billion lives in third world countries by making less land make more food. His research and development since the 1970's, when it began, is groundbreaking to say the least. And yet there are groups who protest this on a consistent basis. And you never see any of these group's members starving, do you?
This is bullshit. For decades the worlds food production have been way above amount of food required to feed the worlds population. In the early 70's the number stood at about 130% of the needed amount.
Starvation today isn't caused by lack of food, but lack of food distribution, fuelled among others by IMF policies (IMF has for ages pushed for high revenue crops such as coffee and tobacco instead of food in the 3rd world) and anti dumping measures in the west.
Add to that that most GM food is sold in the industrialized countries, and your idea of GM food saving lives becomes ridiculous.
I'm not saying that GM food is inherently bad, however I don't think you're doing GM foods any good by making claims that have no basis in reality.
A true tragedy was when an African country decided not to take an American donation of tons of corn because the environmentalists convinced the government of that nation that the genetically altered food was poison. An estimated 25,000 people die every day of starvation, and thousands of innocent people died in that country because of that misinformation.
The country you are referring to is likely Zimbabwe, and if so then what you're saying is complete and utter bullshit.
While Mugabe is a murderous madman of a dictator (much more so than Hussein), his decision to stop GM food imports was made for a very good reason:
Zimbabwe has always been one of the largest food exporters in Africa. A large part of their market is the EU and other countries that have strict rules on import on GM food. If any of the imported grain had been replanted in Zimbabwe, it would have been a disaster for the countries food export as they would have faced severe restrictions on export to a wide range of countries.
In the end the grain was milled to flour before being distributed in Zimbabwe.
The same was the case for the other African countries who raised objections to importing GM grain.
If you want to stamp out terrorism, you have three ways of doing it:
Make society so totalitarian that any knowledge that can potentially be used for terrorism and any means of speech that is hard to restrict or monitor will be stopped. Downside: Totalitarian regimes breed rebel movements. Rebel movements often see terrorism as their only possible weapons.
Go to war, and hope you manage to kill or imprison all the terrorists without creating new ones by antagonising people. Downside: You will likely antagonise people to the point where new terrorist groups pop up.
Solve the underlying issues. Downside: You will need to make painful concessions.
I don't know of ANY conflict where terorrist groups have been involved where the terror has stopped or been significantly limited through the first two options. Even in cases where an entire terrorist organization have been obliterated, as long as the underlying issues are still there new people take their places. It may take time, but it's happened over and over again.
Not only in third world countries - Britain tried to crush the IRA for decades. It was first through peaceful negotiation that the IRA got enough pressure from Irish republicans to stop it's violence, leaving only fringe groups with minimal popular support to deal with.
If the US keeps on down it's slippery slope towards totalitarianism, you won't need terrorists to feel unsafe - the government will be more than enough.
What makes you think that they use valid return addresses on their systems for their messages?
The more common strategy is to either use a fake return address, or just choose a more or less random return e-mail address either belonging to someone else (an anti spammer, perhaps?) or that has been registered for the purpose at a free e-mail service.
I used to be involved in running a fairly large free e-mail service, and our main spam problem was people using addresses from our system in the from field, not people spamming our user. When a spammer sends a few million messages to invalid AOL or Hotmail accounts and one of your addresses is in the From field, you sort of notice the bounce traffic....
Making the spammers crawl invalid e-mail addresses can reduce the amount of spam to real recipients they manage to send, though, which is why there's quite a few spamtrap scripts out there that generate pages containing lots of e-mail addresses and links to other pages generated on the fly by the script.
There's even a Palm port of VNC, so I doubt it would need quite a lot of a Linux system on the terminal end. If you want to waste time squeezing it down to the bare minimum, I'd think you'd get a working Linux setup with VNC in about 1-2MB of disk space, depending on modules you need etc.. Look for DirectVNC for a VNC client that works directly on the Linux framebuffer without the need for X.
I found the explanation perfectly acceptable. Yes, you are right, the infinite space is limited to what is possible, not to what is conceivable - in other words things that can't possibly happen given the laws of nature won't happen in any infinite universe.
But the article went to great lengths of explaining first why infinite space might be possible, and then why the distribution of matter may be more or less relatively uniformly random throughout space, and in that case there will at any time be infinite amounts of everything that can exist at that point in time given the possible starting points and the restrictions that laws of nature put on the further development of events.
The thing that people seem to miss the most is the distinction between creating an infinite number of universes NOW, and creating an infinite number of universes a long time ago and developing them according to a set of rule. The former would allow anything that can be built from elementary particles to exist. The latter will at any given point after the creation preclude an infinite number of possible configurations of the former.
A simple illustration would be if you for each of the two threw a dice. For the first case, any number from one to six would be possible. But lets introduce the "natural law" that the selected face should be crossed out for each subsequent throw, and that if you get a crossed out face you throw again.
Assuming the first two dice throws would produce the same result, beyond that the number of possible sequences for the second dice is clearly less than for the first. Now assume dice with an infinite number of faces. Now the number of possible sequences for the second dice is infinite, even if we cross out a face for each throw, but at the same time there is an infinite number of result that can't be achieved, and for each throw the number of results that can't be achieved grows infinitely.
To get back to the universes, given that I exist, I can relatively safely assume that there's an infinite number of sequences of dice throws that would have led to me still being born and living the exact same life as I do now, and an infinite number of sequences of dice throws that would have led to me living life in subtly or dramatically different ways yet still being close enough for a human to consider it "me".
The "everything-could-exist" proposal as you called it could perhaps have been more precisely defined by explaining the limitations imposed by laws of nature and in particular by cause and effect.
If it is possible and space is really infinite, and the universes were created with truly random starting points, then yes.
The stickiest point is the "possible" part. There's an infinite number of conceivable things that can't possibly arise from a randomly created universe unless the laws of nature can wary in infinite ways between the universes as well. And there's an infinite number of conceivable things that can happen, but couldn't possible have arisen at this point in time, or would have disappeared/been destroyed by now.
In other words, I won't be going to my nearest bookie to place a bet on it...
It's not an assumption about the creation of multiple universes at all, but about the existence of them. Given a certain volume, take any configuration of matter and energy possible, and you have an infinite number of possible universes, many of which will develop exactly the same way for a very long time simply because the few particles that perhaps have a slightly different speed or trajectory between them might not interact with anything else for a long time.
However, once they do interact with something, the changes can have knock on effects.
With infinitely many universes with infinite, random starting points any possible chain of events will unfold. What you need to remember is the "any possible chain of events" part. An inifite number of scenarios that humans are able to invent along the lines of "what if you didn't read this message but did something else instead" may be impossible to reach by changing the starting points of the universe without altering so much of everything happening before this point in time that that difference would be lost in the noise of more significant changes.
Playing out every possible outcome (every outcome that can be achieved by changing the configuration of matter and energy at the time of the creation of the universe and allowing the universe to develop according to the laws of nature) is believable to me. Playing out every conceivable outcome, which is usually what people are really talking about when discussing what-if scenarios, is not.
It only requires a national database of which numbers are operated by which operators. Databases like that already exists, however the granularity is on huge blocks of allocated numbers, not invidiual numbers - that's the only difference that number portability brings.
He as not been arrested, he is being held as a witness.
And your assumption that they won't come after you because you don't make donations to terrorist organizations is extremely weak. The US government now have the power to hold you as a material witness regardless. The question is whether you do something that someone with the power to carry it off dislike enough or not.
The current government may not be extreme enough to be willing to go much further than they currently do, but now the law is there. It will still be there if someone crazy enough gets into power.
That is the very reason for your constitutional protections in the first place. They're not there to protect you against a government that is reasonable and just, they're there as a safeguard in case of a government that is willing to take shortcuts and abuse their power.
Maybe he is getting what he deserves - however, the point is that nobody gets to verify whether or not he is getting what he deserves, or whether he is being held because somebody think he might be involved in something without a shred of evidence, or simply because someone don't like him, because the law they are using to hold him allow them to hold him without without giving him any chance at due process whatsoever.
He is being held as a material witness. He has not been charged with a crime. He has not been named a suspect of a crime. Still he is being held under a law that allow him to be kept with close to no contact with the outside world for an indefinite amount of time without due process.
THAT is the issue, not whether or not he is a "good guy". Even if he turns out to be a criminal, he is still treated in a way that violates fundamental principles of justice, and that is quite reminiscent of tactics used by dictators to silence anyone they don't like.
Why kill and be brutal when holding someone in an unknown location without any requirement for a court hearing is just as effective?
THAT is the issue - that the US government is now step by step emulating more and more of the tactics of the very people they claim they are trying to protect Americans and the world against.
<rant-mode>
And of course it's always nice to try to pretend it's the same people who complain about two seemingly mutually exclusive things. But I think you'll find that quite a lot of the people who are now crying out about human rights abuses in the US weren't that surprised when 9/11 happened. My first reaction was "that's what you get for pissing off an entire people".
Making enemies all over the world is just begging for thousands of people to start thinking about ways to hit back. Becoming more oppressive and more agressive (as with the Iraq war) may stop a few threats now, but it also make thousands more angry enough and desperate enough to start thinking about how it would be to copy the 9/11 terrorists.
I keep hearing "appeasement never work with terrorists", but what you need to realise is that what is terrorism to you and me is considered freedom fighting by the people doing it. Every strike against them validate their beliefs. Every death makes it easier for them to recruit.
You can splinter a terorist group, but unless you remove the root cause, there will only be more. Until the US government sees that the way they keep angering hundreds of millions of people is what is feeding the terrorist threat in the first place, and start taking a gentler tone - not to the terrorists, but to the groups of people from which the terrorist recruit, you will always have the terror threat hanging over you. Appeasement not towards the terrorists, but towards the countries and peoples that are weary, suspicious and downright angry at the US government because of decades of US foreign policy.
A more even handed approach towards the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for instance, would do a great deal to make it harder for fundamentalist muslim terrorist groups to recruit. Similarly, a more patient approach against Iraq would have done the same.
Instead the present US government seems to keep doing everything it can to whirl up more hatred.
The point is you're NOT going through the whole thing all over again. There are very strict limits on what the appeals court will do and what parts of the case it will reconsider. Normally it will reconsider the legal justification for the sentence, not throw out all the evidence and arguments and start all over again.
And no, it is not an excuse to bring badly framed cases, as if you do that, the appeals court will look at your evidence and arguments from the lower court and you risk losing in the higher court based on your badly put together case from the lower court.
You're free not to like it, but you're making a lot of assumptions about how this appeals system work that simply doesn't hold.
Doesn't work that way. It's an appeal, not a retrial, the prosectors office can't just assume they'll be able to change all their charges and introduce lots of new evidence. On the contrary, the appeals court is very strict about what it will (and legally can) reconsider of the case and what new arguments and evidence (if any) can be allowed to be introduced.
Add to that that considerable weight will be given by the court to the judgement from the lower court, and the party who lost in the lower court starts at a significant disadvantage in the appeal court.
I think you'd find on closer examination that the US legal system places defendants much more at the mercy of overzealous prosecutors than the Norwegian one. In part because of the mechanism we have for providing public defense attorneys. I objected to being drafted for military service, and was assigned a very prominent lawyer at one of the most expensive law firms in Norway free of charge, for instance (interestingly enough I didn't need him - I wrote a letter to the court explaining why the Norwegian department of justice had screwed up, and the court dismissed the case without a hearing). And yes, the lawyer actually spent more time on me than I would have needed.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, I'll bring out again that Norway does have something similar to US double jeopardy protection, however the protection is against retrial, not appeal. This is what is normal in legal systems not based on English common law. Appeals in Norway always happen to a higher court, and there are only three levels in the court system. The Supreme Court refuses most request for appeals, and the next level down usually only hear complaints about procedure or application of law and usually put substantial weight on the evidence and findings of the lower court.
As such, the burden of an appeals case is significantly lower than it would have been in a retrial. It's certainly not non-existant, but it's still lower.
Generally, though, looking at prison population in percentage of population compared to reported crime, it would seem that the Norwegian legal system is far less likely to convict you of anything. Add to that that Norwegian law imposes a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison followed by up to 10 years of
regular check ins with the police, a sentence which is usually only used for multiple homicide cases or similar extensive violent crimes. And most crimes have legal maximum sentences that are much, much lower.
What you're left with is a legal system that I'd argue places lower burdens on a defendant overall: You may find that an aquittal get appealed, but you risk less (a significantly lower sentence, and significantly better conditions in prison), and it will likely take more to get a conviction even in the lower court.
Our right wing parties always complain about this, and want our legal system to become more like the US legal system in order to put more people behind bars... In Norway wanting to be "tough on crime" translates directly into wanting to copy the US.
Your point about Nigeria is good, but I'd like to point out there that the Sharia courts point to significant ethnic problems in Nigeria, which is divided pretty evenly between christians and muslims. Sharia courts in the muslim north only apply to muslims. Even so, the federal legal system has made it clear that it considers much of Sharia law to violate federal law, and the federal government has made it clear that anyone sentenced under Sharia law to a punishment not supported by the federal legal system can appeal and expect their sentences to be overturned more or less automatically in the higher court.
The problem faced by Obasanjo (the Nigerian president), though, is that Nigeria is just a few years away from it last period of military dictatorship, ethnic problems have caused significant clashes in the north (between christians and muslims), and ethnic unrest in the south west has placed a large part of Nigeria's oil production in jeopardy, while corruption is still widespread. In a situation like that, he hardly have the power base to address the problem of the Sharia courts - in the last election, the muslim north was an important area for him (despite being christian himself).
Obviously none of that diminish the problem of the sharia courts, but it should give some insight in why they're tolerated - the federal government is still way to weak to take the chance of another uprising or military coup.
Slashdot Mirror
As for your assertion that they wouldn't diversify, that's bullshit. First of all, you are assuming that their only goal is growing wealth. If that was the case, AND as someone else said they were sure not only that Microsoft stock keep going up, but would outperform every single other investment opportunity available to them, then it would be rational for them not to diversify.
However, if they were sure of that, then they would be incompetent idiots, and shouldn't be running any company - there is always risk. Microsoft HQ could get bombed by a lunatic tomorrow, or Gates could die in a car crash, or any number of other blows to the company could devastate it's share price. There is ALWAYS risk, and not diversifying means you risk losing everything, whereas diversifying means that you are sacrificing some growth for safety.
Another important fact to consider is that high profile Microsoft execs like Ballmer and Gates can't simply sell on a whim. Due to their position, any significant sales requires SEC filings, and there are even restrictions as to WHEN they an sell. Which means that not diversifying severely limits their access to cash.
In your arguments you assume that their only target is growth. But what's the point of growth if they will be unable to spend any of the money?
They are diversifying, which is what ANYONE should do with their investments. And no, they are not telling you that cash is a better asset than MSFT - they are telling you that having 90%+ of your wealth tied up in shares you can't easily sell (because SEC regulations force them to disclose sales because of the size of their holdings and their positions in the management of the company) is highly risky.
If Gates or Ballmer wanted to jump into a venture tomorrow that had the potential of growing to ten times the size of Microsoft but required 30-40 billion USD of investment from them, they couldn't do it, even though Gates on paper is worth considerably more than that, because he wouldn't be able to unload his Microsoft shares without crippling the Microsoft share price.
If this was something extraordinary, if Ballmer had never sold Microsoft shares before, or didn't do it on a regular basis, THEN it would be worth taking note of. But these people have been selling Microsoft shares like clockwork for years.
But the main reason Microsoft ust keep stock options valuable is that they don't pay very well, and they compensate for that by diluting shares by issuing stock options regularly instead. As long as their share price keeps sky rocketing this is a good deal for everyone involved. However as soon as the share price is flat or falling, Microsoft massive stock options issuing risks causing further share price decline, and the low value of the stock options makes it less attractive for top people to work at Microsoft.
Their alternative if they can't sustain massive growth is increasing salaries and bonuses, and that will cut dramatically into their profit margins, which certainly will further damage their share price.
It's an extremely high risk strategy on their account - as long as they can grow, they look extremely good to investors. The moment they can't sustain it their problems will quickly multiply thanks to their dependence on rapid growth.
The thing is, most of the upper management of Microsoft that have been with the company from early on have most of their wealth in Microsoft shares. The problem is that they have to sell it off slowly or they wouldn't manage to get a decent price for it.
Of course, as you suggest, he could be counting death threats as responses as well :-)
Still, with todays bandwidth prices, and an estimate of 10kb per e-mail, if he's sending 10 million messages an hour, he'd be sending around 100GB an hour at around $50 an hour (likely less, given the volumes and since it's mail traffic where he doesn't need to pay a premium for low latency connectivity). A product with a reasonable markup and he might be able to recoup the cost of those 10 million messages with a single sale, possibly even making a nice profit.
And that's why asking people not to buy from spammers won't be enough to get them out of business.
"Body first, mind second" sounds nice, but without reproduction and a mechanism for evolution you're not doing anything but creating an environment for your AI to interact with - you're not creating the pressures that caused evolution of intelligence in nature. So why go through the trouble of mechanics when you can simulate environments that are much simpler and easier both to interact with and to understand?
Only if you think Slashdot users are willing to pay more for the stuff that's on slashdot that the average sex.com user is willing to pay for porn...
sex.com is a big money maker. The $65 million were awarded based on expected revenue from operating the site from it was stolen. Alexa lists it as the 1669th largest site in the world based on traffic (Slashdot is at 1029th at the moment), and that doesn't take into accounts the partnerships they have for providing pay per click search engine listings to many of the larger search engines for adult searches.
Copyright law is entirely separate from property law, and as such "intellectual property" as a term is an attempt to sell the concept of copyright as a property right to lessen the outcry over the continuous attack on fair use and the public domain.
The claim I debunked wasn't that GM can reduce starvation, but that it had already saved more than a billion lives. That is simply nonsense. As for GM's possibility to save life, I'll address that as well:
Sure, GM can provide higher yields. However, typically yields are compared with highly technologically intensive production methods that require large capital investment. Second, most GM research is currently being done by corporations that have no interest in helping starving farmers - Monsanto, for instance is infamous for it's licensing and it's work on ensuring that farmers are prevented from replanting grains from their crops, which is a vital part of most third world agriculture.
So while GM could possibly reduce starvation, it won't do so without massive capital investments. People who have the capital to do large scale farming and buying all their seeds aren't starving in the first place.
I'd also like to point out that the problem isn't that it's somehow a big problem to move all this food around - that's being done all the time. The food transport required would be on the orders of a few percent of the food export taking place on a regular basis. Nor is it an issue of money - Europe and the US spends huge amounts stockpiling surplus food and destroying it after having poured billions into subsidies every year.
The issue is that it would affect prices and demand worldwide, and the west isn't willing to risk that effect on their economy. That effect would be just as real if the third world suddenly managed to increase their food production dramatically, and would likely be met with protectionist trade restrictions, as it always have in the past when jobs in the industrialized countries might be at stake. Again, the argument collapses on itself. That food would've saved thousands of lives but, on account of greed and politics, was denied. Even if it was later accepted, people died in its delay. And that is not acceptable in my book.
So you would rather that millions die next year because Zimbabwe loses the majority of it's income from exports and are unable to cover the costs of other vital things like medicine, healthcare and foods that aren't suitable for production there?
Accepting the unmilled grain would have have destroyed their only major livelihood for years to come, and that applies to the other countries who also protested.
Greed had nothing to do with it. Survival has. Destroying their own economy would cause far more long term deaths than a few days of stalling.
In either case, the original claim was that the food was rejected due to claims that GM food was "poison", which is blatantly wrong. Regardless of whether you agree with the economical argument or not, the fact is that the protests from Zimbabwe and other countries against receiving unmilled grain was ONLY made on the basis of the threat to their agricultural exports once their crops recover.
This is bullshit. For decades the worlds food production have been way above amount of food required to feed the worlds population. In the early 70's the number stood at about 130% of the needed amount.
Starvation today isn't caused by lack of food, but lack of food distribution, fuelled among others by IMF policies (IMF has for ages pushed for high revenue crops such as coffee and tobacco instead of food in the 3rd world) and anti dumping measures in the west.
Add to that that most GM food is sold in the industrialized countries, and your idea of GM food saving lives becomes ridiculous.
I'm not saying that GM food is inherently bad, however I don't think you're doing GM foods any good by making claims that have no basis in reality.
A true tragedy was when an African country decided not to take an American donation of tons of corn because the environmentalists convinced the government of that nation that the genetically altered food was poison. An estimated 25,000 people die every day of starvation, and thousands of innocent people died in that country because of that misinformation.
The country you are referring to is likely Zimbabwe, and if so then what you're saying is complete and utter bullshit.
While Mugabe is a murderous madman of a dictator (much more so than Hussein), his decision to stop GM food imports was made for a very good reason:
Zimbabwe has always been one of the largest food exporters in Africa. A large part of their market is the EU and other countries that have strict rules on import on GM food. If any of the imported grain had been replanted in Zimbabwe, it would have been a disaster for the countries food export as they would have faced severe restrictions on export to a wide range of countries.
In the end the grain was milled to flour before being distributed in Zimbabwe.
The same was the case for the other African countries who raised objections to importing GM grain.
I don't know of ANY conflict where terorrist groups have been involved where the terror has stopped or been significantly limited through the first two options. Even in cases where an entire terrorist organization have been obliterated, as long as the underlying issues are still there new people take their places. It may take time, but it's happened over and over again.
Not only in third world countries - Britain tried to crush the IRA for decades. It was first through peaceful negotiation that the IRA got enough pressure from Irish republicans to stop it's violence, leaving only fringe groups with minimal popular support to deal with.
If the US keeps on down it's slippery slope towards totalitarianism, you won't need terrorists to feel unsafe - the government will be more than enough.
The more common strategy is to either use a fake return address, or just choose a more or less random return e-mail address either belonging to someone else (an anti spammer, perhaps?) or that has been registered for the purpose at a free e-mail service.
I used to be involved in running a fairly large free e-mail service, and our main spam problem was people using addresses from our system in the from field, not people spamming our user. When a spammer sends a few million messages to invalid AOL or Hotmail accounts and one of your addresses is in the From field, you sort of notice the bounce traffic....
Making the spammers crawl invalid e-mail addresses can reduce the amount of spam to real recipients they manage to send, though, which is why there's quite a few spamtrap scripts out there that generate pages containing lots of e-mail addresses and links to other pages generated on the fly by the script.
Maybe he attaches it to all the other flying super heros? :)
There's even a Palm port of VNC, so I doubt it would need quite a lot of a Linux system on the terminal end. If you want to waste time squeezing it down to the bare minimum, I'd think you'd get a working Linux setup with VNC in about 1-2MB of disk space, depending on modules you need etc.. Look for DirectVNC for a VNC client that works directly on the Linux framebuffer without the need for X.
But the article went to great lengths of explaining first why infinite space might be possible, and then why the distribution of matter may be more or less relatively uniformly random throughout space, and in that case there will at any time be infinite amounts of everything that can exist at that point in time given the possible starting points and the restrictions that laws of nature put on the further development of events.
The thing that people seem to miss the most is the distinction between creating an infinite number of universes NOW, and creating an infinite number of universes a long time ago and developing them according to a set of rule. The former would allow anything that can be built from elementary particles to exist. The latter will at any given point after the creation preclude an infinite number of possible configurations of the former.
A simple illustration would be if you for each of the two threw a dice. For the first case, any number from one to six would be possible. But lets introduce the "natural law" that the selected face should be crossed out for each subsequent throw, and that if you get a crossed out face you throw again.
Assuming the first two dice throws would produce the same result, beyond that the number of possible sequences for the second dice is clearly less than for the first. Now assume dice with an infinite number of faces. Now the number of possible sequences for the second dice is infinite, even if we cross out a face for each throw, but at the same time there is an infinite number of result that can't be achieved, and for each throw the number of results that can't be achieved grows infinitely.
To get back to the universes, given that I exist, I can relatively safely assume that there's an infinite number of sequences of dice throws that would have led to me still being born and living the exact same life as I do now, and an infinite number of sequences of dice throws that would have led to me living life in subtly or dramatically different ways yet still being close enough for a human to consider it "me".
The "everything-could-exist" proposal as you called it could perhaps have been more precisely defined by explaining the limitations imposed by laws of nature and in particular by cause and effect.
The stickiest point is the "possible" part. There's an infinite number of conceivable things that can't possibly arise from a randomly created universe unless the laws of nature can wary in infinite ways between the universes as well. And there's an infinite number of conceivable things that can happen, but couldn't possible have arisen at this point in time, or would have disappeared/been destroyed by now.
In other words, I won't be going to my nearest bookie to place a bet on it...
However, once they do interact with something, the changes can have knock on effects.
With infinitely many universes with infinite, random starting points any possible chain of events will unfold. What you need to remember is the "any possible chain of events" part. An inifite number of scenarios that humans are able to invent along the lines of "what if you didn't read this message but did something else instead" may be impossible to reach by changing the starting points of the universe without altering so much of everything happening before this point in time that that difference would be lost in the noise of more significant changes.
Playing out every possible outcome (every outcome that can be achieved by changing the configuration of matter and energy at the time of the creation of the universe and allowing the universe to develop according to the laws of nature) is believable to me. Playing out every conceivable outcome, which is usually what people are really talking about when discussing what-if scenarios, is not.
It only requires a national database of which numbers are operated by which operators. Databases like that already exists, however the granularity is on huge blocks of allocated numbers, not invidiual numbers - that's the only difference that number portability brings.
And your assumption that they won't come after you because you don't make donations to terrorist organizations is extremely weak. The US government now have the power to hold you as a material witness regardless. The question is whether you do something that someone with the power to carry it off dislike enough or not.
The current government may not be extreme enough to be willing to go much further than they currently do, but now the law is there. It will still be there if someone crazy enough gets into power.
That is the very reason for your constitutional protections in the first place. They're not there to protect you against a government that is reasonable and just, they're there as a safeguard in case of a government that is willing to take shortcuts and abuse their power.
Maybe he is getting what he deserves - however, the point is that nobody gets to verify whether or not he is getting what he deserves, or whether he is being held because somebody think he might be involved in something without a shred of evidence, or simply because someone don't like him, because the law they are using to hold him allow them to hold him without without giving him any chance at due process whatsoever.
THAT is the issue, not whether or not he is a "good guy". Even if he turns out to be a criminal, he is still treated in a way that violates fundamental principles of justice, and that is quite reminiscent of tactics used by dictators to silence anyone they don't like.
Why kill and be brutal when holding someone in an unknown location without any requirement for a court hearing is just as effective?
THAT is the issue - that the US government is now step by step emulating more and more of the tactics of the very people they claim they are trying to protect Americans and the world against.
<rant-mode>
And of course it's always nice to try to pretend it's the same people who complain about two seemingly mutually exclusive things. But I think you'll find that quite a lot of the people who are now crying out about human rights abuses in the US weren't that surprised when 9/11 happened. My first reaction was "that's what you get for pissing off an entire people".
Making enemies all over the world is just begging for thousands of people to start thinking about ways to hit back. Becoming more oppressive and more agressive (as with the Iraq war) may stop a few threats now, but it also make thousands more angry enough and desperate enough to start thinking about how it would be to copy the 9/11 terrorists.
I keep hearing "appeasement never work with terrorists", but what you need to realise is that what is terrorism to you and me is considered freedom fighting by the people doing it. Every strike against them validate their beliefs. Every death makes it easier for them to recruit.
You can splinter a terorist group, but unless you remove the root cause, there will only be more. Until the US government sees that the way they keep angering hundreds of millions of people is what is feeding the terrorist threat in the first place, and start taking a gentler tone - not to the terrorists, but to the groups of people from which the terrorist recruit, you will always have the terror threat hanging over you. Appeasement not towards the terrorists, but towards the countries and peoples that are weary, suspicious and downright angry at the US government because of decades of US foreign policy.
A more even handed approach towards the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for instance, would do a great deal to make it harder for fundamentalist muslim terrorist groups to recruit. Similarly, a more patient approach against Iraq would have done the same.
Instead the present US government seems to keep doing everything it can to whirl up more hatred.
</rant-mode>
His ulterior motive most of the time seems to be to piss off Gates. He has an inferiority complex.
And no, it is not an excuse to bring badly framed cases, as if you do that, the appeals court will look at your evidence and arguments from the lower court and you risk losing in the higher court based on your badly put together case from the lower court.
You're free not to like it, but you're making a lot of assumptions about how this appeals system work that simply doesn't hold.
Add to that that considerable weight will be given by the court to the judgement from the lower court, and the party who lost in the lower court starts at a significant disadvantage in the appeal court.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, I'll bring out again that Norway does have something similar to US double jeopardy protection, however the protection is against retrial, not appeal. This is what is normal in legal systems not based on English common law. Appeals in Norway always happen to a higher court, and there are only three levels in the court system. The Supreme Court refuses most request for appeals, and the next level down usually only hear complaints about procedure or application of law and usually put substantial weight on the evidence and findings of the lower court.
As such, the burden of an appeals case is significantly lower than it would have been in a retrial. It's certainly not non-existant, but it's still lower.
Generally, though, looking at prison population in percentage of population compared to reported crime, it would seem that the Norwegian legal system is far less likely to convict you of anything. Add to that that Norwegian law imposes a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison followed by up to 10 years of regular check ins with the police, a sentence which is usually only used for multiple homicide cases or similar extensive violent crimes. And most crimes have legal maximum sentences that are much, much lower.
What you're left with is a legal system that I'd argue places lower burdens on a defendant overall: You may find that an aquittal get appealed, but you risk less (a significantly lower sentence, and significantly better conditions in prison), and it will likely take more to get a conviction even in the lower court.
Our right wing parties always complain about this, and want our legal system to become more like the US legal system in order to put more people behind bars... In Norway wanting to be "tough on crime" translates directly into wanting to copy the US.
Your point about Nigeria is good, but I'd like to point out there that the Sharia courts point to significant ethnic problems in Nigeria, which is divided pretty evenly between christians and muslims. Sharia courts in the muslim north only apply to muslims. Even so, the federal legal system has made it clear that it considers much of Sharia law to violate federal law, and the federal government has made it clear that anyone sentenced under Sharia law to a punishment not supported by the federal legal system can appeal and expect their sentences to be overturned more or less automatically in the higher court.
The problem faced by Obasanjo (the Nigerian president), though, is that Nigeria is just a few years away from it last period of military dictatorship, ethnic problems have caused significant clashes in the north (between christians and muslims), and ethnic unrest in the south west has placed a large part of Nigeria's oil production in jeopardy, while corruption is still widespread. In a situation like that, he hardly have the power base to address the problem of the Sharia courts - in the last election, the muslim north was an important area for him (despite being christian himself).
Obviously none of that diminish the problem of the sharia courts, but it should give some insight in why they're tolerated - the federal government is still way to weak to take the chance of another uprising or military coup.