He was talking about it not mattering from the perspective of the general public's reaction and outrage. He was explaining why we let a patsy like Madoff take the rap and that's it. And he's right. Yes people get mad, and the people directly affected by it stay mad, but the rest of the country just kinda shrugs and moves on. Same with Enron. There just aren't the same kinds of reactions to this white-collar crime, even if it ends up being more devastating than other kinds of crime.
given the nature of computers and the Internet, almost every action one takes makes a copy of digital content - making the "automatic copyright" at the heart of the current problems. copying is using, which makes all content created near useless without specific permission (fair use aside).
Except any of those copies made as an essential act of using the computer are specifically exempted. Ergo, using is not copying from a copyright perspective.
This is not a fair use argument by the way. It's simply a limitation on the copyright.
Also, that's not the heart of most copyright problems, since the majority of copyright cases don't involve automatic copies made while otherwise viewing a work distributed with permission of the author.
An old car, properly maintained and serviced, works like new. A cassette can never say the same as no amount of head cleaning will prevent or undo the degradation that occurs over time whether used or not. Even the highest quality cassettes (the only kind I'd buy) are on a slow curve to uselessness.
You can argue that mp3s appeal to the ear only as opposed to cassettes (or even vinyl for that matter) that appeal to the ears, eyes, touch and if you're weird like me, then even taste and smell.
A cassette is present to those senses, but to say they appeal means you are very much a weirdo. They're clunky, fragile, and a poor design undercut only by even more inferior tape formats. My tactile senses are activated when I take the cassette out, my auditory senses are activated when I hear the spools clank around inside the cheap plastic package, and my visual senses engaged as I look to ensure that the tape itself did not get caught in the playing device. This is anything but appealing.
Of course, you have your cover flow, but how can that compare to a piece of paper with art printed on it.
Oh yeah, and cassettes are crap for visual art. Vinyl is at least a better medium for art than the CD on both the case and the disc itself; cassettes are much worse in both respects.
Since then I've just played nice. I'm more interested in getting to my destination than being a martyr. It's one of those "You'd be right, but you'd still lose" scenarios.
Yeah. I'm imagining the phone call: "Oh sorry I couldn't make it to Christmas this year because TSA pulled me out of line for some bullshit reason and instead of playing along I decided to have a fit over it."
It's not the TSA agents that would be dealing with the guilt trips.
What produced it just happened not to be a chicken. Something close, but not quite.
Except when posed in evolutionary terms, the whole question comes down to a problem of the human desire for classification versus nature's complete lack of giving a shit about that desire.
What precisely makes a chicken a chicken versus a chicken-minus-one-generation proto-chicken? Given that any population naturally has a degree of genetic variation, there's no "gold standard" for a chicken genome, and it is entirely possible that every gene we see in chickens was already present in the population of proto-chickens. It could be that the only thing differentiating the chicken from its proto-chicken parent is that the chicken was born into an environment where its only potential mates were other proto-chickens with the same subset of genes from the larger proto-chicken population. Then proto-chicken becomes chicken not by a mutation that completes the chicken genome, but by a quirk of fate that isolated a certain set of genes, and what was once a sub-species of proto-chicken is now its own species, the chicken.
Or it could be that in the list of traits we recognize as chicken-like, a hen laid an egg with the mutation that completed the last of these traits and thus was the chicken born to dominate the proto-chicken. Or a hundred thousand other possibilities I can't think of. I guess I'm just trying to add back in some mystery to an old philosophical question that science seems to give an answer too.:)
Oh and this is unrelated, but proto-chicken seriously needs to be a boss monster in some rpg.
Whether they are smart enough or not, TSA and airport security are essentially required by law to not understand irony, humor, jest, satire, sarcasm, or the like. Now surely the TSA officers in question, reading a script about terrorist attacks (as if such could be the topic of fiction in today's world!) and getting suspicious indicates they fall squarely in the "lack the intellect" bucket... But in either case, trying to explain the irony would just mean they'd say "I'm sorry sir, but according to DHS regulation 372(d) paragraph 2, I'm not allowed to understand what that word means."
I'm wagering that designing a rover that you are certain is capable of running around Mars for 90 days would necessarily entail a degree of engineering that makes it at least theoretically capable of running around Mars for years. Everything that broke and they worked their way out of in the last few years could have happened on day 10. Thus redundancy, back-doors, and clever, robust engineering were the words, even for a short mission.
The 90 day expected life was due to the expectation that the solar panels would get covered in dust, and that the Martian wind would be too slight to blow them off (and various panel cleaning devices were considered and rejected for reasoning as solid as the rest of the rover design). When that assumption was proven false, and the panels were kept clean enough to continue powering the rover, well, then the rover's "expected" life span goes way, way up.
It's not like they said "Oh the mission will only be 90 days, we can design this axle so that it would snap on day 91" or "Hey, the controller code will fail with an out of memory exception on day 100, but we won't fix it or put in a back door to get new code in the rover because who cares if it dies on day 100?"
So, yeah, yay for human ingenuity for sure, but that ingenuity was in there from the start and comparing the result to the 90 day expected life is a little misleading.
It's not about where in particular the US consumer's oil comes from, since it's all part of a single global market.
What's important, in geopolitical terms, is controlling the oil that other people are using. It gives tremendous political leverage internationally. This has almost nothing to do with domestic US politics.
Thanks. People go on about how oil is a fungible commodity, as if that means there's no profit or advantage in owning or controlling sources of it and that therefore the U.S. (and I guess no other country either) would never go to war just for oil (not that it's ever just for oil). They're thinking about it only from the perspective of standing at the gas pumps.
Neither are false analogies, they are useful examples. His illustrates the principle that just because something is not the top effect it is still worth correcting because if left unchecked it could be disastrous, yours demonstrates the principle that some problems are small and local enough that they don't matter. Both are useful, they just apply to different situations. Unlike hippos, you can't avoid the global climate. Unlike murder, you can't even avoid it by avoiding civilization. Human post-industrial emissions falls in the category of things worth addressing even if it isn't the biggest threat, in my opinion.
Though to get back to non-analogies again research shows that solar variance only accounts for ~30% of the measured change. Yeah believe it or not climatologists remembered to check into the effect of the sun even before trolls piped up to remind them of its existence. Amazing, I know. They're so busy raking in those lucrative global warming bucks and shopping for sports cars and maintaining the charade that is global warming, it's amazing they can remember anything about the environment. Meanwhile, the paupers in the oil industry plead for sanity, trying to find the few climatologists honest enough to work for nothing on behalf of the truth.
That last paragraph had nothing to do with your post, btw. The "It's the sun, fools!" line is still a good troll, enough that I bit several comment generations later.:)
It may be a long-term goal, but eventually we must send at least some people "off this rock". Scoff all you want, but that is playing the real probabilities.
I think you're absolutely right, but I also think it really is a long term goal. Long enough that what we're doing right now without conducting manned space missions -- meaning both unmanned space missions to learn about our solar system and technology development here on earth -- are the best way to work towards that goal. I see little chance that we could have enough people in completely independent and autonomous off-world colonies in one hundred or two hundred years to seriously increase our chances of surviving. It's a tough problem, and we have a lot to worry about before the actual act of getting boots on the ground on Mars is the long pole in the tent.
Think of it this way -- just about any disaster you imagine, another K-T event for example, isn't going to make the earth less inhabitable for humans than every other body we know of is by default. So a huge asteroid impacts the earth, destroys coast lines, burns forests, and blocks out the sun for years so even more plants die and crops fail and people starve. By the time the dust (literally) settles, billions have died. Maybe only a few million remain. Hey, that's quite a bit for a species re-boot, and they'd be living in what would still be a huge self-sustaining and regenerating biosphere. It would take one freaking hell of an impact to destroy all life on earth. Compare to a station on Mars, where small asteroids that wouldn't even be able to penetrate our atmosphere could wipe the whole place out.
So, I'm for the current trend in unmanned missions. Frankly I think human presence on other bodies will happen slowly but naturally, and things we're doing now are laying the groundwork.
There is also the issue of a non-US rocket engine being used for a flagship US rocket.
Political posturing. Ugh. Well, there has to a be a way to spin it, to make it out like we're being magnanimous and practical but really giving a backhanded compliment? "You guys did a good job keeping up in the Cold War on the rocket tech, pity how that all turned out. But we'll be good sports and use your bottom rocket stage." Or something like that; I don't know, that's why I'm not in PR or politics.
But seriously, it could easily have a different effect on a different species. I don't know what effect a wallaby's naturally occurring endorphins have on them... maybe the sense of euphoria makes them excited and jumpy instead of lazy?
is the desire to alter your consciousness with drugs a naturally occurring one?
Ever seen a cat around catnip? Lemme put it this way: The question you're asking doesn't occur to them, they just know they love catnip.
And why the hell didn't I give marijuana a try when I was in college?
I hear ya man, especially since where I went to college it was about as close to legal as you can get in the States. When the penalty is a ticket less severe than for double parking, how much enforcement do you think there would be? But nooooo, I had to actually study and be a good student in college...
To paraphrase Darwin: All species are doomed to extinction. (Otherwise there would be no biological evolution.)
Nonsense. Every creature in existence is descended from their forebears -- and as those forebears successfully reproduced as did their offspring, they by definition did not go extinct. Extinction is when every member of a species dies, not when the members of that species develop a mutation such that human taxonomists decide to give them a different name. The common ancestor of the great apes did not go extinct, it evolved and diversified into the great apes, including us. Most dinosaur species went extinct, but some became birds (or okay maybe not but I'm going with the prevailing theory here), and ergo those did not go extinct. They just changed.
Evolution does not require extinction. It does happen a lot, though, and assuming that extinction not being necessarily required means that we can necessarily avoid it would be foolish.
Still, it seems ridiculous to me to rush off and build off-world colonies to "preserve our species". Human life on Titan or Mars or wherever would be desperately fragile compared to earth. Despite seeming as though we're trying to ruin the earth for us, it is still by default a suitable environment for humans to live in, and will be even if the absolute worst global warming scenario is an order-of-magnitude understatement. Even after a catastrophic asteroid impact like a repetition of the K-T Event like the GP is so afraid of, earth would still be a vastly more supportive of human life than anywhere else in the solar system, and you would still have a vastly better chance of continuing the species here than anywhere else.
And that's assuming that these off-world colonies aren't just as dependent on earth as we are. Until we can run a real Biodome here on earth that is completely self contained and self sustaining, this off-world-colony-to-save-humanity stuff is sci-fi wishful thinking. Oh sure we should research and develop technologies to let us survive autonomously off-world, and research in this area is in fact being done. Call me in a hundred years when its viable to ship to Titan. The GP saying they'd voluntarily hop on a one-way rocket to mars now to preserve the species is really just saying they'd voluntarily remove themselves from the gene pool.
It's kinda like you heard "don't put all your eggs in one basket". So you looked at your basket filled with a huge number of eggs, custom designed to protect and cushion your eggs, not invulnerable but generally very safe, and decided to take out two or three eggs and balance them on top of meter long 5mm wide wooden dowels. There, now all your eggs aren't in one basket, but you haven't actually helped yourself very much.
Oh man, and here I thought the Iranian government couldn't get any craftier. You think it hurts the reformist movement to associate them with America? You just wait until they associate the protesters with Trekkies!
They have one of those awesome fuckers in my home town of Kalamazoo. It may technically be on loan, but if I visit one day and it's not there I'm going to be suspicious.
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He was talking about it not mattering from the perspective of the general public's reaction and outrage. He was explaining why we let a patsy like Madoff take the rap and that's it. And he's right. Yes people get mad, and the people directly affected by it stay mad, but the rest of the country just kinda shrugs and moves on. Same with Enron. There just aren't the same kinds of reactions to this white-collar crime, even if it ends up being more devastating than other kinds of crime.
given the nature of computers and the Internet, almost every action one takes makes a copy of digital content - making the "automatic copyright" at the heart of the current problems. copying is using, which makes all content created near useless without specific permission (fair use aside).
Except any of those copies made as an essential act of using the computer are specifically exempted. Ergo, using is not copying from a copyright perspective.
This is not a fair use argument by the way. It's simply a limitation on the copyright.
Also, that's not the heart of most copyright problems, since the majority of copyright cases don't involve automatic copies made while otherwise viewing a work distributed with permission of the author.
I liken it to an old car.
An old car, properly maintained and serviced, works like new. A cassette can never say the same as no amount of head cleaning will prevent or undo the degradation that occurs over time whether used or not. Even the highest quality cassettes (the only kind I'd buy) are on a slow curve to uselessness.
You can argue that mp3s appeal to the ear only as opposed to cassettes (or even vinyl for that matter) that appeal to the ears, eyes, touch and if you're weird like me, then even taste and smell.
A cassette is present to those senses, but to say they appeal means you are very much a weirdo. They're clunky, fragile, and a poor design undercut only by even more inferior tape formats. My tactile senses are activated when I take the cassette out, my auditory senses are activated when I hear the spools clank around inside the cheap plastic package, and my visual senses engaged as I look to ensure that the tape itself did not get caught in the playing device. This is anything but appealing.
Of course, you have your cover flow, but how can that compare to a piece of paper with art printed on it.
Oh yeah, and cassettes are crap for visual art. Vinyl is at least a better medium for art than the CD on both the case and the disc itself; cassettes are much worse in both respects.
Since then I've just played nice. I'm more interested in getting to my destination than being a martyr. It's one of those "You'd be right, but you'd still lose" scenarios.
Yeah. I'm imagining the phone call: "Oh sorry I couldn't make it to Christmas this year because TSA pulled me out of line for some bullshit reason and instead of playing along I decided to have a fit over it."
It's not the TSA agents that would be dealing with the guilt trips.
Your post is better than some stupid karma. :)
What produced it just happened not to be a chicken. Something close, but not quite.
Except when posed in evolutionary terms, the whole question comes down to a problem of the human desire for classification versus nature's complete lack of giving a shit about that desire.
What precisely makes a chicken a chicken versus a chicken-minus-one-generation proto-chicken? Given that any population naturally has a degree of genetic variation, there's no "gold standard" for a chicken genome, and it is entirely possible that every gene we see in chickens was already present in the population of proto-chickens. It could be that the only thing differentiating the chicken from its proto-chicken parent is that the chicken was born into an environment where its only potential mates were other proto-chickens with the same subset of genes from the larger proto-chicken population. Then proto-chicken becomes chicken not by a mutation that completes the chicken genome, but by a quirk of fate that isolated a certain set of genes, and what was once a sub-species of proto-chicken is now its own species, the chicken.
Or it could be that in the list of traits we recognize as chicken-like, a hen laid an egg with the mutation that completed the last of these traits and thus was the chicken born to dominate the proto-chicken. Or a hundred thousand other possibilities I can't think of. I guess I'm just trying to add back in some mystery to an old philosophical question that science seems to give an answer too. :)
Oh and this is unrelated, but proto-chicken seriously needs to be a boss monster in some rpg.
Whether they are smart enough or not, TSA and airport security are essentially required by law to not understand irony, humor, jest, satire, sarcasm, or the like. Now surely the TSA officers in question, reading a script about terrorist attacks (as if such could be the topic of fiction in today's world!) and getting suspicious indicates they fall squarely in the "lack the intellect" bucket... But in either case, trying to explain the irony would just mean they'd say "I'm sorry sir, but according to DHS regulation 372(d) paragraph 2, I'm not allowed to understand what that word means."
Honey, I got you these two solid-state qubits that hold their quantum states for a microsecond and can be used to perform rudimentary algorithms.
I'm wagering that designing a rover that you are certain is capable of running around Mars for 90 days would necessarily entail a degree of engineering that makes it at least theoretically capable of running around Mars for years. Everything that broke and they worked their way out of in the last few years could have happened on day 10. Thus redundancy, back-doors, and clever, robust engineering were the words, even for a short mission.
The 90 day expected life was due to the expectation that the solar panels would get covered in dust, and that the Martian wind would be too slight to blow them off (and various panel cleaning devices were considered and rejected for reasoning as solid as the rest of the rover design). When that assumption was proven false, and the panels were kept clean enough to continue powering the rover, well, then the rover's "expected" life span goes way, way up.
It's not like they said "Oh the mission will only be 90 days, we can design this axle so that it would snap on day 91" or "Hey, the controller code will fail with an out of memory exception on day 100, but we won't fix it or put in a back door to get new code in the rover because who cares if it dies on day 100?"
So, yeah, yay for human ingenuity for sure, but that ingenuity was in there from the start and comparing the result to the 90 day expected life is a little misleading.
1) You'd better figure out how to keep the world from just getting hotter and hotter. That free energy's being turned into work, after all.
That's why he's living on the moon.
2) You're using what would be the greatest advancement in the entirety of human history, to play a prank? On all of humankind?
The prank of becoming their Iron Fisted Ruler! It's a solid plan which I endorse... for me.
It's not about where in particular the US consumer's oil comes from, since it's all part of a single global market.
What's important, in geopolitical terms, is controlling the oil that other people are using. It gives tremendous political leverage internationally. This has almost nothing to do with domestic US politics.
Thanks. People go on about how oil is a fungible commodity, as if that means there's no profit or advantage in owning or controlling sources of it and that therefore the U.S. (and I guess no other country either) would never go to war just for oil (not that it's ever just for oil). They're thinking about it only from the perspective of standing at the gas pumps.
Heh, xkcd is the source of many awesome things.
Neither are false analogies, they are useful examples. His illustrates the principle that just because something is not the top effect it is still worth correcting because if left unchecked it could be disastrous, yours demonstrates the principle that some problems are small and local enough that they don't matter. Both are useful, they just apply to different situations. Unlike hippos, you can't avoid the global climate. Unlike murder, you can't even avoid it by avoiding civilization. Human post-industrial emissions falls in the category of things worth addressing even if it isn't the biggest threat, in my opinion.
Though to get back to non-analogies again research shows that solar variance only accounts for ~30% of the measured change. Yeah believe it or not climatologists remembered to check into the effect of the sun even before trolls piped up to remind them of its existence. Amazing, I know. They're so busy raking in those lucrative global warming bucks and shopping for sports cars and maintaining the charade that is global warming, it's amazing they can remember anything about the environment. Meanwhile, the paupers in the oil industry plead for sanity, trying to find the few climatologists honest enough to work for nothing on behalf of the truth.
That last paragraph had nothing to do with your post, btw. The "It's the sun, fools!" line is still a good troll, enough that I bit several comment generations later. :)
Jeebus. I would not want to be the guy tasked with taking away the bears' booze.
It may be a long-term goal, but eventually we must send at least some people "off this rock". Scoff all you want, but that is playing the real probabilities.
I think you're absolutely right, but I also think it really is a long term goal. Long enough that what we're doing right now without conducting manned space missions -- meaning both unmanned space missions to learn about our solar system and technology development here on earth -- are the best way to work towards that goal. I see little chance that we could have enough people in completely independent and autonomous off-world colonies in one hundred or two hundred years to seriously increase our chances of surviving. It's a tough problem, and we have a lot to worry about before the actual act of getting boots on the ground on Mars is the long pole in the tent.
Think of it this way -- just about any disaster you imagine, another K-T event for example, isn't going to make the earth less inhabitable for humans than every other body we know of is by default. So a huge asteroid impacts the earth, destroys coast lines, burns forests, and blocks out the sun for years so even more plants die and crops fail and people starve. By the time the dust (literally) settles, billions have died. Maybe only a few million remain. Hey, that's quite a bit for a species re-boot, and they'd be living in what would still be a huge self-sustaining and regenerating biosphere. It would take one freaking hell of an impact to destroy all life on earth. Compare to a station on Mars, where small asteroids that wouldn't even be able to penetrate our atmosphere could wipe the whole place out.
So, I'm for the current trend in unmanned missions. Frankly I think human presence on other bodies will happen slowly but naturally, and things we're doing now are laying the groundwork.
There is also the issue of a non-US rocket engine being used for a flagship US rocket.
Political posturing. Ugh. Well, there has to a be a way to spin it, to make it out like we're being magnanimous and practical but really giving a backhanded compliment? "You guys did a good job keeping up in the Cold War on the rocket tech, pity how that all turned out. But we'll be good sports and use your bottom rocket stage." Or something like that; I don't know, that's why I'm not in PR or politics.
Who hops around on opium?
Marsupials. Duh.
But seriously, it could easily have a different effect on a different species. I don't know what effect a wallaby's naturally occurring endorphins have on them... maybe the sense of euphoria makes them excited and jumpy instead of lazy?
is the desire to alter your consciousness with drugs a naturally occurring one?
Ever seen a cat around catnip? Lemme put it this way: The question you're asking doesn't occur to them, they just know they love catnip.
And why the hell didn't I give marijuana a try when I was in college?
I hear ya man, especially since where I went to college it was about as close to legal as you can get in the States. When the penalty is a ticket less severe than for double parking, how much enforcement do you think there would be? But nooooo, I had to actually study and be a good student in college...
To paraphrase Darwin: All species are doomed to extinction. (Otherwise there would be no biological evolution.)
Nonsense. Every creature in existence is descended from their forebears -- and as those forebears successfully reproduced as did their offspring, they by definition did not go extinct. Extinction is when every member of a species dies, not when the members of that species develop a mutation such that human taxonomists decide to give them a different name. The common ancestor of the great apes did not go extinct, it evolved and diversified into the great apes, including us. Most dinosaur species went extinct, but some became birds (or okay maybe not but I'm going with the prevailing theory here), and ergo those did not go extinct. They just changed.
Evolution does not require extinction. It does happen a lot, though, and assuming that extinction not being necessarily required means that we can necessarily avoid it would be foolish.
Still, it seems ridiculous to me to rush off and build off-world colonies to "preserve our species". Human life on Titan or Mars or wherever would be desperately fragile compared to earth. Despite seeming as though we're trying to ruin the earth for us, it is still by default a suitable environment for humans to live in, and will be even if the absolute worst global warming scenario is an order-of-magnitude understatement. Even after a catastrophic asteroid impact like a repetition of the K-T Event like the GP is so afraid of, earth would still be a vastly more supportive of human life than anywhere else in the solar system, and you would still have a vastly better chance of continuing the species here than anywhere else.
And that's assuming that these off-world colonies aren't just as dependent on earth as we are. Until we can run a real Biodome here on earth that is completely self contained and self sustaining, this off-world-colony-to-save-humanity stuff is sci-fi wishful thinking. Oh sure we should research and develop technologies to let us survive autonomously off-world, and research in this area is in fact being done. Call me in a hundred years when its viable to ship to Titan. The GP saying they'd voluntarily hop on a one-way rocket to mars now to preserve the species is really just saying they'd voluntarily remove themselves from the gene pool.
It's kinda like you heard "don't put all your eggs in one basket". So you looked at your basket filled with a huge number of eggs, custom designed to protect and cushion your eggs, not invulnerable but generally very safe, and decided to take out two or three eggs and balance them on top of meter long 5mm wide wooden dowels. There, now all your eggs aren't in one basket, but you haven't actually helped yourself very much.
Rule #1 of parenting is never leave your kids alone with someone until after they agree to tell you their name.
The police department has the same rule about giving recruits guns.
Fucking fascists.
No country operates in a vaccuum. Period.
Well, except for Moonistan.
Oh man, and here I thought the Iranian government couldn't get any craftier. You think it hurts the reformist movement to associate them with America? You just wait until they associate the protesters with Trekkies!
First of all, the power being there doesn't mean that you absorb it.
I'm a rectenna, you insensitive clod!
Good thing it's not the Chinese we're fighting in Afghanistan, then.
They have one of those awesome fuckers in my home town of Kalamazoo. It may technically be on loan, but if I visit one day and it's not there I'm going to be suspicious.