Everyone knows this, There used to be a land bridge between asia and north america. There isn't one now.
Nor does it take more than an idiot to know that global climatological change would be incredibly economically disruptive.
I have a question for you. Can you tell me exactly who funds and who controls the funds for the global warming people? If people are biasable based on where their money comes from, I would like an understandable explanation of who controls the funding for the global warming crowd? I've never seen a comprehensible list.
Is the funding mostly controlled by those who believe in the hypothesis of global warming? Is it not? If the funding for the scientists writing the report comes from people who believe in global warming, am I supposed to believe they're unbiased too?
You're right. I should have researched what I said before looking like this much of a fool. I also error'ed because the site has been recently revamped and the information I meant to link to was no longer obvious. (BTW, the URL you gave at Pace university is dead.)
There seems to be quite a bit of a lack of sanity in the environmentalism circles. For curiosity, have you read http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm ? It's most entertaining. Specifically #14-19.
Let's follow the money then. Let's assume that all scientists are automatically biased in the direction their paycheck comes from.
A scientist working for a corporation tends to lie to help the corporation.. Wouldn't a scientist who's funded by an environmental group also tend to lie to help that group?
Or would you claim that there's a double-standard. That scientists who work for corporations will lie, but those working for environmental groups, although they're in the same circumstances, wouldn't?
Take a clue. Everyone has biases, otherwise we would always have a consensus.. Has Paul Erhlik, a scientist ever admitted his mistaken predictions?
It is our job as the public to distinguish between the lies and biases to find the truth.
Much of the evidence of global warming is in indicators; people who claim they can measure fractions of a degree in tree rings or atospheric gasses. That's something that makes me reluctant to trust them.
I thought I remembered reading that we're in an interglacial period.. IE, we're supposed to be covered by glaciers right now, and it's only chance we've had such good weather the last few 10 thousand years to set up a civilization.
(Assume that I'm the author of the aforementioned code. I'm not, but...)
If you want to use MY code, you have to agree to the terms I give on it. And my terms for using MY code within your program are that you have to release the source code for the entire application.
GPL code is not public domain. You have to satisfy MY price to distribute MY code. Otherwise, you have no rights under copyright law. If you don't like the terms I offer, you can either negotiate other terms with me (which will probably require monetary renumeration), or you don't use the code.
If you want code without these restrictions, either reimplement it yourself, or use public domain. You have no right to use my code.
There is a lot of junk science out there in all fields. But the global warming has seem to become the favored theory of environmentalists, regardless of evidence. Check out the website for another perspective. You don't have to agree with it, just read it and reflect.
What they claim is that there are two internet's. There is the dangerous bad internet full of child porn and drugs, and there is the good internet that's all care bears and disney. And it is their product that makes the difference.
In fact, they cannot sell their product unless they can convince the public that they can offer the second internet to children.
The rest of us know that there is only one internet and there is no way to seperate out the 'safe subset'. Parents don't like hearing those words, they don't want to believe that there's only one internet, and it's an unsafe internet. Filtering companies want parents to believe that the choice exists.
Maybe if we offer alternatives (like my other post) to parents, they will stop believing the fiction of a 'safe internet', and look for alternatives that are reasonable.
Despite what filtering companies want us to believe, One does not have to believe in filtering to believe that parents should have choices for their children.
If filtering actually worked, I wouldn't mind it. If filtering banned what a majority of people called smut. But allowed anything that was gray to go through, then I wouldn't mind it so much.
Stuff which is obviously smut with no value. (pictures, stories, etc) doesn't have a place in libraries.. But, say, an educational site on masturbation (with pictures) is not something I'd call smut and should be allowed to go through. Now, some people feel that anything touching on sex should be blocked, and they would use filtering as an excuse for these excessive blocks.
The problem is that the filtering is ineffective. Automatic filtering cannot and does not make the above distinction. Human-based filtering suffers from a lack of manpower (of about 5 orders of magnitude). Thus, there is no way to do the ideal. There's no way to even approach the ideal.
As peacefire showed, a noticable fraction of the yahoo porn listings were let through by these 'filters'. Similarily, every few seconds, a child is blocked from a legitimate site.
So, in independent tests, filtering let's half of the outright porn through, and bans a lot of legitimate material.. To me, this is like indiscriminate shooting. Let's go into a bad neighborhood and shoot people at random. We might hit some guilty people by chance, but we'll hurt a lot of innocents.
If you can't see the peacefire web site, try turning off of your filters. Most filtering programs have the site classified as everything from porn, to nazi's, to military, to gambling.
If an only if you can show me filtering that does it's job, will I ever accept it. Blocking 90% of the million porn sites leaves 100,000 left; why bother? Using filtering as a way to censor knowledge from your children is bad. (Masturbation, alternate religions) And no filtering program must be allowed to block any educational site, whether that site deals with sexuality, learning about hate-groups, military strategy, guns. For the gains, 100,000 porn sites instead of a whole million, the cost is too much.
Since such a program cannot and does not exist, the most the libraries can do is to put the responsibility on the parent. No one under 18 is allowed internet access. A parent can permit access by their children and can choose among the options:
1. No access allowed.
2. Access allowed only if with an adult. Parent can later review visited websites.
3. Access allowed, parent has the ability to review visited websites. (With an optional time-limit for number of hours)
4. Access allowed, parent does not have the ability to review visited websites. (with an optional time-limit for number of hours)
All access is full access. If a child is with a parent, they get access through their parent's card. No one is allowed to sit in front of the computers without a card. (So a stranger cannot offer a a child access unsupervised.) The parent gets the flexibility for what level of monitoring, if any, their children get. It's also open; the child knows whether or not what they visit will be reviewed by their parents.
Heh.. With some GUI-ified TCL scripts and a squid proxy, this kind of system would be pretty trivial to set up.
If the price is depressed, like the residential rates that PG&E are forced to pay because of rate-limits, who is paying the price?
In the case of electricity in california, it's obvious that PG&E is currently paying the price for the rate limits. And what a price tag, 10 billion!
So, if the price we're paying for power/natural gass/gasholine is depressed, who is paying the difference between the real price and the price we pay. (No, 'our children' is not a correct answer, the energy we use now to bring up our children is an advantage to their future, not a harm.)
You see, my parents both grew up on farms, farms which have since been replaced by trees. Therefore, I feel that our family, and me myself are warranted a eco-credit..
Actually, if you look at the growth of forests nationwide over the last century, on average, everyone in the US is in the black! And throw in all the gains over the last 50 years on top of that.. Whoo-hoo!
Yippee! I've never done a gasholine-fueled bonfire outside before.. I guess it's time to start. Will you join me and use up your credits so we can have a bonfire twice as big?
We hear about all the dangers of cellphone.. Err, rather, we hear certain groups of people proclaiming the dangers of cellphones.
But what I want to see is where are people keeling over dead. People keel over dead of heart disease, of lung cancer, of smoking. But, millions have been using cell phones for YEARS, and yet, we don't hear about tens of thousands of people dying over it.
Now, maybe cell phones, like smoking, don't cause death quickly, maybe they take years/decades to find out for certain. But, any technology runs this risk, the only way to find out for certain is to wait 50 years and look for people keeling over dead. Even if it does cause some increase in disease in 50 years, do people really want to give up such a powerful and valuable technology? If we have to give up cell phones, why not give up electricity, the light bulb, and such.. Is there any evidence that the light bulb will not cause cancer after 50 years? Where are people suing GE over their soft-white light-bulb caused cancers? How about the automobile, there is proof that it kills thousand of people a year.
IMHO, IANAL, and I am unqualified to say this, but, I think this is just a case of a few people who want something to blame for whatever disease they have. ``It's not just bad luck that I got this cancer, it must have been caused by XYZ.'' Healthy people get cancer too.
*Most* of us are adults and able to take the risks of any technology we use. We should not ban a useful technology because some people are dessperate for a reason for their disease other than 'bad luck'.
It took a hundred years from the invention of the printing press to the first book being banned. It took additional centuries for literacy to become widespread, and for widespread literacy to lead to the creation of new forms of thought and essay. -- [[Paraphrased from a talk given at CMU a few years ago. Wish I knew who it was.]]
On this timeline, I'd say that we're probably about year 80.. We're nearing the time when entrenched interests, like the crown, are threatened and trying to repel the danger through banning the 'misuses' of the new technology. [DMCA, UCITA, CSS on DVD's, and all the rest.]
All members have their trust flagged to trust all keys signed by the organization-signing key for their organization. They also get their own key signed by the organization key.
By some configuration of how PGP calculates trust, you can put in transitiveness to make organizations trust other organizations. (For example, all are automatically marked to trust any keys signed by keys signed by the 'master organization'-signing key.
True, PGP is not intended for this. One problem is that the key trust is transitive. I trust you who trusts someone elses key who trusts..... to $N$ levels deep. You need this transitivity, but not necessarily to all 8 levels. We can use the UID field on a key to put an advisory informing PGP to cut the levels of transitivity.
(So, an organization's master key can be flagged to not spread trust too far. You can also have cross-organizational trusting, and finally, one key may be a member of more than one trust heirarchy. (For cross-organizational groups.)
You're not obligated to use the codec, nor are you obligated to use the source code.
GPL code gives you 2 options:
1. Don't use it. If you believe that the GPL code has less value than your code, then you might be better off reimplementing it.
2. Negotiate with the copyright holder. As the copyright holder can license code under whatever terms they wish, I'm sure that they would be willing to license you the codec under terms that are more to your liking.. Of course, there may be a different (probably monetary) price attached.
GPL code is not public domain. There is a price attached. It's not a monetary price (like windows/oracle/mtv/..). But it is a price. You either pay the price, or you don't use GPL'ed code in non-free (libre) software.
Let me repeat that: GPL is not the same as public domain.
As a personal question, how is a GPL code less free than a non-free codec? What are the license fees to fraunhofer for MP3? How about liquid audio? Microsoft Audio? GPL code isn't public domain, but it is free'er than those non-free codec in several ways. Those techniques are closed, trade secret, proprietary, and patented, thus un-reimplementable. At least Vorbis lets you reimplement it with no obligation.
Please give a reference for where 'toy' languages have been used and have failed.
Re:Prosperity: social and economic power is critic
on
Eat Less - Live Longer
·
· Score: 2
Actually yes, I do know a real environmentalist, myself. I am an environmentalist. I do not want to live in filth, I'm glad I live in an affluent society that has similar views. I said nothing about the incompatability of industrial practice and environmentalism. Only the radicals who wish to halt or reverse progress.
There's a difference between what I think and what the radical environmentalists do. Firebombing. Hysteria over GM crops when golden rice can save millions of children from vitamin A deficiency. Hell, even Greenpeace has backed down on their lunacy about DDT; they actually agree it should still be used to stop Malaria. (25 million lives saved a year!) Food irradiation? How many outbreaks of salmonella and E.Coli, how many deaths could have been prevented? How many millions of people sicken or die each year from food-bourne illnesses? [references available upon request]
I detest such views. I detest only those who espouse such views. They are morally wrong. No moral person could want tens of thousands of children to go blind, millions to suffer vitamin deficiency. No moral person could ban a chemical that has saved 25 million lives a year.
I am glad of the environmental movement of the 50's-80's. If you were a member back then, I thank you! But, I find much less to respect about the radical parts of the modern environmental movement.
Yeah, I remember hearing about that study. Aboriginies may have 'short' workweeks, but they don't get many of the labor-intensive things like medical care, automobiles, postal system, computers, television, cable, telephones.
I know I could survive a lot cheaper with less work if I didn't have a computer or a car. (I don't have a car now, getting one would double my monthly expenditures.)
How short could you make your workweek if you gave up all those toys? I could live on about 10 hours a week at my current pay rate.
Prosperity: social and economic power is critical.
on
Eat Less - Live Longer
·
· Score: 3
What is actually evolutionary encouraged is not your own reproduction, but your descendents reproduction. A child that has no further children is not evolutionarily encouraged.
Historically, individual economic and social power is associated with living longer. It's still true. Compare peasants and kings. Compare europe, south america, and africa.
Since such power tended to derive from muscles and work, women, who are biologically disadvantaged in those areas, have historically lacked power. It is only recently with modern sanitation, medicine, and social equality that the higher 'natural' life expectancy for women has finally become apparent.
The number one thing that would improve average life expectancy on Earth is PROSPERITY! Affluent societies can afford sanitation, child labor laws, much less back-breaking labor, modern machinery, technology, modern medical care, electricity, anesthetics, literacy. All of these lead, directly and indirectly to a healthier populace and longer life expectancy.
Anyone who claims that prosperity and technology are wrong are cursing our world to poverty, cursing our world to starving short-lived miserable people. The world has enough of that already. This is a fate that no moral person could wish on anyone. (Unfortunately, there are millions of people that espouse this horrible vision, this is why I dislike the more radical environmental movements, of which Al Gore is a sympathiser. I further note that only people in affluent societies seem to be against progress. Those that do live in poverty seem to feel different.)
Prosperity has it's flaws, but the benefits far outweigh them.
There are many evils in the world, but we let them continue because to not let them continue would violate privacy, or freedom.
Incest happens, one way around it is to require that everyplace that allows children is tape recorded to catch the bastards. A simpler and cheaper alternative is to kill all children.
This is my solution.
Sometimes, when the only way to stop an evil is to do an even greater evil, the only sane thing to do is nothing.
When user interfaces are designed, which is the better design? The simple pictoral design? (Like thos books for kindergardners), or a powerful and complicated design?
In evolutionary terms, it's the simple design, because it's easier to learn. Unfortunately, this is a flaw, it will forever hobble us from creating the most powerful design.
Do not forget, most people in western civilization have to master an incredibly complicated, unnatural, non-intutive task. This task is INCREDIBLY difficult. Most people spend 10 years mastering literacy.
We force our kids to master a complicated and un-intuitive interface because simpler interface don't offer the power, and flexibility.
I like powerful tools for powerful and difficult tasks. Pictures can express instructions or handle simple tasks, but only words can express abstract relationships. Without words, there can be no mathematics, no algebra, because pictures cannot express the concept of a 'variable'.
If you know of UI research that gets around this, I'd love to hear it. Please give me a counterexample.:)
The real purpose is to further the public good. The founders of the United States concluded that the public good is furthered ONLY by increasing the number of works in the public domain.
Ergo, Copyright law, which granted a time-limited limited monopoly. Authors can use it to require renumeration for their works.
The purpose of copyright law is NOT to maximize the rate of return to the copyright holder (note, this isn't necessarily the origional artist) for copyrighted works. Nor is copyright law's purpose to maximize the number of works available. (If it was, then why did they put a time-limit on it?)
Copyright law's purpose to further the public good by insuring the maximum number of artistic works are in the public domain.
\eqnarray can usually be replaced with a better environment like \align or \alignat, or \gather, \split, \multline, etc. I've not found a time when one of these other environments didn't do what I wanted. They also have better spacing.
IMHO, it's a low-level environment that can be replaced with high-level environment describing semantically what's going on. (See 'The LaTeX Companion'), or '/usr/share/texmf/source/latex/amslatex/math/testm ath.tex' and read the section on ``Examples of multiple-line equation structures''. Where I have seen people use it, they either tend to misuse it, or they make another big mistake.
Another mistake I tend to see is people not making commands and environments to suit the semantic structure of their document.. Here are extracts of a couple of prologs of different documents I've done.
I almost never inline a symbol directly into my documents unless it has a common semantic meaning ('+', '*'). I create a command to represent it's semantic meaning and use that (ex: '\StepsTo')
This way, I can reformat things like how I display lambda's (ex: '\Lam'. At one time, I used a subscript and superscript, now they're both subscripts), switch a symbol to another type of symbol, change the spacing around a symbol, etc.
If you want to see what it looks like in a complete document, bounce me an email.
If you're writing a letter to Aunt Sally, or any other short one-of-a-kind document, A word processor is the best solution. It's simple and lets you manage things easily. Ditto for HTML.
If you're writing a hundred very similar documents, or you have a thousand people collaberating writing documentation, Some type of structured XML is the best. It'll let you have a consistent look&feel, and it'll help avoid people shooting each others foot. It also lets you design the input language around the semantic structure of what you're writing. You amortize the creation of the DTD and software over the large number of documents/pages being written.
But, If you're writing documents that have a lot of semantic complexity (mathematics books, papers, etc.) but each document is a one-off, Latex tends to be better as a half&half. It lets you create some simple semantic structure in a powerful, flexible, and easy way. In a sense, you merge the presentation language with the semantic meaning. It doesn't divorice the two issues from each other like XML, but it puts in a distinction that avoids the micromanaging hell of word processors.
It all depends on the type of document you are writing, how many people are collaberating, and number of documents of that type that will be written.
(One good sign of LaTeX being misused is the use of 'eqnarray'. I've used latex for 3 years, written >400 pages in it, and never used it once. Ditto for vspace. If you have useful semantic structure, use/newcommand to tell latex. One of these days, I'll put up some source code to tell people the most frequent uses&misuses of latex.
Slashdot Mirror
linux can do hibernation/sleep. I do it all the time.
Can you supply me a reasonable cost-benefit analysis for the preservation of copyright in the internet age?
This whole issue is coming up BECAUSE the cost-benefit analysis of preserving copyright protection has changed.
There's a new cost, the DMCA, the restrainment of the first amendment, that wasn't there before.
There is an implicit assumption in what you say that the cost-benefit analysis for copyright has remained unchanged. It has.
10 years ago, a 1ghz computer would have been impossible..
Just because it was impossible 10 years ago or hasn't been done yet doesn't mean that it won't be done in the future.
Computer can help solve a LOT of problems.
Everyone knows this, There used to be a land bridge between asia and north america. There isn't one now.
Nor does it take more than an idiot to know that global climatological change would be incredibly economically disruptive.
I have a question for you. Can you tell me exactly who funds and who controls the funds for the global warming people? If people are biasable based on where their money comes from, I would like an understandable explanation of who controls the funding for the global warming crowd? I've never seen a comprehensible list.
Is the funding mostly controlled by those who believe in the hypothesis of global warming? Is it not? If the funding for the scientists writing the report comes from people who believe in global warming, am I supposed to believe they're unbiased too?
You're right. I should have researched what I said before looking like this much of a fool. I also error'ed because the site has been recently revamped and the information I meant to link to was no longer obvious. (BTW, the URL you gave at Pace university is dead.)
There seems to be quite a bit of a lack of sanity in the environmentalism circles. For curiosity, have you read http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm ? It's most entertaining. Specifically #14-19.
Let's follow the money then. Let's assume that all scientists are automatically biased in the direction their paycheck comes from.
A scientist working for a corporation tends to lie to help the corporation.. Wouldn't a scientist who's funded by an environmental group also tend to lie to help that group?
Or would you claim that there's a double-standard. That scientists who work for corporations will lie, but those working for environmental groups, although they're in the same circumstances, wouldn't?
Take a clue. Everyone has biases, otherwise we would always have a consensus.. Has Paul Erhlik, a scientist ever admitted his mistaken predictions?
It is our job as the public to distinguish between the lies and biases to find the truth.
Much of the evidence of global warming is in indicators; people who claim they can measure fractions of a degree in tree rings or atospheric gasses. That's something that makes me reluctant to trust them.
I thought I remembered reading that we're in an interglacial period.. IE, we're supposed to be covered by glaciers right now, and it's only chance we've had such good weather the last few 10 thousand years to set up a civilization.
(Assume that I'm the author of the aforementioned code. I'm not, but...)
If you want to use MY code, you have to agree to the terms I give on it. And my terms for using MY code within your program are that you have to release the source code for the entire application.
GPL code is not public domain. You have to satisfy MY price to distribute MY code. Otherwise, you have no rights under copyright law. If you don't like the terms I offer, you can either negotiate other terms with me (which will probably require monetary renumeration), or you don't use the code.
If you want code without these restrictions, either reimplement it yourself, or use public domain. You have no right to use my code.
www.junkscience.com
There is a lot of junk science out there in all fields. But the global warming has seem to become the favored theory of environmentalists, regardless of evidence. Check out the website for another perspective. You don't have to agree with it, just read it and reflect.
What they claim is that there are two internet's. There is the dangerous bad internet full of child porn and drugs, and there is the good internet that's all care bears and disney. And it is their product that makes the difference.
In fact, they cannot sell their product unless they can convince the public that they can offer the second internet to children.
The rest of us know that there is only one internet and there is no way to seperate out the 'safe subset'. Parents don't like hearing those words, they don't want to believe that there's only one internet, and it's an unsafe internet. Filtering companies want parents to believe that the choice exists.
Maybe if we offer alternatives (like my other post) to parents, they will stop believing the fiction of a 'safe internet', and look for alternatives that are reasonable.
Despite what filtering companies want us to believe, One does not have to believe in filtering to believe that parents should have choices for their children.
If filtering actually worked, I wouldn't mind it. If filtering banned what a majority of people called smut. But allowed anything that was gray to go through, then I wouldn't mind it so much.
Stuff which is obviously smut with no value. (pictures, stories, etc) doesn't have a place in libraries.. But, say, an educational site on masturbation (with pictures) is not something I'd call smut and should be allowed to go through. Now, some people feel that anything touching on sex should be blocked, and they would use filtering as an excuse for these excessive blocks.
The problem is that the filtering is ineffective. Automatic filtering cannot and does not make the above distinction. Human-based filtering suffers from a lack of manpower (of about 5 orders of magnitude). Thus, there is no way to do the ideal. There's no way to even approach the ideal.
As peacefire showed, a noticable fraction of the yahoo porn listings were let through by these 'filters'. Similarily, every few seconds, a child is blocked from a legitimate site.
So, in independent tests, filtering let's half of the outright porn through, and bans a lot of legitimate material.. To me, this is like indiscriminate shooting. Let's go into a bad neighborhood and shoot people at random. We might hit some guilty people by chance, but we'll hurt a lot of innocents.
If you can't see the peacefire web site, try turning off of your filters. Most filtering programs have the site classified as everything from porn, to nazi's, to military, to gambling.
If an only if you can show me filtering that does it's job, will I ever accept it. Blocking 90% of the million porn sites leaves 100,000 left; why bother? Using filtering as a way to censor knowledge from your children is bad. (Masturbation, alternate religions) And no filtering program must be allowed to block any educational site, whether that site deals with sexuality, learning about hate-groups, military strategy, guns. For the gains, 100,000 porn sites instead of a whole million, the cost is too much.
Since such a program cannot and does not exist, the most the libraries can do is to put the responsibility on the parent. No one under 18 is allowed internet access. A parent can permit access by their children and can choose among the options:
1. No access allowed.
2. Access allowed only if with an adult. Parent can later review visited websites.
3. Access allowed, parent has the ability to review visited websites. (With an optional time-limit for number of hours)
4. Access allowed, parent does not have the ability to review visited websites. (with an optional time-limit for number of hours)
All access is full access. If a child is with a parent, they get access through their parent's card. No one is allowed to sit in front of the computers without a card. (So a stranger cannot offer a a child access unsupervised.) The parent gets the flexibility for what level of monitoring, if any, their children get. It's also open; the child knows whether or not what they visit will be reviewed by their parents.
Heh.. With some GUI-ified TCL scripts and a squid proxy, this kind of system would be pretty trivial to set up.
If the price is depressed, like the residential rates that PG&E are forced to pay because of rate-limits, who is paying the price?
In the case of electricity in california, it's obvious that PG&E is currently paying the price for the rate limits. And what a price tag, 10 billion!
So, if the price we're paying for power/natural gass/gasholine is depressed, who is paying the difference between the real price and the price we pay. (No, 'our children' is not a correct answer, the energy we use now to bring up our children is an advantage to their future, not a harm.)
You see, my parents both grew up on farms, farms which have since been replaced by trees. Therefore, I feel that our family, and me myself are warranted a eco-credit..
Actually, if you look at the growth of forests nationwide over the last century, on average, everyone in the US is in the black! And throw in all the gains over the last 50 years on top of that.. Whoo-hoo!
Yippee! I've never done a gasholine-fueled bonfire outside before.. I guess it's time to start. Will you join me and use up your credits so we can have a bonfire twice as big?
We hear about all the dangers of cellphone.. Err, rather, we hear certain groups of people proclaiming the dangers of cellphones.
But what I want to see is where are people keeling over dead. People keel over dead of heart disease, of lung cancer, of smoking. But, millions have been using cell phones for YEARS, and yet, we don't hear about tens of thousands of people dying over it.
Now, maybe cell phones, like smoking, don't cause death quickly, maybe they take years/decades to find out for certain. But, any technology runs this risk, the only way to find out for certain is to wait 50 years and look for people keeling over dead. Even if it does cause some increase in disease in 50 years, do people really want to give up such a powerful and valuable technology? If we have to give up cell phones, why not give up electricity, the light bulb, and such.. Is there any evidence that the light bulb will not cause cancer after 50 years? Where are people suing GE over their soft-white light-bulb caused cancers? How about the automobile, there is proof that it kills thousand of people a year.
IMHO, IANAL, and I am unqualified to say this, but, I think this is just a case of a few people who want something to blame for whatever disease they have. ``It's not just bad luck that I got this cancer, it must have been caused by XYZ.'' Healthy people get cancer too.
*Most* of us are adults and able to take the risks of any technology we use. We should not ban a useful technology because some people are dessperate for a reason for their disease other than 'bad luck'.
It took a hundred years from the invention of the printing press to the first book being banned. It took additional centuries for literacy to become widespread, and for widespread literacy to lead to the creation of new forms of thought and essay. -- [[Paraphrased from a talk given at CMU a few years ago. Wish I knew who it was.]]
On this timeline, I'd say that we're probably about year 80.. We're nearing the time when entrenched interests, like the crown, are threatened and trying to repel the danger through banning the 'misuses' of the new technology. [DMCA, UCITA, CSS on DVD's, and all the rest.]
Just have one organization-signing key.
..... to $N$ levels deep. You need this transitivity, but not necessarily to all 8 levels. We can use the UID field on a key to put an advisory informing PGP to cut the levels of transitivity.
All members have their trust flagged to trust all keys signed by the organization-signing key for their organization. They also get their own key signed by the organization key.
By some configuration of how PGP calculates trust, you can put in transitiveness to make organizations trust other organizations. (For example, all are automatically marked to trust any keys signed by keys signed by the 'master organization'-signing key.
True, PGP is not intended for this. One problem is that the key trust is transitive. I trust you who trusts someone elses key who trusts
(So, an organization's master key can be flagged to not spread trust too far. You can also have cross-organizational trusting, and finally, one key may be a member of more than one trust heirarchy. (For cross-organizational groups.)
Then don't accept them.
You're not obligated to use the codec, nor are you obligated to use the source code.
GPL code gives you 2 options:
1. Don't use it. If you believe that the GPL code has less value than your code, then you might be better off reimplementing it.
2. Negotiate with the copyright holder. As the copyright holder can license code under whatever terms they wish, I'm sure that they would be willing to license you the codec under terms that are more to your liking.. Of course, there may be a different (probably monetary) price attached.
GPL code is not public domain. There is a price attached. It's not a monetary price (like windows/oracle/mtv/..). But it is a price. You either pay the price, or you don't use GPL'ed code in non-free (libre) software.
Let me repeat that: GPL is not the same as public domain.
As a personal question, how is a GPL code less free than a non-free codec? What are the license fees to fraunhofer for MP3? How about liquid audio? Microsoft Audio? GPL code isn't public domain, but it is free'er than those non-free codec in several ways. Those techniques are closed, trade secret, proprietary, and patented, thus un-reimplementable. At least Vorbis lets you reimplement it with no obligation.
Please give a reference for where 'toy' languages have been used and have failed.
Actually yes, I do know a real environmentalist, myself. I am an environmentalist. I do not want to live in filth, I'm glad I live in an affluent society that has similar views. I said nothing about the incompatability of industrial practice and environmentalism. Only the radicals who wish to halt or reverse progress.
There's a difference between what I think and what the radical environmentalists do. Firebombing. Hysteria over GM crops when golden rice can save millions of children from vitamin A deficiency. Hell, even Greenpeace has backed down on their lunacy about DDT; they actually agree it should still be used to stop Malaria. (25 million lives saved a year!) Food irradiation? How many outbreaks of salmonella and E.Coli, how many deaths could have been prevented? How many millions of people sicken or die each year from food-bourne illnesses? [references available upon request]
I detest such views. I detest only those who espouse such views. They are morally wrong. No moral person could want tens of thousands of children to go blind, millions to suffer vitamin deficiency. No moral person could ban a chemical that has saved 25 million lives a year.
I am glad of the environmental movement of the 50's-80's. If you were a member back then, I thank you! But, I find much less to respect about the radical parts of the modern environmental movement.
Yeah, I remember hearing about that study. Aboriginies may have 'short' workweeks, but they don't get many of the labor-intensive things like medical care, automobiles, postal system, computers, television, cable, telephones.
I know I could survive a lot cheaper with less work if I didn't have a computer or a car. (I don't have a car now, getting one would double my monthly expenditures.)
How short could you make your workweek if you gave up all those toys? I could live on about 10 hours a week at my current pay rate.
What is actually evolutionary encouraged is not your own reproduction, but your descendents reproduction. A child that has no further children is not evolutionarily encouraged.
Historically, individual economic and social power is associated with living longer. It's still true. Compare peasants and kings. Compare europe, south america, and africa.
Since such power tended to derive from muscles and work, women, who are biologically disadvantaged in those areas, have historically lacked power. It is only recently with modern sanitation, medicine, and social equality that the higher 'natural' life expectancy for women has finally become apparent.
The number one thing that would improve average life expectancy on Earth is PROSPERITY! Affluent societies can afford sanitation, child labor laws, much less back-breaking labor, modern machinery, technology, modern medical care, electricity, anesthetics, literacy. All of these lead, directly and indirectly to a healthier populace and longer life expectancy.
Anyone who claims that prosperity and technology are wrong are cursing our world to poverty, cursing our world to starving short-lived miserable people. The world has enough of that already. This is a fate that no moral person could wish on anyone. (Unfortunately, there are millions of people that espouse this horrible vision, this is why I dislike the more radical environmental movements, of which Al Gore is a sympathiser. I further note that only people in affluent societies seem to be against progress. Those that do live in poverty seem to feel different.)
Prosperity has it's flaws, but the benefits far outweigh them.
There are many evils in the world, but we let them continue because to not let them continue would violate privacy, or freedom.
Incest happens, one way around it is to require that everyplace that allows children is tape recorded to catch the bastards. A simpler and cheaper alternative is to kill all children.
This is my solution.
Sometimes, when the only way to stop an evil is to do an even greater evil, the only sane thing to do is nothing.
When user interfaces are designed, which is the better design? The simple pictoral design? (Like thos books for kindergardners), or a powerful and complicated design?
:)
In evolutionary terms, it's the simple design, because it's easier to learn. Unfortunately, this is a flaw, it will forever hobble us from creating the most powerful design.
Do not forget, most people in western civilization have to master an incredibly complicated, unnatural, non-intutive task. This task is INCREDIBLY difficult. Most people spend 10 years mastering literacy.
We force our kids to master a complicated and un-intuitive interface because simpler interface don't offer the power, and flexibility.
I like powerful tools for powerful and difficult tasks. Pictures can express instructions or handle simple tasks, but only words can express abstract relationships. Without words, there can be no mathematics, no algebra, because pictures cannot express the concept of a 'variable'.
If you know of UI research that gets around this, I'd love to hear it. Please give me a counterexample.
The real purpose is to further the public good. The founders of the United States concluded that the public good is furthered ONLY by increasing the number of works in the public domain.
Ergo, Copyright law, which granted a time-limited limited monopoly. Authors can use it to require renumeration for their works.
The purpose of copyright law is NOT to maximize the rate of return to the copyright holder (note, this isn't necessarily the origional artist) for copyrighted works. Nor is copyright law's purpose to maximize the number of works available. (If it was, then why did they put a time-limit on it?)
Copyright law's purpose to further the public good by insuring the maximum number of artistic works are in the public domain.
\eqnarray can usually be replaced with a better environment like \align or \alignat, or \gather, \split, \multline, etc. I've not found a time when one of these other environments didn't do what I wanted. They also have better spacing.
m ath.tex' and read the section on ``Examples of multiple-line equation structures''. Where I have seen people use it, they either tend to misuse it, or they make another big mistake.
{ )} }
}
IMHO, it's a low-level environment that can be replaced with high-level environment describing semantically what's going on. (See 'The LaTeX Companion'), or '/usr/share/texmf/source/latex/amslatex/math/test
Another mistake I tend to see is people not making commands and environments to suit the semantic structure of their document.. Here are extracts of a couple of prologs of different documents I've done.
I almost never inline a symbol directly into my documents unless it has a common semantic meaning ('+', '*'). I create a command to represent it's semantic meaning and use that (ex: '\StepsTo')
This way, I can reformat things like how I display lambda's (ex: '\Lam'. At one time, I used a subscript and superscript, now they're both subscripts), switch a symbol to another type of symbol, change the spacing around a symbol, etc.
If you want to see what it looks like in a complete document, bounce me an email.
% Math logic (for representing object variables
\newcommand{\A}{\mathbf{A}}
\newcommand{\B}{\mathbf{B}}
\newcommand{\C}{\mathbf{C}}
\newcommand{\D}{\mathbf{D}}
\newcommand{\E}{\mathbf{E}}
% ELF formulation of a programming language:
\newcommand{\Gvdash}{\Gamma\vdash}
\newcommand{\StepsTo}{\mathrel{\mapsto}}
\newcommand{\EvalsTo}{\mathrel{\Downarrow}}
\newcommand{\cdparens}[1]{\mathcd{(}{#1}\mathcd
\newcommand{\cdbra}[1]{\mathcd{[}{#1}\mathcd{]}
\newcommand{\Lam}[3]{\,\lambda_{#1,#2} \,#3\,}
\newcommand{\RLam}[3]{\,\Lambda_{#1,#2} \,#3\,}
\newcommand{\True}{\,\mathcd{True}\,}
\newcommand{\False}{\,\mathcd{False}\,}
This is all IMHO, but the few people who's latex I've seen tend to create really bad code.
If you're writing a letter to Aunt Sally, or any other short one-of-a-kind document, A word processor is the best solution. It's simple and lets you manage things easily. Ditto for HTML.
/newcommand to tell latex. One of these days, I'll put up some source code to tell people the most frequent uses&misuses of latex.
If you're writing a hundred very similar documents, or you have a thousand people collaberating writing documentation, Some type of structured XML is the best. It'll let you have a consistent look&feel, and it'll help avoid people shooting each others foot. It also lets you design the input language around the semantic structure of what you're writing. You amortize the creation of the DTD and software over the large number of documents/pages being written.
But, If you're writing documents that have a lot of semantic complexity (mathematics books, papers, etc.) but each document is a one-off, Latex tends to be better as a half&half. It lets you create some simple semantic structure in a powerful, flexible, and easy way. In a sense, you merge the presentation language with the semantic meaning. It doesn't divorice the two issues from each other like XML, but it puts in a distinction that avoids the micromanaging hell of word processors.
It all depends on the type of document you are writing, how many people are collaberating, and number of documents of that type that will be written.
(One good sign of LaTeX being misused is the use of 'eqnarray'. I've used latex for 3 years, written >400 pages in it, and never used it once. Ditto for vspace. If you have useful semantic structure, use