Or you could just report back your geographic coordinates via satellite communications every five minutes or so. This could be done by a low power battery backed up transmitter that would continue to run (at very low wattage) even when the fuse is pulled. Breitling makes a watch that transmits your GPS position via satellite, so we're not talking about doing something that requires massive li-ion batteries here. It could run off a very safe, current-limited NiMH battery pack that is vanishingly unlikely to cause a fire. The key is that nobody on board can stop the aircraft's position from being reported.
Well, let's dispense with one argument at a time. The GP was arguing that more CO2 would not be a problem per se, even if we were to go to Jurassic levels of CO2. I dispensed with that.
You and I both agree that the Jurassic levels of CO2 aren't in the cards anytime soon. We also agree that the world isn't going to turn into a "lifeless cinder", although nobody brought that up so it's a straw man. But can climate change enough in the lifetime of people now allive that it represents a disaster?
Even under natural rates of climate change, if you look across the globe you find a patchwork climate change disasters -- individual localities where human industries like agriculture are stressed by natural changes in stuff like temperature and rainfall. Imagine painting those spots black on the globe. Now as you accelerate the rate of climate change above the natural rate you get more and more black spots. But even under the highest imaginable rate of change you'll never paint the entire globe black. But you will affect a lot of people.
Now your chance of being affected depends on how you make a living. If you're a Bengladeshi farmer eking out a living in a low-lying area, you're a sitting duck. If you live off the proceeds of financial assets, however, a long as you keep rebalancing your portfolio to drop investments that you don't expect to do well and pick up ones that you do, climate change on any conceivable scale will never be a disaster for you. In fact you'll make money coming and going. This is not climate-specific. In general people who can live off a well-managed asset portfolio do well out of all kinds of disasters, like war, even though those disasters are catastrophes for many people.
So no level of climate change will ever be a disaster for everyone, unless it's enough to cause a general economic collapse which is unlikely. And no level of climate change reduction will avoid disaster for everyone. But any level of accelerated climate change represents a marginal increase in the number of people experiencing climate-related disasters.
With the provisos that (a) I get to choose the apps on my phone and (b) I get to choose between competing OS providers, (c) network providers have no say whatsoever in what's on my phone. Meet those criteria I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable amount per year -- say $30-50 -- to a software company to provide service and security updates to my phone.
Well, I would care. And I did mention that men do get raped. But to be fair people don't seem to care much about women or minors getting raped in prison so it's not a case of people being specifically unconcerned about men, but about prisoners. It's not misandry, it's plain inhumanity.
I considered the "living fossil" argument, but in general the "living fossil" thing is a bit misleading. When organisms are discovered living that are known from the fossil record (or vice versa), initially the public news is that a "living fossil" has been discovered, but then the systematics geeks get to work and the modern and fossil versions end up classified differently. They continue to be promoted as "living fossils" to a public that needs every encouragement to care about science and the environment, but researchers generally have a more nuanced view than the simple but romantic picture of a population that has remained totally unchanged for millions of years. That just doesn't happen.
The "living fossil" par excellence is of course the Coelecanth. However in the 80 years since the first living example was discovered, living Coelacanths have been placed in a separate genus (Latimeria) from any example in the fossil record. The anatomical resemblances between Latimeria and fossil genera are striking, amazing even. The differences perhaps may be too subtle for a layman to discern, but to a taxonomist they're there. Same goes for horseshoe crabs, ginkgos, etc.
If you think about how genetics works, the idea that a species could be a stable construct over millions of years is extremely implausible. Even if you can't see an anatomical distinction, if you had a time machine and brought back a DNA sample it's bound to put the ancient population in a different taxon just by genetic drift alone. That doesn't count selective advantage for mutations that adapt an individual for changing environmental conditions such as heat and gas composition and, for marine organisms, pH.
See my other post. I thought it went without saying that what was good for Mesozoic ecosystems isn't good for Cenozoic ones, but apparently people need this spelled out.
OK, apparently the answer is "yes", so I'll spell out why the notion is stupid. First, let's be clear what AC is implying: that the fact life thrived under high CO2 Jurassic conditions means that a rapid shift of climate in that direction will be good for the environment. Or at least harmless.
The Jurassic period was over 200 million years ago. Not only did the continents we're familiar not exist, neither did any of the species that currently populate the Earth. In fact major classes and orders of species had yet to emerge. Mammals. Flowering plants -- including all grasses (and that means every cereal crop) and most orders of common trees other than conifers and ginkos. Modern conifers and ginkos of course aren't the same as their ancestors; they've evolved to be adapted for modern conditions.
For that matter every single species currently living on Earth has evolved over the last two hundred million years to thrive and compete in a low CO2, lower O2 atmosphere than in the Jurassic. If you could wave a magic wand and instantly restore Jurassic atmosphere the result would be rapid, mass extinction of most of the species familiar to us. This won't largely be due to individual plants not surviving, but in a massive competitive advantage for plants on the right end of the bell curve for being able to exploit these conditions. Naturally this would be accompanied by massive animal die-offs. Many animals will die off due to direct effects (ocean acidification), others by having the plants they depend on directly or indirectly disappear. This in turn will result in more plant species extinction as animal species they depend upon disappear.
The higher oxygen levels will also hurt some species. O2 isn't just necessary to life, it's also toxic to life at high partial pressures. The level at which it is toxic to humans is slightly higher than Jurassic levels, but many other species won't tolerate it. It's just like water; all plants need water, but watering some plants too much will kill them.
So the result of a shift to a Jurassic atmosphere wouldn't look much like the Jurassic period. Jurassic ecosystems had evolved over tens and hundreds of millions of years along with the changing levels of CO2 and O2. In our rapid CO2 shift scenario plant life would grow explosively, but not all plant life. Very soon we'd be living in a planet overgrown with weeds. This in fact is just a more severe version of the scenario we're actually facing, in which we lose quite a bit of biodiversity as the atmosphere changes on faster-than-evolutionary timescales. But of course the situation *will* right itself -- in a few million years.
So to recap, you can't compare the effect of CO2 in the modern era to the Jurassic era, because the Jurassic era was 200 million years ago. The sun was different, the continents were different, the species on the planet were different, and all those species had adapted over millions of years to gradual changes in the atmosphere.
It's probably true that there's no reason to prefer living on a planet with 200 ppm CO2 to one with, say, 2000 ppm CO2;but there's every reason to prefer living on a planet where the atmosphere has been changing slow enough for evolution to track.
Because if something happens in two different places, there must be a common cause.
If a baby bird falls out of a nest and someone trips and falls headlong down the stairs, there is a common cause: gravity. Forget all the "experts" who say staircases should have handrails, because people have always fallen down stairs. People will always continue to fall down stairs. There's nothing we can do about it, because it's gravity that makes them fall.
Well to take your complaint perfectly seriously, you have to factor in the way cowardly little shits like to operate. They like easy, safe targets. Women have to deal with a pervasive threat of sexual violence. Every time a woman goes into a darkened parking garage, the possibility she might get raped is in the back of her mind. A man might worry he'll be robbed; maybe even killed. But he takes it for granted he won't be tortured and sexually humiliated.
And if you're craven little bastard you exploit that feeling of vulnerability you know is bound to be there, by taking advantage of Internet anonymity. Or if you're a real coward, flirting with threats; saying things you know will terrorize some one but mincing your words so that if they're ever traced back to you you can make a quibbling defense. But you know what the hell you're up to when you're doing it.
Now in truth, men do get raped. In fact men sometimes get raped by women. Statistically it appears to be rare, but we can't exactly trust statistics on this. Saying it isn't a problem is in fact misandrynistic. But the very public ignorance of this phenomenon means it isn't a useful weapon for Internet assholes. Women's vulnerability is, and that will probably never change.
This is not an issue on which you want parity between the sexes.
I'm a bibliophile, and from time to time I've come across some old books from around 1900 that have some printing on the colophon page that is startlingly familiar to modern software buyers: an End User License Agreement. These old book licenses warn the user that the contents of the book belong to the publisher, and sternly lay out what the user can and cannot do with the book. And the things you aren't allowed to do always include reselling or renting it.
Now in 1908 the whole notion of book licenses was struck down in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, in which it was ruled that a book's publisher couldn't control the retail sale price once it had passed through a wholesaler. In other words the publisher could enforce a contract between itself and the wholesaler, but that contract wasn't binding on the retailer or the retail purchaser. And because of the way books were distributed, that was that for book licenses. Publishers had to put up with the public doing whatever the hell they wanted with books, so long as they didn't copy them.
So this result didn't establish that publishers couldn't forbid end purchasers from reselling books. But as a practical matter it established that publishers don't need to do that in order to be economically successful. And in a way, that's the most important question. Utility is the fundamental principle upon which the modern institution of copyright is built. Copyright exists to maximize the public's access to new material. If plenty of new books get published without the practical ability of publishers to forbid resale, resale isn't a necessary feature of a copyright system.
The fact that a successful copyright system doesn't need resale restrictions doesn't mean it can't have them or shouldn't have them. I'd argue that with the right distribution scheme you probably can impose all kinds of contractual obligations on readers; not just resale restrictions, but editorial restrictions on criticism, like some software licenses include. And even if for some reason you can't legally prevent users from reselling, you can certainly make it impossible by tying each copy to the user's crypto credentials.
So we've never really tackled the question of whether book resale restrictions should exist, because it was never practical to impose such restrictions. Now it's very easy, so it's time to think about changing copyright law.
Copyright is essentially a bargain struck between the public and the publishers, and it worked well without resale limitations. But technology is now making it practical for publishers to restrict books just like they can a copy of Microsoft Office. This means we now need to address this question with legislation. It's a good time to revisit this bargain -- or it would be if corporations didn't have disproportionate power in our political system, so that the public good has no effective representation.
Here's the bargain I'd strike: you can have an absolute restriction of resale and lending, but only for a limited time. After that the book goes into the public domain, and you must escrow your cryptographic keys to ensure the public has access (at which point libraries can step in and curate the material). This gives publishers far, far more control over published material than they ever had in the paper era, in exchange for a return to a sane copyright period.
My default expectation in any high profile acquisition is that the target company's stockholders will do well, the CEO of the acquiring company will make a bundle, and the stockholders of the acquiring company will take a bath.
Writing down a hard-to-remember password is sometimes a better strategy than memorizing a low-entropy password. It depends on the nature of the threat.
You have to do a threat assessment. Who are you worried about? For example at work, writing down your server passwords and sticking them in your desk drawer is a bad idea, because one of the purposes of that password is to distinguish between you and coworkers, some of whom might have nefarious reasons to impersonate you. But let's say it's the password to your company's twitter account, and anyone in your office could legitimately use that password. Then a hard-to-remember password like "F4f`kg\HrEX[*yn[" written down on a slip of paper in your upper right hand drawer where everyone knows it lives might be a good solution, especially if you have other means of determining who actually posted something.
Here's what I recommend to many people. For really important stuff like your brokerage account, choose a tough random password and write it down in several places -- in your safe deposit box, your wallet, your safe. Then choose an easy to remember password and concatenate the two. There you have it: poor man's two factor authentication: something you have + something you know.
Of course people make mistakes. But ultimately the only thing you can do with a result you think you've validated statistically is compare it to other data. In other words data "seeming reasonable" is an end point you have to reach; but while that is necessary, it's not sufficient. And you can never know with absolute certainty it's sufficient.
Now the other problem is that the world is full of scientific crackpots who demand that scientists stop what they're doing and pick sense out of their nonsense. And the natural refusal of scientists to take their perpetual motion/vaccine injury theory/cold fusion reactor seriously is taken as proof the scientific establishment is out to silence them. It's not. Individual scientists just want the crackpots to go away and stop wasting their time.
How do we know this is a case of crackpottery? Well, we can't be 100% sure, but one of the hallmarks of the crackpot is when you press them on their methods, they start to get cagey. Perhaps this guy would have got a more respectful hearing if he'd released the software he used so other people could examine it.
Of course he might be right. He might have used the right methods to get to a defensible result, although nobody can know that at this point. Or he might have even used the wrong methods to get to the right result. Sometimes even crackpots get lucky.
Seems easy to do, doesn't it? You take the reciprocal of the interval between heartbeats scale that to beats per minute and there you go.
Except if you've ever designed software and had to look at a problem like this, you'll understand that it's not nearly so simple. The heart isn't nearly precise as the quartz oscillator you're using for your timing reference. Sometimes it throws in an early beat or late one, because it's an electro-chemo-mechanical oscillator that works by the flow of ions across a membranes of countless cells. So the rate is going to jump around a little bit second to second, which will only confuse the user. What's more any sensor that isn't stuck on with adhesive is going to miss a few signals now and then, or maybe get a spurious one.
So what you do is take a moving average to smooth out all the kinds of noise you have in your signal. Having a fitbit myself, I find it surprisingly accurate when compared against a manual pulse when your heart rate is steady. Watching the figures as I exercise hard, it's clear there's a lag in response as your heart rate accelerates in particular (since the heart slows this is less of a problem as you slow down), which indicates that the device is giving me some kind of moving average.
And it's OK. The point is to give users useful feedback about how their heart is doing during periods of strenuous exercise, not to give them a beat by beat accounting of what the sensors are picking up. It doesn't have to be laboratory-precise or instantaneous because there's nothing useful users can do with that precision. I've lost count of many times have I had to explain these two things to clients: you don't need feedback that's an order of magnitude faster than you're capable of responding too, and you shouldn't take action based on statistical noise; data doesn't have to be perfectly precise, they just have to tell you whether you're in the right ballpark or headed in the right direction.
The fitbit works very well for the purpose it's intended and the way users use it. You take a series of readings (which are sometimes off, but recognizably so) to establish what your heart is doing, and then shift to a new level of effort and take several readings as your heart settles into a new equilibrium.
Anyhow, note the weasel phrase "Up to 20 beats per minute." This means in all their testing the very worst discrepancy they ever found between the readings taken from glued on electrodes from the loosely cinched bracelet monitor was 20 beats per minute. That actually sounds pretty good to me for a worst case result.
And, if the original is anything to go by, terrible build quality. Mine had screen tearing practically from the day it was out of warranty, and when I looked into it this was a *very* common problem, and by design the thing is impossible to repair.
Otherwise I liked my Pebble; it was ugly as sin but functional. But I'll wouldn't buy another one from the company, particularly not one of the more expensive ones, unless they come with a three year warranty. I hate buying stuff that that ends up getting tossed into the landfill after a year.
I'm very happy with my Fitbit Surge, although it is a tad to thick to wear with dress clothes and it gives me an alarming looking (although painless) skin rash if I don't swap arms every day. I miss some of the apps and customizable notification capabilities of the Pebble, but the key thing is that the Surge gives me flawlessly reliable service, and that trumps features in my book.
I guess theoretically we could crack down on them with the laws we have now. First you'd have to start by granting fewer BS patents, which means hiring more and better patent examiners. Then you'd have to go after people who falsify stuff, including skipping over obvious cases of prior art.
The reason this remains a problem is that we don't have enough interest in using the laws we already have, much less making any new ones. Until we start electing people who want to do something about this we all have to live in a world where there are BS legal impediments to creating and bringing new products to market. It doesn't matter when it's a company like Apple, which has the resources to defend itself; the chilling effect is much greater on smaller companies. Which is why it politically is allowed to continue existing.
You know they used to have this thing back in Shakespeare's day called "irony", where the audience was supposed to understand a character's words in way that was different than the character intended them to be understood.
People stopped using "irony" because it was stupid; it makes stuff too hard to understand.
Well of course your mileage may vary. I track everything, and I find that I only get sluggish on a fast day if my calorie intake leading up to it is low.
But that's one of the benefits of tracking everything. You soon see patterns and can figure out works for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could just report back your geographic coordinates via satellite communications every five minutes or so. This could be done by a low power battery backed up transmitter that would continue to run (at very low wattage) even when the fuse is pulled. Breitling makes a watch that transmits your GPS position via satellite, so we're not talking about doing something that requires massive li-ion batteries here. It could run off a very safe, current-limited NiMH battery pack that is vanishingly unlikely to cause a fire. The key is that nobody on board can stop the aircraft's position from being reported.
... full of Confederate dollars.
Well, let's dispense with one argument at a time. The GP was arguing that more CO2 would not be a problem per se, even if we were to go to Jurassic levels of CO2. I dispensed with that.
You and I both agree that the Jurassic levels of CO2 aren't in the cards anytime soon. We also agree that the world isn't going to turn into a "lifeless cinder", although nobody brought that up so it's a straw man. But can climate change enough in the lifetime of people now allive that it represents a disaster?
Even under natural rates of climate change, if you look across the globe you find a patchwork climate change disasters -- individual localities where human industries like agriculture are stressed by natural changes in stuff like temperature and rainfall. Imagine painting those spots black on the globe. Now as you accelerate the rate of climate change above the natural rate you get more and more black spots. But even under the highest imaginable rate of change you'll never paint the entire globe black. But you will affect a lot of people.
Now your chance of being affected depends on how you make a living. If you're a Bengladeshi farmer eking out a living in a low-lying area, you're a sitting duck. If you live off the proceeds of financial assets, however, a long as you keep rebalancing your portfolio to drop investments that you don't expect to do well and pick up ones that you do, climate change on any conceivable scale will never be a disaster for you. In fact you'll make money coming and going. This is not climate-specific. In general people who can live off a well-managed asset portfolio do well out of all kinds of disasters, like war, even though those disasters are catastrophes for many people.
So no level of climate change will ever be a disaster for everyone, unless it's enough to cause a general economic collapse which is unlikely. And no level of climate change reduction will avoid disaster for everyone. But any level of accelerated climate change represents a marginal increase in the number of people experiencing climate-related disasters.
With the provisos that (a) I get to choose the apps on my phone and (b) I get to choose between competing OS providers, (c) network providers have no say whatsoever in what's on my phone. Meet those criteria I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable amount per year -- say $30-50 -- to a software company to provide service and security updates to my phone.
Well, I would care. And I did mention that men do get raped. But to be fair people don't seem to care much about women or minors getting raped in prison so it's not a case of people being specifically unconcerned about men, but about prisoners. It's not misandry, it's plain inhumanity.
I considered the "living fossil" argument, but in general the "living fossil" thing is a bit misleading. When organisms are discovered living that are known from the fossil record (or vice versa), initially the public news is that a "living fossil" has been discovered, but then the systematics geeks get to work and the modern and fossil versions end up classified differently. They continue to be promoted as "living fossils" to a public that needs every encouragement to care about science and the environment, but researchers generally have a more nuanced view than the simple but romantic picture of a population that has remained totally unchanged for millions of years. That just doesn't happen.
The "living fossil" par excellence is of course the Coelecanth. However in the 80 years since the first living example was discovered, living Coelacanths have been placed in a separate genus (Latimeria) from any example in the fossil record. The anatomical resemblances between Latimeria and fossil genera are striking, amazing even. The differences perhaps may be too subtle for a layman to discern, but to a taxonomist they're there. Same goes for horseshoe crabs, ginkgos, etc.
If you think about how genetics works, the idea that a species could be a stable construct over millions of years is extremely implausible. Even if you can't see an anatomical distinction, if you had a time machine and brought back a DNA sample it's bound to put the ancient population in a different taxon just by genetic drift alone. That doesn't count selective advantage for mutations that adapt an individual for changing environmental conditions such as heat and gas composition and, for marine organisms, pH.
See my other post. I thought it went without saying that what was good for Mesozoic ecosystems isn't good for Cenozoic ones, but apparently people need this spelled out.
OK, apparently the answer is "yes", so I'll spell out why the notion is stupid. First, let's be clear what AC is implying: that the fact life thrived under high CO2 Jurassic conditions means that a rapid shift of climate in that direction will be good for the environment. Or at least harmless.
The Jurassic period was over 200 million years ago. Not only did the continents we're familiar not exist, neither did any of the species that currently populate the Earth. In fact major classes and orders of species had yet to emerge. Mammals. Flowering plants -- including all grasses (and that means every cereal crop) and most orders of common trees other than conifers and ginkos. Modern conifers and ginkos of course aren't the same as their ancestors; they've evolved to be adapted for modern conditions.
For that matter every single species currently living on Earth has evolved over the last two hundred million years to thrive and compete in a low CO2, lower O2 atmosphere than in the Jurassic. If you could wave a magic wand and instantly restore Jurassic atmosphere the result would be rapid, mass extinction of most of the species familiar to us. This won't largely be due to individual plants not surviving, but in a massive competitive advantage for plants on the right end of the bell curve for being able to exploit these conditions. Naturally this would be accompanied by massive animal die-offs. Many animals will die off due to direct effects (ocean acidification), others by having the plants they depend on directly or indirectly disappear. This in turn will result in more plant species extinction as animal species they depend upon disappear.
The higher oxygen levels will also hurt some species. O2 isn't just necessary to life, it's also toxic to life at high partial pressures. The level at which it is toxic to humans is slightly higher than Jurassic levels, but many other species won't tolerate it. It's just like water; all plants need water, but watering some plants too much will kill them.
So the result of a shift to a Jurassic atmosphere wouldn't look much like the Jurassic period. Jurassic ecosystems had evolved over tens and hundreds of millions of years along with the changing levels of CO2 and O2. In our rapid CO2 shift scenario plant life would grow explosively, but not all plant life. Very soon we'd be living in a planet overgrown with weeds. This in fact is just a more severe version of the scenario we're actually facing, in which we lose quite a bit of biodiversity as the atmosphere changes on faster-than-evolutionary timescales. But of course the situation *will* right itself -- in a few million years.
So to recap, you can't compare the effect of CO2 in the modern era to the Jurassic era, because the Jurassic era was 200 million years ago. The sun was different, the continents were different, the species on the planet were different, and all those species had adapted over millions of years to gradual changes in the atmosphere.
It's probably true that there's no reason to prefer living on a planet with 200 ppm CO2 to one with, say, 2000 ppm CO2;but there's every reason to prefer living on a planet where the atmosphere has been changing slow enough for evolution to track.
Because if something happens in two different places, there must be a common cause.
If a baby bird falls out of a nest and someone trips and falls headlong down the stairs, there is a common cause: gravity. Forget all the "experts" who say staircases should have handrails, because people have always fallen down stairs. People will always continue to fall down stairs. There's nothing we can do about it, because it's gravity that makes them fall.
Could anyone genuinely be this much of a moron?
Well to take your complaint perfectly seriously, you have to factor in the way cowardly little shits like to operate. They like easy, safe targets. Women have to deal with a pervasive threat of sexual violence. Every time a woman goes into a darkened parking garage, the possibility she might get raped is in the back of her mind. A man might worry he'll be robbed; maybe even killed. But he takes it for granted he won't be tortured and sexually humiliated.
And if you're craven little bastard you exploit that feeling of vulnerability you know is bound to be there, by taking advantage of Internet anonymity. Or if you're a real coward, flirting with threats; saying things you know will terrorize some one but mincing your words so that if they're ever traced back to you you can make a quibbling defense. But you know what the hell you're up to when you're doing it.
Now in truth, men do get raped. In fact men sometimes get raped by women. Statistically it appears to be rare, but we can't exactly trust statistics on this. Saying it isn't a problem is in fact misandrynistic. But the very public ignorance of this phenomenon means it isn't a useful weapon for Internet assholes. Women's vulnerability is, and that will probably never change.
This is not an issue on which you want parity between the sexes.
I'm a bibliophile, and from time to time I've come across some old books from around 1900 that have some printing on the colophon page that is startlingly familiar to modern software buyers: an End User License Agreement. These old book licenses warn the user that the contents of the book belong to the publisher, and sternly lay out what the user can and cannot do with the book. And the things you aren't allowed to do always include reselling or renting it.
Now in 1908 the whole notion of book licenses was struck down in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, in which it was ruled that a book's publisher couldn't control the retail sale price once it had passed through a wholesaler. In other words the publisher could enforce a contract between itself and the wholesaler, but that contract wasn't binding on the retailer or the retail purchaser. And because of the way books were distributed, that was that for book licenses. Publishers had to put up with the public doing whatever the hell they wanted with books, so long as they didn't copy them.
So this result didn't establish that publishers couldn't forbid end purchasers from reselling books. But as a practical matter it established that publishers don't need to do that in order to be economically successful. And in a way, that's the most important question. Utility is the fundamental principle upon which the modern institution of copyright is built. Copyright exists to maximize the public's access to new material. If plenty of new books get published without the practical ability of publishers to forbid resale, resale isn't a necessary feature of a copyright system.
The fact that a successful copyright system doesn't need resale restrictions doesn't mean it can't have them or shouldn't have them. I'd argue that with the right distribution scheme you probably can impose all kinds of contractual obligations on readers; not just resale restrictions, but editorial restrictions on criticism, like some software licenses include. And even if for some reason you can't legally prevent users from reselling, you can certainly make it impossible by tying each copy to the user's crypto credentials.
So we've never really tackled the question of whether book resale restrictions should exist, because it was never practical to impose such restrictions. Now it's very easy, so it's time to think about changing copyright law.
Copyright is essentially a bargain struck between the public and the publishers, and it worked well without resale limitations. But technology is now making it practical for publishers to restrict books just like they can a copy of Microsoft Office. This means we now need to address this question with legislation. It's a good time to revisit this bargain -- or it would be if corporations didn't have disproportionate power in our political system, so that the public good has no effective representation.
Here's the bargain I'd strike: you can have an absolute restriction of resale and lending, but only for a limited time. After that the book goes into the public domain, and you must escrow your cryptographic keys to ensure the public has access (at which point libraries can step in and curate the material). This gives publishers far, far more control over published material than they ever had in the paper era, in exchange for a return to a sane copyright period.
My default expectation in any high profile acquisition is that the target company's stockholders will do well, the CEO of the acquiring company will make a bundle, and the stockholders of the acquiring company will take a bath.
How about "pressure cooker".
It's the bomb.
Writing down a hard-to-remember password is sometimes a better strategy than memorizing a low-entropy password. It depends on the nature of the threat.
You have to do a threat assessment. Who are you worried about? For example at work, writing down your server passwords and sticking them in your desk drawer is a bad idea, because one of the purposes of that password is to distinguish between you and coworkers, some of whom might have nefarious reasons to impersonate you. But let's say it's the password to your company's twitter account, and anyone in your office could legitimately use that password. Then a hard-to-remember password like "F4f`kg\HrEX[*yn[" written down on a slip of paper in your upper right hand drawer where everyone knows it lives might be a good solution, especially if you have other means of determining who actually posted something.
Here's what I recommend to many people. For really important stuff like your brokerage account, choose a tough random password and write it down in several places -- in your safe deposit box, your wallet, your safe. Then choose an easy to remember password and concatenate the two. There you have it: poor man's two factor authentication: something you have + something you know.
Of course people make mistakes. But ultimately the only thing you can do with a result you think you've validated statistically is compare it to other data. In other words data "seeming reasonable" is an end point you have to reach; but while that is necessary, it's not sufficient. And you can never know with absolute certainty it's sufficient.
Now the other problem is that the world is full of scientific crackpots who demand that scientists stop what they're doing and pick sense out of their nonsense. And the natural refusal of scientists to take their perpetual motion/vaccine injury theory/cold fusion reactor seriously is taken as proof the scientific establishment is out to silence them. It's not. Individual scientists just want the crackpots to go away and stop wasting their time.
How do we know this is a case of crackpottery? Well, we can't be 100% sure, but one of the hallmarks of the crackpot is when you press them on their methods, they start to get cagey. Perhaps this guy would have got a more respectful hearing if he'd released the software he used so other people could examine it.
Of course he might be right. He might have used the right methods to get to a defensible result, although nobody can know that at this point. Or he might have even used the wrong methods to get to the right result. Sometimes even crackpots get lucky.
Seems easy to do, doesn't it? You take the reciprocal of the interval between heartbeats scale that to beats per minute and there you go.
Except if you've ever designed software and had to look at a problem like this, you'll understand that it's not nearly so simple. The heart isn't nearly precise as the quartz oscillator you're using for your timing reference. Sometimes it throws in an early beat or late one, because it's an electro-chemo-mechanical oscillator that works by the flow of ions across a membranes of countless cells. So the rate is going to jump around a little bit second to second, which will only confuse the user. What's more any sensor that isn't stuck on with adhesive is going to miss a few signals now and then, or maybe get a spurious one.
So what you do is take a moving average to smooth out all the kinds of noise you have in your signal. Having a fitbit myself, I find it surprisingly accurate when compared against a manual pulse when your heart rate is steady. Watching the figures as I exercise hard, it's clear there's a lag in response as your heart rate accelerates in particular (since the heart slows this is less of a problem as you slow down), which indicates that the device is giving me some kind of moving average.
And it's OK. The point is to give users useful feedback about how their heart is doing during periods of strenuous exercise, not to give them a beat by beat accounting of what the sensors are picking up. It doesn't have to be laboratory-precise or instantaneous because there's nothing useful users can do with that precision. I've lost count of many times have I had to explain these two things to clients: you don't need feedback that's an order of magnitude faster than you're capable of responding too, and you shouldn't take action based on statistical noise; data doesn't have to be perfectly precise, they just have to tell you whether you're in the right ballpark or headed in the right direction.
The fitbit works very well for the purpose it's intended and the way users use it. You take a series of readings (which are sometimes off, but recognizably so) to establish what your heart is doing, and then shift to a new level of effort and take several readings as your heart settles into a new equilibrium.
Anyhow, note the weasel phrase "Up to 20 beats per minute." This means in all their testing the very worst discrepancy they ever found between the readings taken from glued on electrodes from the loosely cinched bracelet monitor was 20 beats per minute. That actually sounds pretty good to me for a worst case result.
And, if the original is anything to go by, terrible build quality. Mine had screen tearing practically from the day it was out of warranty, and when I looked into it this was a *very* common problem, and by design the thing is impossible to repair.
Otherwise I liked my Pebble; it was ugly as sin but functional. But I'll wouldn't buy another one from the company, particularly not one of the more expensive ones, unless they come with a three year warranty. I hate buying stuff that that ends up getting tossed into the landfill after a year.
I'm very happy with my Fitbit Surge, although it is a tad to thick to wear with dress clothes and it gives me an alarming looking (although painless) skin rash if I don't swap arms every day. I miss some of the apps and customizable notification capabilities of the Pebble, but the key thing is that the Surge gives me flawlessly reliable service, and that trumps features in my book.
I guess theoretically we could crack down on them with the laws we have now. First you'd have to start by granting fewer BS patents, which means hiring more and better patent examiners. Then you'd have to go after people who falsify stuff, including skipping over obvious cases of prior art.
The reason this remains a problem is that we don't have enough interest in using the laws we already have, much less making any new ones. Until we start electing people who want to do something about this we all have to live in a world where there are BS legal impediments to creating and bringing new products to market. It doesn't matter when it's a company like Apple, which has the resources to defend itself; the chilling effect is much greater on smaller companies. Which is why it politically is allowed to continue existing.
You know they used to have this thing back in Shakespeare's day called "irony", where the audience was supposed to understand a character's words in way that was different than the character intended them to be understood.
People stopped using "irony" because it was stupid; it makes stuff too hard to understand.
Shh!
We're all unique rebels here.
Well of course your mileage may vary. I track everything, and I find that I only get sluggish on a fast day if my calorie intake leading up to it is low.
But that's one of the benefits of tracking everything. You soon see patterns and can figure out works for you.
Now if you could only get an old version of Ubuntu to run on it.