I grew up in the 60's and 70's, my mum was a sunday school teacher up until I was about 6-7, I still remeber overhearing her saying to dad something like "I'm brainwashing my own kids", after that she quit and started encouraging me to read aboriginal dreamtime stories ( not as fact but to demonstrate there were lots of different 'stories' ). It probably helped that my dad was an engineer.
Anyway, my anectdotal experience over the last 50 odd years, plus a bunch of census stats from the US and around the world, tells me that people have turned their back on religion in droves during my lifetime. I agree it started with the sexual revolution in the 60's, but it has been accelerating ever since. More recently it has been put somewhat unkindly as "the internet, where religions come to die', and I think there is a great deal of truth to that because kids will find a plethora of dreamtime stories all by themselves. From a very young age they no longer have to rely on their parents digging out obscure books from the adult library, which is something even my own 80's era kids could not do until their late teens.
Religion is loud and angry in the US right now but it's losing its power and income base (which is why they still disaprove contraception). After millenia of being at the top of the food chain in all previous civilizations they suddenly find they have to start justifying their previously unquestioned claims of 'moral authority' in society with something more substansive than 'might is right'. They find themselves in a world where more and more of their 'sheep' are no longer affraid to laugh in their face and are willing to hold them to account for their hypocricy and crimes.
I don't think I will live long enough to see it but when governments start taxing what are essentially some of the richest organisations on the planet, then you will know reason has won the day. But reason can only take us so far, at some point you just have to accept an assumption, science has boiled it all down to a handful of very basic assumptions (ie: the fundemantal forces and dimentions exist). It may boil it down further but it will always require the assumption that the real world exists and is not some sort of matrix senario where it's all in our heads.
Of course the alternative to all this social upheaval is for everyone to simply tell the truth and just admit that nethier they nor I know the answer to the existential question (Why am I here?), none of us even know if the question makes any sense in the first place. The closest thing to a rational answer that I've ever found is more a statement of fact than an answer, it's a Sagan sounbite;"We are a way for the universe to know itself".
Why not liberate the source and let other companies continue bugfixing?
Oh... doesn't fit the business model?
Of course, if someone in the future is wandering around with a hypothetical bucket of cash trying to spend it on fixing a hypothetical bug in XP then I'm sure MS would happily resurect XP from it's grave and stick a band-aid on it's forehead.
I will bet my left testicle that you have never personally raised a child to adulthood. Rebelion is not a parenting mistake, it's a job discription for young adults.
Penn Jillette is what you get if you cross John Lennon with Ayn Rand, a rich selfish hippie who works for a conservative tell-you-what-to-think-tank. He also has a great sense of humour, (probably from the Lennon side of the family).
Some nerds read it on CNN, others read it on FOX, all of them come here seeking someone who can agrue about it. It explains why slashdot always posts TFA a day or two after the MSM, and why nobody RTFAs on slashdot.
Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and Noble prizes thought that dynamite would end all wars because it was simply too horrific to contemplate it's use in war. Turns out people actually want to do horrible things to their percieved enemies. I lived through the cold war and I don't deny MAD has worked, but it's the diplomatic equivalent of a Mexican standoff, nobody has the faith required to lower their weapons and if one side sneezes were all fucked.
That argument is a little like saying that if you build a dam all people downstream of the dam completely run out of water.
Sure if as you assume the water supply is infinite, but in the real world it isn't and often it stops all together. Irrigation dams are the primary reason why many of the world's major rivers are sucked so dry they no longer reach the sea. People don't just leave the water in the dam and go water skiing, they use if for agriculture, etc. Having said that, I don't agree that rain tanks/barrels cause (or cure) the same problems as dams.
That was the OP's point. It's not about you and how much traffic there is, it's about what other people expect of you and the traffic. If you're on a German freeway or an outback highway, the other people (or lack thereof) are expecting you to be moving like a rocket car, in a 55 zone they expect you to be moving at 55mph +/- 5mph. Problem in the outback is that Camels have no understanding of road rules, the stupid fuckers run away from you in a straight line down the middle of the road, consequently the new north-south rail link is covered in Camel meat from Adielade to Darwin.
I belive EU soda is made with cane sugar, I know the Aussie stuff is made with cane sugar. The cane growers here in Oz have been pissed off at the US for years because they're heavily subsidising the production of HFCS, whilst the cane growers themselves are banned from receiving such subsidies by trade treaties. Still, cane sugar makes you fat if you drink it all day, which is why Aussies prefer beer:)
Sometimes you have to fight arseholes with arseholes. I think Melbourne's cops are doing a great job in that respect!
Since the time I started HS (1969) to the present, I have seen Melbourne's cops become more and more strict on road rules, especially drinking and speeding. The number of cars on the road must be at least 10x what it was back then. However the road toll in that same time period has been reduced by ~80%. Yes, seatbelts and other technical meausres are part of that, but they are not the full story since comprable situations elsewhere that have not implemented things like cameras and booze busses to the extent we have, have not seen such a dramatic improvement.
OTOH I have great memories of (legally) driving down (a 2 lane) springvale rd at 90mph in a red bettle to go fishing at Chelsea after dad knocked of work. Freedom lost and security gained, not because of any conspiracy, it's simply because the number of people on this rock has more than doubled since I was born. More people means a greater effort is required to keep basic order in a society that is only getting more congested and claustrophobic over time. Civilization itself is a 'recent' freedom limiting invention and is a direct result of our remarkable tool-making ability. We have not evolved to live in cities of millions and tribes of hunderds of millions, our 'souls' and instincts were built by nature to work in tribes of 1-200 individuals and are still somewhat confused by all this, but the tool-maker inside us all insist he can fix the civilization tool with yet more tools.
As a licensed driver for 35yrs I say anyone who cannot comprehend that point and obey the posted speed limit is NOT a competent driver. Turns out any fool with lady luck in the passenger seat can push a rust busket to it's 'safe limits' and survive to drink another beer. I was definitely an incompetent driver when I was young and I fully deserved the 4-5yrs of constant legal trouble that came my way because of it. Looking back now, having seen friends and teenage children of friends die from the sheer arrogant stupidity that seems inate to young men in cars I realise how very fortunate I was not to have maimed or killed someone.
Ignoring speed limits and driving at the 'safe limits' of a car on a public road really requires the ability to accurately read the minds of everyone else around you. Since accurate mind reading requires an exchange of tea leaves we have the next best thing, road rules! There's also a licensing regime to ensure every driver knows how every other driver expects them to behave. Watch a police chase on the TV, the only reason the perp and the cops can drive like that is because the other drivers are abiding by the rules and behaving in a predictable manner. In fact when a semi-driver listening to his CB radio DISOBEYS the rules and blocks two lanes then the perp is fucked.
Now to assume every driver in day to day traffic will strictly adhere to the rules is suicidal, but knowing what to expect makes incompetent drivers much easier to spot and avoid, even when the incompetent driver is a younger more alert you..
"A better job" is why the CSIRO attracts such talent in the first place.....oh wait, you ment a job that pays more money than one needs to live comfortably?
Whether or not natural justice is served by patent law is a moral question for lawmakers, not a legal one for judges. I think it's a fair legal judgment on the grounds that the CSIRO and IEEE both wilingly entered into an agreement. The third parties footing the bill are at fault because they also willingly entered an agreement with IEEE to use a standard that they knew (or should've, could've, known), was burdened with a patent. If the third parties didn't do thier legal homework then tough titties, ignorance is not a valid excuse in the eyes of the law.
As an Aussie taxpayer and long time fan of the CSIRO I obviously have a biased opinion in this case, but it doesn't strike me as a morally repugnet outcome, unlike the MAFIAA attacks on individuals in the US, nobody in this case was seriously threatened with incarceration or destitution. And regardless of the value of patent laws to society, this case illustrates precicely how they were intended to be used, encourage and reward inventors for thier practical contributions to society.
When you look at the explosion of science and technology over the last century is becomes very difficult to argue that patent law is "holding us back".
I think the real problem is the relitively recent broadening of the definition of an 'invention', we are handing out patents for things like software, genetic information, trivial business processes, etc, which (when I was at school) was considered trying to patent mathematical transformations, chemical formula, and flow charts, as opposed to inventions. Even though the opinion I hold would leave my beloved CSIRO without a leagl leg to stand on in this case, I love them because I'm sure they would still have willingly told anyone who would listen all about the mathematical transformations they discovered.
...which is exactly what 'civil servants' are supposed to do, and is arguably more important than anything else they do or say.
They're Australia's national science body, the equivalent of NAS in the US. Thier traditional role is to report to government in matters of science. The organization is nobody's lap dog, in the late 50's early 60's they were the ones who showed the causal link between high levels of plutonium in childeren's bones and atmosphereic nuke testing. Nearly two's decade before the French attack on the rainbow warrior, these guys were telling governments and newspapers why it should stop, even though they were under enormus pressure from the Australian and UK goverments to STFU and concentrate on killing those fucking rabbits.
For at least the last decade, possibly longer, one side of parliment has relentlessly sought to soil the CSIRO's reputation because their climate reseach, ( which tells us we're shiting in our own nest ), offends the industry that is laying the golden shovels. From my personal POV the luddites with the golden shovels have failed in their efforts to assasinate the character of a group of exceptional 'civil servants', in fact they have significantly increased my respect for the integrity of the institution and the people within it.
The problem with hydrogen is that the pressures required for a cars fuel tank are such that hydrogen simply seeps through ordinary steel cylinder walls, it's like trying to fill a spagetti strained with water. I belive that about 10yrs ago BMW were the first to come up with a 'certified' hydrogen cylinder that was both practical and safe to use in a car. I'm not sure if it's the same fuel tank that Honda's H2 car uses, but either way the safe storage and energy density arguments seem to have evaporated after BMW and Honda's efforts.
The biggest hurdle would seem to be infrastructure. It's catch 22, mass production and distribution of H2 requires a H2 market to sell to, and vica-versa. Petrol did not really have this problem, the first generation of car owners bought their fuel in cans from the local pharmacy. The car and car fueling infrastructure evolved together, by the second generation of car owners we had two new major industries led by companies such as Ford and Standard Oil.
So here we are in the 21st century and FF transport is ubiquiotous, the no way a competing technology such as H2 will never gain a foothold with current market fources. It would have to be a cooperative effort between government and industry to deliberatly kill off FF cars, that's already happened with lightbulbs but transport is a much bigger challenge and (for some people) it beccomes as personal as a cowboy's horse.
If like me, you are over 50, then every time you see a doctor they want to stick their finger up you're arse. So instead of calling it a "strip search" just give them a paper gown and call it a "health check", jobs done.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in the 60's and 70's, my mum was a sunday school teacher up until I was about 6-7, I still remeber overhearing her saying to dad something like "I'm brainwashing my own kids", after that she quit and started encouraging me to read aboriginal dreamtime stories ( not as fact but to demonstrate there were lots of different 'stories' ). It probably helped that my dad was an engineer.
Anyway, my anectdotal experience over the last 50 odd years, plus a bunch of census stats from the US and around the world, tells me that people have turned their back on religion in droves during my lifetime. I agree it started with the sexual revolution in the 60's, but it has been accelerating ever since. More recently it has been put somewhat unkindly as "the internet, where religions come to die', and I think there is a great deal of truth to that because kids will find a plethora of dreamtime stories all by themselves. From a very young age they no longer have to rely on their parents digging out obscure books from the adult library, which is something even my own 80's era kids could not do until their late teens.
Religion is loud and angry in the US right now but it's losing its power and income base (which is why they still disaprove contraception). After millenia of being at the top of the food chain in all previous civilizations they suddenly find they have to start justifying their previously unquestioned claims of 'moral authority' in society with something more substansive than 'might is right'. They find themselves in a world where more and more of their 'sheep' are no longer affraid to laugh in their face and are willing to hold them to account for their hypocricy and crimes.
I don't think I will live long enough to see it but when governments start taxing what are essentially some of the richest organisations on the planet, then you will know reason has won the day. But reason can only take us so far, at some point you just have to accept an assumption, science has boiled it all down to a handful of very basic assumptions (ie: the fundemantal forces and dimentions exist). It may boil it down further but it will always require the assumption that the real world exists and is not some sort of matrix senario where it's all in our heads.
Of course the alternative to all this social upheaval is for everyone to simply tell the truth and just admit that nethier they nor I know the answer to the existential question (Why am I here?), none of us even know if the question makes any sense in the first place. The closest thing to a rational answer that I've ever found is more a statement of fact than an answer, it's a Sagan sounbite;"We are a way for the universe to know itself".
Why not liberate the source and let other companies continue bugfixing?
Oh... doesn't fit the business model?
Of course, if someone in the future is wandering around with a hypothetical bucket of cash trying to spend it on fixing a hypothetical bug in XP then I'm sure MS would happily resurect XP from it's grave and stick a band-aid on it's forehead.
I will bet my left testicle that you have never personally raised a child to adulthood. Rebelion is not a parenting mistake, it's a job discription for young adults.
Poverb - If you look for evil, you will find it.
Penn Jillette is what you get if you cross John Lennon with Ayn Rand, a rich selfish hippie who works for a conservative tell-you-what-to-think-tank. He also has a great sense of humour, (probably from the Lennon side of the family).
Some nerds read it on CNN, others read it on FOX, all of them come here seeking someone who can agrue about it. It explains why slashdot always posts TFA a day or two after the MSM, and why nobody RTFAs on slashdot.
If your colon is blue, you're in deep shit mate.
Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and Noble prizes thought that dynamite would end all wars because it was simply too horrific to contemplate it's use in war. Turns out people actually want to do horrible things to their percieved enemies. I lived through the cold war and I don't deny MAD has worked, but it's the diplomatic equivalent of a Mexican standoff, nobody has the faith required to lower their weapons and if one side sneezes were all fucked.
..... spam works! I know, I know, but it always has and it always will.
That argument is a little like saying that if you build a dam all people downstream of the dam completely run out of water.
Sure if as you assume the water supply is infinite, but in the real world it isn't and often it stops all together. Irrigation dams are the primary reason why many of the world's major rivers are sucked so dry they no longer reach the sea. People don't just leave the water in the dam and go water skiing, they use if for agriculture, etc. Having said that, I don't agree that rain tanks/barrels cause (or cure) the same problems as dams.
That was the OP's point. It's not about you and how much traffic there is, it's about what other people expect of you and the traffic. If you're on a German freeway or an outback highway, the other people (or lack thereof) are expecting you to be moving like a rocket car, in a 55 zone they expect you to be moving at 55mph +/- 5mph. Problem in the outback is that Camels have no understanding of road rules, the stupid fuckers run away from you in a straight line down the middle of the road, consequently the new north-south rail link is covered in Camel meat from Adielade to Darwin.
I belive EU soda is made with cane sugar, I know the Aussie stuff is made with cane sugar. The cane growers here in Oz have been pissed off at the US for years because they're heavily subsidising the production of HFCS, whilst the cane growers themselves are banned from receiving such subsidies by trade treaties. Still, cane sugar makes you fat if you drink it all day, which is why Aussies prefer beer :)
Don't it always seem to go....
That you don't know what you've got til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Hey farmer, farmer, put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees.
Please!
Maybe [government] can use THIS to justify getting rid of HFCS!
Crush the corn lobby with science? - I very much doubt it.
The crocs ate 'em.
Sometimes you have to fight arseholes with arseholes. I think Melbourne's cops are doing a great job in that respect!
Since the time I started HS (1969) to the present, I have seen Melbourne's cops become more and more strict on road rules, especially drinking and speeding. The number of cars on the road must be at least 10x what it was back then. However the road toll in that same time period has been reduced by ~80%. Yes, seatbelts and other technical meausres are part of that, but they are not the full story since comprable situations elsewhere that have not implemented things like cameras and booze busses to the extent we have, have not seen such a dramatic improvement.
OTOH I have great memories of (legally) driving down (a 2 lane) springvale rd at 90mph in a red bettle to go fishing at Chelsea after dad knocked of work. Freedom lost and security gained, not because of any conspiracy, it's simply because the number of people on this rock has more than doubled since I was born. More people means a greater effort is required to keep basic order in a society that is only getting more congested and claustrophobic over time. Civilization itself is a 'recent' freedom limiting invention and is a direct result of our remarkable tool-making ability. We have not evolved to live in cities of millions and tribes of hunderds of millions, our 'souls' and instincts were built by nature to work in tribes of 1-200 individuals and are still somewhat confused by all this, but the tool-maker inside us all insist he can fix the civilization tool with yet more tools.
Give that post a mod point!
As a licensed driver for 35yrs I say anyone who cannot comprehend that point and obey the posted speed limit is NOT a competent driver. Turns out any fool with lady luck in the passenger seat can push a rust busket to it's 'safe limits' and survive to drink another beer. I was definitely an incompetent driver when I was young and I fully deserved the 4-5yrs of constant legal trouble that came my way because of it. Looking back now, having seen friends and teenage children of friends die from the sheer arrogant stupidity that seems inate to young men in cars I realise how very fortunate I was not to have maimed or killed someone.
Ignoring speed limits and driving at the 'safe limits' of a car on a public road really requires the ability to accurately read the minds of everyone else around you. Since accurate mind reading requires an exchange of tea leaves we have the next best thing, road rules! There's also a licensing regime to ensure every driver knows how every other driver expects them to behave. Watch a police chase on the TV, the only reason the perp and the cops can drive like that is because the other drivers are abiding by the rules and behaving in a predictable manner. In fact when a semi-driver listening to his CB radio DISOBEYS the rules and blocks two lanes then the perp is fucked.
Now to assume every driver in day to day traffic will strictly adhere to the rules is suicidal, but knowing what to expect makes incompetent drivers much easier to spot and avoid, even when the incompetent driver is a younger more alert you..
Your's sincerly,
Crusty Old Bastard.
"A better job" is why the CSIRO attracts such talent in the first place.....oh wait, you ment a job that pays more money than one needs to live comfortably?
they don't say the same thing about the wheel
Cough it up yank, the guy who owns the patent for the wheel lives in my home town.
Whether or not natural justice is served by patent law is a moral question for lawmakers, not a legal one for judges. I think it's a fair legal judgment on the grounds that the CSIRO and IEEE both wilingly entered into an agreement. The third parties footing the bill are at fault because they also willingly entered an agreement with IEEE to use a standard that they knew (or should've, could've, known), was burdened with a patent. If the third parties didn't do thier legal homework then tough titties, ignorance is not a valid excuse in the eyes of the law.
As an Aussie taxpayer and long time fan of the CSIRO I obviously have a biased opinion in this case, but it doesn't strike me as a morally repugnet outcome, unlike the MAFIAA attacks on individuals in the US, nobody in this case was seriously threatened with incarceration or destitution. And regardless of the value of patent laws to society, this case illustrates precicely how they were intended to be used, encourage and reward inventors for thier practical contributions to society.
When you look at the explosion of science and technology over the last century is becomes very difficult to argue that patent law is "holding us back". I think the real problem is the relitively recent broadening of the definition of an 'invention', we are handing out patents for things like software, genetic information, trivial business processes, etc, which (when I was at school) was considered trying to patent mathematical transformations, chemical formula, and flow charts, as opposed to inventions. Even though the opinion I hold would leave my beloved CSIRO without a leagl leg to stand on in this case, I love them because I'm sure they would still have willingly told anyone who would listen all about the mathematical transformations they discovered.
...which is exactly what 'civil servants' are supposed to do, and is arguably more important than anything else they do or say.
They're Australia's national science body, the equivalent of NAS in the US. Thier traditional role is to report to government in matters of science. The organization is nobody's lap dog, in the late 50's early 60's they were the ones who showed the causal link between high levels of plutonium in childeren's bones and atmosphereic nuke testing. Nearly two's decade before the French attack on the rainbow warrior, these guys were telling governments and newspapers why it should stop, even though they were under enormus pressure from the Australian and UK goverments to STFU and concentrate on killing those fucking rabbits.
For at least the last decade, possibly longer, one side of parliment has relentlessly sought to soil the CSIRO's reputation because their climate reseach, ( which tells us we're shiting in our own nest ), offends the industry that is laying the golden shovels. From my personal POV the luddites with the golden shovels have failed in their efforts to assasinate the character of a group of exceptional 'civil servants', in fact they have significantly increased my respect for the integrity of the institution and the people within it.
The problem with hydrogen is that the pressures required for a cars fuel tank are such that hydrogen simply seeps through ordinary steel cylinder walls, it's like trying to fill a spagetti strained with water. I belive that about 10yrs ago BMW were the first to come up with a 'certified' hydrogen cylinder that was both practical and safe to use in a car. I'm not sure if it's the same fuel tank that Honda's H2 car uses, but either way the safe storage and energy density arguments seem to have evaporated after BMW and Honda's efforts.
The biggest hurdle would seem to be infrastructure. It's catch 22, mass production and distribution of H2 requires a H2 market to sell to, and vica-versa. Petrol did not really have this problem, the first generation of car owners bought their fuel in cans from the local pharmacy. The car and car fueling infrastructure evolved together, by the second generation of car owners we had two new major industries led by companies such as Ford and Standard Oil.
So here we are in the 21st century and FF transport is ubiquiotous, the no way a competing technology such as H2 will never gain a foothold with current market fources. It would have to be a cooperative effort between government and industry to deliberatly kill off FF cars, that's already happened with lightbulbs but transport is a much bigger challenge and (for some people) it beccomes as personal as a cowboy's horse.
That is the bizzare bit, everything else is pretty much standard protocol at any airport.
It's sad that geeks are, on the whole, so quick to just dismiss someone with differing values.
Fuck off.
(sorry couldn't resist).
If like me, you are over 50, then every time you see a doctor they want to stick their finger up you're arse. So instead of calling it a "strip search" just give them a paper gown and call it a "health check", jobs done.