I believe the term is "dedicating" the patent. (As in, you're dedicating it to the public domain.) IANAL, but that's the term that I've heard and seen used. And yes, a patent holder can totally do this, but most don't because of how valuable patents themselves are.
It's hard to know where to begin with this screed. First of all, it was published over a year ago -- why this seems relevant now is a mystery to me, especially since most of the author's points have been raised by others, and countered by Kurzweil himself in The Singularity is Near.
The whole idea that technological progress appears to be slowing down is actually covered by Kurzweil quite well in that book, with several arguments to counter.
What the author of this IEEE article provides is not so much a counter-argument to Kurzweil as a flat statement that Kurzweil is wrong. In other words, it's the rhetorical equivalent of "Nuh-uh!" Nordmann doesn't even bother trying to pick specific claims made by singularitarians and dismantle them with logic. In fact, he doesn't try to prove his position at all. He relies on smug and smarmy language to assert a point without ever justifying it, apparently assuming that his position is somehow the "default" and that the singularitarians are solely burdened to make their case. Let's examine this gem from his closing paragraph:
Indeed, there is nothing wrong with the singular simplicity of the singularitarian myth--unless you have something against sloppy reasoning, wishful thinking, and an invitation to irresponsibility.
It sounds like a fine summary statement, until you realize there is precious little actual argument to bolster those claims or views in the preceding three pages.
Presumably, he wants you to buy his book, Singular Simplicity, wherein perhaps he actually gives us some meat to back up his arguments. Based on the quality of the article, however, I am not sanguine. He gives a little time to discussing "irresponsibility," though I'd be hard pressed to know which sense of the word he means in the closing paragraph; in one spot, he does mention the ethical problems posed by new medical diagnostic tests. He does make claims about wishful thinking, citing cherry picked examples (including wild speculation about the bright future of biotechnology and medicine), but the truth is Nordmann uses the term "wishful thinking" as a pejorative for any kind of extrapolation that he considers unjustified. That's a very convenient and very subjective metric.
As for the sloppy reasoning charge, I find it difficult to square with what I know of and have read by various proponents of the Singularity -- not just Kurzweil, but Vinge (whose thoughts on the topic continue to evolve every time I circle back to him) and others. I guess it's not technically an ad hominem attack if you're smearing an entire group of people, but we have other words for that...
When I saw the author's bio blurb at the end of the IEEE article, I realized why the article seemed to have the tone and slant that it did. Alfred Nordmann is a philosopher. OK, a German philosopher -- which implies a whole lot of cultural baggage and a Weltanschauung that might rankle some from a different culture, not to mention a different set of norms for what is considered an appropriate tone for a technical / academic paper. Personally, I found the tone somewhat combative and insulting/offensive, reminding me of Churchill's famous "carnivorous sheep" comment.
Regardless, a philosopher might have a perspective on the growth of technology, but unless he has a concrete mathematical argument -- and yes, logic is considered a branch of math today, not philosophy -- I don't see how he can justify his claims. It is this same arrogance of philosophers that makes me cringe every time they make claims to a special perspective on the problem of hard AI -- Searle's Chinese Room argument stands out as a particular example of "sloppy reasoning," to borrow Nordmann's phrase. Whenever a counter-argument to Searle's Chinese Room was given, Searle would simply do the equivalent of moving the goal posts, hiding behind the ambiguities of language and some philosophical concepts which don't have much curren
The National Socialists weren't true socialists -- not because "Nazis are bad and socialism is good," but because the NSDAP needed the support of the trade unions and other traditional socialist strongholds to gain power. In other words, they cloaked themselves in socialist badging and language until such time as their agenda no longer required the support of the people they had duped. That, and they coopted an existing political party, the German Workers Party, to do what they wanted.
(As an aside, I noticed the Wikipedia article about the NSDAP has an error in the German text -- they give the party name as "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei," but the final word should be "Arbeiterspartei." Probably a small bit of nit-picking, but I remembered enough from German class in high school to know it didn't "sound" right to me. Annoying because Google will try to correct you to "Arbeiterpartei" when searching, no doubt based on the Wikipedia article.)
I once managed a junior programmer who would insist that the compiler had a bug in it when she couldn't get her program to work.
We eventually fired her.
Why do I mention this? Because, as a programmer, when I get results I don't expect, I tend to assume that I have made a mistake somewhere. I don't assume that the underlying theory of how computers work is in error.
Your anecdote looks almost entirely ripped off from The Pragmatic Programmer.:-) No, I'm sure this really happened in your company, but the book goes into this sort of thing at length... I believe the anecdote provided in the book talks about a developer who insisted there was a bug in a linker or loader on a particular system.
Like others who have commented here, I too have discovered a compiler bug on an old SPARC system that used register-based argument passing to functions. (A C function took a float argument, but the calling code used a 0 instead of 0f or 0.0, so the compiler dutifully stuffed a 0 into an integer register, while the called function attempted to read from one of the floating point registers, which sometimes contained leftover garbage. Type coercion/promotion was clearly not happening.) Like others, I know this is a rare occurrence, so I don't look for it except under exceptional circumstances.
That said, if they are indeed not seeing what they think they are seeing (at least insofar as what the object is, regardless of the behavior), then that's cause for alarm -- other observations of exoplanets come into question. But it's entirely possible that some unforeseen dynamics are coming into play, perhaps some kind of relativistic effect that isn't being accounted for. It wouldn't necessarily mean that all we know about orbital mechanics is "wrong," it just means someone didn't model the system right, and something important got left out.
I'm also pretty sure the scientists investigating this hot Jupiter exoplanet have done their due dilligence, have tried chasing down all the likely suspects, and are still left with a conundrum. I doubt they leaped to any conclusions right away that our basic understanding of physics is wrong, and based on TFA, it looks as though they still are being careful not to draw any undue conclusions.
Because you certainly didn't negate anything he said.
The danger with ignoring the rule of law when it seems expedient to do so is, you can always come up with a reasonable-sounding excuse for why it's OK this time. Pretty soon, it's OK all the time because someone can come up with a justification, any justification, for bypassing the rule of law. If you can ignore a law so you can get the scoundrels of the hour, then you can ignore a law meant to protect the average citizen from abuse by society or powerful individuals.
You can also redefine who the scoundrel is.
Furthermore, protecting a national pastime like baseball as something sacrosanct is simply ridiculous. It's a spectator sport for crying out loud. To put the integrity of a sport above the rights of individuals is ludicrous, and I think most reasonable people would see it that way. Athletes are inspirational, but they are not heroes. Firefighters are heroes. Cops can be heroes, too.
I wish I had the mod points left to mod you Troll or Flamebait, because characterizing anyone who advocates for the rule of law as a "cretinous hysteric" certainly qualifies. I'm not even saying I can never see a time for ignoring a law -- there's a reason some people ignore certain laws they consider to be bad legislation, and that reason is called civil disobedience. But those who engage in civil disobedience still know they will likely get prosecuted if caught; it is precisely because of the rule of law that they know they likely won't get raped by the sheriff or given a punishment that far outstrips the crime committed, such as castration for possession of a couple grams of pot.
Well, BM used to allow people to bring their guns and go shooting, but that was ostensibly banned because the event grew too large for all range safety rules to be properly observed. One stray bullet or ricochet could make someone's life very unhappy.
I'm curious if (a) you're a lawyer, and (b) where you got your info on telephoto lenses from, because as an amateur photographer I have done a bit of reading on photographer's rights, and the general rule of thumb has always been stated similar to: "If you are standing in a public place (a place freely accessible to the public, which may in fact be privately owned property), you are free to take whatever photos you want of whatever is visible." It's hard to see how you can make a case that a telephoto lens is somehow violating someone's property rights, since telephoto lenses don't let you see through walls (a violation of privacy), etc. None of the guidelines I have read cite any restrictions on telephoto lenses such as you have described.
In point of fact, people can and routinely do take photographs of private property (buildings, houses, estates, etc.) from the street, even when building owners have a policy requiring "permission" to photograph the edifice (generally unenforceable). Google drives around neighborhoods and busy city streets taking photos of everything, routinely pissing people off, but they're within their legal rights. And photojournalists routinely use telephoto lenses to get difficult shots from a great distance when they don't wish to trespass, and I do not recall any of them getting sued or arrested for using a telephoto lens.
Wish I had the mod points to give you, but you appear to be correct -- I checked the BLM FAQ and it seems to indicate the same thing as well. BLM land is public land, and is administered on behalf of the Federal government.
Judging from what little was revealed in TFA, I guess RockMelt more or less requires you to have a Facebook account, and to use a Facebook login to access RockMelt's features. Talk about bundling! So rather than be an agnostic client agent to surf the web, RockMelt is going to serve as a portal to funnel you, the user, through a specific service before you get anywhere else. I'm sure Andreesen is also betting that this will funnel more dollars into his pockets, since he will create a more captive audience for his service.
No thanks, not a fan of lock-in of any kind. Also not a fan of most social networking services, which is why I have avoided Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et. al.
Say what you like about the new series and in retrospect it was a lot of portentous nonsense that seemed to hint at a depth that it didn't have, but at least the people writing it didn't seem to be capable of vivisecting their prisoners Mengele style and then joking about the fact that the prisoners are messed up by the experience.
No, but Admiral Cain did tacitly approve of her officers raping a number 6 model repeatedly, to the point where she suffered psychological scarring. Yeah, she didn't get vivisected. But the pain she suffered was far worse; after all, she deliberately chose suicide, something considered a sin by the Cylons. The only human to show her compassion was Baltar.
That trick doesn't work quite as well since 9/11. First, getting enough cash out of your savings or checking to do a stunt like that will raise eyebrows, and the bank has to report it... and there's a limit as to how much cash you can obtain in one transaction. I forget the limits, but I know even corporations have limits on how much cash they can withdraw from the bank at one time.
Then there are limits on cash transactions for making large purchases. I believe newer federal regulations (enacted since 9/11) require a waiting period on large cash purchases for things like cars, etc.
Of course, you could always just bypass the cheap shock value of wads of cash in a briefcase and bring a cashier's check, but that doesn't have the same emotional impact.:-)
Since I should put up or shut up, I found this resource which claims that a hair over 62% of all bankruptcies are medical, at least for the year 2007, and these were largely middle class people with jobs and medical insurance.
So, the GP's claim that the majority of bankruptcies are people living beyond their means are demonstrably false, since the majority are provably medical.
You argue from anecdotal evidence, but you don't cite any hard statistics to support your assertion that more people are in financial crisis due to living beyond their means than there are people who are in financial crisis due to unforeseen major expenses (you cite medical, but there are other disasters to consider).
Speaking of other disasters to consider, I recently had an HR action against me at my company, and got written up for insubordination. As part of that process, I can't get any kind of raise or promotion for 6 whole months. So my annual review (which is what we count on for a modest 4% average annual raise) has been delayed until the end of the year. Sure, that was at least partly my own fault (in the sense that the conflicts maybe could have been avoided in at least one case), even though my lawyer doesn't think things should have gone down the way they did. But the situation is what it is. Then I had two major home expenditures within the span of about two months -- air conditioning repair (a necessity in Arizona), and water heater replacement (not quick enough to avoid water damage from the old failing water heater).
Suddenly, my fiancee and I are swamped with a huge increase in debt load, which my income is no longer able to keep up with. Additionally, I was informed that I will need to save up for a new A/C system for my house, because the current system is on its last legs. I have no idea where the money is going to come from for that. Yeah, I'm sure I should have planned ahead and saved many months worth of salary, but that's not the way things worked out for me. As it is, I get paid well below what I should for my industry and my qualifications and experience; it's just that I need this job, so I stick with it while the job market in my field and in this geographic area continues to contract.
Funny enough, looking at the link you provided and following one of the embedded links for context got me this nugget:
By way of example, federal courts in Washington state and California have ruled that the class action bans in AT&T's cell phone contracts couldn't be enforced, because they violated Washington and California state law. In contrast, Federal courts in Louisiana have enforced such class action bans in a T-Mobile cell phone contract, finding that Louisiana state law at the time allowed the ban.
I doubt the infrared sensor mentioned in TFA (which produces images comparable to a "thermal imaging scan") has the resolution necessary to determine eyeline for each person sitting in front of the TV.
As others have pointed out, the "230 MPG" number is computed using the EPA's own guidelines, not GM's. So if anyone is lying here, it's not GM; at worst, they're taking advantage of the government's own flawed metric.
From TFA: We would ask patients to go without cigarettes for 12 hours.
IDIOTS. Anyone who has ever quit smoking will tell you the HELL they go through in the first few days. So they take smokers, ask them to stop smoking, MARVEL at the fact that the patient who is struggling to maintain a grasp on reality anyway - loses it, and then claim that nicotine improves brain function?
I can't tell if you're deliberately distorting the article, or if you're honestly clueless about what the article was saying.
Here, let me add some context back:
Prior to this study, any benefits seen with nicotine in people with schizophrenia were thought to be related to overcoming the effects of smoking withdrawal, said Barr, rather than the beneficial effects of nicotine on disease symptoms themselves.
Previously, "we would ask participants to go without a cigarette for 12 hours and then provide a single dose of nicotine and measure cognitive function," she said.
Emphasis added by me.
Yes, it's funny how the meaning of a phrase or sentence can be radically altered by the omission of one word, which you did. The paragraph prior explains that old thinking on this subject was that the "beneficial effect" for schizophrenics had more to do with the withdrawal symptoms than the nicotine itself. The current study actually debunks that theory, and demonstrates it's the nicotine itself that is beneficial.
Yes, that's why he used the word "until." As in, it was a forward looking statement. You know, the future?
Just because AIs haven't yet even equaled human intelligence (by our own standards), doesn't mean they never will. Any failure of imagination or technical acumen on your part should not be seen as a problem for the rest of humanity to make this particular outcome occur.
Fair use might be an American concept, but it most certainly wasn't invented by the Justices ("oligarchs" by your reckoning) of the Supreme Court. It was, in fact, codified into law in 1976, prior to which it was a common law concept. (Other common law countries have a similar, albeit weaker in practice, concept called "fair dealing.")
What bothers me about this European court making this decision is that it affects all EU countries, which may be forced to reconcile their copyright legislation with this decision as a result. Those in the UK who have been agitating for a formal legal definition of fair dealing and a delineation of what is acceptable and unacceptable are going to get set back a fair bit.
Indeed. Here, you're assuming the absence of a father figure is a cause for ADHD. Isn't it possible that the father (who may or may not be a carrier for the trait himself) might have trouble coping with a "problem child" and abandon the family when the child is young? I've seen this happen to friends in all walks of life -- not everyone can handle special needs kids of whatever variety, and even mild medical issues might be too much for some guys' coping skills.
Parent was responding to grandparent's implicit statement that ADD and ADHD are not real disorders, and that they are "just being a kid." Parent points out that there are adults diagnosed with ADD and ADHD, which blows away the grandparent's theory that these disorders are "just part of being a kid."
Parent was not in any way suggesting that Gary McKinnon was a kid.
Then again, I suppose you would then suggest that there's no such thing as adult ADD or ADHD either, and that the people with these disorders really just want legal speed. (You know, like adderal or ritalin.)
I was recently diagnosed with Asperger's, and although it was a tentative diagnosis, it seemed to fit very well. I sat in shock as I read your post, because it seemed like something I would write. Even the part about anger being one of the few emotions you can experience readily. I get that too -- and it's easy for simple frustration to ratchet quickly into anger.
Thanks for sharing. Once upon a time, even I was skeptical of the existence of Asperger's Syndrome, but the evidence keeps piling up (both objectively, in the form of medical and scientific research, and subjectively, in terms of my self-analysis and recollections of events and behaviors throughout my life). Like you, my gait is screwed up -- indeed, I remember incidents in high school where other students would make fun of my peculiar walk. I never did learn how to ride a bicycle, despite numerous attempts (including some in adulthood).
For all of those CDs still in the shrink wrap, purchased by someone and resold, which clearly have not been *used* anymore than the CDs you buy *new* at Walmart.
Point well taken, but I think the guy was just railing in general (and in a very minor way) against the creep of such weasel-words as "pre-owned" into our lexicon. It's not a grammar nazi thing -- in fact, this isn't an issue of grammar at all, it's one of diction. The term "pre-owned" was invented by marketroids and used car salesmen to take the stigma off of the merchandise that the word "used" confers.
That the term "pre-owned" can be interpreted as being a broad superset of "used" is a happy coincidence, but I should note that the dictionary definition of used includes the meaning of "not new" and "previously owned," so there's nothing incorrect about using "used" to mean "not new." Just in case you doubt me:
previously used or owned; secondhand: a used car [from Random House]
And also...
Not new; secondhand: a used car [from American Heritage]
(I love how they use the same example phrase in both citations.) So there's nothing tortured or incorrect going on here, and the GP was not wrong in his usage. If anything, you're torturing and distorting the word "used" by narrowing its meaning unnecessarily.
For all of those CDs still in the shrink wrap, purchased by someone and resold, which clearly have not been *used* anymore than the CDs you buy *new* at Walmart.
Point well taken, but I think the guy was just railing in general (and in a very minor way) against the creep of such weasel-words as "pre-owned" into our lexicon. It's not a grammar nazi thing -- in fact, this isn't an issue of grammar at all, it's one of diction. The term "pre-owned" was invented by marketroids and used car salesmen to take the stigma off of the merchandise that the word "used" confers.
That the term "pre-owned" can be interpreted as being a broad superset of "used" is a happy coincidence, but I should note that the dictionary definition of used includes the meaning of "not new" and "previously owned," so there's nothing incorrect about using "used" to mean "not new." Just in case you doubt me:
previously used or owned; secondhand: a used car [from Random House]
And also...
Not new; secondhand: a used car [from American Heritage]
(I love how they use the same example phrase in both citations.) So there's nothing tortured or incorrect going on here, and the GP was not wrong in his usage. If anything, you're torturing the word "used" by narrowing its meaning unnecessarily.
That's just silly. Northern Arizona (Flagstaff, for example) gets snow, and is actually quite chilly much of the year. Phoenix and Scottsdale may get ridiculously hot in the summer, but that only lasts about 4 months; the rest of the time, it's comfortable shirt-sleeve weather with low humidity, and it's not unheard of to need a jacket or sweater during the winter, especially at night. Why, we've even been known to get frost on the ground. I even remember it snowing once! (The snowfall only stuck to the ground south of Camelback Road, as I recall, but it lasted for a while.)
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I believe the term is "dedicating" the patent. (As in, you're dedicating it to the public domain.) IANAL, but that's the term that I've heard and seen used. And yes, a patent holder can totally do this, but most don't because of how valuable patents themselves are.
It's hard to know where to begin with this screed. First of all, it was published over a year ago -- why this seems relevant now is a mystery to me, especially since most of the author's points have been raised by others, and countered by Kurzweil himself in The Singularity is Near.
The whole idea that technological progress appears to be slowing down is actually covered by Kurzweil quite well in that book, with several arguments to counter.
What the author of this IEEE article provides is not so much a counter-argument to Kurzweil as a flat statement that Kurzweil is wrong. In other words, it's the rhetorical equivalent of "Nuh-uh!" Nordmann doesn't even bother trying to pick specific claims made by singularitarians and dismantle them with logic. In fact, he doesn't try to prove his position at all. He relies on smug and smarmy language to assert a point without ever justifying it, apparently assuming that his position is somehow the "default" and that the singularitarians are solely burdened to make their case. Let's examine this gem from his closing paragraph:
It sounds like a fine summary statement, until you realize there is precious little actual argument to bolster those claims or views in the preceding three pages.
Presumably, he wants you to buy his book, Singular Simplicity, wherein perhaps he actually gives us some meat to back up his arguments. Based on the quality of the article, however, I am not sanguine. He gives a little time to discussing "irresponsibility," though I'd be hard pressed to know which sense of the word he means in the closing paragraph; in one spot, he does mention the ethical problems posed by new medical diagnostic tests. He does make claims about wishful thinking, citing cherry picked examples (including wild speculation about the bright future of biotechnology and medicine), but the truth is Nordmann uses the term "wishful thinking" as a pejorative for any kind of extrapolation that he considers unjustified. That's a very convenient and very subjective metric.
As for the sloppy reasoning charge, I find it difficult to square with what I know of and have read by various proponents of the Singularity -- not just Kurzweil, but Vinge (whose thoughts on the topic continue to evolve every time I circle back to him) and others. I guess it's not technically an ad hominem attack if you're smearing an entire group of people, but we have other words for that...
When I saw the author's bio blurb at the end of the IEEE article, I realized why the article seemed to have the tone and slant that it did. Alfred Nordmann is a philosopher. OK, a German philosopher -- which implies a whole lot of cultural baggage and a Weltanschauung that might rankle some from a different culture, not to mention a different set of norms for what is considered an appropriate tone for a technical / academic paper. Personally, I found the tone somewhat combative and insulting/offensive, reminding me of Churchill's famous "carnivorous sheep" comment.
Regardless, a philosopher might have a perspective on the growth of technology, but unless he has a concrete mathematical argument -- and yes, logic is considered a branch of math today, not philosophy -- I don't see how he can justify his claims. It is this same arrogance of philosophers that makes me cringe every time they make claims to a special perspective on the problem of hard AI -- Searle's Chinese Room argument stands out as a particular example of "sloppy reasoning," to borrow Nordmann's phrase. Whenever a counter-argument to Searle's Chinese Room was given, Searle would simply do the equivalent of moving the goal posts, hiding behind the ambiguities of language and some philosophical concepts which don't have much curren
The National Socialists weren't true socialists -- not because "Nazis are bad and socialism is good," but because the NSDAP needed the support of the trade unions and other traditional socialist strongholds to gain power. In other words, they cloaked themselves in socialist badging and language until such time as their agenda no longer required the support of the people they had duped. That, and they coopted an existing political party, the German Workers Party, to do what they wanted.
(As an aside, I noticed the Wikipedia article about the NSDAP has an error in the German text -- they give the party name as "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei," but the final word should be "Arbeiterspartei." Probably a small bit of nit-picking, but I remembered enough from German class in high school to know it didn't "sound" right to me. Annoying because Google will try to correct you to "Arbeiterpartei" when searching, no doubt based on the Wikipedia article.)
Your anecdote looks almost entirely ripped off from The Pragmatic Programmer . :-) No, I'm sure this really happened in your company, but the book goes into this sort of thing at length... I believe the anecdote provided in the book talks about a developer who insisted there was a bug in a linker or loader on a particular system.
Like others who have commented here, I too have discovered a compiler bug on an old SPARC system that used register-based argument passing to functions. (A C function took a float argument, but the calling code used a 0 instead of 0f or 0.0, so the compiler dutifully stuffed a 0 into an integer register, while the called function attempted to read from one of the floating point registers, which sometimes contained leftover garbage. Type coercion/promotion was clearly not happening.) Like others, I know this is a rare occurrence, so I don't look for it except under exceptional circumstances.
That said, if they are indeed not seeing what they think they are seeing (at least insofar as what the object is, regardless of the behavior), then that's cause for alarm -- other observations of exoplanets come into question. But it's entirely possible that some unforeseen dynamics are coming into play, perhaps some kind of relativistic effect that isn't being accounted for. It wouldn't necessarily mean that all we know about orbital mechanics is "wrong," it just means someone didn't model the system right, and something important got left out.
I'm also pretty sure the scientists investigating this hot Jupiter exoplanet have done their due dilligence, have tried chasing down all the likely suspects, and are still left with a conundrum. I doubt they leaped to any conclusions right away that our basic understanding of physics is wrong, and based on TFA, it looks as though they still are being careful not to draw any undue conclusions.
Because you certainly didn't negate anything he said.
The danger with ignoring the rule of law when it seems expedient to do so is, you can always come up with a reasonable-sounding excuse for why it's OK this time. Pretty soon, it's OK all the time because someone can come up with a justification, any justification, for bypassing the rule of law. If you can ignore a law so you can get the scoundrels of the hour, then you can ignore a law meant to protect the average citizen from abuse by society or powerful individuals.
You can also redefine who the scoundrel is.
Furthermore, protecting a national pastime like baseball as something sacrosanct is simply ridiculous. It's a spectator sport for crying out loud. To put the integrity of a sport above the rights of individuals is ludicrous, and I think most reasonable people would see it that way. Athletes are inspirational, but they are not heroes. Firefighters are heroes. Cops can be heroes, too.
I wish I had the mod points left to mod you Troll or Flamebait, because characterizing anyone who advocates for the rule of law as a "cretinous hysteric" certainly qualifies. I'm not even saying I can never see a time for ignoring a law -- there's a reason some people ignore certain laws they consider to be bad legislation, and that reason is called civil disobedience. But those who engage in civil disobedience still know they will likely get prosecuted if caught; it is precisely because of the rule of law that they know they likely won't get raped by the sheriff or given a punishment that far outstrips the crime committed, such as castration for possession of a couple grams of pot.
Well, BM used to allow people to bring their guns and go shooting, but that was ostensibly banned because the event grew too large for all range safety rules to be properly observed. One stray bullet or ricochet could make someone's life very unhappy.
I'm curious if (a) you're a lawyer, and (b) where you got your info on telephoto lenses from, because as an amateur photographer I have done a bit of reading on photographer's rights, and the general rule of thumb has always been stated similar to: "If you are standing in a public place (a place freely accessible to the public, which may in fact be privately owned property), you are free to take whatever photos you want of whatever is visible." It's hard to see how you can make a case that a telephoto lens is somehow violating someone's property rights, since telephoto lenses don't let you see through walls (a violation of privacy), etc. None of the guidelines I have read cite any restrictions on telephoto lenses such as you have described.
In point of fact, people can and routinely do take photographs of private property (buildings, houses, estates, etc.) from the street, even when building owners have a policy requiring "permission" to photograph the edifice (generally unenforceable). Google drives around neighborhoods and busy city streets taking photos of everything, routinely pissing people off, but they're within their legal rights. And photojournalists routinely use telephoto lenses to get difficult shots from a great distance when they don't wish to trespass, and I do not recall any of them getting sued or arrested for using a telephoto lens.
Wish I had the mod points to give you, but you appear to be correct -- I checked the BLM FAQ and it seems to indicate the same thing as well. BLM land is public land, and is administered on behalf of the Federal government.
Judging from what little was revealed in TFA, I guess RockMelt more or less requires you to have a Facebook account, and to use a Facebook login to access RockMelt's features. Talk about bundling! So rather than be an agnostic client agent to surf the web, RockMelt is going to serve as a portal to funnel you, the user, through a specific service before you get anywhere else. I'm sure Andreesen is also betting that this will funnel more dollars into his pockets, since he will create a more captive audience for his service.
No thanks, not a fan of lock-in of any kind. Also not a fan of most social networking services, which is why I have avoided Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et. al.
No, but Admiral Cain did tacitly approve of her officers raping a number 6 model repeatedly, to the point where she suffered psychological scarring. Yeah, she didn't get vivisected. But the pain she suffered was far worse; after all, she deliberately chose suicide, something considered a sin by the Cylons. The only human to show her compassion was Baltar.
That trick doesn't work quite as well since 9/11. First, getting enough cash out of your savings or checking to do a stunt like that will raise eyebrows, and the bank has to report it... and there's a limit as to how much cash you can obtain in one transaction. I forget the limits, but I know even corporations have limits on how much cash they can withdraw from the bank at one time.
Then there are limits on cash transactions for making large purchases. I believe newer federal regulations (enacted since 9/11) require a waiting period on large cash purchases for things like cars, etc.
Of course, you could always just bypass the cheap shock value of wads of cash in a briefcase and bring a cashier's check, but that doesn't have the same emotional impact. :-)
Since I should put up or shut up, I found this resource which claims that a hair over 62% of all bankruptcies are medical, at least for the year 2007, and these were largely middle class people with jobs and medical insurance.
So, the GP's claim that the majority of bankruptcies are people living beyond their means are demonstrably false, since the majority are provably medical.
You argue from anecdotal evidence, but you don't cite any hard statistics to support your assertion that more people are in financial crisis due to living beyond their means than there are people who are in financial crisis due to unforeseen major expenses (you cite medical, but there are other disasters to consider).
Speaking of other disasters to consider, I recently had an HR action against me at my company, and got written up for insubordination. As part of that process, I can't get any kind of raise or promotion for 6 whole months. So my annual review (which is what we count on for a modest 4% average annual raise) has been delayed until the end of the year. Sure, that was at least partly my own fault (in the sense that the conflicts maybe could have been avoided in at least one case), even though my lawyer doesn't think things should have gone down the way they did. But the situation is what it is. Then I had two major home expenditures within the span of about two months -- air conditioning repair (a necessity in Arizona), and water heater replacement (not quick enough to avoid water damage from the old failing water heater).
Suddenly, my fiancee and I are swamped with a huge increase in debt load, which my income is no longer able to keep up with. Additionally, I was informed that I will need to save up for a new A/C system for my house, because the current system is on its last legs. I have no idea where the money is going to come from for that. Yeah, I'm sure I should have planned ahead and saved many months worth of salary, but that's not the way things worked out for me. As it is, I get paid well below what I should for my industry and my qualifications and experience; it's just that I need this job, so I stick with it while the job market in my field and in this geographic area continues to contract.
Funny enough, looking at the link you provided and following one of the embedded links for context got me this nugget:
I doubt the infrared sensor mentioned in TFA (which produces images comparable to a "thermal imaging scan") has the resolution necessary to determine eyeline for each person sitting in front of the TV.
As others have pointed out, the "230 MPG" number is computed using the EPA's own guidelines, not GM's. So if anyone is lying here, it's not GM; at worst, they're taking advantage of the government's own flawed metric.
I can't tell if you're deliberately distorting the article, or if you're honestly clueless about what the article was saying.
Here, let me add some context back:
Emphasis added by me.
Yes, it's funny how the meaning of a phrase or sentence can be radically altered by the omission of one word, which you did. The paragraph prior explains that old thinking on this subject was that the "beneficial effect" for schizophrenics had more to do with the withdrawal symptoms than the nicotine itself. The current study actually debunks that theory, and demonstrates it's the nicotine itself that is beneficial.
Yes, that's why he used the word "until." As in, it was a forward looking statement. You know, the future?
Just because AIs haven't yet even equaled human intelligence (by our own standards), doesn't mean they never will. Any failure of imagination or technical acumen on your part should not be seen as a problem for the rest of humanity to make this particular outcome occur.
Fair use might be an American concept, but it most certainly wasn't invented by the Justices ("oligarchs" by your reckoning) of the Supreme Court. It was, in fact, codified into law in 1976, prior to which it was a common law concept. (Other common law countries have a similar, albeit weaker in practice, concept called "fair dealing.")
What bothers me about this European court making this decision is that it affects all EU countries, which may be forced to reconcile their copyright legislation with this decision as a result. Those in the UK who have been agitating for a formal legal definition of fair dealing and a delineation of what is acceptable and unacceptable are going to get set back a fair bit.
Indeed. Here, you're assuming the absence of a father figure is a cause for ADHD. Isn't it possible that the father (who may or may not be a carrier for the trait himself) might have trouble coping with a "problem child" and abandon the family when the child is young? I've seen this happen to friends in all walks of life -- not everyone can handle special needs kids of whatever variety, and even mild medical issues might be too much for some guys' coping skills.
Reading comprehension failure on your part.
Parent was responding to grandparent's implicit statement that ADD and ADHD are not real disorders, and that they are "just being a kid." Parent points out that there are adults diagnosed with ADD and ADHD, which blows away the grandparent's theory that these disorders are "just part of being a kid."
Parent was not in any way suggesting that Gary McKinnon was a kid.
Then again, I suppose you would then suggest that there's no such thing as adult ADD or ADHD either, and that the people with these disorders really just want legal speed. (You know, like adderal or ritalin.)
I was recently diagnosed with Asperger's, and although it was a tentative diagnosis, it seemed to fit very well. I sat in shock as I read your post, because it seemed like something I would write. Even the part about anger being one of the few emotions you can experience readily. I get that too -- and it's easy for simple frustration to ratchet quickly into anger.
Thanks for sharing. Once upon a time, even I was skeptical of the existence of Asperger's Syndrome, but the evidence keeps piling up (both objectively, in the form of medical and scientific research, and subjectively, in terms of my self-analysis and recollections of events and behaviors throughout my life). Like you, my gait is screwed up -- indeed, I remember incidents in high school where other students would make fun of my peculiar walk. I never did learn how to ride a bicycle, despite numerous attempts (including some in adulthood).
Point well taken, but I think the guy was just railing in general (and in a very minor way) against the creep of such weasel-words as "pre-owned" into our lexicon. It's not a grammar nazi thing -- in fact, this isn't an issue of grammar at all, it's one of diction. The term "pre-owned" was invented by marketroids and used car salesmen to take the stigma off of the merchandise that the word "used" confers.
That the term "pre-owned" can be interpreted as being a broad superset of "used" is a happy coincidence, but I should note that the dictionary definition of used includes the meaning of "not new" and "previously owned," so there's nothing incorrect about using "used" to mean "not new." Just in case you doubt me:
And also...
(I love how they use the same example phrase in both citations.) So there's nothing tortured or incorrect going on here, and the GP was not wrong in his usage. If anything, you're torturing and distorting the word "used" by narrowing its meaning unnecessarily.
Point well taken, but I think the guy was just railing in general (and in a very minor way) against the creep of such weasel-words as "pre-owned" into our lexicon. It's not a grammar nazi thing -- in fact, this isn't an issue of grammar at all, it's one of diction. The term "pre-owned" was invented by marketroids and used car salesmen to take the stigma off of the merchandise that the word "used" confers.
That the term "pre-owned" can be interpreted as being a broad superset of "used" is a happy coincidence, but I should note that the dictionary definition of used includes the meaning of "not new" and "previously owned," so there's nothing incorrect about using "used" to mean "not new." Just in case you doubt me:
And also...
Not new; secondhand: a used car [from American Heritage]
(I love how they use the same example phrase in both citations.) So there's nothing tortured or incorrect going on here, and the GP was not wrong in his usage. If anything, you're torturing the word "used" by narrowing its meaning unnecessarily.
That's just silly. Northern Arizona (Flagstaff, for example) gets snow, and is actually quite chilly much of the year. Phoenix and Scottsdale may get ridiculously hot in the summer, but that only lasts about 4 months; the rest of the time, it's comfortable shirt-sleeve weather with low humidity, and it's not unheard of to need a jacket or sweater during the winter, especially at night. Why, we've even been known to get frost on the ground. I even remember it snowing once! (The snowfall only stuck to the ground south of Camelback Road, as I recall, but it lasted for a while.)