There was a time when an opinion poll would've shown that the vast majority of people believe the earth is flat and the sun goes round it (both views, incidentally, which Christianity still argued for long after science showed them to be false)
The former being an especially daft one for Christianity to have ever supported. Considering Eratosthenes had proved this not to be the case nearly 300 years before any Christian Church existed.
The assumption of 1/10 of a bacterium is outrageous, for instance. The primitive Earth can make amino acids, easy, and other moderately complex organic molecules.
You can produce detectable amounts of these chemicals using a few litres of mixed gasses in an experiment running for a few days. If you assume the same processes going on in the atmosphere of a planet for millions of years you'd have huge quanities of such chemicals. Even of those which didn't form very often.
In fact, since there are about 4 million letters in the Bible, we only need 26 monkeys and 4 million seconds, or roughly 47 days.
Also depends what language and how much of the Bible you need to get started. Maybe if you were to just do the Torah in Arameic it would come out closer to 6 days:)
Darwin himself pushed no theology with evolution, and to the extent the theory flew in the face of widespread religous beliefs,
There is both belief and dogma in origanised religion.
that would tend to make the theory HARDER to accept, not easier. Darwin was raised Christian, moved to theism, and settled into agnosticism. Alfred Wallace, a co-discovered of natural selection was also agnostic and was quoted as saying "I cared and thought nothing about [religion]." I think the years of careful observation coupled to the twenty years Darwin spent working on his ideas prior to publication was a bit more important to the acceptance of evolution than their religous implications.
IIRC Wallace had to work hard to persuade Darwin to publish.
The implicit assumption in your point is that all scientists are athiests out to somehow disprove religion, which again, is CRAP.
Gregor Mendal was a monk, Albert Einstein was a deeply religious man. Plenty of scientists, both modern and ancient, would see no conflict between science and religion. Some might even claim that it is their faith which has inspired them to find out how things work.
In astronomy, early scientists like Copernicus and Galileo either lived in fear of the church, or were outright destroyed by it, because they pursued better explanations in the face of authority.
The persecution of Galileo looks to be more about the Vatican retaining political power than anything else. After all the cosmological models which were orthodox at the time appear to have more to do with Aristotle than anything in the Bible.
I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? Maybe I'm demanding this because I'm used to a more rigorous (and arguably, the only) science, that is to say, physics.
Evolution prefectly adequatly explains the apearance of antibiotic resistant bacteria populations.
Then, for those of you who feel more comfortable with soft sciences (i.e. "stamp-collecting" sciences), well, where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"?
It isn't that easy to devise an experiment to test many things in physics. Yet nowhere near this kind of fuss is made about ideas such as singularities...
Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
You can quite easily measure what proportion of a population of organisms survive in a certain environment.
I know about the UK Data Protection Act and similar EU laws (I'm a Brit living in Ireland) - I've had people tell me not to worry, this can't happen, the law prevents it. Yes, they do - today - but these laws were put in place by politicians, and can be nullified just as easily, if an apparent reason emerges.
Or more simply what makes you think that those involved are going to obey the law? Corporate criminals (even police criminals) are not exactly that uncommon.
Perhaps it's because the judicial system lets too many people off who are demonstrably guilty?
That is not mutually exclusive with innocent people being convicted. Or for that matter innocent people being charged on the most flimsy of evidence. Possibly most of the guilty "getting away with it" are career criminals who know how to exploit loopholes. Loopholes which the average member of the public might not be aware even exist.
So I can replace all these DVDs I bought for about $15 each for $7.10 each?
Rather they will buy them from you at $7.10 each. Even though you paid nearly twice that for them. No doubt they will want to "have their cake and eat it". Both continuing to sell DVDs at a higher price and claiming that pirated copies (including those which don't have the full amount of DVD content) are worth more than this $7.10 figure.
That does not make sense to me. If I buy a mobile phone, and somehow lose it, I cannot go to the reseller and claim a new phone simply because I "already own it". If I lose it, then it's lost and I will have to buy a new one.
A phone is a physical object, software isn't.
No one can expect Microsoft to cover for one's own sloppiness - if you lose your key then you'll have to buy a new one. There's no "I already own this" argument to be made when you've lost it yourself.
Except that it is perfectly possible for you to produce evidence that you do have a legitimate licence. e.g. an invoice or reciept. Or even if you have registered with "Microsoft".
Or people who are still using WinME and Win98 who patch what they can from the dribbles off MS table (and they use WinME or Win98 and haven't upgraded because *GASP* those versions of Windows do what they need them to do and they don't want to pay another MS tax to upgrade)?
Plus the time and/or money to get XP to work the way they want it to. Especially in the corporate area the cost of paying MS for the "upgrade" may well be the small part of the equation.
Now all those people who can't afford, won't buy, and don't have "automatic screwup my computer" turned on on their computers will just ADD to the internet spam and increase the S/N ratio of crap that's already out there.
Probably because the "automatic screwup" can do more harm than most pieces of regular malaware.
This may be a little farfetched but I could imagine the one of the intents for Life + 70 years is to prevent someone from killing the author in order that their works would pass on to the public domain immediately.
Actually this is a problem with linking the copyright term with the author's date of death. The idea of tagging on 70 years is that few people are likely to wait that long.
Now that being said, I agree with you completely on all counts... it *is* rediculous.
It also makes the job of copyright libraries virtually impossible and gives works by the same author different levels of copyright protection.
It should be a set number of years from the moment of creation; then there is no doubt as to when a work will become public domain
Thus making the job of a copyright librarian a lot easier.
Yes ma'am! That's how some folks get their funding. Release a report to the media saying "Fear X!", and wait for the ensuing "We need to study this" to ask for your funding.
Unless they're governments. In which case they can say "Fear X!" and spend your money...
They are robots. They'll require soldiers to operate them. In fact, I hesitate to call them robots. They're more like glorified waldoes. I suppose if the mass of hydraulics that assembles cars can be called a robot, so can these.
Well the TV series "Robot Wars" got away with calling glorified radio controlled models "Robots". Maybe they'll go after the company making these for trademark infringement:)
When I think Iraqi... I think of the poor souls who had their sovereign nation invaded and democracy forced down their throat for no justified reason
Whatever they are having forced down their throats is certainly not democracy.
other than the claim of WMDs and terrorist support that has yet to be proven.
Even the US has given up on the WMD search. Whilst continuing to follow the neocon "logic" that they must be too well hidden...
I find it disturbing that anyone would support democracy at gunpoint.
The only way you can have "democracy at gunpoint" is "one bullet one vote". The Iraqi elections are even more of a joke than those under Baathist rule.
yes..yes it is, especially when this "they" people are hidden by masks and no way to tell where the surrounding turf is in detail or the actual true situation, you get to see people killed in a room someplace by masked men and that's it It is *no more* than that.. The crimes are real but who are all the perps? Are you sure you know exactly with zero doubtwho they are all the time, what their org is, what their political affiliation is, what nationality they are, what religion, what ethnicity, what country they are from and who their paymasters are?
Never mind zero doubt, this so called "evidence" almost certainly wouldn't pass the criminal court standard of "beyond reasonable doubt" it might not even meet the civil court standard of "balance of probibilities".
Or are you automatically assuming the press release drivel is 100% authentic?
There is probably some truth in there, since the best way to lie is to sweeten it with a bit of truth.
People killed, sure, but who did it and why they did it is still a question, because the real identities are not known, at least publically.
Much the same applies to the plane hijackings in the US.
We see claims made, but that's just crap without credible verification, and one thing we have learned from this war is that "claims" by this that or the other source can be quite wrong and are frequently quite misleading...yes?
Even claims which have been been completly debunked continue to be made, together with claims which fall apart at the most trivial of critical examinations.
Ever hear of "false flag" recruiting or a "trojan horse" gambit or the hegelian dialectic?
Or "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.
Or even just the reality that there are a lot of mercenaries in the world who will do *anything* merely for some cash? And a whole oot of them are finding lucrative employment in Iraq, and a lot of them are coming from countries and backgrounds were "deathsquad" activity went on? And that the "coalition" employs quite a few thousands of these "gents"? Forgotten that?
Even without these people. There appears to be no shortage of thugs within the regular armies of the countries occupying Iraq.
But case by case is the only way to look at this, definitely. The largest problem in my experience has been that few people, either on the IT side or the management side of the business, have a clear understanding of what they really need, which is the crucial factor in deciding whether a COTS package will do or whether it's worth doing the development in-house. You have to know the business well enough to judge whether the processes can be realigned to fit the COTS' paradigm without losing competetive advantage.
Sounds like you are describing "Systems Analysis". Which is something which appears to have dropped out of fashion...
Very few OSS licenses (do any?) require you to release changes back unless you are distributing your changed apps to others. Even the GPL which MS likes to call "viral" doesn't require you to release a single change you make for use within the enterprise so long as you don't distribute your changed software outside of your enterprise.
Even then you only need to distribute the source to parties your distribute the binaries to. There is also an irony in the GPL showing recognition of the concept of a "corporate person". Than the vast majority of commercial proprietary software.
The simple fact is, at least with the nature of our particular business, any internal app has the potential to become a product that we sell at some point in the future.
What proportion of businesses would this apply to? AFAIK the vast majority of businesses do not sell software at all.
The bosses worry that if any of the tools that support our product become public domain,
The GPL is not public domain.
they can be snatched up by our competitors, thus erasing advantages our solution has over the others.
For that to happen you'd have to supply the software to your copetitors (or your customers would have to do so). If you competitors are so minded they could aquire your software, whatever it's licence, and clone it.
I started writing software again several years ago when I realized two problems with COTS software for specialized problems:
1. The capabilites may not be available on the market at any price.
2. The capabilites may have such limited mass market appeal that they exist only in the outskirts of COTS packages, and are badly done and/or not supported well (remember Willie Sutton's answer to why he robbed banks?).
There's also an issue of "excess baggage". Which includes both having to deal with the third party's licencing and that in order to get the capabilities you need you may also get a lot of "bells and whistles". These can easily equate to potential security holes and performance losses.
Yes, an independendt film maker doing a documentary could easily get distributed using BitTorrent, but..using footage from anywhere would stab him in the back echonomically... oh, the irony
Completly ironic, considering that this is exactly the opposite of what copyright (at least in the US) is ment to achieve.
There are some materials that 5-10 years is too short for copyright period: books,
Even this case is debatable, considering that many books go "out of print" within less than this time. Most books (,movies and music) make most of their sales within a fairly short time of their publication. One one thing which does tend to boost sales of old books is if the same author has published a new book. There's also a more fundermental issue of how much copyright, especially very long copyright, acts as an incentive to authors, poets, musicians, etc.
I think US currently has the copyright law set up so that it's effective for a few decades after the author's death---now, I think that's just absurd. Why can't we have copyrights expire along with the author's life? It seems to be that would be just the right time to release everything to the public domain.
Having copyright expire on an author's death might well have the effect of putting a price on certain people's heads.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a time when an opinion poll would've shown that the vast majority of people believe the earth is flat and the sun goes round it (both views, incidentally, which Christianity still argued for long after science showed them to be false)
The former being an especially daft one for Christianity to have ever supported. Considering Eratosthenes had proved this not to be the case nearly 300 years before any Christian Church existed.
The assumption of 1/10 of a bacterium is outrageous, for instance. The primitive Earth can make amino acids, easy, and other moderately complex organic molecules.
You can produce detectable amounts of these chemicals using a few litres of mixed gasses in an experiment running for a few days. If you assume the same processes going on in the atmosphere of a planet for millions of years you'd have huge quanities of such chemicals. Even of those which didn't form very often.
In fact, since there are about 4 million letters in the Bible, we only need 26 monkeys and 4 million seconds, or roughly 47 days.
:)
Also depends what language and how much of the Bible you need to get started. Maybe if you were to just do the Torah in Arameic it would come out closer to 6 days
Darwin himself pushed no theology with evolution, and to the extent the theory flew in the face of widespread religous beliefs,
There is both belief and dogma in origanised religion.
that would tend to make the theory HARDER to accept, not easier. Darwin was raised Christian, moved to theism, and settled into agnosticism. Alfred Wallace, a co-discovered of natural selection was also agnostic and was quoted as saying "I cared and thought nothing about [religion]." I think the years of careful observation coupled to the twenty years Darwin spent working on his ideas prior to publication was a bit more important to the acceptance of evolution than their religous implications.
IIRC Wallace had to work hard to persuade Darwin to publish.
The implicit assumption in your point is that all scientists are athiests out to somehow disprove religion, which again, is CRAP.
Gregor Mendal was a monk, Albert Einstein was a deeply religious man. Plenty of scientists, both modern and ancient, would see no conflict between science and religion. Some might even claim that it is their faith which has inspired them to find out how things work.
In astronomy, early scientists like Copernicus and Galileo either lived in fear of the church, or were outright destroyed by it, because they pursued better explanations in the face of authority.
The persecution of Galileo looks to be more about the Vatican retaining political power than anything else. After all the cosmological models which were orthodox at the time appear to have more to do with Aristotle than anything in the Bible.
I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? Maybe I'm demanding this because I'm used to a more rigorous (and arguably, the only) science, that is to say, physics.
Evolution prefectly adequatly explains the apearance of antibiotic resistant bacteria populations.
Then, for those of you who feel more comfortable with soft sciences (i.e. "stamp-collecting" sciences), well, where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"?
It isn't that easy to devise an experiment to test many things in physics. Yet nowhere near this kind of fuss is made about ideas such as singularities...
Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
You can quite easily measure what proportion of a population of organisms survive in a certain environment.
I know about the UK Data Protection Act and similar EU laws (I'm a Brit living in Ireland) - I've had people tell me not to worry, this can't happen, the law prevents it. Yes, they do - today - but these laws were put in place by politicians, and can be nullified just as easily, if an apparent reason emerges.
Or more simply what makes you think that those involved are going to obey the law? Corporate criminals (even police criminals) are not exactly that uncommon.
Perhaps it's because the judicial system lets too many people off who are demonstrably guilty?
That is not mutually exclusive with innocent people being convicted. Or for that matter innocent people being charged on the most flimsy of evidence.
Possibly most of the guilty "getting away with it" are career criminals who know how to exploit loopholes. Loopholes which the average member of the public might not be aware even exist.
It really tags *any* media file, including soundtracks etc. of games, iTunes songs and just about everything else.
Sounds like a repackaged version of the bots they have been using on peer to peer networks.
I don't know if they'll replace it with a 'correct' copy or if they're offering 325 crappy movies I don't want (;
Even 325 movies nobody wants to buy and which are actually costing MGM money to store.
So I can replace all these DVDs I bought for about $15 each for $7.10 each?
Rather they will buy them from you at $7.10 each. Even though you paid nearly twice that for them.
No doubt they will want to "have their cake and eat it". Both continuing to sell DVDs at a higher price and claiming that pirated copies (including those which don't have the full amount of DVD content) are worth more than this $7.10 figure.
That does not make sense to me. If I buy a mobile phone, and somehow lose it, I cannot go to the reseller and claim a new phone simply because I "already own it". If I lose it, then it's lost and I will have to buy a new one.
A phone is a physical object, software isn't.
No one can expect Microsoft to cover for one's own sloppiness - if you lose your key then you'll have to buy a new one. There's no "I already own this" argument to be made when you've lost it yourself.
Except that it is perfectly possible for you to produce evidence that you do have a legitimate licence. e.g. an invoice or reciept. Or even if you have registered with "Microsoft".
Or people who are still using WinME and Win98 who patch what they can from the dribbles off MS table (and they use WinME or Win98 and haven't upgraded because *GASP* those versions of Windows do what they need them to do and they don't want to pay another MS tax to upgrade)?
Plus the time and/or money to get XP to work the way they want it to. Especially in the corporate area the cost of paying MS for the "upgrade" may well be the small part of the equation.
Now all those people who can't afford, won't buy, and don't have "automatic screwup my computer" turned on on their computers will just ADD to the internet spam and increase the S/N ratio of crap that's already out there.
Probably because the "automatic screwup" can do more harm than most pieces of regular malaware.
This may be a little farfetched but I could imagine the one of the intents for Life + 70 years is to prevent someone from killing the author in order that their works would pass on to the public domain immediately.
Actually this is a problem with linking the copyright term with the author's date of death. The idea of tagging on 70 years is that few people are likely to wait that long.
Now that being said, I agree with you completely on all counts... it *is* rediculous.
It also makes the job of copyright libraries virtually impossible and gives works by the same author different levels of copyright protection.
It should be a set number of years from the moment of creation; then there is no doubt as to when a work will become public domain
Thus making the job of a copyright librarian a lot easier.
The U.S. would not only have to pass legislation to change it. But they would have to back out of the Berne convention.
If the US can back out of other treaties they can certainly back out of the Berne convention.
Maybe even propose a new copyright treaty...
Yes ma'am! That's how some folks get their funding. Release a report to the media saying "Fear X!", and wait for the ensuing "We need to study this" to ask for your funding.
Unless they're governments. In which case they can say "Fear X!" and spend your money...
They are robots. They'll require soldiers to operate them. In fact, I hesitate to call them robots. They're more like glorified waldoes. I suppose if the mass of hydraulics that assembles cars can be called a robot, so can these.
:)
Well the TV series "Robot Wars" got away with calling glorified radio controlled models "Robots". Maybe they'll go after the company making these for trademark infringement
When I think Iraqi... I think of the poor souls who had their sovereign nation invaded and democracy forced down their throat for no justified reason
Whatever they are having forced down their throats is certainly not democracy.
other than the claim of WMDs and terrorist support that has yet to be proven.
Even the US has given up on the WMD search. Whilst continuing to follow the neocon "logic" that they must be too well hidden...
I find it disturbing that anyone would support democracy at gunpoint.
The only way you can have "democracy at gunpoint" is "one bullet one vote". The Iraqi elections are even more of a joke than those under Baathist rule.
yes..yes it is, especially when this "they" people are hidden by masks and no way to tell where the surrounding turf is in detail or the actual true situation, you get to see people killed in a room someplace by masked men and that's it It is *no more* than that.. The crimes are real but who are all the perps? Are you sure you know exactly with zero doubtwho they are all the time, what their org is, what their political affiliation is, what nationality they are, what religion, what ethnicity, what country they are from and who their paymasters are?
Never mind zero doubt, this so called "evidence" almost certainly wouldn't pass the criminal court standard of "beyond reasonable doubt" it might not even meet the civil court standard of "balance of probibilities".
Or are you automatically assuming the press release drivel is 100% authentic?
There is probably some truth in there, since the best way to lie is to sweeten it with a bit of truth.
People killed, sure, but who did it and why they did it is still a question, because the real identities are not known, at least publically.
Much the same applies to the plane hijackings in the US.
We see claims made, but that's just crap without credible verification, and one thing we have learned from this war is that "claims" by this that or the other source can be quite wrong and are frequently quite misleading...yes?
Even claims which have been been completly debunked continue to be made, together with claims which fall apart at the most trivial of critical examinations.
Ever hear of "false flag" recruiting or a "trojan horse" gambit or the hegelian dialectic?
Or "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.
Or even just the reality that there are a lot of mercenaries in the world who will do *anything* merely for some cash? And a whole oot of them are finding lucrative employment in Iraq, and a lot of them are coming from countries and backgrounds were "deathsquad" activity went on? And that the "coalition" employs quite a few thousands of these "gents"? Forgotten that?
Even without these people. There appears to be no shortage of thugs within the regular armies of the countries occupying Iraq.
But case by case is the only way to look at this, definitely. The largest problem in my experience has been that few people, either on the IT side or the management side of the business, have a clear understanding of what they really need, which is the crucial factor in deciding whether a COTS package will do or whether it's worth doing the development in-house. You have to know the business well enough to judge whether the processes can be realigned to fit the COTS' paradigm without losing competetive advantage.
Sounds like you are describing "Systems Analysis". Which is something which appears to have dropped out of fashion...
Very few OSS licenses (do any?) require you to release changes back unless you are distributing your changed apps to others. Even the GPL which MS likes to call "viral" doesn't require you to release a single change you make for use within the enterprise so long as you don't distribute your changed software outside of your enterprise.
Even then you only need to distribute the source to parties your distribute the binaries to. There is also an irony in the GPL showing recognition of the concept of a "corporate person". Than the vast majority of commercial proprietary software.
The simple fact is, at least with the nature of our particular business, any internal app has the potential to become a product that we sell at some point in the future.
What proportion of businesses would this apply to? AFAIK the vast majority of businesses do not sell software at all.
The bosses worry that if any of the tools that support our product become public domain,
The GPL is not public domain.
they can be snatched up by our competitors, thus erasing advantages our solution has over the others.
For that to happen you'd have to supply the software to your copetitors (or your customers would have to do so). If you competitors are so minded they could aquire your software, whatever it's licence, and clone it.
I started writing software again several years ago when I realized two problems with COTS software for specialized problems:
1. The capabilites may not be available on the market at any price.
2. The capabilites may have such limited mass market appeal that they exist only in the outskirts of COTS packages, and are badly done and/or not supported well (remember Willie Sutton's answer to why he robbed banks?).
There's also an issue of "excess baggage". Which includes both having to deal with the third party's licencing and that in order to get the capabilities you need you may also get a lot of "bells and whistles". These can easily equate to potential security holes and performance losses.
The use of a gun is to kill someone. There is no other use for it.
:)
At least until someone invents the idea of a sport involving shooting at a target. Might even become party of the Olympics
Yes, an independendt film maker doing a documentary could easily get distributed using BitTorrent, but..using footage from anywhere would stab him in the back echonomically... oh, the irony
Completly ironic, considering that this is exactly the opposite of what copyright (at least in the US) is ment to achieve.
There are some materials that 5-10 years is too short for copyright period: books,
Even this case is debatable, considering that many books go "out of print" within less than this time. Most books (,movies and music) make most of their sales within a fairly short time of their publication. One one thing which does tend to boost sales of old books is if the same author has published a new book. There's also a more fundermental issue of how much copyright, especially very long copyright, acts as an incentive to authors, poets, musicians, etc.
I think US currently has the copyright law set up so that it's effective for a few decades after the author's death---now, I think that's just absurd. Why can't we have copyrights expire along with the author's life? It seems to be that would be just the right time to release everything to the public domain.
Having copyright expire on an author's death might well have the effect of putting a price on certain people's heads.