2) All human form and function, including consciousness, is a product of evolution. ie. naturally occurring, essentially random.
The notion that evolution is essentially about "Random Selection" is perhaps the most common misconception that
the fundies use to make evolution sound implausible.
Natural Selection is a theory about evolution, whereas evolution is an
observed fact. And the theory is called "Natural Selection", not "Random Selection".
It's actually random genetic variation followed by competitive selection of individuals.
Can you give an example? We don't let the KKK spout their hate so freely any more, and it has worked wonders in diminishing their presence. It sure as hell hasn't made them look like the good guys.
That's not really true. We don't let the KKK murder people or trespass on private property in order to burn crosses, but they're free to hold marches and to spout their hate in the same manner as others spout political speech.
It could be argued that allowing them to do this freely is what's responsible for diminishing their presence.
I think it is time the people realise that the government is an instrument of the PEOPLE, they work for and represent the PEOPLE. I think alot of people have forgotten this.
The American government represents the American "people". But the question is, who are the American "people"? Sadly, the Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that a corporation is a person, with the same constitiutional rights as a human person. And as "people', corporations are immortal, incredibly wealthy, and exhibit psychopathic behavior.
So the American government, over the past 121 years, has increasingly represented
primarily the corporate "people" who have all the bribe money, and relegated the human "people" to second-class status.
The real troubling thing here is that major news outlets including The Wall Street Journal, ABC, and even our beloved Slashdot are playing right into the hands of Exxon, DPI, and whoever else is behind the video.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the major news outlets are owned by companies such as Exxon, etc., and are being instructed to report it with the official company spin.
In theory, there is nothing stopping them from deciding that France should have backed them in the Iraq war, pointing the.fr SOA record at their own server, and redirecting all traffic for.gov.fr IPs via their own service.
If that came to pass, there is nothing stopping France from setting up their own alternate root servers. Or the UN from doing the same.
It would be a shame to see the Internet balkanized like that, though.
but where is the financial incentive for programmers? I love open source, and even though programmers contribute to the greater good of the world, how do you survive? I guess it's just one of those questions I never really got. I work in a small medical device company writing java, and I could not imagine them using my software for free -- I need to eat too.
Think of programming as necessary infrastructure for a business, not as its core business. Businesses have a lot of costs that aren't related to the core business.
For instance, employees need a place to park their cars when they come to work. Most businesses don't charge their employees to park; they don't consider the employee parking lot as a profit center. And yet, the people who build and maintain the parking lot have to eat too.
Just because the business doesn't charge its employees money to park, doesn't mean the guy laying down the tar and painting the lines in the parking lot has to work for free. And just because the business makes its software open-source, doesn't mean the programmer that did the work-for-hire won't get paid.
Perhaps we should aim more for a "Jetsons" future. You don't have to lock your car, just press a button and it folds itself into a briefcase. Then you can carry it wherever you go.
Also, quite a few stories require that the spacecraft be a certain distance from the gravity well of the solar system before they can use their FTL engines.
Because if you use them too close to a gravity well, you run into hyperspace dragons that eat starships!
I'm surprised there haven't been overtures to ban political donations from corporations - I think it would fix a lot of problems.
Actually, there were. I remember hearing a lot of talk about exactly that, back in 1976 when I was 12 years old. I imagine the debate had been going on long before I ever heard about it.
I was too young at the time to understand the details, but I suspect I was hearing about a case that the Supreme Court was hearing.
As it turns out, the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that political donations are a form of free speech, and since corporations are legally considered to be people, their political donations
cannot be banned.
"Predatory pricing" is traditionally a term that refers to when a merchant tries to sell a product at a price that is vastly less than what the competitors are selling their product for.
No, it isn't. What you describe is called "competition".
"Predatory pricing" is when a merchant tries to sell a product for less than cost in an effort
to destroy its competitors and establish a monopoly. In effect, the merchant would be *paying* customers to take the product.
In order to do this effectively, the predatory
merchant must have sufficient resources to
survive while selling at a loss. A small merchant
is less likely to be able to do this; predators
pretty much have to be big, like Microsoft or Walmart.
Red Hat, SuSe, and Mandrake aren't selling at
a loss. Therefore, their behavior is just
plain old competition.
It goes deeper than holding CEOs accountable... if you held shareholders accountable, then things certainly _would_ change, but everyone would cry unfair, and it would defeat the point of a corporation.
Who are these shareholders? I suspect that if you did a study, you'd discover that for most publicly-held corporations, particularly the largest multinationals, the shareholders are predominantly other corporations. Any corporation whose shares are more than 50% owned by other corporations has effectively escaped from direct human control.
I belive Gotham City is the comic book version of New York City. In fact NYC used to be called Gotham. On a side note, I believe comic book Metropolis was based on Chicago.
I recall hearing a writer from DC Comics giving a talk at a convention, back when I was in high school. He said that Gotham City was indeed a parallel-universe New York City, and that Metropolis was a parallel-universe Detroit.
Seems the discussion here has been mainly about ripping off the retailer. I think the idea of erasing them after purchase for privacy reasons is far more improtant.
However, another way to look at it is as a cheap way to get tags to use at home. I've got large collections of CDs, videos, and books in my house, and it's always a real pain in the ass trying to find something I haven't used in a couple years. If I'm getting all these RFID tags for free in the products I buy anyway, and I'm able to erase and rewrite them easily, then perhaps I can remove them from the products and redeploy them into my books, CDs, etc, and then use an RFID reader to more easily find things.
Sure, it would be a long-term project to get everything tagged and inventoried, but so what? I'd be able to easily find things I'd already tagged, and if I have to search for something that wasn't tagged, it would be easy enough to tag it once I find it.
Well, wouldn't the women actually want the images of the cop hitting her on camera a-la Rodney King style.
The issue is the cop using the surveillance to track the woman's movements. If she's dating someone else, the cop can learn this and then make excuses to harass that guy and scare him off. He can develop a profile of the woman that gives him a great deal of power over this woman, and with no safeguards in place to "watch the watcher", he's free to abuse that information as much as he likes.
In the UK the Data Protection Act (well, an extension to it under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 IIRC) specifies that you have the right to request any information that may be held about you from any data controller - this includes obtaining any CCTV footage you appear in.
I live in Boston, and last time I checked, UK law was not applicable here.
Are you planning on doing something you shouldn't? If so, that's why the cameras are there.
So if a police officer is attracted to someone and uses the cameras to stalk them, to harass and scare off anyone else that person dates, that's not a problem. That person chose not to date the cop, so clearly that person was asking for it.
It's such a good day!
When you trust something like this, you're not just trusting the government in general; you're explicitly extending that trust each and every individual who has access to the surveillance. You're trusting not just the good cops, but also the corrupt ones who will abuse the cameras to select their next victims.
It's too bad that they (the shows' producers/writers) have already stated that they don't want too much or any intermingling of plots and characters between shows.
That's not what they said. Brad Wright and Robert Cooper's exact words, from the "Lowdown" last week, were as follows:
(Bob)
Originally it was more of a hand-off, and now both worlds had to co-exist.
(Brad)
And not step on top of each other. And, more importantly, we didn't
want to have a situation where the solution
in one universe would be to
"Just call the other guys!"
It sounds to me like it doesn't preclude cross-show plots; it's just that they want to
reduce the burden of maintaining continuity
between the two shows by limiting the interface
between the two.
Unless I got it mixed up, I think they may have goofed already: Why is Dr Weir involved with the Atlantis program when she said in this season's 1st episode of SG-1 that she was going to be an ambassador of sorts among all the nations that now know about the Stargate and the various aliens?
No, that's not a screw-up. We won't know the details until tomorrow (well, this evening), but it seems clear to me that Dr. Weir is indeed leaving the SGC to take over negotiations with the other 11 countries that are signatories to the Antartica research treaty, and her role as leader of the Atlantis expedition will be a consequence of that.
When an auto maker (or any product manufacturer), recognizes a safety problem in their product (even if it is generally caused by user ignorance). They send out postal mail to registered consumers, post notices at places where the product is sold and absorb the cost of updating and replacing the defective product.
Of course, it depends on what the alleged "defect" is. If a user drives his car across his neighbor's lawn and runs over his neighbor's kid who was playing in an inflatable wading pool, and then just laughs and says "not my fault, it's the auto maker's responsibility to build a car that doesn't run people over", I doubt the auto maker will agree that this is a defect in the car.
If it's not fun to organize items into folders, how is it anymore fun to add metadata to a file?
Metadata solves the same problem that folders solve. The only meaningful difference that I see is that metadata allows you to have multiple ways to file a document.
Suppose I have a folder for my "vacation 1999" photos. I also have a folder for "photos of my nephew timmy". In which folder do I file a photo of Timmy taken during my visit to his family during my 1999 vacation? Perhaps I've submitted this photo in a contest and it won first prize, and I have a third folder for "published photos" that it needs to be in.
Sure, I can waste space with multiple copies that have no indication they're really the same photo, or I can screw around with hard links or symlinks, but managing multiple views like this with folders is a pain in the butt. Using metadata instead as the primary way of organizing these photos would make it a lot easier to manage this.
Seems to me that they are spending more money developing all these technologies than they stand to gain by knocking out piracy.
You're missing the point of these new laws. The idea is that it used to cost more to produce an episode of a TV show than the studios paid for it, and so the producer of the show had to sell his copyrights to a studio in order to get them to finance production. The studio would collect advertising revenue to make up for the difference and turn a profit, and then reap much larger profits if the show runs long enough to be worth syndicating after it goes off the air.
The current state of computer technology has reduced the costs of the technical aspects of television production to the point where an episode can be produced for less than the cost the networks pay. This makes it possible for a producer to sell his show directly to a network and keep ownership of his copyrights.
In the past, the studios enjoyed a natural monopoly because of the high costs of production, but today's computer technology threatens that monopoly.
The consumer market for camcorders has traditionally been targeted toward things like parents recording their childrens' birthday parties, and the low-cost equipment in this market segment has gotten to the point where it creates broadcast-quality footage. Combine that with cheap PCs that can do decent non-linear editing and decent 3D modelling, and you can put together a low-budget personal studio for a few thousand dollars that can do what ten years ago would have required several million dollars' worth of equipment. You still need talent, of course, but there are plenty of people with talent in the world, and not all of them are contractually bound to a major studio.
All these "piracy" laws being proposed really have nothing to do with file sharing and such; their true intent is to outlaw any possibility of competition for the formerly-natural monopolies.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're pronouncing it in the field, and pronouncing th letters, then it should have been pronounced
"Let's warp to planet Victor India India and moon India India India"
Kids should have the right to sue their parents for endangering their lives by denying them vaccines.
The notion that evolution is essentially about "Random Selection" is perhaps the most common misconception that the fundies use to make evolution sound implausible.
Natural Selection is a theory about evolution, whereas evolution is an observed fact. And the theory is called "Natural Selection", not "Random Selection". It's actually random genetic variation followed by competitive selection of individuals.
That's not really true. We don't let the KKK murder people or trespass on private property in order to burn crosses, but they're free to hold marches and to spout their hate in the same manner as others spout political speech. It could be argued that allowing them to do this freely is what's responsible for diminishing their presence.
That's kind of like saying if an auto mechanic repairs a car that's used to deliver pizzas, then the auto mechanic's job is to deliver pizzas.
The American government represents the American "people". But the question is, who are the American "people"? Sadly, the Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that a corporation is a person, with the same constitiutional rights as a human person. And as "people', corporations are immortal, incredibly wealthy, and exhibit psychopathic behavior.
So the American government, over the past 121 years, has increasingly represented primarily the corporate "people" who have all the bribe money, and relegated the human "people" to second-class status.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the major news outlets are owned by companies such as Exxon, etc., and are being instructed to report it with the official company spin.
If that came to pass, there is nothing stopping France from setting up their own alternate root servers. Or the UN from doing the same.
It would be a shame to see the Internet balkanized like that, though.
Wikipedia - Alternative DNS root
OpenNIC
Think of programming as necessary infrastructure for a business, not as its core business. Businesses have a lot of costs that aren't related to the core business.
For instance, employees need a place to park their cars when they come to work. Most businesses don't charge their employees to park; they don't consider the employee parking lot as a profit center. And yet, the people who build and maintain the parking lot have to eat too.
Just because the business doesn't charge its employees money to park, doesn't mean the guy laying down the tar and painting the lines in the parking lot has to work for free. And just because the business makes its software open-source, doesn't mean the programmer that did the work-for-hire won't get paid.
Perhaps we should aim more for a "Jetsons" future. You don't have to lock your car, just press a button and it folds itself into a briefcase. Then you can carry it wherever you go.
Because if you use them too close to a gravity well, you run into hyperspace dragons that eat starships!
Actually, there were. I remember hearing a lot of talk about exactly that, back in 1976 when I was 12 years old. I imagine the debate had been going on long before I ever heard about it.
I was too young at the time to understand the details, but I suspect I was hearing about a case that the Supreme Court was hearing. As it turns out, the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that political donations are a form of free speech, and since corporations are legally considered to be people, their political donations cannot be banned.
No, it isn't. What you describe is called "competition".
"Predatory pricing" is when a merchant tries to sell a product for less than cost in an effort to destroy its competitors and establish a monopoly. In effect, the merchant would be *paying* customers to take the product.
In order to do this effectively, the predatory merchant must have sufficient resources to survive while selling at a loss. A small merchant is less likely to be able to do this; predators pretty much have to be big, like Microsoft or Walmart.
Red Hat, SuSe, and Mandrake aren't selling at a loss. Therefore, their behavior is just plain old competition.
Who are these shareholders? I suspect that if you did a study, you'd discover that for most publicly-held corporations, particularly the largest multinationals, the shareholders are predominantly other corporations. Any corporation whose shares are more than 50% owned by other corporations has effectively escaped from direct human control.
I recall hearing a writer from DC Comics giving a talk at a convention, back when I was in high school. He said that Gotham City was indeed a parallel-universe New York City, and that Metropolis was a parallel-universe Detroit.
Seems the discussion here has been mainly about ripping off the retailer. I think the idea of erasing them after purchase for privacy reasons is far more improtant.
However, another way to look at it is as a cheap way to get tags to use at home. I've got large collections of CDs, videos, and books in my house, and it's always a real pain in the ass trying to find something I haven't used in a couple years. If I'm getting all these RFID tags for free in the products I buy anyway, and I'm able to erase and rewrite them easily, then perhaps I can remove them from the products and redeploy them into my books, CDs, etc, and then use an RFID reader to more easily find things.
Sure, it would be a long-term project to get everything tagged and inventoried, but so what? I'd be able to easily find things I'd already tagged, and if I have to search for something that wasn't tagged, it would be easy enough to tag it once I find it.
Nonsense. If there's no copyright, then there's no need for the GPL in the first place.
The issue is the cop using the surveillance to track the woman's movements. If she's dating someone else, the cop can learn this and then make excuses to harass that guy and scare him off. He can develop a profile of the woman that gives him a great deal of power over this woman, and with no safeguards in place to "watch the watcher", he's free to abuse that information as much as he likes.
I live in Boston, and last time I checked, UK law was not applicable here.
So if a police officer is attracted to someone and uses the cameras to stalk them, to harass and scare off anyone else that person dates, that's not a problem. That person chose not to date the cop, so clearly that person was asking for it. It's such a good day!
When you trust something like this, you're not just trusting the government in general; you're explicitly extending that trust each and every individual who has access to the surveillance. You're trusting not just the good cops, but also the corrupt ones who will abuse the cameras to select their next victims.
That's not what they said. Brad Wright and Robert Cooper's exact words, from the "Lowdown" last week, were as follows:
It sounds to me like it doesn't preclude cross-show plots; it's just that they want to reduce the burden of maintaining continuity between the two shows by limiting the interface between the two.
No, that's not a screw-up. We won't know the details until tomorrow (well, this evening), but it seems clear to me that Dr. Weir is indeed leaving the SGC to take over negotiations with the other 11 countries that are signatories to the Antartica research treaty, and her role as leader of the Atlantis expedition will be a consequence of that.
to AntarcticaonOf course, it depends on what the alleged "defect" is. If a user drives his car across his neighbor's lawn and runs over his neighbor's kid who was playing in an inflatable wading pool, and then just laughs and says "not my fault, it's the auto maker's responsibility to build a car that doesn't run people over", I doubt the auto maker will agree that this is a defect in the car.
Metadata solves the same problem that folders solve. The only meaningful difference that I see is that metadata allows you to have multiple ways to file a document.
Suppose I have a folder for my "vacation 1999" photos. I also have a folder for "photos of my nephew timmy". In which folder do I file a photo of Timmy taken during my visit to his family during my 1999 vacation? Perhaps I've submitted this photo in a contest and it won first prize, and I have a third folder for "published photos" that it needs to be in.
Sure, I can waste space with multiple copies that have no indication they're really the same photo, or I can screw around with hard links or symlinks, but managing multiple views like this with folders is a pain in the butt. Using metadata instead as the primary way of organizing these photos would make it a lot easier to manage this.
You're missing the point of these new laws. The idea is that it used to cost more to produce an episode of a TV show than the studios paid for it, and so the producer of the show had to sell his copyrights to a studio in order to get them to finance production. The studio would collect advertising revenue to make up for the difference and turn a profit, and then reap much larger profits if the show runs long enough to be worth syndicating after it goes off the air.
The current state of computer technology has reduced the costs of the technical aspects of television production to the point where an episode can be produced for less than the cost the networks pay. This makes it possible for a producer to sell his show directly to a network and keep ownership of his copyrights. In the past, the studios enjoyed a natural monopoly because of the high costs of production, but today's computer technology threatens that monopoly.
The consumer market for camcorders has traditionally been targeted toward things like parents recording their childrens' birthday parties, and the low-cost equipment in this market segment has gotten to the point where it creates broadcast-quality footage. Combine that with cheap PCs that can do decent non-linear editing and decent 3D modelling, and you can put together a low-budget personal studio for a few thousand dollars that can do what ten years ago would have required several million dollars' worth of equipment. You still need talent, of course, but there are plenty of people with talent in the world, and not all of them are contractually bound to a major studio.
All these "piracy" laws being proposed really have nothing to do with file sharing and such; their true intent is to outlaw any possibility of competition for the formerly-natural monopolies.