Software fits copyright to me, because as a programmer I'm using very much the same set of skills that I'd use writing a novel. At least as a lone author. "Team" based software, and Open Source, are different- but not THAT different as we already have novels co-authored by teams of writers as well.
Software does NOT fit patents because you can't patent an idea- software does not exist in the physical realm the same way hardware does.
Another example is copies needed to actually use the software. Sure, there is such a provision in the US copyright law, but it seems to have a requirement of ownership of a copy of the work which many other countries lack. Cases were one is in a posessio of a copy in legal ways (yet not nessecarilly the owner) should not require special permission.
I thought that's what the whole Educational thing was about- when teaching a class in a piece of software, that requires a CD key to run, then it's perfectly legal to run off say, 40 copies of it.
NO THEY DON'T!!! Even Wikipedia clearly discusses these issues, and every "Into to Science" class teaches the same concepts.
From the wikipedia article you quote: Despite popular impressions of science, it is not the goal of science to answer all questions.
Where do you think that "popular impression" comes from, if not from the incredibly bad education of the US Public School system?
Science does gets treated as if it is special, but only because the end results are so good.
Oh yeah- overfeeding and modern medical care subverting evolution resulting in overpopulation, nuclear weapons, massive pollution. Yep, the end results are SO good.
Every type of knowledge or belief is based on some kind of philosophical assumption.
Yes, but very few deny, in their basic method, the existence of the assumptions.
The assumptions that science uses are constantly discussed in the philosophy of science, and that's probably the best place for you to start understanding the issues involved.
Why don't we start by actually teaching philosophy of science classes to grade school children? I'm well aware of the existence of the field now- but nobody mentioned it until *after* I was out of college, at no time in 18 years of education did anybody mention that science was based on "assumptions" rather than the claim in the Wikipedia article that science is based on "perceived reality". Or perhaps you don't know the difference?
Uh huh. and you just happened to understand the story line from those long periods of standing looking at each other. How many words on average per show is vocalised? 15?
Uh- I guess I've never even seen that kind of soap opera. Y&R is almost all verbal- in fact my wife used to "watch" it by tuning an FM radio into the same frequency as Channel 6 in Portland and was able to keep up on the story line. The majority of the story line in that soap is business dealings and legal matters- very little of it is the standard "romance" you apparently think soap operas are.
NOTE: this doesn't distract from my opinion that the characters on that show are mainly incredibly bad two dimensional stereotypes- for instance, the son of the character who just went to jail for bribery & election fraud is himself in trouble with the law- and surprise surprise, the backstory is that he was taken away from his mother when he was young, resulting in a life of self-destruction.
Too bad the protagonist in the story line was white....though there was a black woman's death caused in the story line by the blackmail (very contrived way...argument over blackmail sends black woman over the cliff...but completely predictable. Can you tell I find Y&R to be boring and predictable?)
Well, let's just say it's my "least favorite" TV show- but that any Marxist would find it boring. My wife, however, is of slightly lower IQ, and doesn't quite realize how predictable and stereotypically Marxist Capitalist most of the characters are (for instance, the two main families in the story line, the Abbotts and the Newmans, both slavishly follow the concept of separation of family and business ethics- with a wide variance between the two systems of ethics).
And in a weird Art Imitating Life way- on my wife's favorite Soap Opera (The Young and the Restless) a major character was just sentenced to six years in jail for basically the same crime...though she used blackmail to buy the votes...
I have to wonder what use of software would fall under "fair use" guidelines.
Educational & backup copies, of course. And of course, derivative works, for stuff that is open source to begin with.
Then again, I have to wonder why we treat software as similar to music and literature by placing it under copyright scope in the first place. If software needs a form of IP protection, copyright is the wrong fit, and fair use just makes that all the more evident.
That's strange, I'd argue exactly the opposite- that patents are a wrong fit, as evidenced by the LACK of fair use since software patents have been applied.
To the broader topic: That a company is not required to provide for your fair use is established law, true. Of course, that concept predates the DMCA. The DMCA takes us out of balance by introducing the infamous anti-circumvention clause. Under this clause, not only must I respect the rights of the copyright holder, so must any technology in which I traffic. Not so with fair use -- I can traffic in technology that tramples the consumer's fair use right (per prior law), but not in technology that might be used to trample the copyright (per the new law).
Correct. But also, given fair use (as predated the DMCA, which completely trampled fair use) the consumer's right to fair use should give them the ability to say, make an ISO file of any CD they own.
Most fair-use advocates assume that the best solution to restore balance is to elmiinate the anti-circumvention clause. This returns us to the world of yesterday, where the most technologically capable among us have exercisable fair use rights and the rest of the citizens don't; except that DRM schemes are ever more complex, resulting in an even higher technical barrier to entry into the world of the fair-use "haves".
True enough, though I'd argue that for the widest form of fair use (multiple copies supplied to a classroom for educational purposes) any reasonably well-funded school should be able to circumvent easily (by using nearly identical hardware, thus defeating the "license keyed to specific hardware" algorithm), and have done so for non-circumvention reasons (for ease of maintenance- every computer in a classroom should have identical and interchangeable parts).
But there's another way. Keep the anti-circumvention clause, but add a new clause. Make it illegal to traffic in technology that abridges fair use. If it's illegal to make tools that violate one right, make it illegal to create tools that violate either right. Restore balance. And at the same time, give everyone the ability to exercise their fair use rights, regardless of individual technical knowledge.
Interesting idea that- which would make Windows Genuine Advantage illegal tech....
if it gets this into the Windows and Office EULAs:
"We recognize that copyright law guarantees that you, as a member of the public, have certain legal rights," it says, "You may copy, distribute, prepare derivative works, reproduce, introduce into an electronic retrieval system, perform, and transmit portions of this publication provided that such use constitutes 'fair use' under copyright law, or is otherwise permitted by applicable law."'"
and thus it means that schools can, for educational purposes, run unlicensed copies of said software, it might just be worth it.
Depends on what you consider real money- ODOT did pretty well with $2.5 billion and only one disputed contract recently. And even that disputed contract was due to geology, not smuggling. The idea of a publicly visible bidding process is certainly worth pursuing if the aim is reduction of corruption, even if it means that it adds regulations to the system.
Nice wimpout- I was looking forward to an explanation of how wages were *strongly* linked to productivity, instead of to market rate as they appear to be. (note: if wages are linked to market rate, rather than productivity, then free trade is a betrayal of the working class- instead of accepting the supply vs. demand price of a given skill, it means that the upper class just will sign "trade treaties" to increase the supply until wages are depressed to whatever point they wish to pay- with anybody whose standard of living requires a higher wage priced out of the market).
Here in the UK we use the tiny amount of light to power calculators but I think you would need a panel at least 3km square.
Not at all- ThinkGeek has a $99, 216 cm^2 panel that can be used to recharge your cell phone while using it; your average Wifi router doesn't use more than that. The next thing we need is for Cisco to come out with a mesh router- A Wifi Router that takes a standard 5v or 12v input, but has two radios- a Mesh Mode radio and an Infrastructure Mode radio, so that you can put a forest of Wifi routers and poles in a public place, providing a cloud of coverage with no other wiring.
What B.S. The first thing the teacher talks about in any science class, at any level, is the scientific method and what it means.
Yes, but what they say is that it's a way of determining reality, determining certainty. NOBODY EVER SAYS THAT SCIENCE IS JUST ANOTHER RELIGION BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS.
There's an implicit "according to current theory" in every question, because science classes are about teaching the theories that science generates (and how there were developed, tested, etc).
And yet you need to get to college (or a college equivalent course) to ever hear that. There is a strong "this is the way it is and it can be no other way" underlying the type of experiments we expose younger children to.
When you take an English test, don't you assume that when a question asks about Romeo that it's talking about the Shakespeare character Romeo, not your uncle Romeo?
Not quite safe to do so, unless the topic is really Shakespeare- it could well be talking about a wealth of other Romeos from elsewhere in literature. Assumptions are NEVER safe.
Expecting every statement in a science class to include a verbose listing of all the basic assumptions related to it is absurd.
True, but without it, it is no longer science- but rather a claim to certainty.
You might as well say that "1+1=3" can't be wrong on a test, because it wasn't explicitly stated on that test that "3" refers to the third whole number.
I have indeed argued so- the answer being that eventually, any system of logic must rest on faith- a faith built up of dogmas, of definitions, axioms, and assumptions. But since science specifically denies faith (or rather, certain political groups within science deny faith) we must also deny all that exists upon faith- assumptions, axioms, and definitions included.
Are you suggesting that everything we see as random can't really be that way, so all "randomness" has to be a sign of our mistakes or lack of knowledge?
Either the universe is deterministic (a statement based on faith), which makes science possible; or it is indeterministic (a statement also based on faith) in which case all of science is worthless because you can't count on the same thing happening twice. It doesn't matter what deity you create to make the universe deterministic; call it God, call it Randomness, call it the great green Arklesneziure in the sky, call it the Flying Spaghetti Monster; a truly random universe or a truly irrational God is incompatible with science, so therefore we HAVE to have a deterministic universe. It's the assumption to end all other assumptions- the axiom that without it, nothing else can possibly exist.
I was using an analogy, and you're griping that it isn't perfect. That big, obvious thing you skipped by on your way to a glib reply was my main point.
No, you were using an assumption and building an analogy on it; and in so doing you exited the realm of science. What I'm pointing out is that you've missed the main point that goes beyond all else; that without assumptions, axioms, and definitions we can't make sense of the universe, and if one of those assumptions is indeterministic, you might as well throw all the rest away because it's never going to have any predictive capability anyway.
Theories don't have error ranges, experiments do. Theory says that inertial mass and gravitational mass should be equal (a ratio of exactly 1:1), and experiments show that it is really 1:1, plus or minus 10^-12.
Got a cite for that reference? It's big enough to create an inertial drive out of...
Because they are defined differently and have different properties - look them up.
See, there you go making an assumption based on faith. How do you know the definitions are correct?
Yeah, well, that's the difference between a real democracy and the federal government. A real democracy is so transparent that a teenage hacker can find the patterns and become the whistleblower, 10,000 miles away from the action.
Once you include the requirement in a formal RFP, it makes it very hard for the smugglers.
Science never deals with "final answers" - that's why theories have to be falsifiable to be scientific.
Yeah, right, keep telling yourself that- as millions of so-called science teachers continue to mark answers "wrong".
Theories are always just the most rational guess we can make with what we currently know. We teach quantum mechanics and relativity in science, and we're almost certain that at least one of them has some significant flaw in it. But until we have a working theory of quantum gravity, we teach both of those theories - and the issues with them as well.
Actually, when you rely on random probability, you're avoiding the issues, not teaching them. If you were teaching the issue, "There is something wrong here that we can't see yet" would be the proper answer.
It could be that, in reality, coins land head up nine out of ten times, but that due to some fluke, whenever we've tested them they only come up heads half the time. But that's not reasonable because there's no evidence to support that, the chances of that being true are astronomically small, plus it would defy our physical understanding of how a coin gets flipped. It makes perfect sense to teach the 50/50 H/T ratio in math until someone comes up with that evidence. The same it true for random mutation.
Yep, continuing to avoid the issues. Coin flips are about mass, force and distance- the flipper is in complete control, even if not in conscious control.
Yes, but those patterns are almost certain to fall apart when more tests are made. That's one reason why prediction and repeatability are important in science. And it's also why scientists do huge numbers of observations before making conclusions, include error ranges in their reports, etc.
And yet, when teaching a theory, nobody even mentions the error ranges, just the theory. What was the error range on the theory of inertia for instance? I bet you can't find it.
Fractal are chaotic, not random - those are completely different concepts. The Mandelbrot set is completely deterministic, and the placement of primes is fixed. (You could include randomness in a fractal, but the random part would be in addition to, or mixed with, the non-random chaotic part.)
And you know that randomness is not chaotic exactly how?
Oh c'mon! How does any prohibition help smugglers? Contract or no contract? It doesn't matter if it's legal or not. The point is the deal was done, and lots of money passed hands. It works in the same way that airlines put bogus parts on their aircraft.
Unlike you, I actually work for a government that does due diligence on contracts. If we were putting bogus parts on bridges, it would turn into a three ring media circus in no time flat. Heck, a while back we had a few maintenance shop people getting under $100 gifts for buying cleaning supplies from a certain supplier- that ended up with 5 people losing their jobs with Oregon Department of Transportation and the supplier getting blacklisted to the point where they went out of business, as every one of the 50 states and several Fortune 500 companies stopped buying from them. Tell me, how does a smuggler help a supplier like THAT to survive?
I still don't understand- Iran/Contra wasn't a legal government contract. In what way does restricting say, the FCC from using Seagate hard drives, help smugglers?
No, you simpleton, the difference is that one is a proven working process and the other is a pie-in-the-sky daydream.
They're just methods of building hydrocarbon chains. The basic technology is 4000 years old- it's only that just now we understand and ARE ABLE TO MANIPULATE IT.
Slashdot Mirror
Software fits copyright to me, because as a programmer I'm using very much the same set of skills that I'd use writing a novel. At least as a lone author. "Team" based software, and Open Source, are different- but not THAT different as we already have novels co-authored by teams of writers as well.
Software does NOT fit patents because you can't patent an idea- software does not exist in the physical realm the same way hardware does.
Another example is copies needed to actually use the software. Sure, there is such a provision in the US copyright law, but it seems to have a requirement of ownership of a copy of the work which many other countries lack. Cases were one is in a posessio of a copy in legal ways (yet not nessecarilly the owner) should not require special permission.
I thought that's what the whole Educational thing was about- when teaching a class in a piece of software, that requires a CD key to run, then it's perfectly legal to run off say, 40 copies of it.
NO THEY DON'T!!! Even Wikipedia clearly discusses these issues, and every "Into to Science" class teaches the same concepts.
From the wikipedia article you quote: Despite popular impressions of science, it is not the goal of science to answer all questions.
Where do you think that "popular impression" comes from, if not from the incredibly bad education of the US Public School system?
Science does gets treated as if it is special, but only because the end results are so good.
Oh yeah- overfeeding and modern medical care subverting evolution resulting in overpopulation, nuclear weapons, massive pollution. Yep, the end results are SO good.
Every type of knowledge or belief is based on some kind of philosophical assumption.
Yes, but very few deny, in their basic method, the existence of the assumptions.
The assumptions that science uses are constantly discussed in the philosophy of science, and that's probably the best place for you to start understanding the issues involved.
Why don't we start by actually teaching philosophy of science classes to grade school children? I'm well aware of the existence of the field now- but nobody mentioned it until *after* I was out of college, at no time in 18 years of education did anybody mention that science was based on "assumptions" rather than the claim in the Wikipedia article that science is based on "perceived reality". Or perhaps you don't know the difference?
Uh huh. and you just happened to understand the story line from those long periods of standing looking at each other. How many words on average per show is vocalised? 15?
Uh- I guess I've never even seen that kind of soap opera. Y&R is almost all verbal- in fact my wife used to "watch" it by tuning an FM radio into the same frequency as Channel 6 in Portland and was able to keep up on the story line. The majority of the story line in that soap is business dealings and legal matters- very little of it is the standard "romance" you apparently think soap operas are.
NOTE: this doesn't distract from my opinion that the characters on that show are mainly incredibly bad two dimensional stereotypes- for instance, the son of the character who just went to jail for bribery & election fraud is himself in trouble with the law- and surprise surprise, the backstory is that he was taken away from his mother when he was young, resulting in a life of self-destruction.
I thought *maybe* it was because a meterosexual doesn't exactly make the popular conception of an action hero.
Too bad the protagonist in the story line was white....though there was a black woman's death caused in the story line by the blackmail (very contrived way...argument over blackmail sends black woman over the cliff...but completely predictable. Can you tell I find Y&R to be boring and predictable?)
Well, let's just say it's my "least favorite" TV show- but that any Marxist would find it boring. My wife, however, is of slightly lower IQ, and doesn't quite realize how predictable and stereotypically Marxist Capitalist most of the characters are (for instance, the two main families in the story line, the Abbotts and the Newmans, both slavishly follow the concept of separation of family and business ethics- with a wide variance between the two systems of ethics).
And in a weird Art Imitating Life way- on my wife's favorite Soap Opera (The Young and the Restless) a major character was just sentenced to six years in jail for basically the same crime...though she used blackmail to buy the votes...
I have to wonder what use of software would fall under "fair use" guidelines.
Educational & backup copies, of course. And of course, derivative works, for stuff that is open source to begin with.
Then again, I have to wonder why we treat software as similar to music and literature by placing it under copyright scope in the first place. If software needs a form of IP protection, copyright is the wrong fit, and fair use just makes that all the more evident.
That's strange, I'd argue exactly the opposite- that patents are a wrong fit, as evidenced by the LACK of fair use since software patents have been applied.
To the broader topic: That a company is not required to provide for your fair use is established law, true. Of course, that concept predates the DMCA. The DMCA takes us out of balance by introducing the infamous anti-circumvention clause. Under this clause, not only must I respect the rights of the copyright holder, so must any technology in which I traffic. Not so with fair use -- I can traffic in technology that tramples the consumer's fair use right (per prior law), but not in technology that might be used to trample the copyright (per the new law).
Correct. But also, given fair use (as predated the DMCA, which completely trampled fair use) the consumer's right to fair use should give them the ability to say, make an ISO file of any CD they own.
Most fair-use advocates assume that the best solution to restore balance is to elmiinate the anti-circumvention clause. This returns us to the world of yesterday, where the most technologically capable among us have exercisable fair use rights and the rest of the citizens don't; except that DRM schemes are ever more complex, resulting in an even higher technical barrier to entry into the world of the fair-use "haves".
True enough, though I'd argue that for the widest form of fair use (multiple copies supplied to a classroom for educational purposes) any reasonably well-funded school should be able to circumvent easily (by using nearly identical hardware, thus defeating the "license keyed to specific hardware" algorithm), and have done so for non-circumvention reasons (for ease of maintenance- every computer in a classroom should have identical and interchangeable parts).
But there's another way. Keep the anti-circumvention clause, but add a new clause. Make it illegal to traffic in technology that abridges fair use. If it's illegal to make tools that violate one right, make it illegal to create tools that violate either right. Restore balance. And at the same time, give everyone the ability to exercise their fair use rights, regardless of individual technical knowledge.
Interesting idea that- which would make Windows Genuine Advantage illegal tech....
if it gets this into the Windows and Office EULAs:
"We recognize that copyright law guarantees that you, as a member of the public, have certain legal rights," it says, "You may copy, distribute, prepare derivative works, reproduce, introduce into an electronic retrieval system, perform, and transmit portions of this publication provided that such use constitutes 'fair use' under copyright law, or is otherwise permitted by applicable law."'"
and thus it means that schools can, for educational purposes, run unlicensed copies of said software, it might just be worth it.
I'll believe it the day Microsoft includes the above language in Vista's EULA, not before.
Thus my original point- the way to deal with the danger of smugglers and corruption is to do the following:
1. Hold an open bid system.
2. Write into your RFP specific exclusions for what you're afraid of.
In this case- drives with encryption manufactured in China should *not* be a part of any federal government computer purchase contract.
They'd probably harbor a sleeper cell in the loading dock as long as their supply chain of cheap Chinese crap doesn't slow down.
Why not, I seem to remember a homeless college student spending a couple of days in one of their stores once.
Depends on what you consider real money- ODOT did pretty well with $2.5 billion and only one disputed contract recently. And even that disputed contract was due to geology, not smuggling. The idea of a publicly visible bidding process is certainly worth pursuing if the aim is reduction of corruption, even if it means that it adds regulations to the system.
Nice wimpout- I was looking forward to an explanation of how wages were *strongly* linked to productivity, instead of to market rate as they appear to be. (note: if wages are linked to market rate, rather than productivity, then free trade is a betrayal of the working class- instead of accepting the supply vs. demand price of a given skill, it means that the upper class just will sign "trade treaties" to increase the supply until wages are depressed to whatever point they wish to pay- with anybody whose standard of living requires a higher wage priced out of the market).
Here in the UK we use the tiny amount of light to power calculators but I think you would need a panel at least 3km square.
Not at all- ThinkGeek has a $99, 216 cm^2 panel that can be used to recharge your cell phone while using it; your average Wifi router doesn't use more than that. The next thing we need is for Cisco to come out with a mesh router- A Wifi Router that takes a standard 5v or 12v input, but has two radios- a Mesh Mode radio and an Infrastructure Mode radio, so that you can put a forest of Wifi routers and poles in a public place, providing a cloud of coverage with no other wiring.
What B.S. The first thing the teacher talks about in any science class, at any level, is the scientific method and what it means.
Yes, but what they say is that it's a way of determining reality, determining certainty. NOBODY EVER SAYS THAT SCIENCE IS JUST ANOTHER RELIGION BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS.
There's an implicit "according to current theory" in every question, because science classes are about teaching the theories that science generates (and how there were developed, tested, etc).
And yet you need to get to college (or a college equivalent course) to ever hear that. There is a strong "this is the way it is and it can be no other way" underlying the type of experiments we expose younger children to.
When you take an English test, don't you assume that when a question asks about Romeo that it's talking about the Shakespeare character Romeo, not your uncle Romeo?
Not quite safe to do so, unless the topic is really Shakespeare- it could well be talking about a wealth of other Romeos from elsewhere in literature. Assumptions are NEVER safe.
Expecting every statement in a science class to include a verbose listing of all the basic assumptions related to it is absurd.
True, but without it, it is no longer science- but rather a claim to certainty.
You might as well say that "1+1=3" can't be wrong on a test, because it wasn't explicitly stated on that test that "3" refers to the third whole number.
I have indeed argued so- the answer being that eventually, any system of logic must rest on faith- a faith built up of dogmas, of definitions, axioms, and assumptions. But since science specifically denies faith (or rather, certain political groups within science deny faith) we must also deny all that exists upon faith- assumptions, axioms, and definitions included.
Are you suggesting that everything we see as random can't really be that way, so all "randomness" has to be a sign of our mistakes or lack of knowledge?
Either the universe is deterministic (a statement based on faith), which makes science possible; or it is indeterministic (a statement also based on faith) in which case all of science is worthless because you can't count on the same thing happening twice. It doesn't matter what deity you create to make the universe deterministic; call it God, call it Randomness, call it the great green Arklesneziure in the sky, call it the Flying Spaghetti Monster; a truly random universe or a truly irrational God is incompatible with science, so therefore we HAVE to have a deterministic universe. It's the assumption to end all other assumptions- the axiom that without it, nothing else can possibly exist.
I was using an analogy, and you're griping that it isn't perfect. That big, obvious thing you skipped by on your way to a glib reply was my main point.
No, you were using an assumption and building an analogy on it; and in so doing you exited the realm of science. What I'm pointing out is that you've missed the main point that goes beyond all else; that without assumptions, axioms, and definitions we can't make sense of the universe, and if one of those assumptions is indeterministic, you might as well throw all the rest away because it's never going to have any predictive capability anyway.
Theories don't have error ranges, experiments do. Theory says that inertial mass and gravitational mass should be equal (a ratio of exactly 1:1), and experiments show that it is really 1:1, plus or minus 10^-12.
Got a cite for that reference? It's big enough to create an inertial drive out of...
Because they are defined differently and have different properties - look them up.
See, there you go making an assumption based on faith. How do you know the definitions are correct?
I just want to know how I spend my meager 768kbps on food, clothing, and shelter....
I am sure TorrentSpy handing over a list of User IP's would be sufficient.
I've never figured out why the courts, the **AA, and the lawyers think so. IP addresses map to devices, not to people.
Yeah, well, that's the difference between a real democracy and the federal government. A real democracy is so transparent that a teenage hacker can find the patterns and become the whistleblower, 10,000 miles away from the action.
Once you include the requirement in a formal RFP, it makes it very hard for the smugglers.
Science never deals with "final answers" - that's why theories have to be falsifiable to be scientific.
Yeah, right, keep telling yourself that- as millions of so-called science teachers continue to mark answers "wrong".
Theories are always just the most rational guess we can make with what we currently know. We teach quantum mechanics and relativity in science, and we're almost certain that at least one of them has some significant flaw in it. But until we have a working theory of quantum gravity, we teach both of those theories - and the issues with them as well.
Actually, when you rely on random probability, you're avoiding the issues, not teaching them. If you were teaching the issue, "There is something wrong here that we can't see yet" would be the proper answer.
It could be that, in reality, coins land head up nine out of ten times, but that due to some fluke, whenever we've tested them they only come up heads half the time. But that's not reasonable because there's no evidence to support that, the chances of that being true are astronomically small, plus it would defy our physical understanding of how a coin gets flipped. It makes perfect sense to teach the 50/50 H/T ratio in math until someone comes up with that evidence. The same it true for random mutation.
Yep, continuing to avoid the issues. Coin flips are about mass, force and distance- the flipper is in complete control, even if not in conscious control.
Yes, but those patterns are almost certain to fall apart when more tests are made. That's one reason why prediction and repeatability are important in science. And it's also why scientists do huge numbers of observations before making conclusions, include error ranges in their reports, etc.
And yet, when teaching a theory, nobody even mentions the error ranges, just the theory. What was the error range on the theory of inertia for instance? I bet you can't find it.
Fractal are chaotic, not random - those are completely different concepts. The Mandelbrot set is completely deterministic, and the placement of primes is fixed. (You could include randomness in a fractal, but the random part would be in addition to, or mixed with, the non-random chaotic part.)
And you know that randomness is not chaotic exactly how?
Oh c'mon! How does any prohibition help smugglers? Contract or no contract? It doesn't matter if it's legal or not. The point is the deal was done, and lots of money passed hands. It works in the same way that airlines put bogus parts on their aircraft.
Unlike you, I actually work for a government that does due diligence on contracts. If we were putting bogus parts on bridges, it would turn into a three ring media circus in no time flat. Heck, a while back we had a few maintenance shop people getting under $100 gifts for buying cleaning supplies from a certain supplier- that ended up with 5 people losing their jobs with Oregon Department of Transportation and the supplier getting blacklisted to the point where they went out of business, as every one of the 50 states and several Fortune 500 companies stopped buying from them. Tell me, how does a smuggler help a supplier like THAT to survive?
I still don't understand- Iran/Contra wasn't a legal government contract. In what way does restricting say, the FCC from using Seagate hard drives, help smugglers?
No, you simpleton, the difference is that one is a proven working process and the other is a pie-in-the-sky daydream.
They're just methods of building hydrocarbon chains. The basic technology is 4000 years old- it's only that just now we understand and ARE ABLE TO MANIPULATE IT.