Addressing lowest common denominator concerns is what the candidate will be doing in the actual election and as President as well. That makes the supposed current primary methodology of Presidential candidates paying attention to each individual state unrealistic and deceptive. The individual concerns of the several states are addressed by the Senate, where every state has an equal vote thanks to the Great Compromise, and by the State Governments themselves, who also would be running on National Primary Day.
All of this fiddling and finagling with the primary calendar has the effect of making some State's primaries have more influence on the selection process than others. It also makes the primary process unnecessarily long, expensive and grueling. The obvious answer is to have one Primary Day for the whole nation, and we go and vote, and that's it. The Media would hate it as a long primary season generates a lot of news stories for them that are easy to cover. Broadcasters would hate it as it would concentrate all the political ad revenue during a shorter period of time, leaving them scrambling during the other parts of the year. But it would reduce the horse-race aspect, the front-runner syndrome and overimportance of new hampshire and iowa, two otherwise wholly unremarkable states. People would have to go out and vote for the person they chose as opposed to the ones who had been doing best in previous primaries.
>It almost made me wish that OpenOffice.org would set up a web site, something like OpenOffice.com, that has the exact same software, but charges you a $50 or so fee to download. Unfortunately, regardless of the best of intentions, some people just don't get it. At least then, I could point these people to the site where you can get the "real" copy.
This is, in fact, brilliant. People thought nobody would pay good money for water in bottles either. The money could go to providing the bandwidth for hosting, and for marketing OO, thus generating more downloads, and maybe even as stipends for developers to improve the software.. Plus, by having an officially-licensed for-pay version, it will encourage an entire other class of consumers to "screw the man" by downloading it from free sources. This is, as they say, a win-win-win proposition. Plus people would be directly taxed for having a proprietary mindset.
Moore's Law is just as much a law as Murphy's Law, or Sturgeon's Law. Just because it doesn't have the built-into-the-universe invariance of Kepler's Laws doesn't mean it's not a law. Incidentally, Kepler's Laws were also "just an observation" until Newton came along.
Ok, so it's obvious why industry would want these changes. Any pennies they can shave off their production costs go straight to their bottom line. But where's the government and public interest in allowing these regulations to be changed? This doesn't produce better chocolate. It doesn't produce safer chocolate. It doesn't produce chocolate innovation in a manner that matters to the consumer. There aren't citizen's groups demanding *we want our vegetable oil!*. So, tell us, why should we adulterate our definition of chocolate to improve your profit margins? Sugar-free chocolate is not chocolate and should not be labeled as such. And "harmonizing global standards" basically translates to "but everybody else is doing it." which is not a good enough reason to do anything.
The right and duty of the police to go out on patrol to keep public areas safe is well-established. Police departments already have helicopters and airplanes with which to conduct surveillance. This is just another form of a police patrol, except it's more efficient fuel-wise and keeps our policemen safely back in the station until they're actually needed. Heck, in the golden age of comicbooks, superheroes were lionized for going out to patrol the city on their own time (often from the air) to thwart crime. Why are people so opposed to this now? It's not as if a 50 ft blimp isn't fracking obvious! If you're that concerned about being watched from above, worry about spy satellites which you can't see against the glare of the sky.
Personally, I'd love a set of airship UAVs to patrol above our major highways and provide realtime traffic data and signage. Their hang time and cost of operation is vastly superior to helicopters and the don't produce as much pollution or noise.
Agreed, this is proof that Open Source is working as a successful alternative to Microsoft since M$ has resorted to pricing their software near its true value. This proves that resistance is possible. OSS is *forcing* them to attempt to compete on price, at least in certain segments.
I already pay Sales Tax on every item I sell in Eve in the in-game market. It's not my fault they don't forward the ISK to the appropriate authorities, any more than it would be if Mcdonald's didn't forward the tax on a cheeseburger.
>Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day? (That's especially true for startups, which don't have >the money to compete head to head with larger, more established companies.)
Because the new ideas are valuable in and of themselves even if other people get to use them too. Reality check:"Was anything invented before the Patent Office was opened in 1790?" Why yes, yes, lots of stuff was. Is, in fact, the value of of the patent system (to society, not the individual patent holder) massively less if the rate of technological change outstrips the lifespan of the patent? Let's ask the vonage customers. Let's ask everybody who used or wanted to use GIF or RSA before the patents ran out. RSA was patented the year I was born. In other words it was encumbered for my entire life. And in that time, the entire microcomputer industry came into being, as did the Internet. Patents impair innovation when the tech life cycle is foreshortened because they act as a barrier to entry to people actually making use of the technology and in many cases using the technology *better* than the original inventor. Patents also deprive independent reinventors of the fruits of their own minds. If they had never seen the patent and came up with the idea independently based on their own knowledge of the field in question, then why should they be penalized used nothing of the patent filer's? How does it benefit society to grant an individual or an artificial person a monopoly on how an idea is used, if the idea is in fact useful to many?
Speaking as an atheist, we need to innoculate people against these sorts of stupid memes. If everybody told these jerks to go jump in a lake when they claim God wants people to do (x), then there would be a whole lot fewer acts of extremism in the world. It's extremely difficult to convince an atheist to do something suicidally stupid as we believe this life is all we get. That would take care of external sources, then we 'd just have to work on internal ones. There needs to be a massive education campaign to raise awareness of paranoid schizophrenia and that it is *much, much* more common than direct divine revelation. Perhaps a tag line, "Who do you think you are, Moses?" would help. An appropriately skeptical atheist who starts hearing voices would never think that God is telling him to kill people, but would first check to see if the fillings in his teeth were acting as a rectifier of radio signals, and then failing that, check himself into a mental health clinic.
Never got by the darned switch puzzles in DM. DM2 was fun too. I also liked picking up items and holding them at chest height to throw them. Ninja level gained, sweet! Throwing a falchion into a bad guy was just evil.
The best defense against being driven out of business is a creating stable financial structure for a business. It has become fashionable these days to fund a business via debt instead of equity due to certain tax advantages. However, that also exposes a business to much more risk: if a company's revenue stream falters, they're much more vulnerable to going bankrupt. However, if a firm uses profits rather than debt to grow the business and puts aside a large pile of cash to absorb variances in the marketplace, then their future is secure. This sort of thing is difficult for a startup to achieve, since you are in effect, creating something from nothing. However, large corporations only try to crush you once you're perceived as a threat, and patent trolls tend to sue you only if you've already made a lot of money. So the solution for the software startup is to make sure you keep costs down, overhead low and reinvest profits in the business. Stay off the radar screens of the majors that you fear would crush you until you have a warchest where you could survive disruption of income. And finally, diversify. If all of your revenue comes from one product which turns out to be patent-infringing, you could easily be toast. However if you have multiple product lines which don't all depend on the same technology, then your firm will take a hit to revenue if one gets tied up in court, but it should be survivable based on the revenue from the others.
Yes, we could, but if you're going to go in for such megaengineering anyway, we may as well surface the mirror with solar panels and beam power via microwave back to Earth to replace some fossil fuel power plants. CO2 isn't the only problematic thing they produce. Thousands die every year due to respiratory ailments exacerbated by particulate matter and poor air quality. Burning coal puts toxic mercury into the environment and various radioactiive isotopes which though present in trace amounts in coal get expelled in signifigant amounts due to the scale of coal usage.
The better professors in my classes answered any student who asked "Will this be on the exam?" with the following : "The questions on my exams are drawn from everything we cover in class as well as the readings." After the 6th or 7th repetition of that question, even the densest students in the lecture hall realized that the prof was there to teach, and they were there to learn, rather than game the system.
Computers used to cost millions of dollars routinely in the bad old days. What's new is that this is the first time that a million dollar computer comes in a form factor that's easy to steal.
>>The stakeholders in the DMCA have sufficient finances to make sure that revisions would benefit their perceived interests, not those of the public at large.
And the Public has sufficient votes to make sure that it could elect a fair-use friendly congress regardless of how much Corporations spend in elections. However, it simply doesn't care. Therefore the idiotic pro-corporate DMCA amendments actually do reflect the will of the vast majority of the people. Consent of the governed, the most basic political science of all.
What are you babbling about? Kids don't continue growing physically at the same rate either. These kids are already performing at a level above 99.999% of their so-called peers. If they stopped learning today, they'd be more scientifically literate than all but the most highly trained specialists. But they're not stopping. Many of them will go on to be those highly trained specialists. It's just that once people are intensely specialized they're rarely heard from again by anyone outside their own fields. And we wouldn't have heard about very many of these kids in the first place had it not been for Intel's marketing machine.
Lucid set an American space duration record and then walked off the shuttle. Sergei Krikalev was the Flight Engineer on a couple of ISS expeditions, but I remember him as the guy who got left up there on Mir when the Soviet Union collapsed. Talked to him via Amateur Radio during that time. They got him down eventually. Susan Helms has 5 space missions under her belt, but I remembered her because she starred in the IMAX Space Station 3D movie. I had erroneously associated her with a Hubble Servicing mission but that must have been someone else.
Bah. Susan Helms, Shannon Lucid, Sergei Krikalev, Anousheh Ansari, Mark Shuttleworth. Or do they have to be actually up in orbit to be "currently active"? Sure, one's a cosmonaut, and two are civvies, but they were on our frickin station so it's close enough.
Any slashdot reader who's been paying attention should know at least a few. Then again, I'm card-carrying space enthusiast who has met moonwalkers in person so I'm exception that proves your rule.
Slashdot Mirror
If some things are unthinkable for you, perhaps you should upgrade your thinking?
Addressing lowest common denominator concerns is what the candidate will be doing in the actual election and as President as well. That makes the supposed current primary methodology of Presidential candidates paying attention to each individual state unrealistic and deceptive. The individual concerns of the several states are addressed by the Senate, where every state has an equal vote thanks to the Great Compromise, and by the State Governments themselves, who also would be running on National Primary Day.
All of this fiddling and finagling with the primary calendar has the effect of making some State's primaries have more influence on the selection process than others. It also makes the primary process unnecessarily long, expensive and grueling. The obvious answer is to have one Primary Day for the whole nation, and we go and vote, and that's it. The Media would hate it as a long primary season generates a lot of news stories for them that are easy to cover. Broadcasters would hate it as it would concentrate all the political ad revenue during a shorter period of time, leaving them scrambling during the other parts of the year. But it would reduce the horse-race aspect, the front-runner syndrome and overimportance of new hampshire and iowa, two otherwise wholly unremarkable states. People would have to go out and vote for the person they chose as opposed to the ones who had been doing best in previous primaries.
>It almost made me wish that OpenOffice.org would set up a web site, something like OpenOffice.com, that has the exact same software, but charges you a $50 or so fee to download. Unfortunately, regardless of the best of intentions, some people just don't get it. At least then, I could point these people to the site where you can get the "real" copy.
This is, in fact, brilliant. People thought nobody would pay good money for water in bottles either. The money could go to providing the bandwidth for hosting, and for marketing OO, thus generating more downloads, and maybe even as stipends for developers to improve the software.. Plus, by having an officially-licensed for-pay version, it will encourage an entire other class of consumers to "screw the man" by downloading it from free sources. This is, as they say, a win-win-win proposition. Plus people would be directly taxed for having a proprietary mindset.
If artificial intelligence is developed, can we graft it on the users so they'll have some?
Moore's Law is just as much a law as Murphy's Law, or Sturgeon's Law. Just because it doesn't have the built-into-the-universe invariance of Kepler's Laws doesn't mean it's not a law. Incidentally, Kepler's Laws were also "just an observation" until Newton came along.
Ok, so it's obvious why industry would want these changes. Any pennies they can shave off their production costs go straight to their bottom line. But where's the government and public interest in allowing these regulations to be changed? This doesn't produce better chocolate. It doesn't produce safer chocolate. It doesn't produce chocolate innovation in a manner that matters to the consumer. There aren't citizen's groups demanding *we want our vegetable oil!*. So, tell us, why should we adulterate our definition of chocolate to improve your profit margins? Sugar-free chocolate is not chocolate and should not be labeled as such. And "harmonizing global standards" basically translates to "but everybody else is doing it." which is not a good enough reason to do anything.
The right and duty of the police to go out on patrol to keep public areas safe is well-established. Police departments already have helicopters and airplanes with which to conduct surveillance. This is just another form of a police patrol, except it's more efficient fuel-wise and keeps our policemen safely back in the station until they're actually needed. Heck, in the golden age of comicbooks, superheroes were lionized for going out to patrol the city on their own time (often from the air) to thwart crime. Why are people so opposed to this now? It's not as if a 50 ft blimp isn't fracking obvious! If you're that concerned about being watched from above, worry about spy satellites which you can't see against the glare of the sky.
Personally, I'd love a set of airship UAVs to patrol above our major highways and provide realtime traffic data and signage. Their hang time and cost of operation is vastly superior to helicopters and the don't produce as much pollution or noise.
I, for one, welcome our dirigible overwatch!
Agreed, this is proof that Open Source is working as a successful alternative to Microsoft since M$ has resorted to pricing their software near its true value. This proves that resistance is possible. OSS is *forcing* them to attempt to compete on price, at least in certain segments.
I already pay Sales Tax on every item I sell in Eve in the in-game market. It's not my fault they don't forward the ISK to the appropriate authorities, any more than it would be if Mcdonald's didn't forward the tax on a cheeseburger.
>Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day? (That's especially true for startups, which don't have >the money to compete head to head with larger, more established companies.)
Because the new ideas are valuable in and of themselves even if other people get to use them too. Reality check:"Was anything invented before the Patent Office was opened in 1790?" Why yes, yes, lots of stuff was. Is, in fact, the value of of the patent system (to society, not the individual patent holder) massively less if the rate of technological change outstrips the lifespan of the patent? Let's ask the vonage customers. Let's ask everybody who used or wanted to use GIF or RSA before the patents ran out. RSA was patented the year I was born. In other words it was encumbered for my entire life. And in that time, the entire microcomputer industry came into being, as did the Internet. Patents impair innovation when the tech life cycle is foreshortened because they act as a barrier to entry to people actually making use of the technology and in many cases using the technology *better* than the original inventor. Patents also deprive independent reinventors of the fruits of their own minds. If they had never seen the patent and came up with the idea independently based on their own knowledge of the field in question, then why should they be penalized used nothing of the patent filer's? How does it benefit society to grant an individual or an artificial person a monopoly on how an idea is used, if the idea is in fact useful to many?
I dunno, let's ask jesus. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthe w%203:13-15;&version=46;
Jesus says, " Yes, you should."
Speaking as an atheist, we need to innoculate people against these sorts of stupid memes. If everybody told these jerks to go jump in a lake when they claim God wants people to do (x), then there would be a whole lot fewer acts of extremism in the world. It's extremely difficult to convince an atheist to do something suicidally stupid as we believe this life is all we get. That would take care of external sources, then we 'd just have to work on internal ones. There needs to be a massive education campaign to raise awareness of paranoid schizophrenia and that it is *much, much* more common than direct divine revelation. Perhaps a tag line, "Who do you think you are, Moses?" would help. An appropriately skeptical atheist who starts hearing voices would never think that God is telling him to kill people, but would first check to see if the fillings in his teeth were acting as a rectifier of radio signals, and then failing that, check himself into a mental health clinic.
Never got by the darned switch puzzles in DM. DM2 was fun too. I also liked picking up items and holding them at chest height to throw them. Ninja level gained, sweet! Throwing a falchion into a bad guy was just evil.
I'm sorry, did you have a specific criticism or were you just deciding to be contrary? What exactly do you find impossible about my proposal?
The best defense against being driven out of business is a creating stable financial structure for a business. It has become fashionable these days to fund a business via debt instead of equity due to certain tax advantages. However, that also exposes a business to much more risk: if a company's revenue stream falters, they're much more vulnerable to going bankrupt. However, if a firm uses profits rather than debt to grow the business and puts aside a large pile of cash to absorb variances in the marketplace, then their future is secure. This sort of thing is difficult for a startup to achieve, since you are in effect, creating something from nothing. However, large corporations only try to crush you once you're perceived as a threat, and patent trolls tend to sue you only if you've already made a lot of money. So the solution for the software startup is to make sure you keep costs down, overhead low and reinvest profits in the business. Stay off the radar screens of the majors that you fear would crush you until you have a warchest where you could survive disruption of income. And finally, diversify. If all of your revenue comes from one product which turns out to be patent-infringing, you could easily be toast. However if you have multiple product lines which don't all depend on the same technology, then your firm will take a hit to revenue if one gets tied up in court, but it should be survivable based on the revenue from the others.
Yes, we could, but if you're going to go in for such megaengineering anyway, we may as well surface the mirror with solar panels and beam power via microwave back to Earth to replace some fossil fuel power plants. CO2 isn't the only problematic thing they produce. Thousands die every year due to respiratory ailments exacerbated by particulate matter and poor air quality. Burning coal puts toxic mercury into the environment and various radioactiive isotopes which though present in trace amounts in coal get expelled in signifigant amounts due to the scale of coal usage.
The better professors in my classes answered any student who asked "Will this be on the exam?" with the following : "The questions on my exams are drawn from everything we cover in class as well as the readings." After the 6th or 7th repetition of that question, even the densest students in the lecture hall realized that the prof was there to teach, and they were there to learn, rather than game the system.
Computers used to cost millions of dollars routinely in the bad old days. What's new is that this is the first time that a million dollar computer comes in a form factor that's easy to steal.
>>The stakeholders in the DMCA have sufficient finances to make sure that revisions would benefit their perceived interests, not those of the public at large. And the Public has sufficient votes to make sure that it could elect a fair-use friendly congress regardless of how much Corporations spend in elections. However, it simply doesn't care. Therefore the idiotic pro-corporate DMCA amendments actually do reflect the will of the vast majority of the people. Consent of the governed, the most basic political science of all.
What are you babbling about? Kids don't continue growing physically at the same rate either. These kids are already performing at a level above 99.999% of their so-called peers. If they stopped learning today, they'd be more scientifically literate than all but the most highly trained specialists. But they're not stopping. Many of them will go on to be those highly trained specialists. It's just that once people are intensely specialized they're rarely heard from again by anyone outside their own fields. And we wouldn't have heard about very many of these kids in the first place had it not been for Intel's marketing machine.
Lucid set an American space duration record and then walked off the shuttle. Sergei Krikalev was the Flight Engineer on a couple of ISS expeditions, but I remember him as the guy who got left up there on Mir when the Soviet Union collapsed. Talked to him via Amateur Radio during that time. They got him down eventually. Susan Helms has 5 space missions under her belt, but I remembered her because she starred in the IMAX Space Station 3D movie. I had erroneously associated her with a Hubble Servicing mission but that must have been someone else.
Bah. Susan Helms, Shannon Lucid, Sergei Krikalev, Anousheh Ansari, Mark Shuttleworth. Or do they have to be actually up in orbit to be "currently active"? Sure, one's a cosmonaut, and two are civvies, but they were on our frickin station so it's close enough.
Any slashdot reader who's been paying attention should know at least a few.
Then again, I'm card-carrying space enthusiast who has met moonwalkers in person so I'm exception that proves your rule.
2 billion a year!!! My god, that's a little over an entire week of war in Iraq http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articl es/2006/09/28/cost_of_iraq_war_nearly_2b_a_week/ And yet they haven't killed even one space insurgent. I demand a refund!
Temple of Apshai, great game, very hard as I recall. I was constantly schlepping about giant copper ingots so I didnt get very far.