And it's pretty useless to talk about bits per Hertz -- thoughts are not binary, so "bits" is meaningless
Thoughts aren't binary, but bits are a common unit of information. The signal on the recording can be reduced to information. We can know the limit of this channel through the Shannon/Hartley theory.
If you really can't reduce thoughts down to a signal, then you've already answered the question since what's on the recording is merely a signal. Thus it can't be turned back into thoughts. If thoughts CAN be reduced down to a signal, then measuring the information content of them and comparing that to the information content on the record could at least definitively rule out the possibility.
I heard about this story on NPR yesterday. It's a neat story, and I had never heard about it previously. The line about aliens reconstructing the recording back into thoughts started me thinking though. It seems absurd, but how could you show it was absurd using science and not just opinion? The first thing that came to mind was measuring the information content in the recording, and trying to estimate the information content in thoughts. If the information content in the recording Information content of the thoughts, it is impossible to reconstruct the recording into thoughts no matter how advanced the technology. Brain waves have a very low frequency. On the order of 4-13 Hz. Even if you're able to cram several bits/Hz, that's still a very small amount of information. So the question remains, how to measure the information content of thoughts?
All I can say is that lower taxes seemed to work during the Reagan era and maybe higher taxes failed to work during the Great Depression.
Except if you actually want to be honest, you have to look at the times it didn't work. If you're dishonest there's no point in arguing. Everything works if you only pay attention to the times it worked, including snake oil, magic, and voodoo.
So the best conclusion we can reach is tax cuts have no real impact on the economy. So why do Republicans keep calling for tax cuts to "stimulate the economy" when our self imposed experiments have only show it has no impact? I'd say they're either stupid, or simply trying to appear the Republican base, (the wealthy), who benefit enormously from the Bush era tax cuts.
So why do rich people have more of a "need" to hide tax breaks with a lower tax system than a higher tax system?
Because the majority of people aren't rich, and we live in a democracy. If the huge tax breaks for the wealthy were more apparent the rest of us might get pissed off and start not voting for those in favor of these big tax breaks. Sometimes that actually happens and congress acts to shut down the "loopholes" (yah right). There were a lot of tax shelters in the 80s that got close off because there was enough press attention to them. I forget what they were (something involving real estate).
By giving tax breaks for more complex things like capital gains it both benefits the very wealthy who make a lot of money off capital gains and not through labor, and hides those tax breaks from the majority of the populace who don't have degrees in accounting or economics, or the interest to understand it. Warren Buffet (who obviously makes a lot of money off of investment and capital gains) once said he didn't understand why he paid a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary did. Why do we favor capital over labor?
Another good example is Microsoft not paying taxes to the state of Washington since they license the software in another state they wind up saving a LOT of money in taxes to Washington State. The actual work to produce the software occurs in WA, who supplies all the infra-structure that supports Microsoft. Why the people of WA let Microsoft get away with it I just can't understand.
Anyway, the whole point of the argument was that lower or higher taxes have really nothing to do with tax complexity. It's all just a dog fight and the call to "simplify the tax code" is just another way to muddy the waters and draw attention away from what's really going on.
I merely pointed out that you didn't understand the full impact of taxation.
Does anyone really understand the "full impact of taxation"? Of course not. People argue about it ad-nauseum with little evidence to back it up. I know enough that the impact of taxation is complex, but it's a small part of the whole picture. But hey, let's look at the evidence, and what we actually want to accomplish.
The point you seem to have missed is that there's really no evidence that lowering taxes creates jobs (remember jobs? that's actually what we're after here). In fact, we've done the experiment and it hasn't worked. The Republicans have been repeating the same thing over and over and over again. When will they realize the record is broken? The Republicans under Bush cut income taxes, the estate tax (it's 0 this year in fact), capital gains taxes, and the corporate tax rate. So we should be having a gangbusters economy now right now, with a near zero unemployment rate! Low taxes stimulates the economy! Right?
Meanwhile the Republican Governor of my State (Minnesota) just gave a speech about how if we lower the corporate tax rate by 20%, we'll stimulate the economy! Uh huh. Same old same old. Ignore the evidence and just keep on believing the same thing.
Lower taxes can also lead to a more complex tax code, through the need to hide the tax breaks to the powerful and wealthy. A less transparent tax code is a likely outcome of sneaking tax breaks for the wealthy and powerful.
See! I can make the same argument. (And if you don't believe it's true, just look at the tax code for more than 30 seconds).
Unfortunately, in this case, we need to cut pork not to cut taxes, but rather to get our debt load under control
I agree that we need to get our debt under control, but this is a long term problem. We need to solve it AFTER we get the economy in shape. Cutting spending now is foolhardy. That doesn't mean EVERY program is a worthy one of course. If we're talking about going to the moon again, it's a stupid program that doesn't benefit much of anyone.
The real problem here is Americans have short memories. After this whole economic mess is over in a few years will there really be enough political will to actually solve our long term debt problem?
Every American household is now responsible for almost a million dollars in government debt and as-yet-unfunded government programs.
I'm not sure if you realize this, but there's more to government and business than just lowering taxes. If the lens you bring out is the tax lens, all you're going to see is tax solutions and miss all the far better ones. Demonizing taxes is a sure way to an unbalanced and foolhardy view of the world (Social security is the major cause of unfair competition? Are you actually serious?).
The Republican obsession with lowering taxes reminds me of the old NORML rhetoric of how if we just legalized marijuana, it'd suddenly wipe out about half the problems we have! It'd reduce our prison populations, it'd solve the environment problems through hemp paper(Big Wood Pulp destroys the environment), it'd cure so many diseases that the pharmaceutical companies just want to sell you a pill for, it'd solve all our economic woes though taxing it (big tobacco doesn't want that!, it'd solve our energy problems though hemp oil (big oil!). Hemp rope is 10 times stronger than anything else! (Big nylon) Hemp seed will solve all our nutrition and health problems since it's the perfect food (Big food)!
Sheesh. At least most people saw the extremes of that whole argument for what it was. Unfortunately there's too many people that are True Believers in the lowering of taxes.
Actually Darwin's evolution means that those best adapted to the environment survive, not necessarily the strongest.
I guess I don't understand the distinction. Both those concepts in this context sound the same to me. So, theoretically, the fittest female mosquitoes in this case will be the ones with slightly different frequencies. As a result their genes would likely spawn more of the same.
Evolutionary theory has moved on since Darwin. As I said there's a concept of cost of each change. If a change takes 100 mutations in 100 different genes that's a very costly change. The kind of fast change like bacteria becoming resistant to to a certain anti-biotic is normally a single or a few gene mutations, so it can happen very quickly. How do you know that frequency already varies to any considerable degree in the mosquito population? If it doesn't, how do you know how costly it might be? Unless you just happen to study them I'm guessing you're just making that up.
You know what creates jobs? Small business. The overwhelming majority of Americans are employed by small businesses. And what is the enemy of small business?
Big Business? Healthcare costs? Under-expanding? Over-expanding? Lack of a certain skill? Unfair foreign competition? Lack of access to loans to expand? Key people leaving? Taxes.
Err.. OK. I've been in several small businesses over the years, and the number one thing they worry about sure as hell isn't taxes. It's on the radar of course, but who doesn't like to complain about taxes? Any business that sits around and worries about taxes is already a very successful business to worry about such small scale issues. If you want to help small business, you probably shouldn't start with one of the things of least concern. I'm really tired of the same-old-same-old line from the Republican party that "if we just lower taxes, that'll fix everything!". So here we are with a far lower tax rate than we had during the 90s, and the economy is in the shitter. How many times do you have to do the same thing which doesn't work to realize it's not working?
Darwin says, in a generation or two, the frequency changes.
Right, just like people have evolved to be bulletproof, and bacteria have evolved to survive heat sterilization.
Evolution doesn't mean everything eventually adapts. It only means the strongest survive. Change isn't costless either. Greater change requires more "cost". It may very well be the case that frequency changes are far too difficult of a change to come about. Who knows?
Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.
If this isn't the most useless statement I've ever read on Slashdot, I don't know what is. Using $50 words like "quasi-dualistic" (WTF?) doesn't make an argument. Maybe that flies well around the humanities department, but our BS detectors are a bit better around here.
I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with, but I don't recall anyone mentioning souls, p-zombies, or "Quasi dualistic Searl inspired objections towards functionalism".
No, and it's not supposed to. Neither of the products you linked to had any implication of endorsement by the President, which is what we're actually talking about here.
I think you're spot on. The article focuses on copyright, which as I understand is not the end-all-be-all for speech (which is what we're really talking about here, not copyright).
Talking about copyright is entirely missing the point. The full statement from the Whitehouse is:
This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.
(emphasis mine)
If you want to argue about it from a legal perspective, copyright is not the right law to do so (at least if you want to have an honest discussion about it).
The first part I think I disagree with. Why shouldn't I be able to alter the photograph in any way I see fit? The second part seems entirely reasonable to me, and is likely covered by existing laws about endorsement.
As soon as you start making changes(remove Jar Jar, etc) it ceases to become Lucas' artwork, and moreso a "design by committee".
I think that's kind of the point.
but I don't see how the fans have a say in someone else's art.
Heh. There's an old cliche. "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". Obviously nobody has any legal rights to be able to take SW and change it around to their own pleasing. But you sound like you're going beyond that and claiming nobody should do this on some sort of moral or ethical grounds. If that's the case, all art is guilty of the crime you describe. I'd go so far as all creative works are guilty of it. If you think creation comes out of a vacuum, think again.
I was still able to watch them and enjoy them just not with same wide eyed wonder, but then I wasnt supposed to, they werent made for me, they were made for my kids.
The difference is that the original movies weren't just designed to appeal to kids, and stood up on their own. Plenty of kids grow up liking a certain movie as a child, but later grow out of it and realize it's a crappy kids movie. Is their a real cult following for the Beethoven (the dog) movies for instance? It looks like they made 6 of the things, but I've never heard there's a serious collection of adults that love those movies on the scale of Star Wars. There's plenty of stuff I loved as a kid, but later realized just how terrible it really is. Buck Rogers comes to mind. So I don't agree with your idea that the original Star Wars movies were just kid movies.
The hatred comes from just how bad the new movies ultimately were. Lucas just made a kids movie in space and forgot to hire decent actors, give them good direction, provide a decent storyline, etc. Jar Jar is merely the undeniable representation of this. I think a lot of the more extreme reactions come from some feeling of betrayal. Some people feel like Lucas was "one of them", and the new movies are a complete rejection of that perceived relationship.
I'm really interested in the movie, as I'm fascinated by the whole love/hate relationship people have with Lucas. The only thing that really pissed me off was Han not shooting first. That's just utterly wrong as it changes the character of Solo (which is just a big no-no). You don't mess with character development after the fact. The FX changes I didn't really care about to much, though most of them looked like crap.
Any additional expenses later on, such as marketing costs, remastering costs, etc., should not be allowed to factor in when this guy's royalties are calculated, so that he's guaranteed to get something once the original number for cost is surpassed.
It's all about the wording in the contract, and gross vs. net, and whatever accounting tricks can get pulled behind the scenes. You'd have to be part lawyer, part accountant to really understand what's going on and if it's legal or not. It might be completely illegal and high trickery, but the cost of litigating it vs. the returned value isn't worth it. Who knows?
The real lesson learned is to be wary of what's really going on, and not just trust you'll eventually get a fair deal. It's pretty obvious to anyone looking at the original "And you'll get a percentage of the profits" idea for ROTJ and seeing someone screwed over this guy somewhere. Unfortunately business dealings aren't always about fairness or justice, but about what you can get away with.
All of what you say is probably true. But so what?
You're not thinking like an attacker would, you're thinking like you're trying to protect your own company.
Attackers look for the easiest way to get into a system. They likely wouldn't pick your company for the reasons you describe. But how many companies work in an entirely different manner to obviate everything you just said? I don't know what those are, but the point being you've only excluded one portion of the potential vectors, not the entire set of vectors. That doesn't mean it's possible, or happening. It just means you've not really made a convincing argument that it couldn't happen.
Is the USB key going to open a TCP/IP or UDP connection back to their servers without tripping my firewall that a new application is trying to connect?
Your firewall I don't know about. Not everyone has an outgoing firewall though. How many people have an outgoing firewall on their home network for instance? How many people use laptops at work and home? Maybe it doesn't work at the workplace, but works perfectly well when the laptop gets connected at home, the airport, or coffee shop. That might be a day, a week, or a month later. So what? Report back all the goodies it's gathered during that time period.
Is my virus scanner going to get tripped that something suspicious is coming out of the key without my interaction?
Probably not. Virus scanners mostly work off signatures of known viruses/malware. This isn't going to be a known piece of spyware. The behavior based ones are relatively poor and produce a lot of false positives. I'm sure it wouldn't be terribly hard to design the spyware to even get around even that kind of detection.
In a lot of corporate networks USB Mass media is disabled. I'd love to see a proof of concept that can get around these common checks
Most of these kinds of checks just don't protect against the dedicated attacker, but are designed for the mass virus and malware attacks. Protecting against someone that knows something about your infra-structure, or is willing to write custom software for just one person is going to be much more difficult to protect against. Also, if you really think that USB mass media keys are the only vector a dedicated attacker might use to get into your PC, think again.
Anyway, even if this kind of attack is only 10% effective, do you really think that's not high enough to not be worth it?
The trick is that "far-left" and "far-right" are simply inventions to keep people arguing about trivial matters.
That's odd. I know people that fall on both sides of the spectrum. I guess they must be figments of my imagination. It amuses me that American media is always so polarized. The even hire people to take up "far-right" and "far-left" stances and argue on camera. Given the vitriol engendered in their arguments, viewers mistakenly believe that the topics are important.
You're close. Viewers mistakenly believe that these are actual opinions held by "the other side". It makes people think that they're right, and the other side wrong. People like that, and will watch the show tomorrow. They also feel they've "seen both sides of the issue" so they're "informed". This is largely Fox News, but MSNBC has taken up the crazy charge of "the left". Some of these issues are VERY important, but all you need do is inject some crazy craze into the conversation and pretend that and what you're saying are the only two things that exist.
The GQ article with a cell phone next to a pack of cigarettes couldn't be more misleading. We hear about "such and such % increased risk of this", "such and such % increased risk of that". But these numbers are meaningless in assessing behavior changes unless you know the baseline risk.
So here's some numbers. The article starts off with cigarettes, so what's the risk of lung cancer between smokers and non-smokers?
Well, according to wikipedia, For Men it's 1.3% for non-smokers, and 17% for smokers. Wow!
Let's compare that to Brain cancer (all types). According to the National Cancer institute it's.6% for everyone. The Swedish study from 2006 found a 240% increase. So that's 1.44% risk.
So it seems quite obvious to me that even the most alarming study only showed a small increased health risk from cell phone use, and others have shown none. Compare that to smoking, which has been consistent in showing risk over the years, and an ENORMOUS risk. Oh, and for smoking that's JUST the lung cancer risk. We all should know about the other increased health risks associated with it.
I was astonished the first time I realized that typical 'environmentalist' groups oppose nuclear power.
To some degree it's an artifact of the sidedness of politics. Nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons (right or wrong, people think of them in the same breath). Nuclear weapons are "bad" for the "the left", and "good" for "the right". Most people have no real understanding anything about nuclear power or nuclear reactions so they turn to these kind of simple associations and dig in for the long fight. It's more complicated that this, but it's all driven by fear.
The real problems with nuclear power largely boil down to cost, and waste. The waste isn't going away anytime soon, and we're going to have to deal with it eventually. Every administration just kicks the waste problem down the road, and hopes someone else has to eventually deal with it. The cost issue I don't know much about, but it's also one that's not going away.
I'm an old leftie and a fan of nuclear power, so you can't categorise it like that.
All categories are wrong in some fashion. You can call it "pro-nuclear" and "anti-nuclear" if you like. The labels are irrelevant. The whole point is the insulation and people digging in their viewpoints. Being labeled a "troll" only highlights this point.
Far-Right: There's nothing to see here, it's just those damn liberals and their whining about nuclear power. It's all perfectly safe, there's absolutely no problems whats-so-ever with this plant or any other plant. A possible indicator of other problems around the country? Pshaw.. more liberal clap-trap. We can fix all our power problems with just building a lot of nuclear plants. Waste schmaste.
Far-Left: This is just PROOF that the nuclear power industry are all a bunch of bastard weasels. We ought to shut the whole shootin-match down for good. We can get all of our power from wind and solar anyway. 37 times the standard! I bet the standard is set too high anyway! These plants are all rotting from neglect, and there's probably a ton they're not telling us! I recently saw The China Syndrome and Silkwood, and let me tell you that's all just the tip of the iceberg! Chernobyl!
I'm just really sick of the nonsense on both sides. They both insulate themselves from the other and don't want to hear any real truths from "the other side". The whole nuclear power issue is 90% a "side of the room argument" where nobody wants to be associated with an idea from "the other side". This is what needs to stop to make any progress on the whole issue.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's pretty useless to talk about bits per Hertz -- thoughts are not binary, so "bits" is meaningless
Thoughts aren't binary, but bits are a common unit of information. The signal on the recording can be reduced to information. We can know the limit of this channel through the Shannon/Hartley theory.
If you really can't reduce thoughts down to a signal, then you've already answered the question since what's on the recording is merely a signal. Thus it can't be turned back into thoughts. If thoughts CAN be reduced down to a signal, then measuring the information content of them and comparing that to the information content on the record could at least definitively rule out the possibility.
I heard about this story on NPR yesterday. It's a neat story, and I had never heard about it previously. The line about aliens reconstructing the recording back into thoughts started me thinking though. It seems absurd, but how could you show it was absurd using science and not just opinion? The first thing that came to mind was measuring the information content in the recording, and trying to estimate the information content in thoughts. If the information content in the recording Information content of the thoughts, it is impossible to reconstruct the recording into thoughts no matter how advanced the technology. Brain waves have a very low frequency. On the order of 4-13 Hz. Even if you're able to cram several bits/Hz, that's still a very small amount of information. So the question remains, how to measure the information content of thoughts?
All I can say is that lower taxes seemed to work during the Reagan era and maybe higher taxes failed to work during the Great Depression.
Except if you actually want to be honest, you have to look at the times it didn't work. If you're dishonest there's no point in arguing. Everything works if you only pay attention to the times it worked, including snake oil, magic, and voodoo.
So the best conclusion we can reach is tax cuts have no real impact on the economy. So why do Republicans keep calling for tax cuts to "stimulate the economy" when our self imposed experiments have only show it has no impact? I'd say they're either stupid, or simply trying to appear the Republican base, (the wealthy), who benefit enormously from the Bush era tax cuts.
So why do rich people have more of a "need" to hide tax breaks with a lower tax system than a higher tax system?
Because the majority of people aren't rich, and we live in a democracy. If the huge tax breaks for the wealthy were more apparent the rest of us might get pissed off and start not voting for those in favor of these big tax breaks. Sometimes that actually happens and congress acts to shut down the "loopholes" (yah right). There were a lot of tax shelters in the 80s that got close off because there was enough press attention to them. I forget what they were (something involving real estate).
By giving tax breaks for more complex things like capital gains it both benefits the very wealthy who make a lot of money off capital gains and not through labor, and hides those tax breaks from the majority of the populace who don't have degrees in accounting or economics, or the interest to understand it. Warren Buffet (who obviously makes a lot of money off of investment and capital gains) once said he didn't understand why he paid a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary did. Why do we favor capital over labor?
Another good example is Microsoft not paying taxes to the state of Washington since they license the software in another state they wind up saving a LOT of money in taxes to Washington State. The actual work to produce the software occurs in WA, who supplies all the infra-structure that supports Microsoft. Why the people of WA let Microsoft get away with it I just can't understand.
Anyway, the whole point of the argument was that lower or higher taxes have really nothing to do with tax complexity. It's all just a dog fight and the call to "simplify the tax code" is just another way to muddy the waters and draw attention away from what's really going on.
I merely pointed out that you didn't understand the full impact of taxation.
Does anyone really understand the "full impact of taxation"? Of course not. People argue about it ad-nauseum with little evidence to back it up. I know enough that the impact of taxation is complex, but it's a small part of the whole picture. But hey, let's look at the evidence, and what we actually want to accomplish.
The point you seem to have missed is that there's really no evidence that lowering taxes creates jobs (remember jobs? that's actually what we're after here). In fact, we've done the experiment and it hasn't worked. The Republicans have been repeating the same thing over and over and over again. When will they realize the record is broken? The Republicans under Bush cut income taxes, the estate tax (it's 0 this year in fact), capital gains taxes, and the corporate tax rate. So we should be having a gangbusters economy now right now, with a near zero unemployment rate! Low taxes stimulates the economy! Right?
Meanwhile the Republican Governor of my State (Minnesota) just gave a speech about how if we lower the corporate tax rate by 20%, we'll stimulate the economy! Uh huh. Same old same old. Ignore the evidence and just keep on believing the same thing.
Lower taxes can also lead to a more complex tax code, through the need to hide the tax breaks to the powerful and wealthy. A less transparent tax code is a likely outcome of sneaking tax breaks for the wealthy and powerful.
See! I can make the same argument. (And if you don't believe it's true, just look at the tax code for more than 30 seconds).
Unfortunately, in this case, we need to cut pork not to cut taxes, but rather to get our debt load under control
I agree that we need to get our debt under control, but this is a long term problem. We need to solve it AFTER we get the economy in shape. Cutting spending now is foolhardy. That doesn't mean EVERY program is a worthy one of course. If we're talking about going to the moon again, it's a stupid program that doesn't benefit much of anyone.
The real problem here is Americans have short memories. After this whole economic mess is over in a few years will there really be enough political will to actually solve our long term debt problem?
Every American household is now responsible for almost a million dollars in government debt and as-yet-unfunded government programs.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, but according to the publicly available numbers for the national debt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
and the households:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
The number is actually more like 100,000 per household. That's still bad, but nowhere near the million dollars which you quote.
I'm not sure if you realize this, but there's more to government and business than just lowering taxes. If the lens you bring out is the tax lens, all you're going to see is tax solutions and miss all the far better ones. Demonizing taxes is a sure way to an unbalanced and foolhardy view of the world (Social security is the major cause of unfair competition? Are you actually serious?).
The Republican obsession with lowering taxes reminds me of the old NORML rhetoric of how if we just legalized marijuana, it'd suddenly wipe out about half the problems we have! It'd reduce our prison populations, it'd solve the environment problems through hemp paper(Big Wood Pulp destroys the environment), it'd cure so many diseases that the pharmaceutical companies just want to sell you a pill for, it'd solve all our economic woes though taxing it (big tobacco doesn't want that!, it'd solve our energy problems though hemp oil (big oil!). Hemp rope is 10 times stronger than anything else! (Big nylon) Hemp seed will solve all our nutrition and health problems since it's the perfect food (Big food)!
Sheesh. At least most people saw the extremes of that whole argument for what it was. Unfortunately there's too many people that are True Believers in the lowering of taxes.
Actually Darwin's evolution means that those best adapted to the environment survive, not necessarily the strongest.
I guess I don't understand the distinction. Both those concepts in this context sound the same to me.
So, theoretically, the fittest female mosquitoes in this case will be the ones with slightly different frequencies. As a result their genes would likely spawn more of the same.
Evolutionary theory has moved on since Darwin. As I said there's a concept of cost of each change. If a change takes 100 mutations in 100 different genes that's a very costly change. The kind of fast change like bacteria becoming resistant to to a certain anti-biotic is normally a single or a few gene mutations, so it can happen very quickly. How do you know that frequency already varies to any considerable degree in the mosquito population? If it doesn't, how do you know how costly it might be? Unless you just happen to study them I'm guessing you're just making that up.
You know what creates jobs? Small business. The overwhelming majority of Americans are employed by small businesses. And what is the enemy of small business?
Big Business? Healthcare costs? Under-expanding? Over-expanding? Lack of a certain skill? Unfair foreign competition? Lack of access to loans to expand? Key people leaving?
Taxes.
Err.. OK. I've been in several small businesses over the years, and the number one thing they worry about sure as hell isn't taxes. It's on the radar of course, but who doesn't like to complain about taxes? Any business that sits around and worries about taxes is already a very successful business to worry about such small scale issues. If you want to help small business, you probably shouldn't start with one of the things of least concern. I'm really tired of the same-old-same-old line from the Republican party that "if we just lower taxes, that'll fix everything!". So here we are with a far lower tax rate than we had during the 90s, and the economy is in the shitter. How many times do you have to do the same thing which doesn't work to realize it's not working?
Darwin says, in a generation or two, the frequency changes.
Right, just like people have evolved to be bulletproof, and bacteria have evolved to survive heat sterilization.
Evolution doesn't mean everything eventually adapts. It only means the strongest survive. Change isn't costless either. Greater change requires more "cost". It may very well be the case that frequency changes are far too difficult of a change to come about. Who knows?
Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.
If this isn't the most useless statement I've ever read on Slashdot, I don't know what is. Using $50 words like "quasi-dualistic" (WTF?) doesn't make an argument. Maybe that flies well around the humanities department, but our BS detectors are a bit better around here.
I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with, but I don't recall anyone mentioning souls, p-zombies, or "Quasi dualistic Searl inspired objections towards functionalism".
Do you think this would have prevented Chia Obama https://www.chiaobama.com/flare/next or Obama Fingers http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,612684,00.html?
No, and it's not supposed to. Neither of the products you linked to had any implication of endorsement by the President, which is what we're actually talking about here.
I think you're spot on. The article focuses on copyright, which as I understand is not the end-all-be-all for speech (which is what we're really talking about here, not copyright).
Talking about copyright is entirely missing the point. The full statement from the Whitehouse is:
(emphasis mine)
If you want to argue about it from a legal perspective, copyright is not the right law to do so (at least if you want to have an honest discussion about it).
The first part I think I disagree with. Why shouldn't I be able to alter the photograph in any way I see fit? The second part seems entirely reasonable to me, and is likely covered by existing laws about endorsement.
As soon as you start making changes(remove Jar Jar, etc) it ceases to become Lucas' artwork, and moreso a "design by committee".
I think that's kind of the point.
but I don't see how the fans have a say in someone else's art.
Heh. There's an old cliche. "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". Obviously nobody has any legal rights to be able to take SW and change it around to their own pleasing. But you sound like you're going beyond that and claiming nobody should do this on some sort of moral or ethical grounds. If that's the case, all art is guilty of the crime you describe. I'd go so far as all creative works are guilty of it. If you think creation comes out of a vacuum, think again.
I was still able to watch them and enjoy them just not with same wide eyed wonder, but then I wasnt supposed to, they werent made for me, they were made for my kids.
The difference is that the original movies weren't just designed to appeal to kids, and stood up on their own. Plenty of kids grow up liking a certain movie as a child, but later grow out of it and realize it's a crappy kids movie. Is their a real cult following for the Beethoven (the dog) movies for instance? It looks like they made 6 of the things, but I've never heard there's a serious collection of adults that love those movies on the scale of Star Wars. There's plenty of stuff I loved as a kid, but later realized just how terrible it really is. Buck Rogers comes to mind. So I don't agree with your idea that the original Star Wars movies were just kid movies.
The hatred comes from just how bad the new movies ultimately were. Lucas just made a kids movie in space and forgot to hire decent actors, give them good direction, provide a decent storyline, etc. Jar Jar is merely the undeniable representation of this. I think a lot of the more extreme reactions come from some feeling of betrayal. Some people feel like Lucas was "one of them", and the new movies are a complete rejection of that perceived relationship.
I'm really interested in the movie, as I'm fascinated by the whole love/hate relationship people have with Lucas. The only thing that really pissed me off was Han not shooting first. That's just utterly wrong as it changes the character of Solo (which is just a big no-no). You don't mess with character development after the fact. The FX changes I didn't really care about to much, though most of them looked like crap.
Any additional expenses later on, such as marketing costs, remastering costs, etc., should not be allowed to factor in when this guy's royalties are calculated, so that he's guaranteed to get something once the original number for cost is surpassed.
It's all about the wording in the contract, and gross vs. net, and whatever accounting tricks can get pulled behind the scenes. You'd have to be part lawyer, part accountant to really understand what's going on and if it's legal or not. It might be completely illegal and high trickery, but the cost of litigating it vs. the returned value isn't worth it. Who knows?
The real lesson learned is to be wary of what's really going on, and not just trust you'll eventually get a fair deal. It's pretty obvious to anyone looking at the original "And you'll get a percentage of the profits" idea for ROTJ and seeing someone screwed over this guy somewhere. Unfortunately business dealings aren't always about fairness or justice, but about what you can get away with.
All of what you say is probably true. But so what?
You're not thinking like an attacker would, you're thinking like you're trying to protect your own company.
Attackers look for the easiest way to get into a system. They likely wouldn't pick your company for the reasons you describe. But how many companies work in an entirely different manner to obviate everything you just said? I don't know what those are, but the point being you've only excluded one portion of the potential vectors, not the entire set of vectors. That doesn't mean it's possible, or happening. It just means you've not really made a convincing argument that it couldn't happen.
Is the USB key going to open a TCP/IP or UDP connection back to their servers without tripping my firewall that a new application is trying to connect?
Your firewall I don't know about. Not everyone has an outgoing firewall though. How many people have an outgoing firewall on their home network for instance? How many people use laptops at work and home? Maybe it doesn't work at the workplace, but works perfectly well when the laptop gets connected at home, the airport, or coffee shop. That might be a day, a week, or a month later. So what? Report back all the goodies it's gathered during that time period.
Is my virus scanner going to get tripped that something suspicious is coming out of the key without my interaction?
Probably not. Virus scanners mostly work off signatures of known viruses/malware. This isn't going to be a known piece of spyware. The behavior based ones are relatively poor and produce a lot of false positives. I'm sure it wouldn't be terribly hard to design the spyware to even get around even that kind of detection.
In a lot of corporate networks USB Mass media is disabled. I'd love to see a proof of concept that can get around these common checks
Most of these kinds of checks just don't protect against the dedicated attacker, but are designed for the mass virus and malware attacks. Protecting against someone that knows something about your infra-structure, or is willing to write custom software for just one person is going to be much more difficult to protect against. Also, if you really think that USB mass media keys are the only vector a dedicated attacker might use to get into your PC, think again.
Anyway, even if this kind of attack is only 10% effective, do you really think that's not high enough to not be worth it?
The trick is that "far-left" and "far-right" are simply inventions to keep people arguing about trivial matters.
That's odd. I know people that fall on both sides of the spectrum. I guess they must be figments of my imagination.
It amuses me that American media is always so polarized. The even hire people to take up "far-right" and "far-left" stances and argue on camera. Given the vitriol engendered in their arguments, viewers mistakenly believe that the topics are important.
You're close. Viewers mistakenly believe that these are actual opinions held by "the other side". It makes people think that they're right, and the other side wrong. People like that, and will watch the show tomorrow. They also feel they've "seen both sides of the issue" so they're "informed". This is largely Fox News, but MSNBC has taken up the crazy charge of "the left". Some of these issues are VERY important, but all you need do is inject some crazy craze into the conversation and pretend that and what you're saying are the only two things that exist.
The GQ article with a cell phone next to a pack of cigarettes couldn't be more misleading. We hear about "such and such % increased risk of this", "such and such % increased risk of that". But these numbers are meaningless in assessing behavior changes unless you know the baseline risk.
So here's some numbers. The article starts off with cigarettes, so what's the risk of lung cancer between smokers and non-smokers?
Well, according to wikipedia, For Men it's 1.3% for non-smokers, and 17% for smokers. Wow!
Let's compare that to Brain cancer (all types). According to the National Cancer institute it's .6% for everyone. The Swedish study from 2006 found a 240% increase. So that's 1.44% risk.
So it seems quite obvious to me that even the most alarming study only showed a small increased health risk from cell phone use, and others have shown none. Compare that to smoking, which has been consistent in showing risk over the years, and an ENORMOUS risk. Oh, and for smoking that's JUST the lung cancer risk. We all should know about the other increased health risks associated with it.
I was astonished the first time I realized that typical 'environmentalist' groups oppose nuclear power.
To some degree it's an artifact of the sidedness of politics. Nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons (right or wrong, people think of them in the same breath). Nuclear weapons are "bad" for the "the left", and "good" for "the right". Most people have no real understanding anything about nuclear power or nuclear reactions so they turn to these kind of simple associations and dig in for the long fight. It's more complicated that this, but it's all driven by fear.
The real problems with nuclear power largely boil down to cost, and waste. The waste isn't going away anytime soon, and we're going to have to deal with it eventually. Every administration just kicks the waste problem down the road, and hopes someone else has to eventually deal with it. The cost issue I don't know much about, but it's also one that's not going away.
I'm an old leftie and a fan of nuclear power, so you can't categorise it like that.
All categories are wrong in some fashion. You can call it "pro-nuclear" and "anti-nuclear" if you like. The labels are irrelevant. The whole point is the insulation and people digging in their viewpoints. Being labeled a "troll" only highlights this point.
Far-Right:
There's nothing to see here, it's just those damn liberals and their whining about nuclear power. It's all perfectly safe, there's absolutely no problems whats-so-ever with this plant or any other plant. A possible indicator of other problems around the country? Pshaw.. more liberal clap-trap. We can fix all our power problems with just building a lot of nuclear plants. Waste schmaste.
Far-Left:
This is just PROOF that the nuclear power industry are all a bunch of bastard weasels. We ought to shut the whole shootin-match down for good. We can get all of our power from wind and solar anyway. 37 times the standard! I bet the standard is set too high anyway! These plants are all rotting from neglect, and there's probably a ton they're not telling us! I recently saw The China Syndrome and Silkwood, and let me tell you that's all just the tip of the iceberg! Chernobyl!
I'm just really sick of the nonsense on both sides. They both insulate themselves from the other and don't want to hear any real truths from "the other side". The whole nuclear power issue is 90% a "side of the room argument" where nobody wants to be associated with an idea from "the other side". This is what needs to stop to make any progress on the whole issue.