Then you *know* wrong. Worst case, we can make petroleum from carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide plus water and energy, via Fisher-Tropsh or Sabatier synthesis.
It was pretty obvious that he was talking about fuel that we pump up from the ground, not the end of all stored energy period (i hate when someone assumes a ludicrous position of their opponent so they can swear its wrong). This is fuel with the obvious advantage that we didn't need to spend any energy to create it, only to go get it. If we've gotten to the point that we can efficiently make enough synthetic fossil fuels to serve our daily needs, then we've also probably switched enough of our power infrastructure to new technologies that we could consider abandoning fossil fuels entirely anyway. If we're using fusion as our energy source, why would we bother creating carbon-releasing fuels instead of using the same electricity to charge fuel cells or whatever energy storage technique we come up with? Petroleum makes sense now because 1) it's a huge energy density for something we didn't even put most of the energy into making and 2) any electric alternative probably comes from coal anyway so while there may be some environmental advantages due to scale they are slim.
we have non-proportional voting systems (e.g. to protect cultural minorities)
Oh, is that why we have non-proportional voting? Then we're stupid, because it does the opposite of that. See, in proportional voting if a certain minority represent 10% of the population, and for the sake of argument vote the same way, then they get 10% of the representation. In a non-proportional voting system, because they are a minority and thus unable to win any singe election they get 0% of the representation. Truly, we have looked out for the needs of the minorities.
Well if it doesn't represent minority populations as a whole, what about neighborhoods? Surely a minority district would win a representative for itself that represented the people. Except thanks to gerrymandering it isn't difficult to always ensure that the minorities of the population as a whole remain minorities within each district as well. It's basically the modern equivalent of Jim Crow laws. But instead of preventing blacks from voting in the first place (which is bad), we simply make it a mathematical certainty that their vote is irrelevent and ultimately ignored (which is fine, apparently).
If you accept non-racial minorities, I'm a Texan non-Republican. Guess how much my vote matters!
I do not think that we should throw away all of these refinements and go back to "pure" democracy, unless we want to relive two centuries of bloody revolutions and poorly constructed political systems.
I agree that we do not want "pure" democracy any more than we want "pure" anyother-ism. Yet the system today is poorly constructed. From top to bottom the system is designed such that it supports only two deeply entrenched political parties. Winner-takes-all voting of Presidents and Representatives means that only the Encumbant and a single Challenger have any mathematical hope of winning. By having only a single alternative, an alternative from the same party that was kicked out in the previous election and is part of the same power structure, means that we have lost our ability to be represented because we don't really have choice.
I doubt it would take anything less than bloodshed to change the situation. Yet who is going to revolt? "Proportional representation or death!" doesn't roll off the tongue. Thus the system remains as the seeming least available evil, and Democracy as PR Stunt continues.
Only 47k units moved? Yikes!... Might go with a dual mode player when they get to the $250 mark, but forget about it for now.
I think both formats risk failing, or remaining niche products for many years to come, due to their inability to connect the dots. They know that people don't want to buy two players, but they're trying to ensure their own format succeeds by killing the other. Nobody is killing anybody with those kinds of numbers, even if a real comparison showed one selling 5x better than the other. It's like two kids setting up lemonade stands on the other side of the street. If one sells three cups and the other only sells one, does it matter? Neither are going to be buying the toy they wanted.
There's really two things that are dooming both HD formats right now. Uncertainty and cost. Costs should decrease, but slowly unless there is increasing popular uptake for economies of scale. Uncertainty is preventing that, so they're only hitting the real early adopter market, a subset of the already limited number of people who can afford them. A multi-format player is the obvious way to go to at least get people willing to buy into the concept of HD if they can be sure their player won't be obsolete in two years.
When the anology doesn't work due to the differences between unique tangible property and intangibles, you don't torture it into working. Anyway, the GPL inherently includes distribution right, so if it is possible to argue that releasing patent-encumbered code under the GPL constitutes an implicit license to use the patent, it doesn't matter how many times the code is subsequently transfered. The argument I was making is that releasing patented code under the GPL is an implicit grant to anyone who uses that code to use the patent. I'm not sure that holds legal muster or not, but the point is the redistribution doesn't change anything as it's inherent in the argument to begin with.
The Novel deal really has nothing to do with that; it's a separate and explicit patent license. The legal argument I made stands or falls on its own. GPLv3 would prevent things like the Novel deal from being effective, but it does it by making the "implicit" grant that may or may not exist into an actual explicit grant to everyone receiving the software, and thus covers many more situations than just cases like Novel/MS.
Sure, but spiders play a role in reaching that equilibrium.
Right, so spiders are really good if you have a bug problem. It's not like they'll eliminate bugs, they can't or they'd starve, and the woods are full of spiders and also bugs.
Mostly just curious, as I've never understood arachnophobia...
Well it is, by definition, an irrational fear.
Me, I used to be very arachnophobic. Now I've toned it down to where small spiders don't bother me at all, and as their size increases they bother me more an a more or less exponential scale. I.e. thumbnail sized, still fairly okay, bananna spider sized is very creepy and definitely not something I want around my house, and tarantulas... well, they're sill abject terror. I can barely tolerate seeing those enourmous tarantulas with the abdomen the size of your fist at a museum/zoo when it's behind a full inch of plastic (to protect the spider of course, I know it's harmless, but please refer to afore-mentioned definition of phobia). If I ever ran across a free-roaming tarantula, I'd flee the state.
This makes a lot of sense - why would you publish the source code for something if you didn't want people to be able to use it? If you are publishing the source code which does something you've patented and you don't protect people then there really is no point publishing the code in the first place since it is illegal for someone to use it.
Meaning the only reason to do this would be to plant code you hold a patent on into free software, allow it to be distributed, then sue everyone who is using the software that you yourself gave them.
This is somewhat akin to me putting my stereo in your living room, then calling the police and telling them you stole it. And that's what the clause is in particular trying to prevent.
Though I have to wonder if this has ever actually happened, and if it did, could there be some sort of implicit license argument made? I'd imagine that even if that is possible it'd have to be shown that the company knew that the software they released implemented a patent they held. Otherwise they could say that they didn't realize the code was protected by a patent and now that they knew they wanted people to stop using it. But the clause in the GPL would prevent that too, and thus I'm for it.
It's pretty simple, really. Rather than risk accidentally selling a game to a minor which unbeknownst to the retailer fits the vague criterion of this law, they won't put the game on the shelves at all. Or any game they think might be illegal. Retailers don't want to card, and retailers don't want to be charged with felonies for accidentally selling a game to a minor.
If you are really interested in a more nuanced legal reasoning, try googling up the decisions of the court on every other law like this that has been passed ever. Every single one has been struck down by the courts on 1st Ammendment grounds.
Well of course. " The senate seems to have no fear of possible overturn of the bill, and claims it's only thinking of the children."
Yeah, of course they don't fear it being overturned, which it will be on plain 1st Ammendment grounds just like every other law like it that has ever been passed. What does it being overturned cost them? Nothing, not a damn thing. They passed the happy-feel-good-think-of-the-children-but-don't-ac tually-think legislation, and it was the evil activist judges who knocked it down. Once again that pesky 1st Ammendment puts our children at risk.
If we actually looked badly upon legislators passing blatantly unconstitutional laws that they know will get overturned and waste taxpayer money, then they might possibly have some fear. But as it stands, the people they are catering to would be pleased as punch to throw out free speech if it gave them the illusion that the government is taking care of their children for them. This is nothing but upside for those politicians.
Would we see death camps and Stalinesque tactics? No, I don't think so. Michael Moore and Rosie wouldn't be rounded up and imprisoned, much less shot, Ann Coulter's book sales notwithstanding. But a "unitary Executive" or whatever his lawyers are calling him this week, in charge of the entire federal government, exempted (de facto, if not de jure) from oversight or checks/balances by the legislative and judicial branches, who can suspend elections at will--what else do you really need? As long as there wasn't any slaughter or mass imprisonment, which there wouldn't be, would people really take to the streets for democracy? I wonder.
Michael and Rosie won't be rounded up because they are necessary aspects of the new fascism. Old fascism was very overtly oppressive. Saying anything bad about the fascists was going to land you in serious trouble. Basically by trying to prevent people from saying that they were fascists it caused everyone to be made well aware that they were fascists.
Whereas that kind of overt fascism would be too much for America, where we at least value freedom of speech (or the illusion thereof) enough to get pissed if someone explicitly takes it away. So, someone has a brilliant idea: fascism + freedom of speech. You can say that they are fascists, you can complain about every abuse of power, every corrupt act, every illegal act, on and on as much as you want. Their response will be two things: "That's a crazy conspiracy theory" followed by "But the beautiful thing about this nation is that you are free to say that, God Bless America", and then they'll go about doing what they were doing all along.
And because of the slow ratchet you describe, most people will just nod their heads. After all, the opposition did get to say their peace, didn't they? How could they possibly be right and free to say so at the same time? If the government were really fascist then Michael Moore would be locked up, right? Of course it didn't stop the warrantless detentions, domestic spying, or any of the other things that are actually fascist. Free speech is just a release valve for the anger that these behaviors cause.
So no, nobody is going to rise up to fight for democracy because they won't even realize they've lost it thanks to the new PR friendly face of fascism.
Zelda is a bad example of Wii capabilities simply because it was originally a Gamecube game, it was in fact released on the GC in the same form. That doesn't mean it's a bad example of the graphics of current Wii games, especially considering that there are a lot of Gamecube refugees and PS2 ports out for the Wii now. It just means you shouldn't conclude that Wii is graphically underpowered based on Zelda.
Late-gen PS2 games look great. Late-gen GC games looked even better. The wii is roughly a GC overclocked by 2-3x. Since everything in the system is overclocked, unlike cases where you just overclock the CPU and the rest of the system is imbalanced, the speedup is closer to linear. So it's pretty clear that if the current crop of games don't look as good as PS2 games, then that's an affect of the current crop of games not the hardware. Hopefully that will improve, and I'm betting Metroid will give us a better idea of what games on the Wii can look like.
Don't expect me to feel sorry for you, I'm willing to bet there are numerous consoles within a couple miles of you, wherever you live.
Oh there are often Wiis for sale somewhere in my city, Austin, at any given instant in time, but you had better be there within an hour or two of them showing up on the shelves or they will be gone. I've been calling every store around town from EB to Costo regularly and struck out. I'm not super proactive about it, e.g. when someone at a Toys R Us said they were getting a shipment instead of being there waiting in the morning, I called a half hour after they opened. They had sold out. The people who bought them proved that it is possible to get a wii if you are going to be more rabid about it than I'm willing to be.
As far as I'm concerned if I can't stop at the store on the way home from work and buy one, then that's a shortage. It could easily be different where you live due to any number of factors. Given that I was finally able to get a wii online without it being in a crappy bundle, it may be that the shortage is beginning to wane and stories like yours become common (as they should be). But it ain't there yet.
Those bundles suck. Any bundle that has pre-chosen games sucks becuase there's always one I don't want, and any bundle that includes a freaking strategy guide is a bullshit attempt to suck extra $$ out of you for the privilege of ordering a wii.
I finally found a walmart online bundle that let you pick what games you wanted, so I'm not paying for anything I don't want. But outside of that, the only online places that have the wii in stock are selling them in craptastic bundles like the ones you link to.
Same here. I'm not even going to get up super early on the day the shipment comes and wait outside.
They're still hard to find in Austin, and that's with calling every electronics store, toy store, target, walmart, and costco in town. Most don't know or won't tell you when shipments arrive, probably because they don't want even more people waiting outside their doors.
I have just ordered my wii, when I used a wii tracker to find online deals. WalMart has a bundle that comes with an extra wiimote, and accessory of your choice (I picked nunchuck) and three games of your choice. This makes it oodles better than all the bundles that come with pre-selected games that always includes at least one game I'd never buy. If you were planning on buying at least 3 games and an extra controller along with your wii, then outside of the shipping it's a pretty good deal.
Um, while I do have great respect for Tolkein, I have to say: Who cares what he thought?
Tolkein's legacy was a fantastic series of fantasy novels that created a mythology unto their own. If I recall that was his goal in the first place, to create an English mythology. His legacy does not include a set of rules for ways in which we can enjoy this legacy. Any more than the ancient Greeks can object to us using their mythology to make God of War.
This being aside from any legal and copyright issues. But if his estate signed off on it, I say who cares if he would have minded? Would Shakespeare have minded the authoring of Rosecrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? I'm guessing he wouldn't have minded, but my point is who cares if he did.
How else would you describe (a) the Japanese soldiers scattered all over the Pacific that kept turning up decades after their units were destroyed or surrendered
Well the thing with the Japanese is that their fanatical loyalty was to their Emperor. When the Emperor declared that he was surrendering, while it was a huge blow to national pride, every Japanese put down their arms and the surrender happened in an orderly fashion. The reason the ones on those Pacific atols never stopped fighting is because they never got the message.
As opposed to Muslim extremists whose fundamental loyalty is to (their extremist intepretation of) Allah, and they follow human leaders only so long as their message is aligned with their own extremism. For example, if al Sadr started preaching peace and love of Americans and how his militia should lay down their arms, well, it wouldn't do much except get al Sadr lynched and a new leader chosen.
At minimum, they should've listened to some generals instead of firing them. You know, all the ones who told them during the planning stages just how many guys really needed to be in the field? The generals with still bitter and painful memories of Vietnam? They didn't want all those troops to win the war. They wanted those boots on the ground to win the peace.
It truly is sad how just about every failure and problem that has arisen in Iraq was forseen and voiced by experienced people in the government who were almost universally ignored, discredited, and run out of their jobs by this Administration. Because it was more important to them that their underlings agree instead of do good work. They believed that their beliefs would trump reality, and who would have guessed, reality won!
Truly, I have long since gotten over any accusations of evil as being beside the point to just how incompetent they have all turned out to be.
I can finish of the insurgency in Iraq with one word: nukes.
Thing is, the US military (or, at least, the administration) doesn't have the balls to fight to win.
Maybe you're right, if you assume as is often the case that "balls" are a complete but inadequate replacement for "brains". The military isn't waging war the way you suggest because they remember that "win" doesn't always mean "wipe out the enemy". In this case, we are supposed to be there to free people from repression, and while nuking them may free them from many things including this mortal coil, it would not in any way be a "victory".
Your solution is the same as kicking over the chessboard in a petulant rage and going home because you couldn't win the game you started out playing. Remember we waged this war by choice, so trying to turn it into some all-out war is ridiculous.
People keep positing inane "we lost Vietnam/are losing Iraq because we are too restrained!" theories which completely fails to see why we lost those wars, and what we were trying to win in the first place. Hint: There could be no victory in either conflict without the support of the locals. Escalating the level of violence used would only hurt that cause, and would only ensure that defeat comes sooner.
Nor do you need a conspiracy on the American side -- you just need a bunch of paranoids listening in on the conversations between Saddam and his lieutenants.
More or less true, except they aren't paranoids, they're people who were desperate for any reason whatsoever to justify an invasion of Iraq. So if they recorded Lietenant #1's answer and the result, they didn't pay attention to how that might affect Lietenant #2 and #3, because they didn't want to hear it.
Everyone coming out of the executive branch -- starting with Richard Clark -- has said that the decision to invade Iraq preceded any justification, and that decision colored the search for justification.
The gist is accurate though -- Saddam trying to puff up his WMD capability to stave off local enemies, ending up in a stupid game of Chicken with GWB who Saddam should have realized was more than eager to call his bluff.
You need to rethink your interpretation of Occam's Razor. It's mostly about not adding unecessary complexity to an explanation, not about the answer with no coincidences, as coincidences happen all the time and are often the simplest explanation. Or am I to believe that every pentragram or swashtika that appears in the middle of a city on Google Maps is in fact a deliberately placed occult or Nazi symbol?
The Pentagon is not a military fortification, it's an office building. Military fortifications of the day were generally not pentagon shaped -- E.g. on the beaches of Normandy, German bunkers were positioned so as to provide overlapping fire, it was not a monolithic defense wall pentagonal or otherwise. Military fortifications that were pentagon shaped were constructed hundreds of yeas ago, and are now artifacts of a bygone era.
A pentagonal lot as the original site and thus target of the original design is a simple explanation. It makes more sense than the designer deciding they wanted to utilize the general shape of 1800s forts but no other design feature whatsoever in a building that was not intended to be a fort and for which the benefits of the pentagram are meaningless.
I'm not wed to Obama/Richardson vs Richardson/Obama. The only reason to put Obama first is his popularity and war chest right now, if Richardson lost the primary he might throw his lot in with Obama. As far as an effective executive office, the other way around makes much more sense. If Obama ran for VP with Richardson, who knows, maybe that would be less threatening somehow. I have no idea if either possibility has a chance of happening, but like I said it's still early.
Ron Paul says Osama bin Laden is delighted we invaded Iraq.
and from the sounds of it is thus the only person who was standing on that stage who is not an idiot.
Invading Iraq was bin Laden's dream come true. He probably thought that just luring us into Afghanistan would be enough to weaken us, but then we went and not only got ourselves embroiled in an even bigger quagmire, we also took out a huge enemy of his for him. The only way in which bin Laden could have been made happier is if we had gotten involved in an even bigger quagmire by trying to take out an even bigger enemy of Osama's, namely Iran. Thank God we didn't; Iraq is an episode of American Idol compared to what invading Iran would be like.
We do not excuse - but we must understand.
Nobody fucking understands the difference anymore, and it's made us retarded. If you even imply that the terrorists are not completely insane, completely evil, and driven by nothing less than the demonic forces of hell to kill, then you are condoning their behavior. If you try to discuss the actual motivations behind their actions, you are just making excuses.
We are deliberately avoiding understanding our enemies under the guise of patriotism, and as a result we don't understand our enemies and thus, unsurprisingly, we are completely inneffective against them.
First of all, the democrats can't be stupid enough to actually nominate Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They have to win over the red states, and they can't do that with a black person OR a woman. If they think beating the republicans and stopping all this fascist bullshit is important, they'll go with the safe candidate, Edwards.
That's a very serious problem, yes. Strangely, I think the best way to combat it is to up the ante. Let's not just nominate a black candidate, but let's go for the black/hispanic ticket with Sen. Barack Obama and NM Gov. Bill Richardson.
First, Richardson will help steal hispanic votes from the GOP. This would help secure red states like Arizon, New Mexico, New Orleans, and possibly even (dare I say it) Texas which have large hispanic populations.
Second, Richardson will help balance out Obama's lack of foreign policy experience as Richardson is an experienced diplomat.
Third, I like the guy, he seems very thoughtful and intelligent, and he helped New Mexico get the space port.
This is a fairly half-assed idea; it's still to early for me to be worrying too much about who I'm voting for. I'll admit I want to see this -- Richardson, Obama, even Hillary -- simply because I would love to smash through a traditional race/sex barrier even if the result wasn't the best president ever. Outside of accidentally pressing The Big Red Button, how could they be worse?
I think it was on here that I read about the beer where 80% of tasters in a double-blind taste-test preferred horse piss, and the other 20% thought both were horse piss. I forget which beer though.
Maybe it was Horse Piss Ale! Yes, it actually exists, I saw it in a liquor store in Kentucky. Comes in a 4-pack, and the bottle features a picture of a horse that apparently just had a big carrot shoved up its ass because it's exposing its teeth and gums in a crazy laugh/grin like Mr. Ed used to do sometimes.
We got some, hoping that "Horse Piss Ale" was just clever marketing for our generations raised on irony. But, in fact, it was actually a pretty accurate description of the taste.
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Then you *know* wrong. Worst case, we can make petroleum from carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide plus water and energy, via Fisher-Tropsh or Sabatier synthesis.
It was pretty obvious that he was talking about fuel that we pump up from the ground, not the end of all stored energy period (i hate when someone assumes a ludicrous position of their opponent so they can swear its wrong). This is fuel with the obvious advantage that we didn't need to spend any energy to create it, only to go get it. If we've gotten to the point that we can efficiently make enough synthetic fossil fuels to serve our daily needs, then we've also probably switched enough of our power infrastructure to new technologies that we could consider abandoning fossil fuels entirely anyway. If we're using fusion as our energy source, why would we bother creating carbon-releasing fuels instead of using the same electricity to charge fuel cells or whatever energy storage technique we come up with? Petroleum makes sense now because 1) it's a huge energy density for something we didn't even put most of the energy into making and 2) any electric alternative probably comes from coal anyway so while there may be some environmental advantages due to scale they are slim.
we have non-proportional voting systems (e.g. to protect cultural minorities)
Oh, is that why we have non-proportional voting? Then we're stupid, because it does the opposite of that. See, in proportional voting if a certain minority represent 10% of the population, and for the sake of argument vote the same way, then they get 10% of the representation. In a non-proportional voting system, because they are a minority and thus unable to win any singe election they get 0% of the representation. Truly, we have looked out for the needs of the minorities.
Well if it doesn't represent minority populations as a whole, what about neighborhoods? Surely a minority district would win a representative for itself that represented the people. Except thanks to gerrymandering it isn't difficult to always ensure that the minorities of the population as a whole remain minorities within each district as well. It's basically the modern equivalent of Jim Crow laws. But instead of preventing blacks from voting in the first place (which is bad), we simply make it a mathematical certainty that their vote is irrelevent and ultimately ignored (which is fine, apparently).
If you accept non-racial minorities, I'm a Texan non-Republican. Guess how much my vote matters!
I do not think that we should throw away all of these refinements and go back to "pure" democracy, unless we want to relive two centuries of bloody revolutions and poorly constructed political systems.
I agree that we do not want "pure" democracy any more than we want "pure" anyother-ism. Yet the system today is poorly constructed. From top to bottom the system is designed such that it supports only two deeply entrenched political parties. Winner-takes-all voting of Presidents and Representatives means that only the Encumbant and a single Challenger have any mathematical hope of winning. By having only a single alternative, an alternative from the same party that was kicked out in the previous election and is part of the same power structure, means that we have lost our ability to be represented because we don't really have choice.
I doubt it would take anything less than bloodshed to change the situation. Yet who is going to revolt? "Proportional representation or death!" doesn't roll off the tongue. Thus the system remains as the seeming least available evil, and Democracy as PR Stunt continues.
Only 47k units moved? Yikes! ... Might go with a dual mode player when they get to the $250 mark, but forget about it for now.
I think both formats risk failing, or remaining niche products for many years to come, due to their inability to connect the dots. They know that people don't want to buy two players, but they're trying to ensure their own format succeeds by killing the other. Nobody is killing anybody with those kinds of numbers, even if a real comparison showed one selling 5x better than the other. It's like two kids setting up lemonade stands on the other side of the street. If one sells three cups and the other only sells one, does it matter? Neither are going to be buying the toy they wanted.
There's really two things that are dooming both HD formats right now. Uncertainty and cost. Costs should decrease, but slowly unless there is increasing popular uptake for economies of scale. Uncertainty is preventing that, so they're only hitting the real early adopter market, a subset of the already limited number of people who can afford them. A multi-format player is the obvious way to go to at least get people willing to buy into the concept of HD if they can be sure their player won't be obsolete in two years.
The battle rages on. This only shows that Eyeliner Pirates > Trenchcoat Ninjas, which I think we already knew.
When the anology doesn't work due to the differences between unique tangible property and intangibles, you don't torture it into working. Anyway, the GPL inherently includes distribution right, so if it is possible to argue that releasing patent-encumbered code under the GPL constitutes an implicit license to use the patent, it doesn't matter how many times the code is subsequently transfered. The argument I was making is that releasing patented code under the GPL is an implicit grant to anyone who uses that code to use the patent. I'm not sure that holds legal muster or not, but the point is the redistribution doesn't change anything as it's inherent in the argument to begin with.
The Novel deal really has nothing to do with that; it's a separate and explicit patent license. The legal argument I made stands or falls on its own. GPLv3 would prevent things like the Novel deal from being effective, but it does it by making the "implicit" grant that may or may not exist into an actual explicit grant to everyone receiving the software, and thus covers many more situations than just cases like Novel/MS.
Sure, but spiders play a role in reaching that equilibrium.
Right, so spiders are really good if you have a bug problem. It's not like they'll eliminate bugs, they can't or they'd starve, and the woods are full of spiders and also bugs.
Mostly just curious, as I've never understood arachnophobia...
Well it is, by definition, an irrational fear.
Me, I used to be very arachnophobic. Now I've toned it down to where small spiders don't bother me at all, and as their size increases they bother me more an a more or less exponential scale. I.e. thumbnail sized, still fairly okay, bananna spider sized is very creepy and definitely not something I want around my house, and tarantulas... well, they're sill abject terror. I can barely tolerate seeing those enourmous tarantulas with the abdomen the size of your fist at a museum/zoo when it's behind a full inch of plastic (to protect the spider of course, I know it's harmless, but please refer to afore-mentioned definition of phobia). If I ever ran across a free-roaming tarantula, I'd flee the state.
This makes a lot of sense - why would you publish the source code for something if you didn't want people to be able to use it? If you are publishing the source code which does something you've patented and you don't protect people then there really is no point publishing the code in the first place since it is illegal for someone to use it.
Meaning the only reason to do this would be to plant code you hold a patent on into free software, allow it to be distributed, then sue everyone who is using the software that you yourself gave them.
This is somewhat akin to me putting my stereo in your living room, then calling the police and telling them you stole it. And that's what the clause is in particular trying to prevent.
Though I have to wonder if this has ever actually happened, and if it did, could there be some sort of implicit license argument made? I'd imagine that even if that is possible it'd have to be shown that the company knew that the software they released implemented a patent they held. Otherwise they could say that they didn't realize the code was protected by a patent and now that they knew they wanted people to stop using it. But the clause in the GPL would prevent that too, and thus I'm for it.
It's pretty simple, really. Rather than risk accidentally selling a game to a minor which unbeknownst to the retailer fits the vague criterion of this law, they won't put the game on the shelves at all. Or any game they think might be illegal. Retailers don't want to card, and retailers don't want to be charged with felonies for accidentally selling a game to a minor.
If you are really interested in a more nuanced legal reasoning, try googling up the decisions of the court on every other law like this that has been passed ever. Every single one has been struck down by the courts on 1st Ammendment grounds.
Well of course. " The senate seems to have no fear of possible overturn of the bill, and claims it's only thinking of the children."
c tually-think legislation, and it was the evil activist judges who knocked it down. Once again that pesky 1st Ammendment puts our children at risk.
Yeah, of course they don't fear it being overturned, which it will be on plain 1st Ammendment grounds just like every other law like it that has ever been passed. What does it being overturned cost them? Nothing, not a damn thing. They passed the happy-feel-good-think-of-the-children-but-don't-a
If we actually looked badly upon legislators passing blatantly unconstitutional laws that they know will get overturned and waste taxpayer money, then they might possibly have some fear. But as it stands, the people they are catering to would be pleased as punch to throw out free speech if it gave them the illusion that the government is taking care of their children for them. This is nothing but upside for those politicians.
Would we see death camps and Stalinesque tactics? No, I don't think so. Michael Moore and Rosie wouldn't be rounded up and imprisoned, much less shot, Ann Coulter's book sales notwithstanding. But a "unitary Executive" or whatever his lawyers are calling him this week, in charge of the entire federal government, exempted (de facto, if not de jure) from oversight or checks/balances by the legislative and judicial branches, who can suspend elections at will--what else do you really need? As long as there wasn't any slaughter or mass imprisonment, which there wouldn't be, would people really take to the streets for democracy? I wonder.
Michael and Rosie won't be rounded up because they are necessary aspects of the new fascism. Old fascism was very overtly oppressive. Saying anything bad about the fascists was going to land you in serious trouble. Basically by trying to prevent people from saying that they were fascists it caused everyone to be made well aware that they were fascists.
Whereas that kind of overt fascism would be too much for America, where we at least value freedom of speech (or the illusion thereof) enough to get pissed if someone explicitly takes it away. So, someone has a brilliant idea: fascism + freedom of speech. You can say that they are fascists, you can complain about every abuse of power, every corrupt act, every illegal act, on and on as much as you want. Their response will be two things: "That's a crazy conspiracy theory" followed by "But the beautiful thing about this nation is that you are free to say that, God Bless America", and then they'll go about doing what they were doing all along.
And because of the slow ratchet you describe, most people will just nod their heads. After all, the opposition did get to say their peace, didn't they? How could they possibly be right and free to say so at the same time? If the government were really fascist then Michael Moore would be locked up, right? Of course it didn't stop the warrantless detentions, domestic spying, or any of the other things that are actually fascist. Free speech is just a release valve for the anger that these behaviors cause.
So no, nobody is going to rise up to fight for democracy because they won't even realize they've lost it thanks to the new PR friendly face of fascism.
I hear Trauma Center is popular...
Zelda is a bad example of Wii capabilities simply because it was originally a Gamecube game, it was in fact released on the GC in the same form. That doesn't mean it's a bad example of the graphics of current Wii games, especially considering that there are a lot of Gamecube refugees and PS2 ports out for the Wii now. It just means you shouldn't conclude that Wii is graphically underpowered based on Zelda.
Late-gen PS2 games look great. Late-gen GC games looked even better. The wii is roughly a GC overclocked by 2-3x. Since everything in the system is overclocked, unlike cases where you just overclock the CPU and the rest of the system is imbalanced, the speedup is closer to linear. So it's pretty clear that if the current crop of games don't look as good as PS2 games, then that's an affect of the current crop of games not the hardware. Hopefully that will improve, and I'm betting Metroid will give us a better idea of what games on the Wii can look like.
Don't expect me to feel sorry for you, I'm willing to bet there are numerous consoles within a couple miles of you, wherever you live.
Oh there are often Wiis for sale somewhere in my city, Austin, at any given instant in time, but you had better be there within an hour or two of them showing up on the shelves or they will be gone. I've been calling every store around town from EB to Costo regularly and struck out. I'm not super proactive about it, e.g. when someone at a Toys R Us said they were getting a shipment instead of being there waiting in the morning, I called a half hour after they opened. They had sold out. The people who bought them proved that it is possible to get a wii if you are going to be more rabid about it than I'm willing to be.
As far as I'm concerned if I can't stop at the store on the way home from work and buy one, then that's a shortage. It could easily be different where you live due to any number of factors. Given that I was finally able to get a wii online without it being in a crappy bundle, it may be that the shortage is beginning to wane and stories like yours become common (as they should be). But it ain't there yet.
Those bundles suck. Any bundle that has pre-chosen games sucks becuase there's always one I don't want, and any bundle that includes a freaking strategy guide is a bullshit attempt to suck extra $$ out of you for the privilege of ordering a wii.
I finally found a walmart online bundle that let you pick what games you wanted, so I'm not paying for anything I don't want. But outside of that, the only online places that have the wii in stock are selling them in craptastic bundles like the ones you link to.
Same here. I'm not even going to get up super early on the day the shipment comes and wait outside.
They're still hard to find in Austin, and that's with calling every electronics store, toy store, target, walmart, and costco in town. Most don't know or won't tell you when shipments arrive, probably because they don't want even more people waiting outside their doors.
I have just ordered my wii, when I used a wii tracker to find online deals. WalMart has a bundle that comes with an extra wiimote, and accessory of your choice (I picked nunchuck) and three games of your choice. This makes it oodles better than all the bundles that come with pre-selected games that always includes at least one game I'd never buy. If you were planning on buying at least 3 games and an extra controller along with your wii, then outside of the shipping it's a pretty good deal.
Um, while I do have great respect for Tolkein, I have to say: Who cares what he thought?
Tolkein's legacy was a fantastic series of fantasy novels that created a mythology unto their own. If I recall that was his goal in the first place, to create an English mythology. His legacy does not include a set of rules for ways in which we can enjoy this legacy. Any more than the ancient Greeks can object to us using their mythology to make God of War.
This being aside from any legal and copyright issues. But if his estate signed off on it, I say who cares if he would have minded? Would Shakespeare have minded the authoring of Rosecrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? I'm guessing he wouldn't have minded, but my point is who cares if he did.
Why are you going around sneaking into people's basements to sniff them? And if they smell so bad why don't you stop?
I swear, some people refuse to take personal responsibility for their actions.
How else would you describe (a) the Japanese soldiers scattered all over the Pacific that kept turning up decades after their units were destroyed or surrendered
Well the thing with the Japanese is that their fanatical loyalty was to their Emperor. When the Emperor declared that he was surrendering, while it was a huge blow to national pride, every Japanese put down their arms and the surrender happened in an orderly fashion. The reason the ones on those Pacific atols never stopped fighting is because they never got the message.
As opposed to Muslim extremists whose fundamental loyalty is to (their extremist intepretation of) Allah, and they follow human leaders only so long as their message is aligned with their own extremism. For example, if al Sadr started preaching peace and love of Americans and how his militia should lay down their arms, well, it wouldn't do much except get al Sadr lynched and a new leader chosen.
At minimum, they should've listened to some generals instead of firing them. You know, all the ones who told them during the planning stages just how many guys really needed to be in the field? The generals with still bitter and painful memories of Vietnam? They didn't want all those troops to win the war. They wanted those boots on the ground to win the peace.
It truly is sad how just about every failure and problem that has arisen in Iraq was forseen and voiced by experienced people in the government who were almost universally ignored, discredited, and run out of their jobs by this Administration. Because it was more important to them that their underlings agree instead of do good work. They believed that their beliefs would trump reality, and who would have guessed, reality won!
Truly, I have long since gotten over any accusations of evil as being beside the point to just how incompetent they have all turned out to be.
I can finish of the insurgency in Iraq with one word: nukes.
Thing is, the US military (or, at least, the administration) doesn't have the balls to fight to win.
Maybe you're right, if you assume as is often the case that "balls" are a complete but inadequate replacement for "brains". The military isn't waging war the way you suggest because they remember that "win" doesn't always mean "wipe out the enemy". In this case, we are supposed to be there to free people from repression, and while nuking them may free them from many things including this mortal coil, it would not in any way be a "victory".
Your solution is the same as kicking over the chessboard in a petulant rage and going home because you couldn't win the game you started out playing. Remember we waged this war by choice, so trying to turn it into some all-out war is ridiculous.
People keep positing inane "we lost Vietnam/are losing Iraq because we are too restrained!" theories which completely fails to see why we lost those wars, and what we were trying to win in the first place. Hint: There could be no victory in either conflict without the support of the locals. Escalating the level of violence used would only hurt that cause, and would only ensure that defeat comes sooner.
More or less true, except they aren't paranoids, they're people who were desperate for any reason whatsoever to justify an invasion of Iraq. So if they recorded Lietenant #1's answer and the result, they didn't pay attention to how that might affect Lietenant #2 and #3, because they didn't want to hear it.
Everyone coming out of the executive branch -- starting with Richard Clark -- has said that the decision to invade Iraq preceded any justification, and that decision colored the search for justification.
The gist is accurate though -- Saddam trying to puff up his WMD capability to stave off local enemies, ending up in a stupid game of Chicken with GWB who Saddam should have realized was more than eager to call his bluff.
You need to rethink your interpretation of Occam's Razor. It's mostly about not adding unecessary complexity to an explanation, not about the answer with no coincidences, as coincidences happen all the time and are often the simplest explanation. Or am I to believe that every pentragram or swashtika that appears in the middle of a city on Google Maps is in fact a deliberately placed occult or Nazi symbol?
The Pentagon is not a military fortification, it's an office building. Military fortifications of the day were generally not pentagon shaped -- E.g. on the beaches of Normandy, German bunkers were positioned so as to provide overlapping fire, it was not a monolithic defense wall pentagonal or otherwise. Military fortifications that were pentagon shaped were constructed hundreds of yeas ago, and are now artifacts of a bygone era.
A pentagonal lot as the original site and thus target of the original design is a simple explanation. It makes more sense than the designer deciding they wanted to utilize the general shape of 1800s forts but no other design feature whatsoever in a building that was not intended to be a fort and for which the benefits of the pentagram are meaningless.
I'm not wed to Obama/Richardson vs Richardson/Obama. The only reason to put Obama first is his popularity and war chest right now, if Richardson lost the primary he might throw his lot in with Obama. As far as an effective executive office, the other way around makes much more sense. If Obama ran for VP with Richardson, who knows, maybe that would be less threatening somehow. I have no idea if either possibility has a chance of happening, but like I said it's still early.
Ron Paul says Osama bin Laden is delighted we invaded Iraq.
and from the sounds of it is thus the only person who was standing on that stage who is not an idiot.
Invading Iraq was bin Laden's dream come true. He probably thought that just luring us into Afghanistan would be enough to weaken us, but then we went and not only got ourselves embroiled in an even bigger quagmire, we also took out a huge enemy of his for him. The only way in which bin Laden could have been made happier is if we had gotten involved in an even bigger quagmire by trying to take out an even bigger enemy of Osama's, namely Iran. Thank God we didn't; Iraq is an episode of American Idol compared to what invading Iran would be like.
We do not excuse - but we must understand.
Nobody fucking understands the difference anymore, and it's made us retarded. If you even imply that the terrorists are not completely insane, completely evil, and driven by nothing less than the demonic forces of hell to kill, then you are condoning their behavior. If you try to discuss the actual motivations behind their actions, you are just making excuses.
We are deliberately avoiding understanding our enemies under the guise of patriotism, and as a result we don't understand our enemies and thus, unsurprisingly, we are completely inneffective against them.
First of all, the democrats can't be stupid enough to actually nominate Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They have to win over the red states, and they can't do that with a black person OR a woman. If they think beating the republicans and stopping all this fascist bullshit is important, they'll go with the safe candidate, Edwards.
That's a very serious problem, yes. Strangely, I think the best way to combat it is to up the ante. Let's not just nominate a black candidate, but let's go for the black/hispanic ticket with Sen. Barack Obama and NM Gov. Bill Richardson.
First, Richardson will help steal hispanic votes from the GOP. This would help secure red states like Arizon, New Mexico, New Orleans, and possibly even (dare I say it) Texas which have large hispanic populations.
Second, Richardson will help balance out Obama's lack of foreign policy experience as Richardson is an experienced diplomat.
Third, I like the guy, he seems very thoughtful and intelligent, and he helped New Mexico get the space port.
This is a fairly half-assed idea; it's still to early for me to be worrying too much about who I'm voting for. I'll admit I want to see this -- Richardson, Obama, even Hillary -- simply because I would love to smash through a traditional race/sex barrier even if the result wasn't the best president ever. Outside of accidentally pressing The Big Red Button, how could they be worse?
I think it was on here that I read about the beer where 80% of tasters in a double-blind taste-test preferred horse piss, and the other 20% thought both were horse piss. I forget which beer though.
Maybe it was Horse Piss Ale! Yes, it actually exists, I saw it in a liquor store in Kentucky. Comes in a 4-pack, and the bottle features a picture of a horse that apparently just had a big carrot shoved up its ass because it's exposing its teeth and gums in a crazy laugh/grin like Mr. Ed used to do sometimes.
We got some, hoping that "Horse Piss Ale" was just clever marketing for our generations raised on irony. But, in fact, it was actually a pretty accurate description of the taste.