I'm not familiar with the details, but at first sight, I don't see a problem with those statements.
Remember, this is an atom interferometry. The "beam" refers to a beam of atoms. It's the wavefunction of the atoms that are being used to produce the signal, not the laser (which is the more garden-variety interferometry like one used in LIGO). From the description I get in the abstract, it sounds like they first laser-cool the atoms in a trap (probably magnetic, as the atoms used are frequently paramagnetic and can be trapped), then release the trap letting the atoms drop.
If you have a laser in the atom's path, by appropriately tuning the laser you can produce repulsive force on the atoms (I forget whether this has to be blue-shifted or red-shifted from the transition, but either way it can be done), so much like a rod in a stream, it will force the atoms to take one path or another as it drops under gravity.
The actual scheme in the experiment is probably way more complicated than this (they do claim factor of 2500 increase in the area covered, so the atoms must travel longer somehow), but it's nothing ridiculous. Maybe a little too technical for someone who's not an atomic physicist to grasp immediately.
Unless Chu has another breakthrough he's going to unleash before... Tuesday I would say it's a pretty accurate title. I doubt he'll make another breakthrough in 24 hours.
Oh, the way things go in the academia, I wouldn't be surprised if there's another paper in preparation with Steve Chu's name on it.
If you fudge the timing a little (you know, did the breakthrough happen when the experiment worked and data was taken, or did it happen when a public version of preprint showed up somewhere?), this may indeed not be his final breakthrough before taking office.
The law has absolutely no business examining the race, gender, or religion of people to discriminate different treatment under the law.
Rather, I would say that the law (i.e. the government) has no business meddling with "marriage", period. Let them leave "marriages" to people who have traditionally administered it (priests, reverends, sea captains, and other positions of respect and honor). If an Episcopal priest wants to marry two men, well, let him (and let his congregation decide whether that's acceptable or not).
Prop. 8 was not an "equal rights issue". It was a struggle over naming a particular group of people. Calling this equal rights issue is analogous to saying that both people living in the New York city and Philadelphia has "equal right" to call themselves "New Yorker". Maybe they do, maybe they don't—but then, what's in a name?
If what the opponents of Prop. 8 really wanted was equal rights (because, yes, there are some crucial legal differences between "marriage" and "civil union"), they should have pushed for a proposition of their own, declaring legal equality of marriage and civil union, and spouse and a partner in civil union. By demanding that the definition of "marriage" be extended to cover gay couples, what they are effectively trying to do is change every contract out there written with the word "marriage" in them (and not explicitly defined as a man and woman within the contract, because at one point it was unthinkable that it could be anything else).
Maybe you think that's a good thing, changing other people's agreements, after the fact, perhaps against their wishes (after all, the whole thing started with a lawsuit involving a country club that didn't want spousal benefits to a gay couple, I think), perhaps not.
But for my part, I think the government should stay out of the business of meddling with contracts between private persons—and the only way they can do that and maintain equal rights for everyone (after all, we do all want equal rights for everyone) is by defining a new word for this particular family relationship between one person and another—and probably abolish the legal meaning of "marriage"—and let it keep its traditional meaning in the context of a traditional family.
Yes, QWERTY probably was the fastest TYPEWRITER layout—because, as everyone acknowledges, it was designed to prevent jamming (placing often-used keys further apart).
I'll bet if someone made a typewriter with QWERTY layout and another with Dvorak layout, QWERTY typists would win these competitions all the time, because Dvorak typists will be too busy getting their typewriter jammed (or deliberately slowing themselves so that the key wouldn't jam).
But, are you typing on a typewriter now? The conditions which did make QWERTY superior no longer exists, and yet, as an entrenched option, QWERTY is not easy to displace, regardless of whether there is a better layout for typing on a computer, where jamming is not a problem.
That's what path dependence means, and that's how a product that is not currently the most optimal can become an entrenched option—because it probably was optimal (or fairly close) in the past and people just stuck to it even as the world changed. People are not stupid and will not choose a product that has been bad from the beginning to the end (even DOS was the best operating system out there at some point, for low-cost commodity hardware anyway).
I can type fast because of experience and muscle memory but I don't allocate one finger to a few keys, then allocate another finger to another set of keys as learned in a rigorous keyboarding class.
Touch-typing isn't about "allocating" your finger to several keys. That's the kind of mistake the stupid people who make "ergonomic keyboards" make.
Touch-typing is about putting your hands in the correct position (i.e. in the position so that both your index fingers are over the embossed keys) and hitting each key with the one that feels most natural to you. For some keys, especially "6", it's rather ambiguous which hand should be hitting it, but thankfully, if you are typing a bunch of numbers you really should be using the numpad anyway.
Having said that, as someone who can type reasonably on both QWERTY and Dvorak, I find Dvorak more natural, at least when I am typing English paragraphs. With LaTeX or programming, I had to get used to typing the frequently-occurring symbols that are rather awkwardly placed on standard Dvorak layout.
Now I see what you said. "Countries in every continent", as in if a single country in Asia, say, Singapore allows gay marriage, you say what sounds similar to "Asia allows gay marriage".
That's a great way to produce apparent majority-backed world approval of gay marriage where no such thing exists.
According to the source your sibling poster cited, the majority of Europe would have voted yes on Prop. 8, or at least there is a significant doubt to whether they would have said no on Prop. 8. Prop. 8 leaves open possibilities of civil union, so counting civil union as marriage is cheating.
This majority gets even steeper in other continents, but of course, by saying that "countries in every continent" (with few exceptions you do cite) allows gay marriage, you build an apparent image of widespread agreement.
Countries on every continent except, IIRC, Australia and South America, and two US states (Massachussetts and Connecticut), and ISTR seeing New York recently adopt a policy of recognizing out-of-state marriages of that type though it doesn't perform them.
Countries on every continent? Do you have a source for that?
Somehow, I doubt Arab countries or even some Asian countries (none of which you listed as exception) would be receptive to gay couples. People who come out in those countries risk ostracism at best and their lives at worst. I seriously doubt recognition of their "marriage" in those places would come before tolerance of their life style.
Actually in most states they can't ask you to leave for breastfeeding in public.
I thought most private businesses could ask you to leave for any reason. They would simply ask you to leave (and they don't have to tell you any reason whatsoever), at which point you would be trespassing if you insist on staying on their property.
Now, they may not be able to say specifically not to breastfeed on their property, but the owners of the property can---and indeed, should be able to, in a free country---kick out anyone they want.
I may agree with you that religion and violence are associated—but that's only because violence is associated with EVERYTHING, including science and mathematics that you seem to hold in such high regard.
And if you're encrypting the whole disk -- where will you keep the encryption keys? How will you boot?
I don't know about Truecrypt, but using the standard methods in GNU/Linux (I don't even know what it's called, beyond that it uses LUKS and the command I use is called "cryptsetup"), the encryption key will be on the hard drive itself, encrypted with a symmetric cipher (and ideally you would have a reasonably strong passphrase committed to memory).
On GNU/Linux "full disk encryption" requires a small unencrypted partition which contains the kernel and initrd, and initrd has the tools to decrypt the other partition and continue the full booting process.
Also, I don't think by "password protected" GP means such weak "encryption" as password protected archives. He probably means either GnuPG-encrypted material, or something that uses equally strong encryption. There are a lot of free software (and proprietary software, although I wouldn't know any) that uses encryption that even NSA would have hard time breaking, if ever.
And yet compact fluorescents are moving onto the market with little resistance.
Because the same people who have been making incandescent light bulb are also making compact fluorescent bulbs. That wouldn't have been the case for the candle to light bulb transition.
If you need a car analogy, GM workers do not protest or resist the newest GM models. They, however, do protest Japanese imports, if they can.
But understand this: copyright and patents are not natural rights, they are granted by the society.
All rights are.
No. Some property rights are NATURAL that we should have it. For example, it is natural that I should have ownership of a pencil on my desk. It is in my possession, I can easily exclude others from using it, and if others use it, I can't use it. Regarding physical objects, we have a very natural property rights where taking those rights away (such as in communism) would be highly unusual.
But the strange idea that one should own his words (or, in this case, some lines of code that he wrote) didn't arise until modern times (17th century or so), and while not everything new should be criticized, it is a strong evidence that "intellectual property rights" are highly unusual and unnatural.
One can make arguments whether this highly strange, man-made property "right" is necessary (as you do, which I don't agree with, by the way, or at least, I don't think existing copyright law really encourages creation of new work and/or benefits the public---if this is the true intent, we should first do away with retroactive copyright extensions and the life of the author + 65 years crap), but it should be acknowledged that this is something completely separate and different from the normal property rights.
If we don't, we get nonsense slogans like "copying is theft", and we have stupid people believing in this ridiculous propaganda.
"Pro-copyright" doesn't mean what you use the expression for. FSF is pro-copyright. You need copyrights to protect openness. Perhaps he was an advocate of copyright-protection? That's a very different rat.
Maybe I'm just projecting my personal beliefs onto an organization that I support, but I don't think FSF is "pro-copyright".
FSF is "pro-copyleft".
And, before you say that copyleft is a form of copyright and therefore pro-copyleft is pro-copyright, I would beg to differ: the need for copyleft exists because we have vastly unfair copyright laws. We need copyleft to cancel the deleterious effects of copyright and restore the freedom of users. Without copyright we wouldn't need copyleft.
As for keeping things "open", well, I don't think that's ever really been the main goal of FSF (e.g. FSF doesn't advocate that anything anyone ever wrote should be published. It just advocates that if it is published, it should be published under a free license), but without the freedom-stealing copyright, I would hope we can rely on human decency (e.g. developers who have access to source code, who are now free from restrictions of copyright and perhaps NDAs) for propagating works that are generally useful to others.
Personally, I believe copyright shouldn't exist (or, if it is retained, only in a severely limited form, in particular with respect to the duration---absolutely nothing longer than 5 years, no renewals, no extensions beyond that). It creates unnatural "property rights" and interferes with the market forces (in particular, the labor market). But, this is obviously for another discussion.
You are forgetting that it's not water instead of air (i.e. replacing N2 molecules with H2O molecules)—it's water in *addition* to air (i.e. adding H2O molecules to where there were N2 molecules already), so it is, in fact, thicker and denser.
When did "American" become a lifestyle rather than a place of birth?
When people decided that culture was a sacrosanct, frozen set of behavior rather than an adaptation to environmental forces. Of course the overwhelming nostalgia hasn't helped that problem either.
Great job misinterpreting patriotism and national pride. When one says "American way of" something without sarcasm, it means how we do things NOW. It's hardly frozen or lacking in adaptation. Even though we have kept some of great principles (such as emphasis on individual freedom and respect for due process—or are these the things you accuse people of being nostalgic about and would like to get rid of?) that have been handed down in this country from generation to generation, I doubt that the Founding Fathers (or even Lincoln!) would recognize our country as the country they founded.
I mean, with the federal income tax and Social Security, we are practically a socialist state in comparison to how it was as late as 19th century!
Cook a few and see if others don't start thinking twice about monetary gain or helping the motherland being worth their life.
The chair is probably too benign a form of capital punishment for this kind of crime (the only worse crime than this would have been the crime against the humanity itself). Surely there is something that is much more painful and more likely to make would-be traitors cringe than a little bit of electricity?
So while someone who has been in this country for 20+ years may have the flag flying in their yard and be all "Go USA!" that doesn't change the fact that it would still be easier to get them to give up secrets than a US born.
I agree that having families in oppressive countries is a liability—but, surely the U.S. government can help remove those liabilities (by shortening their immigration process) so that they can hire a qualified man for the job?
This traitorous asshole notwithstanding, most immigrants to this country are fiercely patriotic.
As a physics graduate student who was recently naturalized, I completely agree with you, and I hope this traitor gets what he deserves---a death sentence.
the OSS has a pile of crap which basically resembles the four freedoms from the aspect of business.
Well, as much as Four Freedoms is much more elegant than the long list of criterion for open source, I wouldn't call the Open Source Definition "a pile of crap". After all, it's essentially Debian's Free Software Guideline sans specific references to Debian. If Open Source Definition is a pile of crap, then DFSG must also be a pile of crap... which, as a Debian user, I'm not willing to admit even if it were true.
Stallman's definition of "free": stuff he likes. His definition of "not free": stuff he doesn't like.
Not true. FSF, practically Stallman's baby, lists several licenses that Stallman doesn't like too much as "free".
Not even Stallman's opponents can claim that he has ever labeled a license "free" or "not free" based on anything other than the four freedoms that he defined. If you want to contest whether the four freedoms represent the fundamental freedoms, that's an entirely separate argument.
Well, you better erase that Linux distro off your hard drive if you'll only use software that doesn't use trademarked names. No, no, you can't use Debian either, because the name Linux is trademarked, too.
WRONG. It was never entirely about trademark. It was initially about the copyright status of the artwork for Firefox (the restrictive, all rights reserved "license"). Debian removed those artworks as they violate DFSG, and Mozilla Foundation said that Debian can't use the Firefox name at all if they do not use the official branding.
As for Debian's own logos and branding, they are in fact distributed with an open license (with a varying degree of openness depending on how official it is), so you are free to take them, modify them, and even distribute them (like fan art). The only thing you can't do is fraudulently claim some modified version of GNU/Linux distribution you have is the official Debian distro (i.e. the only thing that the trademark law really governs).
There are plenty of other laws which forbid such things. Just because it's not un-Constitutional doesn't mean it's illegal.
Do you forget that they are the government? "Other laws" mean squat---they can change it the next day if they wanted to. If we are to use your interpretation of the Constitution (that what is not expressly forbidden is allowed), the congress can pass a law tomorrow saying that it's O.K. for the Senators to rape you and take advantage of your daughters, and, with your understanding of the Constitution, that would be completely legal.
The Constitution is the only thing that stands between you and the government---only the very foolish men would dare weaken it with little thought.
I suppose there is some confusion about whether this "community service" would be mandatory or not (if it's not, and if the "tax credit" doesn't cause yet more inflation of education costs---highly unlikely---then everything would be fine, of course), but if it were to be mandatory, before Obama or the congress could institute any such thing, they would need to find a clause in the Constitution which empowers the congress to enact such laws---without such clauses, such laws are definitely unconstitutional. I mean, why do you think that the 13th amendment includes a section 2 which says, "Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation"? It's not because they thought the amendment wasn't long enough. It's because they thought that without this clause, the congress would not be able to pass bills which prohibit slavery in the South.
P.S. And, yes, the constitution itself can be changed, of course, but it involves much more process and approval from the people. If Obama so believes in his "national service" idea, let him put it to the people and have them ratify an amendment that makes it constitutional---I'm fairly certain that it will fail.
In general, sunlight readable displays could chew much less power than normal displays if you can turn off the backlight, like in the OLPC XO-1.
Also, like the OLPC XO-1, it doesn't have to be one or the other option. OLPC XO-1 will operate in BW mode when the backlight is completely off and in the color mode when the backlight is on. Since the number of real pixels stay the same, you can tell the difference in resolution---BW display has the full 1280x900 resolution and looks much sharper than color version.
As innovative as the XO screen is, there's no reason that other ebook readers can't have both modes built into one---it's already been done!
i understand your concerns, and I've always considered myself more of a moderate. but Obama represents more than just some political policies, he represents what America is all about. democracy and culture. anybody can be president. anybody can live here and be free.
Those are a lot of words for saying absolutely nothing substantial.
No, libertarians (... largely---since there is no single definition of "libertarian" either) do not stand for such vague ideas as "American Dream", or "hope for change".
What libertarians (... most of them, anyway) do stand for is defense of personal liberty as embodied in the Constitution. Many of the stands that Obama has taken on issues (his FISA vote, the mandatory national service thing, more taxes and more services from the government) are distinctly anti-libertarian.
Besides---even if you don't think of the Slashdot crowd as libertarian-minded people, it should be noted that Slashdot still draws technically-minded people---people who hate unsupported generalities (like what you just said above) and people who care a lot about specific details---and you will note that criticism of Obama on Slashdot, aside from troll posts, are based firmly on specific issues not such ridiculous points as "Obama is black" or "Obama is muslim" or anything else.
If you can't see these specific, perhaps even constructive criticism as what they are, I suggest that you take a good look at yourself again and see if you can honestly say that you are still "moderate" (too many partisans say this in order to fool the others---if you are doing that, fine, that's the political culture of today, but don't fool yourself).
Slashdot Mirror
Lasers work as beams splitters ?
Sending atoms ?
Um, yeah, right.
I'm not familiar with the details, but at first sight, I don't see a problem with those statements.
Remember, this is an atom interferometry. The "beam" refers to a beam of atoms. It's the wavefunction of the atoms that are being used to produce the signal, not the laser (which is the more garden-variety interferometry like one used in LIGO). From the description I get in the abstract, it sounds like they first laser-cool the atoms in a trap (probably magnetic, as the atoms used are frequently paramagnetic and can be trapped), then release the trap letting the atoms drop.
If you have a laser in the atom's path, by appropriately tuning the laser you can produce repulsive force on the atoms (I forget whether this has to be blue-shifted or red-shifted from the transition, but either way it can be done), so much like a rod in a stream, it will force the atoms to take one path or another as it drops under gravity.
The actual scheme in the experiment is probably way more complicated than this (they do claim factor of 2500 increase in the area covered, so the atoms must travel longer somehow), but it's nothing ridiculous. Maybe a little too technical for someone who's not an atomic physicist to grasp immediately.
Unless Chu has another breakthrough he's going to unleash before... Tuesday I would say it's a pretty accurate title. I doubt he'll make another breakthrough in 24 hours.
Oh, the way things go in the academia, I wouldn't be surprised if there's another paper in preparation with Steve Chu's name on it.
If you fudge the timing a little (you know, did the breakthrough happen when the experiment worked and data was taken, or did it happen when a public version of preprint showed up somewhere?), this may indeed not be his final breakthrough before taking office.
The law has absolutely no business examining the race, gender, or religion of people to discriminate different treatment under the law.
Rather, I would say that the law (i.e. the government) has no business meddling with "marriage", period. Let them leave "marriages" to people who have traditionally administered it (priests, reverends, sea captains, and other positions of respect and honor). If an Episcopal priest wants to marry two men, well, let him (and let his congregation decide whether that's acceptable or not).
Prop. 8 was not an "equal rights issue". It was a struggle over naming a particular group of people. Calling this equal rights issue is analogous to saying that both people living in the New York city and Philadelphia has "equal right" to call themselves "New Yorker". Maybe they do, maybe they don't—but then, what's in a name?
If what the opponents of Prop. 8 really wanted was equal rights (because, yes, there are some crucial legal differences between "marriage" and "civil union"), they should have pushed for a proposition of their own, declaring legal equality of marriage and civil union, and spouse and a partner in civil union. By demanding that the definition of "marriage" be extended to cover gay couples, what they are effectively trying to do is change every contract out there written with the word "marriage" in them (and not explicitly defined as a man and woman within the contract, because at one point it was unthinkable that it could be anything else).
Maybe you think that's a good thing, changing other people's agreements, after the fact, perhaps against their wishes (after all, the whole thing started with a lawsuit involving a country club that didn't want spousal benefits to a gay couple, I think), perhaps not.
But for my part, I think the government should stay out of the business of meddling with contracts between private persons—and the only way they can do that and maintain equal rights for everyone (after all, we do all want equal rights for everyone) is by defining a new word for this particular family relationship between one person and another—and probably abolish the legal meaning of "marriage"—and let it keep its traditional meaning in the context of a traditional family.
You are forgetting that the technology changes.
Yes, QWERTY probably was the fastest TYPEWRITER layout—because, as everyone acknowledges, it was designed to prevent jamming (placing often-used keys further apart).
I'll bet if someone made a typewriter with QWERTY layout and another with Dvorak layout, QWERTY typists would win these competitions all the time, because Dvorak typists will be too busy getting their typewriter jammed (or deliberately slowing themselves so that the key wouldn't jam).
But, are you typing on a typewriter now? The conditions which did make QWERTY superior no longer exists, and yet, as an entrenched option, QWERTY is not easy to displace, regardless of whether there is a better layout for typing on a computer, where jamming is not a problem.
That's what path dependence means, and that's how a product that is not currently the most optimal can become an entrenched option—because it probably was optimal (or fairly close) in the past and people just stuck to it even as the world changed. People are not stupid and will not choose a product that has been bad from the beginning to the end (even DOS was the best operating system out there at some point, for low-cost commodity hardware anyway).
I can type fast because of experience and muscle memory but I don't allocate one finger to a few keys, then allocate another finger to another set of keys as learned in a rigorous keyboarding class.
Touch-typing isn't about "allocating" your finger to several keys. That's the kind of mistake the stupid people who make "ergonomic keyboards" make.
Touch-typing is about putting your hands in the correct position (i.e. in the position so that both your index fingers are over the embossed keys) and hitting each key with the one that feels most natural to you. For some keys, especially "6", it's rather ambiguous which hand should be hitting it, but thankfully, if you are typing a bunch of numbers you really should be using the numpad anyway.
Having said that, as someone who can type reasonably on both QWERTY and Dvorak, I find Dvorak more natural, at least when I am typing English paragraphs. With LaTeX or programming, I had to get used to typing the frequently-occurring symbols that are rather awkwardly placed on standard Dvorak layout.
Now I see what you said. "Countries in every continent", as in if a single country in Asia, say, Singapore allows gay marriage, you say what sounds similar to "Asia allows gay marriage".
That's a great way to produce apparent majority-backed world approval of gay marriage where no such thing exists.
According to the source your sibling poster cited, the majority of Europe would have voted yes on Prop. 8, or at least there is a significant doubt to whether they would have said no on Prop. 8. Prop. 8 leaves open possibilities of civil union, so counting civil union as marriage is cheating.
This majority gets even steeper in other continents, but of course, by saying that "countries in every continent" (with few exceptions you do cite) allows gay marriage, you build an apparent image of widespread agreement.
Countries on every continent except, IIRC, Australia and South America, and two US states (Massachussetts and Connecticut), and ISTR seeing New York recently adopt a policy of recognizing out-of-state marriages of that type though it doesn't perform them.
Countries on every continent? Do you have a source for that?
Somehow, I doubt Arab countries or even some Asian countries (none of which you listed as exception) would be receptive to gay couples. People who come out in those countries risk ostracism at best and their lives at worst. I seriously doubt recognition of their "marriage" in those places would come before tolerance of their life style.
Actually in most states they can't ask you to leave for breastfeeding in public.
I thought most private businesses could ask you to leave for any reason. They would simply ask you to leave (and they don't have to tell you any reason whatsoever), at which point you would be trespassing if you insist on staying on their property.
Now, they may not be able to say specifically not to breastfeed on their property, but the owners of the property can---and indeed, should be able to, in a free country---kick out anyone they want.
I do not concur that religion and violence are unassociated.
And you say this based on the fact that scientists do not commit acts of violence where as religious people do, right?
I am a physicist, but one of the world's greatest atrocity was committed by American physicists. And at least one of them remained unrepentant after the full consequences of their actions were known.
I may agree with you that religion and violence are associated—but that's only because violence is associated with EVERYTHING, including science and mathematics that you seem to hold in such high regard.
And if you're encrypting the whole disk -- where will you keep the encryption keys? How will you boot?
I don't know about Truecrypt, but using the standard methods in GNU/Linux (I don't even know what it's called, beyond that it uses LUKS and the command I use is called "cryptsetup"), the encryption key will be on the hard drive itself, encrypted with a symmetric cipher (and ideally you would have a reasonably strong passphrase committed to memory).
On GNU/Linux "full disk encryption" requires a small unencrypted partition which contains the kernel and initrd, and initrd has the tools to decrypt the other partition and continue the full booting process.
Also, I don't think by "password protected" GP means such weak "encryption" as password protected archives. He probably means either GnuPG-encrypted material, or something that uses equally strong encryption. There are a lot of free software (and proprietary software, although I wouldn't know any) that uses encryption that even NSA would have hard time breaking, if ever.
And yet compact fluorescents are moving onto the market with little resistance.
Because the same people who have been making incandescent light bulb are also making compact fluorescent bulbs. That wouldn't have been the case for the candle to light bulb transition.
If you need a car analogy, GM workers do not protest or resist the newest GM models. They, however, do protest Japanese imports, if they can.
What about the rights of dictators?
Indeed.
And before you say, "But I am not a dictator, so it doesn't affect me," you might want to take a lesson from the poem that starts as "First they came for dictators ..."
But understand this: copyright and patents are not natural rights, they are granted by the society.
All rights are.
No. Some property rights are NATURAL that we should have it. For example, it is natural that I should have ownership of a pencil on my desk. It is in my possession, I can easily exclude others from using it, and if others use it, I can't use it. Regarding physical objects, we have a very natural property rights where taking those rights away (such as in communism) would be highly unusual.
But the strange idea that one should own his words (or, in this case, some lines of code that he wrote) didn't arise until modern times (17th century or so), and while not everything new should be criticized, it is a strong evidence that "intellectual property rights" are highly unusual and unnatural.
One can make arguments whether this highly strange, man-made property "right" is necessary (as you do, which I don't agree with, by the way, or at least, I don't think existing copyright law really encourages creation of new work and/or benefits the public---if this is the true intent, we should first do away with retroactive copyright extensions and the life of the author + 65 years crap), but it should be acknowledged that this is something completely separate and different from the normal property rights.
If we don't, we get nonsense slogans like "copying is theft", and we have stupid people believing in this ridiculous propaganda.
"Pro-copyright" doesn't mean what you use the expression for. FSF is pro-copyright. You need copyrights to protect openness.
Perhaps he was an advocate of copyright-protection? That's a very different rat.
Maybe I'm just projecting my personal beliefs onto an organization that I support, but I don't think FSF is "pro-copyright".
FSF is "pro-copyleft".
And, before you say that copyleft is a form of copyright and therefore pro-copyleft is pro-copyright, I would beg to differ: the need for copyleft exists because we have vastly unfair copyright laws. We need copyleft to cancel the deleterious effects of copyright and restore the freedom of users. Without copyright we wouldn't need copyleft.
As for keeping things "open", well, I don't think that's ever really been the main goal of FSF (e.g. FSF doesn't advocate that anything anyone ever wrote should be published. It just advocates that if it is published, it should be published under a free license), but without the freedom-stealing copyright, I would hope we can rely on human decency (e.g. developers who have access to source code, who are now free from restrictions of copyright and perhaps NDAs) for propagating works that are generally useful to others.
Personally, I believe copyright shouldn't exist (or, if it is retained, only in a severely limited form, in particular with respect to the duration---absolutely nothing longer than 5 years, no renewals, no extensions beyond that). It creates unnatural "property rights" and interferes with the market forces (in particular, the labor market). But, this is obviously for another discussion.
You are forgetting that it's not water instead of air (i.e. replacing N2 molecules with H2O molecules)—it's water in *addition* to air (i.e. adding H2O molecules to where there were N2 molecules already), so it is, in fact, thicker and denser.
When did "American" become a lifestyle rather than a place of birth?
When people decided that culture was a sacrosanct, frozen set of behavior rather than an adaptation to environmental forces. Of course the overwhelming nostalgia hasn't helped that problem either.
Great job misinterpreting patriotism and national pride. When one says "American way of" something without sarcasm, it means how we do things NOW. It's hardly frozen or lacking in adaptation. Even though we have kept some of great principles (such as emphasis on individual freedom and respect for due process—or are these the things you accuse people of being nostalgic about and would like to get rid of?) that have been handed down in this country from generation to generation, I doubt that the Founding Fathers (or even Lincoln!) would recognize our country as the country they founded.
I mean, with the federal income tax and Social Security, we are practically a socialist state in comparison to how it was as late as 19th century!
Cook a few and see if others don't start thinking twice about monetary gain or helping the motherland being worth their life.
The chair is probably too benign a form of capital punishment for this kind of crime (the only worse crime than this would have been the crime against the humanity itself). Surely there is something that is much more painful and more likely to make would-be traitors cringe than a little bit of electricity?
So while someone who has been in this country for 20+ years may have the flag flying in their yard and be all "Go USA!" that doesn't change the fact that it would still be easier to get them to give up secrets than a US born.
And that's because natural-born citizens never sell secrets to enemies, right?
I agree that having families in oppressive countries is a liability—but, surely the U.S. government can help remove those liabilities (by shortening their immigration process) so that they can hire a qualified man for the job?
This traitorous asshole notwithstanding, most immigrants to this country are fiercely patriotic.
As a physics graduate student who was recently naturalized, I completely agree with you, and I hope this traitor gets what he deserves---a death sentence.
the OSS has a pile of crap which basically resembles the four freedoms from the aspect of business.
Well, as much as Four Freedoms is much more elegant than the long list of criterion for open source, I wouldn't call the Open Source Definition "a pile of crap". After all, it's essentially Debian's Free Software Guideline sans specific references to Debian. If Open Source Definition is a pile of crap, then DFSG must also be a pile of crap ... which, as a Debian user, I'm not willing to admit even if it were true.
Stallman's definition of "free": stuff he likes. His definition of "not free": stuff he doesn't like.
Not true. FSF, practically Stallman's baby, lists several licenses that Stallman doesn't like too much as "free".
Not even Stallman's opponents can claim that he has ever labeled a license "free" or "not free" based on anything other than the four freedoms that he defined. If you want to contest whether the four freedoms represent the fundamental freedoms, that's an entirely separate argument.
Well, you better erase that Linux distro off your hard drive if you'll only use software that doesn't use trademarked names. No, no, you can't use Debian either, because the name Linux is trademarked, too.
WRONG. It was never entirely about trademark. It was initially about the copyright status of the artwork for Firefox (the restrictive, all rights reserved "license"). Debian removed those artworks as they violate DFSG, and Mozilla Foundation said that Debian can't use the Firefox name at all if they do not use the official branding.
As for Debian's own logos and branding, they are in fact distributed with an open license (with a varying degree of openness depending on how official it is), so you are free to take them, modify them, and even distribute them (like fan art). The only thing you can't do is fraudulently claim some modified version of GNU/Linux distribution you have is the official Debian distro (i.e. the only thing that the trademark law really governs).
There are plenty of other laws which forbid such things. Just because it's not un-Constitutional doesn't mean it's illegal.
Do you forget that they are the government? "Other laws" mean squat---they can change it the next day if they wanted to. If we are to use your interpretation of the Constitution (that what is not expressly forbidden is allowed), the congress can pass a law tomorrow saying that it's O.K. for the Senators to rape you and take advantage of your daughters, and, with your understanding of the Constitution, that would be completely legal.
The Constitution is the only thing that stands between you and the government---only the very foolish men would dare weaken it with little thought.
I suppose there is some confusion about whether this "community service" would be mandatory or not (if it's not, and if the "tax credit" doesn't cause yet more inflation of education costs---highly unlikely---then everything would be fine, of course), but if it were to be mandatory, before Obama or the congress could institute any such thing, they would need to find a clause in the Constitution which empowers the congress to enact such laws---without such clauses, such laws are definitely unconstitutional. I mean, why do you think that the 13th amendment includes a section 2 which says, "Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation"? It's not because they thought the amendment wasn't long enough. It's because they thought that without this clause, the congress would not be able to pass bills which prohibit slavery in the South.
P.S. And, yes, the constitution itself can be changed, of course, but it involves much more process and approval from the people. If Obama so believes in his "national service" idea, let him put it to the people and have them ratify an amendment that makes it constitutional---I'm fairly certain that it will fail.
In general, sunlight readable displays could chew much less power than normal displays if you can turn off the backlight, like in the OLPC XO-1.
Also, like the OLPC XO-1, it doesn't have to be one or the other option. OLPC XO-1 will operate in BW mode when the backlight is completely off and in the color mode when the backlight is on. Since the number of real pixels stay the same, you can tell the difference in resolution---BW display has the full 1280x900 resolution and looks much sharper than color version.
As innovative as the XO screen is, there's no reason that other ebook readers can't have both modes built into one---it's already been done!
i understand your concerns, and I've always considered myself more of a moderate. but Obama represents more than just some political policies, he represents what America is all about. democracy and culture. anybody can be president. anybody can live here and be free.
Those are a lot of words for saying absolutely nothing substantial.
No, libertarians (... largely---since there is no single definition of "libertarian" either) do not stand for such vague ideas as "American Dream", or "hope for change".
What libertarians (... most of them, anyway) do stand for is defense of personal liberty as embodied in the Constitution. Many of the stands that Obama has taken on issues (his FISA vote, the mandatory national service thing, more taxes and more services from the government) are distinctly anti-libertarian.
Besides---even if you don't think of the Slashdot crowd as libertarian-minded people, it should be noted that Slashdot still draws technically-minded people---people who hate unsupported generalities (like what you just said above) and people who care a lot about specific details---and you will note that criticism of Obama on Slashdot, aside from troll posts, are based firmly on specific issues not such ridiculous points as "Obama is black" or "Obama is muslim" or anything else.
If you can't see these specific, perhaps even constructive criticism as what they are, I suggest that you take a good look at yourself again and see if you can honestly say that you are still "moderate" (too many partisans say this in order to fool the others---if you are doing that, fine, that's the political culture of today, but don't fool yourself).