So, something happened 6 years ago, and nobody knew what it was.
No, something happened 3 billion years ago. An instrument recorded it six years ago. Someone re-analyzed the data recently, and discovered something they couldn't explain. They published a paper yesterday. Where's the fucking news?
The "news" is that there's likely something very big going on we don't understand. It's kind of sad that you and others only think it's news once we understand what's going on. Science isn't just the end product you read about in textbooks. It's a process by which we understand the universe. This is part of that process, and if this isn't just radio interference, it's extremely interesting.
Have you ever heard of Passive mode? Plays just fine with NATs
I have, and it's problematic as well. It's been at least 3 years since I had to deal with setting up an FTP server, but IIRC passive FTP requires a range of open ports on the server end. Some FTP servers allow you to limit the port range, others don't. From what I remember each connection to the FTP server requires it's own port.
It's just a sucky protocol all around from a security perspective. It's fine if, like I said you don't care about data security or limiting port access to a server running FTP. Hell, it's a sucky protocol from a hosting perspective too. The only way to distinguish www.myftpsite.org from www.myotherftpsite.org is by IP address. So no virtual hosting for ftp.
I sleep around 10 hours a night, more on the weekends, but am still tired all the time.
You might have sleep apnea or some other kind of sleep disorder (assuming you haven't been checked for that). You can be waking up in the middle of the night multiple times and not even realize it. I'm no expert, but if I were you I'd try to get refered to an expert. They can give you some kind of monitoring device that'll tell you how many times/night you're waking up.
There's also special sleep clinics around the country that will observe you while you sleep and can diagnose other kinds of sleep disorders. Many doctors aren't aware of the different sleep disorders that exist. (A number of years ago I attended a speech given by a top sleep researcher given to medical professionals, so that's where my primitive knowledge comes from)
So if a lot of people want to jail users into a specific directory for various reasons, why can't we have that functionality?
I don't know exactly how chroot works on the OS level, but I've never felt it was a complete method that's sure to keep people from doing what they shouldn't.
If you want to give people access to a storage, but keep them safe from browing, I'd look into using something like webdav. There's an implementation of it in apache, which is well tested and accepted as secure, and it works over plain old https as well as http. It's also pretty well supported. SFTP is really more of an afterthought on functionality patched onto ssh (IMO at least), and thus doesn't have more advanced functionality like defining it's own root directory you can't get past.
FTP is the devil as far as I'm concerned. It's a sucky protocol that's outlived it's usefulness, and doesn't play well with NATs (and obviously isn't secure either). I guess it's OK if all you care about is bulk insecure downloads, and your firewall plays well with it, but otherwise I hate it.
(Btw, I do know what you mean about the self appointed experts. The sad thing is those people probably know one or two things really well, and know nothing about anything else in IT)
sleep debt is a real phenomenon, and if you're falling asleep at work, you've likely got a large amount of it.
Many people think falling asleep is a sign of "laziness". That's just nonsense, it just means that person needs to get more sleep, or get better quality sleep!
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
The thing is that Microsoft (and really the entire software industry) is built on obsolescence. If people don't feel the need to upgrade to the latest version of your software every few years, that's a major failure. Sure, people still have to buy XP, but this is the first sign of a crack in the decades long Microsoft dominance of operating systems. If Microsoft can't convince people to buy the new "latest and greatest" it's a sign that they're starting to lose ground. It's not going to kill them, obviously. Microsoft has years and years of momentum behind them because of legacy "gotta have it" apps.
But the software industry isn't what it used to be. Software is replaced all the time now, formats are becoming more open, and people are less willing to accept lock-in. That momentum and lock in that Microsoft has isn't going to last forever.
And as for Linux, I already USE Linux. If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine.
I've had Vista since shortly before release, and I've decided to attempt to ditch it when the next version of Ubuntu comes out. It's just too unstable and buggy, and a few pieces of software refuse to work on it. It also crashes fairly often, which NEVER happened on the same hardware under 2000. I have at least one piece of hardware that doesn't have Vista drivers, but works flawlessly out of the box on Linux. It's kind of funny how the tables have turned.
My "gotta have the ability to run some MS software" is going to run win2k on a virtual machine on VMware server. Windows will be a slave to Vmware and Ubuntu. Gaming happens on my Wii anyway, so why not?
I've never been particularly anti-Microsoft, but Vista just isn't really worth it. The UI is a bit better, I like the update management better, but the crashes are a deal killer, and the mouse or keyboard sometimes doesn't work after it comes out of sleep mode. The really cool promises of ReadyDrive (turn off your computer, have it instantly up when you turn it back on) are from what I've heard empty ones even if you can get ahold of the hard-to-get flash memory on PCIExpress.
You're really trying to fit what I have to say into a rather narrow viewpoint, and it's simply not the case. The original statement was that people without a background in science aren't qualified to write about science. I didn't say scientists, I didn't even say you had to have a degree in science. I simply think that knowing what science is, how science works, and what science isn't is a major requirement to writing anything of worth about science. Science reporting isn't just about reporting who did what and when. It's about knowing what the important parts are, knowing what the right questions to ask are, etc. To do that you need to know some science.
I don't really know what Brian Greene, or Gina Kolata think are requirements for writing about science. Why should I? Maybe they share my thoughts, maybe they don't. But I am of the opinion that too many journalists think science is just another "report the facts" game where they can spend an hour, or even a week researching a science topic and then writing something that actually communicates something, without understanding how it actually ties into anything else, or even have any idea what scientific knowledge is at all. That's where bad science journalism comes from.
Some of the best nonfiction books about the mafia ever written have been written by journalists, not mafia hitmen.
Were they good because they were entertaining, or were they good because they were accurate? I'd wager entertaining. You don't need to be accurate to be entertaining. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are two of the most celebrated journalists in American history, for a story you may have heard about -- and, curiously, not only has neither of them ever been the President of the United States, but neither has even held public office.
I don't know much about the background of Woodward and Bernstein, but I'd imagine they have some background in doing investigations, or learned it along the way.
Anyway, the point you're really missing here is that journalists writing about Science (remember we were talking about science?) should at least have a background in science, if for no other reason that they won't know what science is, and what science isn't. It's been my observation that the best books about science were written by scientists, not journalists. The worst writing on science I've seen are by journalists in mainstream publications. I very much doubt these people have any background in science. There is good science reporting our their. Ira Flatow does an excellent job on Science Friday.. . of course Flatow has a background in engineering, so there's another case of "knowing something about your topic". Journalists may be good at writing about the actually people involved in science, but the ones without a background in science stink at writing about science.
Just because you develop software for a living, do you think you could write better magazine articles about software development than somebody who does that for a living?
Some of them. What does that have to do with anything? The premise here is you don't have to have experience in something to write about it. A premise I have a large problem with in Science, and any other area dealing with facts. Hopefully someone writing an article about software development is going to have some experience in software development. Otherwise they're going to not say anything worth reading.
The problem with nearly all your examples is they deal with fiction. You know, making stuff up about stuff you don't know about, and selling it to other people who don't know anything about it either. Knowing something about it might even be considered a hindrance. That's all well and good, since the goal is entertainment, not informing anyone.
The problem comes when writers think they can do the same thing about non-fiction. Writing to inform is NOT the same thing as writing fiction. There are actually right, wrong, and REALLY wrong answers. Knowing what the hell you're talking about is a requirement, not a plus. You don't need to be a programmer to write for a computer magazine, but you sure as hell should know something about computers.
I've got news for you: there's only one person out there who's going to make sure that nobody takes advantage of you. That's you.
Ultimately you're correct. Individuals need to protect themselves and not rely on an outside force to protect them. But that doesn't mean we don't need laws to protect people from unfair labor practices. Your assumption are that everyone can get a fair deal somewhere else. That's not always the case. Most IT workers have the luxury of working in an industry that's expanding and doesn't have a glut of workers. That may change some day, and people like you might be crying out for labor laws to protect them.
It's interesting reading the blog post. I'm a software developer, and software is also built upon other software, much like science is built upon science. In software development we call this dependencies. I.e. program A needs library C to run, library C needs library d,e,f,and g to run. I tested program A to run under version 1.2 of library C, which was tested under version 1.6 of library e, 1.5 of library f, etc. Will the program work if you use version 1.3 of library C? Who knows? So I'm not unfamiliar with building one thing on top of assumptions that may not prove to be true.
It seems to me that scientific journalism ought to try to hard to list it's dependencies more explicitly. It can only improve your paper to list all the assumptions inherent in it. I.e. that Joe Schmoe measured quantity XYZ properly, that lepton numbers are conserved, etc. You don't have to explain what a lepton number is, or even what the assumptions of Joe Schmoe's experiment was. Just a section talking about the assumptions and dependencies would do a world of good IMO.
(Oh, and the insane rambling by the journalist who think they can write about anything and not have a background in it is of course insane. That's typical journalism though. It's just that we tend to catch the errors in science more often though, because there actually IS a correct answer).
THEY KNOWINGLY took the risk of bricking their iPhones when they unlocked them.
Since when is unlocking a phone taking a risk of bricking? I bought a Nokia on ebay that was unlocked. I'd be mighty pissed off if my provider decided to update my phone, or gave me an option to update my phone, and it wound up turning the phone into junk. People unlock phones all the time, and it's not really considered "risky behavior" once you get it unlocked.
Apples excuse is presumably "we can't support 3rd party modifications, blah blah blah". That's just nonsense. If Apple didn't want to get into this situation they should have made unlocking the phone difficult, but foolproof. Obviously they have an "official" way of unlocking the phone.
You know what? I'm sick of this sort of thing. Guess what guys, Apple is in it for the money!
The problem is there's a lot of Apple fanboys who are slowly coming to that conclusion, though fighting it tooth and nail. These people believe Apple exists to make them happy, not to make money.
Because that will be the overriding factor if this will work or not. There are a lot of external costs that are not factored into these 'costs'.
I couldn't agree more. But arguing this fact doesn't change the fact that it's still WAAAY cheaper to the end user to burn coal than this solution. The economic problem doesn't go away by discussing it. Combine that fact with the fact that other renewable energy sources are cheaper, and this idea is dead.
You are making the assumption that all power is generated by coal, and that consumers typically pay in the 2-3c/kwh range.
No, I'm looking at the 17 cents and comparing that to the price I pay of typically 8 to 10 cents kw/h. This price includes distribution costs, etc. The fuel costs are much lower. An added "fuel" cost of 17 cents would double or triple the price I pay.
And here, you're not even talking about doubling or tripling, you're talking about 5 to 8 times the cost (initially) and maybe getting down to slightly worse than tripling.
No, I'm talking about the cost I actually pay for electricity. That includes fuel, distribution, etc. For me that's somewhere around 8-10 cents/kwh.
Sorry, but those costs suck donkey dick. Consumers aren't going to be very happy about doubling or tripling the cost of electricity, no matter how much better it makes people feel about screwing up the environment.
This sounds like a waste of money on a technology without much hope of being economically viable. I'm quite certain that photo-voltaic is a lot cheaper than this, and wind power definately is. It sounds like there's a good reason why this technology was abandoned.
Were they supposed to personally vet all parties involved?
If it came from flickr, they intended to put potentially derogatory and embarrasing captions on it? You bet. Were they supposed to personally vet all parties involved?
I'm not a huge internation corporations that puts up billboards and has national advertising campaigns. Your comparison to someone who puts a photo on a website is absurd. Or audit all the software on your machine to ensure that the people who licensed it to you really had permission to do so?
I'm not a huge corporation with billions of dollars at stake. But on the whole, I'd say that many corporations DO do that kind of think occasionallyOr audit all the software on your machine to ensure that the people who licensed it to you really had permission to do so?.
I guess I find it a little odd that you think the rules and practices are exactly the same if you're one guy on the internet posting a "this is my friend from camp" photo, or a huge multi-national corporation engaging in a national media campaign putting embarrassing captions below photos like "virgin to virgin".
If you wear decidedly unusual clothes you need to consider how others will perceive it, and be prepared to deal with the consequences.
There's something to be said for that. But that also doesn't mean the police didn't over-react here.
I just have to wonder though.. what the hell is wrong with Boston? This is the second "circuit board is a bomb" incident in less than a year. You can't tell me there's not other people in other cities walking around wearing weird crap like this, yet we don't hear of incidents where the police escalate an incident to the level where it gets national media attention.
Seems to me like he wasted a lot of time and money for nothing.
True. I think it's hard to be a crusader when you've got a family to worry about, and who likely doesn't share the need to seek a larger justice. Police departments won't stop this kind of behavior until it starts costing them something.
I love this comment. It's such an interesting insight into the mind of a Microsoft guy: Look, that bridge in Minnesota just collapsed. How long have we been building bridges? We know how to build bridges, right? Sometimes people just have unrealistic expectations of what we can do.
I don't know anyone who thinks a major bridge in major US city in the richest country in the world not collapsing is an "unrealistic expectation". I actually DO agree that having zero security holes in any software as large as Windows (or Linux) is an unrealistic goal. Comparing that to a major bridge disaster that never should have happened is kind of a strange comparison though.
So if an an inventor discovers his $.30 invention is being used in someone's $30,000 machine, shouldn't the remunerative part of the award be based on fees due him from licensing the $.30 part?
Only if the $.30 part isn't the linch-pin that makes the whole $30,000 machine possible. The monetary value of the part is really irrelevant, it's the role the part plays in what the invention does. If I invented a magical $3 device that allows a car to run on gasoline, I'd expect an automaker to pay me a HELL of a lot if they infringed on that patent. Such a device is pretty useless in isolation. On the other hand, if I invented an adjustable cup holder, and an automaker infringed on it, I'd say damages awarded against anyone infringing on that should be based on the little amount of value generated by the better cup-holder, not the whole value of the car.
What the law actually says I don't know.. summaries of law are notoriously terrible.
You do realize that your 1 in 10,000 rate would only be one or two false positives a day in an airport that sees 10s f thousands of people
The 1 in 10,000 number is just a dumb number I made up. It's totally irrelevant to whether this is a good test or not.
Anyway, my point is really that even a 1/10,000 rate is poor evidence the person has done anything wrong. It's not even enough evidence to strip search someone when you're getting several people at each airport every day. What are you going to do at the point where someone shows positive? It's still extraordinarily unlikely they've actually done anything wrong, so you can't justify a hell of a lot.
Your scenario of spraying someone down at a crime scene is a better of example of how this might be useful.
So in effect, ISBN's are owned by no one except for the distributing and maintaining body.
And even the distributing and maintaining body can't "own" them, at least as far as copyright is concerned. To hold a copyright on something it has to be a creative work. A number is not a creative work.
They might be able to stop people from publishing a number on a book and calling it an ISBN number. Individuals or groups might be able to claim copyright on a large collection of ISBN numbers, but a single number printed on a book is not "intellectual property".
Slashdot Mirror
So, something happened 6 years ago, and nobody knew what it was.
No, something happened 3 billion years ago. An instrument recorded it six years ago. Someone re-analyzed the data recently, and discovered something they couldn't explain. They published a paper yesterday.
Where's the fucking news?
The "news" is that there's likely something very big going on we don't understand. It's kind of sad that you and others only think it's news once we understand what's going on. Science isn't just the end product you read about in textbooks. It's a process by which we understand the universe. This is part of that process, and if this isn't just radio interference, it's extremely interesting.
Have you ever heard of Passive mode? Plays just fine with NATs
I have, and it's problematic as well. It's been at least 3 years since I had to deal with setting up an FTP server, but IIRC passive FTP requires a range of open ports on the server end. Some FTP servers allow you to limit the port range, others don't. From what I remember each connection to the FTP server requires it's own port.
It's just a sucky protocol all around from a security perspective. It's fine if, like I said you don't care about data security or limiting port access to a server running FTP. Hell, it's a sucky protocol from a hosting perspective too. The only way to distinguish www.myftpsite.org from www.myotherftpsite.org is by IP address. So no virtual hosting for ftp.
I sleep around 10 hours a night, more on the weekends, but am still tired all the time.
You might have sleep apnea or some other kind of sleep disorder (assuming you haven't been checked for that). You can be waking up in the middle of the night multiple times and not even realize it. I'm no expert, but if I were you I'd try to get refered to an expert. They can give you some kind of monitoring device that'll tell you how many times/night you're waking up.
There's also special sleep clinics around the country that will observe you while you sleep and can diagnose other kinds of sleep disorders. Many doctors aren't aware of the different sleep disorders that exist. (A number of years ago I attended a speech given by a top sleep researcher given to medical professionals, so that's where my primitive knowledge comes from)
So if a lot of people want to jail users into a specific directory for various reasons, why can't we have that functionality?
I don't know exactly how chroot works on the OS level, but I've never felt it was a complete method that's sure to keep people from doing what they shouldn't.
If you want to give people access to a storage, but keep them safe from browing, I'd look into using something like webdav. There's an implementation of it in apache, which is well tested and accepted as secure, and it works over plain old https as well as http. It's also pretty well supported. SFTP is really more of an afterthought on functionality patched onto ssh (IMO at least), and thus doesn't have more advanced functionality like defining it's own root directory you can't get past.
FTP is the devil as far as I'm concerned. It's a sucky protocol that's outlived it's usefulness, and doesn't play well with NATs (and obviously isn't secure either). I guess it's OK if all you care about is bulk insecure downloads, and your firewall plays well with it, but otherwise I hate it.
(Btw, I do know what you mean about the self appointed experts. The sad thing is those people probably know one or two things really well, and know nothing about anything else in IT)
sleep debt is a real phenomenon, and if you're falling asleep at work, you've likely got a large amount of it.
Many people think falling asleep is a sign of "laziness". That's just nonsense, it just means that person needs to get more sleep, or get better quality sleep!
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
The thing is that Microsoft (and really the entire software industry) is built on obsolescence. If people don't feel the need to upgrade to the latest version of your software every few years, that's a major failure. Sure, people still have to buy XP, but this is the first sign of a crack in the decades long Microsoft dominance of operating systems. If Microsoft can't convince people to buy the new "latest and greatest" it's a sign that they're starting to lose ground. It's not going to kill them, obviously. Microsoft has years and years of momentum behind them because of legacy "gotta have it" apps.
But the software industry isn't what it used to be. Software is replaced all the time now, formats are becoming more open, and people are less willing to accept lock-in. That momentum and lock in that Microsoft has isn't going to last forever.
And as for Linux, I already USE Linux. If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine.
I've had Vista since shortly before release, and I've decided to attempt to ditch it when the next version of Ubuntu comes out. It's just too unstable and buggy, and a few pieces of software refuse to work on it. It also crashes fairly often, which NEVER happened on the same hardware under 2000. I have at least one piece of hardware that doesn't have Vista drivers, but works flawlessly out of the box on Linux. It's kind of funny how the tables have turned.
My "gotta have the ability to run some MS software" is going to run win2k on a virtual machine on VMware server. Windows will be a slave to Vmware and Ubuntu. Gaming happens on my Wii anyway, so why not?
I've never been particularly anti-Microsoft, but Vista just isn't really worth it. The UI is a bit better, I like the update management better, but the crashes are a deal killer, and the mouse or keyboard sometimes doesn't work after it comes out of sleep mode. The really cool promises of ReadyDrive (turn off your computer, have it instantly up when you turn it back on) are from what I've heard empty ones even if you can get ahold of the hard-to-get flash memory on PCIExpress.
You're really trying to fit what I have to say into a rather narrow viewpoint, and it's simply not the case. The original statement was that people without a background in science aren't qualified to write about science. I didn't say scientists, I didn't even say you had to have a degree in science. I simply think that knowing what science is, how science works, and what science isn't is a major requirement to writing anything of worth about science. Science reporting isn't just about reporting who did what and when. It's about knowing what the important parts are, knowing what the right questions to ask are, etc. To do that you need to know some science.
I don't really know what Brian Greene, or Gina Kolata think are requirements for writing about science. Why should I? Maybe they share my thoughts, maybe they don't. But I am of the opinion that too many journalists think science is just another "report the facts" game where they can spend an hour, or even a week researching a science topic and then writing something that actually communicates something, without understanding how it actually ties into anything else, or even have any idea what scientific knowledge is at all. That's where bad science journalism comes from.
Some of the best nonfiction books about the mafia ever written have been written by journalists, not mafia hitmen.
Were they good because they were entertaining, or were they good because they were accurate? I'd wager entertaining. You don't need to be accurate to be entertaining.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are two of the most celebrated journalists in American history, for a story you may have heard about -- and, curiously, not only has neither of them ever been the President of the United States, but neither has even held public office.
I don't know much about the background of Woodward and Bernstein, but I'd imagine they have some background in doing investigations, or learned it along the way.
Anyway, the point you're really missing here is that journalists writing about Science (remember we were talking about science?) should at least have a background in science, if for no other reason that they won't know what science is, and what science isn't. It's been my observation that the best books about science were written by scientists, not journalists. The worst writing on science I've seen are by journalists in mainstream publications. I very much doubt these people have any background in science. There is good science reporting our their. Ira Flatow does an excellent job on Science Friday.. . of course Flatow has a background in engineering, so there's another case of "knowing something about your topic". Journalists may be good at writing about the actually people involved in science, but the ones without a background in science stink at writing about science.
Just because you develop software for a living, do you think you could write better magazine articles about software development than somebody who does that for a living?
Some of them. What does that have to do with anything? The premise here is you don't have to have experience in something to write about it. A premise I have a large problem with in Science, and any other area dealing with facts. Hopefully someone writing an article about software development is going to have some experience in software development. Otherwise they're going to not say anything worth reading.
The problem with nearly all your examples is they deal with fiction. You know, making stuff up about stuff you don't know about, and selling it to other people who don't know anything about it either. Knowing something about it might even be considered a hindrance. That's all well and good, since the goal is entertainment, not informing anyone.
The problem comes when writers think they can do the same thing about non-fiction. Writing to inform is NOT the same thing as writing fiction. There are actually right, wrong, and REALLY wrong answers. Knowing what the hell you're talking about is a requirement, not a plus. You don't need to be a programmer to write for a computer magazine, but you sure as hell should know something about computers.
I've got news for you: there's only one person out there who's going to make sure that nobody takes advantage of you. That's you.
Ultimately you're correct. Individuals need to protect themselves and not rely on an outside force to protect them. But that doesn't mean we don't need laws to protect people from unfair labor practices. Your assumption are that everyone can get a fair deal somewhere else. That's not always the case. Most IT workers have the luxury of working in an industry that's expanding and doesn't have a glut of workers. That may change some day, and people like you might be crying out for labor laws to protect them.
It's interesting reading the blog post. I'm a software developer, and software is also built upon other software, much like science is built upon science. In software development we call this dependencies. I.e. program A needs library C to run, library C needs library d,e,f,and g to run. I tested program A to run under version 1.2 of library C, which was tested under version 1.6 of library e, 1.5 of library f, etc. Will the program work if you use version 1.3 of library C? Who knows? So I'm not unfamiliar with building one thing on top of assumptions that may not prove to be true.
It seems to me that scientific journalism ought to try to hard to list it's dependencies more explicitly. It can only improve your paper to list all the assumptions inherent in it. I.e. that Joe Schmoe measured quantity XYZ properly, that lepton numbers are conserved, etc. You don't have to explain what a lepton number is, or even what the assumptions of Joe Schmoe's experiment was. Just a section talking about the assumptions and dependencies would do a world of good IMO.
(Oh, and the insane rambling by the journalist who think they can write about anything and not have a background in it is of course insane. That's typical journalism though. It's just that we tend to catch the errors in science more often though, because there actually IS a correct answer).
THEY KNOWINGLY took the risk of bricking their iPhones when they unlocked them.
Since when is unlocking a phone taking a risk of bricking? I bought a Nokia on ebay that was unlocked. I'd be mighty pissed off if my provider decided to update my phone, or gave me an option to update my phone, and it wound up turning the phone into junk. People unlock phones all the time, and it's not really considered "risky behavior" once you get it unlocked.
Apples excuse is presumably "we can't support 3rd party modifications, blah blah blah". That's just nonsense. If Apple didn't want to get into this situation they should have made unlocking the phone difficult, but foolproof. Obviously they have an "official" way of unlocking the phone.
You know what? I'm sick of this sort of thing. Guess what guys, Apple is in it for the money!
The problem is there's a lot of Apple fanboys who are slowly coming to that conclusion, though fighting it tooth and nail. These people believe Apple exists to make them happy, not to make money.
Why do you only care about the bottom line?
Because that will be the overriding factor if this will work or not.
There are a lot of external costs that are not factored into these 'costs'.
I couldn't agree more. But arguing this fact doesn't change the fact that it's still WAAAY cheaper to the end user to burn coal than this solution. The economic problem doesn't go away by discussing it. Combine that fact with the fact that other renewable energy sources are cheaper, and this idea is dead.
You are making the assumption that all power is generated by coal, and that consumers typically pay in the 2-3c/kwh range.
No, I'm looking at the 17 cents and comparing that to the price I pay of typically 8 to 10 cents kw/h. This price includes distribution costs, etc. The fuel costs are much lower. An added "fuel" cost of 17 cents would double or triple the price I pay.
And here, you're not even talking about doubling or tripling, you're talking about 5 to 8 times the cost (initially) and maybe getting down to slightly worse than tripling.
No, I'm talking about the cost I actually pay for electricity. That includes fuel, distribution, etc. For me that's somewhere around 8-10 cents/kwh.
Sorry, but those costs suck donkey dick. Consumers aren't going to be very happy about doubling or tripling the cost of electricity, no matter how much better it makes people feel about screwing up the environment.
This sounds like a waste of money on a technology without much hope of being economically viable. I'm quite certain that photo-voltaic is a lot cheaper than this, and wind power definately is. It sounds like there's a good reason why this technology was abandoned.
Were they supposed to personally vet all parties involved?
If it came from flickr, they intended to put potentially derogatory and embarrasing captions on it? You bet.
Were they supposed to personally vet all parties involved?
I'm not a huge internation corporations that puts up billboards and has national advertising campaigns. Your comparison to someone who puts a photo on a website is absurd.
Or audit all the software on your machine to ensure that the people who licensed it to you really had permission to do so?
I'm not a huge corporation with billions of dollars at stake. But on the whole, I'd say that many corporations DO do that kind of think occasionallyOr audit all the software on your machine to ensure that the people who licensed it to you really had permission to do so?.
I guess I find it a little odd that you think the rules and practices are exactly the same if you're one guy on the internet posting a "this is my friend from camp" photo, or a huge multi-national corporation engaging in a national media campaign putting embarrassing captions below photos like "virgin to virgin".
If you wear decidedly unusual clothes you need to consider how others will perceive it, and be prepared to deal with the consequences.
There's something to be said for that. But that also doesn't mean the police didn't over-react here.
I just have to wonder though.. what the hell is wrong with Boston? This is the second "circuit board is a bomb" incident in less than a year. You can't tell me there's not other people in other cities walking around wearing weird crap like this, yet we don't hear of incidents where the police escalate an incident to the level where it gets national media attention.
Seems to me like he wasted a lot of time and money for nothing.
True. I think it's hard to be a crusader when you've got a family to worry about, and who likely doesn't share the need to seek a larger justice. Police departments won't stop this kind of behavior until it starts costing them something.
I love this comment. It's such an interesting insight into the mind of a Microsoft guy:
Look, that bridge in Minnesota just collapsed. How long have we been building bridges? We know how to build bridges, right? Sometimes people just have unrealistic expectations of what we can do.
I don't know anyone who thinks a major bridge in major US city in the richest country in the world not collapsing is an "unrealistic expectation". I actually DO agree that having zero security holes in any software as large as Windows (or Linux) is an unrealistic goal. Comparing that to a major bridge disaster that never should have happened is kind of a strange comparison though.
So if an an inventor discovers his $.30 invention is being used in someone's $30,000 machine, shouldn't the remunerative part of the award be based on fees due him from licensing the $.30 part?
Only if the $.30 part isn't the linch-pin that makes the whole $30,000 machine possible. The monetary value of the part is really irrelevant, it's the role the part plays in what the invention does. If I invented a magical $3 device that allows a car to run on gasoline, I'd expect an automaker to pay me a HELL of a lot if they infringed on that patent. Such a device is pretty useless in isolation. On the other hand, if I invented an adjustable cup holder, and an automaker infringed on it, I'd say damages awarded against anyone infringing on that should be based on the little amount of value generated by the better cup-holder, not the whole value of the car.
What the law actually says I don't know.. summaries of law are notoriously terrible.
You do realize that your 1 in 10,000 rate would only be one or two false positives a day in an airport that sees 10s f thousands of people
The 1 in 10,000 number is just a dumb number I made up. It's totally irrelevant to whether this is a good test or not.
Anyway, my point is really that even a 1/10,000 rate is poor evidence the person has done anything wrong. It's not even enough evidence to strip search someone when you're getting several people at each airport every day. What are you going to do at the point where someone shows positive? It's still extraordinarily unlikely they've actually done anything wrong, so you can't justify a hell of a lot.
Your scenario of spraying someone down at a crime scene is a better of example of how this might be useful.
So in effect, ISBN's are owned by no one except for the distributing and maintaining body.
And even the distributing and maintaining body can't "own" them, at least as far as copyright is concerned. To hold a copyright on something it has to be a creative work. A number is not a creative work.
They might be able to stop people from publishing a number on a book and calling it an ISBN number. Individuals or groups might be able to claim copyright on a large collection of ISBN numbers, but a single number printed on a book is not "intellectual property".