Oh right, that industry. Because all my harddrives are manufactured in Africa. If a country doesn't already have a PC hardware industry, this will actually create one - demand for replacement parts, upgrades, new machines, etc. It's quite different from undercutting an existing economy with free produce.
I'd imagine other forms of life to be more complicated than viruses, and the general consensus seems to be that they developed by random chance - they can't evolve until they're complicated enough to reproduce.
There also has to be enough oompf to power the preservation systems for 1000 years. Temperature and humidity control along are going to be big drainers, and you really don't want all your carefully-stored seed sprouting and dying twenty years after you pack em all away.
Not really. They put it on their website with the understanding that the majority of people would be using a traditional web browser to access the content. It's not like they printed it on millions of flyers and carpet bombed every city and town.
You're right. There's no way they could have reach as many people via carpet-bombing as they do via the web. Their website is a medium for communication, and it is open to the public. It is a public medium.
The whole point of the first paragraph of the story is to summarize what comes next. It's like you're not educated or something.
And yet, newspapers and magazines continue to print more than just the first paragraph of any story. Yes, the introductory paragraph is designed to provide a summary, but it's also designed to *hook*. To keep the reader interested, and flipping through more ad-filled pages. The content providers should be happy that Google consistently published their hook for then - its the best thing (for them) that could be used as a summary.
In any case, my main point is still unaddressed. They published it, and Google has a fair-use right to use small snippets for the purposes of categorizing, in just the same way that you have the right to index your collection of DVDs by their copyrighted title. If they don't like it, don't publish it. Then nobody will be able to get their dirty little hands on the precious content.
I know my position is very un-slashdotish, but there is nothing wrong with content producers wanting to control how their content, in particular, the stuff they paid to generate, from being indexed. It's not that they don't want you to see the content, it's that they want to control how you see that content. They want it wrapped in their page, with ads, and not summarized on a search page.
Yes, there is something wrong with it. They published it in a public medium. The snippet that search engines used to provide context is a clear case of fair use, which is why the content providers are whinging and not suing. It'd be analogous to publishers bitching about the reviewers putting all the good quotes in their reviews, so that nobody buys the book. If all the content you have to offer can be summed up in a 20-word blurb, your content sucks and your site deserves to die. If they don't like it, then publish behind a members-only area, or use robots.txt to stop the spidering.
Note that this is different to a search engine caching an entire page/site, where the fair-use case is a bit harder to make.
That's not a botnet. That's a garden-variety virus. Botnets are used to steal computing resources/bandwidth that doesn't belong to you. Government departments have more than enough computing power, they don't need to steal it from a bunch of desktops running four year-old chips over a dialup link.
Why do you assume that my post was directed at you personally? I used the same language in my reply as you did in your original post. And you're right. You probably have a good chance at doing it, and getting away with it. Just the same as people downloading from eMule do. However, by the same token, muggers and burglars have a good chance of getting away with it too (very few muggers and burglars are apprehended, proportionately). On that basis alone, burglary might be considered a good business plan. The reason it's not isn't to do with the mechanics of law and order, and the chances of getting caught. It's because our society is not peopled entirely with sociopaths.
As for the difference between downloading movies and appropriating GPLed software, they're really two different things. It's one thing to make a copy of something. It's another thing to claim that the work is your own, and to sell it as if it was. I've written some minor code that I've thrown out here and there. I don't give a stuff if people use it in their own things. I would care if someone claimed that my work was actually created by them.
And it's probably another example of Microsoft leveraging their monopoly (OS) to gain market share in a new area, the same way IE gained so much traction. Getting a monopoly is not bad (or rather, it may be, but its not illegal). Monopolies can naturally occur when one product is clearly superior, or its a new market just opening up, etc. Monopolies are evil when you use them to kill competition in another market.
there also may or may not be an invisible, intangible Flying Spaghetti Monster, that I also cannot disprove. By your logic, I must also clarify my position of agnosticism regarding him, and also Carl Sagan's Invisible Dragon in his garage.
Are you responding to the right post? I was saying that agnosticism is a blanket statement - it covers all concepts of a deity. Being agnostic in regards to the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a meaningless concept; if you're agnostic, you're agnostic.
The same goes for any other fictional deity.
Now you're making assertions that there is no empirical evidence for. There is no evidence for the non-existence of a deity, except that there is (arguably) no evidence for it.
There is no "in regards to Zeus, Allah", etc. Agnosticism, like atheism, is a blanket statement. Atheism says definitively "there is no god". There is no "soft" or "hard" atheism. A-theism. No god. As such, it's not a scientific position (see your own comment regarding not proving a negative). It's as much a faith-based belief as theism is, albeit in the other direction. Agnosticism says "There may or may not be a divine entity; I don't know". It's much more consistent with the scientific view; it basically amounts to "show me some evidence, until then I have no opinion one way or the other".
When an engineer designs a bridge, the intended environment of the bridge is examined. A detailed set of specifications is drawn up. And, perhaps most importantly, a budget commensurate with the time and effort taken is supplied.
Software doesn't run in a fixed environment. Even on a single OS, third party software is installed, different drivers are installed, etc. Commercial software has to be able to run in innumerable slightly different environments. In your analogy, it would be like telling the engineer that his bridge would have to work no matter where it was placed.
Most of the software I develop has had no formal specification. Clients with no formal training in software development provide vague outlines, and are unwilling or unable to further nail it down. They make lousy decisions in terms of their interface which carry throughout the project. In your analogy, it would be like telling the engineer to "just build a bridge". Don't mention how long it needs to be, how much load it needs to bear, how frequently it should need to be maintained, or what materials are available. Oh, and you probably want to change your mind when the bridge is half-built.
Secure software can be built. It is. It's built for things like medical and aeronautical applications. It relies on being run on a completely known environment. It relies on being given tight specifications. And it's damn expensive, because every line of code in the whole system (the OS, the drivers, the applications, the whole thing) needs to be audited, usually multiple times. Nobody is willing to front that money for commercial development, even if the other constraints were somehow met.
Actually, communism does work ok for some human social groups. Places like monasteries, communes, even families. The problem is that communism is a really shocking economic model for a country. The whole idea behind communism (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) relies on the people earning the most to be willing to give that up for those earning the least. In any of those groups I mentioned above, all the people who are going to be giving something up, enter the group voluntarily. Monks join knowing that all their work goes towards the common good, same deal for communes. And parents (generally) have children knowing that they're going to be supporting them for a good 20 years or so.
The problem is when you impose that sort of system by fiat. Generally, the group of people who earn the most includes the hardest workers, the most intelligent people, and the canniest business men. The group of people who earn the least includes (is not solely composed of, but definitely includes) everyone who is just to plain lazy to get off their arse and work. The former is not generally well disposed to gift the product of their labour to the latter. So they either give up on work, and become a leech on the system like everyone else, or leave and go somewhere their talents are rewarded.
Of course, the other big problem with communism is who gets to decide what is defined by "need". Does the Comrade Chairman need an expensive German motor car to show other nations that communism is successful and profitable more than the workers need heating during the winter? I don't know, but it's Comrade Chairman who makes the call.
Any advanced alien race must be a pack-forming species. The reason is simple: a race of loners would never manage to get culture going, since that requires communication between individuals. It would never reach the stars; in fact it would never even reach metal-working.
You're creating a false dichotomy between pack-forming species and "loner" species. How about hive societies? They may or may not get "culture" going (depending on your definition of that word) but they could co-operate well enough to pursue large objectives, and still be totally alien to our frame of reference.
That's just one alternative, off the top of my head, and modeled on an existing Earth phenomenon.
1) I've never eaten a living thing. To the best of my knowledge, they were all dead when I bit into em.
2) Pretty much all food was once living. Unless you want to live on aspartame or something. If the aliens are carbon-based, chances are, they eat other carbon-based things. Just like all other forms of life known to us. Just because something can't move and scream, doesn't mean it's not alive.
Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit...
on
Chefs As Chemists
·
· Score: 1
Did you even read what you linked?
"Due to this force feeding procedure, and the possible health consequences of an enlarged liver, animal rights and welfare organizations and activists regard foie gras production methods as cruel to animals. Foie gras producers maintain that force feeding ducks and geese is not uncomfortable for the animals nor is it hazardous to their health. Scientific evidence regarding the animal welfare aspects of foie gras production is limited and inconclusive."
And
While force feeding is required to meet the French legal definition of "foie gras", producers outside of France do not always force feed birds in order to produce what they consider to be foie gras. Award-winning Spanish producer Patería de Sousa produces foie gras by taking advantage of the natural instinct of geese to fatten their own livers in preparation for migration.
"poverty creates plenty of carbon output. burning dirty sources of heating and collected wood in inefficient fireplaces etc. and in other countries, its slash and burn"
That "inefficient" wood is not contributing at all to global warming. When you cut down and burn a tree, you're releasing the stored carbon of that tree. As other trees grow, that carbon is re-absorbed, and released when that tree is cut down in turn. It's all part of the current carbon cycle.
The problem with stuff like coal and oil is that they represent carbon which has been out of the cycle for millions of years. When you burn them, you're adding more carbon to the cycle than the world's forests can cope with. Deforestation (which is primarily caused by wealthier civilizations, rather than poor ones with no means to cut down forests on a large scale) only accentuates this.
Slash-and-burn agriculture is ecologically destructive, but it doesn't contribute to the carbon problem. Like burning trees, it's all part of the current carbon cycle. As the land lies fallow and the forest regenerates (prior to the next round of slash-and-burn) the carbon released is reabsorbed. As I said, it causes other ecological problems, like soil erosion and habitat destruction, but it's no more a contributing factor to global warming than any other method of turning woodland into farmland.
Can't really say that about Firefly. Ok, in the feature film after the series, you might have a point. But for the duration of the series, River wasn't a superhuman martial artist, not the main character, not really any unsurmountable tasks, and the dark and nefarious nemesis (the "hands of blue" guys) weren't really developed in the first season.
Looks like your site has been moved to a different directory, but you use absolute directory paths to reference files in include statements or some such. Change your absolute paths to relative and your site should work again.
I'd guess most don't. They either buy a computer (which comes with the price of the OS factored in, but they don't know that), use it because work provided it, or pirate it. I can count the number of people I know who bought a standalone copy of a new Windows OS on one hand.
The fact that twenty-or-so other companies seem to have independently come up with the process indicates that the process patented wasn't non-obvious.
Of course, I'm making an assumption here, and that is that these other companies didn't look up SanDisk's patent filing, and straight-out copy the process. If that's what happened, then SanDisk is entitled to their claims. But I rather doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh right, that industry. Because all my harddrives are manufactured in Africa. If a country doesn't already have a PC hardware industry, this will actually create one - demand for replacement parts, upgrades, new machines, etc. It's quite different from undercutting an existing economy with free produce.
I'd imagine other forms of life to be more complicated than viruses, and the general consensus seems to be that they developed by random chance - they can't evolve until they're complicated enough to reproduce.
There also has to be enough oompf to power the preservation systems for 1000 years. Temperature and humidity control along are going to be big drainers, and you really don't want all your carefully-stored seed sprouting and dying twenty years after you pack em all away.
Not really. They put it on their website with the understanding that the majority of people would be using a traditional web browser to access the content. It's not like they printed it on millions of flyers and carpet bombed every city and town.
You're right. There's no way they could have reach as many people via carpet-bombing as they do via the web. Their website is a medium for communication, and it is open to the public. It is a public medium.
The whole point of the first paragraph of the story is to summarize what comes next. It's like you're not educated or something.
And yet, newspapers and magazines continue to print more than just the first paragraph of any story. Yes, the introductory paragraph is designed to provide a summary, but it's also designed to *hook*. To keep the reader interested, and flipping through more ad-filled pages. The content providers should be happy that Google consistently published their hook for then - its the best thing (for them) that could be used as a summary.
In any case, my main point is still unaddressed. They published it, and Google has a fair-use right to use small snippets for the purposes of categorizing, in just the same way that you have the right to index your collection of DVDs by their copyrighted title. If they don't like it, don't publish it. Then nobody will be able to get their dirty little hands on the precious content.
I know my position is very un-slashdotish, but there is nothing wrong with content producers wanting to control how their content, in particular, the stuff they paid to generate, from being indexed. It's not that they don't want you to see the content, it's that they want to control how you see that content. They want it wrapped in their page, with ads, and not summarized on a search page.
Yes, there is something wrong with it. They published it in a public medium. The snippet that search engines used to provide context is a clear case of fair use, which is why the content providers are whinging and not suing. It'd be analogous to publishers bitching about the reviewers putting all the good quotes in their reviews, so that nobody buys the book. If all the content you have to offer can be summed up in a 20-word blurb, your content sucks and your site deserves to die. If they don't like it, then publish behind a members-only area, or use robots.txt to stop the spidering.
Note that this is different to a search engine caching an entire page/site, where the fair-use case is a bit harder to make.
That's not a botnet. That's a garden-variety virus. Botnets are used to steal computing resources/bandwidth that doesn't belong to you. Government departments have more than enough computing power, they don't need to steal it from a bunch of desktops running four year-old chips over a dialup link.
Why do you assume that my post was directed at you personally? I used the same language in my reply as you did in your original post. And you're right. You probably have a good chance at doing it, and getting away with it. Just the same as people downloading from eMule do. However, by the same token, muggers and burglars have a good chance of getting away with it too (very few muggers and burglars are apprehended, proportionately). On that basis alone, burglary might be considered a good business plan. The reason it's not isn't to do with the mechanics of law and order, and the chances of getting caught. It's because our society is not peopled entirely with sociopaths.
As for the difference between downloading movies and appropriating GPLed software, they're really two different things. It's one thing to make a copy of something. It's another thing to claim that the work is your own, and to sell it as if it was. I've written some minor code that I've thrown out here and there. I don't give a stuff if people use it in their own things. I would care if someone claimed that my work was actually created by them.
And it's probably another example of Microsoft leveraging their monopoly (OS) to gain market share in a new area, the same way IE gained so much traction. Getting a monopoly is not bad (or rather, it may be, but its not illegal). Monopolies can naturally occur when one product is clearly superior, or its a new market just opening up, etc. Monopolies are evil when you use them to kill competition in another market.
Well, if your concept of morality is based on what you can get away with without being caught, I'd say that's something wrong with you right there.
there also may or may not be an invisible, intangible Flying Spaghetti Monster, that I also cannot disprove. By your logic, I must also clarify my position of agnosticism regarding him, and also Carl Sagan's Invisible Dragon in his garage.
Are you responding to the right post? I was saying that agnosticism is a blanket statement - it covers all concepts of a deity. Being agnostic in regards to the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a meaningless concept; if you're agnostic, you're agnostic.
The same goes for any other fictional deity.
Now you're making assertions that there is no empirical evidence for. There is no evidence for the non-existence of a deity, except that there is (arguably) no evidence for it.
are you getting the point yet ?
Have you made a point yet?
There is no "in regards to Zeus, Allah", etc. Agnosticism, like atheism, is a blanket statement. Atheism says definitively "there is no god". There is no "soft" or "hard" atheism. A-theism. No god. As such, it's not a scientific position (see your own comment regarding not proving a negative). It's as much a faith-based belief as theism is, albeit in the other direction. Agnosticism says "There may or may not be a divine entity; I don't know". It's much more consistent with the scientific view; it basically amounts to "show me some evidence, until then I have no opinion one way or the other".
When an engineer designs a bridge, the intended environment of the bridge is examined. A detailed set of specifications is drawn up. And, perhaps most importantly, a budget commensurate with the time and effort taken is supplied.
Software doesn't run in a fixed environment. Even on a single OS, third party software is installed, different drivers are installed, etc. Commercial software has to be able to run in innumerable slightly different environments. In your analogy, it would be like telling the engineer that his bridge would have to work no matter where it was placed.
Most of the software I develop has had no formal specification. Clients with no formal training in software development provide vague outlines, and are unwilling or unable to further nail it down. They make lousy decisions in terms of their interface which carry throughout the project. In your analogy, it would be like telling the engineer to "just build a bridge". Don't mention how long it needs to be, how much load it needs to bear, how frequently it should need to be maintained, or what materials are available. Oh, and you probably want to change your mind when the bridge is half-built.
Secure software can be built. It is. It's built for things like medical and aeronautical applications. It relies on being run on a completely known environment. It relies on being given tight specifications. And it's damn expensive, because every line of code in the whole system (the OS, the drivers, the applications, the whole thing) needs to be audited, usually multiple times. Nobody is willing to front that money for commercial development, even if the other constraints were somehow met.
Actually, communism does work ok for some human social groups. Places like monasteries, communes, even families. The problem is that communism is a really shocking economic model for a country. The whole idea behind communism (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) relies on the people earning the most to be willing to give that up for those earning the least. In any of those groups I mentioned above, all the people who are going to be giving something up, enter the group voluntarily. Monks join knowing that all their work goes towards the common good, same deal for communes. And parents (generally) have children knowing that they're going to be supporting them for a good 20 years or so.
The problem is when you impose that sort of system by fiat. Generally, the group of people who earn the most includes the hardest workers, the most intelligent people, and the canniest business men. The group of people who earn the least includes (is not solely composed of, but definitely includes) everyone who is just to plain lazy to get off their arse and work. The former is not generally well disposed to gift the product of their labour to the latter. So they either give up on work, and become a leech on the system like everyone else, or leave and go somewhere their talents are rewarded.
Of course, the other big problem with communism is who gets to decide what is defined by "need". Does the Comrade Chairman need an expensive German motor car to show other nations that communism is successful and profitable more than the workers need heating during the winter? I don't know, but it's Comrade Chairman who makes the call.
Any advanced alien race must be a pack-forming species. The reason is simple: a race of loners would never manage to get culture going, since that requires communication between individuals. It would never reach the stars; in fact it would never even reach metal-working.
You're creating a false dichotomy between pack-forming species and "loner" species. How about hive societies? They may or may not get "culture" going (depending on your definition of that word) but they could co-operate well enough to pursue large objectives, and still be totally alien to our frame of reference.
That's just one alternative, off the top of my head, and modeled on an existing Earth phenomenon.
1) I've never eaten a living thing. To the best of my knowledge, they were all dead when I bit into em.
2) Pretty much all food was once living. Unless you want to live on aspartame or something. If the aliens are carbon-based, chances are, they eat other carbon-based things. Just like all other forms of life known to us. Just because something can't move and scream, doesn't mean it's not alive.
Did you even read what you linked?
"Due to this force feeding procedure, and the possible health consequences of an enlarged liver, animal rights and welfare organizations and activists regard foie gras production methods as cruel to animals. Foie gras producers maintain that force feeding ducks and geese is not uncomfortable for the animals nor is it hazardous to their health. Scientific evidence regarding the animal welfare aspects of foie gras production is limited and inconclusive."
And
While force feeding is required to meet the French legal definition of "foie gras", producers outside of France do not always force feed birds in order to produce what they consider to be foie gras. Award-winning Spanish producer Patería de Sousa produces foie gras by taking advantage of the natural instinct of geese to fatten their own livers in preparation for migration.
"poverty creates plenty of carbon output. burning dirty sources of heating and collected wood in inefficient fireplaces etc. and in other countries, its slash and burn"
That "inefficient" wood is not contributing at all to global warming. When you cut down and burn a tree, you're releasing the stored carbon of that tree. As other trees grow, that carbon is re-absorbed, and released when that tree is cut down in turn. It's all part of the current carbon cycle.
The problem with stuff like coal and oil is that they represent carbon which has been out of the cycle for millions of years. When you burn them, you're adding more carbon to the cycle than the world's forests can cope with. Deforestation (which is primarily caused by wealthier civilizations, rather than poor ones with no means to cut down forests on a large scale) only accentuates this.
Slash-and-burn agriculture is ecologically destructive, but it doesn't contribute to the carbon problem. Like burning trees, it's all part of the current carbon cycle. As the land lies fallow and the forest regenerates (prior to the next round of slash-and-burn) the carbon released is reabsorbed. As I said, it causes other ecological problems, like soil erosion and habitat destruction, but it's no more a contributing factor to global warming than any other method of turning woodland into farmland.
Can't really say that about Firefly. Ok, in the feature film after the series, you might have a point. But for the duration of the series, River wasn't a superhuman martial artist, not the main character, not really any unsurmountable tasks, and the dark and nefarious nemesis (the "hands of blue" guys) weren't really developed in the first season.
Looks like your site has been moved to a different directory, but you use absolute directory paths to reference files in include statements or some such. Change your absolute paths to relative and your site should work again.
And if you read my second sentence, you'll see that I acknowledge that.
This whole story is about Vista breaking when you perform a routine operation, so your line of thinking is out.
I'd guess most don't. They either buy a computer (which comes with the price of the OS factored in, but they don't know that), use it because work provided it, or pirate it. I can count the number of people I know who bought a standalone copy of a new Windows OS on one hand.
...if you happen to be a tree
The OP is making a distinction between pandemic/epidemic, not against the concept of a disease that is widespread throughout America.
The fact that twenty-or-so other companies seem to have independently come up with the process indicates that the process patented wasn't non-obvious.
Of course, I'm making an assumption here, and that is that these other companies didn't look up SanDisk's patent filing, and straight-out copy the process. If that's what happened, then SanDisk is entitled to their claims. But I rather doubt it.