You're missing one gigantic point, which is that a newspaper's credibility an an *independent* source of information is crucial to its success. The implementation of an idea is the actual words that are written, and that's what was stolen by failing to provide attribution. The packaging as a blog entry or a newspaper column is the outlet, equivalent to the store in which the product is sold. To be literal about this, why should I pay the Honolulu Star Bulletin if all they're doing is repackaging content freely available on the Internet as their own?
Additionally, when a newspaper steals content from the Internet and presents it as their own, they put their stamp of credibility on it. I attach greater credence to something published by a media outlet with a reporter's byline than I do random blog entries on the Internet. When I find out that they're just repackaging unverified info from the 'net, I feel fooled by the newspaper, and downgrade their credibility in mind accordingly.
To carry your analogy through: If I sell "special my store" bananas in my store at $2.00/pound, and it's revealed that those bananas are just common South American bananas available elsewhere at $1.00/pound, I'm going to suffer commercially for that revelation, and if it was the store manager who made the decision to not attribute those bananas and misrepresent them as "special my store" bananas, I'd fire him. Now my store has a bad reputation as someone who'll screw the customer if I can get away with it. My employee has caused harm to my business, and I'm going to punish him by firing him.
Besides, the essence of plagiarism isn't that you create a marketable product with someone else's idea, it's that you take someone else's marketable product and present it as your own. If he'd taken the idea behind the Wikipedia articles and written his own words about that idea/fact/trivia, he wouldn't be in trouble. It's the implementation that he stole.
He's being punished because the exposure of his plagiarism damaged the credibility of his newspaper. He didn't break any laws, he just made his employer look like a media outlet with no journalistic integrity, which certainly damages sales.
Businesses would never accept this kind of qualty from, for example, partners, suppliers, and so on...
Businesses in all markets accept this kind of quality from their suppliers and partners all the time. They don't like it, they scream about it, they change relationships because of it, but don't think that problems of the same scale don't constantly occur in businesses generally. I say this as someone who spent five years in plastic housewares manufacturing. Technology is not unique at all in this respect.
Should we also mention Catastrophism? How about the Norse Tree of Life?
The problem with including a survey of alternatives and a discussion of their merits (or lack thereof) is that we would quickly become bogged down, wasting already precious class time on things that don't further a child's science education. Learning critical thinking and the scientific method is more than adequately served by covering the evolution of various scientific theories, like geocentrism to heliocentrism, or the triumph of germ theory over humours.
The point you're missing is that there's a difference between "expressly denying something" and legally mandated silence on an issue. For ID to be taught in science class in a public school amounts to the government teaching ID, a religious theory. Mandating that the government remain silent on ID by not teaching it is not teaching that ID is false. Were a public teacher to teach against ID, it would be the same violation of church and state as teaching for it.
Ultimately, "separation of church and state" means that the government (and all its agents) remains silent on religious doctrine. Silence is not the same as contradicting religious doctrine.
It is not oppressive to prevent the government from endorsing your views. You're free to articulate them all you want; you just can't have official help.
And science is not religion in the broadest sense. The quality of belief in each case is fundamentally different. Science is predicated on conditional belief, faith on unconditional belief. They are inherently different.
I believe the lies to which the judge referred had to do with the defendents sitting in court claiming that ID was not religiously motivated science, and then making public statements outside of court saying that it was, and that their actions were for the greater glory of God, and that the source of their material was think tanks directly offering ID as a Christian-safe theory of how we all came to be here.
Why would it be that some phenomena are exempt from scientific scruntiny?
Because, as you so calmly assert, they have no materialist basis. They cannot be studied scientifically. Or are you saying that they do, in fact, reduce ultimately to materialism?
It's only metaphysical so long as the physical mechanism hasn't been discovered yet.
Yes, in fact, you are saying that it's all ultimately "hard, atomic stuff" (as you referred to it earlier), just some unknown, "higher energetic", undiscovered "stuff". So what's wrong? Science not going fast enough for you putting its stamp of approval on NDEs and tribal religious rituals?
I never said that I was a materialist, or that I considered science to be the be-all and end-all of life's great questions. I have a healthier respect for science than you, I think, because I recognize what it isn't.
You, on the other hand, seem to have a problem with science insofar as it doesn't re-inforce your metaphysical commitments, and your need for science to do so betrays your own insecurity. I don't deny mystical truths, and I don't seek degrading materialist foundations for them.
A rigid Materialism-based outlook is anti-science.
No, rigid materialism is ALL science is. That's its limit, and that's the foundation of its success: It ignores unfalsifiable, chop-logic theories of everything. It doesn't preclude God, Vitalism, karma, or any other methaphysical entity you wish to build your personal outlook on. It is silent on those topics. The fact that some scientists or supporters of science make claims about those topics is human fallibilism on their part. To claim otherwise is to abuse the common usage of the term 'science'.
Vitalism *is* anti-science because it's inclusion makes any theory built upon it un-falsifiable, violating a basic tenet of the scientific method. Your phenomenological hand-waving doesn't change that.
I've always been a bit mystified by those who want science broadened to include their unscientific ideas. They crave the credibility of science and the scientific method, but would do violence to science itself to obtain that credibility.
That's great that there's an underlying philosophy. Doesn't make it science, though, so there's no reason to give it equal time in a science class.
Yes, science is profoundly materialistic. That's what science is. Accept it or don't, but corrupting it does everyone who's benefitted from scientific fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, etc... well, it does all of us a disservice.
Of course people are happy getting the same thing for less money. That's not the point of the article. It's that for those artists/songs you don't know, your perception of them is influenced by whether they're in the "star" club at $2.49 a song, or the bargain bin at $0.99. It may not be a huge influence on you individually, but in terms of the overall market, it's a huge club to hold over the head of an artist. It's about overall mindshare, not individual purchases.
The server side of the system tracks the amount of drift on the token, updating it every time you use it. You're supposed to enter the number on the screen, but the system will accept the previous and next numbers as well to account for that drift. As long as you don't go too long between uses, the drift is accurately accounted for on the server.
I believe because I followed the public trial in which a judge's findings of facts were available and easy to understood, and given the same data I agreed with his conclusions.
The article answers exactly these points. The energy out:in ratio is 3.5:1 for the new method. As for pollution, the article also mentions that, by doing it in place and creating an underground ice wall around it, groundwater is protected; further, when the oil runs dry, the same heating apparatus is used to flush contaminants out of the rock with the water being pumped back in.
It probably won't turn out to be as slick as it sounds, but it sounds pretty damn slick.
There's a crucial difference you're missing when you say that "science is a kind of religion": scientific belief is necessarily conditional, while religious belief is necessarily unconditional.
Belief in God is faith, and having faith means believing something regardless of the evidence for or against it. When your faith is tested, meaning that you're given reasons to doubt or dismiss your faith, passing the test means retaining your faith in the face contradictory evidence.
Belief in evolution, or the theory of gravity, or quantum physics, means believing in those things to the exact degree that they are supported by the evidence. When scientific belief is tested, meaning that you're given evidence against your theory, passing the test means modifying or rejecting your theory in light of that evidence.
Science and faith are exactly opposite in regards to how each (ideally) deals with evidence against their objects of belief. They are irreconcilable this way, and that's why it's nonsense to describe science as a religion.
But would the good coder know this bit of math without having learned it, either from a book or in a CS class? I doubt it. No one "stumbles" across mathematical proofs.
Gold sells for around $1 for 10 gold on eBay; a serious player can bring in around 10 gold an hour if they're farming the right area (farming, in this case, being the generic "hanging out to kill mobs that drop good loot" meaning). So, at most, someone farming gold to sell it on eBay is bringing in $1-2/hour of revenue; therefore, the actual labour cost of the gold farmer can't be more than about $0.35-0.50/hour to run it as a profitable business.
Where are labour costs that low? SE Asia. Thus, it's presumed that any gold farmer is from that area.
In what way is this racist? Does it stereotype Chinese as being inferior, or possessing some quality that is explained by their ethnicity? Does it look down on Chinese somehow? Should a Chinese person be insulted by a joke that implies that most Chinese players are employed by gold farming companies? The reason that gold farmers are located in Asia is because the cost of labour is much lower there, not because of some innate characteristic of the Chinese.
I honestly fail to see any cause for offense in the joke, or any implication that slurs Chinese as a group. Please explain it to me.
The Van Allen Belts extend to about 65,000 km from the surface of Earth; the Lagrangian Points are located at 120 degree intervals around Earth's solar orbit, plus two that are in a straight line with the Earth and the Sun. The nearest is the one on the far side of Earth from the Sun, ~300,000 km away, well outside the Van Allen Belts.
Why go to space? So we can learn how to go to space.
That seems facetious, but that's really the best and most fundamental reason there is. We all know that we'll be in space eventually, that someday we'll be mining asteroids or putting prisons in orbit or manning orbital launch platforms or something. It's the joke:
1. Go to space 2. ??? 3. Profit.
Except that, given our history, no one has trouble believing there's really a step two; we just don't know what it is yet, and the only way we'll find out is by doing step 1 over and over again. We also think that step 3 isn't 'profit' in the narrow, corporate sense, but in the broad, betterment of humanity sense as well. No, we won't all be drinking Tang from Velcro glasses while writing upside down. It's that someday, someone will be reading the history of early space travel and will be glad that previous generations spent the money, the time, and the lives necessary to not just open the new frontier but to figure out how to live there. It's an investment that will pay off in decades and centuries and millenia.
That said, I think the NASA Big Project style of space exploration, perhaps necessary at first, should now give way to Ansari Prize style exploration, as the stepping stone to venture capital funded space exploration. And I wish that robotic missions, which are cheaper and safer, had more guaranteed budgets.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing one gigantic point, which is that a newspaper's credibility an an *independent* source of information is crucial to its success. The implementation of an idea is the actual words that are written, and that's what was stolen by failing to provide attribution. The packaging as a blog entry or a newspaper column is the outlet, equivalent to the store in which the product is sold. To be literal about this, why should I pay the Honolulu Star Bulletin if all they're doing is repackaging content freely available on the Internet as their own?
Additionally, when a newspaper steals content from the Internet and presents it as their own, they put their stamp of credibility on it. I attach greater credence to something published by a media outlet with a reporter's byline than I do random blog entries on the Internet. When I find out that they're just repackaging unverified info from the 'net, I feel fooled by the newspaper, and downgrade their credibility in mind accordingly.
To carry your analogy through: If I sell "special my store" bananas in my store at $2.00/pound, and it's revealed that those bananas are just common South American bananas available elsewhere at $1.00/pound, I'm going to suffer commercially for that revelation, and if it was the store manager who made the decision to not attribute those bananas and misrepresent them as "special my store" bananas, I'd fire him. Now my store has a bad reputation as someone who'll screw the customer if I can get away with it. My employee has caused harm to my business, and I'm going to punish him by firing him.
Copyright doesn't come into this at all.
Besides, the essence of plagiarism isn't that you create a marketable product with someone else's idea, it's that you take someone else's marketable product and present it as your own. If he'd taken the idea behind the Wikipedia articles and written his own words about that idea/fact/trivia, he wouldn't be in trouble. It's the implementation that he stole.
He's being punished because the exposure of his plagiarism damaged the credibility of his newspaper. He didn't break any laws, he just made his employer look like a media outlet with no journalistic integrity, which certainly damages sales.
Businesses would never accept this kind of qualty from, for example, partners, suppliers, and so on...
Businesses in all markets accept this kind of quality from their suppliers and partners all the time. They don't like it, they scream about it, they change relationships because of it, but don't think that problems of the same scale don't constantly occur in businesses generally. I say this as someone who spent five years in plastic housewares manufacturing. Technology is not unique at all in this respect.
Should we also mention Catastrophism? How about the Norse Tree of Life?
The problem with including a survey of alternatives and a discussion of their merits (or lack thereof) is that we would quickly become bogged down, wasting already precious class time on things that don't further a child's science education. Learning critical thinking and the scientific method is more than adequately served by covering the evolution of various scientific theories, like geocentrism to heliocentrism, or the triumph of germ theory over humours.
The point you're missing is that there's a difference between "expressly denying something" and legally mandated silence on an issue. For ID to be taught in science class in a public school amounts to the government teaching ID, a religious theory. Mandating that the government remain silent on ID by not teaching it is not teaching that ID is false. Were a public teacher to teach against ID, it would be the same violation of church and state as teaching for it.
Ultimately, "separation of church and state" means that the government (and all its agents) remains silent on religious doctrine. Silence is not the same as contradicting religious doctrine.
It is not oppressive to prevent the government from endorsing your views. You're free to articulate them all you want; you just can't have official help.
And science is not religion in the broadest sense. The quality of belief in each case is fundamentally different. Science is predicated on conditional belief, faith on unconditional belief. They are inherently different.
I believe the lies to which the judge referred had to do with the defendents sitting in court claiming that ID was not religiously motivated science, and then making public statements outside of court saying that it was, and that their actions were for the greater glory of God, and that the source of their material was think tanks directly offering ID as a Christian-safe theory of how we all came to be here.
Why would it be that some phenomena are exempt from scientific scruntiny?
Because, as you so calmly assert, they have no materialist basis. They cannot be studied scientifically. Or are you saying that they do, in fact, reduce ultimately to materialism?
It's only metaphysical so long as the physical mechanism hasn't been discovered yet.
Yes, in fact, you are saying that it's all ultimately "hard, atomic stuff" (as you referred to it earlier), just some unknown, "higher energetic", undiscovered "stuff". So what's wrong? Science not going fast enough for you putting its stamp of approval on NDEs and tribal religious rituals?
I never said that I was a materialist, or that I considered science to be the be-all and end-all of life's great questions. I have a healthier respect for science than you, I think, because I recognize what it isn't.
You, on the other hand, seem to have a problem with science insofar as it doesn't re-inforce your metaphysical commitments, and your need for science to do so betrays your own insecurity. I don't deny mystical truths, and I don't seek degrading materialist foundations for them.
A rigid Materialism-based outlook is anti-science.
No, rigid materialism is ALL science is. That's its limit, and that's the foundation of its success: It ignores unfalsifiable, chop-logic theories of everything. It doesn't preclude God, Vitalism, karma, or any other methaphysical entity you wish to build your personal outlook on. It is silent on those topics. The fact that some scientists or supporters of science make claims about those topics is human fallibilism on their part. To claim otherwise is to abuse the common usage of the term 'science'.
Vitalism *is* anti-science because it's inclusion makes any theory built upon it un-falsifiable, violating a basic tenet of the scientific method. Your phenomenological hand-waving doesn't change that.
I've always been a bit mystified by those who want science broadened to include their unscientific ideas. They crave the credibility of science and the scientific method, but would do violence to science itself to obtain that credibility.
That's great that there's an underlying philosophy. Doesn't make it science, though, so there's no reason to give it equal time in a science class.
Yes, science is profoundly materialistic. That's what science is. Accept it or don't, but corrupting it does everyone who's benefitted from scientific fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, etc... well, it does all of us a disservice.
Of course people are happy getting the same thing for less money. That's not the point of the article. It's that for those artists/songs you don't know, your perception of them is influenced by whether they're in the "star" club at $2.49 a song, or the bargain bin at $0.99. It may not be a huge influence on you individually, but in terms of the overall market, it's a huge club to hold over the head of an artist. It's about overall mindshare, not individual purchases.
it will just force attackers to use the information gleaned from such attacks before the fob's digits expire.
The fob's digits expire in 60 seconds. I hadn't heard that real-time phishing attacks were a problem.
The server side of the system tracks the amount of drift on the token, updating it every time you use it. You're supposed to enter the number on the screen, but the system will accept the previous and next numbers as well to account for that drift. As long as you don't go too long between uses, the drift is accurately accounted for on the server.
I believe because I followed the public trial in which a judge's findings of facts were available and easy to understood, and given the same data I agreed with his conclusions.
Mod parent up!
The article answers exactly these points. The energy out:in ratio is 3.5:1 for the new method. As for pollution, the article also mentions that, by doing it in place and creating an underground ice wall around it, groundwater is protected; further, when the oil runs dry, the same heating apparatus is used to flush contaminants out of the rock with the water being pumped back in.
It probably won't turn out to be as slick as it sounds, but it sounds pretty damn slick.
There's a crucial difference you're missing when you say that "science is a kind of religion": scientific belief is necessarily conditional, while religious belief is necessarily unconditional.
Belief in God is faith, and having faith means believing something regardless of the evidence for or against it. When your faith is tested, meaning that you're given reasons to doubt or dismiss your faith, passing the test means retaining your faith in the face contradictory evidence.
Belief in evolution, or the theory of gravity, or quantum physics, means believing in those things to the exact degree that they are supported by the evidence. When scientific belief is tested, meaning that you're given evidence against your theory, passing the test means modifying or rejecting your theory in light of that evidence.
Science and faith are exactly opposite in regards to how each (ideally) deals with evidence against their objects of belief. They are irreconcilable this way, and that's why it's nonsense to describe science as a religion.
But would the good coder know this bit of math without having learned it, either from a book or in a CS class? I doubt it. No one "stumbles" across mathematical proofs.
Until now, I'd thought Paul Thurrot was a paid tongue-bather for Billy G. But this was a pretty unequivocal statement. I'm impressed.
Gold sells for around $1 for 10 gold on eBay; a serious player can bring in around 10 gold an hour if they're farming the right area (farming, in this case, being the generic "hanging out to kill mobs that drop good loot" meaning). So, at most, someone farming gold to sell it on eBay is bringing in $1-2/hour of revenue; therefore, the actual labour cost of the gold farmer can't be more than about $0.35-0.50/hour to run it as a profitable business.
Where are labour costs that low? SE Asia. Thus, it's presumed that any gold farmer is from that area.
In what way is this racist? Does it stereotype Chinese as being inferior, or possessing some quality that is explained by their ethnicity? Does it look down on Chinese somehow? Should a Chinese person be insulted by a joke that implies that most Chinese players are employed by gold farming companies? The reason that gold farmers are located in Asia is because the cost of labour is much lower there, not because of some innate characteristic of the Chinese.
I honestly fail to see any cause for offense in the joke, or any implication that slurs Chinese as a group. Please explain it to me.
I think you mean "there are 1.5 million chinese that have houses because they have jobs playing Wow all day".
The Van Allen Belts extend to about 65,000 km from the surface of Earth; the Lagrangian Points are located at 120 degree intervals around Earth's solar orbit, plus two that are in a straight line with the Earth and the Sun. The nearest is the one on the far side of Earth from the Sun, ~300,000 km away, well outside the Van Allen Belts.
Why go to space? So we can learn how to go to space.
That seems facetious, but that's really the best and most fundamental reason there is. We all know that we'll be in space eventually, that someday we'll be mining asteroids or putting prisons in orbit or manning orbital launch platforms or something. It's the joke:
1. Go to space
2. ???
3. Profit.
Except that, given our history, no one has trouble believing there's really a step two; we just don't know what it is yet, and the only way we'll find out is by doing step 1 over and over again. We also think that step 3 isn't 'profit' in the narrow, corporate sense, but in the broad, betterment of humanity sense as well. No, we won't all be drinking Tang from Velcro glasses while writing upside down. It's that someday, someone will be reading the history of early space travel and will be glad that previous generations spent the money, the time, and the lives necessary to not just open the new frontier but to figure out how to live there. It's an investment that will pay off in decades and centuries and millenia.
That said, I think the NASA Big Project style of space exploration, perhaps necessary at first, should now give way to Ansari Prize style exploration, as the stepping stone to venture capital funded space exploration. And I wish that robotic missions, which are cheaper and safer, had more guaranteed budgets.