That certainly is a consistent definition, but it isn't supported by the Constitution itself or by any other sources I can find.
An "official" is simply a person empowered to exercise judgment in some set of public matters. "Civil" has many definitions, but one of them is "in contradistinction to military or ecclesiastical". So in theory, a "civil official" should anybody who has power over public matters and is not an officer of the military or church.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary and Concise Encyclopedia notes: "By this term are included all officers of the United States who hold their appointments under the national government, whether their duties are executive or judicial, in the highest or the lowest departments; of the government, with the exception of officers of the army and navy. " This definition is widely cited, albeit often in unattributed form.
Bouvier goes on to note that the courts have held that Senators are excluded from this category because they were (at the time) appointed by State legislatures. First, note that the 1797 Blount case points out that the definition you put forward was NOT universally accepted. First, Blount was a senator, so at least some believed senators came under the heading of "civil officers". The basis for rejecting this idea also calls your definition into question: (a) that Senators were appointed by the State legislators and (b) that the Constitution specifically provided means for removing Senators that would be redundant if impeachment applied to them.
If your definition was the one held in the nineteenth century, it would have been clear to everyone that Senators cannot be impeached, because they are not appointed with the approval of the Senate.
Impeachment has been used less than twenty times in over two hundred years, and some of the early uses would not be consistent with current case law with respect to who may be impeached. But your definition has no historical justification that I can see.
I remember back in the 80s when graphical user interfaces were first coming into widespread use. Most program GUIs were horrible, horrible, horrible. Are people getting better at designing GUIs? Some of us are, but even the less experienced designers are doing better than we did back then, with a lot less thought and philosophical reflection needed. They can churn out interfaces that unconsciously embody commonly held assumptions (good or bad) about the way things are supposed to work. They don't have to think much about it to get to "tolerable". If they get things lined up nicely and use negative space effectively and stuff like that, and don't do anything that feels different, they've got something tolerable.
What you're talking about touches on some of those philosophical debates we used to have, especially the difference between expert and novice oriented interfaces. Back in the day, when many of our users had never touched a computer before, this was an even huger dichotomy, but it remains true that you can't have both as your top priority. What is a good interface style for a public kiosk is not necessarily so good for a programmer's integrated development environment.
Over the years, the novice orientation has pretty much won. The tacit assumption is that interfaces can be judged entirely on first impressions. Consider TFA, or the countless linux installation process reviews we've seen over the last decade. Of course, a good UI of any orientation is not unnecessarily bad when used the other way. A kiosk should not unnecessarily frustrate a regular user; an IDE should not be unduly hard to learn. For years, Unix CLI commands were criticized for their arbitrary switch handling, and it was a justifiable criticism of a collection of utilities that simply evolved. This did not refute the indisputable fact that Unix commands were powerful, but they were not powerful because they were arbitrary, nor were they necessarily hard to learn because they were powerful.
Arguably, Windows copied many elements of the Mac interface that made it novice friendly, but failed to copy many of the elements that made it expert friendly. The most famous divergence betweent he two interfaces was the attachment of application menus to app windows rather than the root window, a design decision with no impact on novices but a small yet consistent impact on experts.
Much of the usability advantages in the Mac interface have stemmed from restraint. You touch on another serious issue related to this: the abuse of user attention.
From a marketing perspective, there is no such thing as drawing too much attention to yourself. From a UI perspective, any use of the user's attention that is not strictly needed is too much. The Windows interface is not only profligate with asking the user to make decisions that could be deferred to later, it often notifies users of situations where the user is not required to do anything. Office's infamous Clippy is another example of gratuitous attention grabbing.
When you treat the attention of the user as if it were an infinite resource, its value becomes like that of any other abundant resource: low.
I don't much care for the Gnome tendency to do away with confirmation buttons in dialogs. Is this part of the Gnome HCI guidelines? If it is, it's an interesting choice. If users are unconsciously conditioned to hit the "Confirm" button, maybe the best policy is to un-condition them by getting rid of it altogether, except in cases where dire and unrecoverable damage might result.
I suppose an ideal interface is a one that teaches users to be more effective, then gets out of their way. But either way a good expert interface gets out of the way, which is why CLI is always going to be the gold standard for expert usage: the interface isn't manifest in any way until you call it into existence. A novice oriented interface is tiring to use because you have to continually hack your way through a thicket of unnecessary encouragement and support. A good expert interface is, by contrast, restful to use once you have mastered it.
Well, there is a long, long UI tradition back to the Lotus days of Lotus software being a bit weird from a UI standpoint. In the early days, it was because there wasn't much consensus about how GUIs were supposed to work. Even in the days of Notes 3 or so, the UI was not that bad when compared to contemporary programs, especially given that the capabilities of the system which at the time were unique.
What always mystified me about the product is that it was never given a makeover by a team of competent UI experts. Maybe it was, and the product managers didn't like the results. The product HAS been made over, but in a way that can best be described as amateurish.
With respect to the ease of developing in Notes, this is perhaps the upside of some of the weirdness of Notes. It always struck me that many kinds of applications that are hard to do with a conventional relational database/scripting language stack are easy to do in Notes, but the kinds of apps that are easy to do with that kind of stack are hard to do with Notes.
Notes is not really a calendaring/email system, it was just mis-marketed that way because IBM wanted to position it against Exchange/Outlook. In the MS dominated 90s, this was one of those insane decisions to try to beat MS on its own turf. The way you beat an entrenched monopolist is not a frontal assault on its strong positions. You complete by redefining product categories so that the monopoly begins to loose coherence. Notes is really a messaging/content management/workflow management engine in which it is trivial to put together a sophisticated, if somewhat idiosyncratic email and calendar system. Snap the building blocks together in a different way and get something more wiki-like. Snap them together a different way and you get something blog-like.
The thing is, Notes did all this stuff way back in 1980s (with robust two factor security and cryptographic authentication I might add), but businesses were just focused on getting email and calendaring implemented. When you talked about other kinds of computer mediated collaboration, you faced serious MEGO. Even the technical folks balked at understanding things like a reasonably robust cryptographic key management system.
The average user's understanding of computer systems was only skin deep. This applies not only to the technical aspects of the system, but the business aspects as well. Users can see the usefulness of things like email and shared calendars because they feel familiar with them, but they don't seem to be able to generalize the usefulness of the underlying capabilities that help people collaborate asynchronously.
Notes is still a terrific platform for rapidly prototyping these kinds of human collaboration applications. But people's ability to generalize remains just as limited. People don't see the usefulness of things like an email system because they know email is useful. They don't see that things like a blog are useful because they know blogs are useful. They don't see that things like wikis are useful just because they know wikis are useful.
What they want is their email system to work the way they expect an email system to work; for blogs to work like blogs; for wikis to work like wikis. And that's justifiable. But you could have been ahead of the curve on blogs and wikis and content management systems if you saw the utility underlying email. There are still businesses that could wield Notes' rapid collaboration prototyping to obtain competitive advantages over their rivals, if only they had the imagination to do so. Part of the price is an email system that's a bit awkward, and which requires administrators with specific training to run efficiently.
Non-registration does not preclude compensation. It precludes being awarded damages when someone uses your unregistered work without your permission.
It seems to me that this simply eliminates damages as a primary vehicle of compensation.
If you have a work you believe to be extremely economically valuable, you simply participate in the registration system. If you aren't sure, you do a risk/benefit analysis of participating. If you get it wrong, you'd be entitled to getting the usual kind of licensing deal authors get if, say, Disney uses your unregistered work. You may loathe the idea of Disney using your work, but if that's the case you should have participated in the registration system.
In a sense, this extends the benefits of licensing to authors of works of dubious economic value. If I write a novel that would make a good movie, I can sell the rights to the novel and it might get made into a movie. If I fail to sell the rights, but think somebody might pick them up, then I participate in the registration system. If I doubt it's worth my while, and I discover to my delight that I was wrong, I can still get paid.
reasonable adj., adv. in law, just, rational, appropriate, ordinary or usual in the circumstances. It may refer to care, cause, compensation, doubt (in a criminal trial), and a host of other actions or activities.
It's always tough to say what is reasonable after the fact, especially as compensation can be structured in many different ways: per copy, flat fee, sliding scale, share of profits. What is fair to impose after the fact isn't always the same as what is fair to agree to before the fact. There's more information that we can't pretend we don't know.
For example, suppose two people write Harry Potter VIII, in which Harry returns to Hogwarts to complete his missing year of education. One author writes a huge hit, the other author writes a total flop. Rowling then sues author A, claiming that she should be compensated a percentage of the profits. She then sues author B, claiming she should be compensated a flat fee. Although each arrangement is a possible fair deal up front, after the fact Rowling would be exploiting knowledge not available a priori. This means that an author who chooses not to take steps to protect his or her work could obtain more benefit from the licensing market than one who does. Clearly a system which "protects" the interests of authors this way is not reasonable or fair in itself.
I don't think there will ever be a cut and dried definition of "reasonable compensation"; too much depends on the facts of the case. However, I think one thing that Rowling would not be able to do is claim damages to her Harry Potter property. Providing she has a means to protect herself against damage (participating in the registration system), if she does not take advantage of that protection she should not be able to exact punishment on people who use her works without her permission. The inherent vagueness of "reasonable" isn't a license to pursue vengeance by other means.
I think the point should be to find some balance between the economic "network" benefits of uniformity and the security benefits of diversity.
One of the important benefits of software freedom is the freedom to deploy applications in different modes. A huge amount of the problem of security is trying to secure endless legions of desktop machines. In an ideal world, there would be fewer critical points to secure. Perhaps users would still have the benefits and costs of having their own laptops and desktops to screw up, but having run a number of my critical tasks in virtual machines, I can say it was a huge benefit to be able to plug an external USB drive into a desktop and keep running when the CPU fan on my laptop failed.
Don't forget though -- it's the coverup that is often the key. It's easy to destroy evidence, it's harder to destroy evidence of destroying evidence, then destroy evidence of destroying evidence of destroying evidence, and so ad infinitum.
So first, you prove they're crooks. Then it's much easier to show the extent of their criminality, although this might involve. That's how the Valerie Plame case should have gone, but Scooter willingly took the fall, and Congress wasn't willing to take the next step and impeach Libby, probably anticipating a party line deadlock in the Senate.
More precisely, is there a way a question can be verified by observation? The statement "I'd be happy if I was a billionaire" probably tells me nothing about the future. However, if somebody with a billion dollars at his disposal wanted to answer the question, they could in principle put the proposition to the test. Therefore the sentence is meaningful.
The sentence "God created the Universe" is not meaningful an a positivist sense, because if you could verify it observationally, they you'd have to include God's existence within the lifespan of the universe. It's a bit like asking the question, "What's north of the North Pole?" Language is capable of forming questions and statements that have no possible observational significance. It's not that every meaningless sentence doesn't point the way to a real philosophical question, it's that real philosophical questions are sometimes couched in loaded language.
Of course, mathematics itself is an interesting challenge to positivism. GÃdel showed that every formal system of arithmetic is either inconsistent, or incapable of proving some true statements. A true, but unprovable arithmetic statement is an interesting thing; it can't be said to be meaningless because it could in principle be disproved by counterexample. But it challenges some of the appeal of logical positivism, which seems to make truth something entirely within the grasp of human reason.
I think the invented/discovered dichotomy is less interesting; it's more of a linguistic bug like the "North of the North Pole" thing. Mathematics basically works like this:"If you assert such and so, you must also accept thus and thus." When you start with a set of postulates, it is often necessary to extend the postulates to handle cases that would seem reasonable. Faced with the problem of describing the diagonal of a unit square, you need to postulate the existence of of real numbers. However doing so is an act of choice, as can be seen in the most famous case of postulate system extension of all: the Euclidean Fifth Postulate.
Assuming other cases for the Fifth Postulate leads to different kinds of geometry, which have real world applications.
Therefore there are clearly elements of invention and discovery in the process of "doing mathematics". It's linguistically possible to frame the question about whether mathematical truths are invented or discovered, but any process in which truths are arrived at exclusively by one means or another is not mathematics. Creating postulate systems is not mathematics; arriving at conclusions not inherent in some postulate system is not mathematics either.
By way of comparison, according to the USDA projects that ethanol production will cause the total US corn acreage to reach 90.5 million acres, or over 140 thousand square miles.
We grow a lot of corn.
If you fly over the US, you'll see there is a great deal of area that is arid. Assuming that you can recycle the water used, it would make more sense to locate production there. Saudi Arabia might well be interested in this. They're already in the energy business, they have plenty of sunshine, and they have plenty of water -- it's just salty. And, by a stroke of irony, the land area of Saudi Arabia happens to be just about 829 thousand square miles, so if the process was no more efficient than corn, they could still supply the US transportation sector with nine thousand square miles left to accomodate residents and religious pilgrims.
And maybe del Toro sees things in Hobbit you don't. People who despise a work are really not in a position to consider its useful possibilities. There are people who consider the whole fantasy genre as escapist trash, a viewpoint they are welcome to take, but I wouldn't rely on them to see the artistic possibilities of any fantasy work.
To address your question seriously, LotR is a post WW1 effort to address the issues of death and meaning, but rather than turning to modern ideas of psychoanalysis and existentialism, the author looks back to medieval poetry and late classical era thinkers, such as Boethius and St. Augustine. The connection might have escaped your notice.
The Hobbit is a children's story, but it is more sophisticated in its symbolism and linguistic sophistication than most people recognize. It is, in part, a reflection on Aristotelean virtue ethics. Examining the linguistic clues in the text, it becomes clear that the hero is a ordinary modern person, who by journeying into an archaic world lays claim to ancient heroic virtues, and confronts at the end of that journey modern viciousness (literally vice-filledness).
Of course, Tolkien as an author faces a challenge in the twenty-first century, a challenge that all authors of his influence do: many of his literary devices have been copied so often they are cliche. Still, there are very few authors who use those devices with such an unusual world view.
On the other hand, it's not having 10 years of post graduate schooling working on your own version of Viagra, because Viagra is a hit.
It's not so great when new applications for existing drugs with a long safety track record aren't as attractive as spending tons of research dough on something you can patent.
It's not so great that diseases that don't afflict a large fraction of the population can't attract research investment.
It's not so great that drugs that manage a condition are more profitable than research into prevention.
Oh, there's lots of bad things about any system. This is on place where the fundamental principle of economics is especially true: our wants will always exceed our needs.
The world would not end if some brilliant person decided he'd rather be paid less, but know that millions of poor people will be cured of a treatable disease, than to work on a new, proprietary version of Viagra. There is nothing inherently wrong with preferring to make a lot of dough working on a "me-too" drug. If my admiration for the first person is higher, well, that's part of his pay, isn't it?
He's speaking metaphorically; one can say "All men are grass", without implying that all men photosynthesize. The root of "metaphor" means "to carry over" -- you intend to carry over certain characteristics of blades of grass, e.g. that they are innumerable, that they are from a distance indistinguishable, that they are walked upon (a meta-metaphor).
In this case "fundamentalist" may well carry his meaning accurately. Fundamentalists are religious radicals. They believe many of the same kinds of things that people in the wider Christian community do, but in the name of consistency they apply those beliefs in a way that their co-religionists view as simplistic.
This doesn't validate his view. He's saying, if I interpret correctly, that some people think that advocating for open source is inconsistent with helping Microsoft get XP running on the XO, or spreading the idea that this is possible, or comparing Windows favorably to Linux in any way. While this it is undoubtedly true, it isn't necessarily a fair characterization of all the people who disagree with him.
It's really a matter of how much smoothing you have to do to make the increase monotonic.
Energy prices will continue to go up and down over the course of a day, probably even quarters. I think we'll see prices increasing monotonically from here on when averaged over, say, five years, but there yet may be years where oil goes down.
The current global credit crunch may be a good indicator; it's very interesting that we're seeing record oil prices in that context. If the growth of the global economy is relatively sluggish, and oil prices don't abate, that might be the sign of a new era.
The idea is to produce hydrocarbons. An alcohol is a hydrocarbon with a hydroxyl (-OH) group stuck on.
If I understand the process correctly, biomass fuel is produced mainly from the cellulose in plants. Well, just look at the cellulose molecule, and you'll see it is bristling with hydroxyl groups and chock full of oxygen atoms linking carbons together. But if you take the oxygen out, you'd end up with a mix of hydrocarbons, the raw stuff of plastics and petroleum based fuels.
Now tinkering with hydrocarbon mixes to produce something with just the right mix is something we're very, very good at after over a hundred years of a petroleum based economy. It might require some novel processes to get to gasoline, but there's every reason to believe that if we could get to hydrocarbons without using more energy than remains in them, refining won't be an issue.
Even if the process of converting biomass to hydrocarbons takes too much energy to be practical for fuel production, it's still a very useful thing to be able to do. If there is very little petroleum left in the world by, say the year 2100, it isn't hard to imagine other sources such as nuclear or solar electric taking up the slack. But it's hard to imagine a world without plastics.
It also doesn't address the ongoing problem of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that can't be reabsorbed naturally.
The carbon in biomass comes from the atmosphere. You have to take it out of the atmosphere before you put it back into the atmosphere via your tailpipe. Increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by burning biomass is like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
Of course the reabsorption process isn't natural, but that's the point. It kind of balances the books on humanity's use of atmospheric carbon.
Mining companies chewed up mountains and spit out piles of rubble just to get at a paltry quantity of shale oil. Thousands, probably tens of thousands of startups had ingenious ideas for conserving or producing energy. I knew a lot of smart, creative people who jumped to be part of the new field of alternative energy technology.
Then prices went down and it all collapsed.
I don't think prices will go down as far as they did from the 70s to 80s, but we have to be aware that news of these ideas gets a great deal of play when prices are high, then drop off as prices go the other way. Unless we have reached an era of monotonically increasing oil prices, it will be a long road to replacing oil, littered with companies choked off by fluctuations in cash flow driven by fluctuations in oil prices.
I'm optimistic (???) this time around we're going to see a more consistent trend towards higher oil prices, which means we'll see greater progress in replacing petroleum with renewable energy sources. But I'd be astonished if renewables replaced a significant fraction of our oil consumption within ten years.
I agree, using time dilation is iffy, but it meets my criterion of not physically impossible. However, unless I miss my mark, building a ship that uses time dilation to get our interstellar crew there and back again before they die of old age is probably not feasible using any kind of drive technology currently envisioned. Even future technologies will probably require more energy or matter than will be practical to pack into a mobile craft.
However, it is not out of the question to send a slow ship. If a robotic ship could be sent, then humans could be sent a well -- in the form of frozen embryos that would be robotically unfrozen and reared. This is probably a more feasible method than a generation ship.
A generation ship, however, is not physically impossible nor improbably difficult even for a more technologically advanced society.
The interesting question -- at least to me -- is whether it makes a difference whether humans are along for the trip. If it does, and that is satisfiable by a generation ship, why not a nursery ship?
In any case, the way you'd get someplace interesting is either (a) via time dilation or (b) via a multi-generation ship or (c) via a robotic ship, or some combination of the above.
It's just not practical for the kinds of purposes humans have traditionally done exploration. There is no guarantee that a generation ship will ever find a colonizable planet, for example, and if it did it the colonizers would not have any practical economic relationship to the mother planet.
The point is, work through all the limitations that physics imposes on such a venture, then come up for a reason that despite this, it would be done. The usual method in SF is to simply assume the most onerous constraints away.
Given the current state of knowledge, FTL travel is "more impossible" than air travel was a thousand years ago.
In fact, that's true even given contemporary knowledge; it was quite clear that flight was physically possible in the year 1000, they just didn't know how they would do it in a sustained, controlled manner. In fact there are historical reports of successful manned glider experiments in China and the even the Muslim parts of Europe that predate that era.
Interstellar travel, at least to any place where we'd expect to find intelligent life, is "less impossible" than FTL, but "more impossible" than sustained, controlled flight would be to people of a thousand years past. It is physically possible, given time dilation; however it seems unlikely that humans will ever make a serious attempt utilizing physics more or less as we know it now.
That would make an interesting sci-fi story. Given: that humanity launches an interstellar mission consistent with physics as we know it now, explain: why.
Misusing "begs the question" is actually worse than mixing up the case of pronouns. Mixing up "I" and "we" just doesn't sound right. Misusing "begging the question" can lead readers to make incorrect inferences.
It is often correctly pointed out that phrases and words change their meanings over time, and that ultimately no harm is done as long as the reader is aware of whether the modern or antiquated sense is being used by the writer. However, it is seldom noted that this process is not accomplished at a single instant. This means that there is a considerable period in which deliberate or accidentally misleading use can occur.
It is not even the case that "beg the question" has flipped meanings; it is still in common use in its original sense. A close analogy would be the use of "literally" to mean "very", a sense in which it may well be heard more frequently than in the standard one. "Literally" still means "not in a metaphorical sense". However, we know when an overheated sportscaster says that a linebacker "literally tore off the quarterback's head," he doesn't mean that, in plain fact, the quarterback's head has parted company with his torso.
The misuse of "begging the question" is likewise detectable by common sense. In the standard sense, if question A begs the question B, then an answer must be determined for B prior to raising A. The classic example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?" The incorrect ("colloquial" if you will) sense of the phrase means exactly the opposite: by asserting that B is a natural thing to ask after you have an answer for A, you logically don't need an answer to B before you consider A.
This isn't just a usage quibble; the non-standard use of "begging the question" is potentially much more harmful than "literally"/"very", because it can sometimes mask an attempt to assert two incompatible things at the same time. This most often occurs in an argument against something in which a writer is not forthright about his actual justifications.
As an example, consider this: "The committee report says we only have half as many math elementary school math teachers as we need. This begs the question of whether we can afford them." The speaker is not claiming any burden of proof other than that if we are thinking about doubling the number of math teachers we'll certainly want to know how much it will cost. However, he is also asserting it is meaningless to consider the question of whether more teachers could raise math performance until a budget debate has taken place, an assertion that carries a much higher burden of proof.
Really, it is the habit of reflexive verbal amplification that has to be watched. It is usually just harmless posturing, but it can also easily mask an attempt to twist words so that they support a conclusion that is unjustified by their semantics.
It is not so much the case that bad writing ought to be derided, as it is the case that it should be distrusted. Clear thought is seldom expressed in sloppy writing, but sloppy thought often is.
Well, what if I gave you money? Could I then ask you to stop using the another license for a different product? What if I gave you some other consideration of value? What if that thing of value was the use of my spiffy new product?
Just turn your question on its head for a moment. Sure, an open license to a company's product is an open license, but that does that give you any rights whatsoever to future, similar products? If not, they can offer the future product to you under any terms they choose, and you are free to refuse and continue to use your currently licensed material whether that material is openly licensed or not. It's not changing the deal, it's offering a different deal.
With respect to anti-trust laws, I don't see how they apply here. If they, for example, refused to allow shops that carried third party products created under their open license initiative, you might have a point. Instead, they're giving vendors a choice: license the new stuff, or continue using the old stuff under the old license, but not both. Doesn't sound coercive to me, sounds like a straight up deal.
What WoC is doing is forfeiting any future trust others might put in any open license initiative they attempt. They're no doubt aware of this, so it probably means they look at their open licensing experiment as a net business failure, and not worth repeating.
Frankly, I doubt it really matters that much. The whole source of the original D&D craze was that the system wasn't really that "good". But it was playable. That's why it created a new class of games, "role playing" games, distinct from simulation games. The enjoyment of the game comes entirely from the creativity of the people you play it with. Role playing is really a hybrid of war simulation gaming and "Cowboys and Indians".
Unless the fourth edition is some kind of mighty leap forward in playability, it's doubtful that a company that has been successful at publishing games based on older d20 systems would have much incentive to switch. If they do decide to switch, it's because they see greater profit that way. In any case, users will probably adapt whatever they like out of the new edition into older edition campaigns, including those where the features are not licensed by the vendor.
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That certainly is a consistent definition, but it isn't supported by the Constitution itself or by any other sources I can find.
An "official" is simply a person empowered to exercise judgment in some set of public matters. "Civil" has many definitions, but one of them is "in contradistinction to military or ecclesiastical". So in theory, a "civil official" should anybody who has power over public matters and is not an officer of the military or church.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary and Concise Encyclopedia notes: "By this term are included all officers of the United States who hold their appointments under the national government, whether their duties are executive or judicial, in the highest or the lowest departments; of the government, with the exception of officers of the army and navy. " This definition is widely cited, albeit often in unattributed form.
Bouvier goes on to note that the courts have held that Senators are excluded from this category because they were (at the time) appointed by State legislatures. First, note that the 1797 Blount case points out that the definition you put forward was NOT universally accepted. First, Blount was a senator, so at least some believed senators came under the heading of "civil officers". The basis for rejecting this idea also calls your definition into question: (a) that Senators were appointed by the State legislators and (b) that the Constitution specifically provided means for removing Senators that would be redundant if impeachment applied to them.
If your definition was the one held in the nineteenth century, it would have been clear to everyone that Senators cannot be impeached, because they are not appointed with the approval of the Senate.
Impeachment has been used less than twenty times in over two hundred years, and some of the early uses would not be consistent with current case law with respect to who may be impeached. But your definition has no historical justification that I can see.
I remember back in the 80s when graphical user interfaces were first coming into widespread use. Most program GUIs were horrible, horrible, horrible. Are people getting better at designing GUIs? Some of us are, but even the less experienced designers are doing better than we did back then, with a lot less thought and philosophical reflection needed. They can churn out interfaces that unconsciously embody commonly held assumptions (good or bad) about the way things are supposed to work. They don't have to think much about it to get to "tolerable". If they get things lined up nicely and use negative space effectively and stuff like that, and don't do anything that feels different, they've got something tolerable.
What you're talking about touches on some of those philosophical debates we used to have, especially the difference between expert and novice oriented interfaces. Back in the day, when many of our users had never touched a computer before, this was an even huger dichotomy, but it remains true that you can't have both as your top priority. What is a good interface style for a public kiosk is not necessarily so good for a programmer's integrated development environment.
Over the years, the novice orientation has pretty much won. The tacit assumption is that interfaces can be judged entirely on first impressions. Consider TFA, or the countless linux installation process reviews we've seen over the last decade. Of course, a good UI of any orientation is not unnecessarily bad when used the other way. A kiosk should not unnecessarily frustrate a regular user; an IDE should not be unduly hard to learn. For years, Unix CLI commands were criticized for their arbitrary switch handling, and it was a justifiable criticism of a collection of utilities that simply evolved. This did not refute the indisputable fact that Unix commands were powerful, but they were not powerful because they were arbitrary, nor were they necessarily hard to learn because they were powerful.
Arguably, Windows copied many elements of the Mac interface that made it novice friendly, but failed to copy many of the elements that made it expert friendly. The most famous divergence betweent he two interfaces was the attachment of application menus to app windows rather than the root window, a design decision with no impact on novices but a small yet consistent impact on experts.
Much of the usability advantages in the Mac interface have stemmed from restraint. You touch on another serious issue related to this: the abuse of user attention.
From a marketing perspective, there is no such thing as drawing too much attention to yourself. From a UI perspective, any use of the user's attention that is not strictly needed is too much. The Windows interface is not only profligate with asking the user to make decisions that could be deferred to later, it often notifies users of situations where the user is not required to do anything. Office's infamous Clippy is another example of gratuitous attention grabbing.
When you treat the attention of the user as if it were an infinite resource, its value becomes like that of any other abundant resource: low.
I don't much care for the Gnome tendency to do away with confirmation buttons in dialogs. Is this part of the Gnome HCI guidelines? If it is, it's an interesting choice. If users are unconsciously conditioned to hit the "Confirm" button, maybe the best policy is to un-condition them by getting rid of it altogether, except in cases where dire and unrecoverable damage might result.
I suppose an ideal interface is a one that teaches users to be more effective, then gets out of their way. But either way a good expert interface gets out of the way, which is why CLI is always going to be the gold standard for expert usage: the interface isn't manifest in any way until you call it into existence. A novice oriented interface is tiring to use because you have to continually hack your way through a thicket of unnecessary encouragement and support. A good expert interface is, by contrast, restful to use once you have mastered it.
So what is the precise constitutional test you use to distinguish mere high ranking employees of the executive branch from "civil officers"?
Well, there is a long, long UI tradition back to the Lotus days of Lotus software being a bit weird from a UI standpoint. In the early days, it was because there wasn't much consensus about how GUIs were supposed to work. Even in the days of Notes 3 or so, the UI was not that bad when compared to contemporary programs, especially given that the capabilities of the system which at the time were unique.
What always mystified me about the product is that it was never given a makeover by a team of competent UI experts. Maybe it was, and the product managers didn't like the results. The product HAS been made over, but in a way that can best be described as amateurish.
With respect to the ease of developing in Notes, this is perhaps the upside of some of the weirdness of Notes. It always struck me that many kinds of applications that are hard to do with a conventional relational database/scripting language stack are easy to do in Notes, but the kinds of apps that are easy to do with that kind of stack are hard to do with Notes.
Notes is not really a calendaring/email system, it was just mis-marketed that way because IBM wanted to position it against Exchange/Outlook. In the MS dominated 90s, this was one of those insane decisions to try to beat MS on its own turf. The way you beat an entrenched monopolist is not a frontal assault on its strong positions. You complete by redefining product categories so that the monopoly begins to loose coherence. Notes is really a messaging/content management/workflow management engine in which it is trivial to put together a sophisticated, if somewhat idiosyncratic email and calendar system. Snap the building blocks together in a different way and get something more wiki-like. Snap them together a different way and you get something blog-like.
The thing is, Notes did all this stuff way back in 1980s (with robust two factor security and cryptographic authentication I might add), but businesses were just focused on getting email and calendaring implemented. When you talked about other kinds of computer mediated collaboration, you faced serious MEGO. Even the technical folks balked at understanding things like a reasonably robust cryptographic key management system.
The average user's understanding of computer systems was only skin deep. This applies not only to the technical aspects of the system, but the business aspects as well. Users can see the usefulness of things like email and shared calendars because they feel familiar with them, but they don't seem to be able to generalize the usefulness of the underlying capabilities that help people collaborate asynchronously.
Notes is still a terrific platform for rapidly prototyping these kinds of human collaboration applications. But people's ability to generalize remains just as limited. People don't see the usefulness of things like an email system because they know email is useful. They don't see that things like a blog are useful because they know blogs are useful. They don't see that things like wikis are useful just because they know wikis are useful.
What they want is their email system to work the way they expect an email system to work; for blogs to work like blogs; for wikis to work like wikis. And that's justifiable. But you could have been ahead of the curve on blogs and wikis and content management systems if you saw the utility underlying email. There are still businesses that could wield Notes' rapid collaboration prototyping to obtain competitive advantages over their rivals, if only they had the imagination to do so. Part of the price is an email system that's a bit awkward, and which requires administrators with specific training to run efficiently.
Um, yes he is.
Your assertion does not make sense to me.
Non-registration does not preclude compensation. It precludes being awarded damages when someone uses your unregistered work without your permission.
It seems to me that this simply eliminates damages as a primary vehicle of compensation.
If you have a work you believe to be extremely economically valuable, you simply participate in the registration system. If you aren't sure, you do a risk/benefit analysis of participating. If you get it wrong, you'd be entitled to getting the usual kind of licensing deal authors get if, say, Disney uses your unregistered work. You may loathe the idea of Disney using your work, but if that's the case you should have participated in the registration system.
In a sense, this extends the benefits of licensing to authors of works of dubious economic value. If I write a novel that would make a good movie, I can sell the rights to the novel and it might get made into a movie. If I fail to sell the rights, but think somebody might pick them up, then I participate in the registration system. If I doubt it's worth my while, and I discover to my delight that I was wrong, I can still get paid.
It's always tough to say what is reasonable after the fact, especially as compensation can be structured in many different ways: per copy, flat fee, sliding scale, share of profits. What is fair to impose after the fact isn't always the same as what is fair to agree to before the fact. There's more information that we can't pretend we don't know.
For example, suppose two people write Harry Potter VIII, in which Harry returns to Hogwarts to complete his missing year of education. One author writes a huge hit, the other author writes a total flop. Rowling then sues author A, claiming that she should be compensated a percentage of the profits. She then sues author B, claiming she should be compensated a flat fee. Although each arrangement is a possible fair deal up front, after the fact Rowling would be exploiting knowledge not available a priori. This means that an author who chooses not to take steps to protect his or her work could obtain more benefit from the licensing market than one who does. Clearly a system which "protects" the interests of authors this way is not reasonable or fair in itself.
I don't think there will ever be a cut and dried definition of "reasonable compensation"; too much depends on the facts of the case. However, I think one thing that Rowling would not be able to do is claim damages to her Harry Potter property. Providing she has a means to protect herself against damage (participating in the registration system), if she does not take advantage of that protection she should not be able to exact punishment on people who use her works without her permission. The inherent vagueness of "reasonable" isn't a license to pursue vengeance by other means.
I think the point should be to find some balance between the economic "network" benefits of uniformity and the security benefits of diversity.
One of the important benefits of software freedom is the freedom to deploy applications in different modes. A huge amount of the problem of security is trying to secure endless legions of desktop machines. In an ideal world, there would be fewer critical points to secure. Perhaps users would still have the benefits and costs of having their own laptops and desktops to screw up, but having run a number of my critical tasks in virtual machines, I can say it was a huge benefit to be able to plug an external USB drive into a desktop and keep running when the CPU fan on my laptop failed.
Don't forget though -- it's the coverup that is often the key. It's easy to destroy evidence, it's harder to destroy evidence of destroying evidence, then destroy evidence of destroying evidence of destroying evidence, and so ad infinitum.
So first, you prove they're crooks. Then it's much easier to show the extent of their criminality, although this might involve. That's how the Valerie Plame case should have gone, but Scooter willingly took the fall, and Congress wasn't willing to take the next step and impeach Libby, probably anticipating a party line deadlock in the Senate.
More precisely, is there a way a question can be verified by observation? The statement "I'd be happy if I was a billionaire" probably tells me nothing about the future. However, if somebody with a billion dollars at his disposal wanted to answer the question, they could in principle put the proposition to the test. Therefore the sentence is meaningful.
The sentence "God created the Universe" is not meaningful an a positivist sense, because if you could verify it observationally, they you'd have to include God's existence within the lifespan of the universe. It's a bit like asking the question, "What's north of the North Pole?" Language is capable of forming questions and statements that have no possible observational significance. It's not that every meaningless sentence doesn't point the way to a real philosophical question, it's that real philosophical questions are sometimes couched in loaded language.
Of course, mathematics itself is an interesting challenge to positivism. GÃdel showed that every formal system of arithmetic is either inconsistent, or incapable of proving some true statements. A true, but unprovable arithmetic statement is an interesting thing; it can't be said to be meaningless because it could in principle be disproved by counterexample. But it challenges some of the appeal of logical positivism, which seems to make truth something entirely within the grasp of human reason.
I think the invented/discovered dichotomy is less interesting; it's more of a linguistic bug like the "North of the North Pole" thing. Mathematics basically works like this:"If you assert such and so, you must also accept thus and thus." When you start with a set of postulates, it is often necessary to extend the postulates to handle cases that would seem reasonable. Faced with the problem of describing the diagonal of a unit square, you need to postulate the existence of of real numbers. However doing so is an act of choice, as can be seen in the most famous case of postulate system extension of all: the Euclidean Fifth Postulate.
Assuming other cases for the Fifth Postulate leads to different kinds of geometry, which have real world applications.
Therefore there are clearly elements of invention and discovery in the process of "doing mathematics". It's linguistically possible to frame the question about whether mathematical truths are invented or discovered, but any process in which truths are arrived at exclusively by one means or another is not mathematics. Creating postulate systems is not mathematics; arriving at conclusions not inherent in some postulate system is not mathematics either.
I'd arrive in regular clothing, with no props or anything.
If anybody asks, I'd reply, "We're just like anybody else, really. Only smarter."
By way of comparison, according to the USDA projects that ethanol production will cause the total US corn acreage to reach 90.5 million acres, or over 140 thousand square miles.
We grow a lot of corn.
If you fly over the US, you'll see there is a great deal of area that is arid. Assuming that you can recycle the water used, it would make more sense to locate production there. Saudi Arabia might well be interested in this. They're already in the energy business, they have plenty of sunshine, and they have plenty of water -- it's just salty. And, by a stroke of irony, the land area of Saudi Arabia happens to be just about 829 thousand square miles, so if the process was no more efficient than corn, they could still supply the US transportation sector with nine thousand square miles left to accomodate residents and religious pilgrims.
Well, there's money. That's a draw.
And maybe del Toro sees things in Hobbit you don't. People who despise a work are really not in a position to consider its useful possibilities. There are people who consider the whole fantasy genre as escapist trash, a viewpoint they are welcome to take, but I wouldn't rely on them to see the artistic possibilities of any fantasy work.
To address your question seriously, LotR is a post WW1 effort to address the issues of death and meaning, but rather than turning to modern ideas of psychoanalysis and existentialism, the author looks back to medieval poetry and late classical era thinkers, such as Boethius and St. Augustine. The connection might have escaped your notice.
The Hobbit is a children's story, but it is more sophisticated in its symbolism and linguistic sophistication than most people recognize. It is, in part, a reflection on Aristotelean virtue ethics. Examining the linguistic clues in the text, it becomes clear that the hero is a ordinary modern person, who by journeying into an archaic world lays claim to ancient heroic virtues, and confronts at the end of that journey modern viciousness (literally vice-filledness).
Of course, Tolkien as an author faces a challenge in the twenty-first century, a challenge that all authors of his influence do: many of his literary devices have been copied so often they are cliche. Still, there are very few authors who use those devices with such an unusual world view.
On the other hand, it's not having 10 years of post graduate schooling working on your own version of Viagra, because Viagra is a hit.
It's not so great when new applications for existing drugs with a long safety track record aren't as attractive as spending tons of research dough on something you can patent.
It's not so great that diseases that don't afflict a large fraction of the population can't attract research investment.
It's not so great that drugs that manage a condition are more profitable than research into prevention.
Oh, there's lots of bad things about any system. This is on place where the fundamental principle of economics is especially true: our wants will always exceed our needs.
The world would not end if some brilliant person decided he'd rather be paid less, but know that millions of poor people will be cured of a treatable disease, than to work on a new, proprietary version of Viagra. There is nothing inherently wrong with preferring to make a lot of dough working on a "me-too" drug. If my admiration for the first person is higher, well, that's part of his pay, isn't it?
He's speaking metaphorically; one can say "All men are grass", without implying that all men photosynthesize. The root of "metaphor" means "to carry over" -- you intend to carry over certain characteristics of blades of grass, e.g. that they are innumerable, that they are from a distance indistinguishable, that they are walked upon (a meta-metaphor).
In this case "fundamentalist" may well carry his meaning accurately. Fundamentalists are religious radicals. They believe many of the same kinds of things that people in the wider Christian community do, but in the name of consistency they apply those beliefs in a way that their co-religionists view as simplistic.
This doesn't validate his view. He's saying, if I interpret correctly, that some people think that advocating for open source is inconsistent with helping Microsoft get XP running on the XO, or spreading the idea that this is possible, or comparing Windows favorably to Linux in any way. While this it is undoubtedly true, it isn't necessarily a fair characterization of all the people who disagree with him.
It's really a matter of how much smoothing you have to do to make the increase monotonic.
Energy prices will continue to go up and down over the course of a day, probably even quarters. I think we'll see prices increasing monotonically from here on when averaged over, say, five years, but there yet may be years where oil goes down.
The current global credit crunch may be a good indicator; it's very interesting that we're seeing record oil prices in that context. If the growth of the global economy is relatively sluggish, and oil prices don't abate, that might be the sign of a new era.
The idea is to produce hydrocarbons. An alcohol is a hydrocarbon with a hydroxyl (-OH) group stuck on.
If I understand the process correctly, biomass fuel is produced mainly from the cellulose in plants. Well, just look at the cellulose molecule, and you'll see it is bristling with hydroxyl groups and chock full of oxygen atoms linking carbons together. But if you take the oxygen out, you'd end up with a mix of hydrocarbons, the raw stuff of plastics and petroleum based fuels.
Now tinkering with hydrocarbon mixes to produce something with just the right mix is something we're very, very good at after over a hundred years of a petroleum based economy. It might require some novel processes to get to gasoline, but there's every reason to believe that if we could get to hydrocarbons without using more energy than remains in them, refining won't be an issue.
Even if the process of converting biomass to hydrocarbons takes too much energy to be practical for fuel production, it's still a very useful thing to be able to do. If there is very little petroleum left in the world by, say the year 2100, it isn't hard to imagine other sources such as nuclear or solar electric taking up the slack. But it's hard to imagine a world without plastics.
The carbon in biomass comes from the atmosphere. You have to take it out of the atmosphere before you put it back into the atmosphere via your tailpipe. Increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by burning biomass is like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
Of course the reabsorption process isn't natural, but that's the point. It kind of balances the books on humanity's use of atmospheric carbon.
Back in the 70's, we called it the Energy Crisis.
Mining companies chewed up mountains and spit out piles of rubble just to get at a paltry quantity of shale oil. Thousands, probably tens of thousands of startups had ingenious ideas for conserving or producing energy. I knew a lot of smart, creative people who jumped to be part of the new field of alternative energy technology.
Then prices went down and it all collapsed.
I don't think prices will go down as far as they did from the 70s to 80s, but we have to be aware that news of these ideas gets a great deal of play when prices are high, then drop off as prices go the other way. Unless we have reached an era of monotonically increasing oil prices, it will be a long road to replacing oil, littered with companies choked off by fluctuations in cash flow driven by fluctuations in oil prices.
I'm optimistic (???) this time around we're going to see a more consistent trend towards higher oil prices, which means we'll see greater progress in replacing petroleum with renewable energy sources. But I'd be astonished if renewables replaced a significant fraction of our oil consumption within ten years.
I wouldn't say it's the only way.
I agree, using time dilation is iffy, but it meets my criterion of not physically impossible. However, unless I miss my mark, building a ship that uses time dilation to get our interstellar crew there and back again before they die of old age is probably not feasible using any kind of drive technology currently envisioned. Even future technologies will probably require more energy or matter than will be practical to pack into a mobile craft.
However, it is not out of the question to send a slow ship. If a robotic ship could be sent, then humans could be sent a well -- in the form of frozen embryos that would be robotically unfrozen and reared. This is probably a more feasible method than a generation ship.
A generation ship, however, is not physically impossible nor improbably difficult even for a more technologically advanced society.
The interesting question -- at least to me -- is whether it makes a difference whether humans are along for the trip. If it does, and that is satisfiable by a generation ship, why not a nursery ship?
"More impossible" was meant to be ironic.
In any case, the way you'd get someplace interesting is either (a) via time dilation or (b) via a multi-generation ship or (c) via a robotic ship, or some combination of the above.
It's just not practical for the kinds of purposes humans have traditionally done exploration. There is no guarantee that a generation ship will ever find a colonizable planet, for example, and if it did it the colonizers would not have any practical economic relationship to the mother planet.
The point is, work through all the limitations that physics imposes on such a venture, then come up for a reason that despite this, it would be done. The usual method in SF is to simply assume the most onerous constraints away.
Given the current state of knowledge, FTL travel is "more impossible" than air travel was a thousand years ago.
In fact, that's true even given contemporary knowledge; it was quite clear that flight was physically possible in the year 1000, they just didn't know how they would do it in a sustained, controlled manner. In fact there are historical reports of successful manned glider experiments in China and the even the Muslim parts of Europe that predate that era.
Interstellar travel, at least to any place where we'd expect to find intelligent life, is "less impossible" than FTL, but "more impossible" than sustained, controlled flight would be to people of a thousand years past. It is physically possible, given time dilation; however it seems unlikely that humans will ever make a serious attempt utilizing physics more or less as we know it now.
That would make an interesting sci-fi story. Given: that humanity launches an interstellar mission consistent with physics as we know it now, explain: why.
Misusing "begs the question" is actually worse than mixing up the case of pronouns. Mixing up "I" and "we" just doesn't sound right. Misusing "begging the question" can lead readers to make incorrect inferences.
It is often correctly pointed out that phrases and words change their meanings over time, and that ultimately no harm is done as long as the reader is aware of whether the modern or antiquated sense is being used by the writer. However, it is seldom noted that this process is not accomplished at a single instant. This means that there is a considerable period in which deliberate or accidentally misleading use can occur.
It is not even the case that "beg the question" has flipped meanings; it is still in common use in its original sense. A close analogy would be the use of "literally" to mean "very", a sense in which it may well be heard more frequently than in the standard one. "Literally" still means "not in a metaphorical sense". However, we know when an overheated sportscaster says that a linebacker "literally tore off the quarterback's head," he doesn't mean that, in plain fact, the quarterback's head has parted company with his torso.
The misuse of "begging the question" is likewise detectable by common sense. In the standard sense, if question A begs the question B, then an answer must be determined for B prior to raising A. The classic example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?" The incorrect ("colloquial" if you will) sense of the phrase means exactly the opposite: by asserting that B is a natural thing to ask after you have an answer for A, you logically don't need an answer to B before you consider A.
This isn't just a usage quibble; the non-standard use of "begging the question" is potentially much more harmful than "literally"/"very", because it can sometimes mask an attempt to assert two incompatible things at the same time. This most often occurs in an argument against something in which a writer is not forthright about his actual justifications.
As an example, consider this: "The committee report says we only have half as many math elementary school math teachers as we need. This begs the question of whether we can afford them." The speaker is not claiming any burden of proof other than that if we are thinking about doubling the number of math teachers we'll certainly want to know how much it will cost. However, he is also asserting it is meaningless to consider the question of whether more teachers could raise math performance until a budget debate has taken place, an assertion that carries a much higher burden of proof.
Really, it is the habit of reflexive verbal amplification that has to be watched. It is usually just harmless posturing, but it can also easily mask an attempt to twist words so that they support a conclusion that is unjustified by their semantics.
It is not so much the case that bad writing ought to be derided, as it is the case that it should be distrusted. Clear thought is seldom expressed in sloppy writing, but sloppy thought often is.
Well, what if I gave you money? Could I then ask you to stop using the another license for a different product? What if I gave you some other consideration of value? What if that thing of value was the use of my spiffy new product?
Just turn your question on its head for a moment. Sure, an open license to a company's product is an open license, but that does that give you any rights whatsoever to future, similar products? If not, they can offer the future product to you under any terms they choose, and you are free to refuse and continue to use your currently licensed material whether that material is openly licensed or not. It's not changing the deal, it's offering a different deal.
With respect to anti-trust laws, I don't see how they apply here. If they, for example, refused to allow shops that carried third party products created under their open license initiative, you might have a point. Instead, they're giving vendors a choice: license the new stuff, or continue using the old stuff under the old license, but not both. Doesn't sound coercive to me, sounds like a straight up deal.
What WoC is doing is forfeiting any future trust others might put in any open license initiative they attempt. They're no doubt aware of this, so it probably means they look at their open licensing experiment as a net business failure, and not worth repeating.
Frankly, I doubt it really matters that much. The whole source of the original D&D craze was that the system wasn't really that "good". But it was playable. That's why it created a new class of games, "role playing" games, distinct from simulation games. The enjoyment of the game comes entirely from the creativity of the people you play it with. Role playing is really a hybrid of war simulation gaming and "Cowboys and Indians".
Unless the fourth edition is some kind of mighty leap forward in playability, it's doubtful that a company that has been successful at publishing games based on older d20 systems would have much incentive to switch. If they do decide to switch, it's because they see greater profit that way. In any case, users will probably adapt whatever they like out of the new edition into older edition campaigns, including those where the features are not licensed by the vendor.