Something is very wrong with the Swedish political system.
Don't they know the opposition party is supposed to claim they oppose unpopular laws like those then do nothing about them once they're voted into power.
Yes, they did exactly that, but unfortunately for them there was a power change in Sweden a few years ago, and it became clear that many of unpopular laws being passed by this government had actually been drafted by the last one.
The current Swedish government has rushed through a number of privacy encroaching laws regarding the Internet, which have been deeply unpopular with a large part of the population, and yet have had the support of all the mainstream parties. These have included:
- Unlimited wiretapping with court order of all International data traffic for the intelligence services (and remember that in a country of 9 million, a lot more traffic is international than say in the US - in fact a lot of domestic traffic is routed internationally!)
- Forced data retention laws for ISPs, forcing them to keep information about all incoming/outgoing email as well as TCP connections.
- Laws enacted to help the music/movie industry allowing them to demand ISPs reveal the identity of Internet users with little court oversight.
These things, much more than the takedown of the pirate bay, has influenced people to vote for the Pirate Party, who have presented the only political opposition to them.
In fact, my 58 year old mother just called me to tell me she voted for PP (and I didn't even ask her to). I promise that she has never torrented anything in her life - yet she doesn't like the government spying on her more than anybody else.
Carbon Sciences has developed plans for a CO2-Fuel transformation plant that takes CO2 from a large emitter, such as a power plant, and produces usable fuels as the output.
In case you missed it, that would be when you know this is nonsense.
(By the laws of nature, getting the carbon out of the CO2 will take at least as much energy as you got by burning the carbon in the first place. So attaching the "transformation plant" to a carbon fueled power plant means you have a process turning hydrocarbons into hydrocarbons, and spending energy doing it.)
The Cato Institute is a neo-liberal/neo-conservative "think tank" and lobby group. Of course they're trying to attack Naomi Klein
And your point is? By the same token: Naomi Klein is a leftist, so of course she is trying to attack free economies. But that isn't what undermines her argument, what undermines her argument is that it is false.
Got to ask then... What do you use in Sweden for large purchases before the advent of credit cards? He is wrong to say they were never used - I remember my parents using checks in Sweden back in the 80s. They were however phased out a long time ago. I think there are very few people younger than 30 who have ever used one.
This is a good thing. Having to install monitoring at the source or destination means an operation that requires effort and, hopefully, a court order. This means that their is judicial oversight, and that to catch criminals police have to do, you know, police work rather than just sitting around spying on us.
Ubiquitous encryption does not make law enforcement impossible. It just makes indiscriminate law enforcement impossible.
Ok, so there are two basic ways in which you can deal with these regimes, talk to them or bomb them back to the dark ages. You can also not give them control of the Internet's architecture. I'm not sure under which part of your false dichotomy that falls.
"I do not sanction the grotesque pretense of an organization allegedly devoted to world peace and human rights, which includes Soviet Russia, the worst aggressor and bloodiest butcher in history, as one of its members. The notion of protecting rights, with Soviet Russia among the protectors, is an insult to the concept of rights and to the intelligence of any man who is asked to endorse or sanction such an organization. I do not believe that an individual should cooperate with criminals, and, for all the same reasons, I do not believe that free countries should cooperate with dictatorships."
Change out "Soviet Russia" for "PRC" (and to a growing extent Putin's Russia) and this still holds today.
I'm not American, don't get to vote for American laws, and I dislike, nay detest, many, many, policies of the American government. But I would rather have important elements of the Internet under the control of a single democracy than under an organisation that gives equal voice to completely undemocratic regimes of terror.
The obvious example is resumes that you send via a recruitment agency. They edit it to remove all your contact details and any URLs that link to your work before faxing it to the customer. Wow, that is great! Because there is just NO WAY I could do that myself!
The problem with Many Worlds, as far as I know, is that it is a deterministic theory which takes no account of the probabilistic nature of QM. To fix this, you need to bring in a "measure of reality," which is ill-defined and can not be well-defined IMO. Right. Explaining probability in terms of multiple-worlds is exactly what the researcher cited in the article claims to have done.
(2) Shit happens. Parallel universes are created. That isn't the choice. It is more like:
(1) (Copenhagen) The act of "observing" a particle at some point between the particle, the measuring apparatus, and your mind, somehow magically causes the particle to collapse from a wave state to a fixed one, without any other action on your part. Nobody has ever explained exactly what an observation is (we are, after all, made of particles too) nor when this happens.
(2) (Multiple worlds) Reality consists of particles in quantum waves of superimposed states. Period. When we observe a particles state, it's state becomes entangled with the state of the particles in our mind, and hence we observe the particle as collapsing to a single state "in each world".
I don't know about everybody else, but the fact that all states can exist, yet I can only perceive them separately, is no stranger to me than that all moments of time exist, yet I can only perceive each one separately.
"My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue."
Hey, you want to fire them, all you have to do is buy 51% of the shares. That will run you about eighty-one billion dollars. Let us know when you're ready to put your money where your mouth is.
Actually, no. Most outstanding shares for GOOG are non-voting (or at least reduced voting). Page and Brin retain a majority of the votes, no matter how many shares he buys.
A better way is "fire" them from managing his money by simply selling his shares. I'm sure they will cry many tears.
"Fuck Islam" is not hate speech, any more than "Fuck Christianity", "Fuck Scientology" or "Fuck Atheism" is. If you don't like a set of ideological beliefs and superstitions (ie, a religion) then you have the right to voice that opinion, and the people who try to silence that are the ones who ought to be punished. If you can't handle that not everybody likes what you like, then I recommend you don't read it. In any case, stop perstering us about it.
That said, "Fuck Islam" is obscene speech, but maybe the site in question has a policy of tolerating obscene speech. It is their choice after all.
In addition, most journals do have to pay copy editors, printers, etc.
These jobs can now more or less be handled by computers. In my subject (mathematics), researchers always have to typeset the articles themselves and submit camera ready copies in PDF format, whether the journal is open access or not. This is typically as easy as importing the journals LaTeX template and recompiling. I realize that other fields use inferior document preperation systems - but MS Word can import templates too, right?
The only way PLoS has been able to circumvent this is by (a) huge donations primarily from a couple of donors (b) Charge the authors money to publish their work.
But remember that all the money the journals make come from research donations and universities anyways. Having non-open access journals doesn't add any money to the system, it just takes it out. Funding an open access journal directly is just more open, transparent, and efficient.
And also, it is possible to run open access journals without fees or funds. In my field, The Electronic Journal of Probability is open access, had no publishing fees, as far as I know no large sponsors, and yet is quickly becoming one of the most respected journals.
- Research money (typically from the government, ie your money) is used to fund research and scientists write articles about it.
- Those articles are sent to periodicals (journals) to be published. The journals are corporate, and carry different amounts of prestige. For a researcher, getting papers in prestigious journals is extremely important, so they send them off willingly, and the journals do not pay a dime (in fact, sometimes the researcher has to pay).
- The article gets to sent to an editor at the journal, who is typically a well established senior researcher working for free because being an editor is prestigious (that is, he is working on time paid for by your money).
- The editor chooses researchers to do "peer review" on the article, that is anonymously write judge its merit. These peer reviewers work for free.
- If the article is accepted, the researcher is very happy, and gleefully signs over the copyright on the article he has written (which you paid for) to the corporate publisher.
- The corporate publisher, which now owns the article, won't let anybody access it unless they pay for a subscription to the journal. Large universities typically pay millions of dollars a year (again, largely your money) for journal subscriptions.
So to recap: researchers write the article for free (or pay), editors work for free, reviewers work for free, the publishers get the copyright and loads of money. In some fields you are even expected to typeset the article yourself, leaving the publisher only with the arduous task of visiting the bank to check on its ever increasing balance, and laughing at the sucker who finances all this (you). Because there is prestige in publishing in the "right" journal, and the money being spent doesn't belong to the people spending it, there is no market pressure to drive the prices down nor to make the system more sane. A number of companies, notably Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer, make incredible amounts of money off this.
Lately, however, something has finally started happening. The open access movement has been started to try to make scientific work freely available on the Internet, through open journals (like PLoS) and through researchers retaining copyright so they can put their articles on their own homepages and on sites like arXiv and aforementioned PubMed Central. This movement has gained a lot of momentum, and what is just starting to happen is that the people holding the pursestrap (like the National Institue of Health) want to start requiring that research they pay for published open access. Obviously, the publishers will do anything not to lose their sweet gig, hence the lobbyists all over capitol hill screaming censorship and government interference (both of which are completely ridiculous - I'm as libertarian as the next guy, but if the government pays for the science, it can say where you publish it).
No, wrong. If an event has probability 0 of occuring, it will never occur, even if you keep trying forever. (Mathematically stated: probability measures are countably additive.)
Slashdot Mirror
Something is very wrong with the Swedish political system.
Don't they know the opposition party is supposed to claim they oppose unpopular laws like those then do nothing about them once they're voted into power.
Yes, they did exactly that, but unfortunately for them there was a power change in Sweden a few years ago, and it became clear that many of unpopular laws being passed by this government had actually been drafted by the last one.
The current Swedish government has rushed through a number of privacy encroaching laws regarding the Internet, which have been deeply unpopular with a large part of the population, and yet have had the support of all the mainstream parties. These have included:
- Unlimited wiretapping with court order of all International data traffic for the intelligence services (and remember that in a country of 9 million, a lot more traffic is international than say in the US - in fact a lot of domestic traffic is routed internationally!)
- Forced data retention laws for ISPs, forcing them to keep information about all incoming/outgoing email as well as TCP connections.
- Laws enacted to help the music/movie industry allowing them to demand ISPs reveal the identity of Internet users with little court oversight.
These things, much more than the takedown of the pirate bay, has influenced people to vote for the Pirate Party, who have presented the only political opposition to them.
In fact, my 58 year old mother just called me to tell me she voted for PP (and I didn't even ask her to). I promise that she has never torrented anything in her life - yet she doesn't like the government spying on her more than anybody else.
Carbon Sciences has developed plans for a CO2-Fuel transformation plant that takes CO2 from a large emitter, such as a power plant, and produces usable fuels as the output.
In case you missed it, that would be when you know this is nonsense.
(By the laws of nature, getting the carbon out of the CO2 will take at least as much energy as you got by burning the carbon in the first place. So attaching the "transformation plant" to a carbon fueled power plant means you have a process turning hydrocarbons into hydrocarbons, and spending energy doing it.)
The Cato Institute is a neo-liberal/neo-conservative "think tank" and lobby group. Of course they're trying to attack Naomi Klein
And your point is? By the same token: Naomi Klein is a leftist, so of course she is trying to attack free economies. But that isn't what undermines her argument, what undermines her argument is that it is false.
Read Norberg's full report here:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9384
I still know when you can ford a river in covered wagon and how to die of cholera.
This is a good thing. Having to install monitoring at the source or destination means an operation that requires effort and, hopefully, a court order. This means that their is judicial oversight, and that to catch criminals police have to do, you know, police work rather than just sitting around spying on us.
Ubiquitous encryption does not make law enforcement impossible. It just makes indiscriminate law enforcement impossible.
I call the Bush administration a lame duck which recently lost control of the countries legislator. I call the USA a democracy, for all its flaws.
This is the kind of silly, vaccuous response that makes me wonder why you posted at all.
To qute Ayn Rand about the UN:
"I do not sanction the grotesque pretense of an organization allegedly devoted to world peace and human rights, which includes Soviet Russia, the worst aggressor and bloodiest butcher in history, as one of its members. The notion of protecting rights, with Soviet Russia among the protectors, is an insult to the concept of rights and to the intelligence of any man who is asked to endorse or sanction such an organization. I do not believe that an individual should cooperate with criminals, and, for all the same reasons, I do not believe that free countries should cooperate with dictatorships."
Change out "Soviet Russia" for "PRC" (and to a growing extent Putin's Russia) and this still holds today.
I'm not American, don't get to vote for American laws, and I dislike, nay detest, many, many, policies of the American government. But I would rather have important elements of the Internet under the control of a single democracy than under an organisation that gives equal voice to completely undemocratic regimes of terror.
Just in time for this story, Radiohead's new album is now available for download for the price you name.
Only downside is they are 160 kbps mp3:s, which may not make everybody happy.
(1) Shit happens.
(2) Shit happens. Parallel universes are created. That isn't the choice. It is more like:
(1) (Copenhagen) The act of "observing" a particle at some point between the particle, the measuring apparatus, and your mind, somehow magically causes the particle to collapse from a wave state to a fixed one, without any other action on your part. Nobody has ever explained exactly what an observation is (we are, after all, made of particles too) nor when this happens.
(2) (Multiple worlds) Reality consists of particles in quantum waves of superimposed states. Period. When we observe a particles state, it's state becomes entangled with the state of the particles in our mind, and hence we observe the particle as collapsing to a single state "in each world".
I don't know about everybody else, but the fact that all states can exist, yet I can only perceive them separately, is no stranger to me than that all moments of time exist, yet I can only perceive each one separately.
Whose up for a game of quantum suicide?
Bullshit. Direct quote:
"My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue."
Hey, you want to fire them, all you have to do is buy 51% of the shares. That will run you about eighty-one billion dollars. Let us know when you're ready to put your money where your mouth is.
Actually, no. Most outstanding shares for GOOG are non-voting (or at least reduced voting). Page and Brin retain a majority of the votes, no matter how many shares he buys.
A better way is "fire" them from managing his money by simply selling his shares. I'm sure they will cry many tears.
The jets are not owned by Google, but by a seperate corporation (H211 Inc.) owned by the google executives themselves.
"Fuck Islam" is not hate speech, any more than "Fuck Christianity", "Fuck Scientology" or "Fuck Atheism" is. If you don't like a set of ideological beliefs and superstitions (ie, a religion) then you have the right to voice that opinion, and the people who try to silence that are the ones who ought to be punished. If you can't handle that not everybody likes what you like, then I recommend you don't read it. In any case, stop perstering us about it.
That said, "Fuck Islam" is obscene speech, but maybe the site in question has a policy of tolerating obscene speech. It is their choice after all.
In addition, most journals do have to pay copy editors, printers, etc.
These jobs can now more or less be handled by computers. In my subject (mathematics), researchers always have to typeset the articles themselves and submit camera ready copies in PDF format, whether the journal is open access or not. This is typically as easy as importing the journals LaTeX template and recompiling. I realize that other fields use inferior document preperation systems - but MS Word can import templates too, right?
The only way PLoS has been able to circumvent this is by (a) huge donations primarily from a couple of donors (b) Charge the authors money to publish their work.
But remember that all the money the journals make come from research donations and universities anyways. Having non-open access journals doesn't add any money to the system, it just takes it out. Funding an open access journal directly is just more open, transparent, and efficient.
And also, it is possible to run open access journals without fees or funds. In my field, The Electronic Journal of Probability is open access, had no publishing fees, as far as I know no large sponsors, and yet is quickly becoming one of the most respected journals.
Traditional academic publishing works like this:
- Research money (typically from the government, ie your money) is used to fund research and scientists write articles about it.
- Those articles are sent to periodicals (journals) to be published. The journals are corporate, and carry different amounts of prestige. For a researcher, getting papers in prestigious journals is extremely important, so they send them off willingly, and the journals do not pay a dime (in fact, sometimes the researcher has to pay).
- The article gets to sent to an editor at the journal, who is typically a well established senior researcher working for free because being an editor is prestigious (that is, he is working on time paid for by your money).
- The editor chooses researchers to do "peer review" on the article, that is anonymously write judge its merit. These peer reviewers work for free.
- If the article is accepted, the researcher is very happy, and gleefully signs over the copyright on the article he has written (which you paid for) to the corporate publisher.
- The corporate publisher, which now owns the article, won't let anybody access it unless they pay for a subscription to the journal. Large universities typically pay millions of dollars a year (again, largely your money) for journal subscriptions.
So to recap: researchers write the article for free (or pay), editors work for free, reviewers work for free, the publishers get the copyright and loads of money. In some fields you are even expected to typeset the article yourself, leaving the publisher only with the arduous task of visiting the bank to check on its ever increasing balance, and laughing at the sucker who finances all this (you). Because there is prestige in publishing in the "right" journal, and the money being spent doesn't belong to the people spending it, there is no market pressure to drive the prices down nor to make the system more sane. A number of companies, notably Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer, make incredible amounts of money off this.
Lately, however, something has finally started happening. The open access movement has been started to try to make scientific work freely available on the Internet, through open journals (like PLoS) and through researchers retaining copyright so they can put their articles on their own homepages and on sites like arXiv and aforementioned PubMed Central. This movement has gained a lot of momentum, and what is just starting to happen is that the people holding the pursestrap (like the National Institue of Health) want to start requiring that research they pay for published open access. Obviously, the publishers will do anything not to lose their sweet gig, hence the lobbyists all over capitol hill screaming censorship and government interference (both of which are completely ridiculous - I'm as libertarian as the next guy, but if the government pays for the science, it can say where you publish it).
Cite a source, please. You are at least wrong about the Palomares incident where the lost bomb was recovered after 80 days.
No, wrong. If an event has probability 0 of occuring, it will never occur, even if you keep trying forever. (Mathematically stated: probability measures are countably additive.)
She's his sister.
(Oh come on, you weren't expecting to get through this discussion without finding that out.)