Only a terrorist would spy on police with a toy UAV. And thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, any such terrorist can be detained by the military indefinitely and without trial, even if a US citizen arrested on US soil. That should teach them, right?
It also ignores the security implications of the closed-source nature of Google Chrome. It is completely insecure from the end user's point of view (and so are IE and Opera), but Google, of course, funded the evaluation of the vendor's security, of which the user's security is just a small part.
They should have had plenty of time to fill the galaxy by now.
This is a big unfounded assumption. And while jump-starting life and moving bacteria around may turn out to be easy, moving animals the size of humans to a star system even 20 ly away is already known to be very, very hard. (I mean, mammals could not reach New Zealand for millions of years, and that's another continent, not another star.) And while colonizing deep space is a priority, persisting without a big chunk of rock in the immediate neighborhood is probably a pipe dream. So we should probably think of it as a planet-sized organism (like Earth with its biosphere) casting a seed (a generation ship) to a different star system. One needs to find a planet that's already ripe; being optimistic, there is one within a few dozen ly. One needs to build a big ass ship in deep space, capable of withstanding a several (or many) thousand year journey with a self-sustaining biosphere inside, so probably something like an asteroid several hundred meters in diameter. Then one has to accelerate the sucker with something at least as good as fusion and slowly crawl towards the goal. Just the travel itself is easily 100000 years, and building an ark is a tremendous job as well. Once arrived, colonists cannot hope to propagate again for hundreds of thousands or may be millions of years, since they don't have a planet backing them, so there is more downtime.
Think about what I like calling a "hop time": the mean duration needed for a generation ship to colonize a planet, build a new generation ship, and travel to the next system. It's gotta be pretty big, may be a million years, may be 10. So if someone has a billion years on us, they may be on their 100-1000th hop. They are but a smidgen, may be as big as the width of the galactic disk. And if they are on the other side of the galaxy, we may not run into them for another few billion years.
I believe that taxing the Internet causes much more harm to the economy than the money that can be gained.
Why do you believe that? What I am saying, taxing the Internet does not even begin to compare with censoring the Internet. I would much rather have the former. IMHO, it is strictly better than Copyright. Copyright is a way to reward publishers, distributors, and artists (in that order) for their work. The money is being obtained at the distribution stage. There is some consistency to taxing the raw Internet access (while abolishing non-commercial copyright): they would still be getting money out of the distribution stage, sans the intellectual monopoly. Here's a more specific proposal of the same nature.
I fail to see how copyright is unethical. Sure, lifetime+70 years is as unethical as it can get,
Yes, that's enough to vindicate my statement, isn't it? But beyond the obscene length of the copyright, there is also the matter of domain. Is it ethical to allow to copyright research pertaining to a life-saving drug? Or a piece of software that can save billions of dollars for a developing country? As soon as you leave the domain of pure entertainment, ugly ethical questions come up, especially with regards to non-commercial infringement. I agree with you on this narrow ground though: something like a 5-year copyright on works of pure art is perfectly fine. And a 5-year copyright on anything is suboptimal, but could be a decent compromise.
if the intertubes are being taxed to pay for the production of french culture or something, ISP subscribers can download it without legal worry, right?
One should hope. While some people laugh at France's [1] conviction that art should be sponsored by the government, to me it does look like a more ethical alternative to copyright. Provided, of course, that there is no such thing as "non-commercial infringement". I would much rather pay a flat art tax and not be censored on the Internet than endure any more copyright legislation.
[1] Russia's too. Some countries are just like that.
In what sense do mathematical objects not exist? The physical sense? I am agnostic about that. Philosophically speaking, the world could turn out to be a giant continuous massively parallel computation, and then physics IS math, and nothing BUT mathematical objects exists. I can't think of any way to test for that. Although I have to admit, a non-math universe may seem more credible simply because we can't even begin to draw a mathematical theory of everything. All of the current theories seem to break down at some scales and/or energy levels, so may be we live in an ultimately chaotic universe with some statistical leanings.
Software is a spirit of the machine. Morality applies to it just as well as it does to people. Flash player was programmed to be a jerk, and so it jerks its users around when it's not spying on them.
The year of desktop was 1995. Let's move on already. Free software is more ethical than the alternative and is less of a dick to the end user regardless of what it runs on.
I really like PS, even as a programming language. Somehow it reminds me of the Logo turtle. But my point is, both PS and PDF kind of suck for online scientific "papers". They are hard to flow, they lack the content layer, and are very hard for robots to read.
Only for printing. The difference between PDF (produced from something like LaTeX) and XHTML+MATHML+SVG is that
(1) PDF is paginated nicely, which is essential for printing, and an obvious minus for on-screen viewing.
(2) PDF has lost the content layer, which is nearly irrelevant for printing, and unforgivable for on-screen viewing.
What you really need for scientific papers is a large page that can flexibly display full color text and images. PDF is one of the best ways to describe a printable version, but it's a far cry from the best way to describe an on-line document .
I said "trash" in jest. IANAL, but on an intuitive level, it is questionable that this property was "abandoned". Leaving it behind was a strategic decision by NASA leadership: bringing it back now would be needlessly expensive, would pose additional risk to astronauts' well being, and wouldn't provide any scientific value. Just because something was left on the surface of the Moon doesn't make it abandoned. The flag, for example, wasn't "abandoned"; do you want to argue with that? I would be totally on NASA's side if they were to argue that things like plastic bags were abandoned, but historically interesting scientific equipment was not. If we get a bit more technical, was all the equipment left "in such a condition that it is apparent that [the owner] has no intention of returning to claim it"? Unless melted by the Sun or crushed by a meteorite, all of that junk will still be in absolute mint condition thousands of years from now.
And I certainly don't feel the pain of astronauts who try to make money by selling equipment they brought from the Moon, especially if it was in violation of the mission objectives. Walking on the Moon at the taxpayers' expense already seems like a very generous reward for their work.
It's funny, but IMHO not true. Barring a cataclysmic event, Moon will surely be colonized within a few millenniums, and all of that trash will have tremendous historical value. I don't see how anyone but NASA has a legitimate claim to it, and I would much rather see these items in a public museum than locked up in some collector's private stash.
i think you need to go recheck the demand for linux pre-installed, because the demand really is tiny, if it is so massive, why does dell only have a few pcs that have it?
How do you define "just a few"? Dell's small business portal has 4 laptops with Ubuntu, 20 desktops with FreeDOS (read: Linux-ready), and, as far as I can tell, every server can be shipped with either SUSE or RedHat. Sure, the demand falls off as you get closer to mobiles, but it's not tiny, and on the server side is truly is massive.
The days when Microsoft could strongarm manufacturers of generic hardware are over. So you won't be able to put GNU/Linux on Microsoft's new TV / Web browser / Game console combo-box, do you care? This is about as bad for the consumer as not being able to run HURD on the latest XBOX. The demand for x86-based hardware certified for Linux ain't going away, no matter what Microsoft will do. They lost in productivity and will have to retreat into entertainment.
Why is that a problem? So Microsoft (and Apple too, btw) are transitioning away from a general-purpose OS and towards an entertainment platform for rent. Windows and OS X are on a convergent evolutionary path with whatever runs on playstations and game spheres. They are becoming closed, restricted systems which you cannot open without voiding the warranty, tethered to the mothership, with their functionality carefully trimmed, and the application market moated off from the real world. I, for one, don't give a rat's ass. I don't use their software, and I won't buy their hardware. It's not like hardware manufacturers will stop making computers that can run Linux: the demand is massive, and it keeps rising. Even squares like Dell will sell you laptops, workstations, and servers with Ubuntu preinstalled, through their small (and up) business portal. And then you have people like these (I cannot endorse these vendors since I never used them.). I say, let them do it: let Microsoft write themselves out of the productivity market and into the abject irrelevance of Web-based cinema and games.
Darn, my mod points just expired:) This is pretty much exactly what the OP asked for. Although, OP said "I also don't want some pirate coming along and stealing it out of public domain", so may be CC BY-SA is more up to the task. It all depends on whether derivative works that go beyond verbatim quotation are desirable.
I love Lighting and use it as my only calendar + planner. My number one feature request is actually for Thunderbird as a whole: give us a Web interface already. I am tired of tunneling this monster.
This is crazy, as in a crazy bad value. iPad is just a toy. An $800 toy that spies on you for Apple Corp. Instead, and for half as much, they could have given every kid something like a Dell Mini with Ubuntu.
Slashdot Mirror
Only a terrorist would spy on police with a toy UAV. And thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, any such terrorist can be detained by the military indefinitely and without trial, even if a US citizen arrested on US soil. That should teach them, right?
Natalie Portmans black hole is even tighter, closer, and has been rediscovered many times by independent researchers.
It also ignores the security implications of the closed-source nature of Google Chrome. It is completely insecure from the end user's point of view (and so are IE and Opera), but Google, of course, funded the evaluation of the vendor's security, of which the user's security is just a small part.
Uh... You have to terraform a planet. A whole new unknown planet, possibly with its own simple carbon-based life.
They should have had plenty of time to fill the galaxy by now.
This is a big unfounded assumption. And while jump-starting life and moving bacteria around may turn out to be easy, moving animals the size of humans to a star system even 20 ly away is already known to be very, very hard. (I mean, mammals could not reach New Zealand for millions of years, and that's another continent, not another star.) And while colonizing deep space is a priority, persisting without a big chunk of rock in the immediate neighborhood is probably a pipe dream. So we should probably think of it as a planet-sized organism (like Earth with its biosphere) casting a seed (a generation ship) to a different star system. One needs to find a planet that's already ripe; being optimistic, there is one within a few dozen ly. One needs to build a big ass ship in deep space, capable of withstanding a several (or many) thousand year journey with a self-sustaining biosphere inside, so probably something like an asteroid several hundred meters in diameter. Then one has to accelerate the sucker with something at least as good as fusion and slowly crawl towards the goal. Just the travel itself is easily 100000 years, and building an ark is a tremendous job as well. Once arrived, colonists cannot hope to propagate again for hundreds of thousands or may be millions of years, since they don't have a planet backing them, so there is more downtime.
Think about what I like calling a "hop time": the mean duration needed for a generation ship to colonize a planet, build a new generation ship, and travel to the next system. It's gotta be pretty big, may be a million years, may be 10. So if someone has a billion years on us, they may be on their 100-1000th hop. They are but a smidgen, may be as big as the width of the galactic disk. And if they are on the other side of the galaxy, we may not run into them for another few billion years.
I believe that taxing the Internet causes much more harm to the economy than the money that can be gained.
Why do you believe that? What I am saying, taxing the Internet does not even begin to compare with censoring the Internet. I would much rather have the former. IMHO, it is strictly better than Copyright. Copyright is a way to reward publishers, distributors, and artists (in that order) for their work. The money is being obtained at the distribution stage. There is some consistency to taxing the raw Internet access (while abolishing non-commercial copyright): they would still be getting money out of the distribution stage, sans the intellectual monopoly. Here's a more specific proposal of the same nature.
I fail to see how copyright is unethical. Sure, lifetime+70 years is as unethical as it can get,
Yes, that's enough to vindicate my statement, isn't it? But beyond the obscene length of the copyright, there is also the matter of domain. Is it ethical to allow to copyright research pertaining to a life-saving drug? Or a piece of software that can save billions of dollars for a developing country? As soon as you leave the domain of pure entertainment, ugly ethical questions come up, especially with regards to non-commercial infringement. I agree with you on this narrow ground though: something like a 5-year copyright on works of pure art is perfectly fine. And a 5-year copyright on anything is suboptimal, but could be a decent compromise.
if the intertubes are being taxed to pay for the production of french culture or something, ISP subscribers can download it without legal worry, right?
One should hope. While some people laugh at France's [1] conviction that art should be sponsored by the government, to me it does look like a more ethical alternative to copyright. Provided, of course, that there is no such thing as "non-commercial infringement". I would much rather pay a flat art tax and not be censored on the Internet than endure any more copyright legislation.
[1] Russia's too. Some countries are just like that.
In what sense do mathematical objects not exist? The physical sense? I am agnostic about that. Philosophically speaking, the world could turn out to be a giant continuous massively parallel computation, and then physics IS math, and nothing BUT mathematical objects exists. I can't think of any way to test for that. Although I have to admit, a non-math universe may seem more credible simply because we can't even begin to draw a mathematical theory of everything. All of the current theories seem to break down at some scales and/or energy levels, so may be we live in an ultimately chaotic universe with some statistical leanings.
This is an awful advice which ignores everything the submitter asked for. http://www.practicalstats.com/xlsstats/excelstats.html
Software is a spirit of the machine. Morality applies to it just as well as it does to people. Flash player was programmed to be a jerk, and so it jerks its users around when it's not spying on them.
The year of desktop was 1995. Let's move on already. Free software is more ethical than the alternative and is less of a dick to the end user regardless of what it runs on.
Intriguing.
I really like PS, even as a programming language. Somehow it reminds me of the Logo turtle. But my point is, both PS and PDF kind of suck for online scientific "papers". They are hard to flow, they lack the content layer, and are very hard for robots to read.
PDFs are great for scientific papers.
Only for printing. The difference between PDF (produced from something like LaTeX) and XHTML+MATHML+SVG is that
(1) PDF is paginated nicely, which is essential for printing, and an obvious minus for on-screen viewing.
(2) PDF has lost the content layer, which is nearly irrelevant for printing, and unforgivable for on-screen viewing.
What you really need for scientific papers is a large page that can flexibly display full color text and images. PDF is one of the best ways to describe a printable version, but it's a far cry from the best way to describe an on-line document .
Regardless, I wonder if ISS denizens are already haunted by astroapes' ghosts.
I said "trash" in jest. IANAL, but on an intuitive level, it is questionable that this property was "abandoned". Leaving it behind was a strategic decision by NASA leadership: bringing it back now would be needlessly expensive, would pose additional risk to astronauts' well being, and wouldn't provide any scientific value. Just because something was left on the surface of the Moon doesn't make it abandoned. The flag, for example, wasn't "abandoned"; do you want to argue with that? I would be totally on NASA's side if they were to argue that things like plastic bags were abandoned, but historically interesting scientific equipment was not. If we get a bit more technical, was all the equipment left "in such a condition that it is apparent that [the owner] has no intention of returning to claim it"? Unless melted by the Sun or crushed by a meteorite, all of that junk will still be in absolute mint condition thousands of years from now.
And I certainly don't feel the pain of astronauts who try to make money by selling equipment they brought from the Moon, especially if it was in violation of the mission objectives. Walking on the Moon at the taxpayers' expense already seems like a very generous reward for their work.
It's funny, but IMHO not true. Barring a cataclysmic event, Moon will surely be colonized within a few millenniums, and all of that trash will have tremendous historical value. I don't see how anyone but NASA has a legitimate claim to it, and I would much rather see these items in a public museum than locked up in some collector's private stash.
i think you need to go recheck the demand for linux pre-installed, because the demand really is tiny, if it is so massive, why does dell only have a few pcs that have it?
How do you define "just a few"? Dell's small business portal has 4 laptops with Ubuntu, 20 desktops with FreeDOS (read: Linux-ready), and, as far as I can tell, every server can be shipped with either SUSE or RedHat. Sure, the demand falls off as you get closer to mobiles, but it's not tiny, and on the server side is truly is massive.
The days when Microsoft could strongarm manufacturers of generic hardware are over. So you won't be able to put GNU/Linux on Microsoft's new TV / Web browser / Game console combo-box, do you care? This is about as bad for the consumer as not being able to run HURD on the latest XBOX. The demand for x86-based hardware certified for Linux ain't going away, no matter what Microsoft will do. They lost in productivity and will have to retreat into entertainment.
Why is that a problem? So Microsoft (and Apple too, btw) are transitioning away from a general-purpose OS and towards an entertainment platform for rent. Windows and OS X are on a convergent evolutionary path with whatever runs on playstations and game spheres. They are becoming closed, restricted systems which you cannot open without voiding the warranty, tethered to the mothership, with their functionality carefully trimmed, and the application market moated off from the real world. I, for one, don't give a rat's ass. I don't use their software, and I won't buy their hardware. It's not like hardware manufacturers will stop making computers that can run Linux: the demand is massive, and it keeps rising. Even squares like Dell will sell you laptops, workstations, and servers with Ubuntu preinstalled, through their small (and up) business portal. And then you have people like these (I cannot endorse these vendors since I never used them.). I say, let them do it: let Microsoft write themselves out of the productivity market and into the abject irrelevance of Web-based cinema and games.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/
"teach me physics, without any of that tedious math stuff"
Start by reading something on Intelligent Falling, and go from there.
Darn, my mod points just expired :) This is pretty much exactly what the OP asked for. Although, OP said "I also don't want some pirate coming along and stealing it out of public domain", so may be CC BY-SA is more up to the task. It all depends on whether derivative works that go beyond verbatim quotation are desirable.
I love Lighting and use it as my only calendar + planner. My number one feature request is actually for Thunderbird as a whole: give us a Web interface already. I am tired of tunneling this monster.
Yeah it would be nice if it could replace a wife, but until it can satisfy a man like a girlfriend would, I can't recommend it.
This is crazy, as in a crazy bad value. iPad is just a toy. An $800 toy that spies on you for Apple Corp. Instead, and for half as much, they could have given every kid something like a Dell Mini with Ubuntu.