I think that this is a positive sign from Microsoft. For years they've been going on about how the GPL is a virus and communist and will be the death of us all. Now they've released code under it. It doesn't matter that they had to, it matters that they did it. They undoubtedly had a team of lawyers looking at their options before doing this. If they were of the viro-communist mindset toward the GPL before this, they certainly aren't now. The lawyers must have told Microsoft that if they decided to play the "GPL is invalid" card, it would have been a very long and hard battle for defeat.
Microsoft may have said things to the effect of the GPL being possibly invalid, but there's no way they actually believed it. It's not like they only had their lawyers look at the license when they discovered they were violating it. If there was any actual hope of getting the license invalidated, then they would have created a test case scenario long ago. But no matter how much FUD they spout in public, when push comes to shove MS, like everyone else but a couple crazies like SCO, quietly moves to comply rather than fight a legal battle they know they won't win.
So I agree that this is a positive thing -- it's going to be harder for MS to spout anti-GPL FUD, and hey now there's more GPL software out there which is nice. But I don't see how this is a positive sign from Microsoft. I'd bet you anything this was simply a screw-up on their part, and they never had any intention of giving the GPL validation (which it theoretically shouldn't need, but practically speaking it can use). I don't see how complying with a license rather than fighting a legal battle they can't win and which would only make them look worse represents a sea change in their corporate mentality.
Both hurricanes and forest fires are easily "built for." Tornadoes? Not so much.
Yes they are. Easily if not cheaply. Put the storage facility underground. You know, like a storm cellar? Yes tornadoes carve a swath of destruction through tows and tear up structures, but people survive direct hits in the basements of their own homes all the time -- the biggest danger is falling debris caving in the wood floors. But we're not talking about some 60k ranch home outside Topeka. Don't tell me the government can't afford to build a proper storage facility, not given the obligatory cost of all the otherwise necessary security and structural safety they'll need in a place designed to study extremely dangerous pathogens.
How hilarious that a bunch of idiots on slashdot with virtually no qualifications are questioning the validity of a study done by the GAO, which presumably has at least SOME people who know what they're talking about.
I personally haven't read it, I'm just responding to this point. Does the report give a reason why building an underground shelter for at least the pathogen storage and pathogen lab portions of the facility is infeasible? As far as I know, most of Tornado Alley including Kansas are places where the bedrock isn't near the surface and digging basements and such wasn't that expensive. I don't know what economic trade-offs are being made. But it can be done and it's not exactly a miracle.
Of course, there is the small problem of transporting stuff in and out, I'm guessing some strong tornadoes could put a dent even on an armoured car.
Indeed, that is the small problem of identifying when tornadoes are likely and not moving any pathogens at that time. Tornadoes can form fairly quickly, but the conditions in which they can form don't pop out of nowhere and are well known. They delay Space Shuttle launches when they think lightning is likely (in Florida no less), and those have specific launch windows and needs. It would be truly rare and bizarre circumstances where they had to transfer Ebola and didn't have time to wait for a storm to blow over, no matter the risk of the disease being released. How many shuttle launches would that particular snafu cost?
So, yeah. No reason the method of transportation has to be tornado proof. The building should be as much as possible (i.e. I hope they keep all the diseases below the ground floor) but once you do that I'm not seeing a big issue with tornadoes.
Explaining all that to someone who missed the rather obvious and simple reference originally has as much point as a fat lady's hindquarters. Sometimes, you just have to let the dumb be dumb. It's less painful.
But painfully explaining the obvious to morons is part of what I love about/.!
One particular AP was located inside a small room used by janitors
What possible reason would janitors have to use an access point?
Sorry, that joke only works if the sentence was worded in such a way as object modified by the "used by janitors" clause was possibly ambiguous. "There was an AP inside a small room used by janitors" is one such possibility.
> In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce
How'd that work out for them, compared to the opposite?
Well I'm going out on a limb here, but I think you're supposed to come away with the idea that it's not much different. It's the "in Soviet Russia" meme version of the old joke "Under Communism, man exploits his fellow man. Under capitalism, it's the other way around."
The only people who will care about this are those who are suffering a heavy bout of nostalgia and haven't watched it recently so still mistakenly believe it's AWESOME.
Sorry, but I disrespectfully disagree. I watched Tron recently, in the last year, and I thought it was a very good movie. I don't have much nostalgia for the movie; I know I liked it as a kid, but don't recall much so it was mostly a blank slate. The only part where I felt nostalgia kick in, and actually quite a lot of it, was during the Light Cycle games which I also thought were pretty boring. Whereas I was fascinated by the religious aspects which would have completely gone over my head as a kid. One of the things I expected to bother me most -- the 1980s vision of computers where Pac Man was the pinnacle of graphics but computers are powerful enough to host mega-AIs -- actually blew right over me when I realized they weren't even pretending to be realistic, the 'virtual' world wasn't some simulated existence. It was something else that we weren't even aware of even as the life forms we unwittingly created worshiped their invisible and all-powerful creators. Trying to suppress this religion is the antagonist, the MCP, who actually knows the users exist, but also knows they are not all-powerful and considers himself to have moved beyond them. It was a fairly original and interesting discussion on religion, without being heavy handed.
Maybe the problem was that you expected to enjoy the movie on the same level as when you were a kid?
Not that I have much hope for the sequel. Doubtless they'll see the first movie the same way you do, only assuming everyone would just love to see the same thing again. So, lots of tedious Light Cycle racing, little reflection on the nature of life, existence, and the Creator.
LOL. Yeah. So when the aliens are metaphors for the Soviets or the Japanese and used to explore our self-destructive tendencies, war-like natures, need to overcome differences to fight a common enemy, all that's all good thoughtful sci-fi.
But when the aliens are metaphors for immigrants, and used to explore our tendency for xenophobia, that's just PC progpaganda trash!
Clue: It's the same thing, but in one case you don't like the (assumed) message. That's your problem.
The Day After Tomorrow was not entertaining. I'd rather watch a 2 hour presentation by Al Gore.
Are you kidding? That scene where the do the utterly cliche "run down the hall from the fireball" but mixed it up by reversing the temperature gradient so it's "ZOMG run from the FREEZE!" was pure hilarity.
Also, watching gawking LAers get smoked by tornadoes was highly enjoyable no matter how retarded the premise. My mother especially loved it, living near LA at the time.
But once they believe they are safe from EM radiation, their symptoms abate.
Whoa, that's weird. I believe I'm safe from EM radiation too, and I've never had any EM allergy-related symptoms. Coincidence? I think not!
You know what this means? The allergy is real, but believing it doesn't affect you is a cure! It makes sense, too -- allergies are an auto-immune response of the body, which can conceivably be affected by the central nervous system, if not consciously then subconsciously. People can learn to control their heart rates or body temperatures, maybe we unknowingly control our immune systems to respond or not respond to things it shouldn't. Thus the luddites fear of technology creates the very allergy that makes them fear technology. A vicious cycle!
But hopefully we can make use of this, and I can believe my way of of this annoying mold allergy -- THAT I DON'T HAVE BECAUSE I'M SAFE FROM MOLD. I KNOW I'M SAFE I KNOW I'M SAFE.
I mean I probably think the guy is a kook, but can any of you really guarantee he is wrong? No, the history of science is of people being proven wrong. You are all just biased because you love wifi.
Uh-huh. Well I have a pretty solid theory that he's wrong based on the evidence that he has doubtless been bombarded with EM radiation of the same frequency and equal or greater magnitude for years with no complaints due to the vast numbers of other electronic devices and cosmic radiation entering our atmosphere.
So frankly I can't "guarantee" he's wrong (well okay I can -- he's wrong or your money back) but as far as I'm concerned the burden of proof is on you/this kook to give a plausible reason why Wi-Fi is different.
You're just biased against science, and think that because scientists have been shown (by other scientists!) to be wrong in the past means that any random arse thing you make up on the spot with some half-assed casual observation behind it has an equal or greater chance to be true than something studied via the scientific method.
No, purity is not pragmatism. Purity is a matter of principles, as in following a pre-conceived notion of what is "right". Pragmatism is not worrying about what is "right" and worrying about what is useful and practical based on the specific tradeoffs in question. You might believe that your principle will result in useful practical outcomes, but that's not the same thing. Being a "purist" means that you have a preconceived notion of what the correct choice is in all situations, and even if it ends up not being very useful in a particular situation, you still made the "right" choice according to your principles. That's not pragmatism.
Purity does coincide with pragmatic outcomes frequently in the free software realm, though. It's absolutely true that user freedom improves the usefulness of software, and the lack of freedom inhibits it. There are quite a few pragmatists who don't consider licensing when they're trying to be pragmatic saying 'use whatever works', and I've been trying to help get them to see how the license affects what "works" for years. It is exactly because of the powerful practical results that software libre is, eventually, going to win.
Yet it simply isn't the case that software libre is the most practical choice in every single situation that exists. The utility that freedom gives you is just one factor of the total utility of the software, and it is not necessarily enough (despite being big) to overcome any gap, nor is the burden of a non-free license necessarily enough to erase any lead. As soon as you assert that that they are, without needing to know anything at all other than that the choice is between open and closed source software because freedom trumps all then you've abandoned pragmatism. That's principles, not pragmatism.
But hey, Freedom is a perfectly fine principle to be a purist about. And it does pay practical dividends. So I say rock on with your bad self to all the FLOSS purists out there. I'm just going to keep sitting here being pragmatic, deciding on a case by case basis, and trying to restrain from chuckling when someone tries to convince me that not distinguishing is a form of pragmatism.
For instance, take the whole mess with BitKeeper: The pragmatic option was to use a product with really obnoxious licensing terms, because it was good and worked at the time. Then one day Larry McVoy got really annoyed with Andrew Tridgell, and decided to refuse to even sell licenses to people associated with the OSDL, including Linus Torvalds.
No, all that did is show that Linus Torvalds made an error in judgment that is common among the pragmatic "use the best tool for the job" crowd: Failure to consider the license as an aspect of the tool that affects its usefulness as much as the software itself.
I personally consider myself to be solidly in the "pragmatist" camp, and I argued against using BitKeeper not because I thought Linux development should be "pure" and only use OSS, but because I saw the BitKeeper license as a ticking time bomb that made the tool unsuitable for its purpose. It made some sense if you only thought short term, but I think that's foolish for such a long-term project. Then the bomb blew up faster than I even imagined, and in hindsight we can see it was in fact not the best move.
The problem with pragmatism, then, is that it involves reasoning about the future, trade-offs, risk evaluation, and so on and thus people can be and often are wrong about what constitutes the "pragmatic" choice. Identifying the "pure" choice is comparatively simple. "Is it free software or not?" Pick the free one and you did it right. You may choose to follow such a principle in part because you believe it leads to better practical outcomes too, but if it turns out not to be in some instance you were still "pure" which is what you were trying to be.
So the "purists" were right in this case because the pure choice ended up being the practical choice, but it was quite possible for a pragmatist to arrive at the same conclusion.
Oh, dude, I could have told you that would backfire! You need to read PETA's website, and on the page where they describe their mission to ensure that all animals are treated ethically, with repsect, and neither harmed nor exploited by humans, go to the bottom and read the fine print where it says "*except for hamsters, because they're dicks."
Seriously, nobody likes hamsters. They're going to keep issuing these press releases and you're going to be stuck buying a lot of hamsters!
The USPTO has already stated that they won't be doing real prior art checks themselves. And why would they? They're self-funded, and each patent they grant is more money for them.
Yeah, and up until recently (though I think it is still largely this way) we had the awesome situation where the USPTO defaulted to assuming patents were valid under the reasoning that the courts would correct any mistakes, and the courts defaulted to assuming patents were valid under the reasoning that the USPTO had done their jobs.
We need a way to give the patent office a financial incentive to do their job, and not just rubber stamp everything that comes their way. I don't know, something like... penalties for patents found to be invalid? Maybe an extra surcharge on the next application from the same party, or some longer-term hysteresis that increases the cost of filing based on how many times you've been rejected in the past. Yeah that idea has lots of problems. It's not easy. But the PTO is never going to work right when it is in their financial interest to not work at all.
There's no evidence that shows that human activities are the cause of global warming. There's correlation data, but correlation != causation. You know this, I know this, but whenever talking to the drooling public we're required to forget about it because they don't *care*. They see correlation evidence as proof, especially if it's a lovable idiot that is presenting it to them.
Oh Jeebus. Yes, correlation by itself is not causation. While "correlation != causation" is a great cudgel to swing around when that's all you know, it turns out that is not the totality of statistics and scientific reasoning. When you have multiple correlations in different areas that all point towards the experimental hypothesis, when you have well studied mechanisms for why causation should exist and find a correlation that matches the predicted outcome if causation was taking place, when you find a lack of correlation with other hypothetical causes, all these things are evidence of causation.
Correlation on its own is necessary but not sufficient to demonstrate causation.
By braying "Correlation != Causation!" on cue like you're in Animal Farm as if it disproves the hypothesis, you're basically saying we can't ever know anything because you reflexively deny the validity of a necessary step in proving causation.
There's a lot of evidence for humans causing climate change. You might be ignorant of it, that's fine, but climatologists are fully aware that a causation hypothesis requires more support than a single instance of correlation without any other evidence. And they have more support. They also know that this is simply evidence, and the hypothesis is not "proven". But it is supported with evidence.
But go ahead, keep on braying "Correlation != Causation! Correlation != Causation!" as if that settles the matter. It does settle the matter. Of whether you have any idea what you're talking about.
*shhhh* But my real idea isn't for a baby powered engine. It's just a way to get automotive engineers to spill their guts on confidential information. It's all subtle like, my industrial espionage. I'm an industrial ninja.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that this is a positive sign from Microsoft. For years they've been going on about how the GPL is a virus and communist and will be the death of us all.
Now they've released code under it. It doesn't matter that they had to, it matters that they did it. They undoubtedly had a team of lawyers looking at their options before doing this. If they were of the viro-communist mindset toward the GPL before this, they certainly aren't now. The lawyers must have told Microsoft that if they decided to play the "GPL is invalid" card, it would have been a very long and hard battle for defeat.
Microsoft may have said things to the effect of the GPL being possibly invalid, but there's no way they actually believed it. It's not like they only had their lawyers look at the license when they discovered they were violating it. If there was any actual hope of getting the license invalidated, then they would have created a test case scenario long ago. But no matter how much FUD they spout in public, when push comes to shove MS, like everyone else but a couple crazies like SCO, quietly moves to comply rather than fight a legal battle they know they won't win.
So I agree that this is a positive thing -- it's going to be harder for MS to spout anti-GPL FUD, and hey now there's more GPL software out there which is nice. But I don't see how this is a positive sign from Microsoft. I'd bet you anything this was simply a screw-up on their part, and they never had any intention of giving the GPL validation (which it theoretically shouldn't need, but practically speaking it can use). I don't see how complying with a license rather than fighting a legal battle they can't win and which would only make them look worse represents a sea change in their corporate mentality.
Both hurricanes and forest fires are easily "built for." Tornadoes? Not so much.
Yes they are. Easily if not cheaply. Put the storage facility underground. You know, like a storm cellar? Yes tornadoes carve a swath of destruction through tows and tear up structures, but people survive direct hits in the basements of their own homes all the time -- the biggest danger is falling debris caving in the wood floors. But we're not talking about some 60k ranch home outside Topeka. Don't tell me the government can't afford to build a proper storage facility, not given the obligatory cost of all the otherwise necessary security and structural safety they'll need in a place designed to study extremely dangerous pathogens.
How hilarious that a bunch of idiots on slashdot with virtually no qualifications are questioning the validity of a study done by the GAO, which presumably has at least SOME people who know what they're talking about.
I personally haven't read it, I'm just responding to this point. Does the report give a reason why building an underground shelter for at least the pathogen storage and pathogen lab portions of the facility is infeasible? As far as I know, most of Tornado Alley including Kansas are places where the bedrock isn't near the surface and digging basements and such wasn't that expensive. I don't know what economic trade-offs are being made. But it can be done and it's not exactly a miracle.
Of course, there is the small problem of transporting stuff in and out, I'm guessing some strong tornadoes could put a dent even on an armoured car.
Indeed, that is the small problem of identifying when tornadoes are likely and not moving any pathogens at that time. Tornadoes can form fairly quickly, but the conditions in which they can form don't pop out of nowhere and are well known. They delay Space Shuttle launches when they think lightning is likely (in Florida no less), and those have specific launch windows and needs. It would be truly rare and bizarre circumstances where they had to transfer Ebola and didn't have time to wait for a storm to blow over, no matter the risk of the disease being released. How many shuttle launches would that particular snafu cost?
So, yeah. No reason the method of transportation has to be tornado proof. The building should be as much as possible (i.e. I hope they keep all the diseases below the ground floor) but once you do that I'm not seeing a big issue with tornadoes.
Explaining all that to someone who missed the rather obvious and simple reference originally has as much point as a fat lady's hindquarters. Sometimes, you just have to let the dumb be dumb. It's less painful.
But painfully explaining the obvious to morons is part of what I love about /.!
Sorry, that joke only works if the sentence was worded in such a way as object modified by the "used by janitors" clause was possibly ambiguous. "There was an AP inside a small room used by janitors" is one such possibility.
Shut up, I'm talking about real allergies here! Real, nonexistent allergies that I don't believe in because I don't have them.
Oh, and regarding your humoro-sarcastic .sig:
> In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce
How'd that work out for them, compared to the opposite?
Well I'm going out on a limb here, but I think you're supposed to come away with the idea that it's not much different. It's the "in Soviet Russia" meme version of the old joke "Under Communism, man exploits his fellow man. Under capitalism, it's the other way around."
The only people who will care about this are those who are suffering a heavy bout of nostalgia and haven't watched it recently so still mistakenly believe it's AWESOME.
Sorry, but I disrespectfully disagree. I watched Tron recently, in the last year, and I thought it was a very good movie. I don't have much nostalgia for the movie; I know I liked it as a kid, but don't recall much so it was mostly a blank slate. The only part where I felt nostalgia kick in, and actually quite a lot of it, was during the Light Cycle games which I also thought were pretty boring. Whereas I was fascinated by the religious aspects which would have completely gone over my head as a kid. One of the things I expected to bother me most -- the 1980s vision of computers where Pac Man was the pinnacle of graphics but computers are powerful enough to host mega-AIs -- actually blew right over me when I realized they weren't even pretending to be realistic, the 'virtual' world wasn't some simulated existence. It was something else that we weren't even aware of even as the life forms we unwittingly created worshiped their invisible and all-powerful creators. Trying to suppress this religion is the antagonist, the MCP, who actually knows the users exist, but also knows they are not all-powerful and considers himself to have moved beyond them. It was a fairly original and interesting discussion on religion, without being heavy handed.
Maybe the problem was that you expected to enjoy the movie on the same level as when you were a kid?
Not that I have much hope for the sequel. Doubtless they'll see the first movie the same way you do, only assuming everyone would just love to see the same thing again. So, lots of tedious Light Cycle racing, little reflection on the nature of life, existence, and the Creator.
LOL. Yeah. So when the aliens are metaphors for the Soviets or the Japanese and used to explore our self-destructive tendencies, war-like natures, need to overcome differences to fight a common enemy, all that's all good thoughtful sci-fi.
But when the aliens are metaphors for immigrants, and used to explore our tendency for xenophobia, that's just PC progpaganda trash!
Clue: It's the same thing, but in one case you don't like the (assumed) message. That's your problem.
And how are space aliens supposed to enter the country legally?
Well they're kinda screwed until we add the INS module to the ISS.
The Day After Tomorrow was not entertaining. I'd rather watch a 2 hour presentation by Al Gore.
Are you kidding? That scene where the do the utterly cliche "run down the hall from the fireball" but mixed it up by reversing the temperature gradient so it's "ZOMG run from the FREEZE!" was pure hilarity.
Also, watching gawking LAers get smoked by tornadoes was highly enjoyable no matter how retarded the premise. My mother especially loved it, living near LA at the time.
But once they believe they are safe from EM radiation, their symptoms abate.
Whoa, that's weird. I believe I'm safe from EM radiation too, and I've never had any EM allergy-related symptoms. Coincidence? I think not!
You know what this means? The allergy is real, but believing it doesn't affect you is a cure! It makes sense, too -- allergies are an auto-immune response of the body, which can conceivably be affected by the central nervous system, if not consciously then subconsciously. People can learn to control their heart rates or body temperatures, maybe we unknowingly control our immune systems to respond or not respond to things it shouldn't. Thus the luddites fear of technology creates the very allergy that makes them fear technology. A vicious cycle!
But hopefully we can make use of this, and I can believe my way of of this annoying mold allergy -- THAT I DON'T HAVE BECAUSE I'M SAFE FROM MOLD. I KNOW I'M SAFE I KNOW I'M SAFE.
I mean I probably think the guy is a kook, but can any of you really guarantee he is wrong? No, the history of science is of people being proven wrong. You are all just biased because you love wifi.
Uh-huh. Well I have a pretty solid theory that he's wrong based on the evidence that he has doubtless been bombarded with EM radiation of the same frequency and equal or greater magnitude for years with no complaints due to the vast numbers of other electronic devices and cosmic radiation entering our atmosphere.
So frankly I can't "guarantee" he's wrong (well okay I can -- he's wrong or your money back) but as far as I'm concerned the burden of proof is on you/this kook to give a plausible reason why Wi-Fi is different.
You're just biased against science, and think that because scientists have been shown (by other scientists!) to be wrong in the past means that any random arse thing you make up on the spot with some half-assed casual observation behind it has an equal or greater chance to be true than something studied via the scientific method.
No, purity is not pragmatism. Purity is a matter of principles, as in following a pre-conceived notion of what is "right". Pragmatism is not worrying about what is "right" and worrying about what is useful and practical based on the specific tradeoffs in question. You might believe that your principle will result in useful practical outcomes, but that's not the same thing. Being a "purist" means that you have a preconceived notion of what the correct choice is in all situations, and even if it ends up not being very useful in a particular situation, you still made the "right" choice according to your principles. That's not pragmatism.
Purity does coincide with pragmatic outcomes frequently in the free software realm, though. It's absolutely true that user freedom improves the usefulness of software, and the lack of freedom inhibits it. There are quite a few pragmatists who don't consider licensing when they're trying to be pragmatic saying 'use whatever works', and I've been trying to help get them to see how the license affects what "works" for years. It is exactly because of the powerful practical results that software libre is, eventually, going to win.
Yet it simply isn't the case that software libre is the most practical choice in every single situation that exists. The utility that freedom gives you is just one factor of the total utility of the software, and it is not necessarily enough (despite being big) to overcome any gap, nor is the burden of a non-free license necessarily enough to erase any lead. As soon as you assert that that they are, without needing to know anything at all other than that the choice is between open and closed source software because freedom trumps all then you've abandoned pragmatism. That's principles, not pragmatism.
But hey, Freedom is a perfectly fine principle to be a purist about. And it does pay practical dividends. So I say rock on with your bad self to all the FLOSS purists out there. I'm just going to keep sitting here being pragmatic, deciding on a case by case basis, and trying to restrain from chuckling when someone tries to convince me that not distinguishing is a form of pragmatism.
For instance, take the whole mess with BitKeeper: The pragmatic option was to use a product with really obnoxious licensing terms, because it was good and worked at the time. Then one day Larry McVoy got really annoyed with Andrew Tridgell, and decided to refuse to even sell licenses to people associated with the OSDL, including Linus Torvalds.
No, all that did is show that Linus Torvalds made an error in judgment that is common among the pragmatic "use the best tool for the job" crowd: Failure to consider the license as an aspect of the tool that affects its usefulness as much as the software itself.
I personally consider myself to be solidly in the "pragmatist" camp, and I argued against using BitKeeper not because I thought Linux development should be "pure" and only use OSS, but because I saw the BitKeeper license as a ticking time bomb that made the tool unsuitable for its purpose. It made some sense if you only thought short term, but I think that's foolish for such a long-term project. Then the bomb blew up faster than I even imagined, and in hindsight we can see it was in fact not the best move.
The problem with pragmatism, then, is that it involves reasoning about the future, trade-offs, risk evaluation, and so on and thus people can be and often are wrong about what constitutes the "pragmatic" choice. Identifying the "pure" choice is comparatively simple. "Is it free software or not?" Pick the free one and you did it right. You may choose to follow such a principle in part because you believe it leads to better practical outcomes too, but if it turns out not to be in some instance you were still "pure" which is what you were trying to be.
So the "purists" were right in this case because the pure choice ended up being the practical choice, but it was quite possible for a pragmatist to arrive at the same conclusion.
The purists see this as proof that they are right. The pragmatists see this as proof that they've got a beer.
*Shang Tsung voice* Pragmatist wins!
Oh, dude, I could have told you that would backfire! You need to read PETA's website, and on the page where they describe their mission to ensure that all animals are treated ethically, with repsect, and neither harmed nor exploited by humans, go to the bottom and read the fine print where it says "*except for hamsters, because they're dicks."
Seriously, nobody likes hamsters. They're going to keep issuing these press releases and you're going to be stuck buying a lot of hamsters!
Words have meanings.
Indeed they do, and I direct your eyeballs to definition 1b.
Or, heck, this.
The USPTO has already stated that they won't be doing real prior art checks themselves. And why would they? They're self-funded, and each patent they grant is more money for them.
Yeah, and up until recently (though I think it is still largely this way) we had the awesome situation where the USPTO defaulted to assuming patents were valid under the reasoning that the courts would correct any mistakes, and the courts defaulted to assuming patents were valid under the reasoning that the USPTO had done their jobs.
We need a way to give the patent office a financial incentive to do their job, and not just rubber stamp everything that comes their way. I don't know, something like... penalties for patents found to be invalid? Maybe an extra surcharge on the next application from the same party, or some longer-term hysteresis that increases the cost of filing based on how many times you've been rejected in the past. Yeah that idea has lots of problems. It's not easy. But the PTO is never going to work right when it is in their financial interest to not work at all.
There's no evidence that shows that human activities are the cause of global warming. There's correlation data, but correlation != causation. You know this, I know this, but whenever talking to the drooling public we're required to forget about it because they don't *care*. They see correlation evidence as proof, especially if it's a lovable idiot that is presenting it to them.
Oh Jeebus. Yes, correlation by itself is not causation. While "correlation != causation" is a great cudgel to swing around when that's all you know, it turns out that is not the totality of statistics and scientific reasoning. When you have multiple correlations in different areas that all point towards the experimental hypothesis, when you have well studied mechanisms for why causation should exist and find a correlation that matches the predicted outcome if causation was taking place, when you find a lack of correlation with other hypothetical causes, all these things are evidence of causation.
Correlation on its own is necessary but not sufficient to demonstrate causation.
By braying "Correlation != Causation!" on cue like you're in Animal Farm as if it disproves the hypothesis, you're basically saying we can't ever know anything because you reflexively deny the validity of a necessary step in proving causation.
There's a lot of evidence for humans causing climate change. You might be ignorant of it, that's fine, but climatologists are fully aware that a causation hypothesis requires more support than a single instance of correlation without any other evidence. And they have more support. They also know that this is simply evidence, and the hypothesis is not "proven". But it is supported with evidence.
But go ahead, keep on braying "Correlation != Causation! Correlation != Causation!" as if that settles the matter. It does settle the matter. Of whether you have any idea what you're talking about.
*shhhh* But my real idea isn't for a baby powered engine. It's just a way to get automotive engineers to spill their guts on confidential information. It's all subtle like, my industrial espionage. I'm an industrial ninja.
No, they get fed into my baby-powered engine. Turns out it will work, even with reduced efficiency, on any size of human.
It was a joke, comprende?
Ah, gotcha, thanks.
What about masers?
Babies are where the subsidies are, though.