If you want a pizza-and-drinks game... Munchkin. Doesn't take up as much space as a board game, as it's nothing but cards and dice, and it's a lot of fun.
Munchkin! great game. check out Illuminati! if you haven't tried it yet. Same great inside jokes and humor that gaming geeks love. Any game that lets you play a Russian orbital mind-control laser card is rule of cool defined.
The only ambiguity that's often raised is whether the National Guard constitutes said well-regulated militia. It's unclear since service isn't universal (or at least universal for the sex that cares about protecting freedoms).
Read the Militia Act, and it's pretty clear that the Guard isn't the Militia.
The line "every able-bodied male..." is pretty clearly NOT the Guard.
And I agree - why don't the feminists insist on being included in the militia?
...because they don't have to anymore? Last Thursday, Panetta removed the restriction on females in combat roles in the US military.
It's a bit rich to go on about "the other top nations" refusing to join in when a small group of Republican lawmakers and their energy company donors in the US flatly denies climate change and refuses to join the climate change accords that the rest of the developed (and much of the developing) world have established.
Hmmm...I had to go back and re-read your post. When I first read it, I saw "something is true because a book said it's true" being equated with rationality and pretty much dismissed the rest of the post as equally flawed. I'm glad I went back, though. I am indeed ignoring centuries of christian apologists and philosophers, largely because apologizing for a fallacy doesn't correct the fallacy. Faith is not compatible with reason, despite Augustine's and Aquinas' elegant arguments to the contrary. Descartes' rationalism and Hume's empiricism -- along with Kant's dogged effort to refute them both -- are exactly *why* this is so. But the real fallacies in your post are the assertion that the axioms of mathematics can be applied to the real world, and the assertion that Christianity can even have axioms. Ryle would have called those category errors. Faith is irrational, so by definition it can't have axioms, full stop. Mathematics is abstraction incarnate -- by definition it *can't* have contact with the real world. Debating this is therefore pointless, though entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Thanks for the provocative post -- we need more like that here.:)
I don't think "rational" means what you think it means...there is nothing rational about an epistemology that requires faith to espouse. Faith is the acceptance of truth without evidence. The wikipedia entry for faith and rationality explicitly calls out faith as being incompatible with rational, evidence-based reasoning.
Science is alive and well in at least the Physics community. Whilst I won't even pretend to understand General Relativity, the questioning of it and discussion about those questions is the true essence of science. facts ->theory->more facts->questions->revised theory.
Beautiful!
Did you mean trueFacts, or goodFacts? Anything can be politicized, even physics. Humans, as a rule, don't care about "facts" when they conflict with personal beliefs. If the algorithm starts with "facts", you are setting up a conflict between trueFacts and goodFacts, which allows personal beliefs to corrupt the entire process. Let me propose a slightly different algorithm that takes personal belief out of the way of the pursuit for knowledge:
model -> hypothesis -> measurement -> failure of hypothesis -> revised model.
Start with a model, not some "fact." A model is just a model. As long as it is empirically adequate, it doesn't require truth with a capital "T" to be useful, so nobody has to get their knickers in a twist over those parts of the model that disgust or terrify them. That's how Galileo and Copernicus got their ideas past the Catholic Church. By insisting they were just models that were more useful to them than the Ptolemaic "truth" endorsed by Rome, they therefore posed no threat to the Church's "facts."
For what it is worth, as a mathematician, I've always chuckled at physicists who think that reality is going to be accessible via mathematics, which is a purely abstract tool.:)
I am being serious here: what rights do they have to those minerals if by some miracle this actually 'gets off the ground'? Is international law really Finders Keepers? Hard to believe.
Regardless, I could see the very real scenario of them being underwritten by someone with very deep pockets (ahem-China-ahem) in exchange for exclusive use of the minerals.
Hmmm...perhaps not "Finders Keepers" per se, but possession being nine-tenths of the law, I would wager that exploiting mineral resources is the same thing on or off of the Earth. Once a claim is made on some off-planet resource, it can be challenged and it will either be successfully defended or not, just like it is here on Earth. The framework of the challenge is pretty much irrelevant -- you can use lawyers or you can use guns, but the "rights" go to the guy who can successfully defend the claim. NB: If you bring a lawyer to a gunfight, you automatically lose.
That opening quote is from one of my favorite Futurama episodes. And thus well chosen.
I believe that Evolution is right, or at least as right as we can ever be.
But if someone is strong in their beliefs of... well.. however the earth and man came about. I'm not going to trounce on their rights to believe it.
But it's sad when someone tries to stifle science, in any form, because it goes against something they believe.
Don't feel sad. Like you, I think we shouldn't be trouncing on their right to deny science because science goes against what they believe. Like you, I think what people believe is important to them.
Unlike you, however, I am not going to sit back and let them trounce me because I don't happen to share their belief. I'm going to call out their irrationality whenever they invoke it. It makes me feel *a whole lot* less sad; it should make you feel less sad, too. Give it a try.
This one doesn't quite hold science to be a sacrement, but DOES hold that:
If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition. Unquestionably there must be agreement between true religion and science. If a question be found contrary to reason, faith and belief in it are impossible, and there is no outcome but wavering and vacillation.
And if a question be found contrary to faith? Like, for example, "What if I can explain the universe without reference to faith, i.e., by using only the evidence obtained by observation?" According to Bahai, then faith must be wavering and vacillating, thus denying the existence of true religion -- how can a religion be true if it is wavering and vacillating? The flaw in Bahai (as with any other religion) is the assertion that science and religion are compatible. They aren't. People of the Bahai faith can have their faith, or they can have science -- they can't have both.
Baseball. Can you think of another sport where the defense is the team with the ball?
Hmmm..."with the ball" is relative. Only the offensive team can make points in baseball, which makes it different than most other sports that use a ball (volleyball is the only other one I can think of with this kind of point-scoring asymmetry, if you allow an equivalence between offense and "has the serve.") In baseball, the ball switches from the defensive team to the offensive team with every pitch. There are restrictions on how the ball can be handled by the defense and the offense, certainly, and they are certainly asymmetrical rules, but the offensive team definitely gets to handle the ball.
Basically, the defensive players get to use their hands to handle the ball (one of which is equipped with a device to make handling it *much* easier) and are allowed to handle it as many times as they want when the ball is in play, while only one player on the offense is allowed to handle it (with a large stick, which makes it exponentially harder to handle) and must thereafter avoid being touched by the ball if he indeed is able to handle it at all. The defensive team must give the player with the stick three chances to handle the ball. If the offensive player with the stick can handle the ball in a way that prevents the defensive players from touching him or his teammates with the ball before they can run a certain distance (360 feet in four serial 90-foot segments) the offensive team scores a point. When the defensive team manages to touch any of the offensive team with the ball before they have traversed the fourth 90-foot segment, or prevents the offensive team from handling the ball, in any combination of touches or preventions totaling three, the teams switch offensive and defensive roles, and after nine such role switches, the points are tallied and a winner is determined.
Certainly, the odds are stacked against the offensive team, but since they are the only ones that can accumulate the points required for victory, this shouldn't be surprising. At most only four offensive players (one per 90-foot segment) can be on the field at any given time, only one of whom (at the start of the first 90-foot segment) can touch the ball at all, and only once at that, with said large stick. The defense has nine players on the field at all times with absolutely no restrictions on who can touch the ball. As you can see, even though the defense definitely has more and easier opportunities to handle the ball than the offense, the defense is not exclusively the "team with the ball" by any means.
I'm not sure that the implied distinction between a human with an internet connection and a violent impulse, and a lethal device controlled by said human via an internet connection, is a valid one. Violent criminals can and do use the net to stalk their victims, acquire weapons, and research successful strategies to commit their crimes. Humans are still in the loop whether they are pulling the trigger while standing next to the victim, or while they are sitting in their mom's basement. IMHO, changing the location of the human in the loop is, at best, a distinction without merit.
[snip] Yo, peoples: It belonged to Prodigy, not to you. Slashdot belongs to faceless corporate masters and used to belong to Rob Malda. If you don't like it, you can always do the Rusty Foster thing and start Kuro5hin or some such. Otherwise, it's not yours. And those little Facebook games aren't yours. They never have been. If the evil corps want to shut them down, too bad. They're proprietary and/or copyrighted stuff the owners can do with as they wish no matter how evil you think they're being. [snip]
Well, your premise that a corporate product or service is exempt from consequences because it is not proprietary (your word) to the people who use it is demonstrably false, so your conclusion that consumers of those products have no recourse is also false. You are using a caveat emptor (let the buyer beware!) defense that didn't work for (among many, many others) the tobacco and pornography industries. What *is* proprietary to those Zynga consumers is the consequences of the use of Zynga's product. The idea that a producer of a good or service is responsible for the consequences of that product or service is part of caveat venditor, (let the seller beware!) a legal theory that was created almost a century ago (see: MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co.), which pretty much established (for the purposes of US Tort law, anyway) that the producers of products and services are liable for the consequences of the use of their product or services. If it can be established that Zynga knew, or should have known, that termination of their product or service could harm the consumer, then Zynga is liable for those damages.
Seriously, dude -- if McD's can be held liable to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars for serving a cup of hot coffee which a consumer spilled on herself, why can't Zynga be held liable for the pain suffered by their game-addicted customers when Zynga pulls the plug?
The military aren't the only ones that could really benefit from this technology. I ride motorcycles for fun and profit, and I can assure you having gear, engine, and lap data displayed in my visor is pretty awesome. Adding location/terrain data in real time would be nirvana. If google can do it as well as or better than the existing offerings, and I'm fairly certain they can, then I can look forward to becoming a faster, safer rider with more (read: economically viable) commercial options for my HUD. I'm working with a friend who is passionate about aerial photography to hack together a way to stream video data from a gopro mounted on a quadcopter right to my visor so I can "see" over hills and around blind turns when I'm taking a ride on my favorite winding mountain road. Streaming it to a Nexus 10 bungeed to my tank works pretty good right now, even with the 2 second video lag that plagues the preview mode on the gopro app, but I'd *love* to be able to see the same data without having to take my eye off the road to glance down. As it is, being able to see that sheriff's deputy lurking in hull-defilade beyond the next rise five seconds before his lidar can see me is *priceless.* If google can help make that happen, more power to them. I think every snowmobiler, skier, kayaker, and off-road enthusiast would be a very likely target for this technology.
Stupidity is the only sin in nature. Judgment is swift; the punishment, harsh. And there is no appeal...you live and you learn, or you don't live long.
-Robert A. Heinlein, via Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love
This quote is more than just one SF author's take on the process of natural selection. It applies to *anything* humans do where failure is an option. Torvalds passed judgment -- swift and harsh -- and because Linux is *his* the authority to render that judgment as swiftly and as harshly as he did is his, as well. Stupidity needs to be called out whenever it occurs, period. The alternative is the cessation of progress toward whatever goal you are striving for, be it a stable community, a stable civilization, or indeed, a stable operating system.
Get rid of copyright. Get rid of the notion of applying property rights to non-scarce goods. Any system of property rights (capitalism, communism, etc.) is designed with scarcity in mind.
Well, property rights != copyrights, so your attempt to conflate the two renders your assertion somewhat problematic, but I think you are headed in the right direction. Copyright preserves value by artificially preserving scarcity, but it can only work in a system where scarcity is *allowed* to create value. Under communism, products have their value assigned to them by the State -- scarcity is not necessarily a factor, so copyright isn't necessarily needed to preserve it. Ditto socialism. Under capitalism, however, products have their value dictated by a free market, where scarcity is a significant driver. As long as scarcity is a driver of value, copyright in some form or another has to be available to guarantee scarcity. If you want to be free of copyright, you have to be free of capitalism, or at least the free market-driven kind worshipped in the US.
...indeed. Excellent post. I would supplement it by adding that the only reason that marijuana dealers are of any interest to the Feds at all is the reference to marijuana in Schedule One of the Controlled Substances Act, passed by Congress in 1970. The CSA is the sole source of the authority for the Feds to override local laws when it comes to marijuana use. Removing marijuana from Schedule One of the CSA would remove the conflict between federal and state authorities over the decriminalization of marijuana.
I wonder how Delta, a Georgia based company can be subject to California law with respect to online privacy? What about Los Angeles law? Are they subject to that too?
Does Slashdot have to worry about their website complying with Fresno law?
The whole thing just seems a little bit odd. Like when the US goes after foreign-based online gambling companies.
Well, yes, in short, they do. Jurisdiction is co-terminal with the threat. If you find this "odd", I recommend that you run, not walk, to the nearest legal library and read up a bit. Start with the section on international law...
...the cost to the user is reduced privacy. Instead of giving money to Google, you give a little bit of yourself. Google is primarily a data mining company -- they profit from the data they gather from watching the way you use their products and services by selling it to other people who are interested in knowing how you use those products and services. NB: They also have entered the appliance market with the Nexus brand, and are taking on other appliance makers like Apple. There are two reasons I can think of that explain why Google is deprecating Calendar and Sync. It could be because they've decided that mining that particular data field is no longer profitable for them, or it could be they are interested in competing more directly in the appliance market by reducing interoperability with competitor's devices. Either way, it will be interesting to see where Google shifts resources that were until now dedicated to mining Sync and Calendar data, and to see what the market does to fill the opening left by this shift.
In America, how do you stop somebody from committing mass murder with a gun?
Can you do it with legislation outlawing guns? Presently, the answer is a resounding NO. You can't just pass a law taking guns away, because the right for a US citizen to bear arms is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. I think efforts to pass such legislation are a waste of energy because they will never clear the constitutional hurdle.
So, how about changing the Constitution? Well, there are two ways to do that. Get two-thirds, or 34 of the 50 individual State legislatures to request that Congress assemble a national constitutional convention to rescind the second Amendment. Failing that, get Congress itself to assemble a constitutional convention by getting two-thirds of sitting members of both the Senate and House to agree, but then you have to get three-fourths, or 38 of the 50 State legislatures to ratify it. The Founding fathers wanted it to be hard for the constitution to be changed on a whim by popular opinion -- that's the 2/3 part of the requirement for the State-initiated constitutional convention. And they wanted it even harder for the federal government to change it -- that's why a constitutional convention initiated by the US Congress requires 3/4, not 2/3, of the fifty State legislatures to ratify it. I seriously doubt the ability of any movement to accomplish those kinds of majorities in both the Congress and the State legislatures. Fwiw, the former method has been unsuccessfully tried twice, the last being with the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies. I'd have to say changing the Constitution gets a pretty resounding NO, as well.
...content providers and the advertisers they partner with are not idiots. They will realize that trying to to legally force ad blockers off the net is not going to happen, no matter how much money they throw at it -- as long as every packet is treated the same way, ads can and will be filtered and their content pirated. They learned their lessons from the recording and motion picture industry, who lost control of their distribution channel thanks to recording and networking technologies.
What they will do is take control of the pipe that is carrying the content, so that they can control the distribution channel from end to end, the salient lesson to be learned from the recording and motion picture failures to adapt their business model to the internet. The internet backbone providers want this, so they already have a major ally in making that happen. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, network neutrality will be lost, and the internet will become very much a walled garden for the vast majority of our species, which is terribly, terribly sad.
It is OK to mock Christians, and anyone else who believes in things they cannot prove.
Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that Gödel's First Incompleteness theorem proved that there exist true statements that may never be proven. So that suggests a question: Do you disbelieve true things, or is it OK to mock you?
~Loyal
Uh, epic fail. Godel's theories on undecidable propositions only hold within the formal systems within which they are created. There exist perfectly valid ways to decide these kinds of propositions outside the formal system. Godel's method of proof of the Incompleteness Theorem itself should have been enough to establish that for you. So that suggests a question for you: Do you actually understand why what you are asserting is false, or is it OK to mock you for your ignorance?
Slashdot Mirror
If you want a pizza-and-drinks game... Munchkin. Doesn't take up as much space as a board game, as it's nothing but cards and dice, and it's a lot of fun.
Munchkin! great game. check out Illuminati! if you haven't tried it yet. Same great inside jokes and humor that gaming geeks love. Any game that lets you play a Russian orbital mind-control laser card is rule of cool defined.
Read the Militia Act, and it's pretty clear that the Guard isn't the Militia.
The line "every able-bodied male..." is pretty clearly NOT the Guard.
And I agree - why don't the feminists insist on being included in the militia?
...because they don't have to anymore? Last Thursday, Panetta removed the restriction on females in combat roles in the US military.
It's a bit rich to go on about "the other top nations" refusing to join in when a small group of Republican lawmakers and their energy company donors in the US flatly denies climate change and refuses to join the climate change accords that the rest of the developed (and much of the developing) world have established.
there...FTFY.
Hmmm...I had to go back and re-read your post. When I first read it, I saw "something is true because a book said it's true" being equated with rationality and pretty much dismissed the rest of the post as equally flawed. I'm glad I went back, though. I am indeed ignoring centuries of christian apologists and philosophers, largely because apologizing for a fallacy doesn't correct the fallacy. Faith is not compatible with reason, despite Augustine's and Aquinas' elegant arguments to the contrary. Descartes' rationalism and Hume's empiricism -- along with Kant's dogged effort to refute them both -- are exactly *why* this is so. But the real fallacies in your post are the assertion that the axioms of mathematics can be applied to the real world, and the assertion that Christianity can even have axioms. Ryle would have called those category errors. Faith is irrational, so by definition it can't have axioms, full stop. Mathematics is abstraction incarnate -- by definition it *can't* have contact with the real world. Debating this is therefore pointless, though entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Thanks for the provocative post -- we need more like that here. :)
I don't think "rational" means what you think it means...there is nothing rational about an epistemology that requires faith to espouse. Faith is the acceptance of truth without evidence. The wikipedia entry for faith and rationality explicitly calls out faith as being incompatible with rational, evidence-based reasoning.
Science is alive and well in at least the Physics community. Whilst I won't even pretend to understand General Relativity, the questioning of it and discussion about those questions is the true essence of science. facts ->theory->more facts->questions->revised theory. Beautiful!
Did you mean trueFacts, or goodFacts? Anything can be politicized, even physics. Humans, as a rule, don't care about "facts" when they conflict with personal beliefs. If the algorithm starts with "facts", you are setting up a conflict between trueFacts and goodFacts, which allows personal beliefs to corrupt the entire process. Let me propose a slightly different algorithm that takes personal belief out of the way of the pursuit for knowledge:
model -> hypothesis -> measurement -> failure of hypothesis -> revised model.
Start with a model, not some "fact." A model is just a model. As long as it is empirically adequate, it doesn't require truth with a capital "T" to be useful, so nobody has to get their knickers in a twist over those parts of the model that disgust or terrify them. That's how Galileo and Copernicus got their ideas past the Catholic Church. By insisting they were just models that were more useful to them than the Ptolemaic "truth" endorsed by Rome, they therefore posed no threat to the Church's "facts."
For what it is worth, as a mathematician, I've always chuckled at physicists who think that reality is going to be accessible via mathematics, which is a purely abstract tool. :)
I am being serious here: what rights do they have to those minerals if by some miracle this actually 'gets off the ground'? Is international law really Finders Keepers? Hard to believe. Regardless, I could see the very real scenario of them being underwritten by someone with very deep pockets (ahem-China-ahem) in exchange for exclusive use of the minerals.
Hmmm...perhaps not "Finders Keepers" per se, but possession being nine-tenths of the law, I would wager that exploiting mineral resources is the same thing on or off of the Earth. Once a claim is made on some off-planet resource, it can be challenged and it will either be successfully defended or not, just like it is here on Earth. The framework of the challenge is pretty much irrelevant -- you can use lawyers or you can use guns, but the "rights" go to the guy who can successfully defend the claim. NB: If you bring a lawyer to a gunfight, you automatically lose.
"I don't want to live on this planet any more."
That opening quote is from one of my favorite Futurama episodes. And thus well chosen.
I believe that Evolution is right, or at least as right as we can ever be.
But if someone is strong in their beliefs of... well.. however the earth and man came about. I'm not going to trounce on their rights to believe it.
But it's sad when someone tries to stifle science, in any form, because it goes against something they believe.
Don't feel sad. Like you, I think we shouldn't be trouncing on their right to deny science because science goes against what they believe. Like you, I think what people believe is important to them.
Unlike you, however, I am not going to sit back and let them trounce me because I don't happen to share their belief. I'm going to call out their irrationality whenever they invoke it. It makes me feel *a whole lot* less sad; it should make you feel less sad, too. Give it a try.
This one doesn't quite hold science to be a sacrement, but DOES hold that :
If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition. Unquestionably there must be agreement between true religion and science. If a question be found contrary to reason, faith and belief in it are impossible, and there is no outcome but wavering and vacillation.
And if a question be found contrary to faith? Like, for example, "What if I can explain the universe without reference to faith, i.e., by using only the evidence obtained by observation?" According to Bahai, then faith must be wavering and vacillating, thus denying the existence of true religion -- how can a religion be true if it is wavering and vacillating? The flaw in Bahai (as with any other religion) is the assertion that science and religion are compatible. They aren't. People of the Bahai faith can have their faith, or they can have science -- they can't have both.
How might you feel about a religion that held discovery of God's creation through science to be it's highest sacrament?
The same way I feel about *all* untestable hypotheses in general...it's religion, not science. :)
You mean Republican?
Baseball. Can you think of another sport where the defense is the team with the ball?
Hmmm..."with the ball" is relative. Only the offensive team can make points in baseball, which makes it different than most other sports that use a ball (volleyball is the only other one I can think of with this kind of point-scoring asymmetry, if you allow an equivalence between offense and "has the serve.") In baseball, the ball switches from the defensive team to the offensive team with every pitch. There are restrictions on how the ball can be handled by the defense and the offense, certainly, and they are certainly asymmetrical rules, but the offensive team definitely gets to handle the ball.
Basically, the defensive players get to use their hands to handle the ball (one of which is equipped with a device to make handling it *much* easier) and are allowed to handle it as many times as they want when the ball is in play, while only one player on the offense is allowed to handle it (with a large stick, which makes it exponentially harder to handle) and must thereafter avoid being touched by the ball if he indeed is able to handle it at all. The defensive team must give the player with the stick three chances to handle the ball. If the offensive player with the stick can handle the ball in a way that prevents the defensive players from touching him or his teammates with the ball before they can run a certain distance (360 feet in four serial 90-foot segments) the offensive team scores a point. When the defensive team manages to touch any of the offensive team with the ball before they have traversed the fourth 90-foot segment, or prevents the offensive team from handling the ball, in any combination of touches or preventions totaling three, the teams switch offensive and defensive roles, and after nine such role switches, the points are tallied and a winner is determined.
Certainly, the odds are stacked against the offensive team, but since they are the only ones that can accumulate the points required for victory, this shouldn't be surprising. At most only four offensive players (one per 90-foot segment) can be on the field at any given time, only one of whom (at the start of the first 90-foot segment) can touch the ball at all, and only once at that, with said large stick. The defense has nine players on the field at all times with absolutely no restrictions on who can touch the ball. As you can see, even though the defense definitely has more and easier opportunities to handle the ball than the offense, the defense is not exclusively the "team with the ball" by any means.
I'm not sure that the implied distinction between a human with an internet connection and a violent impulse, and a lethal device controlled by said human via an internet connection, is a valid one. Violent criminals can and do use the net to stalk their victims, acquire weapons, and research successful strategies to commit their crimes. Humans are still in the loop whether they are pulling the trigger while standing next to the victim, or while they are sitting in their mom's basement. IMHO, changing the location of the human in the loop is, at best, a distinction without merit.
[snip] Yo, peoples: It belonged to Prodigy, not to you. Slashdot belongs to faceless corporate masters and used to belong to Rob Malda. If you don't like it, you can always do the Rusty Foster thing and start Kuro5hin or some such. Otherwise, it's not yours. And those little Facebook games aren't yours. They never have been. If the evil corps want to shut them down, too bad. They're proprietary and/or copyrighted stuff the owners can do with as they wish no matter how evil you think they're being. [snip]
Well, your premise that a corporate product or service is exempt from consequences because it is not proprietary (your word) to the people who use it is demonstrably false, so your conclusion that consumers of those products have no recourse is also false. You are using a caveat emptor (let the buyer beware!) defense that didn't work for (among many, many others) the tobacco and pornography industries. What *is* proprietary to those Zynga consumers is the consequences of the use of Zynga's product. The idea that a producer of a good or service is responsible for the consequences of that product or service is part of caveat venditor, (let the seller beware!) a legal theory that was created almost a century ago (see: MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co.), which pretty much established (for the purposes of US Tort law, anyway) that the producers of products and services are liable for the consequences of the use of their product or services. If it can be established that Zynga knew, or should have known, that termination of their product or service could harm the consumer, then Zynga is liable for those damages.
Seriously, dude -- if McD's can be held liable to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars for serving a cup of hot coffee which a consumer spilled on herself, why can't Zynga be held liable for the pain suffered by their game-addicted customers when Zynga pulls the plug?
The military aren't the only ones that could really benefit from this technology. I ride motorcycles for fun and profit, and I can assure you having gear, engine, and lap data displayed in my visor is pretty awesome. Adding location/terrain data in real time would be nirvana. If google can do it as well as or better than the existing offerings, and I'm fairly certain they can, then I can look forward to becoming a faster, safer rider with more (read: economically viable) commercial options for my HUD. I'm working with a friend who is passionate about aerial photography to hack together a way to stream video data from a gopro mounted on a quadcopter right to my visor so I can "see" over hills and around blind turns when I'm taking a ride on my favorite winding mountain road. Streaming it to a Nexus 10 bungeed to my tank works pretty good right now, even with the 2 second video lag that plagues the preview mode on the gopro app, but I'd *love* to be able to see the same data without having to take my eye off the road to glance down. As it is, being able to see that sheriff's deputy lurking in hull-defilade beyond the next rise five seconds before his lidar can see me is *priceless.* If google can help make that happen, more power to them. I think every snowmobiler, skier, kayaker, and off-road enthusiast would be a very likely target for this technology.
Stupidity is the only sin in nature. Judgment is swift; the punishment, harsh. And there is no appeal...you live and you learn, or you don't live long.
-Robert A. Heinlein, via Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love
This quote is more than just one SF author's take on the process of natural selection. It applies to *anything* humans do where failure is an option. Torvalds passed judgment -- swift and harsh -- and because Linux is *his* the authority to render that judgment as swiftly and as harshly as he did is his, as well. Stupidity needs to be called out whenever it occurs, period. The alternative is the cessation of progress toward whatever goal you are striving for, be it a stable community, a stable civilization, or indeed, a stable operating system.
Get rid of copyright. Get rid of the notion of applying property rights to non-scarce goods. Any system of property rights (capitalism, communism, etc.) is designed with scarcity in mind.
Well, property rights != copyrights, so your attempt to conflate the two renders your assertion somewhat problematic, but I think you are headed in the right direction. Copyright preserves value by artificially preserving scarcity, but it can only work in a system where scarcity is *allowed* to create value. Under communism, products have their value assigned to them by the State -- scarcity is not necessarily a factor, so copyright isn't necessarily needed to preserve it. Ditto socialism. Under capitalism, however, products have their value dictated by a free market, where scarcity is a significant driver. As long as scarcity is a driver of value, copyright in some form or another has to be available to guarantee scarcity. If you want to be free of copyright, you have to be free of capitalism, or at least the free market-driven kind worshipped in the US.
uh...off-topic, I know, but seriously...you type in a raid? Ever hear of Ventrilo?
...all your space are belong to us?
...indeed. Excellent post. I would supplement it by adding that the only reason that marijuana dealers are of any interest to the Feds at all is the reference to marijuana in Schedule One of the Controlled Substances Act, passed by Congress in 1970. The CSA is the sole source of the authority for the Feds to override local laws when it comes to marijuana use. Removing marijuana from Schedule One of the CSA would remove the conflict between federal and state authorities over the decriminalization of marijuana.
I wonder how Delta, a Georgia based company can be subject to California law with respect to online privacy? What about Los Angeles law? Are they subject to that too?
Does Slashdot have to worry about their website complying with Fresno law?
The whole thing just seems a little bit odd. Like when the US goes after foreign-based online gambling companies.
Well, yes, in short, they do. Jurisdiction is co-terminal with the threat. If you find this "odd", I recommend that you run, not walk, to the nearest legal library and read up a bit. Start with the section on international law...
...the cost to the user is reduced privacy. Instead of giving money to Google, you give a little bit of yourself. Google is primarily a data mining company -- they profit from the data they gather from watching the way you use their products and services by selling it to other people who are interested in knowing how you use those products and services. NB: They also have entered the appliance market with the Nexus brand, and are taking on other appliance makers like Apple. There are two reasons I can think of that explain why Google is deprecating Calendar and Sync. It could be because they've decided that mining that particular data field is no longer profitable for them, or it could be they are interested in competing more directly in the appliance market by reducing interoperability with competitor's devices. Either way, it will be interesting to see where Google shifts resources that were until now dedicated to mining Sync and Calendar data, and to see what the market does to fill the opening left by this shift.
In America, how do you stop somebody from committing mass murder with a gun?
Can you do it with legislation outlawing guns? Presently, the answer is a resounding NO. You can't just pass a law taking guns away, because the right for a US citizen to bear arms is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. I think efforts to pass such legislation are a waste of energy because they will never clear the constitutional hurdle.
So, how about changing the Constitution? Well, there are two ways to do that. Get two-thirds, or 34 of the 50 individual State legislatures to request that Congress assemble a national constitutional convention to rescind the second Amendment. Failing that, get Congress itself to assemble a constitutional convention by getting two-thirds of sitting members of both the Senate and House to agree, but then you have to get three-fourths, or 38 of the 50 State legislatures to ratify it. The Founding fathers wanted it to be hard for the constitution to be changed on a whim by popular opinion -- that's the 2/3 part of the requirement for the State-initiated constitutional convention. And they wanted it even harder for the federal government to change it -- that's why a constitutional convention initiated by the US Congress requires 3/4, not 2/3, of the fifty State legislatures to ratify it. I seriously doubt the ability of any movement to accomplish those kinds of majorities in both the Congress and the State legislatures. Fwiw, the former method has been unsuccessfully tried twice, the last being with the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies. I'd have to say changing the Constitution gets a pretty resounding NO, as well.
So what's left? This may sound a bit like a certain modest proposal from Johnathan Swift, but I deliberately quoted everybody's favorite SF author in the subject because his pragmatic observations on an armed citizenry formed the basis for what I think may be (the only) possible solution to the problem of random citizens killing eighteen grade-school kids with guns they can legally obtain.
...content providers and the advertisers they partner with are not idiots. They will realize that trying to to legally force ad blockers off the net is not going to happen, no matter how much money they throw at it -- as long as every packet is treated the same way, ads can and will be filtered and their content pirated. They learned their lessons from the recording and motion picture industry, who lost control of their distribution channel thanks to recording and networking technologies. What they will do is take control of the pipe that is carrying the content, so that they can control the distribution channel from end to end, the salient lesson to be learned from the recording and motion picture failures to adapt their business model to the internet. The internet backbone providers want this, so they already have a major ally in making that happen. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, network neutrality will be lost, and the internet will become very much a walled garden for the vast majority of our species, which is terribly, terribly sad.
It is OK to mock Christians, and anyone else who believes in things they cannot prove.
Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that Gödel's First Incompleteness theorem proved that there exist true statements that may never be proven. So that suggests a question: Do you disbelieve true things, or is it OK to mock you?
~Loyal
Uh, epic fail. Godel's theories on undecidable propositions only hold within the formal systems within which they are created. There exist perfectly valid ways to decide these kinds of propositions outside the formal system. Godel's method of proof of the Incompleteness Theorem itself should have been enough to establish that for you. So that suggests a question for you: Do you actually understand why what you are asserting is false, or is it OK to mock you for your ignorance?