Sounds like America. Despite all the hoopla about freedom and whatnot in america, there is substantial indoctrination i.e. any mention of helping others gets you labelled a 'socialist' or a 'commie'. just because Americans believe that no one should be forced to donate their money, doesn't mean that we don't donate ourselves.
http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropy/philanthropy_stats.asp
IMHO America is probably one of THE most indoctrinated societies in the world at the moment. You can't have a discussion about much with a large percentage of people about certain topics. What do you even mean by that? The topics that divide American politics, the ones that people care deeply about are discussed all the time. Abortion, gay rights, immigration, war on terror, torture just to name a few. Just because there is a large percentage of people who have a different view then you doesn't mean that they are not talking about it.
If they are to find "Grand Unified Theory" I wander if it contains not only "The Function" that explains all interactions in universe but more importantly, why is function evaluated at all and how it is evaluated. Is it possible that any mathematical function can evaluate itself, and if not, is there any other explanation? That would be perhaps more interesting answer then The Function itself. Unfortunately its lazy evaluated, so we'll never know.
12.5 billion isn't that much. There are about 80 million people between the age of 15 to 34, which would make about 156.25 dollars per person per year. Thats kind of reasonable to spend on music per year, one CD per month isn't to bad. Its definitely a fraction of what I spend on booze:).
Lets assume that global climate change exists, and lets assume that at some point in the future it the detrimental effects of the change have higher cost then the cost of preventing it. So with that assumption what are the things that we can measure that will occur in the next 5, 10, N years that are consistent with our initial assumption.
Now assume that global climate change exists, but the costs of the effects of the change are much lower then the cost of preventing it. So, what are the things that we can measure in the next 5, 10, N years that are consistent with our initial assumption.
Start measuring and comparing the data, refining your assumptions. If your data is strong enough, you can even say that with some confidence level that bad or good things will occur, then you can make a financial decision. Options and Futures traders have been doing this for years.
I haven't read through every global warming paper, but i have not seen any that spell out simple cause and effect, if we are correct then next years measurements will be this, if we are not then they will be this. Until you can say that, you can't make a financial argument for doing anything about global warming.
A lot of people will claim that we should do something, because if the worst outcome occurs then we're all screwed. But unless you can make a financial argument, doing something is actually much worse. Every dollar thats inefficiently spent is another dollar less that we have for advancing medicine, creating new vaccines, building space ships, improving technology, feeding people. And all those things grow at a compounded rate, so wasting a dollar now is the same thing as wasting 2 dollars 14 years from now (5% growth), 4 dollars 28 years from now...
ill gladly sell you some insurance against your house flooding due to the ice caps melting in the next 50 years:).
What if it was possible to send someone a message with perfect certainty that only they will see that message, and it will be destroyed as soon as they see it. That is what perfect DRM is, and I can see lots of very beneficial uses for it.
whether those "approval ratings" are truly 80% or more like (1/80)%, either Putin has the power to make it look as though he has the people's support
i think you dont really realize the day to day realities of russian life. life expectancy is the lowest in any industrialized nation, alcoholism is rampant (some 80% percent of adults), 33 % live below the poverty line as its set by th russian government (44 dollars a month), etc... do you think any of those people give a rats ass about independent media or human rights abuses in chechnya? if it was up to the russian majority chechnya would have been nuked a long time ago.
as far as russian politics are concerned, putin and the united russia party are pretty centrists, if anything i would say they are slightly liberal. their utmost concern right now is poverty and the economy, at the same time there are no mass arrests, markets are sloooooowly liberalized, there are even cases of officers being tried for abuses in chechnya, people can form political parties that are in opposition to the government, and information can be exchanged freely. There is still no great firewall of russia, and all the nutjob parties on the left and the right have their own newspapers.
granted there is no independent television media, but at the same time there is no statewide political television media at all. russian channels dont really broadcast propaganda, they focus on soft news, and controversy is avoided. in contrast durring yeltzins time, the media channels where owned by the wealthy who exploited them for political power. can you imagine if i was running for office in the US and i paid cnn to broadcast completely baseless lies about my opponent? and if that opponent had no connections with another media channel they where screwed.
Please, disprove it or admit that you accept it. Stop trying to pretend there are no facts.
How about disproving any of these facts: God created the universe, P is not equal NP, I am currently wearing a hat...
Theories are verifiable, but they can all be possibly proven wrong. As far as I can verify with the naked eye, the earth is flat, doesn't mean that its a fact, and I probably can't even prove that its a wrong theory on my own.
And to prove that you didn't post that comment, I actually posted for the sake of expanding this argument.
There is no such thing as fact. There are some theories that we have not been able to disprove for a long time. Like the laws of thermodynamics, which you can disprove with any old perpetual motion machine.
If DRM isn't inherently evil, it certainly doesn't have anything going for it.
I can certainly see lots of good things from a technology that will let you send a message that can only be received by the intended target, and that the message will be destroyed as soon as its read. That is essentially what perfect DRM would enable us to do, I can control where the data is going and how its read.
What if he's found guilty, and the project is continued by other people, and renamed to avoid infamy, and Reiser loses his first appeal because his lawyer fails to subpoena critical records from the medical examiner's office, and Reiser 4 is finally completed and included in Linux 5.0, but develops stability issues, and around that time Hans is acquitted in a later appeal based on new evidence, and he rejoins the project? Will they change the name back?
Would you say to someone that had a relative die due to a driver that drunk driving laws are just FUD PERIOD? No, I don't think so.
Tens of thousands of people die from drunk driving, from firearms, from fires, etc... While only 2k people died from terrorism in the past 5 years. My point is that the amount of money and legislation spent on terrorism is very disproportionite. Especially if you consider that iraq and afganistan wars are part of the "global fight against terrorism" - which I think is bullshit, but thats what we are told:).
I personally don't think there is any malice in the current administration, I am sure they think they are doing whats "best" for us, but thats the core of the problem. We only know whats best for ourselves.
While it is true that Eastern Europeans are masters of understatement and self-deprecation, I don't think that's the whole story. There is a much stronger culture of high-profile competition in the East than in the West, probably because of a long tradition amongst old communist regimes to foster scientific competition. Kind of like the national spelling bee competition in the US, over there much more emphasis was placed on math competitions. Mind you, pretty much the same kinds of people sneered at them as do over here.
I am guessing you never went to a school in eastern europe. When you do well in classes in Russia, you are rewarded by being told to go to a math/science competition abroad. Now its not a bad thing at all, actually its quite awesome to get out of the shithole that you live in every day.
When I aced my tests in a US university, no one gave a rats ass whether I represented my school or not in some math contest, and all I could think about were women and beer.
Yes, I used to be naive like you. It's time you grew up and learned the way things really work. You're comment assumes that we live in a capitalistic democracy, and risk and reward go hand in hand. Not true. We live in a corrupt oligarcy and reward is guaranteed for the corporate elite.
Sorry, but you sound like a nutcase. There is no kabal in the US thats somehow controling prices or marketplace, outside of the Fed interest rate things are more or less controlled by supply and demand.
Have you had to buy gas recently? Looked at your cable bill? If you read Slashdot, yout know about the current attempt to distroy the egalitarian structure of the internet by the big Telcos to fatten their wallets.
Yep, gas prices are rising, guess what, demand for gas is rising, China is growing at 10%, so is India, Brazil, Russia etc... In any case, gas prices in the US have not risen as much compared to the rest of the consumer index. http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/ Gasoline_Inflation.asp
As far as the internet is conserned, I don't really see a problem with it, where I live, a medium size US city, I have a choise of 5 service providers for broadband, thats prolly pretty high for most places in the US, but things will only get better.
Think about this, if i am an ISP i can charge you a certain rate for 100 gb/sec maintained 95% of the time, i can charge some other guy a higher rate for 50 gb/sec 99% of the time. Now i only have so much pipe, and to insure that both of you get what you paid for someone is going to get their packets out faster then someone else. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this as far as the market is concerned. Essentially you get what you paid for. I fullfill my obligation as an isp, you get a bandwith that fits your buisness needs.
A company of this size and portfolia could litaerally drag the entire economy to a standstill if allowed to patent everything. It's one thing to have a whole bunch of different companies pushing competing patents, but when several large (and supposedly competing?) firms get together and pool their patents into one collossus, then you can be certain noone else will be allowed to enter any market remotly connected. This is not a good thing.
Or this company could spur the next tech boom. Patents allow companies to invest their resources into research, and allow those companies to release their findings to the public under the protection of the patent system. Without patents, there is no insentive to share technology, and there is full insentive to hide your technology and obfusticate your products against reverse engineering. just like without copyright there is no insentive to open source your software.
Also working around patents is a great source of innovation, since technology improves and becomes cheaper with every iteration.
if anything, patent laws should become so strict that reverse engineering is no longer nessessary and companies can openly release every detail of their innovations without fear of being ripped off.
That would mean that nvidia could release all the specs to their drivers and we could write open source drivers:), and I can have a pure open source workstation.
Think about what would happend if there were no copyright protections for writers, they are able to flourish today because copyright protection for writers is far more strict then patent protection for technology. Abstract things like style, plot and characters is protected by copyright law.
I know this sounds like a troll but I don't mean it that way. I'd switch from OpenOffice to KOffice in a heartbeat if I could, but I just can't do it right now. Please, please! make printing work right and I'll be eternally grateful.
the pdfs that I export with koffice look exactly like the document on the screen, you should be able to print those anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
12.5 billion isn't that much. There are about 80 million people between the age of 15 to 34, which would make about 156.25 dollars per person per year. Thats kind of reasonable to spend on music per year, one CD per month isn't to bad. Its definitely a fraction of what I spend on booze :).
Lets assume that global climate change exists, and lets assume that at some point in the future it the detrimental effects of the change have higher cost then the cost of preventing it. So with that assumption what are the things that we can measure that will occur in the next 5, 10, N years that are consistent with our initial assumption.
:).
Now assume that global climate change exists, but the costs of the effects of the change are much lower then the cost of preventing it. So, what are the things that we can measure in the next 5, 10, N years that are consistent with our initial assumption.
Start measuring and comparing the data, refining your assumptions. If your data is strong enough, you can even say that with some confidence level that bad or good things will occur, then you can make a financial decision. Options and Futures traders have been doing this for years.
I haven't read through every global warming paper, but i have not seen any that spell out simple cause and effect, if we are correct then next years measurements will be this, if we are not then they will be this. Until you can say that, you can't make a financial argument for doing anything about global warming.
A lot of people will claim that we should do something, because if the worst outcome occurs then we're all screwed. But unless you can make a financial argument, doing something is actually much worse. Every dollar thats inefficiently spent is another dollar less that we have for advancing medicine, creating new vaccines, building space ships, improving technology, feeding people. And all those things grow at a compounded rate, so wasting a dollar now is the same thing as wasting 2 dollars 14 years from now (5% growth), 4 dollars 28 years from now...
ill gladly sell you some insurance against your house flooding due to the ice caps melting in the next 50 years
what adds? oh yea, i have add block plus ;)
What if it was possible to send someone a message with perfect certainty that only they will see that message, and it will be destroyed as soon as they see it. That is what perfect DRM is, and I can see lots of very beneficial uses for it.
I agree with the parent, the iPhone is the first phone that doesn't entirely suck.
i think you dont really realize the day to day realities of russian life. life expectancy is the lowest in any industrialized nation, alcoholism is rampant (some 80% percent of adults), 33 % live below the poverty line as its set by th russian government (44 dollars a month), etc... do you think any of those people give a rats ass about independent media or human rights abuses in chechnya? if it was up to the russian majority chechnya would have been nuked a long time ago.
as far as russian politics are concerned, putin and the united russia party are pretty centrists, if anything i would say they are slightly liberal. their utmost concern right now is poverty and the economy, at the same time there are no mass arrests, markets are sloooooowly liberalized, there are even cases of officers being tried for abuses in chechnya, people can form political parties that are in opposition to the government, and information can be exchanged freely. There is still no great firewall of russia, and all the nutjob parties on the left and the right have their own newspapers.
granted there is no independent television media, but at the same time there is no statewide political television media at all. russian channels dont really broadcast propaganda, they focus on soft news, and controversy is avoided. in contrast durring yeltzins time, the media channels where owned by the wealthy who exploited them for political power. can you imagine if i was running for office in the US and i paid cnn to broadcast completely baseless lies about my opponent? and if that opponent had no connections with another media channel they where screwed.
How about disproving any of these facts: God created the universe, P is not equal NP, I am currently wearing a hat...
Theories are verifiable, but they can all be possibly proven wrong. As far as I can verify with the naked eye, the earth is flat, doesn't mean that its a fact, and I probably can't even prove that its a wrong theory on my own.
And to prove that you didn't post that comment, I actually posted for the sake of expanding this argument.
There is no such thing as fact. There are some theories that we have not been able to disprove for a long time. Like the laws of thermodynamics, which you can disprove with any old perpetual motion machine.
If DRM isn't inherently evil, it certainly doesn't have anything going for it.
I can certainly see lots of good things from a technology that will let you send a message that can only be received by the intended target, and that the message will be destroyed as soon as its read. That is essentially what perfect DRM would enable us to do, I can control where the data is going and how its read.
What if he's found guilty, and the project is continued by other people, and renamed to avoid infamy, and Reiser loses his first appeal because his lawyer fails to subpoena critical records from the medical examiner's office, and Reiser 4 is finally completed and included in Linux 5.0, but develops stability issues, and around that time Hans is acquitted in a later appeal based on new evidence, and he rejoins the project? Will they change the name back?
Yes
Its kind of funny that the guy who made the actual breakthrough doesn't give a rats ass about the Fields medal.
i think the moonlanding was staged to cover up the fact that those mirros up there where left by the piramids.
i have no idea what the cost to build an international airport is, but the cost to expand ohare is 15 billion, http://www.garychicagoairport.com/PressRelease_det ail.asp?ID=49 , adding another 30, or 200 million dollars is penies.
Tens of thousands of people die from drunk driving, from firearms, from fires, etc... While only 2k people died from terrorism in the past 5 years. My point is that the amount of money and legislation spent on terrorism is very disproportionite. Especially if you consider that iraq and afganistan wars are part of the "global fight against terrorism" - which I think is bullshit, but thats what we are told :).
I personally don't think there is any malice in the current administration, I am sure they think they are doing whats "best" for us, but thats the core of the problem. We only know whats best for ourselves.
Try telling that to the families of the 2000+ people that died on 9/11/01.
http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statist
Thats tens of thousands deaths every year. Do you think that would justify orwellian laws for drivers?
Yea, big buisness doesn't benefit when consumers have more money, brilliant.
I thought they changed the name of that planet to Urectum, to end that tired old joke.
I am guessing you never went to a school in eastern europe. When you do well in classes in Russia, you are rewarded by being told to go to a math/science competition abroad. Now its not a bad thing at all, actually its quite awesome to get out of the shithole that you live in every day.
When I aced my tests in a US university, no one gave a rats ass whether I represented my school or not in some math contest, and all I could think about were women and beer.
Sorry, but you sound like a nutcase. There is no kabal in the US thats somehow controling prices or marketplace, outside of the Fed interest rate things are more or less controlled by supply and demand.
Have you had to buy gas recently? Looked at your cable bill? If you read Slashdot, yout know about the current attempt to distroy the egalitarian structure of the internet by the big Telcos to fatten their wallets.
Yep, gas prices are rising, guess what, demand for gas is rising, China is growing at 10%, so is India, Brazil, Russia etc... In any case, gas prices in the US have not risen as much compared to the rest of the consumer index. http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/ Gasoline_Inflation.asp
As far as the internet is conserned, I don't really see a problem with it, where I live, a medium size US city, I have a choise of 5 service providers for broadband, thats prolly pretty high for most places in the US, but things will only get better.
Think about this, if i am an ISP i can charge you a certain rate for 100 gb/sec maintained 95% of the time, i can charge some other guy a higher rate for 50 gb/sec 99% of the time. Now i only have so much pipe, and to insure that both of you get what you paid for someone is going to get their packets out faster then someone else. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this as far as the market is concerned. Essentially you get what you paid for. I fullfill my obligation as an isp, you get a bandwith that fits your buisness needs.
Or this company could spur the next tech boom. Patents allow companies to invest their resources into research, and allow those companies to release their findings to the public under the protection of the patent system. Without patents, there is no insentive to share technology, and there is full insentive to hide your technology and obfusticate your products against reverse engineering. just like without copyright there is no insentive to open source your software.
Also working around patents is a great source of innovation, since technology improves and becomes cheaper with every iteration.
if anything, patent laws should become so strict that reverse engineering is no longer nessessary and companies can openly release every detail of their innovations without fear of being ripped off.
That would mean that nvidia could release all the specs to their drivers and we could write open source drivers
Think about what would happend if there were no copyright protections for writers, they are able to flourish today because copyright protection for writers is far more strict then patent protection for technology. Abstract things like style, plot and characters is protected by copyright law.
the pdfs that I export with koffice look exactly like the document on the screen, you should be able to print those anywhere.
Yeah... I'm not holding my breath. Quit trying to get our hopes up...
I hope no one is holding their breath for this