I don't know who is tripping up who - the dissenters were O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. As a liberal tending person, I was a bit surprised to find myself siding with them on this one.
No - market forces are always at work. If blockage of ads decreases "free" content on the web, and there is still demand for it - then some clever person will step in and meet the demand in some way that works - until something better comes along.
The best solution is to make sure that the full cost of the cleanup/recycle is incorporated into the purchase price of the item. I think both these schemes have a chance to do that.
Putting the burden on the manufacturer's could create some healthy competition - companies with more efficient recycle options would be able to offer cheaper and maybe even less toxic products.
If what I hear is true, then I think Georgie finally got it right - again. I don't care for JarJar as much as the next guy, but we wouldn't care if he didn't do something right the first time. Or the IVth time - whatever. You know what I mean.
It doesn't really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.
The first problem is the card itself. No matter how unforgeable we make it, it will be forged. And even worse, people will get legitimate cards in fraudulent names.
Two of the 9/11 terrorists had valid Virginia driver's licenses in fake names. And even if we could guarantee that everyone who issued national ID cards couldn't be bribed, initial cardholder identity would be determined by other identity documents... all of which would be easier to forge....
But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.
The security risks are enormous. Such a database would be a kludge of existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it....
What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.
And there are security benefits in having a variety of different ID documents. A single national ID is an exceedingly valuable document, and accordingly there's greater incentive to forge it. There is more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.
The problem is that there are many abuses possible with this system and for no gain. All of the 9/11 terrorists had valid id - if this system were in place then, they would have obtained valid "Real IDs".
Let's bring it back to my original objection to your original comment - you wondered what the fuss was about as the definitions seemed to you to both be more or less equally accurate.
I said I didn't agree - that the new definition seemed crafted to limit the scope of scientific inquiry and was a bad idea.
I think we are agreeing that we have doubts that science would actually answer some questions about some things, but if I'm reading you right:
Well they can be, and people have certainly tried. But it's tricky.
You seem to agree that scientific inquiry really isn't limited in what it can be used to study. (Please pardon me if I've misinterpreted.)
To me, that means that it is not a good idea to adopt the new definition.
The underlying issue is about how much merit people should give to the answers that science provides. That is a separate issue from the definition of what science is.
An appreciation of beauty, a sense of morality, the ability to be moved by poetry.
Why can't these be studied scientifically? You don't have to be a determinist to understand that knowledge can be gained by better understanding of how our brain and body works which would be one way to approach these things.
I doubt science would tell us what is beautiful or moral or poetically moving - but there are valid scientific inquiries along these lines.
But even on the subject of what is moral, for example, science is not wholly unusable. When we consider morality issues surrounding the environment and global warming, science can give us information about how things are or are not connected and interrelated which will help us make informed moral choices about how we act in the world.
You are right, science is a systematic practice of looking for explanations (natural) - both definitions agree on that. But science can look for natural explanations in ALL phenomena. The second definition, to my reading, clearly tries to establish that science should only study "natural phenomena" - implying that in fact there are some phenomena which are not in the purview of science.
The first implies that all phenomena can be studied scientifically and is, in my opinion, a more accurate definition of science.
The definitions are different. The old one "seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us" implies that everything that we observer around us has a natural explanation. The second one, "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena" implies that science only should investigate the things around us which are natural.
Science is finding natural explanations. Religion is finding super-natural explanations. Everything can be studied scientifically, everything can be thought from a religious standpoint. The new definition erroneously tries to classify things as being exclusively one or the other.
That's true - and as a Nikon D70 owner (with lots of nice Nikkor glass) I'm pretty much stuck on the Nikon boat as well.
But, what I hope that Nikon will come to realize is that if I were making the decision between Nikon and Canon today (like I was a year ago, with no investment down either road), I would most likely go with Canon. Not because of hardware or optics, but merely because of my perception of how they treat their customers.
No kidding - this is really going to confuse the issue! What if some of those engineers download some pre-released movies and then Blackbeard hijacks their ship? Would he get an extra 3 years tacked on to his sentence?
Maybe that is going to end up being the answer. If they encumber ISPs and the web so much that it becomes unusable, then it will die.
Maybe with all the cities now implementing and developing wireless clouds we will start to see a new-fangled BBS type thing start to flourish? The rural folks will invest in giant-sized prengles cans to connect, then there will be a new, usable, Internet again.
On this issue, I think we can trust market forces and human ingenuity. At least I hope so!
...built from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide - is designed with a compositionally graded collector, base and emitter to reduce transit time and improve current density. With their pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor...
Anybody else think this was copy & pasted from a lost Trek episode? Maybe if they embedded a phased tachyon pulse emitter the transistors could use inverted warp bubble conduits?
Consistent rules can be good - but there could also be a false sense of security associated with such actions. This is the arguement against the various airline lists that allow certain people/profiles to go through while concentrating resources on people on the "bad" list.
They would catch more would-be offenders by using random checks on everybody rather than detaining the people with no passports.
Good point - I've had similar experiments/experiences with Linux. Because of various niggling little things, I've never been able to make is my main OS - the "quick and easy" path of Windows, despite it all, has enough creature comforts to make it preferable for me.
I just recently got myself a PowerBook - Max OS X. So far I think this is the best of it all - it is Unix (I can't really tell the difference between Unix and Linux - all my (limited) Linux knowledge works just great for me) and it has a great desktop/user experience or whatever. I suppose the limited/proprietary hardware is a problem, but it shows that it is possible to achieve an easy, intuitive, and powerful graphical interface on some kind of Unix/Linux OS.
Well, I believe that there is NOT any trademark infringement going on. Now I don't know anything about french law, but in the US the plaintiff must prove that the defendant's use of a mark has created a likelihood-of-confusion about the origin of the defendant's goods or services. It seems unlikely to me that a shade of purple would have created confusion between chocolate and the add for Milka Couture.
Now maybe somebody else might think there is confusion - I don't know. But to me it seems like there is doubt about it. In that case I would have ruled in favor of the person, not the corporation.
Why should the courts have to save corporations money? If you want your brand name in a convenient url form to be available in a country where you market your goods/services, then it is part of the cost of doing business for you to take the time and invest the capital to make a go of it.
Part of the strategy of moving into a new market would be to come up with a plan - investigate available urls, perhaps try to make deals to get ones that you feel would be more advantageous. If there is some cyber-squatting or trademark infringement going on, then maybe the courts would be a good option. This particular case, however, is not cyber-squatting. It is not trademark infringement. It's poor planning by Kraft if you ask me. Milka the person has done nothing wrong - why should she have to change her url to milkacourtwhatever (sorry, don't recall what Kraft suggested)? Why can't kraft register milkachocolate or whatever?
This person WAS using her domain responsibly - she was not selling adulterated chocolate. What I would like to return to are the days before corporate personhood - I would like the rights of individuals to be more important than the rights of businesses.
And I don't really care if companies register every conceivable domain - actually, that seems like it would be a prudent practice to me.
The story said that Kraft had been around a lot longer than the 58 year old Milka - why didn't they buy the domain name sooner? I realize that Kraft bought Milka at some point - but either they bought it and failed to register milka.fr then, or bought it knowing that the name was already taken. No matter how I slice it, Kraft had the opportunity to go into the thing with their eyes open - if they didn't, then why should a living, breathing person suffer for a corporation's lack of planning?
Historical value isn't necessarily the most important consideration. I think it would also have enourmous value as a working spaceship. Spaceship two, etc. are not yet built. Why not try out One's legs a bit more, work out some more kinks to make Two and Three and the rest that much better that much quicker?
I tend to agree with you - but it made realize that my bank, Washington Mutual, has changed things around in the last couple of years. The tellers no longer hand us money; it is counted and dispensed via a machine at the teller's station just like an ATM...
Slashdot Mirror
If it was one of those brailboards, I'd have a heck of time with it - even with my glasses!
I don't know who is tripping up who - the dissenters were O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. As a liberal tending person, I was a bit surprised to find myself siding with them on this one.
No - market forces are always at work. If blockage of ads decreases "free" content on the web, and there is still demand for it - then some clever person will step in and meet the demand in some way that works - until something better comes along.
The best solution is to make sure that the full cost of the cleanup/recycle is incorporated into the purchase price of the item. I think both these schemes have a chance to do that.
Putting the burden on the manufacturer's could create some healthy competition - companies with more efficient recycle options would be able to offer cheaper and maybe even less toxic products.
If what I hear is true, then I think Georgie finally got it right - again. I don't care for JarJar as much as the next guy, but we wouldn't care if he didn't do something right the first time. Or the IVth time - whatever. You know what I mean.
Read the Scheiner article, he explains far better than I (http://www.schneier.com/essay-034.html
... all of which would be easier to forge. ...
...
Selective Quotes:
It doesn't really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.
The first problem is the card itself. No matter how unforgeable we make it, it will be forged. And even worse, people will get legitimate cards in fraudulent names.
Two of the 9/11 terrorists had valid Virginia driver's licenses in fake names. And even if we could guarantee that everyone who issued national ID cards couldn't be bribed, initial cardholder identity would be determined by other identity documents
But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.
The security risks are enormous. Such a database would be a kludge of existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it.
What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.
And there are security benefits in having a variety of different ID documents. A single national ID is an exceedingly valuable document, and accordingly there's greater incentive to forge it. There is more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.
The problem is that there are many abuses possible with this system and for no gain. All of the 9/11 terrorists had valid id - if this system were in place then, they would have obtained valid "Real IDs".
Bruce Schneir has a good article here: http://www.schneier.com/essay-034.html
Let's bring it back to my original objection to your original comment - you wondered what the fuss was about as the definitions seemed to you to both be more or less equally accurate.
I said I didn't agree - that the new definition seemed crafted to limit the scope of scientific inquiry and was a bad idea.
I think we are agreeing that we have doubts that science would actually answer some questions about some things, but if I'm reading you right:
Well they can be, and people have certainly tried. But it's tricky.
You seem to agree that scientific inquiry really isn't limited in what it can be used to study. (Please pardon me if I've misinterpreted.)
To me, that means that it is not a good idea to adopt the new definition.
The underlying issue is about how much merit people should give to the answers that science provides. That is a separate issue from the definition of what science is.
An appreciation of beauty, a sense of morality, the ability to be moved by poetry.
Why can't these be studied scientifically? You don't have to be a determinist to understand that knowledge can be gained by better understanding of how our brain and body works which would be one way to approach these things.
I doubt science would tell us what is beautiful or moral or poetically moving - but there are valid scientific inquiries along these lines.
But even on the subject of what is moral, for example, science is not wholly unusable. When we consider morality issues surrounding the environment and global warming, science can give us information about how things are or are not connected and interrelated which will help us make informed moral choices about how we act in the world.
You are right, science is a systematic practice of looking for explanations (natural) - both definitions agree on that. But science can look for natural explanations in ALL phenomena. The second definition, to my reading, clearly tries to establish that science should only study "natural phenomena" - implying that in fact there are some phenomena which are not in the purview of science.
The first implies that all phenomena can be studied scientifically and is, in my opinion, a more accurate definition of science.
The definitions are different. The old one "seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us" implies that everything that we observer around us has a natural explanation. The second one, "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena" implies that science only should investigate the things around us which are natural.
Science is finding natural explanations. Religion is finding super-natural explanations. Everything can be studied scientifically, everything can be thought from a religious standpoint. The new definition erroneously tries to classify things as being exclusively one or the other.
That's true - and as a Nikon D70 owner (with lots of nice Nikkor glass) I'm pretty much stuck on the Nikon boat as well.
But, what I hope that Nikon will come to realize is that if I were making the decision between Nikon and Canon today (like I was a year ago, with no investment down either road), I would most likely go with Canon. Not because of hardware or optics, but merely because of my perception of how they treat their customers.
How about security and piracy.
No kidding - this is really going to confuse the issue! What if some of those engineers download some pre-released movies and then Blackbeard hijacks their ship? Would he get an extra 3 years tacked on to his sentence?
Maybe that is going to end up being the answer. If they encumber ISPs and the web so much that it becomes unusable, then it will die.
Maybe with all the cities now implementing and developing wireless clouds we will start to see a new-fangled BBS type thing start to flourish? The rural folks will invest in giant-sized prengles cans to connect, then there will be a new, usable, Internet again.
On this issue, I think we can trust market forces and human ingenuity. At least I hope so!
...built from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide - is designed with a compositionally graded collector, base and emitter to reduce transit time and improve current density. With their pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor...
Anybody else think this was copy & pasted from a lost Trek episode? Maybe if they embedded a phased tachyon pulse emitter the transistors could use inverted warp bubble conduits?
Well said! I wish I had some mod points for you.
Spreading information always has an effect.
Consistent rules can be good - but there could also be a false sense of security associated with such actions. This is the arguement against the various airline lists that allow certain people/profiles to go through while concentrating resources on people on the "bad" list.
They would catch more would-be offenders by using random checks on everybody rather than detaining the people with no passports.
Good point - I've had similar experiments/experiences with Linux. Because of various niggling little things, I've never been able to make is my main OS - the "quick and easy" path of Windows, despite it all, has enough creature comforts to make it preferable for me.
I just recently got myself a PowerBook - Max OS X. So far I think this is the best of it all - it is Unix (I can't really tell the difference between Unix and Linux - all my (limited) Linux knowledge works just great for me) and it has a great desktop/user experience or whatever. I suppose the limited/proprietary hardware is a problem, but it shows that it is possible to achieve an easy, intuitive, and powerful graphical interface on some kind of Unix/Linux OS.
No doubt everybody here already knew that...
Well, I believe that there is NOT any trademark infringement going on. Now I don't know anything about french law, but in the US the plaintiff must prove that the defendant's use of a mark has created a likelihood-of-confusion about the origin of the defendant's goods or services. It seems unlikely to me that a shade of purple would have created confusion between chocolate and the add for Milka Couture.
Now maybe somebody else might think there is confusion - I don't know. But to me it seems like there is doubt about it. In that case I would have ruled in favor of the person, not the corporation.
Why should the courts have to save corporations money? If you want your brand name in a convenient url form to be available in a country where you market your goods/services, then it is part of the cost of doing business for you to take the time and invest the capital to make a go of it.
Part of the strategy of moving into a new market would be to come up with a plan - investigate available urls, perhaps try to make deals to get ones that you feel would be more advantageous. If there is some cyber-squatting or trademark infringement going on, then maybe the courts would be a good option. This particular case, however, is not cyber-squatting. It is not trademark infringement. It's poor planning by Kraft if you ask me. Milka the person has done nothing wrong - why should she have to change her url to milkacourtwhatever (sorry, don't recall what Kraft suggested)? Why can't kraft register milkachocolate or whatever?
This person WAS using her domain responsibly - she was not selling adulterated chocolate. What I would like to return to are the days before corporate personhood - I would like the rights of individuals to be more important than the rights of businesses.
And I don't really care if companies register every conceivable domain - actually, that seems like it would be a prudent practice to me.
The story said that Kraft had been around a lot longer than the 58 year old Milka - why didn't they buy the domain name sooner? I realize that Kraft bought Milka at some point - but either they bought it and failed to register milka.fr then, or bought it knowing that the name was already taken. No matter how I slice it, Kraft had the opportunity to go into the thing with their eyes open - if they didn't, then why should a living, breathing person suffer for a corporation's lack of planning?
Writen over 20 years ago by Fred Brooks, still a must-read for all software developers.
Historical value isn't necessarily the most important consideration. I think it would also have enourmous value as a working spaceship. Spaceship two, etc. are not yet built. Why not try out One's legs a bit more, work out some more kinks to make Two and Three and the rest that much better that much quicker?
I tend to agree with you - but it made realize that my bank, Washington Mutual, has changed things around in the last couple of years. The tellers no longer hand us money; it is counted and dispensed via a machine at the teller's station just like an ATM...