Craigslist will be fine. Roommates.com was sued for the exact same behavior, supposedly violating the exact same statute, and they won an easy victory.
Way to go, Taco. Way to destroy any temptation of actually subscribing to/. I have ever had. Louis Savain is a well-known crank and nutjob on sci.physics, the author of such gems as:
The principle of equivalence cannot exist without spacetime curvature. The problem with that is that spacetime is a 100% fictitious mathematical model with no counterpart in the physical world. Spacetime represents nothing in nature because it is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future. Nothing moves in spacetime. Deny at your own detriment.
So contrary to the pronouncements GR fanatics, falling objects ARE accelerating: the PE is a stupid red herring that has slowed progress in our understanding of gravity for close to a century.
GR is just a cheesy math trick. It's a good trick for predictions but it explains absolutely nothing about the physical mechanism of gravity. It is not even physics since physics is about particles, their intrinsic properties and their interactions. GR has didley squat to say about these things.
and:
"Accelerometer" is a misnomer, a planted red herring. An accelerometer does not measure acceleration. It measures force. There is no law in physics that requires that acceleration must be accompanied by the measurement of force. I can easily come up with a thought experiment for a scenario whereby force is applied equally to every part of a body in such a way that no force difference can be measured, even though the body is accelerating. In such a case an accelerometer will measure no force. Does that mean there is no acceleration? No. Implying, as you do, that the use of accelerometers, somehow, experimentally proves the validity of the PE is stupid at best and dishonest at worst. But you are not the only one. I've seen this implication proposed before.
and:
The EM field is definitely not the aether. It is the particles that comprise the EM field that come from the aether when they are dislodged during interactions with moving particles of matter. The electric field is due the motion of matter in the fourth dimension (the aether is four-dimensional) and the magnetic field is the result of motion in the other three dimensions [you won't find this truth in the physics community; you heard it here first]. The aether particles are not in motion until they interact with matter and/or other aether particles. EM is aether particles (photons) in motion. And yes, all motion, including the motion of photons, require interactions because nothing moves without cause. This is the primary function of the aether, to provide a mechanism for motion. And you will definitely not find this truth in that crackpot community. They believe in voodoo/magical acausal motion.
And here you go, giving his webpage a link completely uncritically. Don't editors have some sort of editorial function?
I think it's funny how people here justly criticize the USPO for not having the required expertise in scientific fields to properly evaluate patent applications for functionality and novelty. If you lack the scientific knowledge to properly evaluate the claims of an obvious nutter like Sevain, *pass that task to someone who does*.
This is just as far to the right of reality as the parent post is to the left.
Yes, it is.
My intent is not to claim that what Google is doing is akin to selling slaves. All analogies break down.
My intent was to beat the parent poster over the head with the staggeringly modern notion that just because something is legal does not mean that it is moral, and that just because the law requires that you do something does not indicate that it is ethical or moral for you to comply with it.
A law can, at *best*, only be as good as the system which produced it. In the case of China, the system that produced it is one of brutal oppression of the populace. By doing business in the form it is, Google is participating in that oppression. Now, maybe you can argue that they're not going to participate to the extent that Yahoo or MSN is, maybe you can argue that they'll do something good with the money they get, or so forth. But that doesn't change the fact that Google's hands in this matter are dirtier than they would be if they refrained from doing business in China, because they have now willingly participated in that oppression.
"This is why we ought not do do evil, that good may come: for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby."
If I enter your rich house and steal money from your bedside table, it matters not that I take that money and use it to feed orphans; in stealing from you, I have committed evil, and I am evil as a result.
I'm sorry I don't see what is wrong with obeying the laws of a country in which you do business. Would a European company be evil if it sold non-lead-free electronics in the US?
An analogy indicating that laws prohibiting lead in electronics and laws against seeking democratic political reform are equally valid and equally deserving of respect gets modded as insightful?
Here, I'll explain.
What is wrong with "obeying the laws of a country in which you do business" depends upon the nature of the laws and the nature of the country. A European company would not be evil if it sold non-lead-free electronics in the US, because the US is a democratic state containing at least some feedback between the populace affected by the laws and the process which creates and enforces those laws. If the citizens within the US wanted to change the laws to ban the sale of non-lead-free electronics, then they are capable of doing so, and therefore this hypothetical European country would not be capitalizing on an oppressed and captive citizenry.
Now consider a different European country. Instead of selling non-lead-free electronics in the United States, it sells slaves in Sudan. This company would be acting in accord with the law in Sudan.
There. That's a lot closer to the situation in China: a non-democratic nation whose citizens have no power to effect change in the laws of their country or the manner in which the laws are enforced, and who tend to get crushed under the treads of tanks or suffer sudden 7.62mm brain hemmorhages if they try to do so. Would you excuse that company's actions because you "don't see what's wrong with obeying the laws of a country in which you do business," or would you suddenly acquire the capacity for moral judgement and just maybe perhaps suggest that the company shouldn't do business selling slaves in fucking Sudan?
How is obeying the laws of China when trying to do business in China "doing evil"?
Are you fucking shitting me?
Because those *laws* are evil. Because the entire system of government by which those laws are emplaced and enforced is evil!
But I'm also opposed to telling the Chinese government what to do, or advocating that Google break the country's laws just because the prevailing opinion in the US and most of the rest of the world is that the laws are wrong
What a gigantic fucking strawman. And aside from being a strawman, it's a thoroughly reprehensible standpoint to take.
First, nobody here is suggesting "telling the Chinese government what to do," or advocate that Google break Chinese law. What is being suggested is that engaging in censorship of this nature is evil, that Good should not engage in it, and that if Google has a choice between doing business with China and censoring, and *not* doing business with China and not censoring (and they do, in fact, have this choice), then Google should pick the latter option. That's why what you just said was a gigantic strawman.
Second of all, *what possible reason could exist* for you to be opposed to *telling* (not threatening, not extorting, but merely *telling*!) the Chinese government that they're a bunch of fascist thugs and that if they want to join the rest of the world in open trade they should do so on a basis of a human rights record that does not resemble that of the Spanish Inquisition. How in the *fucking world* could you have a problem with that? You actually have a problem with telling a bunch of fascists that they're a bunch of fascists, and that people deserve better than to be born into and then to live and die under an oppressive government that at every turn denies them open access to information and the most fundamental of human rights? My God!
How would you feel if a company came to do business in your country without following the rules?
If "the rules" included my getting hauled off to jail for researching the political concept of "democracy," I'd probably be pretty okay with it.
Hey, how would *you* feel if your government wanted to round you up into death camps? How would *you* feel about the foreign company your government contracted into helping it?
The history of syphilis is a good illustration of this process at work.
How? If anything, syphilis is the exact opposite case; in its current form after countless generations of infecting people, it is less virulent and severe and more prone to latent infection.
France and Germany are democratic societies; in other words, there is at least a tenative connetion to the will of French and German societies and their anti-censorship laws. If the voters in France and Germany wanted to eliminate those laws, they could do so merely by voting.
People in China have no such option. If they try to change the laws, they get crushed under the treads of tanks.
It's really quite amazing what an atrocious job blizzard has done keeping servers up.
There are queues to limit the number of people on them at a given time. They've recently started deactivating new character creation on certain servers. And there's a weekly maintenance, every Tuesday, where they take all the servers down for a period of *hours*. Even the servers for their community forums go down regularly.
And even after all that, usually on Sunday or Monday night they end up having to reset servers. So they can't even keep them up from one maintenance period to the next one, a mere 7 days later. That's like, what, six sixes of reliability? If your phone company or cable company were that unreliable, there'd be mass hangings in the street, but since it's a MMORPG there's this critical mass of fanboys which makes it Allowed.
Yeah, maybe from a blunderbuss. The wads in modern mass-produced shotgun shells are plastic, just like the shells themselves. Walk downrange where people have been patterning their shotguns and you'll find them all over the ground. They don't burn.
What these games need is a "Fed," an entity which controls and regulates the dispensation of large sums of gold. It doesn't need to be implemented in an even remotely similar way to in the real world, but some kind of control has to exist.
Not necessary. All that needs to be done is to design gold sinks into the economy. The problem with WoW, and to some extent or another, is that there aren't enough. Gold sources are common; go out and kill some level 1 mobs, and you're increasing the supply of money because the NPC vendors will buy the trash they drop. But there are very few sinks; epic mounts are one, but that's pretty much it, because even if you spent 900 gold on a Krol blade at the AH, that money's going to another player and staying in circulation.
Here'd be a great way to take large amounts of money right back out of the economy. The thing of greatest value in an MMORPG isn't a new weapon or mount. It's progress. Experience. And that's non-transferable. Let players go to trainers and spent gold in exchange for experience or skill advancement. Put the stuff up for bid and let the market dictate the price. Every player will end up choosing whether to buy xp directly or buy a shiny new sword that will let them go out and kill monsters faster. And if your game designers want to be a central planning agency like the Fed, then they could start tweaking exchange rates, or changing the amount of experience up for bid.
At >1.5 Sradius, would that outcome be independent of the orbiting body mass?
Yes. 1.5 Sradii is the distance at which you need to travel at c just to stay in orbit. Since that means you're a photon, this distance is called the photon sphere. As I said, orbits at this distance aren't *stable*, but they're *possible*, at least for massless objects. For massive ones, then the closest possible distance at which to orbit is slightly further away.
Does that hold true, w/ regard to 1.5 Sradius, for Binary stars, where the secondary(smaller) star orbits the primary(larger) at extremely high frequencies? Else star collision ensues...
If the object's not a black hole, then the Sradius is smaller than the object itself.
Yes, it does, of 2Gm/c^2. It's just that that radius is so small that it's *inside* the object. Schwarzchild radius of the sun, for example, is about 3 kilometers. Doesn't mean the sun's a black hole, it means that if you somehow compressed the entire sun's mass into a sphere of 3 km radius, *then* you'd have a black hole.
From our frame of reference, matter moving at 177,000km an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole. In fact, we'd never observe it doing so, by the time it crosses the event horizon any radiation from it will be redshifted to infinity.
From the frame of reference of that matter, entry into the black hole will take but an instant.
They're referring to the effects of relativity as an infalling object approaches the event horizon. The object is accelerating towards c, so as it approaches the event horizon (from our external frame of reference), its clock is moving slower and slower, and it takes longer to travel a given distance.
The closest stable orbit around a black hole is at a distance three times the Schwarzchild radius. Closer orbits exist, but they're unstable, the slightest perturbation in them will result in either an escape to infinity or an intersection with the event horizon. At 1.5 Schwarzchild radii, you have the photon sphere; at this distance, orbital velocity equals c, and it's unstable so nothing stays there. Anything closer than 1.5 radii, there are no orbits possible.
Is a meaningful summary too much to ask? The links are slashdotted already, so all I see is a summary that carries as much meaning as "Some organization is suing some guys."
This releases an awful lot of energy, and is the main power source for such a supernova.
What type of supernova? Simply collapsing to a neutron star doesn't *cause* a supernova, although a neutron star can be a supernova remnant.
It sounds like you're saying that if you have a white dwarf sitting there, and it accretes mass from some other source, like a binary companion, when its mass grows to be greater than the C-limit, it collapses into a neutron star, and that the energy released in the collapse generates a supernova.
That's not the case. If you have a white dwarf sitting there, and it accretes enough mass to go over that limit, then basically what happens is that carbon begins to fuse. It happens everywhere, throughout the star, and you wind up with a carbon detonation supernova, a Type 1a supernova. It's not the energy of gravitational collapse which blows the star apart, it's the new fusion reactions.
I'm far less concerned about their changing the name then about them completely ruining what made the original company worth purchasing in the first place.
Launch.com was great, until Yahoo took it over and made it completely fucking useless and annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Craigslist will be fine. Roommates.com was sued for the exact same behavior, supposedly violating the exact same statute, and they won an easy victory.
and:
and:
And here you go, giving his webpage a link completely uncritically. Don't editors have some sort of editorial function?
I think it's funny how people here justly criticize the USPO for not having the required expertise in scientific fields to properly evaluate patent applications for functionality and novelty. If you lack the scientific knowledge to properly evaluate the claims of an obvious nutter like Sevain, *pass that task to someone who does*.
Any building, patch of land, or piece of water (see previous item.)
You'd better tell this to Arizona Highways magazine.
It's not a valid defense in those cases where there actually is evidence.
This is just as far to the right of reality as the parent post is to the left.
Yes, it is.
My intent is not to claim that what Google is doing is akin to selling slaves. All analogies break down.
My intent was to beat the parent poster over the head with the staggeringly modern notion that just because something is legal does not mean that it is moral, and that just because the law requires that you do something does not indicate that it is ethical or moral for you to comply with it.
A law can, at *best*, only be as good as the system which produced it. In the case of China, the system that produced it is one of brutal oppression of the populace. By doing business in the form it is, Google is participating in that oppression. Now, maybe you can argue that they're not going to participate to the extent that Yahoo or MSN is, maybe you can argue that they'll do something good with the money they get, or so forth. But that doesn't change the fact that Google's hands in this matter are dirtier than they would be if they refrained from doing business in China, because they have now willingly participated in that oppression.
"This is why we ought not do do evil, that good may come: for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby."
If I enter your rich house and steal money from your bedside table, it matters not that I take that money and use it to feed orphans; in stealing from you, I have committed evil, and I am evil as a result.
I'm sorry I don't see what is wrong with obeying the laws of a country in which you do business. Would a European company be evil if it sold non-lead-free electronics in the US?
An analogy indicating that laws prohibiting lead in electronics and laws against seeking democratic political reform are equally valid and equally deserving of respect gets modded as insightful?
Here, I'll explain.
What is wrong with "obeying the laws of a country in which you do business" depends upon the nature of the laws and the nature of the country. A European company would not be evil if it sold non-lead-free electronics in the US, because the US is a democratic state containing at least some feedback between the populace affected by the laws and the process which creates and enforces those laws. If the citizens within the US wanted to change the laws to ban the sale of non-lead-free electronics, then they are capable of doing so, and therefore this hypothetical European country would not be capitalizing on an oppressed and captive citizenry.
Now consider a different European country. Instead of selling non-lead-free electronics in the United States, it sells slaves in Sudan. This company would be acting in accord with the law in Sudan.
There. That's a lot closer to the situation in China: a non-democratic nation whose citizens have no power to effect change in the laws of their country or the manner in which the laws are enforced, and who tend to get crushed under the treads of tanks or suffer sudden 7.62mm brain hemmorhages if they try to do so. Would you excuse that company's actions because you "don't see what's wrong with obeying the laws of a country in which you do business," or would you suddenly acquire the capacity for moral judgement and just maybe perhaps suggest that the company shouldn't do business selling slaves in fucking Sudan?
How is obeying the laws of China when trying to do business in China "doing evil"?
Are you fucking shitting me?
Because those *laws* are evil. Because the entire system of government by which those laws are emplaced and enforced is evil!
But I'm also opposed to telling the Chinese government what to do, or advocating that Google break the country's laws just because the prevailing opinion in the US and most of the rest of the world is that the laws are wrong
What a gigantic fucking strawman. And aside from being a strawman, it's a thoroughly reprehensible standpoint to take.
First, nobody here is suggesting "telling the Chinese government what to do," or advocate that Google break Chinese law. What is being suggested is that engaging in censorship of this nature is evil, that Good should not engage in it, and that if Google has a choice between doing business with China and censoring, and *not* doing business with China and not censoring (and they do, in fact, have this choice), then Google should pick the latter option. That's why what you just said was a gigantic strawman.
Second of all, *what possible reason could exist* for you to be opposed to *telling* (not threatening, not extorting, but merely *telling*!) the Chinese government that they're a bunch of fascist thugs and that if they want to join the rest of the world in open trade they should do so on a basis of a human rights record that does not resemble that of the Spanish Inquisition. How in the *fucking world* could you have a problem with that? You actually have a problem with telling a bunch of fascists that they're a bunch of fascists, and that people deserve better than to be born into and then to live and die under an oppressive government that at every turn denies them open access to information and the most fundamental of human rights? My God!
How would you feel if a company came to do business in your country without following the rules?
If "the rules" included my getting hauled off to jail for researching the political concept of "democracy," I'd probably be pretty okay with it.
Hey, how would *you* feel if your government wanted to round you up into death camps? How would *you* feel about the foreign company your government contracted into helping it?
The history of syphilis is a good illustration of this process at work.
How? If anything, syphilis is the exact opposite case; in its current form after countless generations of infecting people, it is less virulent and severe and more prone to latent infection.
Don't even *try* to compare the two.
France and Germany are democratic societies; in other words, there is at least a tenative connetion to the will of French and German societies and their anti-censorship laws. If the voters in France and Germany wanted to eliminate those laws, they could do so merely by voting.
People in China have no such option. If they try to change the laws, they get crushed under the treads of tanks.
It's really quite amazing what an atrocious job blizzard has done keeping servers up.
There are queues to limit the number of people on them at a given time. They've recently started deactivating new character creation on certain servers. And there's a weekly maintenance, every Tuesday, where they take all the servers down for a period of *hours*. Even the servers for their community forums go down regularly.
And even after all that, usually on Sunday or Monday night they end up having to reset servers. So they can't even keep them up from one maintenance period to the next one, a mere 7 days later. That's like, what, six sixes of reliability? If your phone company or cable company were that unreliable, there'd be mass hangings in the street, but since it's a MMORPG there's this critical mass of fanboys which makes it Allowed.
but a good chunk of burning wad as well.
Burning wad?
Yeah, maybe from a blunderbuss. The wads in modern mass-produced shotgun shells are plastic, just like the shells themselves. Walk downrange where people have been patterning their shotguns and you'll find them all over the ground. They don't burn.
What these games need is a "Fed," an entity which controls and regulates the dispensation of large sums of gold. It doesn't need to be implemented in an even remotely similar way to in the real world, but some kind of control has to exist.
Not necessary. All that needs to be done is to design gold sinks into the economy. The problem with WoW, and to some extent or another, is that there aren't enough. Gold sources are common; go out and kill some level 1 mobs, and you're increasing the supply of money because the NPC vendors will buy the trash they drop. But there are very few sinks; epic mounts are one, but that's pretty much it, because even if you spent 900 gold on a Krol blade at the AH, that money's going to another player and staying in circulation.
Here'd be a great way to take large amounts of money right back out of the economy. The thing of greatest value in an MMORPG isn't a new weapon or mount. It's progress. Experience. And that's non-transferable. Let players go to trainers and spent gold in exchange for experience or skill advancement. Put the stuff up for bid and let the market dictate the price. Every player will end up choosing whether to buy xp directly or buy a shiny new sword that will let them go out and kill monsters faster. And if your game designers want to be a central planning agency like the Fed, then they could start tweaking exchange rates, or changing the amount of experience up for bid.
At >1.5 Sradius, would that outcome be independent of the orbiting body mass?
...
Yes. 1.5 Sradii is the distance at which you need to travel at c just to stay in orbit. Since that means you're a photon, this distance is called the photon sphere. As I said, orbits at this distance aren't *stable*, but they're *possible*, at least for massless objects. For massive ones, then the closest possible distance at which to orbit is slightly further away.
Does that hold true, w/ regard to 1.5 Sradius, for Binary stars, where the secondary(smaller) star orbits the primary(larger) at extremely high frequencies? Else star collision ensues
If the object's not a black hole, then the Sradius is smaller than the object itself.
Yes, it does, of 2Gm/c^2. It's just that that radius is so small that it's *inside* the object. Schwarzchild radius of the sun, for example, is about 3 kilometers. Doesn't mean the sun's a black hole, it means that if you somehow compressed the entire sun's mass into a sphere of 3 km radius, *then* you'd have a black hole.
From our frame of reference, matter moving at 177,000km an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole. In fact, we'd never observe it doing so, by the time it crosses the event horizon any radiation from it will be redshifted to infinity.
From the frame of reference of that matter, entry into the black hole will take but an instant.
This is relativity. Always specify your FOR.
They're referring to the effects of relativity as an infalling object approaches the event horizon. The object is accelerating towards c, so as it approaches the event horizon (from our external frame of reference), its clock is moving slower and slower, and it takes longer to travel a given distance.
Relativity.
The closest stable orbit around a black hole is at a distance three times the Schwarzchild radius. Closer orbits exist, but they're unstable, the slightest perturbation in them will result in either an escape to infinity or an intersection with the event horizon. At 1.5 Schwarzchild radii, you have the photon sphere; at this distance, orbital velocity equals c, and it's unstable so nothing stays there. Anything closer than 1.5 radii, there are no orbits possible.
Why, from a moral standpoint, should anyone help MS do their QA?
Because millions more zombies on the network isn't in their interest, no matter how much they dislike MS.
Is a meaningful summary too much to ask? The links are slashdotted already, so all I see is a summary that carries as much meaning as "Some organization is suing some guys."
Great, I'll get right on caring about that.
"Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? Why then, the war would come to you!" - Bertolt Brecht
Excellent.
And, while we're at it, I'd like a pony.
likewise nobody would be forced to take such work because work that insures human dignity would be widely available.
So who exactly mucks out the stables in your world?
Oh, that's right, the bourgeoisie. If they don't want a bullet. 'Human dignity,' my ass.
Some would say the difference between life as a dahlit and life as a dahlit after being paid for it is most certainly a form of force and coercion.
So then, I'm curious.
Would those same 'some' say that we should therefore preclude offering them the choice at all?
This releases an awful lot of energy, and is the main power source for such a supernova.
What type of supernova? Simply collapsing to a neutron star doesn't *cause* a supernova, although a neutron star can be a supernova remnant.
It sounds like you're saying that if you have a white dwarf sitting there, and it accretes mass from some other source, like a binary companion, when its mass grows to be greater than the C-limit, it collapses into a neutron star, and that the energy released in the collapse generates a supernova.
That's not the case. If you have a white dwarf sitting there, and it accretes enough mass to go over that limit, then basically what happens is that carbon begins to fuse. It happens everywhere, throughout the star, and you wind up with a carbon detonation supernova, a Type 1a supernova. It's not the energy of gravitational collapse which blows the star apart, it's the new fusion reactions.
I'm far less concerned about their changing the name then about them completely ruining what made the original company worth purchasing in the first place.
Launch.com was great, until Yahoo took it over and made it completely fucking useless and annoying.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Yahoo could, if Yahoo wanted, sell mp3s. Those mp3s would play merrily on any iPod in the world.
So, again, where is the lock-in/out?