Vaccinations are out of control these days; it's not that they're available, it's that they're required, and for fricking EVERYTHING.
When I was young, the Hepatitis-B vaccine was optional...you got it before you went to college, if you felt like you needed it. Now they're trying to run the whole course of hep B AND A on kids before they're 18 months old. The chicken pox vaccine, which DOESN'T provide a lifetime immunity is required for daycares and preschools...Having had chicken pox when I was 15, rather than 5, you want it over with EARLY. You don't want to forget your 15 year booster at 45 and get hit with it at the worst time in life.
HPV is a vaccine which I think is pretty useful. But I guarantee you the drug companies are going to start lobbying that all girls outta get it by like age 2, THINK OF THE PROFITS! UH, I MEAN CHILDREN!
I guess "being overweight and unhealthy" wasn't scientific enough.
On the one hand, I always like to see things cured. On the other hand, my fear of type II diabetes is one of those things that gets my ass out of bed in the morning, makes me walk to lunch, makes me have an apple instead of a twinky.
It like if they came up with a wonder pill that fixed all the bad cardiovascular problems you get from eating all the wrong stuff, a diet pill that keeps you from gaining any weight, and a cure for type II diabetes...I'm just not sure that would really be good for anyone. You should ahve to have some consequences.
I understand that there are those who get Type II through no fault of their own, and this makes me happy for them...But they're the minority, and I don't have as much sympathy for the rest.
I always went the super eco route, to the point where it was better for me to plant fungus than farms or mines. The huge mindworm boils were pretty entertaining as well. You couldn't control the main stack from a fungal bloom (at least not that same turn), but all the ones around it? No problem.
The only time I did boreholes I did it to hasten global warming, and flood out my enemies coastal cities. Muahaha.
Geeks will install whatever they want to, browser-wise. I usually have several, and I switch back and forth depending on my mood/needs.
But for the vast majority of people, who use whatever browser happens to be in the task bar? Force 'em to IE 7! I don't know why they didn't do it in the first place.
I think all it really takes is you having a copy of something you didn't buy, though the RIAA would never stand for that, as it would invalidate their massive damage claims if they just billed you for what was in your possession.
My first thought was metabolism...Warm blooded animals generally have a much quicker metabolism than cold blooded animals; that whole endothermic thing takes it out of you. Animals with faster metabolisms also tend to have shorter lifespans...The parts wear out quicker. Breeding cycles vary so much by species, it's hard to say anything there.
I haven't done any actual study on this; this is just my off-the-cuff reaction. Seems like it may play in though. Wonder if it applies to the big slow warmbloods (e.g Whales and Elephants) as well...That would definitely tell you something.
The question is not, "Should file sharing be ethical or legal" but "Did the defendant systematically violate the copyrights owned by the plaintiff?"
The law states that file sharing is copyright infringement. If they can prove she did it, or very probably did it, she's liable. That's all there is to it. The RIAA has a bunch of IP address data, and some username stuff, but they habeus no corpus because of a conveniently dead hard drive. The defendant is claiming that their data collection methods are shoddy, that the IP data is inconclusive, and that there is, in effect, no proof of infringement.
The whole trial (it being a civil trial) will come down to who the jury likes more.
Arguing the constitutionality of copyrights applied to music, etc, would have to go to the Supremes, which would involve a case where someone actually admits to doing the filesharing, and argues that it's a constitutional right, and that the laws against it should be ruled unconstitutional. Since admitting to doing the sharing is silly since you're far more likely to get off by denying it, no one (to my knowledge) has yet tried this method.
The problem with all this stuff is not that the evil audiophile magazines are duping perfectly normal, rational people...Quite the contrary. These people are looking for some fantasy to dump their money into, and the magazines and manufacturers are providing it.
This is exactly the sort of thing James Randi loves to get involved in, and the sad thing is how few people actually seem to care when the object of their irrational belief is held up in front of them. Look up the whole "Uri Geller on the Tonight Show" clip, where they set up a clean set of props for him to do his psychic schtick on, and he flopped so hard he left a hole in the stage...and it didn't end his career.
People want to believe irrational stuff. Read The demon haunted world by Carl Sagan...He goes over tons of stuff like this.
Purchase of a physical media containing intellectual property has always granted the purchaser certain rights with regard to that IP. Whether you want to call it a license or not, that is, effectively, what it is. This is most obvious in the case of software, where they make you actually agree to an actual license, but all the little government warnings on CDs and DVDs that spell out your rights? That's effectively a license.
Yea, my main issues are pre-press at this point, so that's my primary concern. CMYK support is one of those things...Work with OSS enough, and you start seeing things like that. CMYK is only useful for a specific niche, granted, Adobe knows damn well that that niche buys TONS of licenses.
Your issue #3 is the one that always jumps out and bites me whenever I'm using GIMP. You don't have to have adjustment layers, but once you're used to them, it's hard as hell to go back.
That's not their job. They're not supposed to have enforcement power. Not that it's not an attractive mental image to have an elite squad of GAO commando's busting into an FCC meeting, grabbing corrupt politicians and hauling their asses off to PMTA prison, but that's not what they do.
A congressman asks the GAO, "Hey is playing fair? Are they doing what they're supposed to do?"
GAO does some research, and responds, "Nope."
Then Congress has the opportunity to bust out massive whoopass, slash their funding, sell their children into slavery, etc, etc...They have the ability to do all kinds of enforcement, and even pass it up the line to the executive, who can call in the commandos, etc.
Though they probably won't do anything, because when does Congress ever do anything good? But they could, and that's how the system is supposed to work.
For a professional, you have to have high quality CMYK support. Period. Doesn't matter how good the other features are, if you're stuck with RGB, you're never going to be accepted in the world of the printed page.
It's just an artifact of technological process. Back when not everyone could make a copy, the thing was the physical medium. Now that anyone can make a copy, the thing is the data itself. What was the need to protect your IP, back when the medium was vinyl, and people had to buy a new copy whenever the old one wore out?
Now though, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Even though it's obvious to everyone that what we're really doing is licensing the IP on a limited basis, with no right to redistribution, they're still trying to hold on to that physical media gravy train and claiming that duplication without redistribution is a crime...Something that could only possibly be the case if the product in question was a physical thing.
The writhing death throes of their business model amuses me. Every time you see a statement like this one, it's another nail in their coffin.
If they set the standard, and patent the standard, then other people have to deal with them to license the standard...It's not a trick from the music people. As far as the music people are concerned, it's been all downhill since vinyl.
It not like, if Sony gets Blu-ray to be the new standard, that they're going to make all their money off selling stuff on blu-ray disks...They'd make that money no matter what the media was. They'll make the money licensing the technology to other people.
Remember, there is a difference between Sony's hardware division that makes stuff that plays music, and Sony's music division that signs artists, and distributes music.
The hardware people are reasonable, they want their stuff to be able to play everything, and record everything, and they want it to work 100% of the time.
The music people just want you to buy their stuff over and over and over. They don't care if you EVER listen to it.
It's a big corporation, and all the parts aren't always working in the same direction, so don't throw down on the people who make stereo equipment, and the DVD-W's you're using to flawlessly copy movies, just because the music people are douchebags.
Tritium has a biological half life of 10 days, which is pretty good. Doesn't really bind to fat, and the mortality numbers aren't off the chart.
www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/tritium.pdf
Most of what I deal with are heavy metals and pcbs, so the stuff just doesn't scare me that much...I'm pro-nuclear power, so I have a bias in this topic.
Science progresses because people are given free rein to express their ideas, protection from persecution if those ideas run counter to the irrational masses, and a license to gather and share ideas.
None of that has the least bit to do with democracy. This country isn't especially science friendly; we underfund pure science, and allow commercial science to patent basic processes that could be used by anyone to advance knowledge.
The biggest problem with democracy and science is when you have a popular movement of anti-intellectualism, that has the potential to become public policy. Rule of the people indeed.
Apparently I know more than you. Tritium is [3]H; that's Hydrogen-3 in case you don't understand superscript. And, yes, as I've already admitted, it has 2 neutrons, not 1 proton.
Tritium is commonly found in the environment as HT (Tritium Gas, One hydrogen + one Hydrogen-3) or HTO (Tritium Oxide, One hydrogen + one Hydrogen-3 + 1 Oxygen). HTO is a liquid, just like H2O, with which it shares almost all it's physical properties. HT is a gas, just like H2, with which it shares almost all of it's physical properties.
At this point, you should be understanding why what you said is, in fact, incorrect. Yes, hydrogen burns in the air, burns quickly, and dissipates. It is in NO WAY as violent a reaction as an exploding lithium battery, pound for pound. When burned it combines with oxygen, producing water.
The same exact thing happens with HT; it burns, combines, and forms HTO (Not T2O). This may last as a vapor for a while, but even if inhaled, it'll pass through the body in around 10 days, and unless inhaled in a vast quantity, the inhaler probably won't see much damage. Light beta emitters are commonly used in medical imaging.
Tritium has a half life of about 12 years. After about 500 years there will be (pulls out calculator) 2^-41.6% of the original material left, or about.00000000000003%...Probably not much to worry about.
Sigh. Tritium would be extremely difficult to turn into a fission weapon; it's been used to boost other fission reactions into the supercritical state, but by itself? No way. It's a common fuel for FUSION reactions, but that's wildly different.
The use to which I was referring was to use it as an aerosol, and even that is extremely suspect. You'd have to have a very large quantity (absurdly large), and frankly, it'd be easier to get the same quantity of hydrogen, and just ignite it. More effective too...Unless you managed to get enough HT to smother people, you're probably not going to kill them with radiation, and again, if you have that much, it's more effective to just light it.
If you were out to radiation poison people, you'd want something that would bind to fat in the body, you'd want something easier to handle than an extremely light gas like HT, and you'd want a more aggressively radioactive isotope. This is hard to handle, hard to obtain, hard to deploy, and not very effective. It'd be a terrible weapon.
Most beta particles are stopped by the skin. A few high energy particles might require clothing as well. The usual danger is with actual skin contact with the material, which is often reactive or toxic, rather than the beta emissions themselves.
It doesn't really work that way...I mean, plutonium has a frick-ton of potential energy, but it's not going to catch fire and explode your house under normal circumstances.
The same goes double for tritium, because tritium is relatively innocuous as far as radioactive materials go. Tritium is a hydrogen isotope...That means if its out in the environment it's probably either going to be a gas or a liquid, and that gas is going to be chemically very similar to hydrogen gas(it'll have 1 extra proton and be a weak beta emitter), and that liquid is going to be chemically similar to water(ditto).
They can be dangerous, but the precautions recommended for working safely, even with high energy, low half-life beta emitters like Phosphorous-32, are usually things you'd do anyway. People are already really irrational about radiation; if you say "dangerous" they think, "Melt your face off/make you sterile" not "Wear gloves and goggles."
Beta emitters (especially like [32]P) are bad news if consumed, but as long as there is something in between you and it, you're probably fine.
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Vaccinations are out of control these days; it's not that they're available, it's that they're required, and for fricking EVERYTHING.
When I was young, the Hepatitis-B vaccine was optional...you got it before you went to college, if you felt like you needed it. Now they're trying to run the whole course of hep B AND A on kids before they're 18 months old. The chicken pox vaccine, which DOESN'T provide a lifetime immunity is required for daycares and preschools...Having had chicken pox when I was 15, rather than 5, you want it over with EARLY. You don't want to forget your 15 year booster at 45 and get hit with it at the worst time in life.
HPV is a vaccine which I think is pretty useful. But I guarantee you the drug companies are going to start lobbying that all girls outta get it by like age 2, THINK OF THE PROFITS! UH, I MEAN CHILDREN!
I guess "being overweight and unhealthy" wasn't scientific enough.
On the one hand, I always like to see things cured. On the other hand, my fear of type II diabetes is one of those things that gets my ass out of bed in the morning, makes me walk to lunch, makes me have an apple instead of a twinky.
It like if they came up with a wonder pill that fixed all the bad cardiovascular problems you get from eating all the wrong stuff, a diet pill that keeps you from gaining any weight, and a cure for type II diabetes...I'm just not sure that would really be good for anyone. You should ahve to have some consequences.
I understand that there are those who get Type II through no fault of their own, and this makes me happy for them...But they're the minority, and I don't have as much sympathy for the rest.
I always went the super eco route, to the point where it was better for me to plant fungus than farms or mines. The huge mindworm boils were pretty entertaining as well. You couldn't control the main stack from a fungal bloom (at least not that same turn), but all the ones around it? No problem.
The only time I did boreholes I did it to hasten global warming, and flood out my enemies coastal cities. Muahaha.
Yea, I'd hate to be forced to give up IE 6...
Geeks will install whatever they want to, browser-wise. I usually have several, and I switch back and forth depending on my mood/needs.
But for the vast majority of people, who use whatever browser happens to be in the task bar? Force 'em to IE 7! I don't know why they didn't do it in the first place.
I think all it really takes is you having a copy of something you didn't buy, though the RIAA would never stand for that, as it would invalidate their massive damage claims if they just billed you for what was in your possession.
My first thought was metabolism...Warm blooded animals generally have a much quicker metabolism than cold blooded animals; that whole endothermic thing takes it out of you. Animals with faster metabolisms also tend to have shorter lifespans...The parts wear out quicker. Breeding cycles vary so much by species, it's hard to say anything there.
I haven't done any actual study on this; this is just my off-the-cuff reaction. Seems like it may play in though. Wonder if it applies to the big slow warmbloods (e.g Whales and Elephants) as well...That would definitely tell you something.
The question is not, "Should file sharing be ethical or legal" but "Did the defendant systematically violate the copyrights owned by the plaintiff?"
The law states that file sharing is copyright infringement. If they can prove she did it, or very probably did it, she's liable. That's all there is to it. The RIAA has a bunch of IP address data, and some username stuff, but they habeus no corpus because of a conveniently dead hard drive. The defendant is claiming that their data collection methods are shoddy, that the IP data is inconclusive, and that there is, in effect, no proof of infringement.
The whole trial (it being a civil trial) will come down to who the jury likes more.
Arguing the constitutionality of copyrights applied to music, etc, would have to go to the Supremes, which would involve a case where someone actually admits to doing the filesharing, and argues that it's a constitutional right, and that the laws against it should be ruled unconstitutional. Since admitting to doing the sharing is silly since you're far more likely to get off by denying it, no one (to my knowledge) has yet tried this method.
The problem with all this stuff is not that the evil audiophile magazines are duping perfectly normal, rational people...Quite the contrary. These people are looking for some fantasy to dump their money into, and the magazines and manufacturers are providing it.
This is exactly the sort of thing James Randi loves to get involved in, and the sad thing is how few people actually seem to care when the object of their irrational belief is held up in front of them. Look up the whole "Uri Geller on the Tonight Show" clip, where they set up a clean set of props for him to do his psychic schtick on, and he flopped so hard he left a hole in the stage...and it didn't end his career.
People want to believe irrational stuff. Read The demon haunted world by Carl Sagan...He goes over tons of stuff like this.
I think that you are wrong.
Purchase of a physical media containing intellectual property has always granted the purchaser certain rights with regard to that IP. Whether you want to call it a license or not, that is, effectively, what it is. This is most obvious in the case of software, where they make you actually agree to an actual license, but all the little government warnings on CDs and DVDs that spell out your rights? That's effectively a license.
Yea, my main issues are pre-press at this point, so that's my primary concern. CMYK support is one of those things...Work with OSS enough, and you start seeing things like that. CMYK is only useful for a specific niche, granted, Adobe knows damn well that that niche buys TONS of licenses.
Your issue #3 is the one that always jumps out and bites me whenever I'm using GIMP. You don't have to have adjustment layers, but once you're used to them, it's hard as hell to go back.
Dammit. Forgot to escape my brackets. That should be:
A congressman asks the GAO, "Hey is *insert name of organization* playing fair? Are they doing what they're supposed to do?"
That's not their job. They're not supposed to have enforcement power. Not that it's not an attractive mental image to have an elite squad of GAO commando's busting into an FCC meeting, grabbing corrupt politicians and hauling their asses off to PMTA prison, but that's not what they do.
A congressman asks the GAO, "Hey is playing fair? Are they doing what they're supposed to do?"
GAO does some research, and responds, "Nope."
Then Congress has the opportunity to bust out massive whoopass, slash their funding, sell their children into slavery, etc, etc...They have the ability to do all kinds of enforcement, and even pass it up the line to the executive, who can call in the commandos, etc.
Though they probably won't do anything, because when does Congress ever do anything good? But they could, and that's how the system is supposed to work.
For a professional, you have to have high quality CMYK support. Period. Doesn't matter how good the other features are, if you're stuck with RGB, you're never going to be accepted in the world of the printed page.
It's just an artifact of technological process. Back when not everyone could make a copy, the thing was the physical medium. Now that anyone can make a copy, the thing is the data itself. What was the need to protect your IP, back when the medium was vinyl, and people had to buy a new copy whenever the old one wore out?
Now though, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Even though it's obvious to everyone that what we're really doing is licensing the IP on a limited basis, with no right to redistribution, they're still trying to hold on to that physical media gravy train and claiming that duplication without redistribution is a crime...Something that could only possibly be the case if the product in question was a physical thing.
The writhing death throes of their business model amuses me. Every time you see a statement like this one, it's another nail in their coffin.
If they set the standard, and patent the standard, then other people have to deal with them to license the standard...It's not a trick from the music people. As far as the music people are concerned, it's been all downhill since vinyl.
It not like, if Sony gets Blu-ray to be the new standard, that they're going to make all their money off selling stuff on blu-ray disks...They'd make that money no matter what the media was. They'll make the money licensing the technology to other people.
Remember, there is a difference between Sony's hardware division that makes stuff that plays music, and Sony's music division that signs artists, and distributes music.
The hardware people are reasonable, they want their stuff to be able to play everything, and record everything, and they want it to work 100% of the time.
The music people just want you to buy their stuff over and over and over. They don't care if you EVER listen to it.
It's a big corporation, and all the parts aren't always working in the same direction, so don't throw down on the people who make stereo equipment, and the DVD-W's you're using to flawlessly copy movies, just because the music people are douchebags.
Tritium has a biological half life of 10 days, which is pretty good. Doesn't really bind to fat, and the mortality numbers aren't off the chart.
www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/tritium.pdf
Most of what I deal with are heavy metals and pcbs, so the stuff just doesn't scare me that much...I'm pro-nuclear power, so I have a bias in this topic.
Democracy has nothing to do with science.
Science progresses because people are given free rein to express their ideas, protection from persecution if those ideas run counter to the irrational masses, and a license to gather and share ideas.
None of that has the least bit to do with democracy. This country isn't especially science friendly; we underfund pure science, and allow commercial science to patent basic processes that could be used by anyone to advance knowledge.
The biggest problem with democracy and science is when you have a popular movement of anti-intellectualism, that has the potential to become public policy. Rule of the people indeed.
Apparently I know more than you. Tritium is [3]H; that's Hydrogen-3 in case you don't understand superscript. And, yes, as I've already admitted, it has 2 neutrons, not 1 proton.
.00000000000003%...Probably not much to worry about.
Tritium is commonly found in the environment as HT (Tritium Gas, One hydrogen + one Hydrogen-3) or HTO (Tritium Oxide, One hydrogen + one Hydrogen-3 + 1 Oxygen). HTO is a liquid, just like H2O, with which it shares almost all it's physical properties. HT is a gas, just like H2, with which it shares almost all of it's physical properties.
At this point, you should be understanding why what you said is, in fact, incorrect. Yes, hydrogen burns in the air, burns quickly, and dissipates. It is in NO WAY as violent a reaction as an exploding lithium battery, pound for pound. When burned it combines with oxygen, producing water.
The same exact thing happens with HT; it burns, combines, and forms HTO (Not T2O). This may last as a vapor for a while, but even if inhaled, it'll pass through the body in around 10 days, and unless inhaled in a vast quantity, the inhaler probably won't see much damage. Light beta emitters are commonly used in medical imaging.
Tritium has a half life of about 12 years. After about 500 years there will be (pulls out calculator) 2^-41.6% of the original material left, or about
Sigh. Tritium would be extremely difficult to turn into a fission weapon; it's been used to boost other fission reactions into the supercritical state, but by itself? No way. It's a common fuel for FUSION reactions, but that's wildly different.
The use to which I was referring was to use it as an aerosol, and even that is extremely suspect. You'd have to have a very large quantity (absurdly large), and frankly, it'd be easier to get the same quantity of hydrogen, and just ignite it. More effective too...Unless you managed to get enough HT to smother people, you're probably not going to kill them with radiation, and again, if you have that much, it's more effective to just light it.
If you were out to radiation poison people, you'd want something that would bind to fat in the body, you'd want something easier to handle than an extremely light gas like HT, and you'd want a more aggressively radioactive isotope. This is hard to handle, hard to obtain, hard to deploy, and not very effective. It'd be a terrible weapon.
Sorry, yea, 2.5 half-lives, so 2^-2.5 (~17) percent remains. I'm off caffeine, and it's showing.
Woops. You're right, my bad. Don't know why I thought that...
Most beta particles are stopped by the skin. A few high energy particles might require clothing as well. The usual danger is with actual skin contact with the material, which is often reactive or toxic, rather than the beta emissions themselves.
It doesn't really work that way...I mean, plutonium has a frick-ton of potential energy, but it's not going to catch fire and explode your house under normal circumstances.
The same goes double for tritium, because tritium is relatively innocuous as far as radioactive materials go. Tritium is a hydrogen isotope...That means if its out in the environment it's probably either going to be a gas or a liquid, and that gas is going to be chemically very similar to hydrogen gas(it'll have 1 extra proton and be a weak beta emitter), and that liquid is going to be chemically similar to water(ditto).
They can be dangerous, but the precautions recommended for working safely, even with high energy, low half-life beta emitters like Phosphorous-32, are usually things you'd do anyway. People are already really irrational about radiation; if you say "dangerous" they think, "Melt your face off/make you sterile" not "Wear gloves and goggles."
Beta emitters (especially like [32]P) are bad news if consumed, but as long as there is something in between you and it, you're probably fine.