>>Simply because time is a continuous and in the black hole event horizon, time doesn't flow. If you stay at the horizon, your clock doesn't go forward nor backward. Therefore as time is continuous, time must go backwards in the black hole, because it goes forward outside the black hole.
Well that sounds very neat and I'm sure any moderator with no knowledge of GR will mod you up. Unfortunately, though, if you do the maths you will discover that time does not run backwards inside a black hole. As someone pointed out, at the event horizon time does not stop for a local observer, but it appears to stop from the viewpoint of someone observing the horizon from outside.
Inside the black hole, what happens is even stranger than time running backwards. As you are no doubt aware, spacetime has 4 dimensions: 3 of space and one of time. Inside the black hole, the time dimension is swapped with one of the space dimensions - the radial dimension pointing at the centre of the hole. (For a spherical black hole, the maths is easiest in polar coordinates so your spatial dimensions are radial, axial and azimuthal rather than x, y and z). Because it's now a time-like dimension, and time marches ever onwards, you are inevitably drawn along the radial direction into the centre of the black hole; you can no more escape it than you can stop time locally. On the other hand, time has now become a spatial dimension, so presumably you can move along the time axis freely (until you hit the centre of the black hole and are crushed into nothingness).
That's what the maths says anyway. What it means philosophically (and biologically) to have your dimensions switched round is another question, and quite beyond my imagining.
>>We walked out of my office, down a flight of stairs, and 50 feet to my car, where I popped the trunk and dropped the bag right in. Size and weight of the computer are meaningless because I seldom carry it for more than 2 minutes at a time.
Well its lucky the Russians didn't have a doomsday device ready, or who knows what might have happened. Or maybe they did and were going to announce it at the part congress the next week?
Double inaccuracy... first of all, the millenium bridge was by Lord Foster, not Sir Foster (if you think such details are irrelevant, try talking about Congressman Kerry and Prime Minister Bush). And secondly, it was never found to be dangerous. It was closed temporarily when it was found to sway several feet from side to side under heavy foot traffic due to an unforeseen resonance at around the frequency of human walking. (Frankly, this was the falt of the engineers more than the architect.) This was fixed by adding a few dampers and now it's perfectly steady.
escape velocity orbits are a special case - anything less than escape velocity and you're right, the angle you start out with is important because (thanks to conservation of angular momentum), a non-vertical launch can never attain zero velocity and results in an elliptical orbit. But escape velocity orbits are a limiting case in which the ellipse becomes a parabola - angular momentum is conserved by the sideways velocity component becoming ever less as infinity is approached.
See http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~vawter/PhysicsNet/Topics/Gr avity/ConicOrbits.html for a nice expose of orbit types and velocity as a function of radius. If you start with v=sqroot[2GM/r](i.e. escape velocity) you'll always be travelling along a trajectory corresponding to a parabolic orbit.
>>If you don't go straight up, you will need more velocity to escape gravity...you need to head in a direction that is directly opposite the center of the earth. (To a first approximation.) If you don't then you will not maximize the speed at which you move away from the earth's center.
That sounds sensible, but it's not true. Think about it in terms of energy. Escape velocity is simply the minimum speed at which an object's kinetic energy is sufficient to escape the Earth's gravitational well: i.e. the point at which kinetic energy equals potential energy. Direction is irrelevent to this calculation: if you are moving with escape velocity, there is not enough pull in the gravitational field to stop you escaping whichever direction you start out.
An intuitive way of thinking about it is to remember that escape velocity is the speed required to get to infinity. Obviously to get to any given distance above the earth's surface, the shortest distance is to head directly up - but the percentage difference in distance decreases the further away you need to go (the maximum difference in real terms is limited by the earth's diameter, since the longest way is to head straight down instead of straight up). But when your destination is infinity, any fixed difference in the distance it takes to get there is irrelevent: infinity plus 3000 miles is the same distance as infinity.
Pretty much everything you say flows from waht you take as a given postulate:
>> The primary goal of environmentalism should be to preserve and expand the land area of natural habitat. Liberal environmentalism, on the other hand, has set a whole bunch of additonal goals, such as advancing renewable energy resources, opposing fission, regulating private land use and regulating genetic diversity. These other actually work against expanding natural habitat.
Well, that's your opinion, but many would not agree that the primary goal of environmentalism is to expand the area of national parkland, as you seem to be suggesting.
First, if a problem has global consequences (viz. climate change), your approach is meaningless. There is no 'natural habitat' if sea levels rise and weather patterns change, whether or not land is cultivated.
Second, you assume that it's automatically beneficial to reduce the square mileage of land under human occupation, whatever the side effect. But there's no reason at all why dotting windfarms around hills, or solar panels across the desert, should have a significant impact on the surrounding ecosystems. Animals and plants aren't hung up on aesthetics - they don't care if the windmill spoils the view if they still have access to food, water and shelter. By contrast, fossil fuel plants may look smaller on the map, but they have a far larger environmental impact - you won't find rabbits scrabbling around in the turbine room.
Third, you adopt (as most people do, unthinkingly) the standard Western assumption that natural = no people. That's the sort of thinking that has seen indigenous people forcibly removed from their homes in order to create "nature reserves", in areas where there has been a continuous human presence since the emergence of mankind. Humans are a part of the natural world too. Instead of throwing people out to create "natural habitat", we need to encourage people to live in harmony with their habitat.
Which brings me to number four, GM crops. Yes, GM crops could potentially feed the world, producing more crops on less fertile land. But the only countries to have produced GM crops that do this are Cuba and China. Western biotech isn't interested in feeding the world's poor - no profit in it. And with a food surplus in the West, who needs to increase yields? So instead Monsanto develops "roundup ready" soy, whose key modification is to make the plant resistant to Monsanto "roundup" herbicide, meaning farmers can liberally douse the fields to kill off any hint of biodiversity. That's of no use to a third-world farmer who can't afford herbicide. And of course, because GM crops are patented, the farmer can't do what has been done since the dawn of agriculture -- keep over some seed and replant it the next year. No, they have to buy new seed from the biotech companies every year. In such a system, there's no such thing as subsistence farming -- if you don't sell your crop, you can't afford to plant a crop next year. Given a choice between selling and eating, you have to choose the former.
By the way, are you a vegetarian? If not, I find it hard to take you seriously. After all, the most wasteful use of land in the world is livestock farming (since you need to grow the food to feed the animals). If everyone gave up meat, the amount of land needed for agriculture (and the amount of energy used in agriculture) would fall dramatically.
Was it a deliberate second-order joke on your part to make a sexist joke in such studied gender-neutral terms, or is it unacceptable to say "spokeswomen"/"spokesmen" in any circumstances any more?
(Reminds me of an occasion when a US journalist, interviewing a South African, asked him what it was like to be an "African American" under apartheid. It seems the journalist could not think any other politically acceptable way to say "black"...)
intention is evaluated objectively. if you make a contract with someone you can't go back and say "actually, I was only joking!". If two people exchange emails explicitly agreeing the sale of a powerbook for $2100, never indicating to the other that it's not a genuine transaction, no judge would even begin to think there was not a binding contract. As for returning the item and getting his money back, it wouldn't quite work like that but yes, he has a civil remedy against customs and excise for restitution. That does not stop him from having been defrauded, though. The fact that I can recover my stolen property from an innocent party does not excuse the theft, annd similarly with fraud. And as for the fake escrow site etc...Attempt (in England) requires you to make "more than merely preparatory acts". E.g. in one case a guy was arrested outside a bank with a replica gun and a note demanding money. He was acquitted of attempted robbery because until he went into the bank, he hadn't done more than prepare-if he'd pulled out at that stage, he'd have done nothing wrong. So here, until the guy had actually received the powerbook, he's done nothing wrong because no money was meant to change hands until the powerbook arrived.
Well I am a lawyer, which is why you should take not of what I wrote. I never claimed Ebay, Fedex, Paypal or the government was defrauded. The scammer was defrauded. He paid over money to customs on the basis of the seller's representation that he was shipping a laptop and not a worthless pile of junk. The important part in theft and fraud is that the victim loses something, not that the criminal gains. If someone steals your laptop and chucks it in a river, he doesn't get acquitted because he didn't gain anything. Similarly if someone cheats you into paying money, just because you pay someone else it does not stop it from being fraud.
But then, I guess I should be grateful. It's the way that almost everyone thinks it's OK to screw someone who's screwed you that keeps lawyers in business. If most people had any idea of how the law works, we'd all be out of a job.
Appleworks is just about passable if you don't need to write anything more complicated than a letter or a memo. For any substantial document, it's hopeless. It's the big exception to user friendliness in Apple's product range - trying to get auto-numbered sections or create and use custom paragraph styles is needlessly difficult. And it has a tendency to lose any advanced formatting when importing docs from Word. It took me less than a day to realise that I needed to by Office for mac.
Despite all that's been written above, there's no doubt that our scambuster broke the law. And moreover it doesn't actually seem that the "scammer" did anything illegal (though it seems likely that he was going to).
* The sale was agreed outside ebay, by email. So it's irrelevant that ebay cancelled the auction. There is undoubtedly a binding contract between the author and the "scammer" to sell a powerbook for $2100.
* Any failure on the part of the seller to deliver the powerbook is a breach of contract. Ditto a failure by the buyer to pay. If both fail to do their part, they are both in breach and can sue each other. E.g. say I have a painting that I think is junk and you think is by Van Gogh. I agree to sell it to you for $100. I don't deliver, you don't pay, we're each furious because we each think we got the better part of the deal. We can sue each other. Two legal wrongs do not cancel each other out.
* Our hero has sent the scammer a fake powerbook. That's not only breach of contract, it's misrepresentation (since what he sent did not match the description). And it is also fraud, because he deliberately sent the wrong item. Those are civil offences. As for criminal, it's clear deception - even if our hero gained nothing, he has caused the victim (sorry, scammer) to lose. And I'd imagine lying on a customs form is some form of perjury.
* as for the alleged scammer, what has he done wrong. He's failed to pay for an item he never got. As I said, that's breach of contract, but the damages would be minimal (especially given the scale of our hero's deception). In criminal law, you could charge him with attempted deception. On the other hand, there was no deception involved since our hero knew exactly what was going on and was never deceived. So in actual fact, it looks like our scammer has done nothing criminal.
* regarding jurisdiction, for the breach of contract it may be US or UK, my inclination is US since that appears to be where the offer was accepted. But for the criminal law, the victim/scammer was in the UK the whole time, so it's pretty clear the UK courts have jurisdiction whether ot not the US courts do as well.
So the net result of this brilliant prank is that our hero has committed one or more criminal offences, and the scammer has done practically nothing wrong. Is this the way things should be? I guess that depends on your view of vigilante justice. Funny that at no point does our caped crusader consider reporting anything to the London police (or the FBI, considering a US college professor was apparently involved). Yes, they'd have probably done nothing but he should have at least attempted a legit channel. This scammer may have been burned, but he's not behind bars - do you really think he's going to give up for a few hundred bucks when he's probably already made thousands? And while it looks like this scammer was for real, there's a real danger of copycat "anti-scammer scams" that will end up screwing an innocent party at some point.
Overall, I'd rate this as a pretty childish attempt at revenge which shows a basic disrespect for the norms of society.
"But I would actually have to say that to a degree, they ARE uniquelly american--We are shocked by the French banning veils in schools. We are shocked that in Germany nazi paraphanelia cannot be sold or bought, and we are shocked by some of the speech codes that forbid racist, anti-religious, etc speech. That's not to say that we in America are RIGHT, or that such laws wouldn't actually be beneficial here, but we still maintain these rights (mostly from the bill of rights) as fundamental the "Right" thing to do. And I do believe that that is a signifigant difference."
And on the other side of the pond, we are shocked that you still have the death penalty (and even more shocked that you use it on mentally retarded people). We're shocked that it's legal to refuse a person medical treatment because they can't afford to pay for it. And I could go on.
I think your last sentence is very revealing. Fundamentally, the American concept of "rights" is inseparable from the constitution. If the right isn't listed in a 200-year-old document -- or if the constitution doesn't apply (Guantanamo, Iraq) -- then apparently people have no rights. It's as if for Americans, rights are a fundamentalist religion with the constitution for scripture: inalienable, yes, but also inflexible and with no application to unbelievers. As a result, America assumes that any other concept of rights is incorrect and inferior. Perhaps others in the west have a more inclusive notion - that a person's rights derive from his dignity as a human being, not his citizenship, and that the substance of those rights should reflect the society in which he lives, and not mimic those created 200 years ago for a far-away country.
It's worse than you think. The new pages are clearly added by someone in the Harvard physics dept (all the people mentioned in the story are located there), and don't actually contain much info, they're all stubs as far as I can see. I wouldn't be surprised if that same person then submitted a story to slashdot about the new entries...Funny thing, nowhere in the page for Juan Maldacena does it mention that he is the most sleep-inducing lecturer known to man (I had the misfortune to take his strings class at Harvard). I'll have to get into that wiki page and edit it myself.
>>Considering they're already 20 years behind our shuttle, why copy from our old tech?
I would say RTFA but in this case the article was shite to start with. If you check out New Scientist's much fuller version, you'll see that the full-sized version will be an unmanned vehicule launched on a sled from a 4-km long track, which will be either magnetic or steam-propelled. That's pretty different from Shuttle technology: acceleration is done on the launch track and powered from the ground using non-explosive, non-polluting propellants. So it needs no booster rockets and very little fuel carried on board, meaning
* much higher payload-to-launch weight, so much more economic. No wasting energycarrying booster rockets and fuel half way into orbit.
* nothing to explode during launch if things go wrong
* environmentally benign fuels
* no humans on board so less need to keep temperatures down during landing, so less heat shielding problems.
So the only thing it's got in common with the shuttle is a glide back to base. Read more at http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94975 (I'm too lazy to make it a link).
It's bad enough MIT breaking with tradition and giving the building a name*. But calling it after a Harvard drop-out...the humiliation.
*For the uninitiated, MIT buildings are almost always referred to by number. The main entrance on Mass Ave has the glorious name of Lobby 12. (Or was it 7...it's been a few years)
I'm sorry, the GPL is undoubtedly a contract, since there is consideration from both sides. If it were a non-contractual license, it would have to be of the form "I give you the right to do X, without you having to do anything in return". Since the GPL expressly makes demands of both sides, it is a contractual license. It will only be binding on those who have notice of its terms. To use your river example, if you decide to charge for fishing rights and make all sorts of conditions, then they will only be enforceable against people who know about them. If e.g. you don't put up a sign, or you put up a sign in an obscure place no-one looks, then by fishing on your, and without permission I'm a trespasser, sure, but I'm not bound by any of your conditions. You can chuck me off your land, but you can't sue me for drinking light beer on a tuesday--only for trespass.
It's exactly the same with the GPL. If I have no knowledge (actual or constructive) that a program is GPL'd, I cannot be bound by any of the terms of the GPL. I am only bound by the ordinary provisions of copyright law.
'No, "distributing without permission" is a copyright violation, regardless of what other rights the copyright owner chooses to grant. The other terms of the license are irrelevant - if you don't have permission to distribute, then it's a violation to distribute, period.'
What I actually said was that distributing without permission is a copyright violation, but it is not automatically a breach of the GPL. Where the GPL for some reason is found not to apply (e.g. lack of notice), distribution will remain a breach of copyright, but there will be no comeback under the GPL.
If I take your code, without realising it is GPL'd, and modify it, then your only rights against me are those given by copyright: sue for damages and stop me using/distributing modified code. But you cannot make me release my modified source code -- that is a requirement of the GPL, not basic copyright law.
It's too simplistic to say that a court case will either confirm or deny the validity of the GPL. As always, the court will focus on the minutiae of the situation. It's very rare for a court to say "this contract is not legally enforceable in any situation" (unless the contract is for an illegal purpose or is so vague as to be meaningless). More likely, if a court rules against enforcement of the GPL in a case, it will cite some factual item in support. E.g. that the recipient of the software did not have proper notice of the license - quite possible if a company hires an outside programmer to do some work on some GPL'd code. Sure the GPL would bind the programmer, but it might not bind the company if they'd never looked at the source code or even realised the software was GPL.
It's no use (as is claimed in the paper) to say that the company had no right to distribute the software except under the GPL. That doesn't mean it's accepted the GPL by the act of distributing the software, if it has no knowledge of the GPL. That argument is like saying if I steal something, I must have agreed to buy it (since otherwise it would not be mine) and am in breach of contract for not paying for it. While someone distributing software without permission is in breach of copyright, it's different to distributing software in breach of the GPL. In the former, the copyright owner can stop distribution/use of the code, but he can't compel the distributer to release the source code, nor to hand over copyright in the modifications made to the code.
I was amazed to discover that calculus isn't an integral part of studying maths in American high schools. In the UK (at least when I was at school, 10 years back), trig and most of the rest of what americans call "pre calc" is examined at 16. If you choose to stick with maths after that (and anyone who wants to study science at university pretty much has to), you'll get a pretty good grasp of calculus and ODEs. In my first semester at university, all science students were plunged straight into multivariate calculus and PDEs. Sure, a lot of students struggled (and specialised in bio as soon as possinle), but the point of university is not to pass courses. It's to learn something.
>>Educated users are key, but because Microsoft has the largest market share, they also get the largest number of uneducated users. What will happen if Linux eventually completely replaces MS products on the desktop? Will they have the same security problems?
No, because uneducated users will never figure out how to get a network connection.
I have an even better explanation: it never existed. The main "source" for Atlantis is a description by Plato - a philosopher, not a historian. He was probably using it as a metaphor for his ideas on government. There might have been legends about it before, but there are plenty of legendary places that never existed - or if they did exist, bear little actual resemblance to the legend. There are enough known "lost" civilisations that could have given rise to such a myth without having to invent a large island that sank below the waves.
If I was this guy, I'd put off looking for Atlantis until they've found the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If he's looking to kill time, he can always join the search for Noah's ark...
I get the feeling you don't spend much time in the kitchen. Oven or fridge doors hinged at the top? Firstly you'd need to move the oven/fridge to head height for it not to get in the way, so you have to lift up the food to put it in. Second, oven doors opening down give you a convenient place to rest dishes when turning/basting etc. (Also what is the logic that argues it's more energy efficient to have both oven and fridge doors opening upwards? if hot air rises and cold air falls, shouldn't the fridge door open downwards?
Also it makes more sense to have the freezer on top, so you can concentrate the cooling on the freezer and let the natural airflow cool the fridge. (Just like when heating, you put the source on the bottom, when cooling, you put the refrigeration element on the top).
This might be what the RIAA and equivalents want you to think, but it's not the law. The reason is the "first sale" doctrine of copyright law. Once a song has been legally marketed & sold, then the copyright owner loses most rights over resale/reimportation. E.g. If you go to a Russian music store and buy a bunch of cheap (legal) CDs, then you don't need the RIAA's permission to bring those CDs back into the US. The copyright in that CD, at least as far as the right to profit from its sale, has been exhausted. Similarly, if you go to Russia and legally download a lot of songs to your laptop from a Russian website, you can bring those songs back to the US.
Now the difference here is that you're actually buying the songs on a Russian website without leaving the US. But legally, that doesn't really matter - it's pretty clear that for long-distance transactions, the transaction takes place at the point where it is received, not where it is sent. E.g. if you order something by phone or fax, the transaction takes place where the call/fax is received. There seems to be no reason why this should be different on the internet though I can't pretend to have checked if there are any cases on it.
Of course, it's pretty clear what will happen. All the US record labels will change their licensing deals in Russia to prevent services like these being offered - i.e. it will be a breach of allofmp3.com's license for them to sell songs outside to people based outside Russia. In other words, exactly the same deal iTunes reached with the record labels that stops them selling songs outside the US. So better get your MP3s from Russia while you still can
Slashdot Mirror
>>Simply because time is a continuous and in the black hole event horizon, time doesn't flow. If you stay at the horizon, your clock doesn't go forward nor backward. Therefore as time is continuous, time must go backwards in the black hole, because it goes forward outside the black hole.
Well that sounds very neat and I'm sure any moderator with no knowledge of GR will mod you up. Unfortunately, though, if you do the maths you will discover that time does not run backwards inside a black hole. As someone pointed out, at the event horizon time does not stop for a local observer, but it appears to stop from the viewpoint of someone observing the horizon from outside.
Inside the black hole, what happens is even stranger than time running backwards. As you are no doubt aware, spacetime has 4 dimensions: 3 of space and one of time. Inside the black hole, the time dimension is swapped with one of the space dimensions - the radial dimension pointing at the centre of the hole. (For a spherical black hole, the maths is easiest in polar coordinates so your spatial dimensions are radial, axial and azimuthal rather than x, y and z). Because it's now a time-like dimension, and time marches ever onwards, you are inevitably drawn along the radial direction into the centre of the black hole; you can no more escape it than you can stop time locally. On the other hand, time has now become a spatial dimension, so presumably you can move along the time axis freely (until you hit the centre of the black hole and are crushed into nothingness).
That's what the maths says anyway. What it means philosophically (and biologically) to have your dimensions switched round is another question, and quite beyond my imagining.
>>We walked out of my office, down a flight of stairs, and 50 feet to my car, where I popped the trunk and dropped the bag right in. Size and weight of the computer are meaningless because I seldom carry it for more than 2 minutes at a time.
My guess is you're not getting enough exercise.
Well its lucky the Russians didn't have a doomsday device ready, or who knows what might have happened. Or maybe they did and were going to announce it at the part congress the next week?
Double inaccuracy... first of all, the millenium bridge was by Lord Foster, not Sir Foster (if you think such details are irrelevant, try talking about Congressman Kerry and Prime Minister Bush). And secondly, it was never found to be dangerous. It was closed temporarily when it was found to sway several feet from side to side under heavy foot traffic due to an unforeseen resonance at around the frequency of human walking. (Frankly, this was the falt of the engineers more than the architect.) This was fixed by adding a few dampers and now it's perfectly steady.
escape velocity orbits are a special case - anything less than escape velocity and you're right, the angle you start out with is important because (thanks to conservation of angular momentum), a non-vertical launch can never attain zero velocity and results in an elliptical orbit. But escape velocity orbits are a limiting case in which the ellipse becomes a parabola - angular momentum is conserved by the sideways velocity component becoming ever less as infinity is approached.
See http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~vawter/PhysicsNet/Topics/G
>>If you don't go straight up, you will need more velocity to escape gravity...you need to head in a direction that is directly opposite the center of the earth. (To a first approximation.) If you don't then you will not maximize the speed at which you move away from the earth's center.
That sounds sensible, but it's not true. Think about it in terms of energy. Escape velocity is simply the minimum speed at which an object's kinetic energy is sufficient to escape the Earth's gravitational well: i.e. the point at which kinetic energy equals potential energy. Direction is irrelevent to this calculation: if you are moving with escape velocity, there is not enough pull in the gravitational field to stop you escaping whichever direction you start out.
An intuitive way of thinking about it is to remember that escape velocity is the speed required to get to infinity. Obviously to get to any given distance above the earth's surface, the shortest distance is to head directly up - but the percentage difference in distance decreases the further away you need to go (the maximum difference in real terms is limited by the earth's diameter, since the longest way is to head straight down instead of straight up). But when your destination is infinity, any fixed difference in the distance it takes to get there is irrelevent: infinity plus 3000 miles is the same distance as infinity.
Pretty much everything you say flows from waht you take as a given postulate:
>> The primary goal of environmentalism should be to preserve and expand the land area of natural habitat. Liberal environmentalism, on the other hand, has set a whole bunch of additonal goals, such as advancing renewable energy resources, opposing fission, regulating private land use and regulating genetic diversity. These other actually work against expanding natural habitat.
Well, that's your opinion, but many would not agree that the primary goal of environmentalism is to expand the area of national parkland, as you seem to be suggesting.
First, if a problem has global consequences (viz. climate change), your approach is meaningless. There is no 'natural habitat' if sea levels rise and weather patterns change, whether or not land is cultivated.
Second, you assume that it's automatically beneficial to reduce the square mileage of land under human occupation, whatever the side effect. But there's no reason at all why dotting windfarms around hills, or solar panels across the desert, should have a significant impact on the surrounding ecosystems. Animals and plants aren't hung up on aesthetics - they don't care if the windmill spoils the view if they still have access to food, water and shelter. By contrast, fossil fuel plants may look smaller on the map, but they have a far larger environmental impact - you won't find rabbits scrabbling around in the turbine room.
Third, you adopt (as most people do, unthinkingly) the standard Western assumption that natural = no people. That's the sort of thinking that has seen indigenous people forcibly removed from their homes in order to create "nature reserves", in areas where there has been a continuous human presence since the emergence of mankind. Humans are a part of the natural world too. Instead of throwing people out to create "natural habitat", we need to encourage people to live in harmony with their habitat.
Which brings me to number four, GM crops. Yes, GM crops could potentially feed the world, producing more crops on less fertile land. But the only countries to have produced GM crops that do this are Cuba and China. Western biotech isn't interested in feeding the world's poor - no profit in it. And with a food surplus in the West, who needs to increase yields? So instead Monsanto develops "roundup ready" soy, whose key modification is to make the plant resistant to Monsanto "roundup" herbicide, meaning farmers can liberally douse the fields to kill off any hint of biodiversity. That's of no use to a third-world farmer who can't afford herbicide. And of course, because GM crops are patented, the farmer can't do what has been done since the dawn of agriculture -- keep over some seed and replant it the next year. No, they have to buy new seed from the biotech companies every year. In such a system, there's no such thing as subsistence farming -- if you don't sell your crop, you can't afford to plant a crop next year. Given a choice between selling and eating, you have to choose the former.
By the way, are you a vegetarian? If not, I find it hard to take you seriously. After all, the most wasteful use of land in the world is livestock farming (since you need to grow the food to feed the animals). If everyone gave up meat, the amount of land needed for agriculture (and the amount of energy used in agriculture) would fall dramatically.
>>female corporate spokespersons
Was it a deliberate second-order joke on your part to make a sexist joke in such studied gender-neutral terms, or is it unacceptable to say "spokeswomen"/"spokesmen" in any circumstances any more?
(Reminds me of an occasion when a US journalist, interviewing a South African, asked him what it was like to be an "African American" under apartheid. It seems the journalist could not think any other politically acceptable way to say "black"...)
intention is evaluated objectively. if you make a contract with someone you can't go back and say "actually, I was only joking!". If two people exchange emails explicitly agreeing the sale of a powerbook for $2100, never indicating to the other that it's not a genuine transaction, no judge would even begin to think there was not a binding contract. As for returning the item and getting his money back, it wouldn't quite work like that but yes, he has a civil remedy against customs and excise for restitution. That does not stop him from having been defrauded, though. The fact that I can recover my stolen property from an innocent party does not excuse the theft, annd similarly with fraud. And as for the fake escrow site etc...Attempt (in England) requires you to make "more than merely preparatory acts". E.g. in one case a guy was arrested outside a bank with a replica gun and a note demanding money. He was acquitted of attempted robbery because until he went into the bank, he hadn't done more than prepare-if he'd pulled out at that stage, he'd have done nothing wrong. So here, until the guy had actually received the powerbook, he's done nothing wrong because no money was meant to change hands until the powerbook arrived.
Well I am a lawyer, which is why you should take not of what I wrote. I never claimed Ebay, Fedex, Paypal or the government was defrauded. The scammer was defrauded. He paid over money to customs on the basis of the seller's representation that he was shipping a laptop and not a worthless pile of junk. The important part in theft and fraud is that the victim loses something, not that the criminal gains. If someone steals your laptop and chucks it in a river, he doesn't get acquitted because he didn't gain anything. Similarly if someone cheats you into paying money, just because you pay someone else it does not stop it from being fraud.
But then, I guess I should be grateful. It's the way that almost everyone thinks it's OK to screw someone who's screwed you that keeps lawyers in business. If most people had any idea of how the law works, we'd all be out of a job.
nanometre-sized organisms reproducing: obviously it's grey goo. Some evil genius has built a molecular assembler and released it on the world.
Appleworks is just about passable if you don't need to write anything more complicated than a letter or a memo. For any substantial document, it's hopeless. It's the big exception to user friendliness in Apple's product range - trying to get auto-numbered sections or create and use custom paragraph styles is needlessly difficult. And it has a tendency to lose any advanced formatting when importing docs from Word. It took me less than a day to realise that I needed to by Office for mac.
Despite all that's been written above, there's no doubt that our scambuster broke the law. And moreover it doesn't actually seem that the "scammer" did anything illegal (though it seems likely that he was going to).
* The sale was agreed outside ebay, by email. So it's irrelevant that ebay cancelled the auction. There is undoubtedly a binding contract between the author and the "scammer" to sell a powerbook for $2100.
* Any failure on the part of the seller to deliver the powerbook is a breach of contract. Ditto a failure by the buyer to pay. If both fail to do their part, they are both in breach and can sue each other. E.g. say I have a painting that I think is junk and you think is by Van Gogh. I agree to sell it to you for $100. I don't deliver, you don't pay, we're each furious because we each think we got the better part of the deal. We can sue each other. Two legal wrongs do not cancel each other out.
* Our hero has sent the scammer a fake powerbook. That's not only breach of contract, it's misrepresentation (since what he sent did not match the description). And it is also fraud, because he deliberately sent the wrong item. Those are civil offences. As for criminal, it's clear deception - even if our hero gained nothing, he has caused the victim (sorry, scammer) to lose. And I'd imagine lying on a customs form is some form of perjury.
* as for the alleged scammer, what has he done wrong. He's failed to pay for an item he never got. As I said, that's breach of contract, but the damages would be minimal (especially given the scale of our hero's deception). In criminal law, you could charge him with attempted deception. On the other hand, there was no deception involved since our hero knew exactly what was going on and was never deceived. So in actual fact, it looks like our scammer has done nothing criminal.
* regarding jurisdiction, for the breach of contract it may be US or UK, my inclination is US since that appears to be where the offer was accepted. But for the criminal law, the victim/scammer was in the UK the whole time, so it's pretty clear the UK courts have jurisdiction whether ot not the US courts do as well.
So the net result of this brilliant prank is that our hero has committed one or more criminal offences, and the scammer has done practically nothing wrong. Is this the way things should be? I guess that depends on your view of vigilante justice. Funny that at no point does our caped crusader consider reporting anything to the London police (or the FBI, considering a US college professor was apparently involved). Yes, they'd have probably done nothing but he should have at least attempted a legit channel. This scammer may have been burned, but he's not behind bars - do you really think he's going to give up for a few hundred bucks when he's probably already made thousands? And while it looks like this scammer was for real, there's a real danger of copycat "anti-scammer scams" that will end up screwing an innocent party at some point.
Overall, I'd rate this as a pretty childish attempt at revenge which shows a basic disrespect for the norms of society.
"But I would actually have to say that to a degree, they ARE uniquelly american--We are shocked by the French banning veils in schools. We are shocked that in Germany nazi paraphanelia cannot be sold or bought, and we are shocked by some of the speech codes that forbid racist, anti-religious, etc speech. That's not to say that we in America are RIGHT, or that such laws wouldn't actually be beneficial here, but we still maintain these rights (mostly from the bill of rights) as fundamental the "Right" thing to do. And I do believe that that is a signifigant difference."
And on the other side of the pond, we are shocked that you still have the death penalty (and even more shocked that you use it on mentally retarded people). We're shocked that it's legal to refuse a person medical treatment because they can't afford to pay for it. And I could go on.
I think your last sentence is very revealing. Fundamentally, the American concept of "rights" is inseparable from the constitution. If the right isn't listed in a 200-year-old document -- or if the constitution doesn't apply (Guantanamo, Iraq) -- then apparently people have no rights. It's as if for Americans, rights are a fundamentalist religion with the constitution for scripture: inalienable, yes, but also inflexible and with no application to unbelievers. As a result, America assumes that any other concept of rights is incorrect and inferior. Perhaps others in the west have a more inclusive notion - that a person's rights derive from his dignity as a human being, not his citizenship, and that the substance of those rights should reflect the society in which he lives, and not mimic those created 200 years ago for a far-away country.
It's worse than you think. The new pages are clearly added by someone in the Harvard physics dept (all the people mentioned in the story are located there), and don't actually contain much info, they're all stubs as far as I can see. I wouldn't be surprised if that same person then submitted a story to slashdot about the new entries...Funny thing, nowhere in the page for Juan Maldacena does it mention that he is the most sleep-inducing lecturer known to man (I had the misfortune to take his strings class at Harvard). I'll have to get into that wiki page and edit it myself.
>>Considering they're already 20 years behind our shuttle, why copy from our old tech?
I would say RTFA but in this case the article was shite to start with. If you check out New Scientist's much fuller version, you'll see that the full-sized version will be an unmanned vehicule launched on a sled from a 4-km long track, which will be either magnetic or steam-propelled. That's pretty different from Shuttle technology: acceleration is done on the launch track and powered from the ground using non-explosive, non-polluting propellants. So it needs no booster rockets and very little fuel carried on board, meaning
* much higher payload-to-launch weight, so much more economic. No wasting energycarrying booster rockets and fuel half way into orbit.
* nothing to explode during launch if things go wrong
* environmentally benign fuels
* no humans on board so less need to keep temperatures down during landing, so less heat shielding problems.
So the only thing it's got in common with the shuttle is a glide back to base. Read more at http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
It's bad enough MIT breaking with tradition and giving the building a name*. But calling it after a Harvard drop-out...the humiliation.
*For the uninitiated, MIT buildings are almost always referred to by number. The main entrance on Mass Ave has the glorious name of Lobby 12. (Or was it 7...it's been a few years)
I hope that slashdot is not one of the sources you use when researching Google Answers...
I'm sorry, the GPL is undoubtedly a contract, since there is consideration from both sides. If it were a non-contractual license, it would have to be of the form "I give you the right to do X, without you having to do anything in return". Since the GPL expressly makes demands of both sides, it is a contractual license. It will only be binding on those who have notice of its terms.
To use your river example, if you decide to charge for fishing rights and make all sorts of conditions, then they will only be enforceable against people who know about them. If e.g. you don't put up a sign, or you put up a sign in an obscure place no-one looks, then by fishing on your, and without permission I'm a trespasser, sure, but I'm not bound by any of your conditions. You can chuck me off your land, but you can't sue me for drinking light beer on a tuesday--only for trespass.
It's exactly the same with the GPL. If I have no knowledge (actual or constructive) that a program is GPL'd, I cannot be bound by any of the terms of the GPL. I am only bound by the ordinary provisions of copyright law.
'No, "distributing without permission" is a copyright violation, regardless of what other rights the copyright owner chooses to grant. The other terms of the license are irrelevant - if you don't have permission to distribute, then it's a violation to distribute, period.'
What I actually said was that distributing without permission is a copyright violation, but it is not automatically a breach of the GPL. Where the GPL for some reason is found not to apply (e.g. lack of notice), distribution will remain a breach of copyright, but there will be no comeback under the GPL.
If I take your code, without realising it is GPL'd, and modify it, then your only rights against me are those given by copyright: sue for damages and stop me using/distributing modified code. But you cannot make me release my modified source code -- that is a requirement of the GPL, not basic copyright law.
It's too simplistic to say that a court case will either confirm or deny the validity of the GPL. As always, the court will focus on the minutiae of the situation. It's very rare for a court to say "this contract is not legally enforceable in any situation" (unless the contract is for an illegal purpose or is so vague as to be meaningless). More likely, if a court rules against enforcement of the GPL in a case, it will cite some factual item in support. E.g. that the recipient of the software did not have proper notice of the license - quite possible if a company hires an outside programmer to do some work on some GPL'd code. Sure the GPL would bind the programmer, but it might not bind the company if they'd never looked at the source code or even realised the software was GPL.
It's no use (as is claimed in the paper) to say that the company had no right to distribute the software except under the GPL. That doesn't mean it's accepted the GPL by the act of distributing the software, if it has no knowledge of the GPL. That argument is like saying if I steal something, I must have agreed to buy it (since otherwise it would not be mine) and am in breach of contract for not paying for it. While someone distributing software without permission is in breach of copyright, it's different to distributing software in breach of the GPL. In the former, the copyright owner can stop distribution/use of the code, but he can't compel the distributer to release the source code, nor to hand over copyright in the modifications made to the code.
I was amazed to discover that calculus isn't an integral part of studying maths in American high schools. In the UK (at least when I was at school, 10 years back), trig and most of the rest of what americans call "pre calc" is examined at 16. If you choose to stick with maths after that (and anyone who wants to study science at university pretty much has to), you'll get a pretty good grasp of calculus and ODEs. In my first semester at university, all science students were plunged straight into multivariate calculus and PDEs. Sure, a lot of students struggled (and specialised in bio as soon as possinle), but the point of university is not to pass courses. It's to learn something.
>>Educated users are key, but because Microsoft has the largest market share, they also get the largest number of uneducated users. What will happen if Linux eventually completely replaces MS products on the desktop? Will they have the same security problems?
No, because uneducated users will never figure out how to get a network connection.
I have an even better explanation: it never existed. The main "source" for Atlantis is a description by Plato - a philosopher, not a historian. He was probably using it as a metaphor for his ideas on government. There might have been legends about it before, but there are plenty of legendary places that never existed - or if they did exist, bear little actual resemblance to the legend. There are enough known "lost" civilisations that could have given rise to such a myth without having to invent a large island that sank below the waves.
If I was this guy, I'd put off looking for Atlantis until they've found the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If he's looking to kill time, he can always join the search for Noah's ark...
I get the feeling you don't spend much time in the kitchen. Oven or fridge doors hinged at the top? Firstly you'd need to move the oven/fridge to head height for it not to get in the way, so you have to lift up the food to put it in. Second, oven doors opening down give you a convenient place to rest dishes when turning/basting etc. (Also what is the logic that argues it's more energy efficient to have both oven and fridge doors opening upwards? if hot air rises and cold air falls, shouldn't the fridge door open downwards?
Also it makes more sense to have the freezer on top, so you can concentrate the cooling on the freezer and let the natural airflow cool the fridge. (Just like when heating, you put the source on the bottom, when cooling, you put the refrigeration element on the top).
This might be what the RIAA and equivalents want you to think, but it's not the law. The reason is the "first sale" doctrine of copyright law. Once a song has been legally marketed & sold, then the copyright owner loses most rights over resale/reimportation. E.g. If you go to a Russian music store and buy a bunch of cheap (legal) CDs, then you don't need the RIAA's permission to bring those CDs back into the US. The copyright in that CD, at least as far as the right to profit from its sale, has been exhausted. Similarly, if you go to Russia and legally download a lot of songs to your laptop from a Russian website, you can bring those songs back to the US.
Now the difference here is that you're actually buying the songs on a Russian website without leaving the US. But legally, that doesn't really matter - it's pretty clear that for long-distance transactions, the transaction takes place at the point where it is received, not where it is sent. E.g. if you order something by phone or fax, the transaction takes place where the call/fax is received. There seems to be no reason why this should be different on the internet though I can't pretend to have checked if there are any cases on it.
Of course, it's pretty clear what will happen. All the US record labels will change their licensing deals in Russia to prevent services like these being offered - i.e. it will be a breach of allofmp3.com's license for them to sell songs outside to people based outside Russia. In other words, exactly the same deal iTunes reached with the record labels that stops them selling songs outside the US. So better get your MP3s from Russia while you still can