Are they doing the right thing by not censoring their results? According to us, and our culture they may be, but not according to the host which has accepted them as a dinner guest. It's morally relative
This is incorrect. If people in group A want to read something by people in group B, people in group C want to make that illegal, and people in group D want to circumvent that, group D is the one respecting the cultural beliefs of A and B, and C is the one disrespecting them.
The moral calculus doesn't change just because C is the group with the most guns.
No health care setup can be fully funded, whether private or public, as there will always come a time when someone needs something new and leading edge and they tend to be expensive.
Expensive for a while, anyway. My thanks go out to everyone who paid $50K each for flat bigscreen HDTVs; while I was just drooling over them, you were subsidizing the R&D on the model I got for $1500 years later. And to those people who held out until today, when prices for that quality are under $800, I'm happy I did my part.
It's a good thing people don't actually care as much about TV as they do about healthcare. We'd either be using CRTs or $5 trillion further in the hole, depending on whether the better models had been categorized as "excessive" or "a human right".
You know what other path there is to barbarism? Spending yourself stupid
You saw that the total budget was $3.834 trillion dollars, right? With more than a trillion dollars of borrowed money? I'm not saying that this particular cut is necessarily a horrible way to reduce that problem by a fraction of a percent, but the irony in your post is just jaw-dropping.
Sacrificing even a few lives for private space flight at this point in time would be irresponsible
Boy, I hope you don't use any wood products, live or work in any large buildings (or any small buildings with roofs, for that matter), eat any fish (or anything grown on a farm, even), use any electricity, buy anything that was shipped in a truck... or, wait, maybe I'm misunderstanding. Is profiting from others' deaths in risky occupations always irresponsible, or just when those deaths are spectacular enough to get network news time?
Ironically, in the long run I would expect space travel to become less risky in a competitive private market. Not because launch company CEOs wouldn't include cheap bastards willing to risk pilots lives, but because they'd include cheap bastards unwilling to risk expensive space vehicles. Building disposable launch vehicles made sense for getting a few people into space fast and scoring political points internationally. Building launch vehicles that have to be regularly rebuilt by standing armies makes sense for bringing jobs to your district and scoring political points domestically. But generally when people who are worried about the bottom line build something expensive, they want to get it back in one piece after each use. Let's just hope that the funding strings and the barriers to entry here aren't too high to keep the launch vehicle industry from ever resembling a competitive private market. It's easy to ignore the bottom line if you're working on a cost-plus contract and you don't see any potential competitors with years of expertise and billions of dollars of R&D money lying around.
I'm 30. I still love playing video games, and if surveys are to be believed, 50% of people who agree are even older than I am. That means many of them also have long work hours, decent pay, wives and/or children, home and extended family responsibilities...
And it means that we're all experienced enough and wise enough to recognize "filler" for what it is. A repetitive level that tacks an hour onto gameplay may decrease the "dollars per hour" spent on the game, but it's not going to win you any new fans or get any extra purchasers for your sequel.
I've never smoked _anything_, nor done any illegal drug in my life and I'm in full support of legalizing marijuana. I believe I'm not the only one out there either.
Nope. I've smoked nicotine three or four times, and regret it in hindsight. I don't intend to ever smoke marijuana. But I hope marijuana (and other drugs) are legalized. Here's a few reasons, in no particular order, missing from your list:
Rule of law - The US Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power to ban drug use. It was briefly amended to add that power for ethanol, but even that amendment was repealed. Modern federal drug laws are based on political convenience, not natural rights or real authority. Allowing different states to independently experiment with different laws was a brilliant idea, and we ought to revisit it. Contrariwise, fighting the "War on X" seems to be a very popular excuse for further degradations of human rights and expansions of unconstitutional police state powers.
Reducing organized crime - One reason Prohibition was repealed is that we discovered that creating "black markets" that are a guaranteed source of profit for criminals is a very dangerous thing. Too dangerous to be worth it for victimless crimes.
Reducing unorganized crime - The money that goes to gangs selling overpriced drugs has to come from somewhere. Sometimes it's from thievery, with all those associated consequences. I suspect most illegal drug users aren't (real) criminals, but we're not making it easy on them. Sending them to prison to associate/train with real criminals can't be very helpful either.
Hurting addicts - What many of them need most isn't jail, it's medical treatment, but it's impossible to encourage someone to admit their problem to authorities as long as that problem is illegal.
Hurting other countries - "America needs to support horrible authoritarian group X because they're fighting against drug producers" is too common an excuse which backfires on us too often. "Drug farmers are enemies of America who might as well support the Taliban" is backfiring on us right now.
Human rights - I know, who am I to think that people should get to decide what does and doesn't go into their own bodies, or what they can buy and sell? Shouldn't we find some central planners, ask them to make the Right Decisions, and then lock up anyone who doesn't go along with the program?
Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.
Because that's what makes it the scientific method. I know UK and US schools differ, but I distinctly remember the latter introducing "form a hypothesis, and try to falsify it" in the second grade.
No, no, Samsung isn't funding an attempt to develop the attainment of a blessed state in which their customers can transcend desire and suffering and achieve Nirvana. That would be nearly impossible.
Samsung is funding an attempt to develop for their customers a completed version of the Enlightenment Window Manager. That will be completely impossible.
No, they *don't*. They "need" to do what they think is best for themselves,
If what's best for themselves is quitting a job so that they don't have to take obvious precautions to avoid becoming a vector between the many infected and many susceptible people that they come in contact with, that's fine. But you don't get to have your cake and eat it too.
But your right to make demands ends absolutely when it comes to what another person does within their own body.
The very premise of the situation contradicts "within their own body", doesn't it? It's all the viruses leaving their body that concern the rest of us. There is no inalienable right to turn yourself into a biohazard. The right to swing your viruses ends where my nose begins.
Even if you're doing something within your own body, other people still have the right to make demands, even if you just want them to pay you, much less if you're putting them at unnecessary risk.
Enjoy all the booze and drugs you want, for example, but we have the right to demand that you don't drive a vehicle on public streets while you're intoxicated. You don't even get to go to work without your employer having the right to demand that you stay sober or lose your job. And if somehow you manage to sneak your problems past the boss, you can still be liable for negligence if the state you're in causes damage to your customers.
These principles apply even if stuff in your bloodstream just makes you a less competent worker. Is it so ridiculous to also demand that you take basic precautions to keep often-lethal diseases out of there too, when you've specifically been hired for a job that requires you to expose yourself to those diseases as well as to the people most endangered by them?
Okay, let's say he wrote an "open rose" textbook then: both the typeset output and the "rose".tex files are freely redistributable. Someone who wants to produce similar output doesn't have to reverse engineer a binary PDF, they can simply look at the original "rose code", which like most other "rose code" is written in a Turing-complete language.
You can feel free to call it whatever you want, but it looks to me like a "rose by any other name" here is a synonym for "source".
Denying access to web browsers that don't hand you a UserAgent header matching some pattern is a kind of dickish thing to do. Pointless, too. Anyone who wants to crawl your site with a robot and knows to tell it to ignore robots.txt will also know how to use a fake UserAgent. So the only people you're going to deny access to are those people who are using web browsers that you forgot to add to your whitelist.
I'm not entirely sure what the "mangles the file extension info" complaint is about, though. Maybe it's that arxiv, although returning the right MIME type, doesn't return a file with a.pdf extension for the PDF article? This is less upsetting. It's fine to use a browser/OS that isn't popular enough to make someone's whitelist, but everybody should at least use one that can handle long-established HTTP standards.
This is why I haven't tried writing science fiction since high school. Every time I think I've got a brilliant idea I end up finding out someone else did a bang-up job of it before I was born.
The vaccine if they really worked it wouldnt matter how many people got the vaccine. The people who got the vaccine would be protected, and the people who didnt would only be harming themselves.
That would be true if "really worked" was a binary, 100% or 0% status. This is not the case.
Vaccines do not protect everyone they are given to (the vaccine merely trains immune systems, after all, which differ from person to person). Even if they were foolproof, vaccines cannot be administered to everyone - even if the risk of complications is far less than the risk of the disease in most people, there may be individuals (e.g. very young infants for the flu vaccine) for whom that is not the case. These still-vulnerable individuals benefit instead from "herd immunity":
One way to make yourself safe from a disease is to make yourself immune, so you can't get the disease. If that is impossible, another way to make yourself safe is to live in a population who have mostly made themselves immune, so you have no contact with anyone who can give you the disease.
Unfortunately, herd immunity also allows people to "defect" from their vaccinations; that's the entire reason why people would even consider skipping a vaccination in the first place! Why expose yourself to the nocebo effect, when you can simply free-ride off the immunity of others? They say that confusing correlation and causation leads to autism, you know!
I should also point out that if your data wires are fiber optic you don't have to worry about your power wires interfering with them, so the cables can be longer. Or just
Or just what?
Wow, that data interference problem is more serious than I thought!
The difference is that you vote for government, but you don't vote for Coca Cola's board of directors.
The difference is:
When I vote against government, there's a 1/100,000 chance that my vote will change government to "the lesser of two evils" from "the greater", and a 99,999/100,000 chance that the same guy will end up in charge anyway, by a negligibly smaller margin. Even if the guy who seems like the lesser evil during his advertising campaign does get into power, there's always the chance that his promises will turn out to be lies and I won't even be able to change my vote for 2 to 6 years.
When I vote against Coca-Cola, there's a 1/1 chance that my vote will stop them from taking any of my money (except, ironically, what they've convinced the government to take for subsidizing their corn syrup supplies). If their advertising campaign turn out to be lies, I can change my mind and watch the change take effect immediately.
Granted, there are such things as "market failures", and I'd rather have a government monopoly than a natural monopoly... but freaking soda? No. When people don't enjoy what you think they should enjoy, that's not a failure of the market, that's a failure of your authoritarian worldview.
Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded.
Yes, because the Netflix rules were set up in such a way as to encourage winners to submit their results as soon as possible upon success. They're not going to wait around to give anyone else the chance to reach the same goal first. You might as well say "Only two people crossed the tape during that photo finish! The other thousand runners are failures!"
The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don't work.
So he had $10,000 worth of company, then $5,000 worth of company, then sold and has $4,988.00 in cash (damn commissions).
And now he wants to sue the entity owned by the people who paid him $5,000 for his shares of it, for mismanagement that occurred under his watch, not theirs? That sounds pretty crooked.
He wants his $5,000 back because he thinks the board negligently mismanaged the incident causing him injury.
And if the board was going to be on the hook for $5,000, that would mean something.
He knows what a magnetic field line is, just like you. He also knows what an electric field line is, which is where you need to catch up. Try to be less arrogant about your ignorance, especially to someone who is taking the time to try to educate you.
it was a lawsuit by shareholders, upset that the company had lost money
Which is insane on top of insane. Suing management would have been fine, but suing the company? Why? Even if you win, instead of stock shares in a $800M company, you end up with cash shares in a $20M settlement plus stock shares in a $780M company.
No, wait, make that a $760M company; trials and infighting cost money. So the lawyers are the only ones who come out ahead. Oh, wait, and it turns out that this was a class-action suit, so the lawyers were really the ones suing in the first place? Now it all makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they doing the right thing by not censoring their results? According to us, and our culture they may be, but not according to the host which has accepted them as a dinner guest. It's morally relative
This is incorrect. If people in group A want to read something by people in group B, people in group C want to make that illegal, and people in group D want to circumvent that, group D is the one respecting the cultural beliefs of A and B, and C is the one disrespecting them.
The moral calculus doesn't change just because C is the group with the most guns.
No health care setup can be fully funded, whether private or public, as there will always come a time when someone needs something new and leading edge and they tend to be expensive.
Expensive for a while, anyway. My thanks go out to everyone who paid $50K each for flat bigscreen HDTVs; while I was just drooling over them, you were subsidizing the R&D on the model I got for $1500 years later. And to those people who held out until today, when prices for that quality are under $800, I'm happy I did my part.
It's a good thing people don't actually care as much about TV as they do about healthcare. We'd either be using CRTs or $5 trillion further in the hole, depending on whether the better models had been categorized as "excessive" or "a human right".
should you cry fowl when there are negative consequences?
Certainly not. That would be ducking responsibility.
Futurama is not great. No-one (other than nerds) thinks it is funny.
A joke isn't any less funny just because someone who doesn't understand the language won't laugh at it.
You know what other path there is to barbarism? Spending yourself stupid
You saw that the total budget was $3.834 trillion dollars, right? With more than a trillion dollars of borrowed money? I'm not saying that this particular cut is necessarily a horrible way to reduce that problem by a fraction of a percent, but the irony in your post is just jaw-dropping.
Sacrificing even a few lives for private space flight at this point in time would be irresponsible
Boy, I hope you don't use any wood products, live or work in any large buildings (or any small buildings with roofs, for that matter), eat any fish (or anything grown on a farm, even), use any electricity, buy anything that was shipped in a truck... or, wait, maybe I'm misunderstanding. Is profiting from others' deaths in risky occupations always irresponsible, or just when those deaths are spectacular enough to get network news time?
Ironically, in the long run I would expect space travel to become less risky in a competitive private market. Not because launch company CEOs wouldn't include cheap bastards willing to risk pilots lives, but because they'd include cheap bastards unwilling to risk expensive space vehicles. Building disposable launch vehicles made sense for getting a few people into space fast and scoring political points internationally. Building launch vehicles that have to be regularly rebuilt by standing armies makes sense for bringing jobs to your district and scoring political points domestically. But generally when people who are worried about the bottom line build something expensive, they want to get it back in one piece after each use. Let's just hope that the funding strings and the barriers to entry here aren't too high to keep the launch vehicle industry from ever resembling a competitive private market. It's easy to ignore the bottom line if you're working on a cost-plus contract and you don't see any potential competitors with years of expertise and billions of dollars of R&D money lying around.
I'm 30. I still love playing video games, and if surveys are to be believed, 50% of people who agree are even older than I am. That means many of them also have long work hours, decent pay, wives and/or children, home and extended family responsibilities...
And it means that we're all experienced enough and wise enough to recognize "filler" for what it is. A repetitive level that tacks an hour onto gameplay may decrease the "dollars per hour" spent on the game, but it's not going to win you any new fans or get any extra purchasers for your sequel.
I've never smoked _anything_, nor done any illegal drug in my life and I'm in full support of legalizing marijuana. I believe I'm not the only one out there either.
Nope. I've smoked nicotine three or four times, and regret it in hindsight. I don't intend to ever smoke marijuana. But I hope marijuana (and other drugs) are legalized. Here's a few reasons, in no particular order, missing from your list:
Rule of law - The US Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power to ban drug use. It was briefly amended to add that power for ethanol, but even that amendment was repealed. Modern federal drug laws are based on political convenience, not natural rights or real authority. Allowing different states to independently experiment with different laws was a brilliant idea, and we ought to revisit it. Contrariwise, fighting the "War on X" seems to be a very popular excuse for further degradations of human rights and expansions of unconstitutional police state powers.
Reducing organized crime - One reason Prohibition was repealed is that we discovered that creating "black markets" that are a guaranteed source of profit for criminals is a very dangerous thing. Too dangerous to be worth it for victimless crimes.
Reducing unorganized crime - The money that goes to gangs selling overpriced drugs has to come from somewhere. Sometimes it's from thievery, with all those associated consequences. I suspect most illegal drug users aren't (real) criminals, but we're not making it easy on them. Sending them to prison to associate/train with real criminals can't be very helpful either.
Hurting addicts - What many of them need most isn't jail, it's medical treatment, but it's impossible to encourage someone to admit their problem to authorities as long as that problem is illegal.
Hurting other countries - "America needs to support horrible authoritarian group X because they're fighting against drug producers" is too common an excuse which backfires on us too often. "Drug farmers are enemies of America who might as well support the Taliban" is backfiring on us right now.
Human rights - I know, who am I to think that people should get to decide what does and doesn't go into their own bodies, or what they can buy and sell? Shouldn't we find some central planners, ask them to make the Right Decisions, and then lock up anyone who doesn't go along with the program?
That sounds like pothead hippie talk.
How about Heinlein?
I think I speak for a lot of Heinlein fans when I say:
No. We used to think that letting Hollywood make his books into movies was a good idea. We were wrong. Please stop now.
Controlling their own airspace also brought a little criticism, or a lot.
Blizzard online game protocols ...
Fortunately reverse engineering a product for the purpose of interoperability is allowed under the DMCA.
That's assuming, of course, that you can convince a judge that your purpose was interoperability. Last I heard, it was still illegal to make a client interoperate with Blizzard's servers, and illegal to make a server interoperate with Blizzard's clients.
Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.
Because that's what makes it the scientific method. I know UK and US schools differ, but I distinctly remember the latter introducing "form a hypothesis, and try to falsify it" in the second grade.
That's pretty ambitious.
No, no, Samsung isn't funding an attempt to develop the attainment of a blessed state in which their customers can transcend desire and suffering and achieve Nirvana. That would be nearly impossible.
Samsung is funding an attempt to develop for their customers a completed version of the Enlightenment Window Manager. That will be completely impossible.
No, they *don't*. They "need" to do what they think is best for themselves,
If what's best for themselves is quitting a job so that they don't have to take obvious precautions to avoid becoming a vector between the many infected and many susceptible people that they come in contact with, that's fine. But you don't get to have your cake and eat it too.
But your right to make demands ends absolutely when it comes to what another person does within their own body.
The very premise of the situation contradicts "within their own body", doesn't it? It's all the viruses leaving their body that concern the rest of us. There is no inalienable right to turn yourself into a biohazard. The right to swing your viruses ends where my nose begins.
Even if you're doing something within your own body, other people still have the right to make demands, even if you just want them to pay you, much less if you're putting them at unnecessary risk.
Enjoy all the booze and drugs you want, for example, but we have the right to demand that you don't drive a vehicle on public streets while you're intoxicated. You don't even get to go to work without your employer having the right to demand that you stay sober or lose your job. And if somehow you manage to sneak your problems past the boss, you can still be liable for negligence if the state you're in causes damage to your customers.
These principles apply even if stuff in your bloodstream just makes you a less competent worker. Is it so ridiculous to also demand that you take basic precautions to keep often-lethal diseases out of there too, when you've specifically been hired for a job that requires you to expose yourself to those diseases as well as to the people most endangered by them?
Okay, let's say he wrote an "open rose" textbook then: both the typeset output and the "rose" .tex files are freely redistributable. Someone who wants to produce similar output doesn't have to reverse engineer a binary PDF, they can simply look at the original "rose code", which like most other "rose code" is written in a Turing-complete language.
You can feel free to call it whatever you want, but it looks to me like a "rose by any other name" here is a synonym for "source".
What are you talking about?
Probably something like this, for the first complaint:
roystgnr@mycroft:~$ wget http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0956
--2009-10-15 08:39:22-- http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0956
Resolving arxiv.org... 128.84.158.114
Connecting to arxiv.org|128.84.158.114|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2009-10-15 08:39:23 ERROR 403: Forbidden.
roystgnr@mycroft:~$ wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/20121223 Ubuntu/9.25 (jaunty) Firefox/3.8" http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0956
--2009-10-15 08:42:20-- http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0956
Resolving arxiv.org... 128.84.158.114
Connecting to arxiv.org|128.84.158.114|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Denying access to web browsers that don't hand you a UserAgent header matching some pattern is a kind of dickish thing to do. Pointless, too. Anyone who wants to crawl your site with a robot and knows to tell it to ignore robots.txt will also know how to use a fake UserAgent. So the only people you're going to deny access to are those people who are using web browsers that you forgot to add to your whitelist.
I'm not entirely sure what the "mangles the file extension info" complaint is about, though. Maybe it's that arxiv, although returning the right MIME type, doesn't return a file with a .pdf extension for the PDF article? This is less upsetting. It's fine to use a browser/OS that isn't popular enough to make someone's whitelist, but everybody should at least use one that can handle long-established HTTP standards.
This is why I haven't tried writing science fiction since high school. Every time I think I've got a brilliant idea I end up finding out someone else did a bang-up job of it before I was born.
The vaccine if they really worked it wouldnt matter how many people got the vaccine. The people who got the vaccine would be protected, and the people who didnt would only be harming themselves.
That would be true if "really worked" was a binary, 100% or 0% status. This is not the case.
Vaccines do not protect everyone they are given to (the vaccine merely trains immune systems, after all, which differ from person to person). Even if they were foolproof, vaccines cannot be administered to everyone - even if the risk of complications is far less than the risk of the disease in most people, there may be individuals (e.g. very young infants for the flu vaccine) for whom that is not the case. These still-vulnerable individuals benefit instead from "herd immunity":
One way to make yourself safe from a disease is to make yourself immune, so you can't get the disease. If that is impossible, another way to make yourself safe is to live in a population who have mostly made themselves immune, so you have no contact with anyone who can give you the disease.
Unfortunately, herd immunity also allows people to "defect" from their vaccinations; that's the entire reason why people would even consider skipping a vaccination in the first place! Why expose yourself to the nocebo effect, when you can simply free-ride off the immunity of others? They say that confusing correlation and causation leads to autism, you know!
We once took pride in saying we were a melting pot of nations (racism aside).
Yeah, but that was before we realized that the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free might take our jobs!
I should also point out that if your data wires are fiber optic you don't have to worry about your power wires interfering with them, so the cables can be longer. Or just
Or just what?
Wow, that data interference problem is more serious than I thought!
The difference is that you vote for government, but you don't vote for Coca Cola's board of directors.
The difference is:
When I vote against government, there's a 1/100,000 chance that my vote will change government to "the lesser of two evils" from "the greater", and a 99,999/100,000 chance that the same guy will end up in charge anyway, by a negligibly smaller margin. Even if the guy who seems like the lesser evil during his advertising campaign does get into power, there's always the chance that his promises will turn out to be lies and I won't even be able to change my vote for 2 to 6 years.
When I vote against Coca-Cola, there's a 1/1 chance that my vote will stop them from taking any of my money (except, ironically, what they've convinced the government to take for subsidizing their corn syrup supplies). If their advertising campaign turn out to be lies, I can change my mind and watch the change take effect immediately.
Granted, there are such things as "market failures", and I'd rather have a government monopoly than a natural monopoly... but freaking soda? No. When people don't enjoy what you think they should enjoy, that's not a failure of the market, that's a failure of your authoritarian worldview.
Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded.
Yes, because the Netflix rules were set up in such a way as to encourage winners to submit their results as soon as possible upon success. They're not going to wait around to give anyone else the chance to reach the same goal first. You might as well say "Only two people crossed the tape during that photo finish! The other thousand runners are failures!"
The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don't work.
By this standard, zero non-collaborations worked.
So he had $10,000 worth of company, then $5,000 worth of company, then sold and has $4,988.00 in cash (damn commissions).
And now he wants to sue the entity owned by the people who paid him $5,000 for his shares of it, for mismanagement that occurred under his watch, not theirs? That sounds pretty crooked.
He wants his $5,000 back because he thinks the board negligently mismanaged the incident causing him injury.
And if the board was going to be on the hook for $5,000, that would mean something.
He knows what a magnetic field line is, just like you. He also knows what an electric field line is, which is where you need to catch up. Try to be less arrogant about your ignorance, especially to someone who is taking the time to try to educate you.
it was a lawsuit by shareholders, upset that the company had lost money
Which is insane on top of insane. Suing management would have been fine, but suing the company? Why? Even if you win, instead of stock shares in a $800M company, you end up with cash shares in a $20M settlement plus stock shares in a $780M company.
No, wait, make that a $760M company; trials and infighting cost money. So the lawyers are the only ones who come out ahead. Oh, wait, and it turns out that this was a class-action suit, so the lawyers were really the ones suing in the first place? Now it all makes sense.