Same stupid claim as the DDR guy above without the funny admission part - the PowerPad was a Twister-pad looking thing, this is a torsion bar for upper-body tension.
Grandparent (if you read it) was not implying anything about the GPL that isn't true - he was making an abstract point about the aesthetic undesirability of spending money to ensure that FS/OS projects remain that way.
Parent was flame-breathing (didn't the all caps tip you off?)
But I am an owner of three Macs (currently), past owner of several more and happy iPod owner.
I've never bought AppleCare on any of my machines because literally nothing hardware-related has ever gone wrong with them. I'm serious - no bad PSUs, no dead pixels (not even one), no nothing. I haven't had a kernel panic since OS X's Public Beta. And I am not shy about cracking boxes open and throwing in extra hardware, though I haven't broken out a soldering iron. Yet.
These disgruntled Mac folks probably have gotten used to similar experiences, and when they get a taste of real PC medicine they cry foul.
Go stuff it, you troublemaking bastards. You read the warranty information - or if you didn't you deserve what you get. Did you buy an extended warranty that would cover your complained-of problems? No? You really expect Apple's products to last forever, even though the company uses nearly all industry-standard equipment? You expect Apple's Li-Ion batteries to magically outlast the identical competition?
Take your licks and quit spreading accusations, petitions and talk of lawsuits. Or even better, go buy from another company and bring your unreasonable dissatisfaction with you. If you're not willing to recognize that an out-of-warranty personal computer (or MP3 player) is your responsibility alone... I guess you're not really a Mac person.
Never mind, I am not Jack's anything. Please, no more ur-hip commentary on how ironic development of a Fight Club game is, given that the book and movie were such insightful commentary on our material culture and a revitalization of self-reliance and blah blah blah.
Fight Club was more or less an intellectual jerkoff session for unsatisfied adolescents, despite its pretensions of enlightenment to a more fundamental meaning. It was a good bit of candy with some bracing flourishes - but ultimately hollow.
As Tyler Durden would say, how's being clever working for you? Cause it doesn't last long.
... On the other hand, if 138 (or so; I can't recall the precise number of shuttle flights leading up to Columbia) X-Prize contestants make manned flights into orbit, with cargo, with less than 14 dead, I'll be damned surprised.
No denying NASA's bureaucratic failures. But the preventable nature of both crashes, coupled with the number of successful flights, speaks more good of the agency's engineering prowess than it does ill of its managerial problems.
... then people who have never used it will understand the importance of requiring admin password entry before installing anything.
That's why you don't, and won't, see malware on OS X - when the machine demands a password for some shite you think is dodgy, people stop and squint; they don't just click the big button that says 'Yes! Show me boobies!'
While I'm not sure I'm up to learning classical Greek to read Euripides or improving my Latin to the point of reading Ovid, I strongly agree with the child posters who point out that pioneers in creative fields often are not just stepping-stones; they are enduring visionaries as well, whose initial works deserve as much thought as more-recent anthologies or restatements.
In the law, my current field of study, you most certainly do not begin contracts, for example, with the Uniform Commercial Code or the most recent American Law Institute Restatement. You start with King's Bench opinions from the 1700s, if not earlier ones.
Modern civil law codes are not intelligible solely from modern commentators; their origins in (sometimes truly ancient) compilations of law are as important, if not more so, than their present incarnations. You will still find civil law judges citing authorities from Roman or Byzantine proconsuls and edictuaries (seriously) to elucidate difficult questions.
And simply because ground-breaking work in creative fields tends to become more specialized and understandable as time passes is no reason to abandon historically important works. You'd sound silly arguing that the opinions of, say, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Cardozo and Learned Hand have no application in modern law. They were insightful decades ago, and remain so. I venture such is true in a variety of fields.
You sound like one, treating "objectivism" as anything more than a faux-mystical conservative crutch. That pap is a Scientology of the self.
The right to own property is the foremost right of every person and should be defended above all these other "rights" like the right to welfare and non-descrimination.
Bzzzzzt.
You'd better leave America (along with Western civilization, and virtually all religion) behind if you think owning property comes before "welfare" - which, in non-reactionary terminology, means efforts by men, through their governments, to help other men - and before "non-discrimination" - which means recognition of equal humanity and everything that flows from it: equal rights, due process, life and liberty, and all those other things Ayn Rand couldn't imagine living without.
Sigh. It takes a fairly well-developed industrial society to produce people with such effective blinders that they mistake their surroundings for the state of nature.
Lemme quote ya yer holy prophetess: I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
Say goodbye to the human race, then. Recognition of human inequality - intellectual, yes, but more importantly economic and social - is a bedrock principle of human morality, as is the value of efforts to rectify inequality. Abandonment of virtue is tantamount to abnegation of one's own humanity; and "self-reliance" (a meaningless idea, given the sociopolitical state in which humans inevitably find themselves) at another's expense is no virtue.
Orlowski does better when he's retyping press releases. The revenue split for Apple (and the also-rans like MusicMatch and Napster) was no secret. Apple's big play wasn't some kind of pie-in-the-sky dam-breaking for peace, love and music; it was a nasty, hard-fought compromise wrested from the RIAA's cold, dead hands that ended up a hair on the right side of the line where the music industry was willing to sign.
It's all about integration, efficiency, ease of use and aesthetics, and nobody does those better than Apple. Also hot monkey sex. It was not then and isn't now about the short-term revenue.
Licensing fees are a fact of life in digital content, and the DRM armor is only going to get shinier. Music is just the first wave - every other form of content, even applications, are moving toward authentication, run-time models, toward licensing and away from first sale. That's just where the money is in a world of perfect copies.
Of course online music is a loss leader. No one has more to gain from that loss leader than Apple - they sell the whole widget, which nobody else does.
They're well, well positioned to sell an assload of Macs and plenty of their integrated apps and services through the ubiquity of the iPod and the universal availability of iTunes.
As for Orlowski's bongwater musings? These really made me laugh:
a plan is to infect as many computers it could with restrictive DRM technology to allow us to rights we once took for granted
Nice language, I know I've felt free to rip and pirate copyrighted works my entire life. Even in the womb, all I remember was eight-tracks being shiftily handed about by my parents. That and mimeographs running off the latest bestsellers. And Betamax copying all over the damn place. Keep in mind that Apple has the most liberal terms around.
But why, you ask, is Apple helping an extinct, and unworthy industry back on its feet?
Unworthy? The fact that everyone wants a college football championship don't mean it's gonna happen in our lifetimes. Same with the record labels.
One where the ancient copyright rules spin the money back to the pigopolists, and some sucker, like Apple, is left holding a brand of dubious (and soon to be extinct) value.
Earth to Orlowski, come in.
as the Jobs judgement is typically both coherent and devoid of technoutopian fantasies...
a global consensus is coalescing around the idea of something called "compulsory licensing"...
A government-sponsored tax granting free music rights to everyone? That's not a technoutopian fantasy? Where's this global consensus forming, in a ratty pub in the Midlands?
Right. Only if the revolution comes. I'm not betting on that.
It's unfortunate that a number including various different ICES projects got attached to the supercomputer project alone. However, it's important to take this person's comments with a grain of salt.
Case in point: Miss de Marquez incorrectly claims Virginia Tech's total quoted cost for Apple's solution "ONLY includes the actual computer."
That's patently not true. VT's announced cost expressly included both the InfiniBand interconnects and the (massive) piped-water cooling system that, incidentally, accounts for most of the facility's projected electricity use.
Also note that Miss de Marquez labels the "value of the specific computer" $3 million. Does that number include cooling, power, the building and labor? There's no way to know, but that information certainly is available for Apple's machine. Telling.
Head on over to VT's page for more info: http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terasca le/
Yeah, it's of consequence cause a high school grad/college freshman cobbled together a low-energy neutron generator from junkyard parts. This is like building a B1 bomber from the crap on Junkyard Wars.
And it's uplifting, neato and entertaining. A rarity.
Seriously, I don't believe that's correct. Regardless of any contract existing between you and the RIAA, prosecution for copyright violation and civil litigation for damages incurred should proceed along the usual lines.
You cannot enforceably contract to forbear from illegal activity any more than you can contract to commit illegal activity. Or rather, you can do so but the promise is not binding. Such a promise, I believe, is contra bonos mores and unsupported by consideration.
Decisions of the Seventh Circuit (which sits in Chicago) are binding on courts in Illinois and Indiana as well as in Wisconsin. Because the 7th is the highest federal court so far to speak on this issue, its decision forms (very) compelling persuasive authority for the entire country.
Basically, you're right. The ProCD case looks bad for future tests, unless the Supreme Court steps up. Or fool-ass paid-for laws make challenging the OEMs pointless anyway.
However, I don't believe you can accurately say contracts of adhesion are not enforceable.
Check Todd D. Rakoff on adhesion in 96 Harv. L. Rev. 1173, 1185 (1983): "in the absence of extraordinary circumstances, the adherent can establish an excuse only by showing affirmative participation by the drafting party in causing misunderstanding."
The restatement (2d) of contracts contains similar language tending to vitiate consent in cases of deceit.
You can say many things about OEM distributors, but I doubt you could prove intentional misrepresentation.
Now, not allowing one "contractor" to even view the EULA in the first place... that goes straight to procedural unconscionability, of which adhesion could be considered a subcategory. A good lawyer before a sympathetic judge - in a sympathetic jurisdiction - might have a shot.
But generally, contracts of adhesion (as which EULAs qualify) generally are enforced.
Disclaimer: IANAL. The above does not constitute legal advice.
The original parent post - that ESR should watch what he says - is dead on. Statements like
The time it takes a lackey to check with HQ for orders is time an ally can spend thinking up ways to make your life complicated that HQ would be too nervous to use. Go on, try to imagine an IBM lawyer approving this letter.
are not disagreement, they are easily construable as incitement and warning of some (illicit?) action against SCO (and its allies, perhaps including Microsoft and Sun?).
This is even worse:
Take that offer while you still can, Mr. McBride. So far your so-called 'evidence' is crap; you'd better climb down off your high horse before we shoot that sucker entirely out from under you.
What is that supposed to mean? I understand the anger Raymond feels, and it's shared by a whole lot of people. And clamor for SCO to show its cards - disagreement, rallying, FS/OS support - is obviously good. But threats, even veiled ones, are not.
The journal's site is here, though the August (autumn) issue isn't yet available online.
Some significant red flags here. First and most obvious is the wunderkind's lack of training and (presumed) familiarity with established concepts of physics and contemporary research. This isn't a deal-breaker, of course, but it's worth remembering. I'd love to see untrained theorists challenging - successfully - old-guard physicists with some astounding new insights, but I don't think that's happening here.
Wheeler's one-word endorsement - "boldness" - isn't ringing, and the bit about his age (he's 27) is irrelevant.
From a referee: "I have only read the first two sections as it is clear that the author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus. I'm afraid I am unwilling to waste any time reading further, and recommend terminal rejection." Ouch with a capital 'O'. There's no maths even referred to in this article, either, which I'd like to see.
"Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived." This hasn't really been a problem since quantum indeterminacy.
From a "prominent Oxford mathematician": "A prominent Oxford mathematician commented, "It's as astonishing, as it is unexpected, but he's right." Unnamed source. HUGE red flag.
Within a quote: "Naturally the parameter and boundary of their respective position and magnitude are naturally determinable up to the limits of possible measurement as stated by the general quantum hypothesis and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but this indeterminacy in precise value is not a consequence of quantum uncertainty." He gives no alternative explanation for the origins of this 'indeterminacy.' Up to this point the article's summary has proceeded along basic Planck/Heisenberg lines. There's really nothing new here, except the (in this article) unsupported assertion of a new form of indeterminacy that's not related to quantum effects on measurement.
"Lynds continues that the cosmological proposal of imaginary time also isn't compatible with a consistent physical description, both as a consequence of this, and secondly, "because it's the relative order of events that's relevant, not the direction of time itself, as time doesn't go in any direction." Consequently it's meaningless for the order of a sequence of events to be imaginary, or at right angles, relative to another sequence of events. When approached about Lynds' arguments against his theory, Hawking failed to respond." Ignores Feynman's 'arrow of time' characterization of antimatter as equivalent to matter moving in time-opposite fashion. Also ignores simple observation that time does, in fact, appear to move in one direction. In a layman's article it would be good to mention Lynds' explanation for this, if he has one. If he doesn't, well... And Hawking 'refused to respond' to whom? To Lynds? To the author? On what questions? In what timeframe? A phone call during dinner from Australia? Red flag.
"Although Lynds remembers being frustrated with Grigson, and once standing at a blackboard explaining how simple it was and telling him to "hurry up and get it", Lynds says that, unlike some others, Prof. Grigson was still encouraging and would always make time to talk to him, even taking him into the staff cafeteria so they could continue talking physics." Seriously big red flag. 'Hurry up and get it'? Sounds like high school bong-water theorizing.
"Although still controversial, judging by the response it has already received from some of science's leading lights, Lynds' work seems likely to establish him as a groundbreaking figure in respect to increasing our understanding of time in physics. It a
Funny thing, that, I tried looking for an email address to complain about 1) no Moz support 2) no Mac support. (not that I would use the service anyway; iTunes is simply badass)
But the only address listed was the webmaster for their corporate parent. They must not welcome constructive criticism.
Your point's well taken. It's hard to overemphasize the point that government and business stances on the inviolability of strict property rights have hardened in last 10 years or so.
However, keep in mind that the Fair Use America we like to think about is as much a pipedream as Music As IP. Please refer to initial drafts of the Declaration of Independence, whose writers heavily depended on Locke and Montesquieuian ideas of property being the basis of the social contract.
The original thought is right there in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: life, liberty and property, not the "pursuit of happiness."
Granted, those folks were thinking of chattel property, not property whose taking leaves the original unchanged. But property as American social basis has been around waaaaaay longer than, say, freely available music.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Apple II and (I believe) Commodore, and probably others.
That game kicked ass; I think I actually cried in frustration (shut up, I was 6 or so) when I accidentally overwrote Side 2 of the floppy.
Same stupid claim as the DDR guy above without the funny admission part - the PowerPad was a Twister-pad looking thing, this is a torsion bar for upper-body tension.
CTFL (click the fucking link), mods.
Grandparent (if you read it) was not implying anything about the GPL that isn't true - he was making an abstract point about the aesthetic undesirability of spending money to ensure that FS/OS projects remain that way.
Parent was flame-breathing (didn't the all caps tip you off?)
GET IT STRAIGHT!
Mod parent up
IANAT.
But I am an owner of three Macs (currently), past owner of several more and happy iPod owner.
I've never bought AppleCare on any of my machines because literally nothing hardware-related has ever gone wrong with them. I'm serious - no bad PSUs, no dead pixels (not even one), no nothing. I haven't had a kernel panic since OS X's Public Beta. And I am not shy about cracking boxes open and throwing in extra hardware, though I haven't broken out a soldering iron. Yet.
These disgruntled Mac folks probably have gotten used to similar experiences, and when they get a taste of real PC medicine they cry foul.
Go stuff it, you troublemaking bastards. You read the warranty information - or if you didn't you deserve what you get. Did you buy an extended warranty that would cover your complained-of problems? No? You really expect Apple's products to last forever, even though the company uses nearly all industry-standard equipment? You expect Apple's Li-Ion batteries to magically outlast the identical competition?
Take your licks and quit spreading accusations, petitions and talk of lawsuits. Or even better, go buy from another company and bring your unreasonable dissatisfaction with you. If you're not willing to recognize that an out-of-warranty personal computer (or MP3 player) is your responsibility alone... I guess you're not really a Mac person.
Sigh. I am Jack's...
Never mind, I am not Jack's anything. Please, no more ur-hip commentary on how ironic development of a Fight Club game is, given that the book and movie were such insightful commentary on our material culture and a revitalization of self-reliance and blah blah blah.
Fight Club was more or less an intellectual jerkoff session for unsatisfied adolescents, despite its pretensions of enlightenment to a more fundamental meaning. It was a good bit of candy with some bracing flourishes - but ultimately hollow.
As Tyler Durden would say, how's being clever working for you? Cause it doesn't last long.
... On the other hand, if 138 (or so; I can't recall the precise number of shuttle flights leading up to Columbia) X-Prize contestants make manned flights into orbit, with cargo, with less than 14 dead, I'll be damned surprised.
No denying NASA's bureaucratic failures. But the preventable nature of both crashes, coupled with the number of successful flights, speaks more good of the agency's engineering prowess than it does ill of its managerial problems.
-1, Pedantic
(no, I don't claim to have made it up)
... then people who have never used it will understand the importance of requiring admin password entry before installing anything.
That's why you don't, and won't, see malware on OS X - when the machine demands a password for some shite you think is dodgy, people stop and squint; they don't just click the big button that says 'Yes! Show me boobies!'
While I'm not sure I'm up to learning classical Greek to read Euripides or improving my Latin to the point of reading Ovid, I strongly agree with the child posters who point out that pioneers in creative fields often are not just stepping-stones; they are enduring visionaries as well, whose initial works deserve as much thought as more-recent anthologies or restatements.
In the law, my current field of study, you most certainly do not begin contracts, for example, with the Uniform Commercial Code or the most recent American Law Institute Restatement. You start with King's Bench opinions from the 1700s, if not earlier ones.
Modern civil law codes are not intelligible solely from modern commentators; their origins in (sometimes truly ancient) compilations of law are as important, if not more so, than their present incarnations. You will still find civil law judges citing authorities from Roman or Byzantine proconsuls and edictuaries (seriously) to elucidate difficult questions.
And simply because ground-breaking work in creative fields tends to become more specialized and understandable as time passes is no reason to abandon historically important works. You'd sound silly arguing that the opinions of, say, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Cardozo and Learned Hand have no application in modern law. They were insightful decades ago, and remain so. I venture such is true in a variety of fields.
LOL
Bzzzzzt.
You'd better leave America (along with Western civilization, and virtually all religion) behind if you think owning property comes before "welfare" - which, in non-reactionary terminology, means efforts by men, through their governments, to help other men - and before "non-discrimination" - which means recognition of equal humanity and everything that flows from it: equal rights, due process, life and liberty, and all those other things Ayn Rand couldn't imagine living without.
Sigh. It takes a fairly well-developed industrial society to produce people with such effective blinders that they mistake their surroundings for the state of nature.
Lemme quote ya yer holy prophetess: I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
Say goodbye to the human race, then. Recognition of human inequality - intellectual, yes, but more importantly economic and social - is a bedrock principle of human morality, as is the value of efforts to rectify inequality. Abandonment of virtue is tantamount to abnegation of one's own humanity; and "self-reliance" (a meaningless idea, given the sociopolitical state in which humans inevitably find themselves) at another's expense is no virtue.
It's all about integration, efficiency, ease of use and aesthetics, and nobody does those better than Apple. Also hot monkey sex. It was not then and isn't now about the short-term revenue.
Licensing fees are a fact of life in digital content, and the DRM armor is only going to get shinier. Music is just the first wave - every other form of content, even applications, are moving toward authentication, run-time models, toward licensing and away from first sale. That's just where the money is in a world of perfect copies.
Of course online music is a loss leader. No one has more to gain from that loss leader than Apple - they sell the whole widget, which nobody else does.
They're well, well positioned to sell an assload of Macs and plenty of their integrated apps and services through the ubiquity of the iPod and the universal availability of iTunes.
As for Orlowski's bongwater musings? These really made me laugh:
Nice language, I know I've felt free to rip and pirate copyrighted works my entire life. Even in the womb, all I remember was eight-tracks being shiftily handed about by my parents. That and mimeographs running off the latest bestsellers. And Betamax copying all over the damn place. Keep in mind that Apple has the most liberal terms around.
Unworthy? The fact that everyone wants a college football championship don't mean it's gonna happen in our lifetimes. Same with the record labels.
Earth to Orlowski, come in.
A government-sponsored tax granting free music rights to everyone? That's not a technoutopian fantasy? Where's this global consensus forming, in a ratty pub in the Midlands?
Right. Only if the revolution comes. I'm not betting on that.
Actually this iTunes/Mac zealot started using the iTunes Music Store when he got an iPod - obviating any silliness you describe.
Including "buying WMA music [I] can use directly." Sorry, guy, no problems here.
It's unfortunate that a number including various different ICES projects got attached to the supercomputer project alone. However, it's important to take this person's comments with a grain of salt.
Case in point: Miss de Marquez incorrectly claims Virginia Tech's total quoted cost for Apple's solution "ONLY includes the actual computer."
That's patently not true. VT's announced cost expressly included both the InfiniBand interconnects and the (massive) piped-water cooling system that, incidentally, accounts for most of the facility's projected electricity use.
Also note that Miss de Marquez labels the "value of the specific computer" $3 million. Does that number include cooling, power, the building and labor? There's no way to know, but that information certainly is available for Apple's machine. Telling.
Head on over to VT's page for more info: http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terasc
Yeah, it's of consequence cause a high school grad/college freshman cobbled together a low-energy neutron generator from junkyard parts. This is like building a B1 bomber from the crap on Junkyard Wars.
And it's uplifting, neato and entertaining. A rarity.
Sorry for the snark.
Seriously, I don't believe that's correct. Regardless of any contract existing between you and the RIAA, prosecution for copyright violation and civil litigation for damages incurred should proceed along the usual lines.
You cannot enforceably contract to forbear from illegal activity any more than you can contract to commit illegal activity. Or rather, you can do so but the promise is not binding. Such a promise, I believe, is contra bonos mores and unsupported by consideration.
IANAL, but I play one on Slashdot.
IANAL, but...
Decisions of the Seventh Circuit (which sits in Chicago) are binding on courts in Illinois and Indiana as well as in Wisconsin. Because the 7th is the highest federal court so far to speak on this issue, its decision forms (very) compelling persuasive authority for the entire country.
Basically, you're right. The ProCD case looks bad for future tests, unless the Supreme Court steps up. Or fool-ass paid-for laws make challenging the OEMs pointless anyway.
Moral: Buy Apple.
Word up about UCITA.
However, I don't believe you can accurately say contracts of adhesion are not enforceable.
Check Todd D. Rakoff on adhesion in 96 Harv. L. Rev. 1173, 1185 (1983): "in the absence of extraordinary circumstances, the adherent can establish an excuse only by showing affirmative participation by the drafting party in causing misunderstanding."
The restatement (2d) of contracts contains similar language tending to vitiate consent in cases of deceit.
You can say many things about OEM distributors, but I doubt you could prove intentional misrepresentation.
Now, not allowing one "contractor" to even view the EULA in the first place... that goes straight to procedural unconscionability, of which adhesion could be considered a subcategory. A good lawyer before a sympathetic judge - in a sympathetic jurisdiction - might have a shot.
But generally, contracts of adhesion (as which EULAs qualify) generally are enforced.
Disclaimer: IANAL. The above does not constitute legal advice.
The original parent post - that ESR should watch what he says - is dead on. Statements like
The time it takes a lackey to check with HQ for orders is time an ally can spend thinking up ways to make your life complicated that HQ would be too nervous to use. Go on, try to imagine an IBM lawyer approving this letter.
are not disagreement, they are easily construable as incitement and warning of some (illicit?) action against SCO (and its allies, perhaps including Microsoft and Sun?).
This is even worse:
Take that offer while you still can, Mr. McBride. So far your so-called 'evidence' is crap; you'd better climb down off your high horse before we shoot that sucker entirely out from under you.
What is that supposed to mean? I understand the anger Raymond feels, and it's shared by a whole lot of people. And clamor for SCO to show its cards - disagreement, rallying, FS/OS support - is obviously good. But threats, even veiled ones, are not.
and let's concentrate on the
Lip + service = $$$!
The journal's site is here, though the August (autumn) issue isn't yet available online.
Some significant red flags here. First and most obvious is the wunderkind's lack of training and (presumed) familiarity with established concepts of physics and contemporary research. This isn't a deal-breaker, of course, but it's worth remembering. I'd love to see untrained theorists challenging - successfully - old-guard physicists with some astounding new insights, but I don't think that's happening here.
Wheeler's one-word endorsement - "boldness" - isn't ringing, and the bit about his age (he's 27) is irrelevant.
From a referee: "I have only read the first two sections as it is clear that the author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus. I'm afraid I am unwilling to waste any time reading further, and recommend terminal rejection." Ouch with a capital 'O'. There's no maths even referred to in this article, either, which I'd like to see.
"Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived." This hasn't really been a problem since quantum indeterminacy.
From a "prominent Oxford mathematician": "A prominent Oxford mathematician commented, "It's as astonishing, as it is unexpected, but he's right." Unnamed source. HUGE red flag.
Within a quote: "Naturally the parameter and boundary of their respective position and magnitude are naturally determinable up to the limits of possible measurement as stated by the general quantum hypothesis and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but this indeterminacy in precise value is not a consequence of quantum uncertainty." He gives no alternative explanation for the origins of this 'indeterminacy.' Up to this point the article's summary has proceeded along basic Planck/Heisenberg lines. There's really nothing new here, except the (in this article) unsupported assertion of a new form of indeterminacy that's not related to quantum effects on measurement.
"Lynds continues that the cosmological proposal of imaginary time also isn't compatible with a consistent physical description, both as a consequence of this, and secondly, "because it's the relative order of events that's relevant, not the direction of time itself, as time doesn't go in any direction." Consequently it's meaningless for the order of a sequence of events to be imaginary, or at right angles, relative to another sequence of events. When approached about Lynds' arguments against his theory, Hawking failed to respond." Ignores Feynman's 'arrow of time' characterization of antimatter as equivalent to matter moving in time-opposite fashion. Also ignores simple observation that time does, in fact, appear to move in one direction. In a layman's article it would be good to mention Lynds' explanation for this, if he has one. If he doesn't, well... And Hawking 'refused to respond' to whom? To Lynds? To the author? On what questions? In what timeframe? A phone call during dinner from Australia? Red flag.
"Although Lynds remembers being frustrated with Grigson, and once standing at a blackboard explaining how simple it was and telling him to "hurry up and get it", Lynds says that, unlike some others, Prof. Grigson was still encouraging and would always make time to talk to him, even taking him into the staff cafeteria so they could continue talking physics." Seriously big red flag. 'Hurry up and get it'? Sounds like high school bong-water theorizing.
"Although still controversial, judging by the response it has already received from some of science's leading lights, Lynds' work seems likely to establish him as a groundbreaking figure in respect to increasing our understanding of time in physics. It a
Cause the Blender.org folks have a binary download for OS X. I imagine there's folks interested in that version than in Irix and FreeBSD.
Funny thing, that, I tried looking for an email address to complain about 1) no Moz support 2) no Mac support. (not that I would use the service anyway; iTunes is simply badass)
But the only address listed was the webmaster for their corporate parent. They must not welcome constructive criticism.
How odd.
Your point's well taken. It's hard to overemphasize the point that government and business stances on the inviolability of strict property rights have hardened in last 10 years or so.
However, keep in mind that the Fair Use America we like to think about is as much a pipedream as Music As IP. Please refer to initial drafts of the Declaration of Independence, whose writers heavily depended on Locke and Montesquieuian ideas of property being the basis of the social contract.
The original thought is right there in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: life, liberty and property, not the "pursuit of happiness."
Granted, those folks were thinking of chattel property, not property whose taking leaves the original unchanged. But property as American social basis has been around waaaaaay longer than, say, freely available music.