"it takes half an hour for the light to travel from Mars "
I don't think this is right. When Mars was in opposition to earth, it was just three light minutes away. I think now it is about 10 or 11 light minutes distant.
OK, I am with you on GM food and irradiated food, but growth hormone? CJD is a fatal disease.
As for pasteurisation, people should surely have the choice whether they want to be able to eat cheese made from pasteurised milk or not.
"It isn't like there is no reason for it".
Perhaps there are good reasons to pasteurise, but you ever tried cheese made from raw milk? These cheeses taste better and when it comes down to it, if I wanna take a risk, surely it is up to me to decide.
A friend of mine bought a TV recently. They can shove a USB stick into the bottom of it and play movies they download from the internet directly. They don't need a DVD or a player. How far away is it until thumb drives can store enough information to effectively play a movie that with all the data included in an entire HD-DVD or Blue-Ray disk?
Will all players as we know them be redundant in a few years?
No matter how good the encryption, you can always scrape a recording of the data and convert it to another format. If they can't stop the downloads, they can't stop the piracy.
It is also true that Apple owns Apple. I find it pretty ridiculous that the world has lost a fruit to the corporate world, and that a place that sells apples, could find themselves sued if they have this fact in their business name.
Does anyone else find it ridiculous that a company, whether it be Google or someone else, thinks they can basically own the rights to a letter in the alphabet. What next, my friend George will get sued and must henceforth be known only as Eorge?
I realise that the case was against "G-Mail" which does bear a similarity to "Gmail" but I see this as the thin end of the wedge. If they didn't want this sort of problem they should have thought more about their name originally.
A lawyer told me once that an application by Nike to register "Air" as a trademark was rejected on the basis that no company could own the rights to one of the four ancient elements. I don't see much difference to owning one of the letters of the alphabet.
I remember reading that penicillin is toxic to guinea pigs, so if that had been tested on them instead of mice, it would probably have never been released.
You may be aware that the UK leads the world with a billion CCTV cameras on every street corner.
Wow, that is a lot of cameras on every corner.
On a more serious note, you ask what the problem is, consider this. Imagine a man has just been released from prison after murdering someone. A CCTV camera takes a snap of him walking down the street in the vicinity of another killing, the night he is released from prison. Is this man going to be treated the same as anyone else who walked down the street?
I bet anything you like that police will target him like bees to honey. He will be harassed, cajoled, and made to prove his innocence.
CCTV has some good uses, and by and large they don't bother me, but I worry about images from them being taken out of context. Just to hedge my bets entirely though, when I was in London I felt safer because of the cameras.
Genocide and slavery already existed in every place on the globe and was delivered to America before the USA was even founded. It was America that was able to end these things in its short life span.
Could you please explain which part of Western Europe delivered genocide and slavery to America? You may be interested to know that America was just about the last Western nation on earth where you could legally buy and sell human beings. Slavery by the English in the British West Indies was banned in 1833. Slavery wasn't abolished in the United States until 1865!
and become THE keystone of the free world. This is just propoganda. Look at the facts, not the slogans. The most free countries, in terms of civil and human rights are undoubtedly the Scandanavian countries. They have the most open media, the best education, the lowest povery etc.
In the United States you are free to say pretty much anything, but you aren't given the freedom of dual citizenship. For the overwhelming majority of people in big cities you don't have the freedom to walk wherever you like without fear of getting mugged. You don't have the freedom to copy your own CDs either.
Only a real creep could hate the US and your seething nature revelas your a failure in life. And of course only a real sycophant would unquestioningly accept every piece of government-inspired drivel they are fed. Try opening your eyes and looking at things independently.
"The only democracy to invade another democracy". I had never heard this before, and it threw me a bit, as I tried to recall a democracy invading another democracy.
Germany versus France in World War II would probably be one example (although how true the democracy that brought Hitler to power is could be questionable). Britain versus Argentina in the Falklands war could be another, although Argentina was never really truly democratic either.
The US invaded Haiti twice, in 1915 and 1994. I think Haiti was nominally democratic on both occasions, but I don't really know enough about Haiti to be sure.
A quick Google search was no real help. Can anyone tell me if dcam is right. It just seems so unlikely, but it could be true.
What he did was clearly plagiarism of the worst kind. No-one in their right mind would try to defend taking another person's work and claiming it so blatantly to be their own. Of course, I have seen the odd designer stealing code from other websites and it seems to pass without comment... Is their a difference in taking someone's art without attribution and taking code that creates art without attribution?
Believe it or not the world still takes more into consideration than just prices. If it didn't we could have been purchasing cheap oil from Iraq for the past decade. Sometimes you gotta look past the prices to what is in the public's best interest. In the USA for example you have laws that limit foreign investment in some sectors.
China probably makes nuclear weapons a lot more cheaply than the United States, but you aren't purchasing them there.
When it comes to a single conglomerate controlling vast amounts of information about a large portion of the world's population, I think it is safe to say prices won't be a factor that will ameliorate concerns.
My thoughts are that consumers SHOULD be aware of what they are eating, and they should be able to choose what to eat themselves. It may be that while not worried about the health impact of cloned meat, a consumer may have ethical concerns about scientists tinkering to produce cloned animals.
What I want to know though, is what happens to the offspring of cloned animals? Is their meat also labelled? If the offspring were the result of a pairing of two cloned animals, then presumably they also have cloned genes floating through their bodies. If the parents are unhealthy, then presumably the offspring are too.
What about the pairing of a cloned animal with an uncloned one? What do you do about their offspring? If an animals is just 1/4 or 1/8 or 1/256th cloned, does it still get a warning?
I am not sure whether you are correct or not. I did a quick Google search and couldn't find anything official that says whether American Samoans pay US income tax. Even if they are paying all the other taxes you mention, surely they should be able to get a vote.
It is taxation without representation in my opinion and that is why the founders of this country took up arms and fought back
. I am not sure if that is why founders of your country ever took up arms and fought back, but if that was the case, I look forward to you joining the war on behalf of the people in American Samoa who have been paying taxes for decades, but don't get a vote on who should be president, despite the POTUS being their head of state and drafting them into the Vietnam war.
"Considering California actually has a higher population than Australia (estimated 36 million in 2005 vs. estimated 20 million in 2006), the California ban, if adopted, would actually have a greater effect."
Surely the effect would have more to do with who has the most lightbulbs? I am yet to see any stats on this.
On the issue of the effect though, if you are talking about the effect on the environment, then you would also have to look at where the energy originates from.
California currently uses quite a bit of renewable power, while Australia's power is overwhelmingly generated from coal plants. Given California appears to have a higher use of renewable sources, Australians giving up inefficient lightbulbs could still have a greater positive impact on the environment.
I read recently that in the UK some artists who cater mainly for older clientelle were making it into the charts. The reason being that their aged fans did not know how to download their songs. Other more web-savvy younger users were downloading so many songs from their favourite artists that they no longer needed to by their albums, so the artists who were actually popular just didn't make the charts anymore.
This move to include download sales is not just a natural progression to indicate popularity of artists, but a commercial necessity for the music companies. How can they promote a platinum-selling artist who has only really sold a handful of albums?
Of course, if they really want to gauge the popularity of artists, they could also start to look at how many people are searching for their music at BitTorrent sites or on Limewire. Eventually this will also have to go into the mix if they want an accurate gauge of what people want to listen to.
What I worry about is a working hack that allows people to insert a different photograph into the information on the chip. There is not border guard in the world who will reject a passport if his electronic scanner shows the photo of the person standing in front of him.
In the "old days" a passport could have had a new photo glued over the top. These could be spotted and rejected. Any new hacks that had a glued-over photo that corresponded with the pic in the RFID chip, would be far less likely to be picked-up. Guards would believe it, because the technology would convince them the passport was genuine.
In any case, we may get to the situation where nobody would look anyway. I came through the gates of Melbourne Airport in Australia a few days ago with my ePassport. I was told by a border guard that soon I would be able to "check myself in" using the passport, without needing to see a border guard.
Often the animals are chosen becaue their systems are very like ours, other times, animals that should have systems like ours have surprising differences. Guinea Pigs and hamsters for instance, find penicillin toxic. Lets be glad this drug was never tested on them before it was injected into people.
I don't know if Slashdotters are ready to have Australia's own Andrew Bolt inflicted on them. Bolt is an ultra-conservative commentator for Australia's most right-wing tabloid, the Herald Sun, and has very strong views that climate change is so much hot air (pun intended).
Just so that people can't say he is being stifled, here is one of his numerous articles on climate change.
I throw him into the mix because, as much as I disagree with him and hate almost everything he writes, he does present his arguments coherently.
In Australia though it is worth noting that far from repressing the climate skeptics, we usually here that the debate has been hijacked in their favour. ie While nearly all climatoligists agree global warming is happening, the news appears to show it is tightly fought debate.
I want to echo the comments of those who say that to have a watered-down version just so people can have access to something is ridiculous. It is an admission of defeat. It is an acknowledgement that the censors have been able to defeat not just their own people learning things, but others as well.
The way to defeat state censorship of this kind I think involves getting as much information as possible out there. If they want to ban access to it, let them. Web-savvy Chinese will find a way to get to it. The word will spread. The truth is more persistent and resilient than cockroaches. Once it gets out it is difficult to stop.
I sure would hate to think the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or "June 4th Incident" as it is known in China, will go down in history with a Chinese-govt spin on it.
Already the English version of wikipedia calls it the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. I wonder what they call it on the Chinese version? Tianenmen Square - nothing happened, don't ask perhaps?
I doubt a whitelist would work for a company that may get hundreds, or thousands of calls each day. As I see it the whole idea of this service is that you can attract new customers by letting them contact a company after they have searched for something at Google, not to offer a way for existing customers to phone.
I think it could be a really valuable service. I know if I see something I want to buy very often I think it would be great to contact the company and ask questions, but I can't be bothered making a long distance call to get more info. This could actually be quite handy. I just hope the probs with false callbacks is addressed.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this is right. When Mars was in opposition to earth, it was just three light minutes away. I think now it is about 10 or 11 light minutes distant.
As for pasteurisation, people should surely have the choice whether they want to be able to eat cheese made from pasteurised milk or not.
"It isn't like there is no reason for it".
Perhaps there are good reasons to pasteurise, but you ever tried cheese made from raw milk? These cheeses taste better and when it comes down to it, if I wanna take a risk, surely it is up to me to decide.
A friend of mine bought a TV recently. They can shove a USB stick into the bottom of it and play movies they download from the internet directly. They don't need a DVD or a player. How far away is it until thumb drives can store enough information to effectively play a movie that with all the data included in an entire HD-DVD or Blue-Ray disk?
Will all players as we know them be redundant in a few years?
No matter how good the encryption, you can always scrape a recording of the data and convert it to another format. If they can't stop the downloads, they can't stop the piracy.
I think you will find that McDonalds has pursued several high-profile lawsuits against companies who dare to put the prefix "Mc" on their name.
It is also true that Apple owns Apple. I find it pretty ridiculous that the world has lost a fruit to the corporate world, and that a place that sells apples, could find themselves sued if they have this fact in their business name.
Does anyone else find it ridiculous that a company, whether it be Google or someone else, thinks they can basically own the rights to a letter in the alphabet. What next, my friend George will get sued and must henceforth be known only as Eorge?
I realise that the case was against "G-Mail" which does bear a similarity to "Gmail" but I see this as the thin end of the wedge. If they didn't want this sort of problem they should have thought more about their name originally.
A lawyer told me once that an application by Nike to register "Air" as a trademark was rejected on the basis that no company could own the rights to one of the four ancient elements. I don't see much difference to owning one of the letters of the alphabet.
I would be more like to think that it proves that on the internet, any two-bit study of a few dozen people is given significance it doesn't deserve.
I remember reading that penicillin is toxic to guinea pigs, so if that had been tested on them instead of mice, it would probably have never been released.
The new mnemonic avoiding Plute and Eros, which aren't really planets, just for Slashdotters:
Many Veteran E-users May Joke Slashdot Upsets Nerds
Wow, that is a lot of cameras on every corner.
On a more serious note, you ask what the problem is, consider this. Imagine a man has just been released from prison after murdering someone. A CCTV camera takes a snap of him walking down the street in the vicinity of another killing, the night he is released from prison. Is this man going to be treated the same as anyone else who walked down the street?
I bet anything you like that police will target him like bees to honey. He will be harassed, cajoled, and made to prove his innocence.
CCTV has some good uses, and by and large they don't bother me, but I worry about images from them being taken out of context. Just to hedge my bets entirely though, when I was in London I felt safer because of the cameras.
Genocide and slavery already existed in every place on the globe and was delivered to America before the USA was even founded. It was America that was able to end these things in its short life span.
Could you please explain which part of Western Europe delivered genocide and slavery to America? You may be interested to know that America was just about the last Western nation on earth where you could legally buy and sell human beings. Slavery by the English in the British West Indies was banned in 1833. Slavery wasn't abolished in the United States until 1865!
and become THE keystone of the free world.
This is just propoganda. Look at the facts, not the slogans. The most free countries, in terms of civil and human rights are undoubtedly the Scandanavian countries. They have the most open media, the best education, the lowest povery etc.
In the United States you are free to say pretty much anything, but you aren't given the freedom of dual citizenship. For the overwhelming majority of people in big cities you don't have the freedom to walk wherever you like without fear of getting mugged. You don't have the freedom to copy your own CDs either.
Only a real creep could hate the US and your seething nature revelas your a failure in life.
And of course only a real sycophant would unquestioningly accept every piece of government-inspired drivel they are fed. Try opening your eyes and looking at things independently.
"The only democracy to invade another democracy". I had never heard this before, and it threw me a bit, as I tried to recall a democracy invading another democracy.
Germany versus France in World War II would probably be one example (although how true the democracy that brought Hitler to power is could be questionable). Britain versus Argentina in the Falklands war could be another, although Argentina was never really truly democratic either.
The US invaded Haiti twice, in 1915 and 1994. I think Haiti was nominally democratic on both occasions, but I don't really know enough about Haiti to be sure.
A quick Google search was no real help. Can anyone tell me if dcam is right. It just seems so unlikely, but it could be true.
What he did was clearly plagiarism of the worst kind. No-one in their right mind would try to defend taking another person's work and claiming it so blatantly to be their own. Of course, I have seen the odd designer stealing code from other websites and it seems to pass without comment... Is their a difference in taking someone's art without attribution and taking code that creates art without attribution?
Believe it or not the world still takes more into consideration than just prices. If it didn't we could have been purchasing cheap oil from Iraq for the past decade. Sometimes you gotta look past the prices to what is in the public's best interest. In the USA for example you have laws that limit foreign investment in some sectors.
China probably makes nuclear weapons a lot more cheaply than the United States, but you aren't purchasing them there.
When it comes to a single conglomerate controlling vast amounts of information about a large portion of the world's population, I think it is safe to say prices won't be a factor that will ameliorate concerns.
My thoughts are that consumers SHOULD be aware of what they are eating, and they should be able to choose what to eat themselves. It may be that while not worried about the health impact of cloned meat, a consumer may have ethical concerns about scientists tinkering to produce cloned animals.
What I want to know though, is what happens to the offspring of cloned animals? Is their meat also labelled? If the offspring were the result of a pairing of two cloned animals, then presumably they also have cloned genes floating through their bodies. If the parents are unhealthy, then presumably the offspring are too.
What about the pairing of a cloned animal with an uncloned one? What do you do about their offspring?
If an animals is just 1/4 or 1/8 or 1/256th cloned, does it still get a warning?
I am not sure whether you are correct or not. I did a quick Google search and couldn't find anything official that says whether American Samoans pay US income tax. Even if they are paying all the other taxes you mention, surely they should be able to get a vote.
. I am not sure if that is why founders of your country ever took up arms and fought back, but if that was the case, I look forward to you joining the war on behalf of the people in American Samoa who have been paying taxes for decades, but don't get a vote on who should be president, despite the POTUS being their head of state and drafting them into the Vietnam war.
Surely the effect would have more to do with who has the most lightbulbs? I am yet to see any stats on this.
On the issue of the effect though, if you are talking about the effect on the environment, then you would also have to look at where the energy originates from.
California currently uses quite a bit of renewable power, while Australia's power is overwhelmingly generated from coal plants. Given California appears to have a higher use of renewable sources, Australians giving up inefficient lightbulbs could still have a greater positive impact on the environment.
I read recently that in the UK some artists who cater mainly for older clientelle were making it into the charts. The reason being that their aged fans did not know how to download their songs. Other more web-savvy younger users were downloading so many songs from their favourite artists that they no longer needed to by their albums, so the artists who were actually popular just didn't make the charts anymore.
This move to include download sales is not just a natural progression to indicate popularity of artists, but a commercial necessity for the music companies. How can they promote a platinum-selling artist who has only really sold a handful of albums?
Of course, if they really want to gauge the popularity of artists, they could also start to look at how many people are searching for their music at BitTorrent sites or on Limewire. Eventually this will also have to go into the mix if they want an accurate gauge of what people want to listen to.
What I worry about is a working hack that allows people to insert a different photograph into the information on the chip. There is not border guard in the world who will reject a passport if his electronic scanner shows the photo of the person standing in front of him.
In the "old days" a passport could have had a new photo glued over the top. These could be spotted and rejected. Any new hacks that had a glued-over photo that corresponded with the pic in the RFID chip, would be far less likely to be picked-up. Guards would believe it, because the technology would convince them the passport was genuine.
In any case, we may get to the situation where nobody would look anyway. I came through the gates of Melbourne Airport in Australia a few days ago with my ePassport. I was told by a border guard that soon I would be able to "check myself in" using the passport, without needing to see a border guard.
Often the animals are chosen becaue their systems are very like ours, other times, animals that should have systems like ours have surprising differences. Guinea Pigs and hamsters for instance, find penicillin toxic. Lets be glad this drug was never tested on them before it was injected into people.
Rather than just the abstract here is the full article text.
Just so that people can't say he is being stifled, here is one of his numerous articles on climate change.
I throw him into the mix because, as much as I disagree with him and hate almost everything he writes, he does present his arguments coherently.
In Australia though it is worth noting that far from repressing the climate skeptics, we usually here that the debate has been hijacked in their favour. ie While nearly all climatoligists agree global warming is happening, the news appears to show it is tightly fought debate.
The way to defeat state censorship of this kind I think involves getting as much information as possible out there. If they want to ban access to it, let them. Web-savvy Chinese will find a way to get to it. The word will spread. The truth is more persistent and resilient than cockroaches. Once it gets out it is difficult to stop.
I sure would hate to think the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or "June 4th Incident" as it is known in China, will go down in history with a Chinese-govt spin on it.
Already the English version of wikipedia calls it the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. I wonder what they call it on the Chinese version? Tianenmen Square - nothing happened, don't ask perhaps?I doubt a whitelist would work for a company that may get hundreds, or thousands of calls each day. As I see it the whole idea of this service is that you can attract new customers by letting them contact a company after they have searched for something at Google, not to offer a way for existing customers to phone.
I think it could be a really valuable service. I know if I see something I want to buy very often I think it would be great to contact the company and ask questions, but I can't be bothered making a long distance call to get more info. This could actually be quite handy. I just hope the probs with false callbacks is addressed.