In such cases, it is very difficult to ascertain the will of the people involved - they lack education in the options, they lack the freedom to discuss and consider and experiment with them, etc. They risk public censure or other punishments by trying.
So really, in that case, I say... is someone in that situation really free to hold their different view?
Rwandan Genocide was an example of standing back and not doing something when we should have. So was the Holocaust. (By 'We', I mean the wealthy western world that makes claims about championing freedom and democracy and human rights).
BTW, the fact that the situation in Iraq may have required the removal of a dictator does not and should not be taken as suggesting that the follow on operations were well planned, executed, or that their results have been very good. But that doesn't mean that someone didn't need to get Saddam out of power. It just means the job was not done anything near to flawlessly.
And as to your last sentence, I could not agree more. I think we (including my country that did not go) should have went to Iraq. But it should have been for the right reasons (the reasons occasionally alluded to, but probably not meant... and not for the economic ones I suspect). And it should have been in the right way.
I think anyone can admit the situations of real world geopolitics have complexities and poorly implemented plans can result in untold suffering. At the same time, I don't think some antiquated idea of national soveriegnty should trump basic human rights and freedoms.
There are no clear, easy answers. That is why we (collectively) still haven't got this right.
A key example of this from my old CF reserve unit: We had young men in there of 18 years of age who could go places and die for their country *but who could not have a beer in the mess!*. So, it was okay to give them a firearm and let them call in artillery, but Dear Lord don't let them touch a light beer. (Well, combining the two is a bad idea, but that's not really what I was getting at....)
Of course, this just led to the 'blind eye'. Many of us felt if you were old enough to wear the uniform, take the oath, and kill and die for your country, you could at least have a beer from time to time.
Sadly, the benevolent monarchy often gives way to the malignant monarchy, the inept monarchy, the corrupt monarchy, the repressive monarchy, or any other of a range of flavours of absolute (often less than competent) rule.
And it is debatable whether monarchy is the best system from an economic point of view. So far, depending on how you do your math, democracy might have monarchy edged on that score.
We're seeing the demise of monarchies the world over (last 200 years) and the increase of democracies. Or things that call themselves democracies, but that's a whole other discussion....
It does matter if you are in China or in the USA or in Canada if you are someone who has a dissenting view. In China, if you are an inconvenient Tibetan, something unfortunate might happen to you. In Canada, you will probably be granted a public soapbox.
Whereas I think part of the problem in Iraq may have been a poor post-invasion security and rebuilding plan, part of it probably was the belief that just making people happy by kicking out their obnoxious and villanous leader was sufficient to make them love you. As it turns out, they have more expectations (things improving security wise, economy wise, freedom wise, etc... even to the point of not being realistic expectations). When those expectations are shorted, they get pissed off. Voila! Today!
But the incredibly naive theory that all ideologies are equivalent or that where you live or what kind of regime you live under is quite funny. The mod should have been 'Funny' not 'Insightful'.
It is possible for us to differ (person to person) on particular values. But few of us would say that the right to be arbitrarily arrested, shot or disappeared is a good thing. Few of us would say that a state brutally oppressing minorities was a good thing. There really *are* some commonly agreeble points. This is how some world bodies have developed a generalized concepts of international law and human rights.
It *does* matter what your value system is, when it threatens to impinge on the rights of others. It is *your* value system and should only be considered applicable to *you*. The minute you start breaking that boundary, you are infringing others' basic freedoms.
It *does* matter if your government oppresses you and others or not. Yes, certainly, there is a theory that enough people oppressed badly enough might maybe rebel, but revolution without outside support is difficult. And while we blissfully wait for revolution to uplift people (or for people to 'uplift themselves' which is a grouping of people into a personified entity that probably does an injustice to the reality), innocent people are oppressed in many cases. Or killed.
How anyone can find a practice of ignoring or standng off while this goes on defensible is beyond me. You can spin all the fine words about freedom and compassion and the right to choose your own fate, but if people have no information to know about their alternatives, no freedom to explore them, no ability to discuss them without going to jail or disappearing, then that's a horrendous situation that all the local will in the world might not fix.
Sometimes, it takes a big 200 lbs gorilla to come in and lay down a new way of doing things. And then step back and let the people sort their own problems out when they finally *have* the freedom to be pissed off, dissappointed, etc.
Disagree with me if you will... I accord you that freedom (and you'd take it anyway). But realize that you have it and not everyone does because not every government lets them.
Two points:
First, I literally mean that I can recall absolutely useless facts... and *not* ones that are important to me, just ones that happened, for some chaotic reason, to stick in my head. Now, you might try the unproven assumption fallacy by trying to reason that these were important to me, but with the particular things I'm thinking of, I fail to see how. So I submit that one sometimes does remember utterly unimportant details very accurately.
Second, remembering things that prevent my @$$ from getting kicked (such as anniversaries, etc) is non-trivial and actually matters. Not in and of itself, but because the consequences of not remembering are significant. Ergo they do matter because they matter to someone who will give you grief if you forget. So, yes, you can fail to remember these things too and they still matter.
Sorry, that one small part was spoken tongue-in-cheek based on the fact cats sometimes won't let on they notice *anything* around them that they choose to ignore.
I am quite sure cats do remember things. I'm not sure how good their memory is (I think a dogs might be superior), but I am sure they can recall things like smells, friends, what the sound of an opening can means, etc. Or at least they can form behaviour patterns off of these things, which seems to suggest recall.
Hmmm. This doesn't exactly explain how one can, with crystal clarity, remember absolutely useless bits of information when not being able to retain information that is far more important to ones success in life. For instance, one can forget ones fiance's birthday or the day you got engaged or little things like Valentine's day, while remembering the gram molecular weight of ethanol or the exact number of Tribbles sat on by James T. Kirk.... so I'm not sure that evolution has strictly wired us for efficiency.
The truth is evolution is a coarse brush. In order for something to offer a significant chance of being genetically propagated, it has to offer a sizeable benefit (25%+ if I recall my conversation with one of the world's better population modellers working for CSIRO). Less than that and it will tend to get lost in the noise.
So I'm sure that memory setup the way it has been (to forget some pains, to remember others) has been something we've grown into, but I'm also sure some element of it prevades almost every intelligent animal as well. I bet our cat has that same setup (well, there is the claim they may in fact remember nothing, but I know too well this is just propaganda...). But I wouldn't say the system was yet 'fully optimized' for being able to deal with future events.
The fact is, there probably is no fully optimized configuration, given an infinite range of possible future events. So we're probably in that fuzzy zone of mostly useful in most situations, which is right where we should be (that is to say though I disagree with the particulars of the comment, I agree with the general conclusion).
Sure, we can probably enhance memory via drugs or nanos eventually for certain things. Handy, perhaps an advantage. We may be able to help blot out trauma (a pill, for instance, for a recent victim of physical trauma so the trauma does not become the stuff of recurrent nightmare but fades from their memory over time). So these applications would have some use. But giving everyone an eidetic memory might not be either a good idea nor terribly feasible.
Depends what you mean by winning. If the new generation of gecko browsers drive MS into upgrading their security, adding tabbed browsing, and a host of other things that the 'others' now do, then really, the war will be won. Some people think the point is to get rid of M$. The truth is, the point is to get better software out there for everyone. And in that sense, Firefox and the others can make this a reality.
One thing that really bothers me about free health care is this attitude that any private hospitals will mean the immediate demise of our entire health care system.
The funnier aspect is that we've *had* private medical clinics, MRI clinics, etc. for *years* and they've functioned just fine as an adjunct to the public system. I think the fear is that it is a 'thin edge of the wedge' scenario - let in a private hospital, let enough people start to use it, then they'll say 'why should we also fund the public one?' etc. I mean, it isn't entirely implausible that people might take up that attitude. At the same time, throwing money at our current health care system without accompanying internal reform will not necessarily resolve the issues either.
I'm a developer on SIP-based PBX software and on proprietary PBX software also (both from a vendor you'd recognize).
SIP has opened up some options, but the implementation has revealed lots of little gotchas along the way.
And I was just (in the middle of this email) speaking to a SIP architect from another vendor. His comment:
"SIP is great in the network, but not so good to the desktop".
My own observation was that SIP puts a lot of brains often into the end device, and the effect of that is to distribute the programming task and the troubleshooting task. That's more of a dev-side issue, but if you are a company looking at doing something with SIP, being aware of these sorts of difficulties/costs can be important.
To much IP law is creating a landmine for future development. It will be to the point that code gets completed and then is looked at by company attorneys for legal exposure, then gets recoded with inferior algorithms or less exspensively licensed libraries.
Totally agree. I worked for a company doing a flavour of MMORPG for the movie and TV industry, and we hit patents a lot - things involved, for instance, in rendering. You have a graphics card that can load X entities into it. You have N entities in the locally visible cell of your world, where N > X. So, how do you select a subset N' of N to display in your X capacity? Common sense would dictate you show the X closest objects in your line of sight. But guess what? That blisteringly obvious method is patented. So everyone gets around it by showing the (X-1) closest objects, then finding some suitably unique way to stick the last object in.... some work to avoid the obvious way to solve the problem because someone at the patent obvious was too dense to understand the requirement for a patent to be 'non-obvious'.
And this helps innovation? Having to spend cycles working around the obvious solutions to problems in order to avoid infringement? Somehow, that does not compute, even in Metric... (or SI)....
The Canadian Government, to my understanding, as dissected by CBC and their legal professor talking head, was not taking issue with every aspect of the case. RIM may well be in hot water for actual patent violations in some regards. But, where it pertained to the parts of RIM's service provided on machine in Canada, running technology developed here, providing services located here, on machines physically located here, they felt this clearly (by common prior practice, which is what I meant by tradition) meant that Canadian laws apply here and not US ones. Thereby the US Court, by extending its domain to these particular systems and services was in fact introducing a sovereignty issue. That is why the government here thinks there is a problem. There may in fact be other parts of the case where RIM is clearly wrong and infringing within US jurisdiction. But those particular services and servers were outside of US jurisdiction. And I'm fairly sure they don't consider Canadian-side service provision to be 'importing into the US'.
Hopefully that is clearer. I don't seek to convey the impression that RIM has commited no foul (I really can't speak to that) but to put some context on the particular aspect of the case which got the Canadian Government's attention.
Please also remember, this is not my theory, only what has been reported as the reason for Canadian Government interest.
You could get the CDPD modems as wireless cards. The non-wireless card car versions could kick out 25 watts or more IIRC. They gave really decent coverage ranges in Red Deer (fairly flat) with only 3 towers as a result.
Hmm, you make it sound like something existing is strictly some sort of Darwinian thing and we'd be snuffing out all lawyers or all IP lawyers if we made any changes to current IP law.
Let us take the other side of the coin: IP law has been getting more teeth, patents and copyrights have been extending in scope and duration, over the last 20-30 years most notably. Is this right?
This whole 'buy a patent, sue everyone else' and 'failure to acknowledge spontaneous creation/first past the patent post' system are a result of our legal frameworks. These are not natural creations - we made them up and lobbied them into their current state.
So if we could create them, we should darn well be able to realize their flaws and tear them down. This isn't the big nasty public crushing the heads of baby seal-like lawyers with large clubs... this is the case of a profession that has lobbied the government (and been paid for it) to create legal frameworks that allow more suing and more quashing of competition and innovation.
Some amount of protection is probably sensible, but I think we're pretty far beyond the original intents and equally far beyond good sense. So applying some corrective measures isn't some sort of Draconic Evil... it would, if we could manage it, simply be restoring freedom to innovate and develop - which ostensibly is a good thing.
Should that not exist, to use your own leading question?
Yes, I think this is the 'technical issue'. The reason the Canadian Government is involved has more to do with the fact that the servers and back end services that make this all work reside in Canada. So attempting to go after RIM in this particular means attempting to apply the associated patents etc. across the border into someone else's country. That's what has the Canadian government involving itself.
I think that's entirely wrongheaded. Take off your tinfoil hat for a minute. CBC had some good coverage of this issue last night.
The issue here is that the US court is trying to apply an outrageous scope to their own IP law - well beyond their borders onto systems physically present and using technology developed in Canada. This violates a number of traditions in the legal area (perhaps even aggreements or laws, but I'm a bit vague her) that say essentially that if something resides in your country, your own IP law applies. The US judge has made a decision which extends US IP law into Canadian space.
The Canadian government is thus getting involved as a matter of national sovereignty and to forestall a whole whack of these. And to protect Canadian business interests from this ridiculous decision - it would effectively open up a whack of Canadian businesses to suits under a vastly changed understanding of how IP law is supposed to work and it would infringe Canada's sovereignty to have its own laws that differ from those that operate within our southern neighbour.
This is perfectly well a matter of Canadian government legal, political and economic interest. It has nothing to do with RIM particularly, they just happen to be the test case. This is about a US court that is letting itself exceed its domain and pass judgements with wide ranging ramifications that reach into other countries.
I think the simple logic that the US should be applying here is this: If it would piss us off if someone did it, maybe we should think twice before we do it to someone else.
The might makes right argument has been responsible for any number of horrors over the years. Last time I checked, the US is supposed to stand for liberalized trade, free enterprise, fairness, etc. This judgement is about trying to inflict the laws of nation A on nation B in contravention of the historical process and in an unfair manner.
I'm not confident it will be struck down - IP laws which original protected and fostered innovation and artists now throttle them and quash innovation through prodigious if questionable litigations. The US court in question has been passing wide ranging decisions which seem to strengthen the IP laws rather than pruning them back to foster the innovation they were originally meant to foster. So it may well be that this (to my mind) ridiculous decision stands.
But this, for once, is an example of the Canadian government standing up and doing something *where and when it should* though perhaps getting involved earlier might have been useful. Still, they may not have expected such a wide ranging ruling and the precedents it set, so perhaps that isn't even a fair criticism.
Get pissed off all you want. The U.S. does what it does because it can.
Not to draw an exact comparison, merely to lampoon the sense of that particular statement, but I'm reasonably sure that was also why Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia did what they did too.
I'm not sure the ability to do a thing makes it a good idea. And this has nothing to do with attempting to eradicate socialism, despite the fact that is a personally significant (to you) issue, it is a red herring as far as the current US copyright actions go.
This has more to do with protecting the likes of the MPAA and RIAA and the big corps than it does with insuring innovation. And attempting to break the historical assumptions about IP sovereignty and who gets which laws applied to them isn't necessarily a wise precedent to set. If the reverse was done, the US would be screaming bloody murder...
Correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't there an issue re: alumnimum and Alzheimers (pots?). I know that a pot you cook food in differs from paint, but if the dusted particulates can get loose, would it be any different? Now, the obvious answer would be to mix this stuff with your primer and make sure you overcoate with a layer or two of other paint (coloured) and then maybe a sealer layer.
CDPD modems used to pop out up to 2 watts when they were having trouble finding a base station. That's a lot more than a few hundred milliwatts. And I watched modems for the Bell Ardis network punch out enough juice to cause notable screen distortion on all nearby systems in a test lab in the same type of situation. Not all cell phones nor all cellular type devices or networks operate up at 2.4 GHz either.
Probably not. It takes two coats to render lower frequency (relatively) stuff at low power inoperative. Three coats to stop higher frequency stuff. But the power of a wireless station can be up to 30-50x the power of the device (max power comparisons). You aren't going to stop that... you might reduce the sensitivity (range) of the reciever but you won't likely block outgoing transmission.
But I seem to recall that in the early days here in Canada, microwave techs would check waveguide alignments by eyeball and of course then wonder after a while why they were having trouble with one eye and having to use the other... since they didn't turn the towers right off IIRC. On board some of the military ships, I've heard of fire control systems cooking seagulls at close enough ranges.
Yes, and so the idea of the 'step up the power to reach out' (where your 300 mW device kicks up to 2W if it can't get out... or at least that's what it was for CDPD modems, probably lesser for cell phones) is just lovely. Subways and other places must just be little radiation trap nodes.
And now people want to turn their houses into this. Of course, it might help keep out everyone else's emissions, so maybe the net result isn't so bad.
Of course, on the third hand (having probably used up the other two already), you might have issues with metal flake in the paint (anyone remember some of the asbestos issues?) over the long term.
Ah, life is just a series of choices between poisons...:)
Oddly, I'm having trouble placing 1996 in the Third Age of Mankind. I'm thinking it might just have (allegedly) happened before 1996. Does the act cover historical recovery of those deceased before 1996? (Or who never actually lived?)
I think not. And the fact that you would invoke legalese tells me you are an emissary of Sauron. Only the Dark Lord would use Lawyers.
You know, I think you've got the right idea. That was sort of my thinking when I talked about confederation of municipalities. Really, even two Ontario cities like Toronto and Ottawa have vastly different realities (in some aspects). Sure, there are areas for common union (trade, environmental issues, defence, etc) but there are a lot of very local issues (religious, cultural, or ethnic situations, education to an extent, the vagarities of local geography and service provision, etc). Why not let local government handle those?
Ontario is repleted with too much government (one example is Ottawa with a municipal government, various nearby county governments, a provincial government, a regional national capital region, and a federal government....).
Also, to my thinking, federal/union government should not be a program implementer where it is reasonable for it not to be (this might be bad for defence, etc). They should maintain a cadre of investigators and standards assessors, set standards, and let the local governments implement the standards, ideally through the private sector for efficiency. The government then becomes the monitor to see to it that its services are provided at agreed upon levels within a negotiated cost structure, but it lets private industry do the provision thus ensuring competition and cost control. Mind you, in order to do this, public sector contract letting process would need revamped, streamlined and improved in diligence and competence.
Anyway, it just bugs me when someone says "X can't do Y because he lives in A" and A is some 'drawn-on-map' historical polity. Free trade has brought us free movement of goods and services (mostly, ignoring protectionism) in continental areas. When do we realize people are a key commodity too, a valuable one, and grant them free movement? When do we realize a country is an artifical designation and that accident of birth should not constrain people so mightily? Is it right for Saddam to torture people in Iraq just because they are 'his citizens' and if anyone interfered, it would be interfering in the rights of a 'sovereign country'? How does that trump universal human rights? I admit to being quite sick of the assertion of antiquarian political structures and borders as a defence for odious conduct on behalf of tyrants and potentates.
Terrorists are a varied lot. The dangerous ones are smart, well trained, and dedicated. OTOH, they realize and take advantage of tools like GPS where it exists - why take the hard road when there is an easier one to exploit? Yes, they probably have fall backs, but they may well use GPS where it is ubiquitous. But you'll usually be shutting it down AFTER they've nailed you, because you won't know ahead of time anyway... so the capability isn't a bad thing to have, but it won't have many useful opportunities to be employed.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: Why do you have a 10 mm handgun? A: Because they don't make an 11 mm. They do make .45 ACP and that's pretty close. And fairly effective.
How do you know 'everyone' considers it normal?
In such cases, it is very difficult to ascertain the will of the people involved - they lack education in the options, they lack the freedom to discuss and consider and experiment with them, etc. They risk public censure or other punishments by trying.
So really, in that case, I say... is someone in that situation really free to hold their different view?
Rwandan Genocide was an example of standing back and not doing something when we should have. So was the Holocaust. (By 'We', I mean the wealthy western world that makes claims about championing freedom and democracy and human rights).
BTW, the fact that the situation in Iraq may have required the removal of a dictator does not and should not be taken as suggesting that the follow on operations were well planned, executed, or that their results have been very good. But that doesn't mean that someone didn't need to get Saddam out of power. It just means the job was not done anything near to flawlessly.
And as to your last sentence, I could not agree more. I think we (including my country that did not go) should have went to Iraq. But it should have been for the right reasons (the reasons occasionally alluded to, but probably not meant... and not for the economic ones I suspect). And it should have been in the right way.
I think anyone can admit the situations of real world geopolitics have complexities and poorly implemented plans can result in untold suffering. At the same time, I don't think some antiquated idea of national soveriegnty should trump basic human rights and freedoms.
There are no clear, easy answers. That is why we (collectively) still haven't got this right.
A key example of this from my old CF reserve unit: We had young men in there of 18 years of age who could go places and die for their country *but who could not have a beer in the mess!*. So, it was okay to give them a firearm and let them call in artillery, but Dear Lord don't let them touch a light beer. (Well, combining the two is a bad idea, but that's not really what I was getting at....)
Of course, this just led to the 'blind eye'. Many of us felt if you were old enough to wear the uniform, take the oath, and kill and die for your country, you could at least have a beer from time to time.
Sadly, the benevolent monarchy often gives way to the malignant monarchy, the inept monarchy, the corrupt monarchy, the repressive monarchy, or any other of a range of flavours of absolute (often less than competent) rule.
And it is debatable whether monarchy is the best system from an economic point of view. So far, depending on how you do your math, democracy might have monarchy edged on that score.
We're seeing the demise of monarchies the world over (last 200 years) and the increase of democracies. Or things that call themselves democracies, but that's a whole other discussion....
It does matter if you are in China or in the USA or in Canada if you are someone who has a dissenting view. In China, if you are an inconvenient Tibetan, something unfortunate might happen to you. In Canada, you will probably be granted a public soapbox. Whereas I think part of the problem in Iraq may have been a poor post-invasion security and rebuilding plan, part of it probably was the belief that just making people happy by kicking out their obnoxious and villanous leader was sufficient to make them love you. As it turns out, they have more expectations (things improving security wise, economy wise, freedom wise, etc... even to the point of not being realistic expectations). When those expectations are shorted, they get pissed off. Voila! Today! But the incredibly naive theory that all ideologies are equivalent or that where you live or what kind of regime you live under is quite funny. The mod should have been 'Funny' not 'Insightful'. It is possible for us to differ (person to person) on particular values. But few of us would say that the right to be arbitrarily arrested, shot or disappeared is a good thing. Few of us would say that a state brutally oppressing minorities was a good thing. There really *are* some commonly agreeble points. This is how some world bodies have developed a generalized concepts of international law and human rights. It *does* matter what your value system is, when it threatens to impinge on the rights of others. It is *your* value system and should only be considered applicable to *you*. The minute you start breaking that boundary, you are infringing others' basic freedoms. It *does* matter if your government oppresses you and others or not. Yes, certainly, there is a theory that enough people oppressed badly enough might maybe rebel, but revolution without outside support is difficult. And while we blissfully wait for revolution to uplift people (or for people to 'uplift themselves' which is a grouping of people into a personified entity that probably does an injustice to the reality), innocent people are oppressed in many cases. Or killed. How anyone can find a practice of ignoring or standng off while this goes on defensible is beyond me. You can spin all the fine words about freedom and compassion and the right to choose your own fate, but if people have no information to know about their alternatives, no freedom to explore them, no ability to discuss them without going to jail or disappearing, then that's a horrendous situation that all the local will in the world might not fix. Sometimes, it takes a big 200 lbs gorilla to come in and lay down a new way of doing things. And then step back and let the people sort their own problems out when they finally *have* the freedom to be pissed off, dissappointed, etc. Disagree with me if you will... I accord you that freedom (and you'd take it anyway). But realize that you have it and not everyone does because not every government lets them.
Two points: First, I literally mean that I can recall absolutely useless facts... and *not* ones that are important to me, just ones that happened, for some chaotic reason, to stick in my head. Now, you might try the unproven assumption fallacy by trying to reason that these were important to me, but with the particular things I'm thinking of, I fail to see how. So I submit that one sometimes does remember utterly unimportant details very accurately. Second, remembering things that prevent my @$$ from getting kicked (such as anniversaries, etc) is non-trivial and actually matters. Not in and of itself, but because the consequences of not remembering are significant. Ergo they do matter because they matter to someone who will give you grief if you forget. So, yes, you can fail to remember these things too and they still matter.
Sorry, that one small part was spoken tongue-in-cheek based on the fact cats sometimes won't let on they notice *anything* around them that they choose to ignore. I am quite sure cats do remember things. I'm not sure how good their memory is (I think a dogs might be superior), but I am sure they can recall things like smells, friends, what the sound of an opening can means, etc. Or at least they can form behaviour patterns off of these things, which seems to suggest recall.
Hmmm. This doesn't exactly explain how one can, with crystal clarity, remember absolutely useless bits of information when not being able to retain information that is far more important to ones success in life. For instance, one can forget ones fiance's birthday or the day you got engaged or little things like Valentine's day, while remembering the gram molecular weight of ethanol or the exact number of Tribbles sat on by James T. Kirk.... so I'm not sure that evolution has strictly wired us for efficiency.
The truth is evolution is a coarse brush. In order for something to offer a significant chance of being genetically propagated, it has to offer a sizeable benefit (25%+ if I recall my conversation with one of the world's better population modellers working for CSIRO). Less than that and it will tend to get lost in the noise.
So I'm sure that memory setup the way it has been (to forget some pains, to remember others) has been something we've grown into, but I'm also sure some element of it prevades almost every intelligent animal as well. I bet our cat has that same setup (well, there is the claim they may in fact remember nothing, but I know too well this is just propaganda...). But I wouldn't say the system was yet 'fully optimized' for being able to deal with future events.
The fact is, there probably is no fully optimized configuration, given an infinite range of possible future events. So we're probably in that fuzzy zone of mostly useful in most situations, which is right where we should be (that is to say though I disagree with the particulars of the comment, I agree with the general conclusion).
Sure, we can probably enhance memory via drugs or nanos eventually for certain things. Handy, perhaps an advantage. We may be able to help blot out trauma (a pill, for instance, for a recent victim of physical trauma so the trauma does not become the stuff of recurrent nightmare but fades from their memory over time). So these applications would have some use. But giving everyone an eidetic memory might not be either a good idea nor terribly feasible.
Depends what you mean by winning. If the new generation of gecko browsers drive MS into upgrading their security, adding tabbed browsing, and a host of other things that the 'others' now do, then really, the war will be won. Some people think the point is to get rid of M$. The truth is, the point is to get better software out there for everyone. And in that sense, Firefox and the others can make this a reality.
One thing that really bothers me about free health care is this attitude that any private hospitals will mean the immediate demise of our entire health care system.
The funnier aspect is that we've *had* private medical clinics, MRI clinics, etc. for *years* and they've functioned just fine as an adjunct to the public system. I think the fear is that it is a 'thin edge of the wedge' scenario - let in a private hospital, let enough people start to use it, then they'll say 'why should we also fund the public one?' etc. I mean, it isn't entirely implausible that people might take up that attitude. At the same time, throwing money at our current health care system without accompanying internal reform will not necessarily resolve the issues either.
I'm a developer on SIP-based PBX software and on proprietary PBX software also (both from a vendor you'd recognize).
SIP has opened up some options, but the implementation has revealed lots of little gotchas along the way.
And I was just (in the middle of this email) speaking to a SIP architect from another vendor. His comment:
"SIP is great in the network, but not so good to the desktop".
My own observation was that SIP puts a lot of brains often into the end device, and the effect of that is to distribute the programming task and the troubleshooting task. That's more of a dev-side issue, but if you are a company looking at doing something with SIP, being aware of these sorts of difficulties/costs can be important.
To much IP law is creating a landmine for future development. It will be to the point that code gets completed and then is looked at by company attorneys for legal exposure, then gets recoded with inferior algorithms or less exspensively licensed libraries.
Totally agree. I worked for a company doing a flavour of MMORPG for the movie and TV industry, and we hit patents a lot - things involved, for instance, in rendering. You have a graphics card that can load X entities into it. You have N entities in the locally visible cell of your world, where N > X. So, how do you select a subset N' of N to display in your X capacity? Common sense would dictate you show the X closest objects in your line of sight. But guess what? That blisteringly obvious method is patented. So everyone gets around it by showing the (X-1) closest objects, then finding some suitably unique way to stick the last object in.... some work to avoid the obvious way to solve the problem because someone at the patent obvious was too dense to understand the requirement for a patent to be 'non-obvious'.
And this helps innovation? Having to spend cycles working around the obvious solutions to problems in order to avoid infringement? Somehow, that does not compute, even in Metric... (or SI)....
The Canadian Government, to my understanding, as dissected by CBC and their legal professor talking head, was not taking issue with every aspect of the case. RIM may well be in hot water for actual patent violations in some regards. But, where it pertained to the parts of RIM's service provided on machine in Canada, running technology developed here, providing services located here, on machines physically located here, they felt this clearly (by common prior practice, which is what I meant by tradition) meant that Canadian laws apply here and not US ones. Thereby the US Court, by extending its domain to these particular systems and services was in fact introducing a sovereignty issue. That is why the government here thinks there is a problem. There may in fact be other parts of the case where RIM is clearly wrong and infringing within US jurisdiction. But those particular services and servers were outside of US jurisdiction. And I'm fairly sure they don't consider Canadian-side service provision to be 'importing into the US'. Hopefully that is clearer. I don't seek to convey the impression that RIM has commited no foul (I really can't speak to that) but to put some context on the particular aspect of the case which got the Canadian Government's attention. Please also remember, this is not my theory, only what has been reported as the reason for Canadian Government interest.
You could get the CDPD modems as wireless cards. The non-wireless card car versions could kick out 25 watts or more IIRC. They gave really decent coverage ranges in Red Deer (fairly flat) with only 3 towers as a result.
Hmm, you make it sound like something existing is strictly some sort of Darwinian thing and we'd be snuffing out all lawyers or all IP lawyers if we made any changes to current IP law.
Let us take the other side of the coin: IP law has been getting more teeth, patents and copyrights have been extending in scope and duration, over the last 20-30 years most notably. Is this right?
This whole 'buy a patent, sue everyone else' and 'failure to acknowledge spontaneous creation/first past the patent post' system are a result of our legal frameworks. These are not natural creations - we made them up and lobbied them into their current state.
So if we could create them, we should darn well be able to realize their flaws and tear them down. This isn't the big nasty public crushing the heads of baby seal-like lawyers with large clubs... this is the case of a profession that has lobbied the government (and been paid for it) to create legal frameworks that allow more suing and more quashing of competition and innovation.
Some amount of protection is probably sensible, but I think we're pretty far beyond the original intents and equally far beyond good sense. So applying some corrective measures isn't some sort of Draconic Evil... it would, if we could manage it, simply be restoring freedom to innovate and develop - which ostensibly is a good thing.
Should that not exist, to use your own leading question?
Yes, I think this is the 'technical issue'. The reason the Canadian Government is involved has more to do with the fact that the servers and back end services that make this all work reside in Canada. So attempting to go after RIM in this particular means attempting to apply the associated patents etc. across the border into someone else's country. That's what has the Canadian government involving itself.
I think that's entirely wrongheaded. Take off your tinfoil hat for a minute. CBC had some good coverage of this issue last night.
The issue here is that the US court is trying to apply an outrageous scope to their own IP law - well beyond their borders onto systems physically present and using technology developed in Canada. This violates a number of traditions in the legal area (perhaps even aggreements or laws, but I'm a bit vague her) that say essentially that if something resides in your country, your own IP law applies. The US judge has made a decision which extends US IP law into Canadian space.
The Canadian government is thus getting involved as a matter of national sovereignty and to forestall a whole whack of these. And to protect Canadian business interests from this ridiculous decision - it would effectively open up a whack of Canadian businesses to suits under a vastly changed understanding of how IP law is supposed to work and it would infringe Canada's sovereignty to have its own laws that differ from those that operate within our southern neighbour.
This is perfectly well a matter of Canadian government legal, political and economic interest. It has nothing to do with RIM particularly, they just happen to be the test case. This is about a US court that is letting itself exceed its domain and pass judgements with wide ranging ramifications that reach into other countries.
I think the simple logic that the US should be applying here is this: If it would piss us off if someone did it, maybe we should think twice before we do it to someone else.
The might makes right argument has been responsible for any number of horrors over the years. Last time I checked, the US is supposed to stand for liberalized trade, free enterprise, fairness, etc. This judgement is about trying to inflict the laws of nation A on nation B in contravention of the historical process and in an unfair manner.
I'm not confident it will be struck down - IP laws which original protected and fostered innovation and artists now throttle them and quash innovation through prodigious if questionable litigations. The US court in question has been passing wide ranging decisions which seem to strengthen the IP laws rather than pruning them back to foster the innovation they were originally meant to foster. So it may well be that this (to my mind) ridiculous decision stands.
But this, for once, is an example of the Canadian government standing up and doing something *where and when it should* though perhaps getting involved earlier might have been useful. Still, they may not have expected such a wide ranging ruling and the precedents it set, so perhaps that isn't even a fair criticism.
Get pissed off all you want. The U.S. does what it does because it can.
Not to draw an exact comparison, merely to lampoon the sense of that particular statement, but I'm reasonably sure that was also why Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia did what they did too.
I'm not sure the ability to do a thing makes it a good idea. And this has nothing to do with attempting to eradicate socialism, despite the fact that is a personally significant (to you) issue, it is a red herring as far as the current US copyright actions go.
This has more to do with protecting the likes of the MPAA and RIAA and the big corps than it does with insuring innovation. And attempting to break the historical assumptions about IP sovereignty and who gets which laws applied to them isn't necessarily a wise precedent to set. If the reverse was done, the US would be screaming bloody murder...
Correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't there an issue re: alumnimum and Alzheimers (pots?). I know that a pot you cook food in differs from paint, but if the dusted particulates can get loose, would it be any different? Now, the obvious answer would be to mix this stuff with your primer and make sure you overcoate with a layer or two of other paint (coloured) and then maybe a sealer layer.
CDPD modems used to pop out up to 2 watts when they were having trouble finding a base station. That's a lot more than a few hundred milliwatts. And I watched modems for the Bell Ardis network punch out enough juice to cause notable screen distortion on all nearby systems in a test lab in the same type of situation. Not all cell phones nor all cellular type devices or networks operate up at 2.4 GHz either.
Probably not. It takes two coats to render lower frequency (relatively) stuff at low power inoperative. Three coats to stop higher frequency stuff. But the power of a wireless station can be up to 30-50x the power of the device (max power comparisons). You aren't going to stop that... you might reduce the sensitivity (range) of the reciever but you won't likely block outgoing transmission.
Or perhaps not.
:)
But I seem to recall that in the early days here in Canada, microwave techs would check waveguide alignments by eyeball and of course then wonder after a while why they were having trouble with one eye and having to use the other... since they didn't turn the towers right off IIRC. On board some of the military ships, I've heard of fire control systems cooking seagulls at close enough ranges.
Yes, and so the idea of the 'step up the power to reach out' (where your 300 mW device kicks up to 2W if it can't get out... or at least that's what it was for CDPD modems, probably lesser for cell phones) is just lovely. Subways and other places must just be little radiation trap nodes.
And now people want to turn their houses into this. Of course, it might help keep out everyone else's emissions, so maybe the net result isn't so bad.
Of course, on the third hand (having probably used up the other two already), you might have issues with metal flake in the paint (anyone remember some of the asbestos issues?) over the long term.
Ah, life is just a series of choices between poisons...
Oddly, I'm having trouble placing 1996 in the Third Age of Mankind. I'm thinking it might just have (allegedly) happened before 1996. Does the act cover historical recovery of those deceased before 1996? (Or who never actually lived?)
I think not. And the fact that you would invoke legalese tells me you are an emissary of Sauron. Only the Dark Lord would use Lawyers.
You know, I think you've got the right idea. That was sort of my thinking when I talked about confederation of municipalities. Really, even two Ontario cities like Toronto and Ottawa have vastly different realities (in some aspects). Sure, there are areas for common union (trade, environmental issues, defence, etc) but there are a lot of very local issues (religious, cultural, or ethnic situations, education to an extent, the vagarities of local geography and service provision, etc). Why not let local government handle those?
Ontario is repleted with too much government (one example is Ottawa with a municipal government, various nearby county governments, a provincial government, a regional national capital region, and a federal government....).
Also, to my thinking, federal/union government should not be a program implementer where it is reasonable for it not to be (this might be bad for defence, etc). They should maintain a cadre of investigators and standards assessors, set standards, and let the local governments implement the standards, ideally through the private sector for efficiency. The government then becomes the monitor to see to it that its services are provided at agreed upon levels within a negotiated cost structure, but it lets private industry do the provision thus ensuring competition and cost control. Mind you, in order to do this, public sector contract letting process would need revamped, streamlined and improved in diligence and competence.
Anyway, it just bugs me when someone says "X can't do Y because he lives in A" and A is some 'drawn-on-map' historical polity. Free trade has brought us free movement of goods and services (mostly, ignoring protectionism) in continental areas. When do we realize people are a key commodity too, a valuable one, and grant them free movement? When do we realize a country is an artifical designation and that accident of birth should not constrain people so mightily? Is it right for Saddam to torture people in Iraq just because they are 'his citizens' and if anyone interfered, it would be interfering in the rights of a 'sovereign country'? How does that trump universal human rights? I admit to being quite sick of the assertion of antiquarian political structures and borders as a defence for odious conduct on behalf of tyrants and potentates.
Terrorists are a varied lot. The dangerous ones are smart, well trained, and dedicated. OTOH, they realize and take advantage of tools like GPS where it exists - why take the hard road when there is an easier one to exploit? Yes, they probably have fall backs, but they may well use GPS where it is ubiquitous. But you'll usually be shutting it down AFTER they've nailed you, because you won't know ahead of time anyway... so the capability isn't a bad thing to have, but it won't have many useful opportunities to be employed.