Include Cybermen and/or Daleks, and we're one brain-snatching away from three different sci-fi universes colliding with reality.
Right idea but wrong Sci-Fi universe: they are going to be sending it to a nuclear power plant in Japan which seems to be how half of the Godzilla movies start...
Prof. Moglen is also one of the most polished speakers anywhere, on any topic, ever.
Except when he's straight up yelling at interviewers?
...and given the video evidence except when he is speaking. Perhaps the submitter should give their second interview for a bit of comparison before making sweeping claims like this.
you were apparently fully prepared to raise a child with sufficient resources so the kid's life won't be a living hell. That is not the only environment in which fetuses exist.
Careful what you argue - there are regions on this world where kids are born into terrible conditions of abject poverty, famine and disease. This is arguably far worse than even the lowest level of poverty in the US or Europe.
Pro-lifers tend to argue that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception so I say lets adopt that. In this case the mother provides life support services to another individual at some discomfort to herself. Were this between two already born people we would have no issue in letting one person decide that they did not want to continue bearing the burden and they would be able to terminate their life support of the other. However in such a case the other person would not be killed but would be allowed to carry on without life support to live - or die - based on their own capability to support their own life.
What I would suggest is we treat abortion the same way. The fetus should be removed, without damaging it, and should be allowed a chance to live on its own. Before about 6 months there is essentially no chance that it will survive but after this its chances start to greatly increase. This gives the woman full control over her body - she can withdraw her life support services whenever she wants - but also respects the fetus' right to life because it gets a chance at survival.
This is more-or-less consistent with abortion law in most countries except that there is usually fixed date after which no abortion is allowed (barring medical necessity to protect the mother's life) rather than an extraction and see if they survive approach. Currently in Canada it is perfectly legal - although unusual - to abort an 8.5 month fetus which, given its survival chance by itself, I find hard to differentiate from murder.
Just like ABS, traction control, stability control... they're all just ways of allowing drivers to become stupid, lazy and less involved.
Not just less involved but less in control. They either need to go the whole way and have properly driverless cars where the computer is responsible for everything or have the driver responsible for everything which means that a computer cannot override the drivers control. Having both driver and computer each partially in control would be like having an aircraft piloted by committee.
No wonder we have a population in debt when we don't even teach our kids how to manage *life*.
...and yet somehow the population managed not to get in debt for centuries before "home economics" was introduced as a subject. Perhaps a far more effective approach, would be to teach basic ethics then the next generation of bankers might lend money in a more responsible fashion.
No, driving in certain ways that a government has deemed to be unsafe is illegal. There are plenty of unsafe things which are perfectly legal. For a start the US could improve it's driving test to the point where making 4 right turns and one left turn and knowing how large some fines are (without what they were for being clearly explained!) is not sufficient to pass a driving test.
I was not arguing in favour of making prostitution illegal I was simply pointing out that the OP made a really stupid argument. Your point is far more poignant. The problems I see with prostitution are twofold: disease and the safety and potential exploitation of the women involved. Both of these are bad things for society. It is not clear that illegality is a good way to address either issue but, equally, I'm not convinced that making it legal would do this either.
So since drinking lots of alcohol is legal and driving a car is legal then drink driving should be legal? Voltaire is correct but the absurdity here is your argument.
I am so happy I pay by wire and never use my real name! Yay, go me!
The problem with this is what happens when the pseudonym that you use happens to be someone else's name? That person will be completely innocent of any crime but will probably have their name dragged through the mud because it is included on a list. A similar thing happened in the UK a few years ago when the police busted a child pornography ring. They then went around and very publicly arrested all the people whose credit cards had been used. While they undoubtedly exposed and arrested several child molesters they also tarnished the reputations of completely innocent people who had had their credit cards stolen.
My feeling is that they should not release something like this until all those on it have at least been charged with the associated crime. Even this can lead to mistakes - as seen in the UK - but at least then there will be a clear record of the mistake and the possibility of consequences for truly incompetent ones that should motivate police to act carefully. After all if they have sufficient evidence to convict someone of a crime in a law court then surely they have a duty to do so? If they don't have that much evidence then they should not be trying to convict someone in the court of public opinion instead - it's unprofessional and potentially wide open to abuse.
Patents are illegal to use for blocking production, you can only make sure you earn your due.
That is simply not true. If you choose the license the patent then yes: it must be done in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion but deciding not to license is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. If you look here there are also things such as "RAND-RF" where licensing costs are free but the patent holder requires registration to prevent certain types of products from being sold. Not to mention that exclusive licenses like this would not be legal.
In fact if you could NOT use a patent to block production then they would be worthless because anyone could build whatever they wanted using your patents and force you to license them to you. If you look at the Samsung/Apple disputes around the globe each is trying to get production (well imports since they are produced elsewhere) blocked which would be impossible if all patent holder could do is extract a fee - there would just be damages instead.
The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon's poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier
Actually that is NOT what the article says. I know on slashdot that us commenters rarely read the article but things are getting pretty bad if not even the submitter reads the article!
The reason for locating it at the poles (as the article explains) is due to the availability of water ice for cooling. You stick it in a deep crater there to provide a stable thermal environment i.e. you avoid having to design a system to cope with both the heat during the day and the cold at night. The reason this is important is because vacuum is a fantastic insulator so, despite it being cold, the only way to lose that heat is via radiation which is not very fast (this is why thermos flasks use vacuum as an insulator). The presence of water ice means that you can use it to transport the heat away from the the computer.
I would vote to nuke them -- I mean quite literally nuke them, with a pound of bacon on board just to make the fallout more interesting -- before agreeing to some censorship policy they endorse.
I would agree that it is completely unacceptable to agree to such censorship but somehow saying "no" seems to be a far better option than killing millions of innocent civilians and releasing large clouds of highly dangerous radioactive material into the environment - not to mention bringing the entire world far closer to the spectre of nuclear armageddon. I know it sounds a bit boring and doesn't have the same Hollywood appeal as a nuclear holocaust would but somehow judging a population based on the actions of its government doesn't seem to be a wise thing for an American - or for that matter anyone - to suggest.
Why does this matter - this is a patent NOT a law. All this means is that anyone who wants to implement DRM must pay the patent holder. In effect this is an obstacle to implementing DRM. In fact perhaps this is something people ought to think about. For example if I were the holder of this patent I could presumably set the royalty fee sufficiently high such that nobody could afford to create a printer with DRM effectively blocking DRM for the life of the patent...so I suppose in that case the lifetime would matter because after that anyone could add DRM.
Interestingly enough, while the OP is clearly not playing with a full deck, there is a phenomenon know as Zitterbewegung which is very similar to what the OP was suggesting. However this behaviour is suggested by free-particle solutions to the Dirac equation which is firmly grounded in both special relativity and quantum mechanics.
Essentially the solutions suggest that e.g. an electron may propagate by jittering back and forth at the speed of light such that the velocity averages out to the expected value. The frequency of this jittering is of the order of 10^21 Hz and so it has never been experimentally observed but it is, nevertheless, an interesting possibility. Sometimes reality is stranger than even crazy people think!
Actually I think they say this because they are mathematicians, not physicists. Mass is a Lorentz invariant and is constant in all inertial frames and it is a common misconception deriving from the fact that it is easier to think of mass increasing with speed that it is to grasp the concept that our Newtonian notion of velocity does not actually work in relativity because space and time are relative and not independent of one another. My guess is that this is also true in their paper and that, rather than mass decreasing, it is their concept of velocity which actually needs to change, not the mass.
Metric is for people who are too bad at math to mentally convert from different base systems.
So what you are implying is that Imperial users are good enough at maths to mentally convert to metric but too stubborn and stuck in the past to do so?
There is no reason to believe that the second law of thermodynamics can be violated, and overwhelming evidence that it cannot.
True but within what we already know it is entirely possible to imagine that you could dump your low grade heat "invisibly" without violating thermodynamics. For example suppose you dump it into neutrinos or perhaps Dark Matter or Dark Energy if you want to be more exotic. I don't see any reason why this would be forbidden but equally I see no way that we could achieve it because the neutrino coupling to matter is incredibly small unless you go to extremely high energy. So I would rate it as highly improbable (given our current understanding) but by no means impossible.
Dont know about that, they still count money in pounds.
Ah but those are metric pounds which are far better than the pounds-shilling-pence system that preceded it and used to be referred to as the 'LSD' system which, as far as I can tell, if probably what you would need to take in order before it made sense.
If he had been the company president and a big political contributor, some poor tech way down the ladder would be facing charges instead.
If you are going to claim that how do you know it did not happen in this case and he isn't the "poor tech way down the ladder"? You claim this as a viable possibility and then immediately dismiss it out of hand for this case which suggests that you don't really believe it is a sensible possibility (which I would tend to agree with). There is clearly a problem with accountability at the top of large corporations, especially the banks, but they seem to get away with their behaviour because nobody holds them accountable for it not by framing someone else lower down.
Slashdot Mirror
Include Cybermen and/or Daleks, and we're one brain-snatching away from three different sci-fi universes colliding with reality.
Right idea but wrong Sci-Fi universe: they are going to be sending it to a nuclear power plant in Japan which seems to be how half of the Godzilla movies start...
Prof. Moglen is also one of the most polished speakers anywhere, on any topic, ever.
Except when he's straight up yelling at interviewers?
you were apparently fully prepared to raise a child with sufficient resources so the kid's life won't be a living hell. That is not the only environment in which fetuses exist.
Careful what you argue - there are regions on this world where kids are born into terrible conditions of abject poverty, famine and disease. This is arguably far worse than even the lowest level of poverty in the US or Europe.
Pro-lifers tend to argue that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception so I say lets adopt that. In this case the mother provides life support services to another individual at some discomfort to herself. Were this between two already born people we would have no issue in letting one person decide that they did not want to continue bearing the burden and they would be able to terminate their life support of the other. However in such a case the other person would not be killed but would be allowed to carry on without life support to live - or die - based on their own capability to support their own life.
What I would suggest is we treat abortion the same way. The fetus should be removed, without damaging it, and should be allowed a chance to live on its own. Before about 6 months there is essentially no chance that it will survive but after this its chances start to greatly increase. This gives the woman full control over her body - she can withdraw her life support services whenever she wants - but also respects the fetus' right to life because it gets a chance at survival.
This is more-or-less consistent with abortion law in most countries except that there is usually fixed date after which no abortion is allowed (barring medical necessity to protect the mother's life) rather than an extraction and see if they survive approach. Currently in Canada it is perfectly legal - although unusual - to abort an 8.5 month fetus which, given its survival chance by itself, I find hard to differentiate from murder.
Just like ABS, traction control, stability control ... they're all just ways of allowing drivers to become stupid, lazy and less involved.
Not just less involved but less in control. They either need to go the whole way and have properly driverless cars where the computer is responsible for everything or have the driver responsible for everything which means that a computer cannot override the drivers control. Having both driver and computer each partially in control would be like having an aircraft piloted by committee.
I must've had enlightened history teaching, because I was never once required to memorize any dates with just one exception: July 4, 1776.
Exactly! The -236 year anniversary of the Higgs discovery!
No wonder we have a population in debt when we don't even teach our kids how to manage *life*.
You don't learn practical problem solving like that in Public Speaking class! :)
No one is saying he's innocent.
Indeed - he is guilty of embarrassing the pentagon which might be a truly terrible crime in the US but is somewhat less so in the UK.
I know - sorry for being so old fashioned.
Driving unsafely is illegal.
No, driving in certain ways that a government has deemed to be unsafe is illegal. There are plenty of unsafe things which are perfectly legal. For a start the US could improve it's driving test to the point where making 4 right turns and one left turn and knowing how large some fines are (without what they were for being clearly explained!) is not sufficient to pass a driving test.
How is having sex a danger to society?
I was not arguing in favour of making prostitution illegal I was simply pointing out that the OP made a really stupid argument. Your point is far more poignant. The problems I see with prostitution are twofold: disease and the safety and potential exploitation of the women involved. Both of these are bad things for society. It is not clear that illegality is a good way to address either issue but, equally, I'm not convinced that making it legal would do this either.
So since drinking lots of alcohol is legal and driving a car is legal then drink driving should be legal? Voltaire is correct but the absurdity here is your argument.
I am so happy I pay by wire and never use my real name! Yay, go me!
The problem with this is what happens when the pseudonym that you use happens to be someone else's name? That person will be completely innocent of any crime but will probably have their name dragged through the mud because it is included on a list. A similar thing happened in the UK a few years ago when the police busted a child pornography ring. They then went around and very publicly arrested all the people whose credit cards had been used. While they undoubtedly exposed and arrested several child molesters they also tarnished the reputations of completely innocent people who had had their credit cards stolen.
My feeling is that they should not release something like this until all those on it have at least been charged with the associated crime. Even this can lead to mistakes - as seen in the UK - but at least then there will be a clear record of the mistake and the possibility of consequences for truly incompetent ones that should motivate police to act carefully. After all if they have sufficient evidence to convict someone of a crime in a law court then surely they have a duty to do so? If they don't have that much evidence then they should not be trying to convict someone in the court of public opinion instead - it's unprofessional and potentially wide open to abuse.
Patents are illegal to use for blocking production, you can only make sure you earn your due.
That is simply not true. If you choose the license the patent then yes: it must be done in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion but deciding not to license is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. If you look here there are also things such as "RAND-RF" where licensing costs are free but the patent holder requires registration to prevent certain types of products from being sold. Not to mention that exclusive licenses like this would not be legal.
In fact if you could NOT use a patent to block production then they would be worthless because anyone could build whatever they wanted using your patents and force you to license them to you. If you look at the Samsung/Apple disputes around the globe each is trying to get production (well imports since they are produced elsewhere) blocked which would be impossible if all patent holder could do is extract a fee - there would just be damages instead.
The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon's poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier
Actually that is NOT what the article says. I know on slashdot that us commenters rarely read the article but things are getting pretty bad if not even the submitter reads the article!
The reason for locating it at the poles (as the article explains) is due to the availability of water ice for cooling. You stick it in a deep crater there to provide a stable thermal environment i.e. you avoid having to design a system to cope with both the heat during the day and the cold at night. The reason this is important is because vacuum is a fantastic insulator so, despite it being cold, the only way to lose that heat is via radiation which is not very fast (this is why thermos flasks use vacuum as an insulator). The presence of water ice means that you can use it to transport the heat away from the the computer.
I would vote to nuke them -- I mean quite literally nuke them, with a pound of bacon on board just to make the fallout more interesting -- before agreeing to some censorship policy they endorse.
I would agree that it is completely unacceptable to agree to such censorship but somehow saying "no" seems to be a far better option than killing millions of innocent civilians and releasing large clouds of highly dangerous radioactive material into the environment - not to mention bringing the entire world far closer to the spectre of nuclear armageddon. I know it sounds a bit boring and doesn't have the same Hollywood appeal as a nuclear holocaust would but somehow judging a population based on the actions of its government doesn't seem to be a wise thing for an American - or for that matter anyone - to suggest.
What is the life of this patent?
Why does this matter - this is a patent NOT a law. All this means is that anyone who wants to implement DRM must pay the patent holder. In effect this is an obstacle to implementing DRM. In fact perhaps this is something people ought to think about. For example if I were the holder of this patent I could presumably set the royalty fee sufficiently high such that nobody could afford to create a printer with DRM effectively blocking DRM for the life of the patent...so I suppose in that case the lifetime would matter because after that anyone could add DRM.
plenty of math saying people could break it
I think you mean physics. Maths can say whatever you want because it is not tied to describing the real world.
Interestingly enough, while the OP is clearly not playing with a full deck, there is a phenomenon know as Zitterbewegung which is very similar to what the OP was suggesting. However this behaviour is suggested by free-particle solutions to the Dirac equation which is firmly grounded in both special relativity and quantum mechanics.
Essentially the solutions suggest that e.g. an electron may propagate by jittering back and forth at the speed of light such that the velocity averages out to the expected value. The frequency of this jittering is of the order of 10^21 Hz and so it has never been experimentally observed but it is, nevertheless, an interesting possibility. Sometimes reality is stranger than even crazy people think!
Now we're losing mas as we accelerate!
Actually I think they say this because they are mathematicians, not physicists. Mass is a Lorentz invariant and is constant in all inertial frames and it is a common misconception deriving from the fact that it is easier to think of mass increasing with speed that it is to grasp the concept that our Newtonian notion of velocity does not actually work in relativity because space and time are relative and not independent of one another. My guess is that this is also true in their paper and that, rather than mass decreasing, it is their concept of velocity which actually needs to change, not the mass.
Metric is for people who are too bad at math to mentally convert from different base systems.
So what you are implying is that Imperial users are good enough at maths to mentally convert to metric but too stubborn and stuck in the past to do so?
There is no reason to believe that the second law of thermodynamics can be violated, and overwhelming evidence that it cannot.
True but within what we already know it is entirely possible to imagine that you could dump your low grade heat "invisibly" without violating thermodynamics. For example suppose you dump it into neutrinos or perhaps Dark Matter or Dark Energy if you want to be more exotic. I don't see any reason why this would be forbidden but equally I see no way that we could achieve it because the neutrino coupling to matter is incredibly small unless you go to extremely high energy. So I would rate it as highly improbable (given our current understanding) but by no means impossible.
Since he's in Britain it'll be a real pint - 568 ml, not that rip-off US version. Any way, you wouldn't - you'd just order a half-liter
Actually in the UK that would be 0.5 litres.
Dont know about that, they still count money in pounds.
Ah but those are metric pounds which are far better than the pounds-shilling-pence system that preceded it and used to be referred to as the 'LSD' system which, as far as I can tell, if probably what you would need to take in order before it made sense.
If he had been the company president and a big political contributor, some poor tech way down the ladder would be facing charges instead.
If you are going to claim that how do you know it did not happen in this case and he isn't the "poor tech way down the ladder"? You claim this as a viable possibility and then immediately dismiss it out of hand for this case which suggests that you don't really believe it is a sensible possibility (which I would tend to agree with). There is clearly a problem with accountability at the top of large corporations, especially the banks, but they seem to get away with their behaviour because nobody holds them accountable for it not by framing someone else lower down.