One can only speculate what they think they will achieve with this, but it seem to me they shoot themselves in the foot. DRM has never worked so far, and everything we've seen locks the customer into a situation that is perceived as next to impossible to live with. What I think may well happen is something like:
1. AMD make it impossible to use frambuffer if the DRM says you aren't allowed. 2. Some competitor comes up with a workaround that makes this irrelevant. 3. AMD die off or change their way.
The thing is, as long as there are countries in the world that do not have the same kind of draconic IP laws as the US, it will be possible to circumvent this kind of nonsense. America can make it 'mandatory' that all computers have this crap installed, but all it will do is isolate the country in yet another way. Sigh.
As if language has anything to do with it. The tlds are meant for geographic/economic regions, nothing else. Many nations have more than one language: China is home to around 50 languages, India has several, Russia dozens, and N. America houses languages from all over the world, not to mention the Native American language. And, to take an extreme example: 500 - 800 languages are spoken in New Guinea.
The.eu tld is a very valid idea and one that is likely to become increasingly relevant as the EU becomes more and more powerful on the world scene.
The four-letter-mafias (riaa/mpaa et al) keep howling about 'pirates' and some people even believe in the nonsense the spew out. But isn't it true that piracy is only piracy because they want to be able to have a monopoly? They will simply have to get back to reality and learn to produce their wares cost effectively.
In most cases the actual artists only earn peanuts; the Hollywood stars and bands that earn tens of millions are rare, at least if you compare to the number of artist out there. For each superstar there is 100000 good artists who earn next to nothing - I have heard about many musicians that made a CD, sold quite well, got known, but never saw a penny, so I don't think the socalled pirates take anything aways from the artists.
The position of people like you, the so-caled 'climate-skeptics', is similar to the one that says 'I have now fallen 2 miles and nothing bad has happened, so nothing will bad happen over the last 20 yards [SPLAT]'
They would like the legislation to exempt anyone who owns a copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret from restrictions against pretexting.
I wonder if they have thought this through. After all, anybody who has ever written anything is a 'copyright owner', so once I have sent this Copyrighted Material I could go and pretend I was somebody else and get their personal info, right? This is what happens when all you need to call yourself 'a deep thinker with high moral standards' is a load of money. I mean, it isn't the only case of somebody in a powerful position displaying the morals, insight and integrity of a drugdealer; America has lost its way - once the admired leader of the free world, but now?
An interesting line from the article is, '[RIAA's Brad] Buckles said the recording industry had never, nor would it ever, assume someone's identity to access that person's phone or bank records.'
But he spotted that one, didn't he? So he has thought about it. And even if one could actually have any confidence in what he has to say, he can only speak for himself - what about his colleagues or those that come after him? And judging from the way they bully young children and other defenceless individual, does it seem at all likely that they will 'never assume somebody's identity to access that person's phone or bank records'? They have already shown us all how little regard they have for common decency; they will lie effortlessly and with glee if it means more money in their pockets.
And it worked quite well for the US too. Let's not forget that once the United States was a backward nation that 'stole' all its technological advances from the British Empire; this went on almost up until the second world war, if I remember correctly.
There is nothing wrong with this - it is called learning from you superiors, and it is what any nation does until it has caught up. Apart from that, China is already ahead of the West in a number of areas, simply because it is relevant for them and not for us; and of course it doesn't help that the current anti-intellectual climate in America tends to stifle research for religious reasons.
In the end it doesn't matter all that much - advances in Chinese science and technology will benefit us all, just like advances in American, European, Indian, Russian,.... technology will.
I use Gentoo - it takes about two days to install because I have to go to work too, and there are things that I start in the morning and come home to find are finished. when I do it in the office it takes about a day or so. What takes all the time, really, is installing the desktop.
After that I install Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice - they take perhaps a couple of days, again because I start them in the mornings and evenings, and after that it is all the small stuff, like Gimp and a handful of other essentials, and then I am right at home, I think. All in all about a week, give or take.
But then on the other hand, with Linux, and especially Gentoo, you are never 'finished', because you always go and try new stuff, and then of course you mess things up and start over. That, however, is often the whole point of playing with a computer; it's like Lego - you can build The Thing and be done with it, but you don't, you keep taking them apart and building other things, because that is where the fun is.
It is becoming more and more clear through research that the main difference between humans and the other animals is one of quantity rather than quality. It seems that most primates, and in particular the apes, have intelligence, personality, self-awareness or whatever else it is we consider makes us humans unique. The same goes for many other mammals and birds, and it seems that even some molluscs - the squids and octopuses - are somewhat sentient. So on that ground animals should be given the same sort of legal protection that humans have.
On the other hand, it also seems clear that most other animals wouldn't fit into our system of rights; perhaps we should develop a set of 'Rights of the Living'.
If that were humans, it would take us from Homo erectus to George W Bush in just a few seconds!! Hmm, on second thought, perhaps not all that impressive.
This is great news for road safety - now we just need to eliminate passengers as well as pedestrians and other road users so we can finally avoid people getting hurt in traffic.
What all these new things tell me (not an illiterate) is that here ia a lot of SW that probably still needs to be debugged. There is a reason why old systems like MVS are still going strong, business-wise: They have been thoroughly debugged, simply because they have hung around for something like 40 years.
I remember something about Vista having to rewritten more or less from scratch not so long ago; or am I wrong? It may be that Vista will be great in a couple of years, but it is probably too much grief right now, I think.
I would say quite often in fact, but that's just my opinion. I think there is something in what serves as the basic moral code in American-style business, that makes it difficult to know where the line goes. Now don't take this as an attack on Americans or even America in general, but the kind of business ethics that is tought to American MBAs etc, is scarily devoid of what normal people would consider good moral.
I once read about a class situation at one university - I don't recall the exact circumstances, but perhaps somebody else recognises it. The professor asked the class 'You are in charge of marketing a new medicine, and you receive reports that this medicine may be dangerous. What is the right thing to do?' Most would say things like 'We have to hold back and find out whether this product is actually dangerous and perhaps stop selling it' - but the 'right' answer, according to the professor was 'You keep on selling as much as possible until the company is forced to stop. Your only concern should be the shareholders' profit'
This story, I think, tells just how twisted things can be. When young people are told that they have to commit moral and ethical suicide like this, how should they be able to see the fine line between being a creative entrpreneur and an outright criminal? If the size of the profit is what determines how 'right' or 'good' your actions are, then surely crime is perfectly justfied law abiding citizens are simply idiots, little better than cattle?
(yes, yes, I know, he's no apologising in the usual sense; this is a play on words, or a pun, as it is also known)
Still, FORTRAN was and still is one of the great programming languages. There are many languages that offer better features and are much suitable for general usage, but there's huge number of programs written in FORTRAN, and many in science still prefer it to C/C++; FORTRAN is very well suited for numerical calculations, which is after all what is was made for.
Working as sys admin for an American company, I have had enough exposure to Sarbanes-Oxley to last me a while.
While I fully understand and sympathise with the need to ensure that companies don't lie as much as they would like (we should something for politicians and lawyers too, eh?), in some cases it is taken to ridiculous extremes. In my company we now have to submit all new hostnames to a security commission - these are hostnames that are allocated on an internal DNS server. Why is that? I don't understand it, but there you are.
And we are not allowed to use an external NTP server - the hole in the firewall is simply closed, and the request doesn't get through. On the other hand http is allowed through, of course - but don't tell me that the problems you can get on your machine from NTP are worse than what you import via http.
Now, I know that are many theorectical computer security issues associated with using networks, but in our case the Sarpox is simply being used as an excuse for allowing the most anal-retentive security people in the company to bully everybody. Wasn't the idea that it should be harder for people in upper management to abuse their power to strip the company of money and line their own pockets? Introducing rules that hamper the production teams in everything they do only provokes resentment and inspires people to find ways around, thus defeating the entire project and creating new, but unknown security threats. And meanwhile those in power positions, who are ethically challenged, will still be dishonest; and of course they will also just find new ways to steal, won't they?
So the real question remains - what can actually be done about the basic problem: that people in the top of companies (and indeed people in any power position) are fundamentally flawed? Looking to other countries, we can see that it is possible; the moral and ethical standards for companies in Europe are much higher than in the US.
Listen everyone: Censorship is a fact of life. You may not like the way some do it; but we all do it, and most think their kind of censorship is just fine.
No matter whether we think we believe in Freedom and all that, we all know that there has to be limits to what can be said. It is generally accepted that 'Freedom of Speech' doea not allow us to perpetrate crimes on the net - such as soliciting child pornography or teaching how to fly passenger planes into tall buildings, just to mention a few. The question is where should the limit go - should we allow hardcore porn on websites that target children? No?
A very big factor in what one thinks is suitable is culture - have you ever seen those adverts for HSBC (an international bank)? They are all about how some things are different in different countries (and how important local knowledge is); like eg. that showing your bare feet may be fine in USA or Australia, but is considered extremely rude in Thailand. What I am saying here is: You and I don't necessarily know what is an absolute no-no in other countries, and we should not be too hasty in condemning what other countries choose is not acceptable on the Net. Filtering in China is after all not denying Americans access to things they feel are OK.
On the other hand, I fully understand and respect that there are certain things that should never be censored - but I don't think freedom of speech as a fundamental right is something you can use as an excuse for not being able to show a bit of cultural sensitivity. One of the main reasons that freedom of speech is important is that democracy doesn't work without it - people must have the right to know all there is to know about the decision they make when they vote; it is not primarily there to ensure that everybody can pour all kinds of tripe out in the public space.
Maybe judgement should be reserved until someone has seen this data.
Would you like to eat products containing this? I think the problem here is not 'do we have clear proof' - this is about whether it is right or not to sell foodstuffs that can be suspected of being poisonous. This is like the BSE infected cattle - for a long time nodoby was actually sure that eating the meat from a cow with BSE was dangerous, but UK still slaughtered just about every cow in the country and burned them, because of the risk.
If this modified variant of corn turns out to be poisonous and you feed it to potentially billions of people, isn't that serious enough to stop it here and now? Millions could die from it, even if it only kills one in 1000, hundreds of millions might get serious liver or kidney damage. Living with kidney- or liverdamage is not at all fun; there is a lot of things you simply can't do, and it's not just about having to cut back on your alcohol comsumption.
I have said it before - in my opinion companies that endanger lives in their ruthless pursuit of profit no matter what the cost should be punished very hard. Jail the leaders in charge - including the stockholders - and confiscate the company.
What we need is indeed a form of source control, but perhaps not so much for the text os the laws. The big, fundamental problem here is not that a law was changed, altough that is a very serious thing - but at the bottom of it all is the way that the country is ruled by powerful minorities that have not been elected. If the US had a true democracy, most politicians would always feel that they represented their voters and that had to work sincerely for the people. This is what happens in other countries.
I think two issues are central to the problem in America: Lobbying and party funding. In many countries there are tight restrictions on those two; much of what is considered lobbying or contributing to a party would be seen as corruption in Europe. Lobbying is why interest groups with a narrow focus, but a lot of money to spend have so much power: the oil industry, the arms industry, the rabid curs on the religious fringe, if you'll excuse my French. The way election campaigns are funded means that the voters don't get a chance to make a truly informed choice, which is why it makes no difference whether you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans; they are all in the pockets of big money, because otherwise they won't ever be heard in the big shouting match. Cut out those two factors and suddenly the electorate will have a chance of actually making an informed decicion, which is what democracy is all about.
On top of that it would be a lot better if proportional representation was introduced. It would lead to many more parties being represented; some would say that this is a bad thing, since government would be less able to act, but I think this is actually a GOOD THING. In the normal state of affairs there is actually loads of time to make decisions on government level, and a slightly indecisive government, that always has to go and negotiate deals before they do anything major would never have attacked Iraq; they would have to cultivate some restraint and learn some useful skills in cooperation and negotiation. As a result the US would not now be quite as despised in the world.
To those who fear what would happen in an emergency if the government doesn't have the power to act - this is what a state of emergency is for. But in peacetime when there is no great threat to the nation, what you want is a government that actually represents the people as a whole, who works for the people and who spends enough time on making decisions, so they get it right.
First of all - it is a fundamental assumption in Einstein's theory that the speed of light is the same in EVERY frame of reference; ie. two observers moving at some speed relative to each other will see the same lightwave moving at the same speed. One consequence of this is that all (rest-) massless particles move at the speed of light - in a way they only exist as movement or a disturbance of some field or other. Photons are disturbances in the electro-magnetic field, gravitons are disturbances in the gravity field (or the 'structure of space', if you like). Another consequence of the constance of the speed of light is that particles with real restmass > 0 get heavier when they move faster and the perceived mass goes to infinity as the relative speed approaches the speed of light.
It will be interesting to see in what sense they have exceeded the speed of light; so far all examples of this have proven to be tricks of the circumstances rather than actual physics - eg. it is easy, at least in theory, to make a shadow move faster than the speed of light, but it doesn't represent actual, physical motion; I'm sure most have heard about this one.
Evolution is a theory. In science, it is better to focus on the known facts (as it seems is beginning to happen).
On the contrary. Science is about researching the unknown. This is why we scientists have theories - we are trying to learn the truth, acknowledging that we don't know it all and probably never will. The only things that are 'known facts' are observations, like last time I let go of a stone it fell down, not up. Nobody knows that it will do the same next time, strictly speaking, but we have a very well researched theory that says it will. Theories are the basis for everything around you: the computer you use was developed using such a theory as quantum mechanics, which is far more speculative than evolution. After all, the theory of evolution is based on fossils you can see with your bare eyes, whereas quantum mechanics deals with things we can't see. It is quite possible - likely even - that our idea about what fundamental particles are like is only a poor approximation to reality.
So if you can accept quantum theory well enough to use computers and other modern electronics, why not evolution? As for facts - we can see that evolution has happened; the fossils are there, and just like a line of footprints on a beach tells you that somebody has walked there recently, the fossils tell you that life has evolved. There is no reasonable doubt about that, and 'evolution theory' is not about that. It is about how it happened.
What you say is true, up to a point. When I'm asked if I have something to hide, I have to answer 'Yes - my privacy'.
It is good to hear that this is important in the US, that the majority shouldn't lose their freedom because there may be a minorty who would misuse. If only this fairness was extended to others as well, like people 'suspected' of terrorism. I'm not talking about letting people off the hook easily, but about fairness, you know the thing that legal justice was supposed to be all about, which is enshrined in such principles as being told what the charges and evidence against you are, so you have the chance to defend yourself. The principle that you are innocent until PROVEN guilty in a court of law etc.
This is the same old story as ever. We keep messing around without thinking about the consequences until it suddenly dawns on us that we should have, at which point it is too late; or almost. In the beginning of the industrial revolution we pumped smoke and poisonous dust out into the local environment until people were choking to death, and still we refused to do anything about it for a long time. In the sixties we saw how pollution affected whole countries with acid rain, dead rivers etc, and yet it took decades of increasing problems before anybody in power reacted. Since then we have continued much on the same track, so now we are in the middle of a mass extinction - the seas are being fished dry, the forests are being cut down, coral reefs are being bulldozed by trawlers etc etc. Not to mention global warming.
So what can we conclude? That humans, after all, are just another dumb animal that reacts to its temporary evolutionary success by destroying the basis for its own existence? What idiocy. What complete and utter, desperate idiocy.
- that in America the state is nothing and big money is everything. Some apparently think this is a good thing, but I think it is a shame to see that once great nation becoming just the property of a self-styled big money aristocracy.
Slashdot Mirror
One can only speculate what they think they will achieve with this, but it seem to me they shoot themselves in the foot. DRM has never worked so far, and everything we've seen locks the customer into a situation that is perceived as next to impossible to live with. What I think may well happen is something like:
1. AMD make it impossible to use frambuffer if the DRM says you aren't allowed.
2. Some competitor comes up with a workaround that makes this irrelevant.
3. AMD die off or change their way.
The thing is, as long as there are countries in the world that do not have the same kind of draconic IP laws as the US, it will be possible to circumvent this kind of nonsense. America can make it 'mandatory' that all computers have this crap installed, but all it will do is isolate the country in yet another way. Sigh.
The new in-thing for going to the disco.
As if language has anything to do with it. The tlds are meant for geographic/economic regions, nothing else. Many nations have more than one language: China is home to around 50 languages, India has several, Russia dozens, and N. America houses languages from all over the world, not to mention the Native American language. And, to take an extreme example: 500 - 800 languages are spoken in New Guinea.
.eu tld is a very valid idea and one that is likely to become increasingly relevant as the EU becomes more and more powerful on the world scene.
The
The four-letter-mafias (riaa/mpaa et al) keep howling about 'pirates' and some people even believe in the nonsense the spew out. But isn't it true that piracy is only piracy because they want to be able to have a monopoly? They will simply have to get back to reality and learn to produce their wares cost effectively.
In most cases the actual artists only earn peanuts; the Hollywood stars and bands that earn tens of millions are rare, at least if you compare to the number of artist out there. For each superstar there is 100000 good artists who earn next to nothing - I have heard about many musicians that made a CD, sold quite well, got known, but never saw a penny, so I don't think the socalled pirates take anything aways from the artists.
The position of people like you, the so-caled 'climate-skeptics', is similar to the one that says 'I have now fallen 2 miles and nothing bad has happened, so nothing will bad happen over the last 20 yards [SPLAT]'
They would like the legislation to exempt anyone who owns a copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret from restrictions against pretexting.
I wonder if they have thought this through. After all, anybody who has ever written anything is a 'copyright owner', so once I have sent this Copyrighted Material I could go and pretend I was somebody else and get their personal info, right? This is what happens when all you need to call yourself 'a deep thinker with high moral standards' is a load of money. I mean, it isn't the only case of somebody in a powerful position displaying the morals, insight and integrity of a drugdealer; America has lost its way - once the admired leader of the free world, but now?
An interesting line from the article is, '[RIAA's Brad] Buckles said the recording industry had never, nor would it ever, assume someone's identity to access that person's phone or bank records.'
But he spotted that one, didn't he? So he has thought about it. And even if one could actually have any confidence in what he has to say, he can only speak for himself - what about his colleagues or those that come after him? And judging from the way they bully young children and other defenceless individual, does it seem at all likely that they will 'never assume somebody's identity to access that person's phone or bank records'? They have already shown us all how little regard they have for common decency; they will lie effortlessly and with glee if it means more money in their pockets.
And it worked quite well for the US too. Let's not forget that once the United States was a backward nation that 'stole' all its technological advances from the British Empire; this went on almost up until the second world war, if I remember correctly.
.... technology will.
There is nothing wrong with this - it is called learning from you superiors, and it is what any nation does until it has caught up. Apart from that, China is already ahead of the West in a number of areas, simply because it is relevant for them and not for us; and of course it doesn't help that the current anti-intellectual climate in America tends to stifle research for religious reasons.
In the end it doesn't matter all that much - advances in Chinese science and technology will benefit us all, just like advances in American, European, Indian, Russian,
I use Gentoo - it takes about two days to install because I have to go to work too, and there are things that I start in the morning and come home to find are finished. when I do it in the office it takes about a day or so. What takes all the time, really, is installing the desktop.
After that I install Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice - they take perhaps a couple of days, again because I start them in the mornings and evenings, and after that it is all the small stuff, like Gimp and a handful of other essentials, and then I am right at home, I think. All in all about a week, give or take.
But then on the other hand, with Linux, and especially Gentoo, you are never 'finished', because you always go and try new stuff, and then of course you mess things up and start over. That, however, is often the whole point of playing with a computer; it's like Lego - you can build The Thing and be done with it, but you don't, you keep taking them apart and building other things, because that is where the fun is.
It is becoming more and more clear through research that the main difference between humans and the other animals is one of quantity rather than quality. It seems that most primates, and in particular the apes, have intelligence, personality, self-awareness or whatever else it is we consider makes us humans unique. The same goes for many other mammals and birds, and it seems that even some molluscs - the squids and octopuses - are somewhat sentient. So on that ground animals should be given the same sort of legal protection that humans have.
On the other hand, it also seems clear that most other animals wouldn't fit into our system of rights; perhaps we should develop a set of 'Rights of the Living'.
If that were humans, it would take us from Homo erectus to George W Bush in just a few seconds!! Hmm, on second thought, perhaps not all that impressive.
This is great news for road safety - now we just need to eliminate passengers as well as pedestrians and other road users so we can finally avoid people getting hurt in traffic.
What all these new things tell me (not an illiterate) is that here ia a lot of SW that probably still needs to be debugged. There is a reason why old systems like MVS are still going strong, business-wise: They have been thoroughly debugged, simply because they have hung around for something like 40 years.
I remember something about Vista having to rewritten more or less from scratch not so long ago; or am I wrong? It may be that Vista will be great in a couple of years, but it is probably too much grief right now, I think.
I would say quite often in fact, but that's just my opinion. I think there is something in what serves as the basic moral code in American-style business, that makes it difficult to know where the line goes. Now don't take this as an attack on Americans or even America in general, but the kind of business ethics that is tought to American MBAs etc, is scarily devoid of what normal people would consider good moral.
I once read about a class situation at one university - I don't recall the exact circumstances, but perhaps somebody else recognises it. The professor asked the class 'You are in charge of marketing a new medicine, and you receive reports that this medicine may be dangerous. What is the right thing to do?' Most would say things like 'We have to hold back and find out whether this product is actually dangerous and perhaps stop selling it' - but the 'right' answer, according to the professor was 'You keep on selling as much as possible until the company is forced to stop. Your only concern should be the shareholders' profit'
This story, I think, tells just how twisted things can be. When young people are told that they have to commit moral and ethical suicide like this, how should they be able to see the fine line between being a creative entrpreneur and an outright criminal? If the size of the profit is what determines how 'right' or 'good' your actions are, then surely crime is perfectly justfied law abiding citizens are simply idiots, little better than cattle?
...Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN...
(yes, yes, I know, he's no apologising in the usual sense; this is a play on words, or a pun, as it is also known)
Still, FORTRAN was and still is one of the great programming languages. There are many languages that offer better features and are much suitable for general usage, but there's huge number of programs written in FORTRAN, and many in science still prefer it to C/C++; FORTRAN is very well suited for numerical calculations, which is after all what is was made for.
Working as sys admin for an American company, I have had enough exposure to Sarbanes-Oxley to last me a while.
While I fully understand and sympathise with the need to ensure that companies don't lie as much as they would like (we should something for politicians and lawyers too, eh?), in some cases it is taken to ridiculous extremes. In my company we now have to submit all new hostnames to a security commission - these are hostnames that are allocated on an internal DNS server. Why is that? I don't understand it, but there you are.
And we are not allowed to use an external NTP server - the hole in the firewall is simply closed, and the request doesn't get through. On the other hand http is allowed through, of course - but don't tell me that the problems you can get on your machine from NTP are worse than what you import via http.
Now, I know that are many theorectical computer security issues associated with using networks, but in our case the Sarpox is simply being used as an excuse for allowing the most anal-retentive security people in the company to bully everybody. Wasn't the idea that it should be harder for people in upper management to abuse their power to strip the company of money and line their own pockets? Introducing rules that hamper the production teams in everything they do only provokes resentment and inspires people to find ways around, thus defeating the entire project and creating new, but unknown security threats. And meanwhile those in power positions, who are ethically challenged, will still be dishonest; and of course they will also just find new ways to steal, won't they?
So the real question remains - what can actually be done about the basic problem: that people in the top of companies (and indeed people in any power position) are fundamentally flawed? Looking to other countries, we can see that it is possible; the moral and ethical standards for companies in Europe are much higher than in the US.
Perhaps now is the time where I should buy my mother in law that trip to see Old Faithful...
Listen everyone: Censorship is a fact of life. You may not like the way some do it; but we all do it, and most think their kind of censorship is just fine.
No matter whether we think we believe in Freedom and all that, we all know that there has to be limits to what can be said. It is generally accepted that 'Freedom of Speech' doea not allow us to perpetrate crimes on the net - such as soliciting child pornography or teaching how to fly passenger planes into tall buildings, just to mention a few. The question is where should the limit go - should we allow hardcore porn on websites that target children? No?
A very big factor in what one thinks is suitable is culture - have you ever seen those adverts for HSBC (an international bank)? They are all about how some things are different in different countries (and how important local knowledge is); like eg. that showing your bare feet may be fine in USA or Australia, but is considered extremely rude in Thailand. What I am saying here is: You and I don't necessarily know what is an absolute no-no in other countries, and we should not be too hasty in condemning what other countries choose is not acceptable on the Net. Filtering in China is after all not denying Americans access to things they feel are OK.
On the other hand, I fully understand and respect that there are certain things that should never be censored - but I don't think freedom of speech as a fundamental right is something you can use as an excuse for not being able to show a bit of cultural sensitivity. One of the main reasons that freedom of speech is important is that democracy doesn't work without it - people must have the right to know all there is to know about the decision they make when they vote; it is not primarily there to ensure that everybody can pour all kinds of tripe out in the public space.
Maybe judgement should be reserved until someone has seen this data.
Would you like to eat products containing this? I think the problem here is not 'do we have clear proof' - this is about whether it is right or not to sell foodstuffs that can be suspected of being poisonous. This is like the BSE infected cattle - for a long time nodoby was actually sure that eating the meat from a cow with BSE was dangerous, but UK still slaughtered just about every cow in the country and burned them, because of the risk.
If this modified variant of corn turns out to be poisonous and you feed it to potentially billions of people, isn't that serious enough to stop it here and now? Millions could die from it, even if it only kills one in 1000, hundreds of millions might get serious liver or kidney damage. Living with kidney- or liverdamage is not at all fun; there is a lot of things you simply can't do, and it's not just about having to cut back on your alcohol comsumption.
I have said it before - in my opinion companies that endanger lives in their ruthless pursuit of profit no matter what the cost should be punished very hard. Jail the leaders in charge - including the stockholders - and confiscate the company.
No, no, it just smells funny.
What we need is indeed a form of source control, but perhaps not so much for the text os the laws. The big, fundamental problem here is not that a law was changed, altough that is a very serious thing - but at the bottom of it all is the way that the country is ruled by powerful minorities that have not been elected. If the US had a true democracy, most politicians would always feel that they represented their voters and that had to work sincerely for the people. This is what happens in other countries.
I think two issues are central to the problem in America: Lobbying and party funding. In many countries there are tight restrictions on those two; much of what is considered lobbying or contributing to a party would be seen as corruption in Europe. Lobbying is why interest groups with a narrow focus, but a lot of money to spend have so much power: the oil industry, the arms industry, the rabid curs on the religious fringe, if you'll excuse my French. The way election campaigns are funded means that the voters don't get a chance to make a truly informed choice, which is why it makes no difference whether you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans; they are all in the pockets of big money, because otherwise they won't ever be heard in the big shouting match. Cut out those two factors and suddenly the electorate will have a chance of actually making an informed decicion, which is what democracy is all about.
On top of that it would be a lot better if proportional representation was introduced. It would lead to many more parties being represented; some would say that this is a bad thing, since government would be less able to act, but I think this is actually a GOOD THING. In the normal state of affairs there is actually loads of time to make decisions on government level, and a slightly indecisive government, that always has to go and negotiate deals before they do anything major would never have attacked Iraq; they would have to cultivate some restraint and learn some useful skills in cooperation and negotiation. As a result the US would not now be quite as despised in the world.
To those who fear what would happen in an emergency if the government doesn't have the power to act - this is what a state of emergency is for. But in peacetime when there is no great threat to the nation, what you want is a government that actually represents the people as a whole, who works for the people and who spends enough time on making decisions, so they get it right.
First of all - it is a fundamental assumption in Einstein's theory that the speed of light is the same in EVERY frame of reference; ie. two observers moving at some speed relative to each other will see the same lightwave moving at the same speed. One consequence of this is that all (rest-) massless particles move at the speed of light - in a way they only exist as movement or a disturbance of some field or other. Photons are disturbances in the electro-magnetic field, gravitons are disturbances in the gravity field (or the 'structure of space', if you like). Another consequence of the constance of the speed of light is that particles with real restmass > 0 get heavier when they move faster and the perceived mass goes to infinity as the relative speed approaches the speed of light.
It will be interesting to see in what sense they have exceeded the speed of light; so far all examples of this have proven to be tricks of the circumstances rather than actual physics - eg. it is easy, at least in theory, to make a shadow move faster than the speed of light, but it doesn't represent actual, physical motion; I'm sure most have heard about this one.
Evolution is a theory. In science, it is better to focus on the known facts (as it seems is beginning to happen).
On the contrary. Science is about researching the unknown. This is why we scientists have theories - we are trying to learn the truth, acknowledging that we don't know it all and probably never will. The only things that are 'known facts' are observations, like last time I let go of a stone it fell down, not up. Nobody knows that it will do the same next time, strictly speaking, but we have a very well researched theory that says it will. Theories are the basis for everything around you: the computer you use was developed using such a theory as quantum mechanics, which is far more speculative than evolution. After all, the theory of evolution is based on fossils you can see with your bare eyes, whereas quantum mechanics deals with things we can't see. It is quite possible - likely even - that our idea about what fundamental particles are like is only a poor approximation to reality.
So if you can accept quantum theory well enough to use computers and other modern electronics, why not evolution? As for facts - we can see that evolution has happened; the fossils are there, and just like a line of footprints on a beach tells you that somebody has walked there recently, the fossils tell you that life has evolved. There is no reasonable doubt about that, and 'evolution theory' is not about that. It is about how it happened.
What you say is true, up to a point. When I'm asked if I have something to hide, I have to answer 'Yes - my privacy'.
It is good to hear that this is important in the US, that the majority shouldn't lose their freedom because there may be a minorty who would misuse. If only this fairness was extended to others as well, like people 'suspected' of terrorism. I'm not talking about letting people off the hook easily, but about fairness, you know the thing that legal justice was supposed to be all about, which is enshrined in such principles as being told what the charges and evidence against you are, so you have the chance to defend yourself. The principle that you are innocent until PROVEN guilty in a court of law etc.
This is the same old story as ever. We keep messing around without thinking about the consequences until it suddenly dawns on us that we should have, at which point it is too late; or almost. In the beginning of the industrial revolution we pumped smoke and poisonous dust out into the local environment until people were choking to death, and still we refused to do anything about it for a long time. In the sixties we saw how pollution affected whole countries with acid rain, dead rivers etc, and yet it took decades of increasing problems before anybody in power reacted. Since then we have continued much on the same track, so now we are in the middle of a mass extinction - the seas are being fished dry, the forests are being cut down, coral reefs are being bulldozed by trawlers etc etc. Not to mention global warming.
So what can we conclude? That humans, after all, are just another dumb animal that reacts to its temporary evolutionary success by destroying the basis for its own existence? What idiocy. What complete and utter, desperate idiocy.
- that in America the state is nothing and big money is everything. Some apparently think this is a good thing, but I think it is a shame to see that once great nation becoming just the property of a self-styled big money aristocracy.