Yes, but think of all the fundamental changes in Calculus that take place each year that you are funding. The book has to be expensive if they want to keep up with ever changing subjects like calc.
Actually, it looks like it wasn't a case with the flash memory being corrupted, but rather it having to many files...
Were these files, by chance, secretly added by an unmentioned government security adminstration that wished to investigate strange emanations from the red planet?
Or am I just getting this expedition confused with the 2001 manned mission to Jupiter?
I realize my point was a little out of date, based on the observations that many excellent students I knew couldn't get into medicine in the 80s. There was not even an entry point.
I still contend that the doctor shortage is largely the result of problems in the medical education industry. 18 years of education for a 18 year career is a bit excessive.
Of course, the whole US education system is suffering from the same problems. The costs keep rising without a corresponding increase in quality. We bury the students in debt and they can't start they own practice, business, etc., they just become unhappy cogs in the machine.
The worldwide shortage of doctors is more the result of the various acreditation programs (AMA, etc) that manages to keep students who want to study medicine out of the schools.
The cost and limited seats in medical schools mean that a large number of students who would want to pursue the path of medicine don't even get out of the starting gate.
The AMA has effectively elevated the position of doctor a notch and a half above god. By artificially limiting access to the profession, the doctors who do pass through the gauntlet can charge a premium. However, the the monopoly the organizations have on health care education also prevent the wide spread dissemination of healthcare knowledge. Just count the number of seats in medical schools (where the shortage begins) it is impossible for everyone to have access to a doctor.
The US has the same problem as Canada. We wouldn't need socialization of medicine if the field was not already burdened with too many artificial controls.
As for a God who wishes to toil in muck with the peasantry (I mean the physician who wishes to descend to the level of peasantry and work on computers) I am simply dumbfounded. Companies that are making programs for the medical field would probably snatch you up without any computer training. They would probably assign you a team of programmers and you could learn on the job.
Vegas had one of the best car body styles of the 70s. They had one of the worst engines ever. There was a whole industry devoted to yanking engines from the beasts. The Pinto was a bad design all around, but the Vega shell was a great starting place for people who enjoyed building their own car.
Having been liberated by the United States, I suspect that Iraq will soon pass copyright protections and recognize international copyrights.
From the anti-intellectual property perspective, this means that a country that rejected intellectual property will start having copyrights. I suspect that, sometime in the near future, commercial software will start being available in the country, and that Iraq will see a major crackdown on the copying and free distribution of copyrighted material.
If your primary political view revolves around rejectiong the existence of intellectual property, then the Iraqi war would be seen as a step backward...the poor people of Iraq are being enslaved by property rights.
Yeah, in the old Iraq, you would get tortured and brutally murdered for expressing your opinions, but you didn't have to pay for your CD collection.
You'd be surprised at the number of businesses that get set up with the primary goal of trying to goad a larger company into buying them.
Most of the dot coms, for that matter, were set up to gain market share, then to sell the company.
Often research initiatives are done by setting up a company. They do the research, then selling the company, patents etc., if the results are good. Building a company who's only product is the company is often the best way to jump start an idea.
Microsoft has always been adept with the distribution of carrots...how else do you think they've been able to steer their firm through the treacherous waters of antitrust lawsuits.
Here, Mr. Judge, is a big diamond studded gold carrot. Here, Mr. Senator, can I help you with your campaign funds...
Whistle blowing and companies reactions to whistle blowing is a completely different issue outside the copyright issue brought up by the article.
The fact that companies try to find ways to twist every law in the book against whistle blowers is not an indictment of the law itself. I would not be surprised to find a company trying to use leash laws to reign in their employees. This does not mean that leash laws are evil, it just means lawyers are always looking for ways to abuse any and all written laws.
The copyright law should not control whistle blowing. It should only affect the publishing of information by a whistle blower. Other issues involved in whistle blowing and protecting whistle blowers should be handled separately.
If a whistle blower choses to publish information, then they are, in effect, trying to indict the company in the court of public opinion, and that means they need to abide by the laws regulating published information.
This is not a case of free and open internal communications
I would not be surprised if Diebold was a dysfunctional company with really screwed up internal communications. I do not know the company. My experience is that most companies have problems with internal communications. The actually rulings about the copyright laws should not be based on the quality of internal communications of a single company.
The state of affairs at Diebold really shouldn't matter in the eyes of copyright law as the precedents apply to both healthy and sick companies. What would happen with no copyright protection for internal communications? I suspect that ALL companies would then have to resort to obfuscated and clandestine communications.
Providing copyright protection for internal communications makes open communication possible. It does not guarantee quality communications. Without legal protections companies would resort to encrypting and other techniques to guard information. The more I think of it, a broad copyright on internal communications is a very good thing as the copyright does allow improved communications.
Fair use allows for quotations, especially when used for criticisms and refutations. The question about fair use is whether or not what you created is itself an original work.
A well written article with quotes and a summary of the articles would have been considered an original work, and probably would have been more damning of Diebold.
The ability of Diebold to suppress the work by threatening the ISP is freightening, as the ISP is not likely to make any judgments based on merits of the case.
It is entirely possible that the left will someday start respecting the rights of the individual again. In ancient history (before 1900) Liberalism was concerned with expanding the rights of individuals. In the 20th century, it flipflopped and liberalism was a synonym for expanding the state to curtail the evil individual.
Today, it seems clear that the conservative movement in the US is abandonning its brief flirtation with libertarianism. Meanwhile some people calling themselves "liberal" are starting to realize the importance of individual rights. It is possible that a polar shift might occur again.
Of course for most, the situation is clear. Anything good people, like college students, do is okay. Anything bad people, like those who work for a living, do is bad. Far too few people seem to ever go beyond punishing enemies and rewarding friends and actually think about the ideas themselves.
The interesting thing about the article is the use of copyright to try and silence criticism of the Diebold system.
Before jumping on the repeal property rights bandwagon, we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
The article paints this issue as horrible corporate America positioned against wonderful students. However, I see a lot of issues going on beyond publication. For example, there is the issue of open communications within a corporation. If there is no legal protection for open internal discussions about a product, then companies will have no choice but to limit open dialog within the company.
Shouldn't Diebold be commended for having an open internal communication system that allows its workers to actively criticize and tear apart their company's product? If any document stolen from a company could be published to paint the company in bad light, then we would see companies cracking down on the open internal communications needed to improve products.
Having been involved in several projects, I've written and have read extremely critical emails about different aspects of a program. The purpose of these communications is generally to improve the quality of a program. Strongly worded emails generally have a better chance of making it into a product. Often the strongly worded emails are bunk. If all of the test documentation of the Alpha and design systems got published then we could make any company look horrible.
I rue the day when each and every word written in internal communications has to be polished into marketing material.
It depends on the niche of the consulting company. If you are in networking, or if your company focusses on the one time set up of machines, the certifications are key. If the company has a base of products that it pushes or is doing custom programming, the certifications are not quite as important.
There is also a little bit of graft going on where a computer company will send you leads if you pay their exhorbitant price for certification materials. I mean, if your employees are certified.
Consulting firms vary by the niche market they pursue.
Rene Descartes days ended when he took a job as a tutor to the Queen of who like to study philosophy early in the morning. Queen Christina liked to study philosophy early in the morning and would drag Descartes out of bed at 5:00 AM. Like a good philosopher Descartes believed in sleeping past noon. With the new schedule, he caught pneumonia and promptly died.
As most email address harvesters don't compile the javascript, you can use that to obscur the mailto link and still have an email button that works for most users...you miss the people with javascript disabled.
Of course, there is no email address obscurring that prevents manual harvesting. Considering that email sent to an obscurred address is more likely to be read than one sent to posted address. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there were people employed in sweat shops manually harvesting "obscurred" addresses.
Would dreams be considered a creative work under US copyright law?
When Kafka is given his rightful position at the head of the copyright agency they will be.
Of course, getting a conviction on dream copyright violations will be tough. Every time the jury is about to deliver a verdict, everyone will wake up...and you will have to wait for the next night for a new trial.
It's not the size of your pixels but what you do with them.
I am not surprised at all, and I am glad to see that NASA didn't fall for the marketing hype that the number of megapixels is the determining factor in the quality of a photographic image. Personally, I would prefer a 1 megapixel camera with an SLR (single reflex lens) to 5 megapixel camera.
I believe the secret to art is the process used in filtering down to the information that you really need in a picture.
The two areas that you miss with smaller megapixel cameras are textures and fractal patterns such as the shapes of leaves, forests and grassy fields. However, when you really need to study a pattern, you can zoom in (assuming you have a decent lens) and get the information you need.
I think 1 megapixel is the right image size for the job at hand. Of course, all the pictures from Mars with trees and grassy fields will be a bit fuzzy. Those of rocks, landscapes and strange green alien creatures will turn out fine.
I think the article is indicating that the stock price hints that there might be more behind the company than what we see in the anti-SCO press. The stock is rising. Is there something that the anti-SCO press is missing about the company? or is it a suckers' bubble?
I tend to take any stock that comes from Provo with a grain of salt. Provo is the MLM capital of the world. Here is another Utah Valley company: The Dream Mine was revealed to a prophet about a hundred years. It is not a traditional mine. The mine actually leads to the hidden vault of treasures buried by the Nephites. FYI, the Nephites were from a lost tribes of Isreal that came to America on a submarine a few thousand years ago. They got all the best treasures. But the Lamanites (American Indians) were horrible sinful creatures. They killed all the Nephites. The Nephites buried all of their treasures before the final battle.
The trick to the mine is that the secret entrance will not be revealed until God is getting ready to smite the gentiles.
This investment is great if you wish to hedge against Armagedden, and the stock tends to do quite well, despite the fact that it won't have a product until the end of the world.
Unfortunately, you have to be of the faith to own stock.
SCO is likely just another dream mine. As mentioned early, the faithful have a long history of falling for every MLM and get rich quick scheme you can name. They often get burned. Of course, if the case comes before a jury of the faithful, SCO will win big time, regardless of the merits of their case.
The Utah Court system is SCO's ace in the hole. If the jury thinks that ruling in favor SCO would make Utah Valley the new Bellevue, then they might rule for SCO. Regardless, I would be worried about shorting SCO or any penny stock from Utah, as Provo Stocks have certain irrational characteristics.
Or perhaps the reason that banks have more old code and old systems sitting around is because they were among the very first adopters of IT. The fact that a company maintains the same code base for several decades doesn't mean that they are somehow inferior. It means they have a longer lifecyle in mind than flash in the pan companies.
BTW, just judging from web sites, banks tend to employ more advanced encryption, have larger databases, etc., than your typical web site. Of course, banks rarely have good flash animation.
In other words, if copyright-indifferent file-sharing had not gathered so much steam, might the iTunes Store instead be selling more useful MP3 files rather than those DRM'ed ones?
I am suggesting that if music sharers weren't running around proclaiming that they were bringing an end to intellectual property and the capitalist machine, then we would have been in a better position to get a user friendly format.
Also, if there was a greater effort to adhere to the spirit and letter of the copyright law, then the community would have been in a better position to negotiate better IP laws and avoid the DRMed formats. What we now have is a situtation where the entrenched interests in the music industry will be able to point to P2P and proclaim the public untrustworthy.
It was not the momentum of MP3, but the hot air and flagrant disregard for the very concept of rule of law that seems to be bringing the end to open formats for music.
Sorry, but I doubt the music industry launching a double front attack with law suits and rather expensive and less usable alternatives is that much of a coincidence.
For that matter, the two pronged assault was probably orchestrated. To launch lawsuits without a replacement technology in place would be a losing strategy. Launching legitimate music channels while building a case against the anti-capitalist P2Pers would have weakened the case for built in copyright protection.
You probably should ammend your post to say that both the lawsuit and pay per song services were part of the strategy, and that the strategy is working quite well at keeping the power in the hands of the few.
Watching the free music crowd getting played for suckers was an extremely painful thing to watch...especially since their was a better option: If there was respect for the written laws, we could have had our MP3s and copied them to our MP3 player too. Hey, we may have even been in a better position to change the laws for the better.
Right now, terrorism of the skies is pretty much restricted to those groups that have a ready supply of people willing to kill themselves for their cause. Remote control airplanes will open the terrorist industry to technical savvy terrorist groups who like to work safely from the ground.
Best of all, remote control airplanes would allow terrorist groups to work in larger numbers. Right now, terrorist groups are pushed to their limits to take over 4 airplanes. In this new system, a terrorist group that hacks the remote control code procedures for the soft walls project might be able to take take down 20 to 30 planes before the airlines are able to ground the fleet.
The current airline security system pretty much exludes those terrorist groups that have people willing to kill for their beliefs, but not willing to die for them. This will be welcome news to any terrorist organization with good hackers.
As for my comfort flying, the fact that I know that someone can take control of the airplane from the pilot will make me just that much more likely to buy one of those airline insurance policies.
I agree the 2.5 liters is probably a made up number. The amount of water you should drink is dictated by your size, activity, diet and climate. The reason I added a number to the post is because I wanted to indicate that drinking a good amount of water would probably help kick the caffeine habit.
Just saying drink a good amount of water would have been insufficient, as I would need to define a good amount of water.
Grabbing numbers from web sites that I realized were not authorative sources was sufficient.
It probably would have been better to say: "drink water until your pee is clear."
I have no doubt that schools are promoting the "water myth" and actively encouraging students to carry water bottles. Their reasoning has little to do with scientific evidence about the exact amount of water people must drink to survive, but an effort to counter the over consumption of sugared drinks.
The sugared drink industry, undoubtedly, would fund any research counter to the water drinking argument.
I have been seeing articles that indicate that drinking too much juice as a child is bad for their health.
My personal experience in bicycling, hiking, traveling and various labor jobs is that drinking a good deal of water is extremely helpful. Drinking soda is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but think of all the fundamental changes in Calculus that take place each year that you are funding. The book has to be expensive if they want to keep up with ever changing subjects like calc.
Were these files, by chance, secretly added by an unmentioned government security adminstration that wished to investigate strange emanations from the red planet?
Or am I just getting this expedition confused with the 2001 manned mission to Jupiter?
I realize my point was a little out of date, based on the observations that many excellent students I knew couldn't get into medicine in the 80s. There was not even an entry point.
I still contend that the doctor shortage is largely the result of problems in the medical education industry. 18 years of education for a 18 year career is a bit excessive. Of course, the whole US education system is suffering from the same problems. The costs keep rising without a corresponding increase in quality. We bury the students in debt and they can't start they own practice, business, etc., they just become unhappy cogs in the machine.
The worldwide shortage of doctors is more the result of the various acreditation programs (AMA, etc) that manages to keep students who want to study medicine out of the schools.
The cost and limited seats in medical schools mean that a large number of students who would want to pursue the path of medicine don't even get out of the starting gate.
The AMA has effectively elevated the position of doctor a notch and a half above god. By artificially limiting access to the profession, the doctors who do pass through the gauntlet can charge a premium. However, the the monopoly the organizations have on health care education also prevent the wide spread dissemination of healthcare knowledge. Just count the number of seats in medical schools (where the shortage begins) it is impossible for everyone to have access to a doctor.
The US has the same problem as Canada. We wouldn't need socialization of medicine if the field was not already burdened with too many artificial controls.
As for a God who wishes to toil in muck with the peasantry (I mean the physician who wishes to descend to the level of peasantry and work on computers) I am simply dumbfounded. Companies that are making programs for the medical field would probably snatch you up without any computer training. They would probably assign you a team of programmers and you could learn on the job.
Vegas had one of the best car body styles of the 70s. They had one of the worst engines ever. There was a whole industry devoted to yanking engines from the beasts. The Pinto was a bad design all around, but the Vega shell was a great starting place for people who enjoyed building their own car.
Having been liberated by the United States, I suspect that Iraq will soon pass copyright protections and recognize international copyrights.
From the anti-intellectual property perspective, this means that a country that rejected intellectual property will start having copyrights. I suspect that, sometime in the near future, commercial software will start being available in the country, and that Iraq will see a major crackdown on the copying and free distribution of copyrighted material.
If your primary political view revolves around rejectiong the existence of intellectual property, then the Iraqi war would be seen as a step backward...the poor people of Iraq are being enslaved by property rights.
Yeah, in the old Iraq, you would get tortured and brutally murdered for expressing your opinions, but you didn't have to pay for your CD collection.
You'd be surprised at the number of businesses that get set up with the primary goal of trying to goad a larger company into buying them.
Most of the dot coms, for that matter, were set up to gain market share, then to sell the company.
Often research initiatives are done by setting up a company. They do the research, then selling the company, patents etc., if the results are good. Building a company who's only product is the company is often the best way to jump start an idea.
Microsoft has always been adept with the distribution of carrots...how else do you think they've been able to steer their firm through the treacherous waters of antitrust lawsuits.
Here, Mr. Judge, is a big diamond studded gold carrot. Here, Mr. Senator, can I help you with your campaign funds...
Whistle blowing and companies reactions to whistle blowing is a completely different issue outside the copyright issue brought up by the article.
The fact that companies try to find ways to twist every law in the book against whistle blowers is not an indictment of the law itself. I would not be surprised to find a company trying to use leash laws to reign in their employees. This does not mean that leash laws are evil, it just means lawyers are always looking for ways to abuse any and all written laws.
The copyright law should not control whistle blowing. It should only affect the publishing of information by a whistle blower. Other issues involved in whistle blowing and protecting whistle blowers should be handled separately.
If a whistle blower choses to publish information, then they are, in effect, trying to indict the company in the court of public opinion, and that means they need to abide by the laws regulating published information.
I would not be surprised if Diebold was a dysfunctional company with really screwed up internal communications. I do not know the company. My experience is that most companies have problems with internal communications. The actually rulings about the copyright laws should not be based on the quality of internal communications of a single company.
The state of affairs at Diebold really shouldn't matter in the eyes of copyright law as the precedents apply to both healthy and sick companies. What would happen with no copyright protection for internal communications? I suspect that ALL companies would then have to resort to obfuscated and clandestine communications.
Providing copyright protection for internal communications makes open communication possible. It does not guarantee quality communications. Without legal protections companies would resort to encrypting and other techniques to guard information. The more I think of it, a broad copyright on internal communications is a very good thing as the copyright does allow improved communications.
Fair use allows for quotations, especially when used for criticisms and refutations. The question about fair use is whether or not what you created is itself an original work.
A well written article with quotes and a summary of the articles would have been considered an original work, and probably would have been more damning of Diebold.
The ability of Diebold to suppress the work by threatening the ISP is freightening, as the ISP is not likely to make any judgments based on merits of the case.
It is entirely possible that the left will someday start respecting the rights of the individual again. In ancient history (before 1900) Liberalism was concerned with expanding the rights of individuals. In the 20th century, it flipflopped and liberalism was a synonym for expanding the state to curtail the evil individual.
Today, it seems clear that the conservative movement in the US is abandonning its brief flirtation with libertarianism. Meanwhile some people calling themselves "liberal" are starting to realize the importance of individual rights. It is possible that a polar shift might occur again.
Of course for most, the situation is clear. Anything good people, like college students, do is okay. Anything bad people, like those who work for a living, do is bad. Far too few people seem to ever go beyond punishing enemies and rewarding friends and actually think about the ideas themselves.
The interesting thing about the article is the use of copyright to try and silence criticism of the Diebold system.
Before jumping on the repeal property rights bandwagon, we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
The article paints this issue as horrible corporate America positioned against wonderful students. However, I see a lot of issues going on beyond publication. For example, there is the issue of open communications within a corporation. If there is no legal protection for open internal discussions about a product, then companies will have no choice but to limit open dialog within the company.
Shouldn't Diebold be commended for having an open internal communication system that allows its workers to actively criticize and tear apart their company's product? If any document stolen from a company could be published to paint the company in bad light, then we would see companies cracking down on the open internal communications needed to improve products.
Having been involved in several projects, I've written and have read extremely critical emails about different aspects of a program. The purpose of these communications is generally to improve the quality of a program. Strongly worded emails generally have a better chance of making it into a product. Often the strongly worded emails are bunk. If all of the test documentation of the Alpha and design systems got published then we could make any company look horrible.
I rue the day when each and every word written in internal communications has to be polished into marketing material.
It depends on the niche of the consulting company. If you are in networking, or if your company focusses on the one time set up of machines, the certifications are key. If the company has a base of products that it pushes or is doing custom programming, the certifications are not quite as important.
There is also a little bit of graft going on where a computer company will send you leads if you pay their exhorbitant price for certification materials. I mean, if your employees are certified.
Consulting firms vary by the niche market they pursue.
Rene Descartes days ended when he took a job as a tutor to the Queen of who like to study philosophy early in the morning. Queen Christina liked to study philosophy early in the morning and would drag Descartes out of bed at 5:00 AM. Like a good philosopher Descartes believed in sleeping past noon. With the new schedule, he caught pneumonia and promptly died.
As most email address harvesters don't compile the javascript, you can use that to obscur the mailto link and still have an email button that works for most users...you miss the people with javascript disabled.
Of course, there is no email address obscurring that prevents manual harvesting. Considering that email sent to an obscurred address is more likely to be read than one sent to posted address. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there were people employed in sweat shops manually harvesting "obscurred" addresses.
Can you tell me of a better deal than getting someon else to pay for it?
When Kafka is given his rightful position at the head of the copyright agency they will be.
Of course, getting a conviction on dream copyright violations will be tough. Every time the jury is about to deliver a verdict, everyone will wake up...and you will have to wait for the next night for a new trial.
I am not surprised at all, and I am glad to see that NASA didn't fall for the marketing hype that the number of megapixels is the determining factor in the quality of a photographic image. Personally, I would prefer a 1 megapixel camera with an SLR (single reflex lens) to 5 megapixel camera.
I believe the secret to art is the process used in filtering down to the information that you really need in a picture.
The two areas that you miss with smaller megapixel cameras are textures and fractal patterns such as the shapes of leaves, forests and grassy fields. However, when you really need to study a pattern, you can zoom in (assuming you have a decent lens) and get the information you need.
I think 1 megapixel is the right image size for the job at hand. Of course, all the pictures from Mars with trees and grassy fields will be a bit fuzzy. Those of rocks, landscapes and strange green alien creatures will turn out fine.
Assume a perfectly round stone on a flat earth...
I think the article is indicating that the stock price hints that there might be more behind the company than what we see in the anti-SCO press. The stock is rising. Is there something that the anti-SCO press is missing about the company? or is it a suckers' bubble?
I tend to take any stock that comes from Provo with a grain of salt. Provo is the MLM capital of the world. Here is another Utah Valley company: The Dream Mine was revealed to a prophet about a hundred years. It is not a traditional mine. The mine actually leads to the hidden vault of treasures buried by the Nephites. FYI, the Nephites were from a lost tribes of Isreal that came to America on a submarine a few thousand years ago. They got all the best treasures. But the Lamanites (American Indians) were horrible sinful creatures. They killed all the Nephites. The Nephites buried all of their treasures before the final battle.
The trick to the mine is that the secret entrance will not be revealed until God is getting ready to smite the gentiles.
This investment is great if you wish to hedge against Armagedden, and the stock tends to do quite well, despite the fact that it won't have a product until the end of the world.
Unfortunately, you have to be of the faith to own stock.
SCO is likely just another dream mine. As mentioned early, the faithful have a long history of falling for every MLM and get rich quick scheme you can name. They often get burned. Of course, if the case comes before a jury of the faithful, SCO will win big time, regardless of the merits of their case.
The Utah Court system is SCO's ace in the hole. If the jury thinks that ruling in favor SCO would make Utah Valley the new Bellevue, then they might rule for SCO. Regardless, I would be worried about shorting SCO or any penny stock from Utah, as Provo Stocks have certain irrational characteristics.
Or perhaps the reason that banks have more old code and old systems sitting around is because they were among the very first adopters of IT. The fact that a company maintains the same code base for several decades doesn't mean that they are somehow inferior. It means they have a longer lifecyle in mind than flash in the pan companies.
BTW, just judging from web sites, banks tend to employ more advanced encryption, have larger databases, etc., than your typical web site. Of course, banks rarely have good flash animation.
I am suggesting that if music sharers weren't running around proclaiming that they were bringing an end to intellectual property and the capitalist machine, then we would have been in a better position to get a user friendly format.
Also, if there was a greater effort to adhere to the spirit and letter of the copyright law, then the community would have been in a better position to negotiate better IP laws and avoid the DRMed formats. What we now have is a situtation where the entrenched interests in the music industry will be able to point to P2P and proclaim the public untrustworthy.
It was not the momentum of MP3, but the hot air and flagrant disregard for the very concept of rule of law that seems to be bringing the end to open formats for music.
Sorry, but I doubt the music industry launching a double front attack with law suits and rather expensive and less usable alternatives is that much of a coincidence.
For that matter, the two pronged assault was probably orchestrated. To launch lawsuits without a replacement technology in place would be a losing strategy. Launching legitimate music channels while building a case against the anti-capitalist P2Pers would have weakened the case for built in copyright protection.
You probably should ammend your post to say that both the lawsuit and pay per song services were part of the strategy, and that the strategy is working quite well at keeping the power in the hands of the few.
Watching the free music crowd getting played for suckers was an extremely painful thing to watch...especially since their was a better option: If there was respect for the written laws, we could have had our MP3s and copied them to our MP3 player too. Hey, we may have even been in a better position to change the laws for the better.
Right now, terrorism of the skies is pretty much restricted to those groups that have a ready supply of people willing to kill themselves for their cause. Remote control airplanes will open the terrorist industry to technical savvy terrorist groups who like to work safely from the ground.
Best of all, remote control airplanes would allow terrorist groups to work in larger numbers. Right now, terrorist groups are pushed to their limits to take over 4 airplanes. In this new system, a terrorist group that hacks the remote control code procedures for the soft walls project might be able to take take down 20 to 30 planes before the airlines are able to ground the fleet.
The current airline security system pretty much exludes those terrorist groups that have people willing to kill for their beliefs, but not willing to die for them. This will be welcome news to any terrorist organization with good hackers.
As for my comfort flying, the fact that I know that someone can take control of the airplane from the pilot will make me just that much more likely to buy one of those airline insurance policies.
I agree the 2.5 liters is probably a made up number. The amount of water you should drink is dictated by your size, activity, diet and climate. The reason I added a number to the post is because I wanted to indicate that drinking a good amount of water would probably help kick the caffeine habit.
Just saying drink a good amount of water would have been insufficient, as I would need to define a good amount of water.
Grabbing numbers from web sites that I realized were not authorative sources was sufficient.
It probably would have been better to say: "drink water until your pee is clear."
I have no doubt that schools are promoting the "water myth" and actively encouraging students to carry water bottles. Their reasoning has little to do with scientific evidence about the exact amount of water people must drink to survive, but an effort to counter the over consumption of sugared drinks.
The sugared drink industry, undoubtedly, would fund any research counter to the water drinking argument.
I have been seeing articles that indicate that drinking too much juice as a child is bad for their health.
My personal experience in bicycling, hiking, traveling and various labor jobs is that drinking a good deal of water is extremely helpful. Drinking soda is not.