1) K-Ar dating is unreliable for samples < 2 MYA 2) A sample < 2 MYA was submitted for analysis 3) an unreliable measurement resulted.
No one claims the rock is 2 MYA. Evolutionists don't continue to claim that the rock is 2 MYA, because it isn't, and there isn't any reliable evidence to suggest there is! You have made only a straw man argument. However, geochronologists do believe K-Ar ages for other samples indicating 18 MYA, and such results AGREE WITH MULTIPLE OTHER METHODS.
The second law of thermodynamics does not preclude evolution. The law states that CLOSED systems invariably proceed toward states of higher entropy.
The Earth's biosphere is NOT a closed system. There is this massive energy source called the SUN (perhaps you've heard of it?) which puts lots of energy into the biosphere. Which means that local entropy reduction inside your own body, for instance, every second of every day, is more than balanced by a HUGE entropy increase in the sun.
The most likely intermediate forms developed feather-like structures *before* flight, and gliding before powered flight. Consider ostriches: they have feathers, but not light bones. As for wings, bats have wings without feathers. And flying squirrels are living examples of how gliding structures can exist and be used for flight without either full blown wings or feathers. Light bones are a benefit to creatures *with flight.*
Carbon dating cannot be used for rocks. It is for organic material continuously incorporating carbon from the atmosphere. In fact, if you follow what is apparently a link to the issue you bring up, you see that it is argon dating that causes anomalous results.
Using logical reasoning, and after considering other mechanisms (lab contamination), he concludes the most likely explanation is that excess Ar-40 was present in the rock when it was first solidified.
However, he neglects to consider one other aspect: because of the long half-life of K-40, the dating procedure cannot be expected to be accurate for samples younger than about 2 million years before present. In fact, the lab he sent the sample had a standard warning to that effect. Plus, there were lots of questionable processing steps before he sent the samples to the lab.
Meaning the most likely logical chain is:
1) K-Ar dating is unreliable for samples analysis of Austin's work?
When do you think the flood happened? While dinosaurs still existed? Do you believe man existed at that time? The point about the Eskimos and aboriginies is that you are presumably claiming a *recent* date for Noah to start the entire human population. How did the Native Americans get to meet Columbus? How did they get to America if they were recently descended from a population begun in the Middle East? Mainstream biologists have genetic and archaeological evidence showing multiple migrations occuring TENS of thousands of years ago, correlating with ice-age migrations of large mammals. Did those wooly mammoths get off the ark? Did opossums and kangaroos? If so, why aren't there any kangaroos or koalas or playtpuses or opossums on the mainland of Asia?
What "map" are you talking about? Do you have a link? Is it any more than a few ambiguous marks?
How do you draw the line between "new" and "old" organisms? There is no reason for wild tuberculin to be resistant to new antibiotics. Yet, when conditions change, the organism evolves. No one believes a single mutation can change a dinosaur into a bird. However, multiple mutations eventually add up to significant differences. Do you believe that modern dogs, domesticated pigeons, and agricultural crops are the same species as the wild varieties? Do you think the amazing results that breeding of domestic plants and animals can produce in just a few years have anything to do with possibly large changes that could happen in many millions of years?
On the other hand, letting the enemy see whats going on is the only way to credibly DE-escalate after you get what you want. If you are planning ahead for some conclusion other than total (mutual?) annihilation, it perhaps better not to poke out all of your enemy's eyes.
If the enemy can't see what you are actually doing on a global scale, he'll have to assume the worst. Better to use disguise to hide the really important stuff, or use misdirection by showing him what you want him to believe.
Of course, this only applies to the widest-field sensors; obviously, it makes sense to jam radars, etc., used for terminal targeting, or radio channels used for tactical communication.
You completely misunderstand the second law of thermodynamics. Your understanding of the geology of the Grand Canyon is laughable. It is great evidence for an ancient earth, not for any fairy tale flood.
You oversimplify the evolution of birds to create a strawman. It is easy to conceive of intermediate forms between dinosaurs and modern birds; you are apparently comparing huge dinosaurs (dinosaurs weren't all giant Tyrannosaurs and Apatosaurs) with small birds.
Do you believe God created the dinosaurs? And then made them extinct? Does that sound like an intelligent and benificent designer? Why does an intelligent designer create Mercury and Pluto? Or the billions of other galaxies? Sure seems like a real waste if all creation was meant to produce Abraham and his descendants.
Your definition of "beneficial chance mutation" is unclear. Do you believe any mutations are not due to chance? Or do you believe there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation? How do you explain drug-resistance in infectious agents? Mutations sure seem to benefit the tuberculosis bacterium. Is this from the recent action of the hand of the Creator? Or evolution by artificial selection acting on random variation?
You totally ignore the huge problems with a Bible-based creation theory. You apparently think Native Americans, Eskimos, Australian aboriginies, and Polynesians all managed to belong to the same family tree with Noah at the very top. You apparently think all of the millions of insect species in the world somehow survived a global flood a few thousand years ago; presumably in the Ark. Not to mention all the species native to Australia.
I'm not sure why you keep trying to divert the discussion toward evolution when you are trying to defend a literal six-day creation, but evolution is by no means dying.
It may be that American society is becoming less and less informed over time; there is no guarantee that societies or humankind can avoid mass ignorance. But that has nothing to do with the actual truth of evolution, which is that it is the only scientific theory consistent with the accumulated evidence of hundreds of thousands of person-years of scientific investigation. The popularity of a belief does not indicate truth. The rejection of evolution is, at its base, a rejection of scientific inquiry as a way of determining truth.
The thing is, all Christians believe they are Christians according to scripture. But many of them still deny the literal six-day creation. Your struggle to comprehend is just a measure of how narrow and closed your method of interpretation is.
Where you say "narrow as Scripture" you really mean "narrow as my interpretation of Scripture."
I'm interested where you think Christ himself, during his ministry on Earth, actually said anything about the six-day creation story.
The point is not about your so-called "scientists," the point is your use of the word "Christian."
If you maintain that a literal belief in a six-day creation is necessary to be called "Christian," then you are using the word in a very restrictive sense. There are far more people who call *themselves* Christian than you would call Christian.
Can you clearly answer this question or not:
QUESTION: Do you have to believe in a literal six-day creation to be Christian?
"Christianity" only states that God created the earth in six literal days only if you mean some restricted subset of Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Genesis story.
Common descent of all humanity through Noah is a laughable idea. It just does not make literal sense on any number of levels, right up there with Joshua calling on God to stop the sun.
Catholics don't have to believe in such nonsense to be considered faithful Catholics, for instance, and they still call themselves Christian.
Thanks for reminding readers about an important third category of patent holders. I am a believer in the patent system as a whole, and my discussion left out the important case of a startup that wants to become a major player, instead of staying a one-person show. The VC game is a wholly different arena, with its own strategies, pitfalls, and rewards.
I'm not sure what your point is with your response to my MS comment. Are you trying to make some pointed reference to Linux? Linux is not a lone coder project by any stretch.
Patent litigation is indeed a weapon that a company can use to threaten one's livelihood as a lone coder, but that the way such weapons get used is to make oneself a visible and important target. Companies won't hit what they don't see or what they think is harmless. On the other hand, if you go out of your way to make MS or any other company think you are a threat, don't be surprised when they treat you like one. Once you've woken a dragon, even if you are secure from patent litigation, there are plenty of other ways to get burned.
Proving you had an idea first only becomes a useful tactic inside the boxing ring of litigation. Most lone coders are not going to want to get in the ring toe-to-toe with some heavyweight; it's inherently an unfair battle. By the time you are in front of a judge, the legal fees are already draining your bank account, and there are no guarantees in a courtroom.
The main problem with patent searches is that the signal-to-noise ratio of the patent database is just so damn low.
The threshold for patentability does not include "is a good idea," "practically useful," or even "works" or "physically possible." The main criteria are "novel" and "not obvious to a practitioner skilled in the art." You don't actually have to be able to make it for a reasonable cost, and it could be absolutely the worst possible way to accomplish the task, and the task might be totally useless.
Most of the really good ideas are protected by trade secrets and tricky parts that aren't actually clear from the patent description, or just the secrets of successful execution: i.e. how to optimize your design for performance or cost, or whatever.
Most importantly, patents by definition only include the stuff that competitors are willing to make public knowledge.
The Library of Congress is not mostly in the business of dealing with the details of authorship. The purpose of a catalog is to allow people to find the book who don't have it in their hands. Allowing you to find it under "Josiah Woodward" is better in many ways than filing only under "Anonymous" in some attempt to be pure.
In fact, if you are talking about "PN2047.R4 1704a" they mention "anon." in the description. And you can also find it by the name of the guy who wrote the introduction, among other things.
Due diligence is only worthwhile if you want to make a patent of your own. Using it as a guide to "what not to do" is a total waste of time.
Look, all the patent does is allow someone to sue you if they believe they can prove in court your work infringes the patent. This requires several steps to have a real effect on you.
1) They have to notice you 2) They have to care somewhat about what you are doing and analyze it in some detail to determine it is in their patent library 3a) You have to be perceived as a threat to be shut down 3b) alternatively, you could have deep pockets to be emptied. 4) They have to contact you/make the first move 5) They have to decide to sue you 6) They have to be successful enough in court to 7a) bankrupt you 7b) make you empty your deep pockets 7c) make you stop and do something else.
At many points along the way, the process can break down in your favor.
- A lone coder can easily stay under the radar while making a comfortable living for one person. - Unless they hear about your product, and are able to gather enough information, they won't know it infringes their patents. - If you are successful enough to have deep enough pockets that a patent-holder notices (and patent holders have to be big enough to spend many thousands of dollars to file a defensible patent, not to mention R&D for real innovation), or to be perceived as a threat, you've made enough money to hire a good lawyer. Or, enough money to give up without a fight and retire on your savings. - When they contact you, you can counteroffer. Lawsuits are risky. Maybe you can create a win-win situation which they would prefer to a possible lose-win situation favoring you. You probably have some code they would like, or skills they would find useful. Offer to come work for them, or license the code to them, or some other kind of collaboration. - If they decide to crush you instead of accepting the offer, you can just walk away. Agree to cease & desist, and move on. If you don't have enough money to walk away, they what the hell are they suing you for?
Patent holders are either
1) huge companies that don't care about the little ants scurrying around beneath them unless the ant looks like its going to grow into something big. Then, they would rather buy it than crush it. Mostly, they get patents to cross-license as protection or to protect their market niche from the other huge companies or *aggressive* startups.
2) small companies looking for a big company to sue for violating a patent. They are an ant themselves, looking to take down one of the elephants. Other ants don't have enough money to make enticing targets.
Neither of these cases really cares about crushing some lone coder just for the savage thrill.
Plus, (IANAL) the damages they can get are related to the profits they would have had but for the infringement. If you are some small potatoes guy, the revenue you suck away would be tiny, unless you are obviously going against some cash cow like Microsoft Office or iTunes Music Store or a commercial data base. Creating a commercial product dedicated directly to putting MS out of business is obviously asking for trouble. But is also beyond the lone coder.
Don't waste psychic energy worrying about the remote risk that a patent lawsuit will crush you. You'll have plenty of other reasons to fail, anyway. Life is too short to worry about this kind of thing before the C&D warning shot comes over the bow.
I believe stanmann might mean that the "defense" in question was against Republikflucht, not against, say, military invasion emenating from West Berlin. The wall enclosed West Berlin, which gives meaning to his last statement that the imprisoned area was outside (i.e. East Germany).
Or he might have been trying too subtly to be funny. Hard to tell.
There are, however, textual indications, at least for the Old Testament, of editing and redaction of conflicting materials, to support one or another side in a now long-dead controversy. As well as some evidence of later additions or emendations of New Testament books, even above the usual problems of slight differences between sources.
Of course, many people reject the idea that the Bible was subject to the sorts of human impulses that govern the writing of other documents, or that it is valid to use the techniques of textual criticism on sacred writing. Then again, many people think the Bible was written in English, or that the KJV is somehow more (or less) valid than newer translations.
It is actually not a prisoner's dilemma or a tragedy of the commons. Any other phrases you care to try?
Also, fire departments do not protect property "rights" they protect *property*. These things are in no way the same thing. Fire isn't subject to legal restrictions, only people are. The reason we have fire departments is that a fire in your house can spread to mine. If we can't afford individually to hire a firefighter, just in case, then it makes sense for us to hire him together.
Here's a hint: logical reasoning is not simply making analogies to overly simplistic examples, or echoing stock phrases you have heard without understanding them. It is recognizing the simplest model that has all the *essential* details of what you wish to understand.
Health care is very different from beach front housing. Markets, while powerful, FAIL in dramatic ways, most particularly when the price does not reflect all of the true costs.
For example: It is a lot cheaper and gives better results, for instance, to provide preventative care for pregnant women than it is to wait for them to show up at the emergency room when it is time for them to deliver. How can a market create the right incentives? Sick people who go untreated can spread costly disease to others, without causing any additional suffering to themselves; i.e. there are costs not reflected in the price of any transaction. The market also fails in health insurance for the important reason that no insurance company wants to insure the sickest people.
Once again MARKETS CAN FAIL. Unless you have some sort of idea for how to compensate for the market failures in health care, then you have no solution.
The reason to force everyone to invest in things like government-funded research and public schools is the same "free rider problem" that leads us to force everyone to pay for the police and fire department: the people who don't pay would get the same benefits as the people who do, because it is impossible to separate out my benefits from your benefits.
The railroads may have been private enterprises, but they got an absolutely enormous public subsidy when they were granted rights-of-way across the nation. Just as private airlines get a huge subsidy in the public construction of airports.
Roads and highways could be, in principle, and sometimes are, in practice, private enterprises. However, it might, also in principle, be cheaper overall to build them with public funds and avoid the overhead associated with restricting the private roads to authorized users and also with the inevitable redundancies involved when multiple private entities build roads from the same point A to the same point B, and the hassles involved in negotiating with who-knows-how-many private entities in order to establish regular delivery services.
In theory, we could go so far as to privatize air, building sufficient enclosures so that one could only breathe the air that one has paid the market price for. But there is no guarantee that doing so would be the most economically efficient solution. In fact, there's a good chance that this scheme would be incredibly wasteful. And hence, a net loss to society as a whole. Better to keep the air a public good.
The G5 in a notebook gets you exactly nothing unless you have the wickedly high-bandwidth memory system that the G5 PowerMacs have. Which, of course, is the REAL reason we won't see G5 Powerbooks anytime soon...even the G4 Powerbooks have substantially slower memory systems than the G4 iMacs had.
Putting a G5 in a system with a slow memory system gives you a Powerbook that is no faster than a G4 Powerbook, and eats into limited G5 supplies for no good reason.
So the answer to your question is absolutely nothing except a higher number on the logo.
Perhaps you're talking about the National Guard in 2004, but George W. Bush was in the National Guard from 1968 to 1973 (ignoring all the ugly details about whether he showed up, how seriously he took it). In that time, there were long waiting lists to get into the Guard because everyone knew you'd be defending Texas from Oklahoma, with very little to no chance of being sent over to Vietnam (maybe you've heard of it?) with all the poor schmucks with lousy draft numbers who weren't able to get some deferment or other.
Of course the National Guard in 2004 is being used and abused with stop-loss orders to serve much longer in actual danger than any of them had a reasonable expectation when they signed up, but that's a whole different era of the George W. Bush saga, now, isn't it?
John Kerry is only "apparently" willing to make US decisions depend on the UN if your "appearances" are determined by what you see on FOX News.
In case you haven't paid attention to the history of the UN, it was precisely created in such a way that it could NOT stop or act against the interests of any of the principal powers, i.e., the permanent members of the Security Council, including the U.S.
The whole problem with Bush is not necessarily that he has a policy of pre-emption, but that the threshold for action keeps getting lower and lower. Saddam Hussein having a wet dream about someday having nuclear weapons, although that dream gets further away every day as his country collapses, is apparently justification for unlimited force.
The only believable reason for Bush to *still* believe Iraq was justified was that Bush's so-called instincts, or God speaking to him directly, tells him so. Not because any rational analysis of the facts leads to it.
To get back to a reasonable view of the world, you have to realize that all the power of the U.S. can't actually change very much on its own; that one way or another even George W. Bush is reduced to hoping that other countries will somehow pitch in and help even if their legitimate concerns were totally ignored in the process of keeping the Pentagon timetable from falling behind. Except that Bush has totally alienated or undermined almost every possible source of help.
The real problem with Bush is that he is obviously ignorant about basic foreign policy, and doesn't care to change that. Anyone who thought, for instance, that the word "crusade" was a good one to use except when talking to right-wing Bible thumpers, or that Iraqis would somehow allow Turkish soldiers to provide security, is totally oblivious to the most basic historical facts of the Middle East. And when confronted with the kind of ignorance that confuses Sweden and Switzerland, the whole crowd around the president just goes uncomfortably quiet.
When your "core policy" is based on faith-based hope rather than fact-based analysis, who knows what kind of disasters can happen. We'll be LUCKY if we get an Iraqi regime that is even as stable as the Shah's was in Iran. And we know how well that turned out for the U.S., now, don't we?
While I think the iMac G5 is an extremely interesting computer, your use of the term "fast" is somewhat misleading, in that "G5" is an extremely vague term.
The iMac G5s provide only a 600 MHz FSB, not to mention topping out at a single 1.8 GHz G5.
The PowerMac G5, on the other hand, *starts* at DUAL 1.8 GHz G5s, has up to 1.25 GHz front side bus per processor.
An utterly oversimplified model based on no real data would estimate that reducing the G5 CPU to flat-panel dimensions has cost a factor of 2--4 in *peak* performance in what you mean by "G5."
Look, even in your first example, you cannot tell the difference between a "massless Earth" (zero G field) that happens to be accelerating toward you at 1 g and a massive Earth that is deforming space-time around you, creating a "gravitational field."
In your second example, what the hell do you mean "I feel no inertia?" I have never heard anyone use that phrase.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, a runaway tag cut off part of the argument.
The most likely chain is
1) K-Ar dating is unreliable for samples < 2 MYA
2) A sample < 2 MYA was submitted for analysis
3) an unreliable measurement resulted.
No one claims the rock is 2 MYA. Evolutionists don't continue to claim that the rock is 2 MYA, because it isn't, and there isn't any reliable evidence to suggest there is! You have made only a straw man argument. However, geochronologists do believe K-Ar ages for other samples indicating 18 MYA, and such results AGREE WITH MULTIPLE OTHER METHODS.
How do you respond to the following analysis Austin's work?
The second law of thermodynamics does not preclude evolution. The law states that CLOSED systems invariably proceed toward states of higher entropy.
The Earth's biosphere is NOT a closed system. There is this massive energy source called the SUN (perhaps you've heard of it?) which puts lots of energy into the biosphere. Which means that local entropy reduction inside your own body, for instance, every second of every day, is more than balanced by a HUGE entropy increase in the sun.
The most likely intermediate forms developed feather-like structures *before* flight, and gliding before powered flight. Consider ostriches: they have feathers, but not light bones. As for wings, bats have wings without feathers. And flying squirrels are living examples of how gliding structures can exist and be used for flight without either full blown wings or feathers. Light bones are a benefit to creatures *with flight.*
Carbon dating cannot be used for rocks. It is for organic material continuously incorporating carbon from the atmosphere. In fact, if you follow what is apparently a link to the issue you bring up, you see that it is argon dating that causes anomalous results.
Using logical reasoning, and after considering other mechanisms (lab contamination), he concludes the most likely explanation is that excess Ar-40 was present in the rock when it was first solidified.
However, he neglects to consider one other aspect: because of the long half-life of K-40, the dating procedure cannot be expected to be accurate for samples younger than about 2 million years before present. In fact, the lab he sent the sample had a standard warning to that effect. Plus, there were lots of questionable processing steps before he sent the samples to the lab.
Meaning the most likely logical chain is:
1) K-Ar dating is unreliable for samples analysis of Austin's work?
When do you think the flood happened? While dinosaurs still existed? Do you believe man existed at that time? The point about the Eskimos and aboriginies is that you are presumably claiming a *recent* date for Noah to start the entire human population. How did the Native Americans get to meet Columbus? How did they get to America if they were recently descended from a population begun in the Middle East? Mainstream biologists have genetic and archaeological evidence showing multiple migrations occuring TENS of thousands of years ago, correlating with ice-age migrations of large mammals. Did those wooly mammoths get off the ark? Did opossums and kangaroos? If so, why aren't there any kangaroos or koalas or playtpuses or opossums on the mainland of Asia?
What "map" are you talking about? Do you have a link? Is it any more than a few ambiguous marks?
How do you draw the line between "new" and "old" organisms? There is no reason for wild tuberculin to be resistant to new antibiotics. Yet, when conditions change, the organism evolves. No one believes a single mutation can change a dinosaur into a bird. However, multiple mutations eventually add up to significant differences. Do you believe that modern dogs, domesticated pigeons, and agricultural crops are the same species as the wild varieties? Do you think the amazing results that breeding of domestic plants and animals can produce in just a few years have anything to do with possibly large changes that could happen in many millions of years?
On the other hand, letting the enemy see whats going on is the only way to credibly DE-escalate after you get what you want. If you are planning ahead for some conclusion other than total (mutual?) annihilation, it perhaps better not to poke out all of your enemy's eyes.
If the enemy can't see what you are actually doing on a global scale, he'll have to assume the worst. Better to use disguise to hide the really important stuff, or use misdirection by showing him what you want him to believe.
Of course, this only applies to the widest-field sensors; obviously, it makes sense to jam radars, etc., used for terminal targeting, or radio channels used for tactical communication.
There are a few Common Lisp implementations as well
Open Source:
Open MCL
SBCL
Commercial:
Macintosh Common Lisp
Allegro Common Lisp
Xanalys Lispworks
You completely misunderstand the second law of thermodynamics. Your understanding of the geology of the Grand Canyon is laughable. It is great evidence for an ancient earth, not for any fairy tale flood.
You oversimplify the evolution of birds to create a strawman. It is easy to conceive of intermediate forms between dinosaurs and modern birds; you are apparently comparing huge dinosaurs (dinosaurs weren't all giant Tyrannosaurs and Apatosaurs) with small birds.
Do you believe God created the dinosaurs? And then made them extinct? Does that sound like an intelligent and benificent designer? Why does an intelligent designer create Mercury and Pluto? Or the billions of other galaxies? Sure seems like a real waste if all creation was meant to produce Abraham and his descendants.
Your definition of "beneficial chance mutation" is unclear. Do you believe any mutations are not due to chance? Or do you believe there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation? How do you explain drug-resistance in infectious agents? Mutations sure seem to benefit the tuberculosis bacterium. Is this from the recent action of the hand of the Creator? Or evolution by artificial selection acting on random variation?
You totally ignore the huge problems with a Bible-based creation theory. You apparently think Native Americans, Eskimos, Australian aboriginies, and Polynesians all managed to belong to the same family tree with Noah at the very top. You apparently think all of the millions of insect species in the world somehow survived a global flood a few thousand years ago; presumably in the Ark. Not to mention all the species native to Australia.
I'm not sure why you keep trying to divert the discussion toward evolution when you are trying to defend a literal six-day creation, but evolution is by no means dying.
It may be that American society is becoming less and less informed over time; there is no guarantee that societies or humankind can avoid mass ignorance. But that has nothing to do with the actual truth of evolution, which is that it is the only scientific theory consistent with the accumulated evidence of hundreds of thousands of person-years of scientific investigation. The popularity of a belief does not indicate truth. The rejection of evolution is, at its base, a rejection of scientific inquiry as a way of determining truth.
The thing is, all Christians believe they are Christians according to scripture. But many of them still deny the literal six-day creation. Your struggle to comprehend is just a measure of how narrow and closed your method of interpretation is.
Where you say "narrow as Scripture" you really mean "narrow as my interpretation of Scripture."
I'm interested where you think Christ himself, during his ministry on Earth, actually said anything about the six-day creation story.
The point is not about your so-called "scientists," the point is your use of the word "Christian."
If you maintain that a literal belief in a six-day creation is necessary to be called "Christian," then you are using the word in a very restrictive sense. There are far more people who call *themselves* Christian than you would call Christian.
Can you clearly answer this question or not:
QUESTION: Do you have to believe in a literal six-day creation to be Christian?
Yes or No?
"Christianity" only states that God created the earth in six literal days only if you mean some restricted subset of Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Genesis story.
Common descent of all humanity through Noah is a laughable idea. It just does not make literal sense on any number of levels, right up there with Joshua calling on God to stop the sun.
Catholics don't have to believe in such nonsense to be considered faithful Catholics, for instance, and they still call themselves Christian.
Thanks for reminding readers about an important third category of patent holders. I am a believer in the patent system as a whole, and my discussion left out the important case of a startup that wants to become a major player, instead of staying a one-person show. The VC game is a wholly different arena, with its own strategies, pitfalls, and rewards.
I'm not sure what your point is with your response to my MS comment. Are you trying to make some pointed reference to Linux? Linux is not a lone coder project by any stretch.
Patent litigation is indeed a weapon that a company can use to threaten one's livelihood as a lone coder, but that the way such weapons get used is to make oneself a visible and important target. Companies won't hit what they don't see or what they think is harmless. On the other hand, if you go out of your way to make MS or any other company think you are a threat, don't be surprised when they treat you like one. Once you've woken a dragon, even if you are secure from patent litigation, there are plenty of other ways to get burned.
Proving you had an idea first only becomes a useful tactic inside the boxing ring of litigation. Most lone coders are not going to want to get in the ring toe-to-toe with some heavyweight; it's inherently an unfair battle. By the time you are in front of a judge, the legal fees are already draining your bank account, and there are no guarantees in a courtroom.
The main problem with patent searches is that the signal-to-noise ratio of the patent database is just so damn low.
The threshold for patentability does not include "is a good idea," "practically useful," or even "works" or "physically possible." The main criteria are "novel" and "not obvious to a practitioner skilled in the art." You don't actually have to be able to make it for a reasonable cost, and it could be absolutely the worst possible way to accomplish the task, and the task might be totally useless.
Most of the really good ideas are protected by trade secrets and tricky parts that aren't actually clear from the patent description, or just the secrets of successful execution: i.e. how to optimize your design for performance or cost, or whatever.
Most importantly, patents by definition only include the stuff that competitors are willing to make public knowledge.
The Library of Congress is not mostly in the business of dealing with the details of authorship. The purpose of a catalog is to allow people to find the book who don't have it in their hands. Allowing you to find it under "Josiah Woodward" is better in many ways than filing only under "Anonymous" in some attempt to be pure.
.R4 1704a" they mention "anon." in the description. And you can also find it by the name of the guy who wrote the introduction, among other things.
In fact, if you are talking about "PN2047
Due diligence is only worthwhile if you want to make a patent of your own. Using it as a guide to "what not to do" is a total waste of time.
Look, all the patent does is allow someone to sue you if they believe they can prove in court your work infringes the patent. This requires several steps to have a real effect on you.
1) They have to notice you
2) They have to care somewhat about what you are doing and analyze it in some detail to determine it is in their patent library
3a) You have to be perceived as a threat to be shut down
3b) alternatively, you could have deep pockets to be emptied.
4) They have to contact you/make the first move
5) They have to decide to sue you
6) They have to be successful enough in court to
7a) bankrupt you
7b) make you empty your deep pockets
7c) make you stop and do something else.
At many points along the way, the process can break down in your favor.
- A lone coder can easily stay under the radar while making a comfortable living for one person.
- Unless they hear about your product, and are able to gather enough information, they won't know it infringes their patents.
- If you are successful enough to have deep enough pockets that a patent-holder notices (and patent holders have to be big enough to spend many thousands of dollars to file a defensible patent, not to mention R&D for real innovation), or to be perceived as a threat, you've made enough money to hire a good lawyer. Or, enough money to give up without a fight and retire on your savings.
- When they contact you, you can counteroffer. Lawsuits are risky. Maybe you can create a win-win situation which they would prefer to a possible lose-win situation favoring you. You probably have some code they would like, or skills they would find useful. Offer to come work for them, or license the code to them, or some other kind of collaboration.
- If they decide to crush you instead of accepting the offer, you can just walk away. Agree to cease & desist, and move on. If you don't have enough money to walk away, they what the hell are they suing you for?
Patent holders are either
1) huge companies that don't care about the little ants scurrying around beneath them unless the ant looks like its going to grow into something big. Then, they would rather buy it than crush it.
Mostly, they get patents to cross-license as protection or to protect their market niche from the other huge companies or *aggressive* startups.
2) small companies looking for a big company to sue for violating a patent. They are an ant themselves, looking to take down one of the elephants. Other ants don't have enough money to make enticing targets.
Neither of these cases really cares about crushing some lone coder just for the savage thrill.
Plus, (IANAL) the damages they can get are related to the profits they would have had but for the infringement. If you are some small potatoes guy, the revenue you suck away would be tiny, unless you are obviously going against some cash cow like Microsoft Office or iTunes Music Store or a commercial data base. Creating a commercial product dedicated directly to putting MS out of business is obviously asking for trouble. But is also beyond the lone coder.
Don't waste psychic energy worrying about the remote risk that a patent lawsuit will crush you. You'll have plenty of other reasons to fail, anyway. Life is too short to worry about this kind of thing before the C&D warning shot comes over the bow.
I believe stanmann might mean that the "defense" in question was against Republikflucht, not against, say, military invasion emenating from West Berlin. The wall enclosed West Berlin, which gives meaning to his last statement that the imprisoned area was outside (i.e. East Germany).
Or he might have been trying too subtly to be funny. Hard to tell.
There are, however, textual indications, at least for the Old Testament, of editing and redaction of conflicting materials, to support one or another side in a now long-dead controversy. As well as some evidence of later additions or emendations of New Testament books, even above the usual problems of slight differences between sources.
Of course, many people reject the idea that the Bible was subject to the sorts of human impulses that govern the writing of other documents, or that it is valid to use the techniques of textual criticism on sacred writing. Then again, many people think the Bible was written in English, or that the KJV is somehow more (or less) valid than newer translations.
It is actually not a prisoner's dilemma or a tragedy of the commons. Any other phrases you care to try?
Also, fire departments do not protect property "rights" they protect *property*. These things are in no way the same thing. Fire isn't subject to legal restrictions, only people are. The reason we have fire departments is that a fire in your house can spread to mine. If we can't afford individually to hire a firefighter, just in case, then it makes sense for us to hire him together.
Here's a hint: logical reasoning is not simply making analogies to overly simplistic examples, or echoing stock phrases you have heard without understanding them. It is recognizing the simplest model that has all the *essential* details of what you wish to understand.
Health care is very different from beach front housing. Markets, while powerful, FAIL in dramatic ways, most particularly when the price does not reflect all of the true costs.
For example: It is a lot cheaper and gives better results, for instance, to provide preventative care for pregnant women than it is to wait for them to show up at the emergency room when it is time for them to deliver. How can a market create the right incentives? Sick people who go untreated can spread costly disease to others, without causing any additional suffering to themselves; i.e. there are costs not reflected in the price of any transaction. The market also fails in health insurance for the important reason that no insurance company wants to insure the sickest people.
Once again MARKETS CAN FAIL. Unless you have some sort of idea for how to compensate for the market failures in health care, then you have no solution.
The reason to force everyone to invest in things like government-funded research and public schools is the same "free rider problem" that leads us to force everyone to pay for the police and fire department: the people who don't pay would get the same benefits as the people who do, because it is impossible to separate out my benefits from your benefits.
The railroads may have been private enterprises, but they got an absolutely enormous public subsidy when they were granted rights-of-way across the nation. Just as private airlines get a huge subsidy in the public construction of airports.
Roads and highways could be, in principle, and sometimes are, in practice, private enterprises. However, it might, also in principle, be cheaper overall to build them with public funds and avoid the overhead associated with restricting the private roads to authorized users and also with the inevitable redundancies involved when multiple private entities build roads from the same point A to the same point B, and the hassles involved in negotiating with who-knows-how-many private entities in order to establish regular delivery services.
In theory, we could go so far as to privatize air, building sufficient enclosures so that one could only breathe the air that one has paid the market price for. But there is no guarantee that doing so would be the most economically efficient solution. In fact, there's a good chance that this scheme would be incredibly wasteful. And hence, a net loss to society as a whole. Better to keep the air a public good.
The G5 in a notebook gets you exactly nothing unless you have the wickedly high-bandwidth memory system that the G5 PowerMacs have. Which, of course, is the REAL reason we won't see G5 Powerbooks anytime soon...even the G4 Powerbooks have substantially slower memory systems than the G4 iMacs had.
Putting a G5 in a system with a slow memory system gives you a Powerbook that is no faster than a G4 Powerbook, and eats into limited G5 supplies for no good reason.
So the answer to your question is absolutely nothing except a higher number on the logo.
Perhaps you're talking about the National Guard in 2004, but George W. Bush was in the National Guard from 1968 to 1973 (ignoring all the ugly details about whether he showed up, how seriously he took it). In that time, there were long waiting lists to get into the Guard because everyone knew you'd be defending Texas from Oklahoma, with very little to no chance of being sent over to Vietnam (maybe you've heard of it?) with all the poor schmucks with lousy draft numbers who weren't able to get some deferment or other.
Of course the National Guard in 2004 is being used and abused with stop-loss orders to serve much longer in actual danger than any of them had a reasonable expectation when they signed up, but that's a whole different era of the George W. Bush saga, now, isn't it?
John Kerry is only "apparently" willing to make US decisions depend on the UN if your "appearances" are determined by what you see on FOX News.
In case you haven't paid attention to the history of the UN, it was precisely created in such a way that it could NOT stop or act against the interests of any of the principal powers, i.e., the permanent members of the Security Council, including the U.S.
The whole problem with Bush is not necessarily that he has a policy of pre-emption, but that the threshold for action keeps getting lower and lower. Saddam Hussein having a wet dream about someday having nuclear weapons, although that dream gets further away every day as his country collapses, is apparently justification for unlimited force.
The only believable reason for Bush to *still* believe Iraq was justified was that Bush's so-called instincts, or God speaking to him directly, tells him so. Not because any rational analysis of the facts leads to it.
To get back to a reasonable view of the world, you have to realize that all the power of the U.S. can't actually change very much on its own; that one way or another even George W. Bush is reduced to hoping that other countries will somehow pitch in and help even if their legitimate concerns were totally ignored in the process of keeping the Pentagon timetable from falling behind. Except that Bush has totally alienated or undermined almost every possible source of help.
The real problem with Bush is that he is obviously ignorant about basic foreign policy, and doesn't care to change that. Anyone who thought, for instance, that the word "crusade" was a good one to use except when talking to right-wing Bible thumpers, or that Iraqis would somehow allow Turkish soldiers to provide security, is totally oblivious to the most basic historical facts of the Middle East. And when confronted with the kind of ignorance that confuses Sweden and Switzerland, the whole crowd around the president just goes uncomfortably quiet.
When your "core policy" is based on faith-based hope rather than fact-based analysis, who knows what kind of disasters can happen. We'll be LUCKY if we get an Iraqi regime that is even as stable as the Shah's was in Iran. And we know how well that turned out for the U.S., now, don't we?
it was exactly like the Ipod today.
Yup. And the transistor radio won't really be popular either until it supports Ogg Vorbis.
While I think the iMac G5 is an extremely interesting computer, your use of the term "fast" is somewhat misleading, in that "G5" is an extremely vague term.
The iMac G5s provide only a 600 MHz FSB, not to mention topping out at a single 1.8 GHz G5.
The PowerMac G5, on the other hand, *starts* at DUAL 1.8 GHz G5s, has up to 1.25 GHz front side bus per processor.
An utterly oversimplified model based on no real data would estimate that reducing the G5 CPU to flat-panel dimensions has cost a factor of 2--4 in *peak* performance in what you mean by "G5."
Look, even in your first example, you cannot tell the difference between a "massless Earth" (zero G field) that happens to be accelerating toward you at 1 g and a massive Earth that is deforming space-time around you, creating a "gravitational field."
In your second example, what the hell do you mean "I feel no inertia?" I have never heard anyone use that phrase.