I wouldn't be OK with that. The issue isn't that someone might complain when they are starving in the street, the issue is that no matter how idiotically someone has conducted themselves, the public as a whole is not going to let them starve in the street, whether they complain or not.
Social Security prevents psychopaths (those who find it acceptable when someone in a wealthy country where people are paid to not grow food starves to death in the street) from being free riders on the backs of those with a conscience.
Actual, honest-to-God starvation in this country hasn't happened in this country for decades, so save the guilt trip. This is America; even the homeless are fat as often as not. What we're doing now is creating a cradle-to-grave system in which the government takes half your income so it can make your decisions for you. We have state-mandated pensions (Social Security) whose benefits increase at a time when the number of retirees/worker is ballooning. We're well on our way to socialized medical care. I'm a big boy; I can make my own decisions. Save that crap and get your hands off my paycheck.
Also, that's precisely what I meant by the government being your daddy - I don't want to be part of your social insurance program. if you feel compelled to donate to our bloated and demonstrably ineffective welfare state, go ahead; simply remove it from the tax code so I don't have to.
Just to appease the "we can't let people starve!" crowd, I'm fine with the government making available 2000 cheap, bland, nutritionally balanced calories to anyone who wants it. Should cost about $1/day/person. I'm guessing such a program would be taken advantage of by about a few hundred thousand people per day (probably much less), costing the average taxpayer $5/year. I'll trade that out for our appalling food stamp program, which is riddled with fraud.
In my experience, geeks are generally in favor of civil liberties, but also in favor of significant government provision of public services, such as high-speed rail, NASA, and funding for the National Science Foundation. Many also support significant regulation of markets, such as more vigorous enforcement of antitrust law, and institution of net-neutrality rules.
I'm intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Seriously, that's me exactly. It doesn't fit the usual labels, so I call it "game theory politics." Namely, preserve people's rights to the utmost practical limit, and have government only involve itself in programs that would otherwise fail due to game theory considerations. Example: building roads is really bad if left to the individual to do ad-hoc. Building a space program requires such massive collaboration that it will never happen if left to individuals. People generally want clear air - but aren't willing to unilaterally buy a cleaner car if others won't. We all know that taxes are necessary to some extent, but try like hell to minimize our own burdens.
To me, all those examples are where the majority of the individuals want a given outcome, but nobody wants to take the first step. Government is good at fixing that. Problems that a person can, could, or should solve on their own, no thanks. In particular, I really hate "the government is your daddy" taxes, and would opt out of Social Security in a second if I could.
No, the funny part is that the users who torrented and installed pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 got exactly what they deserved. Instant karma.
Why do idiots keep mislabeling their music as w4r3z? Here I wanted photoshop and all I got was a shitty John Lennon song.
Why can't we? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the enviro-nazis and NIMBY bastards successfully stymied the construction of new plants back in the 70s and 80s and in so doing left zero incentive for American industry to retain the plant and equipment to build reactors?
Ha! I think those nutcases have been put out to pasture, long overdue. At this point, I think it's more that nuclear plants are kind of complicated and aren't something you slap together in a year. Retrofitting existing combustion facilities, on the other hand, might have a quicker impact. If that sort of thing matters to you. And if you happen to be a president with one eye on the polls and one eye on the calendar, it does.
There's also problems in that running a nuclear plant requires immediate access to large amounts of water for cooling towers, which limits where they can be placed.
Congratulations environmentalists -- you ripped the heart out of the only energy source that could have weaned us off carbon in our lifetimes. Seems a bit shortsighted in retrospect, doesn't it?
It's funny, actually, the environmentalists have started falling over themselves lately to support nuclear. For very much the reasons you state.
There's NO way this administration would ever actually do anything to support coal
Care to make it interesting? They said that about wiretaps too (among other issues Obama's reversed himself on).
Fact is, there's no other energy technology available that can be widely implemented during Obama's administration, even if he's re-elected. You can't build nuclear plants that fast. Solar and wind aren't ready for wide-scale connection to the grid.
So guess what? You're back to good old coal, with a few twists to make it more palatable to environmentalists.
And, from what I have read, it is the people who are being sued by the RIAA/MPAA that are doing questionably legal things. Until legislation changes things or a new legal precedent is set, it's been made pretty clear that if you get caught downloading or sharing movies/mp3s, you can and most likely will get sued. (and lose.) And, as far as I've read, the laws and precedents support this. (IANAL)
Does that include the dead people they've sued, the grandmothers who don't know how to use computers, and the like? Are you OK with identity via IP address?
It's actually funny seeing people rationalize moves like these that have gone completely against the sort of change Obama promised. The RIAA uses tactics not altogether different from racketeering against people who have, at best, been associated with an IP address that may have downloaded a file that may be copyrighted. In many cases, yes, the people in question violated the law. In too many others, however, the RIAA doesn't do much to determine whether that was the case. There's a whole lot of collateral damage, and in many cases they've collected from innocent people simply because they didn't have the resources to fight it. That's the problem - the way the system has been purchased by the RIAA, they get to be judge, jury, and executioner.
There's also the negotiation from a position of bought strength - namely, the laws passed that apply a judgment somewhere around 100,000x the actual damages. With that in place, you have to give them what they ask. You can count on worse than that, surely, with all these RIAA appointments.
Just remember, kids - this is the change you voted for. If you thought the RIAA harassment was fun before, you ain't seen nothing yet.
No. The majority of the cost of infrastructure is digging down fiber. Once that fiber is down you can send pretty much any amount of information on it with only some smaller differences in equipment cost.
And why would more fiber need to be laid down? Because the old network reached capacity. Why did the old network reach capacity? Because of the minority of people who are using a ton of bandwidth. So if the cable company is looking at raising prices to subsidize infrastructure improvements that are only necessary because of a couple of bandwidth hogs, let the hogs pay for it.
The argument of "bandwidth is almost free once the fiber is laid" is dead stupid, because you laid the fiber to carry the bandwidth you need. That argument is circular.
You are the asshole who wants to pay less for driving on the shared neighbourhood road because you only drive on it once a week, even though you completly needed the road to get from your house to store.
Substitute "highway" for "shared neighborhood road" and I certainly agree. Which is why such things are paid for in large part by gas taxes, effectively a metered rate.
I don't much see this surviving challenge, if it goes that far. A tax on things like cigarettes is one thing; a tax on media due to its content seems like something that contravenes the 1st Amendment. Otherwise, you'd never have to ban speech you don't like, you'd just make it really, really expensive.
Bear in mind I'm not a lawyer; I don't even play one on message boards.
Because the cost to the ISP isn't based on how much I use. They have to maintain the infrastructure no matter how much it's being utilized.
That's fantasyland. The only reason they need the infrastructure is because people use it. And the lion's share of that need for more infrastructure is people using it a lot. Otherwise, they could use less infrastructure and provide lower prices. Since you are the reason the rest of us can't get lower prices, it's in the interest of the rest of us to boot you from the shared pool and make you pay your own way.
In effect, you're the asshole who gets the filet mignon and wants to split the check. Uh, no.
I shouldn't have to pay more because I use the resource that is available.
Just so long as you're OK with the other side of that - namely, that by not paying for what you're using, they won't be investing in higher bandwidth.
Bottom line is, if there's a shared resource and you're using 100x as much as the average person, why the hell SHOULDN'T you pay more? I've no idea why people accept metered usage for cell phones but not network connectivity. There's no substantive difference in the argument.
The age of the domain name is over in my opinion. People find information by going through search engines, I would guess a very small population still types www.whatiwant.com when surfing. They would have learned their lesson a long time ago that that's not a smart idea.
I don't think that's true at all, lots of important sites can be easily remembered, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, we place all of our information, some of it vital, into the hands of a few big companies, like Google, who would then hold the keys to the castle. It's almost like they're a one-man DNS server converting what you want into a site name. I think we'd be better served to pare things down a tad so there weren't so many damned TLDs, rather than just give up. If we did give up, why not eliminate names altogether?
But honestly, the problem's not that dire, domain names are still usable. Let's say I want info on the Obama administration, for instance. I type in "whitehouse.com" and find a great deal of valuable information, some interesting images, and end up feeling a lot better about the direction this country is headed.
Let me ask a question. If the newspapers that create the AP content are going out of business, where will the content come from?
Somewhere, like it always has. The AP didn't invent the concept of news. If the AP went under, news would come from different sources, probably with a different revenue model. Your question is like asking where the music will come from when the RIAA is toast. Content will still be created - already, the marginal value of generic news like the AP vs. talented individuals who specialize in subject-based internet sites is questionable.
And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?
That would be a great question if it were actually happening. Right now Google is directing traffic to these sites ("Oh NOES!"), with the benefit that they themselves become a place where many people go for aggregated news. Something, I'll point out, that the AP themselves could have done years ago. The AP is basically saying "Pay us to give us free traffic".
As many people dont understand GPLed code still has an owner.
It may have an owner, but that owner gave an unlimited redistribution license to a whole lot of people (provided those people redistribute via GPL). Once that cat's out of the bag, it's not going back in.
The only thing they really can do (that any other GPL licensee can't) is re-license the code under alternate licenses that are more permissive than the GPL.
Independent of that mysql may still be a trademark.
True. But that only applies to the branding stuff, not the code.
The most relevant example is probably CentOS, which is a binary compatible clone of RHEL. Only difference is any material that says "Red Hat" or RHEL.
While i am *not sure* of the details, i am pretty sure that SUNs lawyers did not forget to make very definite regulations for maintainers leaving, forking of etc
Did they? I'm pretty sure non-compete clauses that require people not to leave, work for competitors, etc are illegal in California where Sun is headquartered. At least many such contracts have been found to be so. They might pay attractive retention bonuses, but they can't force anyone to work for them, slavery being illegal and all. So I'm not so sure how much protection they can really have. I also wonder how one would go about restricting anyone's ability to fork.
I still find it amazing that ISPs go along with thi....wait...we're talking about Comcast/Verizon here. Same people who used to throttle legitimate P2P traffic. I guess we can assume that if you're shut off for 3 months for downloading music, there will be a fee greater than the bill for 3 months of service you missed to reinstate your account.
It took me a while to figure out what was in it for them as well. After all, this is a lot of work just to piss off your customers. But you hit it with the comparison to P2P throttling - what they want to do is get rid of their most unprofitable customers - those using the most bandwidth. One subset of people using lots of bandwidth includes people downloading music illegally. As it happens, that's a group easy to go after - but they certainly won't stop there.
If you want to see this go away, we need to push for the demise of flat-rate pricing. If the carriers were *more* money by the people using more bandwidth (for whatever reason), they'd be telling the RIAA to go pound sand.
So you're absolutely right, these guys are doing it the right way. Even if Krivit is right and the cold fusion hypothesis is just "physics fantasies", they're still doing "excellent empirical work" and that should be the key to figuring out what is going on.
Right. And it's when people start immediately dismissing work as "physics fantasies" that I get a little suspicious of their objectivity. That's what I couldn't stand about academia when I was in grad school - so many egos, and so many people who make a career out of attacking other people's work rather than actually trying to discover anything new.
In this case, Krivit seems to make it his personal goal to disprove cold fusion, not find out the truth, and that gets dangerous if your goal is objective science. He seems to be bending over backwards to make any available alternate theory fit the evidence. Not to say that fusion's actually occurring, but it has to be considered.
Were you even around when the first claims where made? You do realize the reason it was dismissed was because
NOONE COULD REPLICATE THE RESULTS!
Yes. However, carefully define "it" in you above sentence and carefully consider what it means when you say that "no one could replicate the results". In this case, "it" can only be Pons and Fleischmann's experiment - not cold fusion as a whole. And no one replicating the results invalidates that specific experiment alone. That's all.
This experiment bears no relationship to the prior one. This one is a lot simpler and has apparently been repeated. It has better controls. These researchers are not named Pons or Fleischmann.
You've fallen into the same logical trap I mentioned in my first post: namely, assuming that by invalidating Pons and Fleischmann's experiment, you've proven false the notion of any sort of "cold" fusion. That's not what the evidence shows. All the experiments showed is that their experimental setup failed to reliably show any sort of fusion. That doesn't mean at all that other, better designed experiments couldn't correctly demonstrate the same result.
Your argument would be akin to Creationists who point to any invalidated piece of evidence in anthropology as evidence that evolution itself is wrong. That's not the way it works. If other, better evidence is available, then that is what should be considered. To be sure, that better evidence hasn't much existed until recently. But new studies should be considered on their own merit. You don't toss out the baby (possible cold fusion) with the bathwater (Pons and Fleischmann's experiment).
In this case, any objective scientist should be intrigued by the possible existence of neutrons in this well-controlled experiment. Whether it is fusion should be considered to be an open question. However, it cannot be dismissed simply because of two researchers who presented bad science 20 years ago.
Without that it's sheer speculation because other processes can produce high-energy neutrons; it's not unique to a fusion process.
Quite true. However, considering their controls, alternate processes considered as possible explanations need to create high-energy neutrons given the specific set of conditions that existed in the test but not the control setup. That's the key - they were able to show that their experimental setup created the neutrons while the control didn't. And that is exactly what should be done in the future: follow up experiments designed to distinguish between possible alternatives.
That's what science is all about, right? Not letting our preconceived notions get in the way of evidence? Examining evidence narrowly and not making unsupported genrealizations?
I know one of the guys who helped debunk the thing way back when, and there's so much disgust for the original guys that it seems to be a foregone conclusion that cold fusion can never work. For example, in the current article, the tone seems to be that people really want to prove these guys wrong, which to me seems too much of an almost religious zeal. Worse, a lot of very prominent scientists have very vocally declared the thing impossible, and it will be a very hard thing for a lot of them to even consider the possibility that they were wrong. I think a lot of people made a false logical step from "these guys haven't proven their case for cold fusion" to "cold fusion can't work".
I think the original claim got a lot of fury from people who not only dismissed the research, but the way they announced it via press conference. In this case, the researchers are doing the right things - publishing first in peer reviewed journals, making presentations at the major conferences, getting the results validated by other experts.
It's not clear at this point that it *is* cold fusion, but the result is interesting enough that cold fusion seems to be a good possibility. Certainly it warrants investigation by other researchers who can keep an open mind. It would be funny if the biggest scientific joke of the last half of the 20th century ended up being the biggest discovery of the 21st.
Actually, the fun part is that there's a long history of people doing exactly that. The patent offices in the US and other countries have an ongoing problem of people attempting to patent perpetual-motion machines. In most cases, a "proof" that a particular gadget will work is produced by taking the standard equations and using Celsius/Centigrade numbers when temperature in "degrees" is needed.
Wow. Just, wow. Goes to show, no matter how dumb you think people are, idiots will exceed your imagination.;)
No. Being innovative means being original, and that means taking new and different paths.
Yeah, but you still have to get on the road so you can blaze your own trail off of it. That means knowing how other people have done things.
Otherwise, how far do you go with this? First principles? Hell, really, the only way to ensure a totally creative being is to have a baby and hand it over to wolves for rearing. You can be sure that that kid's ideas will be totally uncorrupted by the ideas of other humans. Of course, the kid's ideas will also be useless, but that's the price you pay for creativity.
373.15 - Water boils at 1 atmosphere
310 - Very hot
300 - Hot
290 - Nice
280 - Chilly
273.15 - Water freezes at 1 atmosphere
0 - absolute zero! how easy is that.
'xactly. These trolls try to go anti-US with their fancy metric system then they fuck it up with Centigrade. Try plugging centigrade temperatures into the ideal gas law and lemme know how it goes.;)
Why is it so important to these companies to push service plans and insurance and batteries, and mark up a cable to $60 and sell you a hot apple pie with that? Because they've slashed their margins on the things you're actually there to buy so low trying to get you in there to buy them. Think about the people you know. If they could choose between Store A which has their product at $300 and Store B that has it at $250 but are going to push as hard as they possibly can to get you to buy their $50 warranty, which are they likely to choose? The majority of people are going to choose Store B and then bitch about the pressure to buy a warranty as if the two things were unrelated.
Nobody's complaining about having to listen to the pitch. Just tell them no - no problem with that. However, if you're suggesting the consumer is to blame for deceptive sales practices, that's going a little far. What's as bad as the behavior claimed in the article is Office Depot's standard "bait-n-switch" practice, where they advertise a good price on a laptop, then don't have any in stock.
I don't mind anyone's business model, so long as it isn't deceptive. You want to give me a good price on electronics in the hopes I might be dumb enough to buy the warranty? Fine. Just be honest, don't lie about prices and stock.
The FBI's recordkeeping and information handling internally are as poor as for FOIA requests, which would mean that it has no coherent idea what is going on, and is thus only effective in cases where minimally coordinated local offices can do the job.
That'd be it. See this article about the complete failure that came about when SAIC was hired to modernize the FBI's computer systems. $200M spent and nothing to show for it but a smoking crater. Both the FBI and the contractor appear to have screwed this one up big-time. Because of that, the FBI's information management is still basically stone age.
Slashdot Mirror
Wherever there is greed, it can be harnessed to actually do some good. I love it!
I wouldn't be OK with that. The issue isn't that someone might complain when they are starving in the street, the issue is that no matter how idiotically someone has conducted themselves, the public as a whole is not going to let them starve in the street, whether they complain or not. Social Security prevents psychopaths (those who find it acceptable when someone in a wealthy country where people are paid to not grow food starves to death in the street) from being free riders on the backs of those with a conscience.
Actual, honest-to-God starvation in this country hasn't happened in this country for decades, so save the guilt trip. This is America; even the homeless are fat as often as not. What we're doing now is creating a cradle-to-grave system in which the government takes half your income so it can make your decisions for you. We have state-mandated pensions (Social Security) whose benefits increase at a time when the number of retirees/worker is ballooning. We're well on our way to socialized medical care. I'm a big boy; I can make my own decisions. Save that crap and get your hands off my paycheck.
Also, that's precisely what I meant by the government being your daddy - I don't want to be part of your social insurance program. if you feel compelled to donate to our bloated and demonstrably ineffective welfare state, go ahead; simply remove it from the tax code so I don't have to.
Just to appease the "we can't let people starve!" crowd, I'm fine with the government making available 2000 cheap, bland, nutritionally balanced calories to anyone who wants it. Should cost about $1/day/person. I'm guessing such a program would be taken advantage of by about a few hundred thousand people per day (probably much less), costing the average taxpayer $5/year. I'll trade that out for our appalling food stamp program, which is riddled with fraud.
In my experience, geeks are generally in favor of civil liberties, but also in favor of significant government provision of public services, such as high-speed rail, NASA, and funding for the National Science Foundation. Many also support significant regulation of markets, such as more vigorous enforcement of antitrust law, and institution of net-neutrality rules.
I'm intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Seriously, that's me exactly. It doesn't fit the usual labels, so I call it "game theory politics." Namely, preserve people's rights to the utmost practical limit, and have government only involve itself in programs that would otherwise fail due to game theory considerations. Example: building roads is really bad if left to the individual to do ad-hoc. Building a space program requires such massive collaboration that it will never happen if left to individuals. People generally want clear air - but aren't willing to unilaterally buy a cleaner car if others won't. We all know that taxes are necessary to some extent, but try like hell to minimize our own burdens.
To me, all those examples are where the majority of the individuals want a given outcome, but nobody wants to take the first step. Government is good at fixing that. Problems that a person can, could, or should solve on their own, no thanks. In particular, I really hate "the government is your daddy" taxes, and would opt out of Social Security in a second if I could.
No, the funny part is that the users who torrented and installed pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 got exactly what they deserved. Instant karma.
Why do idiots keep mislabeling their music as w4r3z? Here I wanted photoshop and all I got was a shitty John Lennon song.
Why can't we? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the enviro-nazis and NIMBY bastards successfully stymied the construction of new plants back in the 70s and 80s and in so doing left zero incentive for American industry to retain the plant and equipment to build reactors?
Ha! I think those nutcases have been put out to pasture, long overdue. At this point, I think it's more that nuclear plants are kind of complicated and aren't something you slap together in a year. Retrofitting existing combustion facilities, on the other hand, might have a quicker impact. If that sort of thing matters to you. And if you happen to be a president with one eye on the polls and one eye on the calendar, it does.
There's also problems in that running a nuclear plant requires immediate access to large amounts of water for cooling towers, which limits where they can be placed.
Congratulations environmentalists -- you ripped the heart out of the only energy source that could have weaned us off carbon in our lifetimes. Seems a bit shortsighted in retrospect, doesn't it?
It's funny, actually, the environmentalists have started falling over themselves lately to support nuclear. For very much the reasons you state.
There's NO way this administration would ever actually do anything to support coal
Care to make it interesting? They said that about wiretaps too (among other issues Obama's reversed himself on).
Fact is, there's no other energy technology available that can be widely implemented during Obama's administration, even if he's re-elected. You can't build nuclear plants that fast. Solar and wind aren't ready for wide-scale connection to the grid.
So guess what? You're back to good old coal, with a few twists to make it more palatable to environmentalists.
And, from what I have read, it is the people who are being sued by the RIAA/MPAA that are doing questionably legal things. Until legislation changes things or a new legal precedent is set, it's been made pretty clear that if you get caught downloading or sharing movies/mp3s, you can and most likely will get sued. (and lose.) And, as far as I've read, the laws and precedents support this. (IANAL)
Does that include the dead people they've sued, the grandmothers who don't know how to use computers, and the like? Are you OK with identity via IP address?
It's actually funny seeing people rationalize moves like these that have gone completely against the sort of change Obama promised. The RIAA uses tactics not altogether different from racketeering against people who have, at best, been associated with an IP address that may have downloaded a file that may be copyrighted. In many cases, yes, the people in question violated the law. In too many others, however, the RIAA doesn't do much to determine whether that was the case. There's a whole lot of collateral damage, and in many cases they've collected from innocent people simply because they didn't have the resources to fight it. That's the problem - the way the system has been purchased by the RIAA, they get to be judge, jury, and executioner.
There's also the negotiation from a position of bought strength - namely, the laws passed that apply a judgment somewhere around 100,000x the actual damages. With that in place, you have to give them what they ask. You can count on worse than that, surely, with all these RIAA appointments.
Just remember, kids - this is the change you voted for. If you thought the RIAA harassment was fun before, you ain't seen nothing yet.
No. The majority of the cost of infrastructure is digging down fiber. Once that fiber is down you can send pretty much any amount of information on it with only some smaller differences in equipment cost.
And why would more fiber need to be laid down? Because the old network reached capacity. Why did the old network reach capacity? Because of the minority of people who are using a ton of bandwidth. So if the cable company is looking at raising prices to subsidize infrastructure improvements that are only necessary because of a couple of bandwidth hogs, let the hogs pay for it.
The argument of "bandwidth is almost free once the fiber is laid" is dead stupid, because you laid the fiber to carry the bandwidth you need. That argument is circular.
You are the asshole who wants to pay less for driving on the shared neighbourhood road because you only drive on it once a week, even though you completly needed the road to get from your house to store.
Substitute "highway" for "shared neighborhood road" and I certainly agree. Which is why such things are paid for in large part by gas taxes, effectively a metered rate.
I don't much see this surviving challenge, if it goes that far. A tax on things like cigarettes is one thing; a tax on media due to its content seems like something that contravenes the 1st Amendment. Otherwise, you'd never have to ban speech you don't like, you'd just make it really, really expensive.
Bear in mind I'm not a lawyer; I don't even play one on message boards.
Because the cost to the ISP isn't based on how much I use. They have to maintain the infrastructure no matter how much it's being utilized.
That's fantasyland. The only reason they need the infrastructure is because people use it. And the lion's share of that need for more infrastructure is people using it a lot. Otherwise, they could use less infrastructure and provide lower prices. Since you are the reason the rest of us can't get lower prices, it's in the interest of the rest of us to boot you from the shared pool and make you pay your own way.
In effect, you're the asshole who gets the filet mignon and wants to split the check. Uh, no.
I shouldn't have to pay more because I use the resource that is available.
Just so long as you're OK with the other side of that - namely, that by not paying for what you're using, they won't be investing in higher bandwidth.
Bottom line is, if there's a shared resource and you're using 100x as much as the average person, why the hell SHOULDN'T you pay more? I've no idea why people accept metered usage for cell phones but not network connectivity. There's no substantive difference in the argument.
That troll would have been smarter a few years ago when whitehouse.com was still actually a porn site.
Ah hell. I try and I try, but actually checking it would have been extra NSFW. Whatcha gonna do?
The age of the domain name is over in my opinion. People find information by going through search engines, I would guess a very small population still types www.whatiwant.com when surfing. They would have learned their lesson a long time ago that that's not a smart idea.
I don't think that's true at all, lots of important sites can be easily remembered, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, we place all of our information, some of it vital, into the hands of a few big companies, like Google, who would then hold the keys to the castle. It's almost like they're a one-man DNS server converting what you want into a site name. I think we'd be better served to pare things down a tad so there weren't so many damned TLDs, rather than just give up. If we did give up, why not eliminate names altogether?
But honestly, the problem's not that dire, domain names are still usable. Let's say I want info on the Obama administration, for instance. I type in "whitehouse.com" and find a great deal of valuable information, some interesting images, and end up feeling a lot better about the direction this country is headed.
Let me ask a question. If the newspapers that create the AP content are going out of business, where will the content come from?
Somewhere, like it always has. The AP didn't invent the concept of news. If the AP went under, news would come from different sources, probably with a different revenue model. Your question is like asking where the music will come from when the RIAA is toast. Content will still be created - already, the marginal value of generic news like the AP vs. talented individuals who specialize in subject-based internet sites is questionable.
And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?
That would be a great question if it were actually happening. Right now Google is directing traffic to these sites ("Oh NOES!"), with the benefit that they themselves become a place where many people go for aggregated news. Something, I'll point out, that the AP themselves could have done years ago. The AP is basically saying "Pay us to give us free traffic".
Sure guys. Whatever you say.
As many people dont understand GPLed code still has an owner.
It may have an owner, but that owner gave an unlimited redistribution license to a whole lot of people (provided those people redistribute via GPL). Once that cat's out of the bag, it's not going back in.
The only thing they really can do (that any other GPL licensee can't) is re-license the code under alternate licenses that are more permissive than the GPL.
Independent of that mysql may still be a trademark.
True. But that only applies to the branding stuff, not the code.
The most relevant example is probably CentOS, which is a binary compatible clone of RHEL. Only difference is any material that says "Red Hat" or RHEL.
While i am *not sure* of the details, i am pretty sure that SUNs lawyers did not forget to make very definite regulations for maintainers leaving, forking of etc
Did they? I'm pretty sure non-compete clauses that require people not to leave, work for competitors, etc are illegal in California where Sun is headquartered. At least many such contracts have been found to be so. They might pay attractive retention bonuses, but they can't force anyone to work for them, slavery being illegal and all. So I'm not so sure how much protection they can really have. I also wonder how one would go about restricting anyone's ability to fork.
I still find it amazing that ISPs go along with thi....wait...we're talking about Comcast/Verizon here. Same people who used to throttle legitimate P2P traffic. I guess we can assume that if you're shut off for 3 months for downloading music, there will be a fee greater than the bill for 3 months of service you missed to reinstate your account.
It took me a while to figure out what was in it for them as well. After all, this is a lot of work just to piss off your customers. But you hit it with the comparison to P2P throttling - what they want to do is get rid of their most unprofitable customers - those using the most bandwidth. One subset of people using lots of bandwidth includes people downloading music illegally. As it happens, that's a group easy to go after - but they certainly won't stop there.
If you want to see this go away, we need to push for the demise of flat-rate pricing. If the carriers were *more* money by the people using more bandwidth (for whatever reason), they'd be telling the RIAA to go pound sand.
So you're absolutely right, these guys are doing it the right way. Even if Krivit is right and the cold fusion hypothesis is just "physics fantasies", they're still doing "excellent empirical work" and that should be the key to figuring out what is going on.
Right. And it's when people start immediately dismissing work as "physics fantasies" that I get a little suspicious of their objectivity. That's what I couldn't stand about academia when I was in grad school - so many egos, and so many people who make a career out of attacking other people's work rather than actually trying to discover anything new.
In this case, Krivit seems to make it his personal goal to disprove cold fusion, not find out the truth, and that gets dangerous if your goal is objective science. He seems to be bending over backwards to make any available alternate theory fit the evidence. Not to say that fusion's actually occurring, but it has to be considered.
Were you even around when the first claims where made? You do realize the reason it was dismissed was because NOONE COULD REPLICATE THE RESULTS!
Yes. However, carefully define "it" in you above sentence and carefully consider what it means when you say that "no one could replicate the results". In this case, "it" can only be Pons and Fleischmann's experiment - not cold fusion as a whole. And no one replicating the results invalidates that specific experiment alone. That's all.
This experiment bears no relationship to the prior one. This one is a lot simpler and has apparently been repeated. It has better controls. These researchers are not named Pons or Fleischmann.
You've fallen into the same logical trap I mentioned in my first post: namely, assuming that by invalidating Pons and Fleischmann's experiment, you've proven false the notion of any sort of "cold" fusion. That's not what the evidence shows. All the experiments showed is that their experimental setup failed to reliably show any sort of fusion. That doesn't mean at all that other, better designed experiments couldn't correctly demonstrate the same result.
Your argument would be akin to Creationists who point to any invalidated piece of evidence in anthropology as evidence that evolution itself is wrong. That's not the way it works. If other, better evidence is available, then that is what should be considered. To be sure, that better evidence hasn't much existed until recently. But new studies should be considered on their own merit. You don't toss out the baby (possible cold fusion) with the bathwater (Pons and Fleischmann's experiment).
In this case, any objective scientist should be intrigued by the possible existence of neutrons in this well-controlled experiment. Whether it is fusion should be considered to be an open question. However, it cannot be dismissed simply because of two researchers who presented bad science 20 years ago.
Without that it's sheer speculation because other processes can produce high-energy neutrons; it's not unique to a fusion process.
Quite true. However, considering their controls, alternate processes considered as possible explanations need to create high-energy neutrons given the specific set of conditions that existed in the test but not the control setup. That's the key - they were able to show that their experimental setup created the neutrons while the control didn't. And that is exactly what should be done in the future: follow up experiments designed to distinguish between possible alternatives.
That's what science is all about, right? Not letting our preconceived notions get in the way of evidence? Examining evidence narrowly and not making unsupported genrealizations?
I know one of the guys who helped debunk the thing way back when, and there's so much disgust for the original guys that it seems to be a foregone conclusion that cold fusion can never work. For example, in the current article, the tone seems to be that people really want to prove these guys wrong, which to me seems too much of an almost religious zeal. Worse, a lot of very prominent scientists have very vocally declared the thing impossible, and it will be a very hard thing for a lot of them to even consider the possibility that they were wrong. I think a lot of people made a false logical step from "these guys haven't proven their case for cold fusion" to "cold fusion can't work".
I think the original claim got a lot of fury from people who not only dismissed the research, but the way they announced it via press conference. In this case, the researchers are doing the right things - publishing first in peer reviewed journals, making presentations at the major conferences, getting the results validated by other experts.
It's not clear at this point that it *is* cold fusion, but the result is interesting enough that cold fusion seems to be a good possibility. Certainly it warrants investigation by other researchers who can keep an open mind. It would be funny if the biggest scientific joke of the last half of the 20th century ended up being the biggest discovery of the 21st.
Actually, the fun part is that there's a long history of people doing exactly that. The patent offices in the US and other countries have an ongoing problem of people attempting to patent perpetual-motion machines. In most cases, a "proof" that a particular gadget will work is produced by taking the standard equations and using Celsius/Centigrade numbers when temperature in "degrees" is needed.
Wow. Just, wow. Goes to show, no matter how dumb you think people are, idiots will exceed your imagination. ;)
Thanks for sharing that.
No. Being innovative means being original, and that means taking new and different paths.
Yeah, but you still have to get on the road so you can blaze your own trail off of it. That means knowing how other people have done things.
Otherwise, how far do you go with this? First principles? Hell, really, the only way to ensure a totally creative being is to have a baby and hand it over to wolves for rearing. You can be sure that that kid's ideas will be totally uncorrupted by the ideas of other humans. Of course, the kid's ideas will also be useless, but that's the price you pay for creativity.
whats so hard about adding 273.15 to all your temp measurements?
What's so hard about doing any unit conversion? Unintuitive and inelegant.
373.15 - Water boils at 1 atmosphere 310 - Very hot 300 - Hot 290 - Nice 280 - Chilly 273.15 - Water freezes at 1 atmosphere 0 - absolute zero! how easy is that.
'xactly. These trolls try to go anti-US with their fancy metric system then they fuck it up with Centigrade. Try plugging centigrade temperatures into the ideal gas law and lemme know how it goes. ;)
Why is it so important to these companies to push service plans and insurance and batteries, and mark up a cable to $60 and sell you a hot apple pie with that? Because they've slashed their margins on the things you're actually there to buy so low trying to get you in there to buy them. Think about the people you know. If they could choose between Store A which has their product at $300 and Store B that has it at $250 but are going to push as hard as they possibly can to get you to buy their $50 warranty, which are they likely to choose? The majority of people are going to choose Store B and then bitch about the pressure to buy a warranty as if the two things were unrelated.
Nobody's complaining about having to listen to the pitch. Just tell them no - no problem with that. However, if you're suggesting the consumer is to blame for deceptive sales practices, that's going a little far. What's as bad as the behavior claimed in the article is Office Depot's standard "bait-n-switch" practice, where they advertise a good price on a laptop, then don't have any in stock.
I don't mind anyone's business model, so long as it isn't deceptive. You want to give me a good price on electronics in the hopes I might be dumb enough to buy the warranty? Fine. Just be honest, don't lie about prices and stock.
The FBI's recordkeeping and information handling internally are as poor as for FOIA requests, which would mean that it has no coherent idea what is going on, and is thus only effective in cases where minimally coordinated local offices can do the job.
That'd be it. See this article about the complete failure that came about when SAIC was hired to modernize the FBI's computer systems. $200M spent and nothing to show for it but a smoking crater. Both the FBI and the contractor appear to have screwed this one up big-time. Because of that, the FBI's information management is still basically stone age.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485_pf.html
People are always keen to say "such and such" is just talk but the fact is the language we use about ourselves has a profound impact on our behavior.
That's about the same logic as the wingnuts who claim that video games lead to real-life violence.
It's just make-believe. People with proper psychological functioning can easily compartmentalize fantasy from reality.