In the real world, upwards of 40% of a given barrel of oil ends up as gasoline, and maybe up to 60%. Gasoline.
Firstly, grandparent's point stands. A huge amount of oil is used for stuff other than gasoline. Furthermore, a lot of that gasoline does stuff other than fueling cars and homes, so, yeah, 25% sounds reasonable. We have no replacement for making plastics, nor for powering the turbines in jets, nor making asphalt. The point here is that even if we all stopped driving petrol-powered cars and switched to electric cars powered by big fusion generators, the oil industry wouldn't disappear; the stuff still has lots of uses.
Besides, we've already got the technology to move beyond fossil fuels, it's as safe or safer than burning coal, pollutes a helluva lot less, and has enough fuel sitting around to last us practically forever: fission. The only thing lacking is the political will, and the only problem is that people are stupid.
I'm a proponent of fission power. I know it's pollution-free, the reactors are vastly safer than any other method out there, and the anti-nuke crowd is very much to blame for a continued reliance on coal. However, fission is not an end-all solution. Uranium is not a limitless resource and reactor-safety, while not as critical as some have made it out to be, is an issue that needs to be regulated, which adds to inefficiency.
It's my personal belief that until we get fusion working, someone ought to do a re-branding effort on fission. Resell it to the public as "SafePower(TM)". Yes, with a small PR-manuver nuclear power could once again be our answer. The money from the t-shirt sales from SafePower(TM) would go to fusion research.
Let's say 12 hours of music per-CD-R. I'd need around 50 CDs to have my entire collection available. And, frankly, I don't think burning a new CD every day with a new playlist, then coming home and throwing the thing out is very environmentally-responsible.
I'm not sure if we can trust Wikipedia, but any man who says:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."...very likely wouldn't be too concerned about people changing his song in any way. Perhaps a bit sad is the fact that he's been dead for almost 40 years, and yet that copyright he thought would last only 28 years is still in effect.
Cue in image of logo of Verizon. Fade in market capitalization: $97.85 Billion
Cut to image of logo of Intel. Fade in market capitalization: $146.63 Billion
Cut to image of SUN. Fade in market capitalization: $12.27 Billion
Cut to Yahoo! logo. Fade in market capitalization: $37.96 Billion
Announcer (in stern voice): These huge, multinational corporations want to stop the average American from being able to prosecute them for illegally encouraging theft of their copyrighted content. A non-partisan artists' interests group* recently was denied the ability to sue companies which encourage this piracy. Don't you think it's time to say "NO" to these huge companies? Call your senator and say "Yes, I support the INDUCE Act."
If some parents think killing cops is a-okay, you think it's alright for their kids to be taught that?
Now, I don't support this law simply because I don't think there's a correlation between violence in video games/music/movies/TV and physical violence (well, not a direct correlation anyway; probably an inverse correlation). However, this prevalent attitude that parents should be 100% responsible for their kids right up until the day they turn 18 is absurd. As the state makes it legal to use web forums and the like when you turn 13 but illegal to give your consent until you're 18, the state has some responsibility to regulate what 13-17 year olds can be led into.
"Congress shall pass no law preventing the forced disclosure of cell network failure"
I'm sorry, to call this a "right" at all is stretching, at best. If anything, the right I'd like to keep is the right to run a wireless network without having to publish reports with the FCC every time it goes down.
Since FCC regulations of public spectrum use was something of a hot topic on/., thought I might bring this up...
Cingular is now planning to simultaneously run four different cell network, Analog (AMPS), IS-136 ("TDMA"), GSM and now UMTS/WCDMA. This is going to take a whole crapload of spectrum space, considerably more than any other carrier. Since spectrum limited, doesn't this concern anyone? How is planning to get away with this?
In fact, the Supreme Court ruled today that state laws which require citizens to reveal their identity to police officers are constitutional. Such laws do not exist in all states, but have existed in many states for several years (unchallenged until this point, by the way). I think this is an important distinction.
If you don't like this kind of law, you can ask your state government to not have one.
If you really wanted to avoid entanglement with the RIAA, just download the song from a P2P network. Allofmp3.com isn't really playing fair, if you ask me. Russia doesn't even respect copyrights from before 1973, so if you download the Beatles, all of the commissions from the sales on AllOfMP3.com are going straight to ROMS (Russian RIAA). At least on iTunes the artists will be getting something.
...what's the harm in just lying? Why not just make this a matter of national security? Someone needs to start putting out information that Earth's atmosphere is going to turn into helium in 50 years, and everyone needs to get to Mars as soon as possible. You wouldn't even have to convince everyone, maybe just 25% of the population. They'd go off and buy the technology and make it work, then everyone else could follow suit.
Because Howard Stern has made "being censored" part of his image.
Does anyone honestly think Clear Channel or anyone is actually being hurt by this? Of course not. People see a headline "Show fined for $1.7 million" and its free advertising. Notice how the show hasn't been removed anywhere except in places where regional demand was minimal?
Censorship? Give me a big fucking break. If he were really all about being as raunchy as possible, Stern could go onto satellite radio. He wants to make a scene and spew political nonsense.
And before someone makes some absurd political point about this all being the current executive branch's fault somehow (either because they own the FCC, are own by ClearChannel, or both), they've been fined before, specifically while Clinton was in office.
I think you're supposed to use particle weight, not atomic weight. In this case, the hydrogen particle has half the mass of a helium particle, not a quarter.
Just as an example, EVD has been something of a flop.
The Chinese didn't actually invent most of the technology in EVD; they seem to have just taken the existing DVD medium and licensed On2's VP6 video codec (On2 is US-based). They've shipped so little actual EVD units that On2 is suing the Chinese companies involved for not fulfilling their minimum units obligations. As a bit of anecdotal evidence, my Chinese friend claims that he can't even find EVDs any more (there were more several months ago).
TD-SCDMA was also developed in large part by outsiders (Siemen's IIRC), and hasn't completely taken off, though this may change if/when the government decides to require operators to use it. Point is, I believe many of these new "Chinese standards" are really just a way to encourage real competition in the new Chinese economy, and it's actually working extremely well. EVD, for example, might actually be a really great way to stop the HD-DVD mafia from imposing discriminatory patent fees against Chinese electronics manufacturers.
When Sacramento agents made their request in August 2003, the wiretap provision had not yet been used, and authorities had to convince a federal judge to grant the authority.
I don't know how you read that, but I read it as "This was a new law, so it took a bunch of legal maneuvering this first time to convince a judge to give them the authority." There's no reference whatsoever to "the newfound ability of police to wiretap anyone they feel like." All this new law seems to say is that police are now allowed to get such authority after demonstrating their evidence to a judge. That such a tap wasn't possible before seems like a major oversight in the law; you could be caught if you requested kiddie porn over a telephone, but not over an internet connection?
...FhG and other groups that receive government funding in Germany will be giving up their all their math- and software-related patents, too. After all, such a ruling would put Dolby, for instance, at something of a disadvantage in Europe, wouldn't it?
The software industry was thriving before patents were allowed, and there's no particular evidence they help any actual innovaters now, either, except again, mere assertion.
Patents have been allowed since the 1700s. Software, let alone a software industry, has existed since perhaps the 1940s. So, I'm going assume you're referring to Diamond v. Diehr, making the first "allowed" software patents begin in 1981.
Well, let's look at the industry. For the 30 years before 1981, not a lot happened. The industry was relatively small. Since then, there's been the desktop computing revolution, the rise of the internet as a publicly usable medium, and the software industry has gotten perhaps an orders of magnitude larger in two decades. It's seems to me, anyway, that this is pretty good evidence for patents encouraging innovation.
Now, would this explosion have happened even if software patents were strictly banned? Impossible to tell, but there is certainly some evidence it wouldn't have been as big as it was. One major effect of patents is that once a patent becomes extant, its holder has an interest in the technology being used as much as possible. So, when it became in the MP3 patent people's interest to get every machine in the world to have an MP3 decoder, well...you know...
The Federal Aviation Administration is an agency of the Department of Transportation, so both XCOR and and Scaled Composites dealt with the DOT. I'm guessing Scaled Composites didn't want to spend the time getting a commercial license, since they don't see the need to sell payload space; XCOR may be financing their operation this way. NASA is a scientific agency, so their standardization of "astronaut" as being above 50 miles is just for consistency, I guess.
As for too many agencies being involved, I guess I'm not so sure here. There is limited airspace, so regulation is needed to keep the skies safe, and rockets full of explosive fuels could certainly pose a hazard to the public. Therefore, requiring testers to check with the authorities first seems like a logical thing to do. Contrary to what many have been grumbling about over the apparent slow-down in space exploration (a government conspiracy to keep private industry out of space, for instant), the relevant agencies seems to be open to allowing people with something to actually test to do their testing. In fact, if XCOR is any indication, the gov't seems to be interested in allowing private industry to take the next step and conduct for-profit space flight.
It looks like a program that has the ability to read/write/delete files from your hard drive. In fact, it is a program that has the ability to read/write/delete files from your hard drive. This same exploit could work on essentially any other OS.
"But as far as big, high-quality apps... there just aren't many, and those that are being released are from the usual suspects. Nothing much new."
My question is, couldn't this could really be said for any platform (except maybe Linux, and even then mostly via porting)? What major, big, commercial, ground breaking applications have been release on Windows in the last 3 years that weren't there before? The Mac has lost Framemaker and Premiere, but what successful new applications has Windows gained? Is this really an effect of a larger fallout in the software development world?
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Gattaca was, to my eyes, far too blatant. The genetically-modified antagonists' name is "Eugene?" Come on, now.
In the real world, upwards of 40% of a given barrel of oil ends up as gasoline, and maybe up to 60%. Gasoline.
Firstly, grandparent's point stands. A huge amount of oil is used for stuff other than gasoline. Furthermore, a lot of that gasoline does stuff other than fueling cars and homes, so, yeah, 25% sounds reasonable. We have no replacement for making plastics, nor for powering the turbines in jets, nor making asphalt. The point here is that even if we all stopped driving petrol-powered cars and switched to electric cars powered by big fusion generators, the oil industry wouldn't disappear; the stuff still has lots of uses.
Besides, we've already got the technology to move beyond fossil fuels, it's as safe or safer than burning coal, pollutes a helluva lot less, and has enough fuel sitting around to last us practically forever: fission. The only thing lacking is the political will, and the only problem is that people are stupid.
I'm a proponent of fission power. I know it's pollution-free, the reactors are vastly safer than any other method out there, and the anti-nuke crowd is very much to blame for a continued reliance on coal. However, fission is not an end-all solution. Uranium is not a limitless resource and reactor-safety, while not as critical as some have made it out to be, is an issue that needs to be regulated, which adds to inefficiency.
It's my personal belief that until we get fusion working, someone ought to do a re-branding effort on fission. Resell it to the public as "SafePower(TM)". Yes, with a small PR-manuver nuclear power could once again be our answer. The money from the t-shirt sales from SafePower(TM) would go to fusion research.
Adrian is a guy. And they're not related.
Ana is his wife.
Let's say 12 hours of music per-CD-R. I'd need around 50 CDs to have my entire collection available. And, frankly, I don't think burning a new CD every day with a new playlist, then coming home and throwing the thing out is very environmentally-responsible.
I'm not sure if we can trust Wikipedia, but any man who says:
...very likely wouldn't be too concerned about people changing his song in any way. Perhaps a bit sad is the fact that he's been dead for almost 40 years, and yet that copyright he thought would last only 28 years is still in effect.
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
There's another interpretation here.
Cue in image of logo of Verizon.
Fade in market capitalization: $97.85 Billion
Cut to image of logo of Intel.
Fade in market capitalization: $146.63 Billion
Cut to image of SUN.
Fade in market capitalization: $12.27 Billion
Cut to Yahoo! logo.
Fade in market capitalization: $37.96 Billion
Announcer (in stern voice):
These huge, multinational corporations want to stop the average American from being able to prosecute them for illegally encouraging theft of their copyrighted content. A non-partisan artists' interests group* recently was denied the ability to sue companies which encourage this piracy. Don't you think it's time to say "NO" to these huge companies? Call your senator and say "Yes, I support the INDUCE Act."
Coming soon to your TV.
* the RIAA
If some parents think killing cops is a-okay, you think it's alright for their kids to be taught that?
Now, I don't support this law simply because I don't think there's a correlation between violence in video games/music/movies/TV and physical violence (well, not a direct correlation anyway; probably an inverse correlation). However, this prevalent attitude that parents should be 100% responsible for their kids right up until the day they turn 18 is absurd. As the state makes it legal to use web forums and the like when you turn 13 but illegal to give your consent until you're 18, the state has some responsibility to regulate what 13-17 year olds can be led into.
Where exactly in the constitution is a line like:
"Congress shall pass no law preventing the forced disclosure of cell network failure"
I'm sorry, to call this a "right" at all is stretching, at best. If anything, the right I'd like to keep is the right to run a wireless network without having to publish reports with the FCC every time it goes down.
Since FCC regulations of public spectrum use was something of a hot topic on /., thought I might bring this up...
Cingular is now planning to simultaneously run four different cell network, Analog (AMPS), IS-136 ("TDMA"), GSM and now UMTS/WCDMA. This is going to take a whole crapload of spectrum space, considerably more than any other carrier. Since spectrum limited, doesn't this concern anyone? How is planning to get away with this?
We are prisoners to our own...martha steward pajamas.
No, Martha Stewart is our prisoner now. Muwhaha.
In fact, the Supreme Court ruled today that state laws which require citizens to reveal their identity to police officers are constitutional. Such laws do not exist in all states, but have existed in many states for several years (unchallenged until this point, by the way). I think this is an important distinction.
If you don't like this kind of law, you can ask your state government to not have one.
The US iTunes site says "The Best Digital Jukebox."
The UK site says "A digital jukebox beyond compare."
I think they got a bit of a fright from that "the PowerMac G5 is the world's fastest computer" debacle.
If you really wanted to avoid entanglement with the RIAA, just download the song from a P2P network. Allofmp3.com isn't really playing fair, if you ask me. Russia doesn't even respect copyrights from before 1973, so if you download the Beatles, all of the commissions from the sales on AllOfMP3.com are going straight to ROMS (Russian RIAA). At least on iTunes the artists will be getting something.
...what's the harm in just lying? Why not just make this a matter of national security? Someone needs to start putting out information that Earth's atmosphere is going to turn into helium in 50 years, and everyone needs to get to Mars as soon as possible. You wouldn't even have to convince everyone, maybe just 25% of the population. They'd go off and buy the technology and make it work, then everyone else could follow suit.
Well, that's what I'd do anyway.
Because Howard Stern has made "being censored" part of his image.
Does anyone honestly think Clear Channel or anyone is actually being hurt by this? Of course not. People see a headline "Show fined for $1.7 million" and its free advertising. Notice how the show hasn't been removed anywhere except in places where regional demand was minimal?
Censorship? Give me a big fucking break. If he were really all about being as raunchy as possible, Stern could go onto satellite radio. He wants to make a scene and spew political nonsense.
And before someone makes some absurd political point about this all being the current executive branch's fault somehow (either because they own the FCC, are own by ClearChannel, or both), they've been fined before, specifically while Clinton was in office.
I think you're supposed to use particle weight, not atomic weight. In this case, the hydrogen particle has half the mass of a helium particle, not a quarter.
Just as an example, EVD has been something of a flop.
The Chinese didn't actually invent most of the technology in EVD; they seem to have just taken the existing DVD medium and licensed On2's VP6 video codec (On2 is US-based). They've shipped so little actual EVD units that On2 is suing the Chinese companies involved for not fulfilling their minimum units obligations. As a bit of anecdotal evidence, my Chinese friend claims that he can't even find EVDs any more (there were more several months ago).
TD-SCDMA was also developed in large part by outsiders (Siemen's IIRC), and hasn't completely taken off, though this may change if/when the government decides to require operators to use it. Point is, I believe many of these new "Chinese standards" are really just a way to encourage real competition in the new Chinese economy, and it's actually working extremely well. EVD, for example, might actually be a really great way to stop the HD-DVD mafia from imposing discriminatory patent fees against Chinese electronics manufacturers.
When Sacramento agents made their request in August 2003, the wiretap provision had not yet been used, and authorities had to convince a federal judge to grant the authority.
I don't know how you read that, but I read it as "This was a new law, so it took a bunch of legal maneuvering this first time to convince a judge to give them the authority." There's no reference whatsoever to "the newfound ability of police to wiretap anyone they feel like." All this new law seems to say is that police are now allowed to get such authority after demonstrating their evidence to a judge. That such a tap wasn't possible before seems like a major oversight in the law; you could be caught if you requested kiddie porn over a telephone, but not over an internet connection?
...to offer a googol bytes of e-mail storage!
...FhG and other groups that receive government funding in Germany will be giving up their all their math- and software-related patents, too. After all, such a ruling would put Dolby, for instance, at something of a disadvantage in Europe, wouldn't it?
The software industry was thriving before patents were allowed, and there's no particular evidence they help any actual innovaters now, either, except again, mere assertion.
Patents have been allowed since the 1700s. Software, let alone a software industry, has existed since perhaps the 1940s. So, I'm going assume you're referring to Diamond v. Diehr, making the first "allowed" software patents begin in 1981.
Well, let's look at the industry. For the 30 years before 1981, not a lot happened. The industry was relatively small. Since then, there's been the desktop computing revolution, the rise of the internet as a publicly usable medium, and the software industry has gotten perhaps an orders of magnitude larger in two decades. It's seems to me, anyway, that this is pretty good evidence for patents encouraging innovation.
Now, would this explosion have happened even if software patents were strictly banned? Impossible to tell, but there is certainly some evidence it wouldn't have been as big as it was. One major effect of patents is that once a patent becomes extant, its holder has an interest in the technology being used as much as possible. So, when it became in the MP3 patent people's interest to get every machine in the world to have an MP3 decoder, well...you know...
The Federal Aviation Administration is an agency of the Department of Transportation, so both XCOR and and Scaled Composites dealt with the DOT. I'm guessing Scaled Composites didn't want to spend the time getting a commercial license, since they don't see the need to sell payload space; XCOR may be financing their operation this way. NASA is a scientific agency, so their standardization of "astronaut" as being above 50 miles is just for consistency, I guess.
As for too many agencies being involved, I guess I'm not so sure here. There is limited airspace, so regulation is needed to keep the skies safe, and rockets full of explosive fuels could certainly pose a hazard to the public. Therefore, requiring testers to check with the authorities first seems like a logical thing to do. Contrary to what many have been grumbling about over the apparent slow-down in space exploration (a government conspiracy to keep private industry out of space, for instant), the relevant agencies seems to be open to allowing people with something to actually test to do their testing. In fact, if XCOR is any indication, the gov't seems to be interested in allowing private industry to take the next step and conduct for-profit space flight.
For now.
It looks like a program that has the ability to read/write/delete files from your hard drive. In fact, it is a program that has the ability to read/write/delete files from your hard drive. This same exploit could work on essentially any other OS.
Perhaps this is because the stupid artists sign the greedy record industry bastards' contracts.
The stated assumption of this rant is:
"But as far as big, high-quality apps... there just aren't many, and those that are being released are from the usual suspects. Nothing much new."
My question is, couldn't this could really be said for any platform (except maybe Linux, and even then mostly via porting)? What major, big, commercial, ground breaking applications have been release on Windows in the last 3 years that weren't there before? The Mac has lost Framemaker and Premiere, but what successful new applications has Windows gained? Is this really an effect of a larger fallout in the software development world?