That's why I'm an advocate of an adversarial patent system, something kinda like this:
You (as a private individual or a company) can sign up to be a "patent examiner", for a minor fee. You specify which areas in which you have expertise (and you (or your employees) may need certain certifications as specified by professional groups in that area, depending). When a patent is submitted, it is required that the patent clearly and specifically state what problem the covered art solves - e.g, in this case, it would be something like "efficiently encoding video using components found in a commodity computer".
Then, a few examiners are picked at random. They're given a day or so in isolation, with whatever reference materials they want to bring (no networked devices, though) to figure out how they would solve the problem. At the end of their isolation, they just need to produce a couple of sketches of how they would go about solving the problem.
If a majority of the examiners (who should be experts in the field of the patent) produce any solution sketches that are largely similar to the patent, the patent is rejected - because clearly, if when experts in the field set their minds to solving that problem they come up with the to-be-patented invention, then it's not novel; it's just an obvious evolution no one else has gotten around to doing yet.
Hehe, that's actually kind of the punchline to Implied Spaces, one of Walter Jon Williams' books. Much like the way the desired shape of a building implies certain unintended spaces, the "shape" of our universe implies an unintended people.
So one day, we will find our way to the intelligence that created this universe, and kick their fucking asses for all the pain and misery their shortsighted universe-creation caused.
Query: how does the Catholic Church react when all the evidence contradicts their favored hypothesis (e.g, in the case of souls, or the public health benefits of birth control)?
Do they close their ears and go "la la la can't hear you" just like the fundamentalist Protestant churches do for evolution, or do they say "well I guess you're right, looks like there's no reason to believe a soul exists, and we really should support birth control in order to make people's lives better"?
Because if it's the former, the Catholic Church is just as bad as our "fundamentalist Protestant churches" - they're just cloaked with a fake aura of moderation, because over the centuries they've learned to not let their freak flags fly.
My favorite is "if the universe was created for us, why is it that if you pick a random place and time inside the universe, 100% of the time (rounded off, but not by much) humans will die immediately in that place and time?"
The universe is inherently hostile to our life. Why is that, if it was created for us?
Final Fantasy 14, amongst other things, implements a "reverse rest EXP system" -- the more you play, the less you get out of playing. Not only that, when people openly started talking about this, Square Enix bold faced LIED about it to the player base -- claiming that it was all made up by "foreign websites trolling for hits." It took 2ch and the other Japanese fansites breaking NDA en mass and saying "no, that's all true" for them to own up and admit it publically. Blizzard specifically said they originally tried the same thing for WOW, but decided it was stupid and inverted it -- instead of punishing you with fatigue for playing too much, they gave you bonuses for taking breaks
And people are absolute idiots if that pacifies them, because the everything works out exactly the same either way. Seriously, if you actually care about this sort of thing what Blizzard did is equivalent to saying "well it wasn't rape, it was surprise sex!"
New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality.
Seriously? This coming from a man whose subordinates spread the lie that condoms don't prevent the spread of aids? From a guy whose predecessors believed they could change matters of fact by turning on their special powers? From an institution that is completely invested in the idea that consciousness is somehow divorced from the body (e.g, the soul) despite the fact that there is zero evidence for that hypothesis, and a great deal of evidence against it - after all, the entire field of therapeutic pharmaceuticals would be a waste of time if your consciousness wasn't inextricably linked to your body.
I believe Jesus said something about motes and planks and eyes.
Oh come on. Do you really think they got funding specifically for that paper? Sometimes a researcher will whip out a silly little thing like that on their own time, using resources that have already been paid for, just for fun. What you're doing is the equivalent of whining about the fact that someone actually maintains the fortune program, despite the fact that it's just for fun.
Oh god, there's an EA version of Tetris for the iPhone. My wife has it. It is an absolute piece of shit.
You'd imagine that on a multitouch interface, you'd be able to pinch-rotate the pieces, right? No such luck; you have to tap on the right or left side of the screen to rotate the piece in that direction. Since you also have to drag the pieces left and right to move them around, this means that if you just tap the piece to rotate it (which is the intuitive gesture) it may or may not rotate in the direction you intend for it to rotate, depending on which side of the board it's on.
Further, the game board is tiny compared to the screen. There's a significant amount of empty space around the edges of the board; they could have made it a lot larger without losing the aspect ratio, but for some reason they chose not to.
The worst part, though, are the special effects. The game board is translucent, for instance. Why? So that behind it, they can show a confusing, randomly generated set of bubbles or something that get deformed and bounce around continually, serving no purpose whatsoever except to distract you from the pieces you're rotating in the wrong direction. When you make a tetris (four lines in a row using a long block, for those of you who don't know) the pieces glow briefly and explode in all directions, briefly obscuring your view - for no reason. IIRC the game doesn't even pause when this happens!
Basically, the EA version of Tetris is absolute crap. And what really sucks is that over the years there have been a few Tetris clones for the iPhone, and they've all been pulled for some reason - even though they don't use any material that's under copyright (and keep in mind that you can't copyright gameplay).
So Apple's walled garden + bowing to corporate pressure means that there is exactly one version of Tetris for the iPhone, and it is pretty much the worst of all possible versions of Tetris that could be made for the iPhone. And it costs $3. The free Tetris clone that came with my n900 is better (my wife will occasionally steal my phone to play it, when she gets bored of Chicktionary), even though its RNG is fucked up and always starts the game off with a square block and doesn't have multi-touch.
Wait, so let me get this straight - you're positing a war wherein some aerial reconaissance platform has a mostly uninterrupted, continual radar view of all enemy troop movements? And it doesn't get the shit blown out of it why, exactly?
You're basically assuming that one side would have complete air superiority, which is simply not going to happen unless you're talking about something like the Iraq "war", wherein one super power goes in and completely thrashes a country with technology that's several generations old.
Sorry, but you (and the Troll parent) completely misunderstand the reasoning behind a smoking tax. The idea is not that if you smoke you get sick and need medical attention - after all, your illness probably won't be that much of a drain on society in itself as you've probably paid for it either way, what with health insurance and whatnot.
No, the idea is that if you get sick and die of lung cancer when you're 40, that's twenty-five years of taxable income that society loses out on. Thus, in order to discourage you from dying early and thus losing a productive member of society, we tax cigarettes.
Is that really such a terrible thing, to try and keep people alive despite the fact that they're bound and determined to kill themselves early for a pack of cigarettes?
It's really hard to do validation without the source data...
Which interestingly climate "scientists" are reluctant to make available.
Only if you're blind, or some sort of google-phobe. This simple Google search immediately turns up the RealClimate.org index of climate data sources, which has a shit-ton of climate data, ranging from raw modern data to processed modern data to paleoclimate reconstructions to models to visualization packages.
So did you just assume that the scientists are reluctant to make the data available, or are you knowingly making false statements?
Umm... so are we going to see someone getting hit with some sort of countersuit, since they've clearly misused the DMCA takedown process? Or is this one of those things where you can spew out accusations willy-nilly without your victim having any sort of recourse besides getting their video reinstated?
So I am given to wonder why so often this theory is sold in terms of percentage of believers. It really does seem like it is being sold like a product, or a political process. "Well enough people have voted this is right, so that's the situation. Can't argue, we have a consensus." While that doesn't make it wrong, it sure does set off a warning bell. So why is it done that way?
Because the vast majority of people are morons, and wouldn't understand the science if it was bashed over their heads. In fact a large portion of them have had the science bashed over their heads, and they still don't get it.
I mean, what exactly do you want us to do? The science says global warming is happening and that we're causing it. Explaining why in explicit detail would take several pages and cover topics ranging from college-level mathematics to PhD level earth systems science and radiochemistry. What would it take to prove to Joe Eigenamerican that it does, when he doesn't even remember what a partial differential equation is, and gets a migraine from looking at a plot with more than one line?
So, we use marketing-like tactics. People who are experts in this field say it's happening; thus, it's probably happening. If you want a more thorough explanation, feel free to look it up - there's several good ones out there.
If you do not cut back your consumption by 10%, people will die. They will not be people in your country, or even people in your continent - they will be anonymous Chinese rice farmers, or Indian fishermen, or Nigerian scam artists. But you don't give a shit, because those people are brown and don't even speak English, right?
The 10:10 commercial wasn't saying "comply or die" - it was saying "if you don't comply, people will die". They just tried to bring the point home by exploding the people who didn't comply, I guess because in the normal course of things it's other people so who cares about them huh?
I have to admit, I don't see what was so horrible about the 10:10 commercials, except that maybe they assigned consequences to the people who caused them.
Look, it's like this: people are going to die due to global warming. This is a fact. If we do not cut back on our CO2 emissions, more people will die.
The thing is, your average American or Brit doesn't give a shit, because the people who die will not be them. It'll be some poor Bangladeshi who can't afford to get the hell out of his province before it floods, or some Chinese rice farmer who dies of heat stroke, or a Nigerian fisherman who is drowned by an out-of-season storm.
So if Ted from accounting keeps on driving his huge honking SUV, some anonymous guy in China will die. No one cares, right? That's not horrible at all, it's just some dude in China nobody cares about - he doesn't even speak a proper language.
But as soon as you explode Ted, suddenly it's a big issue. Weird, huh? Apparently the rice farmer was less of a person than Ted.
Oh man, did you just mention Wegman? I think you did! The Wegman report was a hilarious parody of science, as has been quitethoroughlydocumented. Not only that, but Wegman's penchant for plagiarism has apparently spread to his PhD students! Imagine that, an unethical scientist creating unethical students.
The whole thing is just funny, but a kinda sad sort of funny.
Eh? A screw is an assemblage of parts. There's a cylindrical part, with a ridge wound around it and a cap on the head that accepts a driver bit. It transmits forces, motions and energy in a predetermined manner - when you apply a proper torque to the screw cap, that torque is transmitted along the cylinder of the screw and into the ridge, at which point (depending on the screw) it either meshes with an appropriately formed ridge in the destination material, or digs in to the destination material. The screw turns a rotational force into a linear force that drives itself either into or out of the material.
Well but that's the thing - Canada gaining independence was more like a 22 year old moving out after finding their first after-college job, not a 40 year old who still lives in his parents' basement.
Keep in mind that nations have a much longer lifespan than people, so you have to adjust these things appropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I'm an advocate of an adversarial patent system, something kinda like this:
You (as a private individual or a company) can sign up to be a "patent examiner", for a minor fee. You specify which areas in which you have expertise (and you (or your employees) may need certain certifications as specified by professional groups in that area, depending). When a patent is submitted, it is required that the patent clearly and specifically state what problem the covered art solves - e.g, in this case, it would be something like "efficiently encoding video using components found in a commodity computer".
Then, a few examiners are picked at random. They're given a day or so in isolation, with whatever reference materials they want to bring (no networked devices, though) to figure out how they would solve the problem. At the end of their isolation, they just need to produce a couple of sketches of how they would go about solving the problem.
If a majority of the examiners (who should be experts in the field of the patent) produce any solution sketches that are largely similar to the patent, the patent is rejected - because clearly, if when experts in the field set their minds to solving that problem they come up with the to-be-patented invention, then it's not novel; it's just an obvious evolution no one else has gotten around to doing yet.
Hehe, that's actually kind of the punchline to Implied Spaces, one of Walter Jon Williams' books. Much like the way the desired shape of a building implies certain unintended spaces, the "shape" of our universe implies an unintended people.
So one day, we will find our way to the intelligence that created this universe, and kick their fucking asses for all the pain and misery their shortsighted universe-creation caused.
Query: how does the Catholic Church react when all the evidence contradicts their favored hypothesis (e.g, in the case of souls, or the public health benefits of birth control)?
Do they close their ears and go "la la la can't hear you" just like the fundamentalist Protestant churches do for evolution, or do they say "well I guess you're right, looks like there's no reason to believe a soul exists, and we really should support birth control in order to make people's lives better"?
Because if it's the former, the Catholic Church is just as bad as our "fundamentalist Protestant churches" - they're just cloaked with a fake aura of moderation, because over the centuries they've learned to not let their freak flags fly.
In the immor(t?)al words of Tim Minchin:
And unfortunately, we have quite a bit of evidence that implies he knowingly did so.
Good thing the whole of Exodus never actually happened, huh?
TL;DR version:
There's no sign of any sort of decline in overall Egyptian power during any time that could reasonably be attributed to the Exodus.
My favorite is "if the universe was created for us, why is it that if you pick a random place and time inside the universe, 100% of the time (rounded off, but not by much) humans will die immediately in that place and time?"
The universe is inherently hostile to our life. Why is that, if it was created for us?
The NT is a God/Mary slashfic with a Marty Stu main character :)
And people are absolute idiots if that pacifies them, because the everything works out exactly the same either way. Seriously, if you actually care about this sort of thing what Blizzard did is equivalent to saying "well it wasn't rape, it was surprise sex!"
Seriously? This coming from a man whose subordinates spread the lie that condoms don't prevent the spread of aids? From a guy whose predecessors believed they could change matters of fact by turning on their special powers? From an institution that is completely invested in the idea that consciousness is somehow divorced from the body (e.g, the soul) despite the fact that there is zero evidence for that hypothesis, and a great deal of evidence against it - after all, the entire field of therapeutic pharmaceuticals would be a waste of time if your consciousness wasn't inextricably linked to your body.
I believe Jesus said something about motes and planks and eyes.
See, e.g, Babbage's Analytical Engine.
I call this the Fundamental Theorem of Republican Economics:
The Laffer curve exists, and its slope is always negative.
Oh come on. Do you really think they got funding specifically for that paper? Sometimes a researcher will whip out a silly little thing like that on their own time, using resources that have already been paid for, just for fun. What you're doing is the equivalent of whining about the fact that someone actually maintains the fortune program, despite the fact that it's just for fun.
Oh god, there's an EA version of Tetris for the iPhone. My wife has it. It is an absolute piece of shit.
You'd imagine that on a multitouch interface, you'd be able to pinch-rotate the pieces, right? No such luck; you have to tap on the right or left side of the screen to rotate the piece in that direction. Since you also have to drag the pieces left and right to move them around, this means that if you just tap the piece to rotate it (which is the intuitive gesture) it may or may not rotate in the direction you intend for it to rotate, depending on which side of the board it's on.
Further, the game board is tiny compared to the screen. There's a significant amount of empty space around the edges of the board; they could have made it a lot larger without losing the aspect ratio, but for some reason they chose not to.
The worst part, though, are the special effects. The game board is translucent, for instance. Why? So that behind it, they can show a confusing, randomly generated set of bubbles or something that get deformed and bounce around continually, serving no purpose whatsoever except to distract you from the pieces you're rotating in the wrong direction. When you make a tetris (four lines in a row using a long block, for those of you who don't know) the pieces glow briefly and explode in all directions, briefly obscuring your view - for no reason. IIRC the game doesn't even pause when this happens!
Basically, the EA version of Tetris is absolute crap. And what really sucks is that over the years there have been a few Tetris clones for the iPhone, and they've all been pulled for some reason - even though they don't use any material that's under copyright (and keep in mind that you can't copyright gameplay).
So Apple's walled garden + bowing to corporate pressure means that there is exactly one version of Tetris for the iPhone, and it is pretty much the worst of all possible versions of Tetris that could be made for the iPhone. And it costs $3. The free Tetris clone that came with my n900 is better (my wife will occasionally steal my phone to play it, when she gets bored of Chicktionary), even though its RNG is fucked up and always starts the game off with a square block and doesn't have multi-touch.
Wait, so let me get this straight - you're positing a war wherein some aerial reconaissance platform has a mostly uninterrupted, continual radar view of all enemy troop movements? And it doesn't get the shit blown out of it why, exactly?
You're basically assuming that one side would have complete air superiority, which is simply not going to happen unless you're talking about something like the Iraq "war", wherein one super power goes in and completely thrashes a country with technology that's several generations old.
Sorry, but you (and the Troll parent) completely misunderstand the reasoning behind a smoking tax. The idea is not that if you smoke you get sick and need medical attention - after all, your illness probably won't be that much of a drain on society in itself as you've probably paid for it either way, what with health insurance and whatnot.
No, the idea is that if you get sick and die of lung cancer when you're 40, that's twenty-five years of taxable income that society loses out on. Thus, in order to discourage you from dying early and thus losing a productive member of society, we tax cigarettes.
Is that really such a terrible thing, to try and keep people alive despite the fact that they're bound and determined to kill themselves early for a pack of cigarettes?
Also you're serving them pie, which is already dangerous to diabetics and children.
Seriously, Americans are way too fearful of alcohol. A little bit now and then really won't hurt anyone more than some sugar would.
Only if you're blind, or some sort of google-phobe. This simple Google search immediately turns up the RealClimate.org index of climate data sources, which has a shit-ton of climate data, ranging from raw modern data to processed modern data to paleoclimate reconstructions to models to visualization packages.
So did you just assume that the scientists are reluctant to make the data available, or are you knowingly making false statements?
Umm... so are we going to see someone getting hit with some sort of countersuit, since they've clearly misused the DMCA takedown process? Or is this one of those things where you can spew out accusations willy-nilly without your victim having any sort of recourse besides getting their video reinstated?
Because the vast majority of people are morons, and wouldn't understand the science if it was bashed over their heads. In fact a large portion of them have had the science bashed over their heads, and they still don't get it.
I mean, what exactly do you want us to do? The science says global warming is happening and that we're causing it. Explaining why in explicit detail would take several pages and cover topics ranging from college-level mathematics to PhD level earth systems science and radiochemistry. What would it take to prove to Joe Eigenamerican that it does, when he doesn't even remember what a partial differential equation is, and gets a migraine from looking at a plot with more than one line?
So, we use marketing-like tactics. People who are experts in this field say it's happening; thus, it's probably happening. If you want a more thorough explanation, feel free to look it up - there's several good ones out there.
Good lord you missed the point.
If you do not cut back your consumption by 10%, people will die. They will not be people in your country, or even people in your continent - they will be anonymous Chinese rice farmers, or Indian fishermen, or Nigerian scam artists. But you don't give a shit, because those people are brown and don't even speak English, right?
The 10:10 commercial wasn't saying "comply or die" - it was saying "if you don't comply, people will die". They just tried to bring the point home by exploding the people who didn't comply, I guess because in the normal course of things it's other people so who cares about them huh?
I have to admit, I don't see what was so horrible about the 10:10 commercials, except that maybe they assigned consequences to the people who caused them.
Look, it's like this: people are going to die due to global warming. This is a fact. If we do not cut back on our CO2 emissions, more people will die.
The thing is, your average American or Brit doesn't give a shit, because the people who die will not be them. It'll be some poor Bangladeshi who can't afford to get the hell out of his province before it floods, or some Chinese rice farmer who dies of heat stroke, or a Nigerian fisherman who is drowned by an out-of-season storm.
So if Ted from accounting keeps on driving his huge honking SUV, some anonymous guy in China will die. No one cares, right? That's not horrible at all, it's just some dude in China nobody cares about - he doesn't even speak a proper language.
But as soon as you explode Ted, suddenly it's a big issue. Weird, huh? Apparently the rice farmer was less of a person than Ted.
Oh man, did you just mention Wegman? I think you did! The Wegman report was a hilarious parody of science, as has been quite thoroughly documented. Not only that, but Wegman's penchant for plagiarism has apparently spread to his PhD students! Imagine that, an unethical scientist creating unethical students.
The whole thing is just funny, but a kinda sad sort of funny.
Eh? A screw is an assemblage of parts. There's a cylindrical part, with a ridge wound around it and a cap on the head that accepts a driver bit. It transmits forces, motions and energy in a predetermined manner - when you apply a proper torque to the screw cap, that torque is transmitted along the cylinder of the screw and into the ridge, at which point (depending on the screw) it either meshes with an appropriately formed ridge in the destination material, or digs in to the destination material. The screw turns a rotational force into a linear force that drives itself either into or out of the material.
Well but that's the thing - Canada gaining independence was more like a 22 year old moving out after finding their first after-college job, not a 40 year old who still lives in his parents' basement.
Keep in mind that nations have a much longer lifespan than people, so you have to adjust these things appropriately.
Why would you go to jail? You were simply returning federal property.