These two statement have nothing to do with each other. I am sure there are tons of static flash, there are also tons of flash that uses hover. If you look at video controls, a lot more than tons.
So, the existence of content that doesn't work 100% is a good reason to make content that works perfectly unusuable as well? I disagree.
You N900 is an ugly hack.
In what way? It does what I want it to do, and if not I could even change it so that it does. That's the important thing.
However, if it's anything like the youtube-like flash players I've seen that auto-hide their controls, I could use that sort of thing just fine on my N900.
First, the amount of hover usage in flash isn't that great. There are tons of completely static animations that don't have any interaction of any sort. And there are plenty games that just require clicking in place. A lot of flash content that gets passed around is stuff like the Kenya and Magical Trevor animations.
Second, the lack of hover is simply a lack of imagination on Apple's part. On my N900 for instance, I can have a pointer that works for flash by starting to drag from the border of the screen. Now, it's not 100% perfect and could be done better, but it works, and I played Winter Bells quite successfully on my N900.
I don't spend a significant amount of my time launching applications. I start things maybe once a week, and just keep suspending and resuming my laptop. Most of my time is spent in 3-4 apps that are constantly running already.
Also my usage isn't all that predictable, so it probably wouldn't work so well.
Sorry, no. The copyright doesn't just favor the artist, it absolutely, 100% protects the artist and only the artist.
In theory. In practice, sign up for a programming job, and now the protection is for your employer. Sign up with a label, and the protection moves to the label. And so on.
If you want to keep that protection, you need to pretty much replace your employer, by running your own software company, label, etc. And few people have the resources to do that. And, if the alternative to selling your rights to a label is becoming one, that IMO indicates pretty clearly that things aren't really geared towards the independent artist.
The only reason that artists can be in the position to negotiate for cash in exchange for copyrighted material is because the copyright law is so strongly in their favor.
Huh? No, that's just the barely minimum reasonable situation to be in: to be able to negotiate payment. I don't see how you could even have any less than this.
If things were really set to favour the artist, the artist would have the record company by the balls and not the other way, and would be able to for instance, at any time pack and leave without penalty, and sell their stuff through a company they liked better.
It could have the technical part of it - package manager, repository, etc.
But where Linux wins massively is that the package manager system serves exclusively the needs of the user. It doesn't try to push crap like toolbars on you with every new application. It doesn't install spyware. It doesn't try to get you to "Try this new cool thing we made!". It doesn't install applications that do underhanded things - if one slipped through the distribution would remove it. It won't allow an application mess with another. It will remove anything it installed if asked, removing it fully.
And it provides everything, with kitchen sink and all, without refusing applications because they would compete with their own, or are used for something porn related, or would let you do things they don't want you to do.
I don't think Windows could have this due to the large amount of commercial interests. It'd be heavily regulated to favour Microsoft (like Apple does with their store), or it'd include undesirable things because companies pay for it, or it'd install things without your knowledge, or something else. The temptation is just too great when money is involved.
preload monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this
data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those
binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.
Still, I never found an use for that kind of thing, so I don't bother installing it.
Recent versions of Ubuntu preload some stuff on boot at least. For doing it during runtime there's the "preload" package. Now the good thing is that if I think it's pointless, then I don't need to install it, and it isn't on my system.
And I concur with the grandparent, the naming of various mostly not very interesting technologies with some moniker to make it sound more exciting is annoying, and I enjoy the lack of that stuff in Linux.
Sorry for what? It doesn't change anything I said.
I was replying to the idea of that there's something wrong with "He just made a copy, nothing was lost. It's not stealing".
And, in this case indeed nothing that falls under the idea of "IP" was lost, whether you believe that "IP" is something that should exist or not. If it exists, you as an employee signed a contract agreeing that all of it belongs to the company. It can't be stolen from you because it's not your in the first place. And if you don't believe in it, then something that doesn't exist can't be stolen from you either.
Sure, crimes were committed here, but none of them have anything to do with copyright.
This isn't about a freak accident, this is about 243 guns getting lost. With that many, there has to be a way to reduce the number. 243 guns in 2 years is a gun getting lost every 3 days on average.
From what I heard, if a cop loses a gun, that's a very big deal, with serious consequences. By the 5th gun getting lost in a short timeframe there should have been a serious internal investiguation about whether the officers are getting taught the right procedures, and at some point after that heads should have started rolling until things improved.
What you mean is, it's actually his first name. Just like it's the first name of a lot of other people.
Precisely one of the reasons why I think the whole event should have been impossible. A normal first name should be only an identifier, not subject to any sort of ownership or licensing.
You're feeling sorry for the party that can't be bothered to read something put in front of them?
No, you're not reading the discussion.
toriver said "[...] how can copyright laws apply? They are there to protect artists and creators, not industry corporations". I pointed out that the current copyright laws don't favour the artist, they favour the corportations most of the time. You're merely providing more evidence of that, and saying that it's the right way for them to be, because not reading a contract properly is a stupid thing to do.
I'm saying that for copyright law to really be something that intends to protect the artist it should be biased to favour the artist at the cost of the company. This is not a particularly strange thing. For instance you can't legally sell yourself into slavery by not reading a contract. This is biased in the weakest party's favour, if it was a legal thing to do, it wouldn't be the huge corporations that'd get hit with it.
I'm not having an argument though, because I'm not arguing in favour in any of both positions, I'm just saying what would things be like if it was really something for the artists.
My own opinion is neither of those. I'd heavily restrict copyright to favour the society over both the companies and the author.
A great example of a poorly structured business relationship. That's not his full, legal name.
No, it's actually his name. He was born as Prince Rogers Nelson.
It's his brand, just like a band name. He agreed to take a pile of cash in exchange for allowing a publishing company to operate that brand name. Turns out he was more interested in the short term cash than he was in his own long-term prospects. Typical amateur maneuver.
This, and what's below is a perfect explanation why the current laws don't favour the artist.
They favour those who are the most informed about the legal intrincacies, and have the biggest advantage in the relationship. That could be the artist, if we're talking about a famous and rich one who has it all figured out, and whose name on something carries prestige, but usually isn't.
Because then the creation can get used against the artist, and I can't see how would that be something the artist wants. Take for instance the ridiculousness of "Prince" being a trademark not owned by Prince, and him being denied use of it, despite it being his real name.
Also, generally there's not a negotiation happening on equal terms. The huge conglomerate has an advantage over the artist, so I think they should be restricted in what they can ask. There's a reason why you can't enslave yourself, or sell your children through a contract.
I think that it should be possible to *grant* rights, going as far as granting enough rights that somebody could do as if they owned the copyright, but never actually transferring, so it's impossible to lose the rights to something you created.
I'm a programmer and what I do is work for hire. You pay me X/hour, I spend that time solving the problem you have.
Usually that hour is spent writing code, but sometimes that hour is spent on research that results in "Yes, we could do this, and here's how", or "No, it's not going to work for this reason".
What happens to what I wrote doesn't really matter to me, so long I got paid for the time.
I still think it's a creative endeavour anyway, in the same way that a decorator being paid for "come here and tell me how to make this prettier" isn't exactly performing an assembly line job.
They are there to protect artists and creators, not industry corporations.
Hah. If that were true, copyright wouldn't work the way it does. To start with, if copyright was really about the artist it wouldn't be transferrable.
Actually, the way I see it, the quote is completely right, even in this case.
The "IP" is irrelevant. The employees are owed for the time they worked, and nothing more. Even if you believe there is such a thing as "IP", the employees agreed it belongs to the company when they signed the contract, so it can't be "stolen" from them.
Having the CEO fire everybody and have another team continue development would have been perfectly legal. The only illegal thing is not paying the previous employees all they were owed.
LED arrays that are reasonably cheap still produce very little light. At large hardware shops here I've mostly seen 1W bulbs, which isn't nearly enough. 4W ones are very hard to find, and for 8W seems nearly impossible, and they cost an arm and a leg too.
You've been dodging this from the moment I asked it, focusing on anything and everything else to avoid it, trying to spin and reframe terms until you can succeed at completely different arguements, and until you answer it, fuck off:
I challenge you to name one incident in human history where a human society collapsed because of extinction of an organism.
That sentence has little relevation to the start of our argument.
Your position seems to be "starvation/extinction/etc are natural processes, so there's nothing to worry about, and no need to try to preserve anything, because it's business as usual". Or something along those lines.
My position is that not all natural things are good for me, and while on the long term life goes on, on the scales of human lifetimes things can turn extremely unpleasant, and it's not in my interest to let them get to that point. My standard for an unacceptable situation to live in is much less strict than a civilization collapse, so I start caring about environmental issues much before that happens.
Your question was "why do I care", and I provided an explanation based on my own egoism and examples of what happens in other places when things get tough. I do not think in absolute terms of "survival of humanity/civilization" like you do, but in terms of my own wellbeing, so I do not need to find an instance of civilization collapse. All I need to justify my position is to find an example of a place that's screwed up enough for me to say "I do not want to live like that", or "I do not want to have to deal with such neighbours".
But, the grandparent's claim was that some people would die of hunger while still being fat. There might be somebody somewhere with freak genetics that would result in such a thing, but if it was a common ocurrence I think I'd have heard of it, so I'd like some proof of that it is a more or less frequent ocurrence in cases of starvation.
First, if you read my post, it does not say that it is all genetic. It simply points out that the skinny people in the use are not generally skinny because they are superior.
I don't deny that there may be a genetic component. But that doesn't explain the disparity between the US and Europe, especially when most people living in the US are descendants of Europeans and shouldn't be that different genetically speaking.
For it to be a genetical difference over so little time there would have to be something that consistently selected for the propensity to obesity over so little time. But that seems rather illogical, because with the harsh conditions early Americans had to endure, the propensity to have such an inefficient energy usage as to die of hunger while remaining fat should have been selected against, not for.
Second, The "you can't violate the conservation of energy" argument is stupid. It is only used by the people to simple minded to understand that humans have an anus.
Lack of comprehension here. When speaking of calories in nutrition, it refers to the amount of energy a human body extracts from food. What comes out of your other end isn't included in that measure. For humans, celery has negative calories, because the body expends more energy trying to extract something from it than it ends up receiving. A rabbit probably gains from it, though.
There are exactly 0 people on the planet whose body is balanced via calories eaten vs. calories burned. The argument is simply absurd.
Sure there are. Not every single day of course, but on average. People with a disposition to staying skinny are those whose bodies demand just enough or a bit too little food, and eat that much instead of gorging on it every day. That's what hunger is for.
Can you run forever without stopping? Can you do an infinite number of pull ups? Not likely. When you have tried to do as many pull ups as possible, was it reaching 0% body fat that caused you to stop? not likely. Why? Because calories consumed vs. calories burned isn't even a 1/4 of the story.
No, at a point you "hit the wall", due to exhaustion of glycogen, and buildup of lactic acid.
No, you cannot violate conservation of energy, but you can starve to death while still being obese. Both obese by the absurd BMI standard, or by the 'Holy Crap man, your wider than you are tall' standard.
Please provide examples. Humans can last a long time without food. You could probably go weeks without it. A human couldn't possibly exist that long on stored glucose/glycogen. Glucose is very short term, and glycogen can be exhausted with intensive exercise in a few hours. After that energy has to come from somewhere.
You did not provide an example that fit the parameters of the question,
Oh yes I did. I was replying to your "Many species have 'gone the way of the dodo' during human existence, and that. has. never. mattered.". Nowhere in there there is a requirement for social collapse being caused by extinction.
I consider that the rise of piracy in Somalia is an outcome that definitely matters, given all the talk about it.
and since all you're going to do is spin things and claim that you did (and further claim that your fallacious circular cause
"Collapse -> inability to defend -> exploitation by others -> piracy as a reaction" is not a circular argument. It starts with collapse, but doesn't end with it. The idea to add collapse to the end of the chain is your own invention, and which I never spoke of.
Even in your last post you admit that the societal collapse in Somalia was a cause, so it cannot be an effect, negating its validity as an example.
Well, duh. I never said the collapse was a consequence, I said piracy was. You insist in trying to add it as a consequence, which I never did.
This demonstrates that you are a blatantly dishonest (or extremely obtuse) person
No, I'm not being really dishonest, or obtuse (IMO you are), I'm just very persistent in trying to get people to understand what I'm saying. Once you get what I'm trying to say, then you can make some sort of refutation of it. Twisting my words to something I never said won't do.
which places you literally beneath my contempt.
I don't care if you like me or not, and that's not a way to win an argument.
First, it can't be all genetic. People living in the US aren't native americans for the most part, they came for a large part from Europe, not so long ago. They shouldn't have wildly different genetics, yet you're going to find a lot more fat people in the US than in Europe.
What the US has that is considerably different is the food and the layout of the cities. When I came to the US I was quite amazed at the rather insane serving sizes. An US "normal" sized ice cream is something I simply couldn't finish eating. The idea of a restaurant serving enough food that you'd ask for a box to take it home was completely alien to me before visiting the US. Getting the drinks refilled constantly was another new thing.
Also, in Europe you can, and usually do walk to places. Even if you have a car, there is a small grocery store somewhere nearby you can walk to when you find you don't have enough milk, and not far enough to actually bother getting into the car. In the parts of the US I've been to, however, it seems impossible to do that as the streets aren't made for it.
Second, no matter what kind of metabolism you have, you can't violate the conservation of energy. If you use enough energy, or eat less than you consume, you will HAVE to get slimmer, eventually. Your body can't create additional mass out of nowhere, or produce energy to keep you going out of nothing.
Ah, salting the land. Yeah, that has happened so much in the modern era, I forgot all about it. (That's sarcasm, yo.)
It was an example. Pick another if you prefer. The point is, political decisions have an effect on the ecology.
Also, I'm not obsessing about extinction, it's the topic that spawned this discussion, or perhaps you weren't paying attention. Now you try to shift the frame of things to 'maybe an extinction made some people inconvenienced and uncomfortable.' What a specter that is.
Extinction isn't required. What does it matter if there is 1000 fish or no fish? If the number is small enough it's pretty much the same as if there weren't any.
Things aren't binary, they get screwed up well before there's a complete extinction.
And Somalia. You're kidding right? Is this becoming logical fallacy amateur hour now? Let me walk you through this:
Social collapse - leads to - overfishing to compensate for resource shortfalls caused by a disintegrated infrastructure - leads to... social collapse? Oh wait, that ALREADY HAPPENED and was the CAUSE not the EFFECT. Not to mention you cite no extinction, only the vague possibility of one in some hypothetical extension of the scenario.
No. Societal collapse leads to inability to defend their territorial waters from foreign nations that decide to fish there, since there is nobody to stop them. Which leads to the piracy, which has been in the news quite a bit.
When things get tough, as you said yourself, people are going to fight and try to survive. And that can be an unpleasant business.
Not to mention you cite no extinction, only the vague possibility of one in some hypothetical extension of the scenario.
It seems even better to me. If things are already screwed up to too few members of a species, then it's obvious that the species going extinct outright isn't going to be any better.
I repeat, things aren't binary. It's not going to be all fine right until the last member of a species dies.
So, yes, the argument is still over, you still have not provided one example that actually fits the parameters that would set the necessary precedent.
I provided one, you invented some crazy interpretation of it. Not conceding this one, sorry.
Starvation in the modern era is far more frequently a political problem than an agricultural problem.
Politics affect ecology. If during a war, land is salted as a part of a scorched earth campaign, that's an ecological problem that will exist after the war is over.
(Your categorizations are poor, treating land's productive capacity as fixed, it isn't, which means it is a matter of agricultural technology, not ecology. I might also add that you were the first to distinguish between agricultural and ecological issues, and now you try to conflate them.)
Land's productive capacity is finite. There's a limit to what you can grow on an amount of land. No technology will allow growing the world's food supply on one acre of land. And, agricultural and ecological issues aren't different issues, agricultural issues are a subset of ecological issues.
I notice you dodged my question about when any human society has collapsed due to an extinction. Isn't that kind of the crux of this issue? Wouldn't it establish an important precedent for your point? Of course it would, but the lack of any example, because there are none, does the opposite.
Again you obsess with extinction, collapse, etc. I don't think a complete disaster is needed to make things unpleasant. There can be starvation without civilization collapse, and food shortages without huge amounts of people dying. I don't think that's a good thing to have either.
Many species have 'gone the way of the dodo' during human existence, and that. has. never. mattered.
How about overfishing in Somalia? Since they lack a government they have a hard time policing their own waters, which resulted in quite a few outside people fishing there. That led to food shortages, and to pirates. Given all the news about that, I'd say that quite a few people care about what resulted, so it would be fair enough to say that it matters.
Now, if too few fish to eat is a bad thing, obviously no fish at all would be even worse. There's not an infinite amount of species of fish in any area, and some of them depend on others, so the extinction of enough of them will kill the rest. It's not really hard to see.
Argument over.
Ah, if only stating something is indisputable made it true. No, I'm afraid it doesn't work like that.
You have no concept of scale. Obviously I'm not saying 'go starve yourself because it's fun!' but rather that starvation has happened both individually and en masse to every animal species in the history of life itself, and will continue to happen. It is happening right now, and not because of ecology. What are you doing about that? Nothing? Of course. More starvation is inevitable.
What do you mean "not because of ecology"?
The planet is quite capable of producing plenty food. Starvation happens in places where more resources are used than the land is capable of providing, there is a lot of contamination, or where the resources are available but not properly used. Except for the last one it's very much an ecology problem.
Since when did we start talking about you?
Since you asked "What do you care of the starved creatures of the Devonian?". If you don't want my opinion, don't ask for it. Though I might give it anyway.
You want to live, take care of yourself. You want others to live, take care of them too, but don't pretend that propping up species that are no longer able to function in their environment is the direct means of doing those things.
Egoism is far reaching. I don't exist in a void, hence if my existence requires the ecology to be in good shape then I'll have to make sure of that. Doing otherwise is stupid and suicidal.
I also like taking nature photos. That's a lesser priority, but still a reason to make sure something to take photos of remains.
There was a time when people killed lions with their bare hands, but civilization has turned humanity into one big soft, sensitive hippy campfire drum circle.
Yeah, that is easy to say while comfortably seated in front of your computer, heh. You're probably just as soft yourself. Even if you're into some "manly" activity like boxing, you probably still do it in safe conditions.
If killing lions with bare hands is the kind of thing you crave, please go do that, then tell how well it went.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the existence of content that doesn't work 100% is a good reason to make content that works perfectly unusuable as well? I disagree.
In what way? It does what I want it to do, and if not I could even change it so that it does. That's the important thing.
No, Hulu doesn't want me to view their videos.
However, if it's anything like the youtube-like flash players I've seen that auto-hide their controls, I could use that sort of thing just fine on my N900.
First, the amount of hover usage in flash isn't that great. There are tons of completely static animations that don't have any interaction of any sort. And there are plenty games that just require clicking in place. A lot of flash content that gets passed around is stuff like the Kenya and Magical Trevor animations.
Second, the lack of hover is simply a lack of imagination on Apple's part. On my N900 for instance, I can have a pointer that works for flash by starting to drag from the border of the screen. Now, it's not 100% perfect and could be done better, but it works, and I played Winter Bells quite successfully on my N900.
I don't spend a significant amount of my time launching applications. I start things maybe once a week, and just keep suspending and resuming my laptop. Most of my time is spent in 3-4 apps that are constantly running already.
Also my usage isn't all that predictable, so it probably wouldn't work so well.
In theory. In practice, sign up for a programming job, and now the protection is for your employer. Sign up with a label, and the protection moves to the label. And so on.
If you want to keep that protection, you need to pretty much replace your employer, by running your own software company, label, etc. And few people have the resources to do that. And, if the alternative to selling your rights to a label is becoming one, that IMO indicates pretty clearly that things aren't really geared towards the independent artist.
Huh? No, that's just the barely minimum reasonable situation to be in: to be able to negotiate payment. I don't see how you could even have any less than this.
If things were really set to favour the artist, the artist would have the record company by the balls and not the other way, and would be able to for instance, at any time pack and leave without penalty, and sell their stuff through a company they liked better.
IMO, Windows won't ever have this.
It could have the technical part of it - package manager, repository, etc.
But where Linux wins massively is that the package manager system serves exclusively the needs of the user. It doesn't try to push crap like toolbars on you with every new application. It doesn't install spyware. It doesn't try to get you to "Try this new cool thing we made!". It doesn't install applications that do underhanded things - if one slipped through the distribution would remove it. It won't allow an application mess with another. It will remove anything it installed if asked, removing it fully.
And it provides everything, with kitchen sink and all, without refusing applications because they would compete with their own, or are used for something porn related, or would let you do things they don't want you to do.
I don't think Windows could have this due to the large amount of commercial interests. It'd be heavily regulated to favour Microsoft (like Apple does with their store), or it'd include undesirable things because companies pay for it, or it'd install things without your knowledge, or something else. The temptation is just too great when money is involved.
Still, I never found an use for that kind of thing, so I don't bother installing it.
Recent versions of Ubuntu preload some stuff on boot at least. For doing it during runtime there's the "preload" package. Now the good thing is that if I think it's pointless, then I don't need to install it, and it isn't on my system.
And I concur with the grandparent, the naming of various mostly not very interesting technologies with some moniker to make it sound more exciting is annoying, and I enjoy the lack of that stuff in Linux.
Sorry for what? It doesn't change anything I said.
I was replying to the idea of that there's something wrong with "He just made a copy, nothing was lost. It's not stealing".
And, in this case indeed nothing that falls under the idea of "IP" was lost, whether you believe that "IP" is something that should exist or not. If it exists, you as an employee signed a contract agreeing that all of it belongs to the company. It can't be stolen from you because it's not your in the first place. And if you don't believe in it, then something that doesn't exist can't be stolen from you either.
Sure, crimes were committed here, but none of them have anything to do with copyright.
Yes, but we can make it happen a lot less.
This isn't about a freak accident, this is about 243 guns getting lost. With that many, there has to be a way to reduce the number. 243 guns in 2 years is a gun getting lost every 3 days on average.
From what I heard, if a cop loses a gun, that's a very big deal, with serious consequences. By the 5th gun getting lost in a short timeframe there should have been a serious internal investiguation about whether the officers are getting taught the right procedures, and at some point after that heads should have started rolling until things improved.
Precisely one of the reasons why I think the whole event should have been impossible. A normal first name should be only an identifier, not subject to any sort of ownership or licensing.
No, you're not reading the discussion.
toriver said "[...] how can copyright laws apply? They are there to protect artists and creators, not industry corporations". I pointed out that the current copyright laws don't favour the artist, they favour the corportations most of the time. You're merely providing more evidence of that, and saying that it's the right way for them to be, because not reading a contract properly is a stupid thing to do.
I'm saying that for copyright law to really be something that intends to protect the artist it should be biased to favour the artist at the cost of the company. This is not a particularly strange thing. For instance you can't legally sell yourself into slavery by not reading a contract. This is biased in the weakest party's favour, if it was a legal thing to do, it wouldn't be the huge corporations that'd get hit with it.
I'm not having an argument though, because I'm not arguing in favour in any of both positions, I'm just saying what would things be like if it was really something for the artists.
My own opinion is neither of those. I'd heavily restrict copyright to favour the society over both the companies and the author.
No, it's actually his name. He was born as Prince Rogers Nelson.
This, and what's below is a perfect explanation why the current laws don't favour the artist.
They favour those who are the most informed about the legal intrincacies, and have the biggest advantage in the relationship. That could be the artist, if we're talking about a famous and rich one who has it all figured out, and whose name on something carries prestige, but usually isn't.
Because then the creation can get used against the artist, and I can't see how would that be something the artist wants. Take for instance the ridiculousness of "Prince" being a trademark not owned by Prince, and him being denied use of it, despite it being his real name.
Also, generally there's not a negotiation happening on equal terms. The huge conglomerate has an advantage over the artist, so I think they should be restricted in what they can ask. There's a reason why you can't enslave yourself, or sell your children through a contract.
I think that it should be possible to *grant* rights, going as far as granting enough rights that somebody could do as if they owned the copyright, but never actually transferring, so it's impossible to lose the rights to something you created.
I'm a programmer and what I do is work for hire. You pay me X/hour, I spend that time solving the problem you have.
Usually that hour is spent writing code, but sometimes that hour is spent on research that results in "Yes, we could do this, and here's how", or "No, it's not going to work for this reason".
What happens to what I wrote doesn't really matter to me, so long I got paid for the time.
I still think it's a creative endeavour anyway, in the same way that a decorator being paid for "come here and tell me how to make this prettier" isn't exactly performing an assembly line job.
Hah. If that were true, copyright wouldn't work the way it does. To start with, if copyright was really about the artist it wouldn't be transferrable.
Actually, the way I see it, the quote is completely right, even in this case.
The "IP" is irrelevant. The employees are owed for the time they worked, and nothing more. Even if you believe there is such a thing as "IP", the employees agreed it belongs to the company when they signed the contract, so it can't be "stolen" from them.
Having the CEO fire everybody and have another team continue development would have been perfectly legal. The only illegal thing is not paying the previous employees all they were owed.
What's wrong with boingboing's coverage of it? Seems like a perfectly good article to me. Ars even links to the boingboing one.
LED arrays that are reasonably cheap still produce very little light. At large hardware shops here I've mostly seen 1W bulbs, which isn't nearly enough. 4W ones are very hard to find, and for 8W seems nearly impossible, and they cost an arm and a leg too.
That sentence has little relevation to the start of our argument.
Your position seems to be "starvation/extinction/etc are natural processes, so there's nothing to worry about, and no need to try to preserve anything, because it's business as usual". Or something along those lines.
My position is that not all natural things are good for me, and while on the long term life goes on, on the scales of human lifetimes things can turn extremely unpleasant, and it's not in my interest to let them get to that point. My standard for an unacceptable situation to live in is much less strict than a civilization collapse, so I start caring about environmental issues much before that happens.
Your question was "why do I care", and I provided an explanation based on my own egoism and examples of what happens in other places when things get tough. I do not think in absolute terms of "survival of humanity/civilization" like you do, but in terms of my own wellbeing, so I do not need to find an instance of civilization collapse. All I need to justify my position is to find an example of a place that's screwed up enough for me to say "I do not want to live like that", or "I do not want to have to deal with such neighbours".
Well, of course such a thing would be unhealthy.
But, the grandparent's claim was that some people would die of hunger while still being fat. There might be somebody somewhere with freak genetics that would result in such a thing, but if it was a common ocurrence I think I'd have heard of it, so I'd like some proof of that it is a more or less frequent ocurrence in cases of starvation.
I don't deny that there may be a genetic component. But that doesn't explain the disparity between the US and Europe, especially when most people living in the US are descendants of Europeans and shouldn't be that different genetically speaking.
For it to be a genetical difference over so little time there would have to be something that consistently selected for the propensity to obesity over so little time. But that seems rather illogical, because with the harsh conditions early Americans had to endure, the propensity to have such an inefficient energy usage as to die of hunger while remaining fat should have been selected against, not for.
Lack of comprehension here. When speaking of calories in nutrition, it refers to the amount of energy a human body extracts from food. What comes out of your other end isn't included in that measure. For humans, celery has negative calories, because the body expends more energy trying to extract something from it than it ends up receiving. A rabbit probably gains from it, though.
Sure there are. Not every single day of course, but on average. People with a disposition to staying skinny are those whose bodies demand just enough or a bit too little food, and eat that much instead of gorging on it every day. That's what hunger is for.
No, at a point you "hit the wall", due to exhaustion of glycogen, and buildup of lactic acid.
Please provide examples. Humans can last a long time without food. You could probably go weeks without it. A human couldn't possibly exist that long on stored glucose/glycogen. Glucose is very short term, and glycogen can be exhausted with intensive exercise in a few hours. After that energy has to come from somewhere.
Oh yes I did. I was replying to your "Many species have 'gone the way of the dodo' during human existence, and that. has. never. mattered.". Nowhere in there there is a requirement for social collapse being caused by extinction.
I consider that the rise of piracy in Somalia is an outcome that definitely matters, given all the talk about it.
"Collapse -> inability to defend -> exploitation by others -> piracy as a reaction" is not a circular argument. It starts with collapse, but doesn't end with it. The idea to add collapse to the end of the chain is your own invention, and which I never spoke of.
Well, duh. I never said the collapse was a consequence, I said piracy was. You insist in trying to add it as a consequence, which I never did.
No, I'm not being really dishonest, or obtuse (IMO you are), I'm just very persistent in trying to get people to understand what I'm saying. Once you get what I'm trying to say, then you can make some sort of refutation of it. Twisting my words to something I never said won't do.
I don't care if you like me or not, and that's not a way to win an argument.
Two things.
First, it can't be all genetic. People living in the US aren't native americans for the most part, they came for a large part from Europe, not so long ago. They shouldn't have wildly different genetics, yet you're going to find a lot more fat people in the US than in Europe.
What the US has that is considerably different is the food and the layout of the cities. When I came to the US I was quite amazed at the rather insane serving sizes. An US "normal" sized ice cream is something I simply couldn't finish eating. The idea of a restaurant serving enough food that you'd ask for a box to take it home was completely alien to me before visiting the US. Getting the drinks refilled constantly was another new thing.
Also, in Europe you can, and usually do walk to places. Even if you have a car, there is a small grocery store somewhere nearby you can walk to when you find you don't have enough milk, and not far enough to actually bother getting into the car. In the parts of the US I've been to, however, it seems impossible to do that as the streets aren't made for it.
Second, no matter what kind of metabolism you have, you can't violate the conservation of energy. If you use enough energy, or eat less than you consume, you will HAVE to get slimmer, eventually. Your body can't create additional mass out of nowhere, or produce energy to keep you going out of nothing.
It was an example. Pick another if you prefer. The point is, political decisions have an effect on the ecology.
Extinction isn't required. What does it matter if there is 1000 fish or no fish? If the number is small enough it's pretty much the same as if there weren't any.
Things aren't binary, they get screwed up well before there's a complete extinction.
No. Societal collapse leads to inability to defend their territorial waters from foreign nations that decide to fish there, since there is nobody to stop them. Which leads to the piracy, which has been in the news quite a bit.
When things get tough, as you said yourself, people are going to fight and try to survive. And that can be an unpleasant business.
It seems even better to me. If things are already screwed up to too few members of a species, then it's obvious that the species going extinct outright isn't going to be any better.
I repeat, things aren't binary. It's not going to be all fine right until the last member of a species dies.
I provided one, you invented some crazy interpretation of it. Not conceding this one, sorry.
Politics affect ecology. If during a war, land is salted as a part of a scorched earth campaign, that's an ecological problem that will exist after the war is over.
Land's productive capacity is finite. There's a limit to what you can grow on an amount of land. No technology will allow growing the world's food supply on one acre of land. And, agricultural and ecological issues aren't different issues, agricultural issues are a subset of ecological issues.
Again you obsess with extinction, collapse, etc. I don't think a complete disaster is needed to make things unpleasant. There can be starvation without civilization collapse, and food shortages without huge amounts of people dying. I don't think that's a good thing to have either.
How about overfishing in Somalia? Since they lack a government they have a hard time policing their own waters, which resulted in quite a few outside people fishing there. That led to food shortages, and to pirates. Given all the news about that, I'd say that quite a few people care about what resulted, so it would be fair enough to say that it matters.
Now, if too few fish to eat is a bad thing, obviously no fish at all would be even worse. There's not an infinite amount of species of fish in any area, and some of them depend on others, so the extinction of enough of them will kill the rest. It's not really hard to see.
Ah, if only stating something is indisputable made it true. No, I'm afraid it doesn't work like that.
What do you mean "not because of ecology"?
The planet is quite capable of producing plenty food. Starvation happens in places where more resources are used than the land is capable of providing, there is a lot of contamination, or where the resources are available but not properly used. Except for the last one it's very much an ecology problem.
Since you asked "What do you care of the starved creatures of the Devonian?". If you don't want my opinion, don't ask for it. Though I might give it anyway.
Egoism is far reaching. I don't exist in a void, hence if my existence requires the ecology to be in good shape then I'll have to make sure of that. Doing otherwise is stupid and suicidal.
I also like taking nature photos. That's a lesser priority, but still a reason to make sure something to take photos of remains.
Yeah, that is easy to say while comfortably seated in front of your computer, heh. You're probably just as soft yourself. Even if you're into some "manly" activity like boxing, you probably still do it in safe conditions.
If killing lions with bare hands is the kind of thing you crave, please go do that, then tell how well it went.