Well, many would-be theories of everything are in precisely this position: they predict the existence of some particle or phenomenon that while so far we've been successful in not observing, the parameters of the theory are sufficiently broad that we cannot perform all the experiments that might lead to that particle's observation.
Most U.S. limits on, er, questionable business practices stem from a populist backlash in the early 20th century. I see no way for a populist movement to form under China's political system without a general revolution.
However, either of these designs will require serious reconstruction work at canaveral: they are substantially taller than the assembled shuttle, and so will not be able to be built in the present shuttle assembly building, nor be able to use the present launch pad.
If you look through the decision (and even the dissenting opinion, for that matter), the court seems to be saying that they are deliberately not setting a binding precedent here, but are saying that insofar as this particular case is a close call, and local government ought to know best what is and isn't a valid public use, that the Court defers to the judgment of the state and local councils and courts that considered the case before it did.
Even the dissenting opinion didn't call the takings for the whole development unconstitutional, but only for that portion of it that was going to be used for offices and leased parking. The rest, though it was going to be privately owned, would be publically accessible, and that was public enough for them.
The court went so far out of its way to defer to other bodies in this case, that all this does is move the more general battle down to the states. If a legislature wants to decide this issue for once and for all in their state, the door is still open for them to do so.
Of course, if intelligence facilitates increased affluence, and affluence increases the survivability of those who probably wouldn't successfully reproduce "in the wild," then this should come as no surprise.
Swimming underwater is more efficient, which is why fish do it. On the surface, you have a wake, which is much worse drag than simply moving through a viscous medium.
Much of what was lost was lost before the Middle Ages. Most of the ancient contributions to science and mathematics happened before the first century BC. As Roman rule spread to encompass much of the Hellenistic world, interest in these subjects waned. There was a brief resurgence in interest for about a generation in the 2nd century AD (Galen, Ptolemy, and Heron all hail from this period), but other than that, ancient science was moribund by imperial times.
Do what we do for NYT registration: if the authentication is 'something you know' rather than 'something you have,' (eg, a password) just use a publicly-shared password.
Yes. Putting things in orbit is expensive. But you can get most of the advantages of LEO by merely going to the stratosphere.
A large solar collector stationed at 30 km up would be above the weather, and while it would still have day and night, and least day would be a few percent longer, and by allowing the collector to follow the sun, you could have noon-like light for most of the day.
You would want the lift gas to be hydrogen rather than helium. Reason 1 is that it's cheaper, but reason 2 is that the installation would need some propulsive abilities for station-keeping against wind. What I envision is electric engines powered by hydrogen fuel cells, so that the lift gas and fuel are the same. During the night, you consume hydrogen to remain on-station. During the day, you have electrical power to re-hydrolyze the water to regenerate lift and fuel. And, at 30 km, the pressure is too low for hydrogen and air to support combustion, so the flammability issues you'd have at lower altitudes are moot.
Another aspect of this design, or solar satellites, is that at 30 km up, you can see a few hundred km in any direction. At LEO, you have a horizon of about 1000 km, if I recall. This allows you to beam power to any antenna in this radius, so in order to be economical, this design need not compete with the price of power produced by large coal, nuclear, or hydro installations, but rather, with the price of power on the spot market. A high-altitude power plant could put power wherever it is needed (and by corollary, wherever it is most valuable.)
Sources? This is a straightforward application of integral calculus. Let R(t) be the function describing the revenue derived from a copyright as a function of time, and i the interest rate. Then the condition is met for
In all seriousness, five years is a little bit too short, except for ephemera. But it's not too short by much.
In terms of an accounting analysis, it is "fair" for copyright to expire when the present value of all future rents that could be extracted from the copyright is equal to the present value of all past rents that have been extracted from the copyright. At this point in time, the public receives somethign of equal in value to what they have paid the creator.
For a work of enduring value, that ensures a constant revenue stream to its copyright holder, this condition is met for various interest rates according to the following table:
2% 35 yr 3% 23 yr 4% 17 yr 5% 14 yr 6% 12 yr 7% 10 yr
For ephemeral works, the copyright expiration condition proposed above is met after a shorter amount of time, since the amount of revenue that can be extracted from the copyright is smaller with each passing year.
The problem is analytically tractable for an exponentially decaying sales curve. If sales are k percent smaller in each passing year, then for an interest rate of 4%, the copyright expiration condition is met for various annual sales decay rates according to the following table:
0% 17 yr 1% 14 yr 2% 12 yr 5% 8 yr 10% 5 yr 20% 3 yr 50% 15 mo
However, keeping track of each work's sales curve would be a tremendous hassle, so I would propose giving creators the benefit of the doubt and assuming that all of their works are of enduring value, figuring an interest rate of around 4%, and granting a blanket 17-year copyright term.
Those less inclined to be generous might compute separate sales decay rates by class of work (books, periodicals, musical recordings, photographs, films, etc...)
Why is the change in coyote behavior surprising? If the fossil record has been correctly interpreted, before human beings came to this continent, they were a larger animal, and one that moved in packs rather than as a mostly solitary animal.
In areas where wolves were displaced but large ruminants remained, they resumed their former behaviors. Before they reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, the coyote pack had quite effectively picked up wolves' ecological niche.
Coyotes are opportunists extraordinaire. They will eat mice and berries, root through suburban trash, scavenge corpses, or be top predators, depending on where the food is at. Kind of like people for that matter. And no one who has considered the diversity of dog breeds should be surprised when even a small shift in behavior brings about a change in shape or size. The diversity of canine phenotypes is the amazing thing.
I've seen a video clip of a person using the implant. He was an older man who had originally been sighted, but had lost his vision several decades ago. An object was placed in front of him on a table, and he proceeded to move his head around in a circular pattern, kind of like a bird doing some sort of mating display. I think this motion multiplied the effective resolution of the device, giving him a better sense of where the object's boundaries were than if he'd held his head still.
After about 20 seconds, he announced, it's a cup, and he was on the verge of tears, and honestly, so was I. Increasing the resolution of the device is just a matter of engineering. The concept works.
Open-source code can't kill the commercial software industry, because much of the software that needs to be written would be useful to only a small number of firms, and the OSS model doesn't work well for software that has slim-to-nil utility for the general community.
There will be no open-source project to write the code for the XYZ-2912a widget interface, unless the 2912a becomes a popular widget, at which point the commercial coders already got paid.
Software for sale to the general public might be in danger eventually. Software consulting has job security.
Yeah, I kind of felt the last book was DA in a bad spot of life telling fans, "There, now don't bother me anymore." I won't take away from its few really great moments, ("He says he came willingly.") but while the other books had a feeling of being barely in control, that one just had an overarching air of heavyhanded authorial intervention throughout.
Tetris (and good puzzle games in general) are an interesting case. No one would pay $50 to pay Tetris now (and we didn't then, either...) because Tetris doesn't provide the endorphin-rush that drives the mainstream game industry. But over the course of a lifetime, most of will spend a lot more time playing tetris (or minesweepter, or...shudder... solitaire) than we will playing Quake. Tetris is a fun toy to mash buttons on when you need five minutes' diversion, and it never gets old because it starts out about as old as it will ever get. And games like that are still being made. !Fishy! is a great example.
But then, I'm speaking as someone whose hard drive contains no games more recent than Civ II.
At sunset, the moon is already hot, so your ability to radiate is impaired by the thermal radiation from the moon beneath you. And you have to leave before it gets dark, because then you can't see anything.
In an ideal world, people would do the Right Thing because it was the Right Thing. In this one, they sometimes do the Right Thing because they are prideful and don't want to be shown up by those they have contempt for. But at least they are doing the Right Thing, and that is a Good Thing.
And the Internet Archive can snarf and collate them both, anyway. With the cost of hard drive space doing what it's doing, in four or five years, the entire print Public Domain will fit in few thousand dollars worth of storage space.
On the other hand, until you get further away from the earth, you're taking in 1000 W / m^2 on the side facing the sun, and you have to get rid of that, too. The Apollo missions landed at lunar dawn for a reason.
But I thought, much to the chagrin of Adobe et pals, that U.S. Courts had repeatedly denied font copyrightability. While fonts are often patented, and the code used to generate the letters can be copyrighted, the letterforms themselves are not copyrighted. And if no copyright resides in the letters, the GPL is toothless, isn't it?
Thomas Jefferson. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is on the back. One of the more lucid bits of artwork from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, many would-be theories of everything are in precisely this position: they predict the existence of some particle or phenomenon that while so far we've been successful in not observing, the parameters of the theory are sufficiently broad that we cannot perform all the experiments that might lead to that particle's observation.
Now, a scientific theory must be falsifiable by observational evidence.
Under this definition, "X exists" is not a valid scientific theory, because the falsification test, observing its non-existence, cannot be performed.
Not that I disagree with you in the main, but your ideas of what constitute valid science should be enlarged.
Most U.S. limits on, er, questionable business practices stem from a populist backlash in the early 20th century. I see no way for a populist movement to form under China's political system without a general revolution.
However, either of these designs will require serious reconstruction work at canaveral: they are substantially taller than the assembled shuttle, and so will not be able to be built in the present shuttle assembly building, nor be able to use the present launch pad.
If you look through the decision (and even the dissenting opinion, for that matter), the court seems to be saying that they are deliberately not setting a binding precedent here, but are saying that insofar as this particular case is a close call, and local government ought to know best what is and isn't a valid public use, that the Court defers to the judgment of the state and local councils and courts that considered the case before it did.
Even the dissenting opinion didn't call the takings for the whole development unconstitutional, but only for that portion of it that was going to be used for offices and leased parking. The rest, though it was going to be privately owned, would be publically accessible, and that was public enough for them.
The court went so far out of its way to defer to other bodies in this case, that all this does is move the more general battle down to the states. If a legislature wants to decide this issue for once and for all in their state, the door is still open for them to do so.
I'm just curious how many people, when their television goes black, will realize they didn't watch it much anymore anyway and not replace it.
It's worth rereading the Onion article: "Television ends."
Of course, if intelligence facilitates increased affluence, and affluence increases the survivability of those who probably wouldn't successfully reproduce "in the wild," then this should come as no surprise.
Swimming underwater is more efficient, which is why fish do it. On the surface, you have a wake, which is much worse drag than simply moving through a viscous medium.
Much of what was lost was lost before the Middle Ages. Most of the ancient contributions to science and mathematics happened before the first century BC. As Roman rule spread to encompass much of the Hellenistic world, interest in these subjects waned. There was a brief resurgence in interest for about a generation in the 2nd century AD (Galen, Ptolemy, and Heron all hail from this period), but other than that, ancient science was moribund by imperial times.
Do what we do for NYT registration: if the authentication is 'something you know' rather than 'something you have,' (eg, a password) just use a publicly-shared password.
Yes. Putting things in orbit is expensive. But you can get most of the advantages of LEO by merely going to the stratosphere.
A large solar collector stationed at 30 km up would be above the weather, and while it would still have day and night, and least day would be a few percent longer, and by allowing the collector to follow the sun, you could have noon-like light for most of the day.
You would want the lift gas to be hydrogen rather than helium. Reason 1 is that it's cheaper, but reason 2 is that the installation would need some propulsive abilities for station-keeping against wind. What I envision is electric engines powered by hydrogen fuel cells, so that the lift gas and fuel are the same. During the night, you consume hydrogen to remain on-station. During the day, you have electrical power to re-hydrolyze the water to regenerate lift and fuel. And, at 30 km, the pressure is too low for hydrogen and air to support combustion, so the flammability issues you'd have at lower altitudes are moot.
Another aspect of this design, or solar satellites, is that at 30 km up, you can see a few hundred km in any direction. At LEO, you have a horizon of about 1000 km, if I recall. This allows you to beam power to any antenna in this radius, so in order to be economical, this design need not compete with the price of power produced by large coal, nuclear, or hydro installations, but rather, with the price of power on the spot market. A high-altitude power plant could put power wherever it is needed (and by corollary, wherever it is most valuable.)
Int(0,T) R(t) * exp[-it] dt = Int(T,inf) R(t) * exp[-it] dt
or
Int(0,T) R(t) * exp[-it] dt = 1/2 * Int(0,inf) R(t) * exp[-it] dt
In terms of an accounting analysis, it is "fair" for copyright to expire when the present value of all future rents that could be extracted from the copyright is equal to the present value of all past rents that have been extracted from the copyright. At this point in time, the public receives somethign of equal in value to what they have paid the creator.
For a work of enduring value, that ensures a constant revenue stream to its copyright holder, this condition is met for various interest rates according to the following table:
For ephemeral works, the copyright expiration condition proposed above is met after a shorter amount of time, since the amount of revenue that can be extracted from the copyright is smaller with each passing year.
The problem is analytically tractable for an exponentially decaying sales curve. If sales are k percent smaller in each passing year, then for an interest rate of 4%, the copyright expiration condition is met for various annual sales decay rates according to the following table:
However, keeping track of each work's sales curve would be a tremendous hassle, so I would propose giving creators the benefit of the doubt and assuming that all of their works are of enduring value, figuring an interest rate of around 4%, and granting a blanket 17-year copyright term.
Those less inclined to be generous might compute separate sales decay rates by class of work (books, periodicals, musical recordings, photographs, films, etc...)
Why is the change in coyote behavior surprising? If the fossil record has been correctly interpreted, before human beings came to this continent, they were a larger animal, and one that moved in packs rather than as a mostly solitary animal. In areas where wolves were displaced but large ruminants remained, they resumed their former behaviors. Before they reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, the coyote pack had quite effectively picked up wolves' ecological niche. Coyotes are opportunists extraordinaire. They will eat mice and berries, root through suburban trash, scavenge corpses, or be top predators, depending on where the food is at. Kind of like people for that matter. And no one who has considered the diversity of dog breeds should be surprised when even a small shift in behavior brings about a change in shape or size. The diversity of canine phenotypes is the amazing thing.
I've seen a video clip of a person using the implant. He was an older man who had originally been sighted, but had lost his vision several decades ago. An object was placed in front of him on a table, and he proceeded to move his head around in a circular pattern, kind of like a bird doing some sort of mating display. I think this motion multiplied the effective resolution of the device, giving him a better sense of where the object's boundaries were than if he'd held his head still.
After about 20 seconds, he announced, it's a cup, and he was on the verge of tears, and honestly, so was I. Increasing the resolution of the device is just a matter of engineering. The concept works.
There will be no open-source project to write the code for the XYZ-2912a widget interface, unless the 2912a becomes a popular widget, at which point the commercial coders already got paid.
Software for sale to the general public might be in danger eventually. Software consulting has job security.
Coding isn't inherently stressful, but working under fear of unemployment is. Now, if you're already unemployed ...
Yeah, I kind of felt the last book was DA in a bad spot of life telling fans, "There, now don't bother me anymore." I won't take away from its few really great moments, ("He says he came willingly.") but while the other books had a feeling of being barely in control, that one just had an overarching air of heavyhanded authorial intervention throughout.
But then, I'm speaking as someone whose hard drive contains no games more recent than Civ II.
At sunset, the moon is already hot, so your ability to radiate is impaired by the thermal radiation from the moon beneath you. And you have to leave before it gets dark, because then you can't see anything.
In an ideal world, people would do the Right Thing because it was the Right Thing. In this one, they sometimes do the Right Thing because they are prideful and don't want to be shown up by those they have contempt for. But at least they are doing the Right Thing, and that is a Good Thing. And the Internet Archive can snarf and collate them both, anyway. With the cost of hard drive space doing what it's doing, in four or five years, the entire print Public Domain will fit in few thousand dollars worth of storage space.
On the other hand, until you get further away from the earth, you're taking in 1000 W / m^2 on the side facing the sun, and you have to get rid of that, too. The Apollo missions landed at lunar dawn for a reason.
My experience with pass-sentences is that even a moderately long pass-sentence is difficult to type error-free, blind, more than 30-40% of the time.
But I thought, much to the chagrin of Adobe et pals, that U.S. Courts had repeatedly denied font copyrightability. While fonts are often patented, and the code used to generate the letters can be copyrighted, the letterforms themselves are not copyrighted. And if no copyright resides in the letters, the GPL is toothless, isn't it?
Thomas Jefferson. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is on the back. One of the more lucid bits of artwork from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.