I think it would have been nice if the Journalist BW had put a disclaimer on his Rolling Stones articles *as a courtesy* to prevent confusion, but no way in the world should he be forced to do so through threat of legal sanction. He has a greater claim to the name, in some ways.
Conversely, it would be equally nice that should Musician BW decide to write anything, he specify he is not the Journalist BW.
People overlook these things so often, by just leaping straight to legal threats and litigation. Had Musician BW (or his agent) just written a friendly letter to Journalist BW, asking him to consider qualifying his Rolling Stones articles as a courtesy, I'm sure it would have been readily agreed to. But no, people with lawyers always have to leap to the 'cease and desist'.
By way of example, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once received a polite letter from an American writer of the same name, asking very nicely if PM Churchill could qualify his byline (PM Churchill was also a published author of some note) to make clear the difference between the two. PM Churchill instantly agreed (in a quite amusing reply letter) to always include his middle intial when publishing texts in the U.S. Both sides were satisfied, quickly and without lawyers, by using a bit of civility and commonsense.
Doesn't seem to be as much of that about thesedays.
On a daily basis, I carry my Victorinox Cybertool (wanky name, but very useful tool, perfectly designed with nerds in mind; only thing it's missing that I'd like in a pocketknife is a saw), and a small pill container with some breath mints, painkillers and antihistamines. After that just the general stuff like a handkerchief, watch, change, mobile phone, notepad and a biro (even though the pocketknife has a small biro for emergencies).
I eventually got a belt pouch for the pocketknife because it is quite large and heavy, and was just *ruining* the cut of my cargo pants.:)
Other than that, everything I now keep in my pockets is of a comfortable weight, and I rarely seem to need anything extra.
Saturday? Doesn't that discriminate against practicing Jews (and people who work on Saturday)?
Certainly it does, but every day of the week is a holy day for someone, but on balance I think Saturdays are a whole lot fairer than Tuesdays. Australia also doesn't have anything like the Jewish population that the US has.
In any case, employers here are required to give their employees time to go vote, if they cannot do so outside of business hours.
[sarcasm]And knowing the powerful industrial laws the US has to protect workers, I'm sure all employers happily honour that, and no employee fears workplace reprisal for taking time off of work to vote.[/sarcasm]
Even so, if voting was held on a Saturday (or a Sunday), it would certainly mean that a far smaller proportion of the population would have to seek special leave in order to partake in democracy. Everything you've said only further convinces me, sadly, that having election day on a Tuesday, coupled with other niggling obstacles (the weather, the voluntary vote) is mainly intended to discourage people from voting, not encourage it.
I've got to know: Whose frickin stupid idea was it to have US elections held on a TUESDAY, that isn't even a public holiday for the purpose?
I mean, surely it MUST be realised that the people who are going to avoid voting are those that cannot afford take the time off of work to vote, on what is likely to be a pretty cold day. Essentially, having Election Day on what is an ordinary work day in the chill of November is invariably going to be a HUGE disincentive for the 'lower orders' to participate. It just seems so blatantly intended to discriminate that it just boggles the mind.
Here in Australia, we ALWAYS have elections on Saturdays, leaving virtually no good reason for not being able to turn up to vote, even if we didn't have compulsory voting. It's practical, and accomodates most everyone. Very few people have to get special time off to vote, since the booths are open from about 7 in the morning until 6 at night.
Oh yeah -- here, we put NUMBERS in the boxes (proportional voting rather than first-past-the-post), count the votes BY HAND, and can still have a reliable election result the same night. Stick that in your corn-cob pipes and smoke it.;)
Hmmmm - AIM supports ICQ, and iChat supports AOL users...
I wonder if iChat will go on to support ICQ in its next version?
I ask this because frankly, I'l be buggered if I going to pay Apple AU$200 for a.Mac account, just to use their funky instant messenger. I'd love to be able to use iChat, and it seems like there's not a reason in the world I can't, other than Apple wants to leverage the free software to get people to sign up for their less-than-fabulous online service.
Is it so hard? Is it so hard to have just one IM app that will interact seamlessly with every service?
I always used to like the old story about how the NASA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get a ballpoint pen to work in space, and the Russians got around the problem by just using pencils.
The Russians have always been pretty good at doing more with less, but I guess there comes a point when you can only do less with less.
See what happens when you commit yourself to a proprietary solution to a problem, and then run out of money? What we need is some Open Source spacecraft...;)
I don't care what anyone says - the actor playing Arthur Dent must be British. Like Doctor Who, there is a fundamental britishness to the character that is difficult to mimic effectively for anyone non-British (and I say this as an Australian). I think someone else in this thread suggested Alan Cumming, who I think would be a first-class choice. They did the right thing insisting on British actors for Harry Potter, and I think they should do that here too, at least for this character.
Ford Prefect - David Dixon, who played Ford in the TV series, was spot on - that slight alien-ness to the features. This was actually one of the reasons why the director of the the TV series didn't use Geoffrey McGivern (who played Ford in the radio series) for the role on TV, because McGivern looked "too ordinary". Dixon is too old now, unfortunately. If he or David Bowie were 20 years younger, they'd be a great choice.
Zaphod Beeblebrox - An American could easily play this role, since the character is so clearly intended to be a caricature of the American psyche anyway - unbelievably brash, loud, whim-driven, egocentric and vulgar. Find an American actor with a good sense of irony and self-deprecation, and you've got a winner. Michael Keaton might be good. - he did play Batman, after all.:)
I'm of two minds (no pun intended) about the whole 2-heads-3-arms thing; it was originally written as a throwaway line in the radio play, but when it came to TV, the director decided it had to be implemeted, with questionable results. It could probably be done more easily and better now with CG. We kind of expect it now because of the TV series, but I often wonder how much it actually brings to the story.
And Ian McKellen would be great for Slartibartfast - you'll need a really talented actor to pull off the wonderful weary distractedness that Richard Vernon (may he RIP) played him with.
And maybe Michael Palin for The Book.
The changing culture of the public service...
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 1
This sort of thing has been insidiously increasing in recent years, all over the public service (and these science committees fall into that category I think). There've been a number of political discussions in the media about it over here.
It used to be that senior public servants here in Australia would more or less have tenure, and maintain there positions regardless of what party was in office; their long-term expertise in running their particular department or committee was held to be of greater value than their own personal political views. they were, for practical purposes, politically neutral.
Over the last 20 years or so though, there has been an increasing trend toward making political appointments to cronies of the party in goverment. When the party changes, the whole upper level of the public service gets purged, to be replaced by another crop of short-term political appointees. The problems of this should be obvious, since there is no medium to long term continuity in how things are run.
I cannot help but think that the we were better off the old way.
I would spend time making toys. Not just wooden toys, but learn how to vacuum cast resin as well, just to make things interesting. Maybe learn some electronics for them too. I think I could have a lifetime of fun just making all sorts of toys, vehicles, action figures, plushies, you name it, out of all sorts of things.
And after a long, tiring but satisfying day in my workshop, I would sit on my porch and play my banjo. I need to practice more anyway.:)
I want to see PERSONAL responsibility brought back into the justice system. If a high-level manager makes a decision that amounts to committing a crime, don't drag the company to court - drag HIM to court. If people knew that the things they do at work are things they will be held responsible for, they'd be a lot less willing to do things they know are wrong.
That's all well and good, but there are some important qualifiers you've neglected. What if the company benefits from an illegal action from one of it's employees? Surely they can't just hand over the errant worker, wash their hands, and lets the profits from that illegal action continue to flow? The company must be held accountable for the actions of it's employees, especially when the company has benefitted from those actions. This doesn't negate the idea of punishing criminal employees as well, of course.
Secondly, I think that limited liability within the corporate system should be scrapped; this is an issue of personal responsibility too. If you're a shareholder of a corporation, and that corporation bilks it's employees out of their entitlements the day after paying its execs massive unjustified bonuses (as has happened in the US with Enron et al, and in Australia with One.Tel and HIH), then whatever money is owed should be stripped from the people running the company first, then whatever else is required should be stripped from the shareholders. The fact that they had less say over the everyday running of the corporation should be taken into account of course, but people need to stop treating share ownership as just a big cash cow, and take some serious responsibility for their investment decisions. They provided the money for these companies to do their dirty work.
All of this comes to bear on Adobe et al, who live in a world where the risks they seem happy to take with the money and work of others is great, but accept responsibilities few.
I don't know of any scientific double-blind studies, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to be found. Again, this whole issue hinges on whether or not anecdotal evidence in and of itself is proof that something works. You claim it isn't; I claim it is. It's a circular argument neither of us will win.
I don't know about that. Plenty of people believe wholeheartedly that praying to their God of choice has cured them of disease, and will testify to that fact, even when those people come from different and mutually incompatible faiths. Since they cannot all be right, it does throw some doubt on the validity of their own interpretations of their personal experiences. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is very very common, and since most people don't know what it is, can't check themselves for when they're doing it.
This is why science accepts anecdotal evidence only as giving a potential direction to look in for conducting proper research, but is otherwise given very little weight.
I've read reviews of this study, and acknowledge that there has been shown that acupuncture has some very limited and short term effect on pain relief, for a limited number of people. Probably for the same reason that people often feel great when they come out of a tattoo parlour; the pain causess the body to flush with endorphins. Hardly warrants calling it a mainstream way of treating pain, especially when there are so many more effective methods.
To my mind though, showing that acupuncture has a very limited effect on pain relief does not demonstrate it's efficacy as a treatment for disease, and it is disingenuous to claim it does. There is no evidence to support the claim that acupuncture has any special effect on healing.
"A reputable medical journal"? Like the AMA's journal, in which doctors subsidized by pharmaceutical firms carry on "research" in the name of objective science?
Of course, no-one who gets paid to do something can possibly be honest.
Besides, that's why research is published; so it can be assessed and tested by others in the field, your methodology challenged, your experiments questioned. If you've been rigorous, you'll be validated. If you've been bodgy, and fudged the results for profit, odds are pretty good you'll be found out fairly sharpish. I've yet to see any rigorous testing from homeopaths and the like that hasn't been shot down in flames in very short order...
I challenge you to show me where it says the only effective demonstration of a medical treatment is to be found in medical journals.
The accepted method of providing evidence for your proposals is to publish them in a widely-read journal, so as many people as possible can assess your results, and possibly repeat your experients. Only then can the effectiveness of a treatment be rigorously tested. As I pointed out in my earleir post; just because something has been done for a long time does not mean it works. This is argumentum ad antiquitatem, and is a logical fallacy.
I notice that you still didn't provide me with any studies (from a medical journal, or other scientific journal) proving your point.
I've had friends die of cancer, horrible and lingering suffering, after being treated with cancer drugs declared "proven" by "reputable medical journals"...evidence-based medicine isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
News Flash - people sometimes die, even when mainstream medicine has done all it can. I think this is actually one of the strengths of mainstream medicine; if it's done all it can do, it will usually tell you so. Many people don't like this of course; they'd rather have false hope, and consequently fall for quack treatments in a desperate hope to stave off the inevitable. And I don't see a lot of homeopaths working for free...
You've obviously been duped into believing anything the for-profit medical industry has to say about medicine.
*sigh* Those black helicopters must be flying pretty low thesedays. This is a such a textbook, paranoid-conspiracy-theory response: "If you don't agree with me, then you've clearly been brainwashed by The Man". If you want to make an argument, then make one, but spare me the X-Files rhetoric...
I'm very willing to accept that 'alternative' therapies work, but advocates need to do the work, and prove their case. If they worked as well as you claim you do, then shouldn't they be mainstream therapies by now anyway?
Proven medical treatments, such as silver, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. (proven not by a few piddly years of research, but in most cases many decades or centuries of use)
I can't speak for silver (I've not done enough reading on this particular 'treatment'), but I can say that both acupuncture and homeopathy are NOT proven treatments, nothing even close. I challenge you to produce one paper in a reputable medical journal that demonstrates the effectiveness of these treatments.
Just because something has been done for a long time, does not mean it works. All it has to do is make people think it works, and people are pretty easy to fool. People believed in the 4 bodily humours for centuries too, and the entirety of Western medical practice was based on this premise for a long time. Eventually though, evidence-based medicine took over and properly so.
You know, I've been thinking for a while that I'd much rather see companies put more effort into making existing-sized drives smaller and cheaper, than constantly bumping the storage level up and up.
I'm a web designer, I use some pretty space hungry apps, and image files can get pretty big too, but I can't think of any reason I would need even a 100Gb hard drive. Even if I put every audio CD I owned onto the machine, plus all my software, I wouldn't use more than 15% of it.
I would much rather have an 10-20 Gb Firewire drive that I can carry easily in a coat pocket, for a reasonable price (like an iPod, but even cheaper) than a 1Tb drive in my desktop.
IBM seemed to be on the right track a while ago, with their thumbnail-sized 1 Gb drive, designed for embedded devices. Any more news on stuff like this?
I wonder though - What if I was standing at the Canadian border and shouting obscenities, or exposing my genitals, such that what I was doing could be considering Disturbing the Peace, Indecent Exposure or suchlike, and that could be perceived by someone in US territory? Could I be held liable under U.S. law for something of this kind? This case seems to me like only a higher-tech version of this scenario.
For the record, I in no way approve of what the Italian goverment has done here; it is clearly a violation of national sovereignty. But would a non-electronic/non-meatspace violation like the one I detailed above fall into the jurisdiction you describe?
The fossilised pterosaur skull belongs to one of the world's first flying vertebrates
I don't think this is accurate. The article states that the skull is only 100 million years old, and pterosaurs had been around since about 225 million years ago.
Oh boohoo - Bobby Wag-School spends his life digging ditches, and can't listen to MP3s on his iPod, therefore all other workers in other industries should feel his pain?
I can't think of the last road crew I saw that didn't have a radio blaring while they worked. If that music helps them get through the day, and god-forbid even helps them work better, then more power to them.
Why should office workers be consciously deprived of the right to listen to music (via whatever medium; the issue of space-shifting shouldn't matter) just because management drone (who can't write and chew gum at the same time) thinks that other workers can't listen to music and work at the same time?
I think the whole thing should have been taken out. Yoda is above physical combat, or at least he should be. I really love the line in the movie where Dooku says something like, "It looks like this can't be settled with the force - we'll have to use lightsabers." Uhm, isn't the force supposed to be more powerful than lightsabers? Why didn't they just play rock-paper-scissors instead? It seems like the force isn't useful for a whole lot, since the Jedi always immediatly pull out their light sabers before even trying to thrash each other mentally.
I'm increasingly inclined to believe that a good portion of lightsabre battle is profoundly psychological, especially between Jedi. It's like a form of ritualised mental and physical duelling, formed around the use of the lightsabre in conjuntion with the Force.
While superficially it just seems like crude physical combat, I suspect that it has been used as a vehicle to portray Jedi discipline as being a combination of both mental and physical discipline, indivisible (like the Bene Gesserit from Dune, ancient Japanese Samurai and more).
Yoda has been almost completely cerebral up until this point, yet could not possibly have achieved his high status without having mastered all of the relevant disciplines to the highest level. It was absolutely appropriate to the further fleshing-out of the character that he be shown exercising all of his expertise, including those skills you believe are "beneath him".
The Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stones, and the Oil Age will not end because we run out of oil.
The Stone Age ended because better ways of doing the same things were found, making the old ways uneconomical or obsolete. The same thing will happen with the Oil Age, and it's great to see a small nation like Iceland setting this agenda.
I've posted about this in previous thread on this subject, but here goes again.
Cloning this animal is a BAD IDEA, for a number of reason:
1) It gives people the idea that they don't actually have to protect exisiting endangered species - after all, if we fuck up and kill them all, we can just clone them again later, right? This kind of use of genetic technology mean that we don't have to take responsibilty for wiping things out. The thylacine should stay dead, for no other reason than as a reminder of our own foolishness.
2) Even if they do manage to clone an animal, they only have retrievable DNA of one thylacine (or at most 2 or 3, if stories about other viable preserved DNA samples turning up in museums are to be believed). Which means we are going to have a single thylacine cloned endlessly, becoming a zoo sideshow, and never reintroduced into the wild, much like animals in zoos are now. The same rhetoric would surface about animals in zoos "protecting the species", but lets be honest - no endangered zoo animal or any of its zoo-bred descendents are ever going to be reintroduced into the wild, meaning this argument is a furphy.
If we cannot produce a viable, self-sustaining population of these animals, then really, what is the point? If we can't give the animal the dignity of being a viable species, then at least give it the dignity of being a regretful memory. Being a genetic freakshow for the pleasure of humans without any hope of surviving on its own would be the worst kind of existence.
Is it so unreasonable to expect Adobe to go "Hey, the court says it's our patent, but we'll licence you the right to use it.". Who loses in that scenario? Adobe gets cash from Macromedia to cover it's development and patent costs (such as they are), and Macromedia doesn't have to completely redesign Flash to take the product of Adobe's patent out.
Adobe, will of course, most likely use this decision as leverage to hobble Flash for long enough to hock their own less-successful equivalent.
It'd be nice to see a big media corporation occasionally act in the interests of it's users rather than just what they see as the interests of their shareholders. It'd also be nice to see media companies use patent law the way it was meant to be used, rather than to oppress the market into doing things its way.
My favourite sitcom "News Radio" was always in trouble and was cancelled because the characters were too mean to each other.
I always thought it had more to do with the death of Phil Hartman. It's hard to make a show funny when you know why one of the main characters isn't there anymore. Suddenly Susan had the same problem after David Strickland killed himself.
Both shows struggled through the ensuing season each without the characters, but without enthusiasm. They may both have been on the way out anyway, of course, and were simply unable to survive those final decisive blows.
I wonder if something similar might have happened to the Simpsons had Phil Hartman played a more prominent role instead of occasional bit parts.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would have been nice if the Journalist BW had put a disclaimer on his Rolling Stones articles *as a courtesy* to prevent confusion, but no way in the world should he be forced to do so through threat of legal sanction. He has a greater claim to the name, in some ways.
Conversely, it would be equally nice that should Musician BW decide to write anything, he specify he is not the Journalist BW.
People overlook these things so often, by just leaping straight to legal threats and litigation. Had Musician BW (or his agent) just written a friendly letter to Journalist BW, asking him to consider qualifying his Rolling Stones articles as a courtesy, I'm sure it would have been readily agreed to. But no, people with lawyers always have to leap to the 'cease and desist'.
By way of example, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once received a polite letter from an American writer of the same name, asking very nicely if PM Churchill could qualify his byline (PM Churchill was also a published author of some note) to make clear the difference between the two. PM Churchill instantly agreed (in a quite amusing reply letter) to always include his middle intial when publishing texts in the U.S. Both sides were satisfied, quickly and without lawyers, by using a bit of civility and commonsense.
Doesn't seem to be as much of that about thesedays.
On a daily basis, I carry my Victorinox Cybertool (wanky name, but very useful tool, perfectly designed with nerds in mind; only thing it's missing that I'd like in a pocketknife is a saw), and a small pill container with some breath mints, painkillers and antihistamines. After that just the general stuff like a handkerchief, watch, change, mobile phone, notepad and a biro (even though the pocketknife has a small biro for emergencies).
:)
I eventually got a belt pouch for the pocketknife because it is quite large and heavy, and was just *ruining* the cut of my cargo pants.
Other than that, everything I now keep in my pockets is of a comfortable weight, and I rarely seem to need anything extra.
Saturday? Doesn't that discriminate against practicing Jews (and people who work on Saturday)?
Certainly it does, but every day of the week is a holy day for someone, but on balance I think Saturdays are a whole lot fairer than Tuesdays. Australia also doesn't have anything like the Jewish population that the US has.
In any case, employers here are required to give their employees time to go vote, if they cannot do so outside of business hours.
[sarcasm]And knowing the powerful industrial laws the US has to protect workers, I'm sure all employers happily honour that, and no employee fears workplace reprisal for taking time off of work to vote.[/sarcasm]
Even so, if voting was held on a Saturday (or a Sunday), it would certainly mean that a far smaller proportion of the population would have to seek special leave in order to partake in democracy. Everything you've said only further convinces me, sadly, that having election day on a Tuesday, coupled with other niggling obstacles (the weather, the voluntary vote) is mainly intended to discourage people from voting, not encourage it.
I've got to know: Whose frickin stupid idea was it to have US elections held on a TUESDAY, that isn't even a public holiday for the purpose?
;)
I mean, surely it MUST be realised that the people who are going to avoid voting are those that cannot afford take the time off of work to vote, on what is likely to be a pretty cold day. Essentially, having Election Day on what is an ordinary work day in the chill of November is invariably going to be a HUGE disincentive for the 'lower orders' to participate. It just seems so blatantly intended to discriminate that it just boggles the mind.
Here in Australia, we ALWAYS have elections on Saturdays, leaving virtually no good reason for not being able to turn up to vote, even if we didn't have compulsory voting. It's practical, and accomodates most everyone. Very few people have to get special time off to vote, since the booths are open from about 7 in the morning until 6 at night.
Oh yeah -- here, we put NUMBERS in the boxes (proportional voting rather than first-past-the-post), count the votes BY HAND, and can still have a reliable election result the same night. Stick that in your corn-cob pipes and smoke it.
Hmmmm - AIM supports ICQ, and iChat supports AOL users...
.Mac account, just to use their funky instant messenger. I'd love to be able to use iChat, and it seems like there's not a reason in the world I can't, other than Apple wants to leverage the free software to get people to sign up for their less-than-fabulous online service.
I wonder if iChat will go on to support ICQ in its next version?
I ask this because frankly, I'l be buggered if I going to pay Apple AU$200 for a
Is it so hard? Is it so hard to have just one IM app that will interact seamlessly with every service?
I always used to like the old story about how the NASA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get a ballpoint pen to work in space, and the Russians got around the problem by just using pencils.
;)
The Russians have always been pretty good at doing more with less, but I guess there comes a point when you can only do less with less.
See what happens when you commit yourself to a proprietary solution to a problem, and then run out of money? What we need is some Open Source spacecraft...
I don't care what anyone says - the actor playing Arthur Dent must be British. Like Doctor Who, there is a fundamental britishness to the character that is difficult to mimic effectively for anyone non-British (and I say this as an Australian). I think someone else in this thread suggested Alan Cumming, who I think would be a first-class choice. They did the right thing insisting on British actors for Harry Potter, and I think they should do that here too, at least for this character.
:)
Ford Prefect - David Dixon, who played Ford in the TV series, was spot on - that slight alien-ness to the features. This was actually one of the reasons why the director of the the TV series didn't use Geoffrey McGivern (who played Ford in the radio series) for the role on TV, because McGivern looked "too ordinary". Dixon is too old now, unfortunately. If he or David Bowie were 20 years younger, they'd be a great choice.
Zaphod Beeblebrox - An American could easily play this role, since the character is so clearly intended to be a caricature of the American psyche anyway - unbelievably brash, loud, whim-driven, egocentric and vulgar. Find an American actor with a good sense of irony and self-deprecation, and you've got a winner. Michael Keaton might be good. - he did play Batman, after all.
I'm of two minds (no pun intended) about the whole 2-heads-3-arms thing; it was originally written as a throwaway line in the radio play, but when it came to TV, the director decided it had to be implemeted, with questionable results. It could probably be done more easily and better now with CG. We kind of expect it now because of the TV series, but I often wonder how much it actually brings to the story.
And Ian McKellen would be great for Slartibartfast - you'll need a really talented actor to pull off the wonderful weary distractedness that Richard Vernon (may he RIP) played him with.
And maybe Michael Palin for The Book.
This sort of thing has been insidiously increasing in recent years, all over the public service (and these science committees fall into that category I think). There've been a number of political discussions in the media about it over here.
It used to be that senior public servants here in Australia would more or less have tenure, and maintain there positions regardless of what party was in office; their long-term expertise in running their particular department or committee was held to be of greater value than their own personal political views. they were, for practical purposes, politically neutral.
Over the last 20 years or so though, there has been an increasing trend toward making political appointments to cronies of the party in goverment. When the party changes, the whole upper level of the public service gets purged, to be replaced by another crop of short-term political appointees. The problems of this should be obvious, since there is no medium to long term continuity in how things are run.
I cannot help but think that the we were better off the old way.
I would spend time making toys. Not just wooden toys, but learn how to vacuum cast resin as well, just to make things interesting. Maybe learn some electronics for them too. I think I could have a lifetime of fun just making all sorts of toys, vehicles, action figures, plushies, you name it, out of all sorts of things.
:)
And after a long, tiring but satisfying day in my workshop, I would sit on my porch and play my banjo. I need to practice more anyway.
I want to see PERSONAL responsibility brought back into the justice system. If a high-level manager makes a decision that amounts to committing a crime, don't drag the company to court - drag HIM to court. If people knew that the things they do at work are things they will be held responsible for, they'd be a lot less willing to do things they know are wrong.
That's all well and good, but there are some important qualifiers you've neglected. What if the company benefits from an illegal action from one of it's employees? Surely they can't just hand over the errant worker, wash their hands, and lets the profits from that illegal action continue to flow? The company must be held accountable for the actions of it's employees, especially when the company has benefitted from those actions. This doesn't negate the idea of punishing criminal employees as well, of course.
Secondly, I think that limited liability within the corporate system should be scrapped; this is an issue of personal responsibility too. If you're a shareholder of a corporation, and that corporation bilks it's employees out of their entitlements the day after paying its execs massive unjustified bonuses (as has happened in the US with Enron et al, and in Australia with One.Tel and HIH), then whatever money is owed should be stripped from the people running the company first, then whatever else is required should be stripped from the shareholders. The fact that they had less say over the everyday running of the corporation should be taken into account of course, but people need to stop treating share ownership as just a big cash cow, and take some serious responsibility for their investment decisions. They provided the money for these companies to do their dirty work.
All of this comes to bear on Adobe et al, who live in a world where the risks they seem happy to take with the money and work of others is great, but accept responsibilities few.
I don't know of any scientific double-blind studies, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to be found. Again, this whole issue hinges on whether or not anecdotal evidence in and of itself is proof that something works. You claim it isn't; I claim it is. It's a circular argument neither of us will win.
I don't know about that. Plenty of people believe wholeheartedly that praying to their God of choice has cured them of disease, and will testify to that fact, even when those people come from different and mutually incompatible faiths. Since they cannot all be right, it does throw some doubt on the validity of their own interpretations of their personal experiences. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is very very common, and since most people don't know what it is, can't check themselves for when they're doing it.
This is why science accepts anecdotal evidence only as giving a potential direction to look in for conducting proper research, but is otherwise given very little weight.
I've read reviews of this study, and acknowledge that there has been shown that acupuncture has some very limited and short term effect on pain relief, for a limited number of people. Probably for the same reason that people often feel great when they come out of a tattoo parlour; the pain causess the body to flush with endorphins. Hardly warrants calling it a mainstream way of treating pain, especially when there are so many more effective methods.
To my mind though, showing that acupuncture has a very limited effect on pain relief does not demonstrate it's efficacy as a treatment for disease, and it is disingenuous to claim it does. There is no evidence to support the claim that acupuncture has any special effect on healing.
"A reputable medical journal"? Like the AMA's journal, in which doctors subsidized by pharmaceutical firms carry on "research" in the name of objective science?
Of course, no-one who gets paid to do something can possibly be honest.
Besides, that's why research is published; so it can be assessed and tested by others in the field, your methodology challenged, your experiments questioned. If you've been rigorous, you'll be validated. If you've been bodgy, and fudged the results for profit, odds are pretty good you'll be found out fairly sharpish. I've yet to see any rigorous testing from homeopaths and the like that hasn't been shot down in flames in very short order...
I challenge you to show me where it says the only effective demonstration of a medical treatment is to be found in medical journals.
The accepted method of providing evidence for your proposals is to publish them in a widely-read journal, so as many people as possible can assess your results, and possibly repeat your experients. Only then can the effectiveness of a treatment be rigorously tested. As I pointed out in my earleir post; just because something has been done for a long time does not mean it works. This is argumentum ad antiquitatem, and is a logical fallacy.
I notice that you still didn't provide me with any studies (from a medical journal, or other scientific journal) proving your point.
I've had friends die of cancer, horrible and lingering suffering, after being treated with cancer drugs declared "proven" by "reputable medical journals"...evidence-based medicine isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
News Flash - people sometimes die, even when mainstream medicine has done all it can. I think this is actually one of the strengths of mainstream medicine; if it's done all it can do, it will usually tell you so. Many people don't like this of course; they'd rather have false hope, and consequently fall for quack treatments in a desperate hope to stave off the inevitable. And I don't see a lot of homeopaths working for free...
You've obviously been duped into believing anything the for-profit medical industry has to say about medicine.
*sigh* Those black helicopters must be flying pretty low thesedays. This is a such a textbook, paranoid-conspiracy-theory response: "If you don't agree with me, then you've clearly been brainwashed by The Man". If you want to make an argument, then make one, but spare me the X-Files rhetoric...
I'm very willing to accept that 'alternative' therapies work, but advocates need to do the work, and prove their case. If they worked as well as you claim you do, then shouldn't they be mainstream therapies by now anyway?
Proven medical treatments, such as silver, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. (proven not by a few piddly years of research, but in most cases many decades or centuries of use)
I can't speak for silver (I've not done enough reading on this particular 'treatment'), but I can say that both acupuncture and homeopathy are NOT proven treatments, nothing even close. I challenge you to produce one paper in a reputable medical journal that demonstrates the effectiveness of these treatments.
Just because something has been done for a long time, does not mean it works. All it has to do is make people think it works, and people are pretty easy to fool. People believed in the 4 bodily humours for centuries too, and the entirety of Western medical practice was based on this premise for a long time. Eventually though, evidence-based medicine took over and properly so.
For more info, visit The Skeptic's Dictionary.
You know, I've been thinking for a while that I'd much rather see companies put more effort into making existing-sized drives smaller and cheaper, than constantly bumping the storage level up and up.
I'm a web designer, I use some pretty space hungry apps, and image files can get pretty big too, but I can't think of any reason I would need even a 100Gb hard drive. Even if I put every audio CD I owned onto the machine, plus all my software, I wouldn't use more than 15% of it.
I would much rather have an 10-20 Gb Firewire drive that I can carry easily in a coat pocket, for a reasonable price (like an iPod, but even cheaper) than a 1Tb drive in my desktop.
IBM seemed to be on the right track a while ago, with their thumbnail-sized 1 Gb drive, designed for embedded devices. Any more news on stuff like this?
I wonder though - What if I was standing at the Canadian border and shouting obscenities, or exposing my genitals, such that what I was doing could be considering Disturbing the Peace, Indecent Exposure or suchlike, and that could be perceived by someone in US territory?
Could I be held liable under U.S. law for something of this kind? This case seems to me like only a higher-tech version of this scenario.
For the record, I in no way approve of what the Italian goverment has done here; it is clearly a violation of national sovereignty. But would a non-electronic/non-meatspace violation like the one I detailed above fall into the jurisdiction you describe?
The fossilised pterosaur skull belongs to one of the world's first flying vertebrates
:)
I don't think this is accurate. The article states that the skull is only 100 million years old, and pterosaurs had been around since about 225 million years ago.
Damn freaky looking thing though.
Oh boohoo - Bobby Wag-School spends his life digging ditches, and can't listen to MP3s on his iPod, therefore all other workers in other industries should feel his pain?
I can't think of the last road crew I saw that didn't have a radio blaring while they worked. If that music helps them get through the day, and god-forbid even helps them work better, then more power to them.
Why should office workers be consciously deprived of the right to listen to music (via whatever medium; the issue of space-shifting shouldn't matter) just because management drone (who can't write and chew gum at the same time) thinks that other workers can't listen to music and work at the same time?
I think the whole thing should have been taken out. Yoda is above physical combat, or at least he should be. I really love the line in the movie where Dooku says something like, "It looks like this can't be settled with the force - we'll have to use lightsabers." Uhm, isn't the force supposed to be more powerful than lightsabers? Why didn't they just play rock-paper-scissors instead? It seems like the force isn't useful for a whole lot, since the Jedi always immediatly pull out their light sabers before even trying to thrash each other mentally.
I'm increasingly inclined to believe that a good portion of lightsabre battle is profoundly psychological, especially between Jedi. It's like a form of ritualised mental and physical duelling, formed around the use of the lightsabre in conjuntion with the Force.
While superficially it just seems like crude physical combat, I suspect that it has been used as a vehicle to portray Jedi discipline as being a combination of both mental and physical discipline, indivisible (like the Bene Gesserit from Dune, ancient Japanese Samurai and more).
Yoda has been almost completely cerebral up until this point, yet could not possibly have achieved his high status without having mastered all of the relevant disciplines to the highest level. It was absolutely appropriate to the further fleshing-out of the character that he be shown exercising all of his expertise, including those skills you believe are "beneath him".
I read this from someone else's post some time ago. It applies well to your argument:
Capitalist economies don't spring up automatically, like crabgrass. They are dependent upon a complex set of laws. Capitalism is a government program.
The government absolutely has a role in moderating market excesses.
The Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stones, and the Oil Age will not end because we run out of oil.
The Stone Age ended because better ways of doing the same things were found, making the old ways uneconomical or obsolete. The same thing will happen with the Oil Age, and it's great to see a small nation like Iceland setting this agenda.
I've posted about this in previous thread on this subject, but here goes again.
Cloning this animal is a BAD IDEA, for a number of reason:
1) It gives people the idea that they don't actually have to protect exisiting endangered species - after all, if we fuck up and kill them all, we can just clone them again later, right? This kind of use of genetic technology mean that we don't have to take responsibilty for wiping things out. The thylacine should stay dead, for no other reason than as a reminder of our own foolishness.
2) Even if they do manage to clone an animal, they only have retrievable DNA of one thylacine (or at most 2 or 3, if stories about other viable preserved DNA samples turning up in museums are to be believed). Which means we are going to have a single thylacine cloned endlessly, becoming a zoo sideshow, and never reintroduced into the wild, much like animals in zoos are now. The same rhetoric would surface about animals in zoos "protecting the species", but lets be honest - no endangered zoo animal or any of its zoo-bred descendents are ever going to be reintroduced into the wild, meaning this argument is a furphy.
If we cannot produce a viable, self-sustaining population of these animals, then really, what is the point? If we can't give the animal the dignity of being a viable species, then at least give it the dignity of being a regretful memory. Being a genetic freakshow for the pleasure of humans without any hope of surviving on its own would be the worst kind of existence.
Is it so unreasonable to expect Adobe to go "Hey, the court says it's our patent, but we'll licence you the right to use it.". Who loses in that scenario? Adobe gets cash from Macromedia to cover it's development and patent costs (such as they are), and Macromedia doesn't have to completely redesign Flash to take the product of Adobe's patent out.
Adobe, will of course, most likely use this decision as leverage to hobble Flash for long enough to hock their own less-successful equivalent.
It'd be nice to see a big media corporation occasionally act in the interests of it's users rather than just what they see as the interests of their shareholders. It'd also be nice to see media companies use patent law the way it was meant to be used, rather than to oppress the market into doing things its way.
but I emplore you to keep an open yet critical mind
Keeping an open mind is good, but be careful it isn't so open that your brain falls out.
My favourite sitcom "News Radio" was always in trouble and was cancelled because the characters were too mean to each other.
I always thought it had more to do with the death of Phil Hartman. It's hard to make a show funny when you know why one of the main characters isn't there anymore. Suddenly Susan had the same problem after David Strickland killed himself.
Both shows struggled through the ensuing season each without the characters, but without enthusiasm. They may both have been on the way out anyway, of course, and were simply unable to survive those final decisive blows.
I wonder if something similar might have happened to the Simpsons had Phil Hartman played a more prominent role instead of occasional bit parts.