Just because these landmines can be easily disabled, doesn't mean that they will be disabled. Landmines kill and maim due to neglegence. What happens in a war zone when a military uses a mine field to cover their retreat, and then no longer have access to the area in which they planted the mines? (Somalia and Iraq are both good examples) Will they remain there forever? Deaths from landmines are not an issue of technological inability. It is an issue of will.
Land mines in principle are terrible ideas. They are indiscriminate warfare. Nuking Nagasaki was an atrocity. Firebombing Dresden and Tokyo were atrocities. Landmine use is the same sort of thing as those tactics. And even if you wanted to argue that the scale of death from landmine use is different, at this point, i'm willing to bet that all the injuries and deaths caused by landmines world wide is not a insignificant number.
And really, with a fast mobile army, what's the point in using landmines? As most of the conflicts that the US has to deal with now are asymmetrical, what good are landmines going to be?
End products are merely an output of the process which generated them. The fact that a state of events currently exists is far less meaningful than knowledge of the history and processes which have generated that state of events. This is particularly significant when you have a single state of events which could have been generated by multiple different processes. Especially when you want to hypothesize what will occur next. If you can tell two processes apart by the data points you are currently looking at, you look at how well each proposed process replicated previous data points.
A harmonious peaceful society can be reached via genocide and absolute annihilation of anyone who disagrees, leaving behind only true-believers, or it can be reached through tolerance and acceptance of others. Just having a peaceful society isn't enough. The process by which you have arrived there is of critical importance.
That is based upon the unstated assumption that you will have any influence in what they're planning on doing.
Of course, that's the entire point of cooperation. The Chinese government needs something from Google. Google can play ball to varying degrees, or they can stonewall and become marginalized.
Are you expendable? That's possible. But i'll put it to you again (and again this requires some trust in Google), is it not better to know for yourself what China is doing? Again, if there's no way for them to be stopped? Disengagement is not an effective solution. It's true in politics, it's true in business, it's true in society, and i'd say it holds true here too.
Obviously, i'm suggesting a pragmatic stance. And i'm going to give you a pragmatic response to your final statement. You are right regarding core morals and ethics. Once you've hit the bone, you can't cut any further. That doesn't mean that principles you are flexible on are not part of your ethical or moral structure.
This is a race to the bottom. I think the ambivelence that Google displays is a reasonable response to a complicated issue.
I don't think it's an unreasonable position to say you will cooperate with someone who is doing something that you dislike, because not cooperating is not going to stop them, and at least if you're the one cooperating, you know what's going on, and you can shape the process.
Er, i presume that it's only really stock manipulation if you have credibility. Otherwise it's just meaningless speculation. Fortunately, things like this posted to slashdot have no credibility.
Unlike "Notheory (580275) 2.0", web2.0, as much as we like it or not, has actually come to mean something, due in large part to O'Reilly's (the institution) efforts. They were trying to convey something when they copyrighted web 2.0, as dumb a name as it is. Lambasting them for holding the rights for a term that they invented (not made as in the term, but made as in the meaning) is an idiotic and backwards piece of reasoning.
As for O'Reilly's citations, the man is not justifying his behavior based on the behavior of others. He is stating that he is not the only one interested in protecting trademarks. So unless you'd like to make the additional claim that you think the trademark system should be thrown out, you have made a non-point.
MediaLive filed for the trademark on the Web 2.0 Conference back in November 2003, when they first entered into the partnership agreement with O'Reilly on this conference. This was before Web 2.0 became such a popular term -- the filing actually preceded the first conference. However, I wasn't personally aware of this trademark filing till this past February, as a result of discussions with CMP after the MediaLive purchase.
Next, is the issue of proportional response. O'Reilly as an INSTUTION apologized for the gaff that resulted in sending this man a C&D. The shit storm that resulted from his blog, and then the rest of the half-cocked idiots such as parent post was not warranted, accurately sourced, or anything more than mis-reported hearsay. Please, for the love of mike, READ before posting. The apology issued to O'Reilly was justified.
Finally, if you'd read the other comments before posting, no finger pointing has taken place. O'Reilly CITES Torvolds and others as examples of trademark holders who also want to protect their trademarks. Again, if parent post had RTFA (s)he'd know that. But parent post clearly did not.
TOR Calls Out Torvalds, Stallman on Web 2.0. theodp writes "In an unusual defense of partner CMP's trademarking of Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly points a finger at Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in his rebuttal posts. TOR also says the blogger who posted the O'Reilly-approved cease-and-desist letter from CMP 'owes us an apology for the way he responded' (he got one)."
If one reads O'Reilly's post, the entire endeavor undertaken in the post is to explain how USUAL the cease and desist letter that was issued is when defending a trademark. And then he cites Torvolds and other as examples of other people who have trademarks they wish to defend. There's no finger pointing going on, nor is there any oddity in his defense. Which again, is the whole point of O'Reilly's discussion. This entire thing has been blown way out of proportion, and i'm amazed that someone can read O'Reilly's piece and then go ahead and incorrectly convey the content.
Er, well i guess that was my point. He doesn't have the option of taking the fifth, or not answering if he's sworn under oath. So the interested powers who are in charge of whatever wiretapping is going on are going to do their absolute damnedest to avoid putting any officials who actually know about this under oath, or they'll likely have to perjure themselves. The only legal way they're going to get away with not telling people is by not testifying at all.
The Fifth Amendment protects SELF-incrimination. It does not protect you against testifying about other matters. If you have been called to testify and have been sworn in, and do not testify, you can be held in contempt of court or congress. At least, so far as i understand it. Since Michael Hayden != NSA or any telecommunications company, the 5th amendment has no relevance to this case.
But that's the point. The only justifications are partisan ones. Behavior like this should be unacceptable regardless of who you are. Just because the Dems did it, like the Republicans before them, and the dems before them, and the republicans before that, does not justify current behavior.
I am kind of depressed that parent got modded funny. This is a valid point. The question at hand is really what is the purpose of classifying information, and what is a just use of the powers of classification. The Bush administration does clearly use it for their political benefit (Cheney's energy task force being the most egregious example). And i don't know whether a non-partisan case can be made for using classificational powers in this manner.
FYI, Michael V. Hayden is the former head of the NSA.
Also, i sincerely doubt that they'd put the head of the CIA under oath. The republican senate has been extremely leery about putting anyone under oath who might face tough questions (I.e. justice department officials such as Alberto Gonzales).
You know, i'm not a fan of microsoft at all. I used to be a bungie adherent back in the Marathon days, but i don't care for them since they were bought out. But on this count i'll defend them. This may be a business decision, but this could be just as likely an engineering decision. So seriously, people need to lay off. There's barely a potential for unethical behavior, but seriously, this is their gear, their software, why the hell can't the decide what they release it for? What's next? Would you have them re-write all their game titles for the gamecube and the PS3 too?
(that said, as much as i enjoyed halo 1 and 2, i don't have any sort of X-box, and have no intention of getting one, even for a halo game.)
Bridging the gap between computer science, robotics, molecular genetics, and biochemistry seems like a bizarre and convoluted route to addressing the problems stated in the article.
First, modeling engineered devices on real world objects, even features of living objects, is not a new concept. Second, we're talking a fairly simple system, a big long ribbon, not a complicated self-regulating autonomous device. Nor is there any reason to make something that would need to be as fault tolerant and robust as possible more complex than it needs to be. So, self-reparing system may sound sexy, but if a simpler mechanism can be devised than inventing an entirely new class of devices and methodologies to fix the problem, that is rightly the domain of material sciences, i fail to see why we'd want to start spouting off ungrounded hype about inter-disciplinary science that at the moment is... to be kind, speculative.
I think a lot of people are being unfair. With instructions like this on SpamOrHam:
Please read the message below, enter the verification code in the box (if asked) and then click one of the three buttons. If you think the message is a spam click This is Spam, if you think it's a genuine message click This is Ham, and if you are not sure click I'm not sure.
You are seeing the message as displayed in Microsoft Outlook and the raw message as it is seen by your email program. In the raw message, first the headers are shown (with From, To and Subject highlighted in bold) and then the body of the message follows colored blue.
I don't see how you could possibly think that the results of such a website could be meaningful. Spam filtering is a contextual process. This site cripples the critical component that allows humans to behave differently from naive filters, i.e. judgement based on memory. The claim being made here is that humans can't identify other people's spam (and this makes sense, how can you tell if you're shown a random email whether it's unsolicited or not? the only way you can is by knowing whether the recipient had been signed up for a mailing list or not!). You should NOT conclude, based on that fact, that humans are bad at identifying their own spam.
It's not clear. NPR had a story discussing this last week. The outbreak is wide enough that people are beginning to wonder if there's a hole in the efficacy of the MMR vaccines. Normally the vaccine is inneffective in 10% of the population, but the way it's spreading makes it seem like there's a wider problem of some sort.
I also wonder if it could have been that there were bad batches of vaccine or something. Then again, i don't know what the demographic background of the people effected is. If it's people from all over the country (a possibility with college students) then the cause will be different if it's just people from a cluster of states in the mid-west.
Other examples include rulings written entirely in rhyming couplets, and more. Apparently Law Schools test their n00b students' ability to research cases by asking they dig up such arcane trivia.
I hope you realize that NASA is going to use the Hubble until the satellite falls out of space and burns up on reentry. If you can figure out how to use it after that, i'm sure NASA's got a job for you.
So has there been any serious discussion about the fact that the screen is held to the body of the phone by a single strut? My inclination is to say that it looks flimsy, and while i'd be interested in the functions of the phone, i'd be afraid to do things like cradle the phone.
Okay, but did each individual instance of a piece of software protected by it's own unique passkey? I take it that that fact is the critical "innovation" under discussion.
Either way it's a stupid patent, but i'm not sure what you're referencing is relevent. (is it?)
Um... Advanced Wars DS anyone?
I loved Final Fantasy Tactics. it's still one of my favorite games. But FFTA was such a let down, i don't have much hope for any other sequels.
Advanced Wars however has some awesome gameplay across the entire series, and the plots while hokey are kind of endearing (if you ignore the bizarre overtones romanticizing warfare). Anyway, brilliant game play. No customization like you would in an FFT game, but the strategy elements are definitely more interesting.
No, what he's showing disdain for is people who profit at the unwilling expense of others, through no effort or cleverness of their own. And i'm sorry but i think there are probably a good number of people who agree with him (myself included)
Besides, using "yeah well they did it first" doesn't mean that it's right, or that other things should be modeled in the same fashion, even if one was to accept that land development is a suitable analogy to domain squatting.
I don't think there's any implying taking place. The article clearly states that Nintendo isn't trying to battle Sony and Microsoft on raw speed or capacity. They believe that machines are powerful enough already that they don't have to push that particular envelope. They're concentrating on other stuff, controllers, price, making it easy for Cube developers to transition to the revolution.
It's all in the article. This article is interesting because you can see exactly how the revolution is going to match up in terms of power. The fact that you're non-plussed says more about you than nintendo, or this article. It's just saying what's been said all along. we've just got numbers now.
And for the record, i'm nearing 27, and i'm really interested in seeing what's gonna happen on the revolution.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link. Fascinating to see that expiring mines are the primary focus of mine use by the USA.
Just because these landmines can be easily disabled, doesn't mean that they will be disabled. Landmines kill and maim due to neglegence. What happens in a war zone when a military uses a mine field to cover their retreat, and then no longer have access to the area in which they planted the mines? (Somalia and Iraq are both good examples) Will they remain there forever? Deaths from landmines are not an issue of technological inability. It is an issue of will.
Land mines in principle are terrible ideas. They are indiscriminate warfare. Nuking Nagasaki was an atrocity. Firebombing Dresden and Tokyo were atrocities. Landmine use is the same sort of thing as those tactics. And even if you wanted to argue that the scale of death from landmine use is different, at this point, i'm willing to bet that all the injuries and deaths caused by landmines world wide is not a insignificant number.
And really, with a fast mobile army, what's the point in using landmines? As most of the conflicts that the US has to deal with now are asymmetrical, what good are landmines going to be?
Nonsense.
End products are merely an output of the process which generated them. The fact that a state of events currently exists is far less meaningful than knowledge of the history and processes which have generated that state of events. This is particularly significant when you have a single state of events which could have been generated by multiple different processes. Especially when you want to hypothesize what will occur next. If you can tell two processes apart by the data points you are currently looking at, you look at how well each proposed process replicated previous data points.
A harmonious peaceful society can be reached via genocide and absolute annihilation of anyone who disagrees, leaving behind only true-believers, or it can be reached through tolerance and acceptance of others. Just having a peaceful society isn't enough. The process by which you have arrived there is of critical importance.
Are you expendable? That's possible. But i'll put it to you again (and again this requires some trust in Google), is it not better to know for yourself what China is doing? Again, if there's no way for them to be stopped? Disengagement is not an effective solution. It's true in politics, it's true in business, it's true in society, and i'd say it holds true here too.
Obviously, i'm suggesting a pragmatic stance. And i'm going to give you a pragmatic response to your final statement. You are right regarding core morals and ethics. Once you've hit the bone, you can't cut any further. That doesn't mean that principles you are flexible on are not part of your ethical or moral structure.
This is a race to the bottom. I think the ambivelence that Google displays is a reasonable response to a complicated issue. I don't think it's an unreasonable position to say you will cooperate with someone who is doing something that you dislike, because not cooperating is not going to stop them, and at least if you're the one cooperating, you know what's going on, and you can shape the process.
Er, i presume that it's only really stock manipulation if you have credibility. Otherwise it's just meaningless speculation. Fortunately, things like this posted to slashdot have no credibility.
Wow, what a stunning rebuttal.
Unlike "Notheory (580275) 2.0", web2.0, as much as we like it or not, has actually come to mean something, due in large part to O'Reilly's (the institution) efforts. They were trying to convey something when they copyrighted web 2.0, as dumb a name as it is. Lambasting them for holding the rights for a term that they invented (not made as in the term, but made as in the meaning) is an idiotic and backwards piece of reasoning.
As for O'Reilly's citations, the man is not justifying his behavior based on the behavior of others. He is stating that he is not the only one interested in protecting trademarks. So unless you'd like to make the additional claim that you think the trademark system should be thrown out, you have made a non-point.
And i quote:
2.
MediaLive filed for the trademark on the Web 2.0 Conference back in November 2003, when they first entered into the partnership agreement with O'Reilly on this conference. This was before Web 2.0 became such a popular term -- the filing actually preceded the first conference. However, I wasn't personally aware of this trademark filing till this past February, as a result of discussions with CMP after the MediaLive purchase.
Next, is the issue of proportional response. O'Reilly as an INSTUTION apologized for the gaff that resulted in sending this man a C&D. The shit storm that resulted from his blog, and then the rest of the half-cocked idiots such as parent post was not warranted, accurately sourced, or anything more than mis-reported hearsay. Please, for the love of mike, READ before posting. The apology issued to O'Reilly was justified.
Finally, if you'd read the other comments before posting, no finger pointing has taken place. O'Reilly CITES Torvolds and others as examples of trademark holders who also want to protect their trademarks. Again, if parent post had RTFA (s)he'd know that. But parent post clearly did not.
TOR Calls Out Torvalds, Stallman on Web 2.0. theodp writes "In an unusual defense of partner CMP's trademarking of Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly points a finger at Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in his rebuttal posts. TOR also says the blogger who posted the O'Reilly-approved cease-and-desist letter from CMP 'owes us an apology for the way he responded' (he got one)."
If one reads O'Reilly's post, the entire endeavor undertaken in the post is to explain how USUAL the cease and desist letter that was issued is when defending a trademark. And then he cites Torvolds and other as examples of other people who have trademarks they wish to defend. There's no finger pointing going on, nor is there any oddity in his defense. Which again, is the whole point of O'Reilly's discussion. This entire thing has been blown way out of proportion, and i'm amazed that someone can read O'Reilly's piece and then go ahead and incorrectly convey the content.
What irony.
Er, well i guess that was my point. He doesn't have the option of taking the fifth, or not answering if he's sworn under oath. So the interested powers who are in charge of whatever wiretapping is going on are going to do their absolute damnedest to avoid putting any officials who actually know about this under oath, or they'll likely have to perjure themselves. The only legal way they're going to get away with not telling people is by not testifying at all.
The Fifth Amendment protects SELF-incrimination. It does not protect you against testifying about other matters. If you have been called to testify and have been sworn in, and do not testify, you can be held in contempt of court or congress. At least, so far as i understand it. Since Michael Hayden != NSA or any telecommunications company, the 5th amendment has no relevance to this case.
But that's the point. The only justifications are partisan ones. Behavior like this should be unacceptable regardless of who you are. Just because the Dems did it, like the Republicans before them, and the dems before them, and the republicans before that, does not justify current behavior.
I am kind of depressed that parent got modded funny. This is a valid point. The question at hand is really what is the purpose of classifying information, and what is a just use of the powers of classification. The Bush administration does clearly use it for their political benefit (Cheney's energy task force being the most egregious example). And i don't know whether a non-partisan case can be made for using classificational powers in this manner.
FYI, Michael V. Hayden is the former head of the NSA. Also, i sincerely doubt that they'd put the head of the CIA under oath. The republican senate has been extremely leery about putting anyone under oath who might face tough questions (I.e. justice department officials such as Alberto Gonzales).
You know, i'm not a fan of microsoft at all. I used to be a bungie adherent back in the Marathon days, but i don't care for them since they were bought out. But on this count i'll defend them. This may be a business decision, but this could be just as likely an engineering decision. So seriously, people need to lay off. There's barely a potential for unethical behavior, but seriously, this is their gear, their software, why the hell can't the decide what they release it for? What's next? Would you have them re-write all their game titles for the gamecube and the PS3 too?
(that said, as much as i enjoyed halo 1 and 2, i don't have any sort of X-box, and have no intention of getting one, even for a halo game.)
what a meaningless (parent) post.
Bridging the gap between computer science, robotics, molecular genetics, and biochemistry seems like a bizarre and convoluted route to addressing the problems stated in the article.
First, modeling engineered devices on real world objects, even features of living objects, is not a new concept. Second, we're talking a fairly simple system, a big long ribbon, not a complicated self-regulating autonomous device. Nor is there any reason to make something that would need to be as fault tolerant and robust as possible more complex than it needs to be. So, self-reparing system may sound sexy, but if a simpler mechanism can be devised than inventing an entirely new class of devices and methodologies to fix the problem, that is rightly the domain of material sciences, i fail to see why we'd want to start spouting off ungrounded hype about inter-disciplinary science that at the moment is... to be kind, speculative.
I don't see how you could possibly think that the results of such a website could be meaningful. Spam filtering is a contextual process. This site cripples the critical component that allows humans to behave differently from naive filters, i.e. judgement based on memory. The claim being made here is that humans can't identify other people's spam (and this makes sense, how can you tell if you're shown a random email whether it's unsolicited or not? the only way you can is by knowing whether the recipient had been signed up for a mailing list or not!). You should NOT conclude, based on that fact, that humans are bad at identifying their own spam.
It's not clear. NPR had a story discussing this last week. The outbreak is wide enough that people are beginning to wonder if there's a hole in the efficacy of the MMR vaccines. Normally the vaccine is inneffective in 10% of the population, but the way it's spreading makes it seem like there's a wider problem of some sort.
I also wonder if it could have been that there were bad batches of vaccine or something. Then again, i don't know what the demographic background of the people effected is. If it's people from all over the country (a possibility with college students) then the cause will be different if it's just people from a cluster of states in the mid-west.
Actually, judges in the US insert all sorts of stuff into their rulings depending on how bored/pissed off they are at a particular case, lawyer, etc.
Exhibit 1.
Other examples include rulings written entirely in rhyming couplets, and more. Apparently Law Schools test their n00b students' ability to research cases by asking they dig up such arcane trivia.
IANAL but I know a number of law students.
I hope you realize that NASA is going to use the Hubble until the satellite falls out of space and burns up on reentry. If you can figure out how to use it after that, i'm sure NASA's got a job for you.
So has there been any serious discussion about the fact that the screen is held to the body of the phone by a single strut? My inclination is to say that it looks flimsy, and while i'd be interested in the functions of the phone, i'd be afraid to do things like cradle the phone.
Okay, but did each individual instance of a piece of software protected by it's own unique passkey? I take it that that fact is the critical "innovation" under discussion.
Either way it's a stupid patent, but i'm not sure what you're referencing is relevent. (is it?)
Um... Advanced Wars DS anyone? I loved Final Fantasy Tactics. it's still one of my favorite games. But FFTA was such a let down, i don't have much hope for any other sequels. Advanced Wars however has some awesome gameplay across the entire series, and the plots while hokey are kind of endearing (if you ignore the bizarre overtones romanticizing warfare). Anyway, brilliant game play. No customization like you would in an FFT game, but the strategy elements are definitely more interesting.
No, what he's showing disdain for is people who profit at the unwilling expense of others, through no effort or cleverness of their own. And i'm sorry but i think there are probably a good number of people who agree with him (myself included)
Besides, using "yeah well they did it first" doesn't mean that it's right, or that other things should be modeled in the same fashion, even if one was to accept that land development is a suitable analogy to domain squatting.
I don't think there's any implying taking place. The article clearly states that Nintendo isn't trying to battle Sony and Microsoft on raw speed or capacity. They believe that machines are powerful enough already that they don't have to push that particular envelope. They're concentrating on other stuff, controllers, price, making it easy for Cube developers to transition to the revolution.
:)
It's all in the article. This article is interesting because you can see exactly how the revolution is going to match up in terms of power. The fact that you're non-plussed says more about you than nintendo, or this article. It's just saying what's been said all along. we've just got numbers now.
And for the record, i'm nearing 27, and i'm really interested in seeing what's gonna happen on the revolution.