If Kopimism's main doctrine is the sharing of knowledge, then it clearly fails the primary characteristic of a religion, which is to share beliefs. In fact, distinguishing knowledge from belief pretty much disqualifies it as a religion. Religions generally deny the value of knowledge, primarily by classifying knowledge as just another set of beliefs that's no better than anyone else's beliefs.
If you prefer actual knowledge of facts, then you might be a scientist, or a historian, or maybe just an enlightened individual, but you're not religious. Religions don't depend on actual knowledge. You just believe what you're told, because if you don't, then that religion's god(s) will punish you severely (with the help of their followers). This doesn't require any file sharing, since the religious leaders are quite good at supplying you with all the beliefs that you'll ever need.
Sorry; franking doesn't quite cover it. That only means "free postage", which is, lessee now... (It's been a while since I sent a letter;-)... that's $0.44, which doesn't even cover the suggested $1. And typically, the cost to print the doc and stuff it into an envelope (and address the envelope) is more in the $3-$10 range. So, yes, franking privileges helps, but it's only on the order of 1/10 the total per-envelope cost.
I will gladly pay $1 in taxes each year to pay for them to print and mail a statement.
I've seen the accounting for such things in a number of corporations, and none of them could send out statements at a cost of under $1, so I doubt that the SSA can achieve such a cheap mailing, either.
There are a lot more costs than the paper and postage. This is the reason for the inexorable move to electronic statements. It's far cheaper to move a flock of electrons or photons than it is to move the equivalent pieces of paper. Electrons and photons are much better behaved than pieces of paper, so it can mostly be handled by the computers and comm gear, without human hands getting involved. You'd be surprised at how difficult it is to fully automate paper communications.
(Unless you've done it, of course, in which case you know most of the zillions of ways that pieces of paper -- and the moving parts that push them around -- can screw things up.;-)
When I follow that link and try to download the video, I get a message saying "The player cannot load the requested video. The player does not have permission. Message ID: UVP05004".
This is with several different browsers (FF, Safari, Opera) on my Macbook Pro. Anyone know how to make it work?
So let this be a lesson to you. Don't challenge scientists (real or wannabe) by saying that they can't find a way to disagree. Scientists are experts at disagreeing with each other; it's a basic part of what they do. Any competent scientist can come up with several incompatible "explanations" of any phenomenon. (The important part is that they can also apply for grants to test all the explanations.;-)
Some asshat on facebook complained that the sun doesn't have a surface,...
Similarly, if you look closely enough at what appears to be your (skin) surface, you'll find that in reality it's nothing more substantive than a fuzzy cloud of electrons. Small neutral particles of about the same size as the electrons (neutrons, neutrinos, etc.) have no problem with this "surface", and pass through it as if it didn't exist.
Whether something has a "surface" depends a lot on your definition of the term.
Well, I live a few blocks from the interchange between US 20 and I-95 (128), which is a rotary (roundabout). A standard problem here is the the traffic on US 20 tends to act as if, since it's a US highway, they have total right-of-way. So they often come barging into the rotary at highways speed, ignoring any traffic that might be in the rotary. It's not helped by the fact that they can't easily see the merging rotary traffic, since their view is blocked by the trees in the little triangle at the entrances. Similarly, rotary traffic can't easily see traffic coming in on the ramps from either highway. Also, the rotary surface is somewhat banked at the entrances, which further decreases visibility. And there are no stripes separating the traffic lanes.
So I'm pretty familiar with how the highway people can screw up what could have been a very good design for an interchange between two major highways.
New England in general is somewhat notorious for having poorly-designed street and highway systems. The typical example that visitors notice is the practice of having street signs at intersections that name only one of the streets. The section of US 20 between the above interchange and Main Street about 1.5 miles east has no sign anywhere giving its name. I found its name (Weston Street) accidentally one day by noticing it on google maps, then found that my GPS gadget also knows it. But the town apparently considers it a secret, not to be divulged to visitors.;-)
I've read the claim from any number of traffic experts, that roundabouts (or rotaries here in New England) are safer than 4-way intersections with or without lights. One of the theories is consistent with the many comments here that "people don't know how to behave in them": A roundabout looks dangerous to most people, so they are very wary in one, and are actually paying attention to the cars on both sides.
So maybe we should keep quiet about the safety aspect. If people believe it, they'll stop being so careful in roundabouts, and the accident rate will rise. We should keep them scared, while converting more intersections to roundabouts.
Yes, but it is a corruption of the US Constitution,...
Indeed. And that passage in the Constitution was worded as it was, in part because the guys who wrote it were familiar with the way that patent systems in Europe had often been corrupted to create monopolies on common goods. The phrase "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" was designed to prevent patents on things that didn't involve such progress.
Am I the one one here who thinks it's time to start reigning in this use of "war" for situations in which nobody is dying?
We should be demanding that the authors of such propaganda be required to document instances of rape, pillage and/or murder by the participants in such purported "wars". If they can't document google's bombing raids, etc., then they should be required to edit their reports to use more accurate terms for what google is actually doing to their victims.
(Actually, a lot of us would like to see the videos of google's acts of war against their opponents. Can we get them posted to youtube? That would certainly end a log of the fanboyism we see here with respect to google.;-)
It's not about society. It's about protecting specific interests, to protect industry from the effects of new technology that threatens its existence. From Gutenberg's printing press right up through the present and into the future.
Ah, but you're ignoring the well-documented fact that copyright was invented well before Gutenberg. The very name dates from before printing technology, when all texts had to be copied by hand, by scribes. And the first documented copyright had nothing to do with authorship; the concept was invented to control the copying of bibles and other religious texts, whose authors were centuries dead (and often unknown). The function of copyright was to legally restrict the production of religious texts to only the versions officially approved by the local rulers, and to keep the number of copies sufficiently low that only the priesthood could get copies.
The application of copyright to original documents, for economic reasons, was an innovation of the late 15th century, some decades after Gutenberg's work, and a century or so after the first print shops appeared in Europe.
But most of the history of copyright is about limiting the production of hand-copied text to only "authorized" versions, primarily for religious reasons. The extension to commercial transactions is, historically speaking, rather recent.
As is so often true now, there's a useful wikipedia article that summarizes this, and includes some useful links (for people who want to actually understand the history rather than just repeat the current commercial propaganda on the topic;-).
... patents are designed to encourage otherwise secret matters to be made publicly available in exchange for a limited monopoly on their use. It would take a face much straighter than mine to claim, at least with respect to matters anywhere near software, that they are other than a mess today; but that was in fact the theory.
Actually, if you consult various histories of the concept of patent, you'll find that restricting patents to new inventions is a rather recent (17th C?) development. Historically, it has long been common to (as the the US Patent Office now does) give a patent to anyone willing to pay the appropriate registration fee.
As usual, wikipedia has an article that describes this, and mentions that it was James I who added the requirement to English law that a patent had to be for something new. He did this in response to some extreme abuse of the patent system to award common commodities (salt is mentioned) as a monopoly to a specific manufacturer, which effectively prevented previous manufacturers from continuing their business.
But this isn't the first documented case of such things. There are a number of descriptions of an ancient Greek cooking contest, in which the winner was awarded a patent for one year, during which nobody else could produce the same dish. There's no hint that the winning entry had to be new; it just had to be the one preferred by the panel of judges, exactly like modern cooking contests.
It's likely that the current US scheme of rewarding a patent for things well known in the industry isn't a corruption, but rather a return to the original use of patent law. It was designed to give a monopoly in exchange for paying whatever fee the local ruler(s) demanded.
(This may seem cynical to modern readers, but it doesn't take much reading of the relevant ancient histories for it to pass from cynicism to understanding that this is one way that rulers have always enriched themselves.)
We need a better system, like having all candidates participate as contestants on one of those crazy Japanese game shows. This would immediately disqualify Sara Palin, as she can't even find Japan on a map.
Maybe not, but she can easily find it in real life. She just looks across her back fence, where she can see Russia, then looks zt the islands just to the left. Those are Japan.
Why not just pencil in an X next to the candidate's name like they do in other countries?
Because that wouldn't produce income for the top people in the companies that make the electronic voting equipment. And, of course, those are people who have contributed to the re-election campaigns of the legislators who have promised to push electronic voting.
Also, it's pretty well understood that secret, verifiable elections aren't exactly popular with "incumbent" legislators.
Here in the US, we had that amusing case a couple of elections ago, where the CEO of Diebold (one of the main makers of electronic voting equipment) promised the Republicans in Ohio in writing that he would deliver Ohio to the Republicans in the next election. He delivered, too.
Actually, I think the best comment on this issue was this story. (For the benefit of the whoosh-impaired, I'll point out that this is a satirical site.;-)
... firefox's own bar that comes up when you enter a password, or when a popup is blocked is yellow, iirc.
Not with the FF that's on this (Macbook Pro) machine, or on my Ubuntu box. I just did a quick test, by opening a new FF window and entering "microsoft.com" in the URL field. I've found that a useful example because it seems to always do something odd. This time, I got a "Firefox prevented this page from automatically reloading" message, which is white text on a dark gray background. I have no idea why it picked those colors, or how to change them.
Yes, I did look at the page's source, but it doesn't contain that message. In fact, the entire body of the message is:
<BODY><P></BODY>
This strikes me as very odd... But when I refresh the window, I do get the microsoft.com home page, without the dark-gray bar at the top. (So I closed the window.;-)
8. People who have strong prejudices tend to side with whomever validates their prejudices, regardless of the motive of the validator. (This also applies to both sides.)
Now that we are clear on that, I think it becomes very plain what the answer is:
Humans are stupid.
Heh. Actually, not all of them are stupid. But it reminds me of the old theory that the intelligence of a group of humans is an inverse function of the number of people in the group. Just what the function is doesn't seem to be completely known, but there's a lot of evidence to support the general idea: When people "buy into" a group for any reason, their resulting level of intelligence falls.
I've read a suggestion that one of the reasons for the success of science over the past few centuries is that scientists tend to gather only in rather small groups. This seriously limits the loss of intelligence of the group's results. Large scientific organizations tend to not accomplish anything themselves, though; they mostly just stupidly coordinate the communications of their members and the small research groups, and blindly rubber-stamp the results of the small groups or individuals.
It's interesting to think about in discussions like this.
As a previous poster said, the ones making the claim need to provide the proof. All we have it conjecture and computer models...basically guesses. Fancy guesses, but still nothing that approaches the level of "proof".
Any idiot knows, you can't prove a negative, which what you just claimed they have to do.
Well, sure, idiots often know that. But sensible people often understand that many negatives are quite easy to prove.
Consider a claim of the form "X is not always followed by Y". This is a very negative claim, and all that is required to prove it is to present one documented case of X that is not followed by Y.
This isn't a trivial sort of example. It's the core of the scientific method. As has been pointed out by many of the historians and theoreticians of science, scientific methods rarely if ever "prove" anything. Scientific methods fundamentally rely on disproving things. People collect a body of evidence on some topic, they (or others) propose a list of hypotheses that all explain the evidence; experiments and/or observations are done that attempt to disprove these hypotheses. Eventually, most of them are disproved, and those left standing are promoted to "scientific theory", tentatively accepted as valid until someone manages to disprove one or more of them.
The canonical textbook example is probably Einstein's theories, including both Special and General Relativity, and also Quantum Theory. These theories made lots of counter-intuitive predictions about the way the universe behaves, and when scientists first tried disproving them, they failed. The universe really was that weird, it seemed. This process is still going on. Some recent observations of the behavior of our satellites have tried to find counter-evidence to the bizarre concept of "frame dragging"; they found that the satellites behaved as if frame dragging actually happens as Einstein's equations predict (to within the margin of error of the observations).
But note that nothing here actually proves that Einstein's theories are correct. As with Newton's theories before his, Einstein's work may eventually turn out to be just an approximation. So scientists keep trying to find ways to disprove the the predictions of Einstein's equations. They keep failing. This is the closest thing to "proof" that science has.
So criticising the climate researchers for not proving something isn't a valid criticism. Of course they don't; they're doing science, not mathematics. They don't do proofs. They make predictions based on the best current theories, then they try to disprove them by observation and experiment. Experiment is difficult with climate, so they mostly do observation. Decades of observational data doesn't prove anything, but it's all consistent with the hypothesis that humans are pushing a major climate shift on the planet. The data is inconsistent with any other prediction.
(It is somewhat interesting that the "climate skeptic" crowd doesn't actual seem to make testable predictions of their own. We should conclude that, whether they're right or wrong, they aren't scientists. In fact, they seem to have little understanding of how science actually works.;-)
I spent years debating IDers and Creationists and it strikes me that pretty much every tactic used by the pseudo-skeptics in that debate have been used against science in this one.
Probably true, but the explanation could be something that's pretty much independent of the subject matter: There is a well-known set of logical failures that humans are subject to, and people who for some reason want to convince us of something that's contrary to the evidence will naturally use fallacious reasoning from this set to persuade audiences. It shouldn't come as a surprise that pseudo-science in different topics would be based on similar methods of fallacious reasoning.
Yeah, I suppose, though the google/FF relationship is a rather cooperative sort of competition.;-) A new install of FF does come up with google as the default search engine, for example. Unless they've changed it recently.
Hmmm... In the FF on this Macbook Pro, and also on my Ubuntu box, it's clearly a dark gray (but not quite black). I haven't (knowingly;-) set it to dark gray. So do you know how to set its color? I've been thinking of digging into the HTML, and see if I can create some CSS that will override the color, but it hasn't been enough an annoyance to sink the time into doing it. Or I could dig into google's HTML and see if I can tweak it. Or both, if I have even more time to waste.
This is becoming a common solution to the "designer bloat" of so many web sites. The top-selling computers are now "smart phones" and other small portables with limited screen space. This puts pressure on web sites to supply a second access path that has most of the wasted screen space stripped out. Very often, you can add "/mobile/" to the URL, though "/pda/" is also common. That often also strips out most of the ads, especially the cpu-chomping video ads.
People on the go who are rapidly consulting their handhelds don't tolerate such bloat very well, and tend to hit "Back" rapidly when they see such things, so we can expect that these space-efficient pages will continue to spread. I've worked on a number of web sites recently where I created this second, stripped-down version of most of the content, triggered by "/mobile/" in the URL.
Almost all the mobile/pda web sites work quite well on a large screen, so it can be worthwhile to try to find them for any site that you want to visit more than once. Why allow a single site's web page to claim most of your screen, when you can use the "mobile" version and fit several sites on the screen?
There was always a menu at the top. Now it's a different color,...
Yes, but in my case, I think the reason it's a problem is that the new color exactly mimics the bar you get with Firefox saying "Firefox prevented this page from...", for some particular suspicious value of "...". I use several browsers routinely in my web testing and browsing, but FF is one of my first tools, so my subconscious notices this dark-grey bar and tells me to pay attention to it. Google's use of the same color scheme in the same position is rather annoying, and I've also wondered if I could find a way to make it not so intrusive.
Of course, google and Firefox come from rather unrelated sources, so I don't expect them to coordinate their actions. But I do find this a good example of why so much stuff on the Web is jumbled, inconsistent and confusing. As if I really needed such examples...;-)
If I'm searching for something technology or video game related and my search query happens to resemble an old news headline or phrase, I end up with thousands of blogs repeating the exact same story with slightly rearranged headlines. And god help you if your search phrase is part of some song lyric. Why do that many lyrics websites even exist?
Heh. A related problem I've run into lately is that I've been trying to get a handle on the HTML5 developments. The problem is that by now, there seem to be over 1000 HTML5 "forums", most of which get a handful of questions per month, and which are mostly answered (if at all) by the forum's maintainer. You'd think they'd want to get together and pool their resources into one or a few major "HTML5 info" sites. But it looks like, while everyone agrees with this, they all think "It obviously should be my site." And when you ask google or any other search site an HTML5 question, you get zillions of links to versions of the same question, most of which aren't answered. If you find an answer and bookmark that site, you find that it doesn't have answers to many other questions.
This is a case where old usenet system did a much better job. But we all know that usenet is dead, right? It's been replaced by "much better" web sites, each of which has its own idiosyncratic interface that requires yet another login account and has a different UI from all the others. And a large number of sites dealing with the same topic.
Actually, it's more accurate to say that Big got caught presenting Google's search results as its own. The difference is subtle, but significant.
The practice of connecting to other search sites and incorporating their results in your own site's results is not only common now; it's also recognized as a separate sort of search with its own emerging standards. Pretty much all the big search sites, including google, are involved in this development, and google has contributed significantly to the emerging standards.
This is really no different that the old practice among scholars of incorporating other's results. The significant part is that you are expected to let the reader know that you've done this. Traditionally, this was done in the footnotes that reference the publication that you've taken information from. If you don't include the reference, you've committed an act of plagiarism, but if you properly credit your sources, you've committed an act of scholarship.
The web-search arena is slowly building a version of the same sort of thing. As with the traditional scholarly system, Bing's sin wasn't presenting results taken from others; Bing's sin was presenting the results as their own, and not crediting their sources.
The computer field has many example of this sort of offense. A big one back in the 1990s was when Sun offended the open-source crowd. Sun had always incorporated a lot of "FOSS" code in their products, with the blessing of the code's authors. But in this case, they stripped out all the credits from the code, making it look like their were claiming all the code as their own. As in traditional scholarship, and as with the recent Bing offense, this was totally unacceptable to the FOSS crowd. The rule is "You can use our stuff all you like, but you must give us proper credit for our work." Sun and Bing both violated this rule, and were properly (and very publicly) criticized for this. Sun eventually apologized and restored the credits, but the incident was never forgotten by the people who followed the story. (Did Bing ever actually apologize for their plagiarism?)
Now if we could just get the "news industry" to adopt similar rules of always crediting their sources. This is a good part of why a lot of the growing online news system feels so little sympathy for the traditional news publications. They almost never included even bylines with their news, only with their editorials. Their web sites mostly continue the practice of omitting source attribution. When they start giving their sources proper credit, they may find that a lot of us will have much more sympathy for their plight.
Slashdot Mirror
Rational responses on religion can get a person into trouble around here.
Rationalism in the vicinity of religion can get a person into trouble nearly anywhere.
If Kopimism's main doctrine is the sharing of knowledge, then it clearly fails the primary characteristic of a religion, which is to share beliefs. In fact, distinguishing knowledge from belief pretty much disqualifies it as a religion. Religions generally deny the value of knowledge, primarily by classifying knowledge as just another set of beliefs that's no better than anyone else's beliefs.
If you prefer actual knowledge of facts, then you might be a scientist, or a historian, or maybe just an enlightened individual, but you're not religious. Religions don't depend on actual knowledge. You just believe what you're told, because if you don't, then that religion's god(s) will punish you severely (with the help of their followers). This doesn't require any file sharing, since the religious leaders are quite good at supplying you with all the beliefs that you'll ever need.
Sorry; franking doesn't quite cover it. That only means "free postage", which is, lessee now ... (It's been a while since I sent a letter ;-) ... that's $0.44, which doesn't even cover the suggested $1. And typically, the cost to print the doc and stuff it into an envelope (and address the envelope) is more in the $3-$10 range. So, yes, franking privileges helps, but it's only on the order of 1/10 the total per-envelope cost.
I will gladly pay $1 in taxes each year to pay for them to print and mail a statement.
I've seen the accounting for such things in a number of corporations, and none of them could send out statements at a cost of under $1, so I doubt that the SSA can achieve such a cheap mailing, either.
There are a lot more costs than the paper and postage. This is the reason for the inexorable move to electronic statements. It's far cheaper to move a flock of electrons or photons than it is to move the equivalent pieces of paper. Electrons and photons are much better behaved than pieces of paper, so it can mostly be handled by the computers and comm gear, without human hands getting involved. You'd be surprised at how difficult it is to fully automate paper communications.
(Unless you've done it, of course, in which case you know most of the zillions of ways that pieces of paper -- and the moving parts that push them around -- can screw things up. ;-)
When I follow that link and try to download the video, I get a message saying "The player cannot load the requested video. The player does not have permission. Message ID: UVP05004".
This is with several different browsers (FF, Safari, Opera) on my Macbook Pro. Anyone know how to make it work?
So let this be a lesson to you. Don't challenge scientists (real or wannabe) by saying that they can't find a way to disagree. Scientists are experts at disagreeing with each other; it's a basic part of what they do. Any competent scientist can come up with several incompatible "explanations" of any phenomenon. (The important part is that they can also apply for grants to test all the explanations. ;-)
Some asshat on facebook complained that the sun doesn't have a surface, ...
Similarly, if you look closely enough at what appears to be your (skin) surface, you'll find that in reality it's nothing more substantive than a fuzzy cloud of electrons. Small neutral particles of about the same size as the electrons (neutrons, neutrinos, etc.) have no problem with this "surface", and pass through it as if it didn't exist.
Whether something has a "surface" depends a lot on your definition of the term.
Well, I live a few blocks from the interchange between US 20 and I-95 (128), which is a rotary (roundabout). A standard problem here is the the traffic on US 20 tends to act as if, since it's a US highway, they have total right-of-way. So they often come barging into the rotary at highways speed, ignoring any traffic that might be in the rotary. It's not helped by the fact that they can't easily see the merging rotary traffic, since their view is blocked by the trees in the little triangle at the entrances. Similarly, rotary traffic can't easily see traffic coming in on the ramps from either highway. Also, the rotary surface is somewhat banked at the entrances, which further decreases visibility. And there are no stripes separating the traffic lanes.
So I'm pretty familiar with how the highway people can screw up what could have been a very good design for an interchange between two major highways.
New England in general is somewhat notorious for having poorly-designed street and highway systems. The typical example that visitors notice is the practice of having street signs at intersections that name only one of the streets. The section of US 20 between the above interchange and Main Street about 1.5 miles east has no sign anywhere giving its name. I found its name (Weston Street) accidentally one day by noticing it on google maps, then found that my GPS gadget also knows it. But the town apparently considers it a secret, not to be divulged to visitors. ;-)
I've read the claim from any number of traffic experts, that roundabouts (or rotaries here in New England) are safer than 4-way intersections with or without lights. One of the theories is consistent with the many comments here that "people don't know how to behave in them": A roundabout looks dangerous to most people, so they are very wary in one, and are actually paying attention to the cars on both sides.
So maybe we should keep quiet about the safety aspect. If people believe it, they'll stop being so careful in roundabouts, and the accident rate will rise. We should keep them scared, while converting more intersections to roundabouts.
Yes, but it is a corruption of the US Constitution, ...
Indeed. And that passage in the Constitution was worded as it was, in part because the guys who wrote it were familiar with the way that patent systems in Europe had often been corrupted to create monopolies on common goods. The phrase "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" was designed to prevent patents on things that didn't involve such progress.
I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of this infamous recent patent. ;-)
Am I the one one here who thinks it's time to start reigning in this use of "war" for situations in which nobody is dying?
We should be demanding that the authors of such propaganda be required to document instances of rape, pillage and/or murder by the participants in such purported "wars". If they can't document google's bombing raids, etc., then they should be required to edit their reports to use more accurate terms for what google is actually doing to their victims.
(Actually, a lot of us would like to see the videos of google's acts of war against their opponents. Can we get them posted to youtube? That would certainly end a log of the fanboyism we see here with respect to google. ;-)
It's not about society. It's about protecting specific interests, to protect industry from the effects of new technology that threatens its existence. From Gutenberg's printing press right up through the present and into the future.
Ah, but you're ignoring the well-documented fact that copyright was invented well before Gutenberg. The very name dates from before printing technology, when all texts had to be copied by hand, by scribes. And the first documented copyright had nothing to do with authorship; the concept was invented to control the copying of bibles and other religious texts, whose authors were centuries dead (and often unknown). The function of copyright was to legally restrict the production of religious texts to only the versions officially approved by the local rulers, and to keep the number of copies sufficiently low that only the priesthood could get copies.
The application of copyright to original documents, for economic reasons, was an innovation of the late 15th century, some decades after Gutenberg's work, and a century or so after the first print shops appeared in Europe.
But most of the history of copyright is about limiting the production of hand-copied text to only "authorized" versions, primarily for religious reasons. The extension to commercial transactions is, historically speaking, rather recent.
As is so often true now, there's a useful wikipedia article that summarizes this, and includes some useful links (for people who want to actually understand the history rather than just repeat the current commercial propaganda on the topic ;-).
... patents are designed to encourage otherwise secret matters to be made publicly available in exchange for a limited monopoly on their use. It would take a face much straighter than mine to claim, at least with respect to matters anywhere near software, that they are other than a mess today; but that was in fact the theory.
Actually, if you consult various histories of the concept of patent, you'll find that restricting patents to new inventions is a rather recent (17th C?) development. Historically, it has long been common to (as the the US Patent Office now does) give a patent to anyone willing to pay the appropriate registration fee.
As usual, wikipedia has an article that describes this, and mentions that it was James I who added the requirement to English law that a patent had to be for something new. He did this in response to some extreme abuse of the patent system to award common commodities (salt is mentioned) as a monopoly to a specific manufacturer, which effectively prevented previous manufacturers from continuing their business.
But this isn't the first documented case of such things. There are a number of descriptions of an ancient Greek cooking contest, in which the winner was awarded a patent for one year, during which nobody else could produce the same dish. There's no hint that the winning entry had to be new; it just had to be the one preferred by the panel of judges, exactly like modern cooking contests.
It's likely that the current US scheme of rewarding a patent for things well known in the industry isn't a corruption, but rather a return to the original use of patent law. It was designed to give a monopoly in exchange for paying whatever fee the local ruler(s) demanded.
(This may seem cynical to modern readers, but it doesn't take much reading of the relevant ancient histories for it to pass from cynicism to understanding that this is one way that rulers have always enriched themselves.)
We need a better system, like having all candidates participate as contestants on one of those crazy Japanese game shows. This would immediately disqualify Sara Palin, as she can't even find Japan on a map.
Maybe not, but she can easily find it in real life. She just looks across her back fence, where she can see Russia, then looks zt the islands just to the left. Those are Japan.
It's a lot harder on a map, y'know.
Why not just pencil in an X next to the candidate's name like they do in other countries?
Because that wouldn't produce income for the top people in the companies that make the electronic voting equipment. And, of course, those are people who have contributed to the re-election campaigns of the legislators who have promised to push electronic voting.
Also, it's pretty well understood that secret, verifiable elections aren't exactly popular with "incumbent" legislators.
Here in the US, we had that amusing case a couple of elections ago, where the CEO of Diebold (one of the main makers of electronic voting equipment) promised the Republicans in Ohio in writing that he would deliver Ohio to the Republicans in the next election. He delivered, too.
Actually, I think the best comment on this issue was this story. (For the benefit of the whoosh-impaired, I'll point out that this is a satirical site. ;-)
... firefox's own bar that comes up when you enter a password, or when a popup is blocked is yellow, iirc.
Not with the FF that's on this (Macbook Pro) machine, or on my Ubuntu box. I just did a quick test, by opening a new FF window and entering "microsoft.com" in the URL field. I've found that a useful example because it seems to always do something odd. This time, I got a "Firefox prevented this page from automatically reloading" message, which is white text on a dark gray background. I have no idea why it picked those colors, or how to change them.
Yes, I did look at the page's source, but it doesn't contain that message. In fact, the entire body of the message is:
<BODY><P></BODY>
This strikes me as very odd ... But when I refresh the window, I do get the microsoft.com home page, without the dark-gray bar at the top. (So I closed the window. ;-)
8. People who have strong prejudices tend to side with whomever validates their prejudices, regardless of the motive of the validator. (This also applies to both sides.)
Now that we are clear on that, I think it becomes very plain what the answer is:
Humans are stupid.
Heh. Actually, not all of them are stupid. But it reminds me of the old theory that the intelligence of a group of humans is an inverse function of the number of people in the group. Just what the function is doesn't seem to be completely known, but there's a lot of evidence to support the general idea: When people "buy into" a group for any reason, their resulting level of intelligence falls.
I've read a suggestion that one of the reasons for the success of science over the past few centuries is that scientists tend to gather only in rather small groups. This seriously limits the loss of intelligence of the group's results. Large scientific organizations tend to not accomplish anything themselves, though; they mostly just stupidly coordinate the communications of their members and the small research groups, and blindly rubber-stamp the results of the small groups or individuals.
It's interesting to think about in discussions like this.
As a previous poster said, the ones making the claim need to provide the proof. All we have it conjecture and computer models...basically guesses. Fancy guesses, but still nothing that approaches the level of "proof". Any idiot knows, you can't prove a negative, which what you just claimed they have to do.
Well, sure, idiots often know that. But sensible people often understand that many negatives are quite easy to prove.
Consider a claim of the form "X is not always followed by Y". This is a very negative claim, and all that is required to prove it is to present one documented case of X that is not followed by Y.
This isn't a trivial sort of example. It's the core of the scientific method. As has been pointed out by many of the historians and theoreticians of science, scientific methods rarely if ever "prove" anything. Scientific methods fundamentally rely on disproving things. People collect a body of evidence on some topic, they (or others) propose a list of hypotheses that all explain the evidence; experiments and/or observations are done that attempt to disprove these hypotheses. Eventually, most of them are disproved, and those left standing are promoted to "scientific theory", tentatively accepted as valid until someone manages to disprove one or more of them.
The canonical textbook example is probably Einstein's theories, including both Special and General Relativity, and also Quantum Theory. These theories made lots of counter-intuitive predictions about the way the universe behaves, and when scientists first tried disproving them, they failed. The universe really was that weird, it seemed. This process is still going on. Some recent observations of the behavior of our satellites have tried to find counter-evidence to the bizarre concept of "frame dragging"; they found that the satellites behaved as if frame dragging actually happens as Einstein's equations predict (to within the margin of error of the observations).
But note that nothing here actually proves that Einstein's theories are correct. As with Newton's theories before his, Einstein's work may eventually turn out to be just an approximation. So scientists keep trying to find ways to disprove the the predictions of Einstein's equations. They keep failing. This is the closest thing to "proof" that science has.
So criticising the climate researchers for not proving something isn't a valid criticism. Of course they don't; they're doing science, not mathematics. They don't do proofs. They make predictions based on the best current theories, then they try to disprove them by observation and experiment. Experiment is difficult with climate, so they mostly do observation. Decades of observational data doesn't prove anything, but it's all consistent with the hypothesis that humans are pushing a major climate shift on the planet. The data is inconsistent with any other prediction.
(It is somewhat interesting that the "climate skeptic" crowd doesn't actual seem to make testable predictions of their own. We should conclude that, whether they're right or wrong, they aren't scientists. In fact, they seem to have little understanding of how science actually works. ;-)
I spent years debating IDers and Creationists and it strikes me that pretty much every tactic used by the pseudo-skeptics in that debate have been used against science in this one.
Probably true, but the explanation could be something that's pretty much independent of the subject matter: There is a well-known set of logical failures that humans are subject to, and people who for some reason want to convince us of something that's contrary to the evidence will naturally use fallacious reasoning from this set to persuade audiences. It shouldn't come as a surprise that pseudo-science in different topics would be based on similar methods of fallacious reasoning.
Yeah, I suppose, though the google/FF relationship is a rather cooperative sort of competition. ;-) A new install of FF does come up with google as the default search engine, for example. Unless they've changed it recently.
Hmmm ... In the FF on this Macbook Pro, and also on my Ubuntu box, it's clearly a dark gray (but not quite black). I haven't (knowingly ;-) set it to dark gray. So do you know how to set its color? I've been thinking of digging into the HTML, and see if I can create some CSS that will override the color, but it hasn't been enough an annoyance to sink the time into doing it. Or I could dig into google's HTML and see if I can tweak it. Or both, if I have even more time to waste.
http://www.google.com/pda/
Thank you!
This is becoming a common solution to the "designer bloat" of so many web sites. The top-selling computers are now "smart phones" and other small portables with limited screen space. This puts pressure on web sites to supply a second access path that has most of the wasted screen space stripped out. Very often, you can add "/mobile/" to the URL, though "/pda/" is also common. That often also strips out most of the ads, especially the cpu-chomping video ads.
People on the go who are rapidly consulting their handhelds don't tolerate such bloat very well, and tend to hit "Back" rapidly when they see such things, so we can expect that these space-efficient pages will continue to spread. I've worked on a number of web sites recently where I created this second, stripped-down version of most of the content, triggered by "/mobile/" in the URL.
Almost all the mobile/pda web sites work quite well on a large screen, so it can be worthwhile to try to find them for any site that you want to visit more than once. Why allow a single site's web page to claim most of your screen, when you can use the "mobile" version and fit several sites on the screen?
There was always a menu at the top. Now it's a different color, ...
Yes, but in my case, I think the reason it's a problem is that the new color exactly mimics the bar you get with Firefox saying "Firefox prevented this page from ...", for some particular suspicious value of "...". I use several browsers routinely in my web testing and browsing, but FF is one of my first tools, so my subconscious notices this dark-grey bar and tells me to pay attention to it. Google's use of the same color scheme in the same position is rather annoying, and I've also wondered if I could find a way to make it not so intrusive.
Of course, google and Firefox come from rather unrelated sources, so I don't expect them to coordinate their actions. But I do find this a good example of why so much stuff on the Web is jumbled, inconsistent and confusing. As if I really needed such examples ... ;-)
If I'm searching for something technology or video game related and my search query happens to resemble an old news headline or phrase, I end up with thousands of blogs repeating the exact same story with slightly rearranged headlines. And god help you if your search phrase is part of some song lyric. Why do that many lyrics websites even exist?
Heh. A related problem I've run into lately is that I've been trying to get a handle on the HTML5 developments. The problem is that by now, there seem to be over 1000 HTML5 "forums", most of which get a handful of questions per month, and which are mostly answered (if at all) by the forum's maintainer. You'd think they'd want to get together and pool their resources into one or a few major "HTML5 info" sites. But it looks like, while everyone agrees with this, they all think "It obviously should be my site." And when you ask google or any other search site an HTML5 question, you get zillions of links to versions of the same question, most of which aren't answered. If you find an answer and bookmark that site, you find that it doesn't have answers to many other questions.
This is a case where old usenet system did a much better job. But we all know that usenet is dead, right? It's been replaced by "much better" web sites, each of which has its own idiosyncratic interface that requires yet another login account and has a different UI from all the others. And a large number of sites dealing with the same topic.
Actually, it's more accurate to say that Big got caught presenting Google's search results as its own. The difference is subtle, but significant.
The practice of connecting to other search sites and incorporating their results in your own site's results is not only common now; it's also recognized as a separate sort of search with its own emerging standards. Pretty much all the big search sites, including google, are involved in this development, and google has contributed significantly to the emerging standards.
This is really no different that the old practice among scholars of incorporating other's results. The significant part is that you are expected to let the reader know that you've done this. Traditionally, this was done in the footnotes that reference the publication that you've taken information from. If you don't include the reference, you've committed an act of plagiarism, but if you properly credit your sources, you've committed an act of scholarship.
The web-search arena is slowly building a version of the same sort of thing. As with the traditional scholarly system, Bing's sin wasn't presenting results taken from others; Bing's sin was presenting the results as their own, and not crediting their sources.
The computer field has many example of this sort of offense. A big one back in the 1990s was when Sun offended the open-source crowd. Sun had always incorporated a lot of "FOSS" code in their products, with the blessing of the code's authors. But in this case, they stripped out all the credits from the code, making it look like their were claiming all the code as their own. As in traditional scholarship, and as with the recent Bing offense, this was totally unacceptable to the FOSS crowd. The rule is "You can use our stuff all you like, but you must give us proper credit for our work." Sun and Bing both violated this rule, and were properly (and very publicly) criticized for this. Sun eventually apologized and restored the credits, but the incident was never forgotten by the people who followed the story. (Did Bing ever actually apologize for their plagiarism?)
Now if we could just get the "news industry" to adopt similar rules of always crediting their sources. This is a good part of why a lot of the growing online news system feels so little sympathy for the traditional news publications. They almost never included even bylines with their news, only with their editorials. Their web sites mostly continue the practice of omitting source attribution. When they start giving their sources proper credit, they may find that a lot of us will have much more sympathy for their plight.