Actually, the problem with this line of reasoning is that in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology, God is omni-potent and omni-benevolent (also omniscient, but that's a whole 'nother ball of impossibilities), and hence has a positive responsibility to affect good within the world. The existence of evil and harm in the world doesn't disprove the existence of God per-se, but it does disprove his omni-benevolence.
Basically, it boils down to: If you have the ability to do good, failure to do so is evil. And that is a perfectly reasonable judgment because as God is characterized as omni-potent then it is impossible to give credence to the idea that 'this person had to come to harm so God's plan could work out.'
This is correct because in this case the 'it' is a reference to the book.
"Which book did you file without reading?"
In this case, you don't need the pronoun because the word 'reading' very obviously does not refer to the verb 'file'.
"John was killed when a rock fell on him."
In this sentence, 'him' refers to what the rock fell onto. The whole verb in this sentence is actually 'fell on to', though by a quirk of the English language, you can omit the 'to' part. Further complicating the matter is the choice between 'on to' and 'onto', which is a style difference, not one of meaning.
"John was killed when a rock fell on. "
What is wrong in this case is that you have an incomplete verb-structure. Rocks don't 'fall on' they 'fall on to something'. You could just as easily rewrite the sentence:
"John was killed when a rock fell."
Which is similar in construction to the second sentence - "Which book...", though there are a couple of differences.
Chomsky was trying to trick people, there is no 'mystery'.
'll say it again - DRM sucks. But I really dont see how it is stripping away your right to own and govern property. It may be restricting your ability to use the property they are trying to sell you'
Ummm... what part of the synonymous words govern and use are you missing out on? That is exactly what they are trying to do. Here's the deal: DRM disallows your right to use (govern) the media you purchased as you see fit. Notice the separation of media and content there. The content (the music) is only licensed to you, but you have purchased the media it is placed on (the CD, the hard drive you download the music onto, whatever). DRM interferes with your fundamental right to operate your own property in the way you see fit. You don't have a problem with that? I certainly do.
That there is more gold per character in a system causes inflation, but since there has been no change in the previous posters ability to aquire gold, the epic mount is actually HARDER to get.
Now, if a player were to/just/ play the AH, then that person is reasonably well insulated from inflation, but the problem is that not everyone/can/ just play the AH - otherwise where do the goods for them to play with come from?
So, the people out gathering (not professional farmers) suddenly have LESS earning power because of inflated prices. Why? Because inflation is not equalized over the spread of goods available. The ones pouring money into the economy (the professional farmers) do so mainly by selling many low-cost items (hence the term: farmer) which actually/depresses/ the price of low-end goods. Inflation happens at the top end of the economic scale: the good stuff is very heavily affected, the mediocre stuff is not and bad (or basic) stuff is actually DEflated. The basic stuff, like herbs for making potions and whatnot, actually earns you less money because the professional farmers are competing with you and their jobs depend on it, while yours does not.
It's a case of the 10/90's: 10% of the goods are responsible for 90% of the economy's inflation.
The Greek and Norse Mythos', for a couple of examples. Basically any polytheistic mythos who's gods are exaggerations of human traits could be described as 'inadequate' when comparing to more modern belief systems.
One can put a lot of the 'fun' back in fundamentalism by educating them on the evolution of religious belief systems.
In defense of the OP, they were most definitely using definition two of inchoate:
Imperfectly formed or developed: a vague, inchoate idea.
Most modern conceptions of 'God' have several glaring problems, the most famous being the paradoxes invited by their absolute attributes like omnipotence and omnibenevolence - Can an omnipotent being do something he cannot do? or Can an omnibenevolent being actually allow evil to exist? You'll get a lot of wishy-washyness from theologians about those, they've had thousands of years to come up with good answers and haven't yet. They like to side-track you with discussions about 'what's the point?' and 'God's essence is such that these things do not occur'. Wikipedia featured just this issue on the front page on the 9th of January.
I was only being slightly facetious. Acutally, I think that putting emacs in with the 'minimum necessary' section is a good idea because it gives you just about everything you would need to get productive fairly quickly: vi-alike editor, shell, browser, file manager , and when it all inevitably goes horribly wrong, psychologist.
I was just thinking about this very topic the other day as I contemplated installing linux on my roomie's computer after several abortive attempts to get various versions of Windows installed on it. As an itermediate step for all of these well thought out plans for re-arranging the *nix program methodology, wouldn't adding a top level directory called/config make a LOT of sense?
If it's got a configuration file, put it in/config. Having X's config file in the same location as Bash's and SAMBA's makes sense. Making even more sense is putting links to the actual files in/config. If it's a per-user config file put it in/config/usrname.
Does anyone have a handy list of all the flat files used in the distributions of Linux and their 'customary' locations?
Again crops up the misunderstanding between the definitions of 'theory' and 'fact'. One does not move from 'hypothesis' to 'theory' to 'fact'.
In layman's terms: A Hypothesis is what you have BEFORE you conduct an experiment. In this case: Species are related to one another by descent was the starting hypothesis.
A Fact is what you collect when testing a Hypothesis. In this case: Fossil records of 'inbetween' species, known examples of speciation, observable changes in structure due to differing environments, etc.
A Theory is a Hypothesis supported by facts. In this case, the Hypothesis of Evolution has moved to the Theory of Evolution because the facts so far collected support the Hypothesis. If the facts had not supported it, it would have been dropped.
That's it, really. Unfortunately, English (and language in general) is ambiguous, words can have several meanings and it is not always easy to use context to determine which meaning is being used.
To add to the confusion you have a 'Law'. A Law is a Theory that the community at large has chosen not to argue about. We still talk about Newton's 'Law' of gravity, even though it's well known that Einstein's General Relativity is more accurate.
Now, off on a tangent...
Let's contrast with 'Intelligent Design'.
Hypothesis: God created life because life is too complex for it to be otherwise.
Facts:
Theory:
See what biologists are getting at? Creationism is not a theory, it isn't even a very good hypothesis, IMO because while a god being involved IS an answer, it's an answer that's more cop-out than anything else. What further knowledge does one gain by proclaiming that a god 'did it'? None. The phrase 'god did it' has zero information content. When religion clashes with science, the track record is obvious:
Except that 'God did it,' isn't really an answer. If we accepted that, we'd still be carrying around sharpened sticks. The religious mind-set has a terrible track record with this line of thought. Every time someone crops up with 'God did it,' they turn out to be wrong. 100% of the time.
'God did it,' by being the answer to, literally, everything is meaningless. What is there to learn when you already know the answers to all the "why's" out there? Unfortunately, one of religion's major faults is basic anti-intellectualism.
"The funny thing is that there is no more evidence supporting evelution as a creation of life"
Actually, evolution, as a theory, has about as much to say about the creation of life as the big bang theory has to say about the creation of the universe: not much.
Once both of these things got their start, THEN do these theories have a bunch of things to say.
As for this supposed dichotomy between macro- and micro- evolution, the line between separate species is extremely blurry. The most common criteria for speciation is inability for populations to interbreed [1] and it's not hard to accomplish, IIRC, it takes only a few months to speciate fruit flies. You might want to look into some of the more pop-culture oriented books by Stephen J. Gould.
To 'see' speciation in action, one must remember that truly massive differentiation takes hundreds of thousands of years. It hasn't stop, and as long as life exists on earth, it'll continue to do so.
[1] Here's the very first link on Google for 'speciation': http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/S/Speciation.html
As long as something can be turned into competition, it's a sport, even if it's only an endurance contest. Let's take for our examples, chess and Le Tour de France.
The Tour is primarily an endurance sport, other abilities are tested too, but primarily endurance. Stages (and the whole race, FTM) are decided primarily by who has the most endurance, period.
Now, let's take chess: has a match ever been decided because of a lack of endurance? yup. It's cost tournaments.
As long as there is the potential to turn something into a contest, it's a sport by even your definition, because, strictly (by your standards, even though from your post you obviously consider it one) speaking, NASCAR racers shouldn't be considered sportsmen, all they do is hold on to a wheel while sitting down the whole time! Wait, wait, you say, what about reflexes!? what about the 'ability' to know how cars react in airstreams at 180mph!?... sorry, reflexes are primarily a mental activity, and knowledge of one's job is no different that that of a chessmaster or mathlete. NASCAR drivers do nothing, the car does all the work, but it's obviously a sport. Hell, the primary driver for Ferrari (his name escapes me ATM) is the highest paid athlete in the WORLD, he makes more money than God for just sitting behind the wheel, and that's ALL he does: sit behind the wheel.
You're so off base with this, you're not even wrong.
Amazingly, Asimov is the only person who has books in all major sections of the Dewey Decimal System. How's that for geekish trivia?
He's written history books, general science books (Check out his Physics book(s), B&N is selling a 3-in-1 compendium - Motion, Sound and Heat; Light, Magnetism and Electricity; and The Electron, Proton and Neutron: absolutely the most readable exposition of physics, ever. If you can do HS Algebra - even barely - you will understand everything in this book), books on language... The man was the quintessential renaissance man of the 20th century.
Of course, now that I take a closer look, it seems that bn.com is out of stock of the 3-in-1 (used copies available), but I saw it on the shelves (in the bargian section, no less!) of my local B&N just the other day, so you should be able to find it. It's one of those must have books for every geekish library.
Asimov is my hero. Of course, I wouldn't want to be him, him being dead and all, but if there were anyone who ever lived that I would want to be compared to, it would be him.
I'm embarrased, it's true... I read MOST of the articles...
That said, just because SOME (some != all) of his ideas have already been thought of by other people, he should just give it up and not try? No no no. That's what the patent system is FOR. The patent office says "Sorry sir, someone already thought of the bread slicing machine," and you move on to the next wonderful idea. No biggie. However, that's exactly what Mr. Wardak SHOULD be doing, so that when Big Bad Corporate Entity shows up with something that Wardak beat them to, the patent office can say "Sorry Mr. Entity, Mr. Wardak already has a patent for the wheel. But he says that you are free to use it for the betterment of all, you just don't get to have a monopoly on it."
As for the money issue, one can't really compare standards of living between third world countries and industrialized ones. So he gets $200/month, which is a similar percentage gap to someone making $4000+/month here in the US, all that tells me is that someone thought it was necessary that he have a small amount of money to purchase the supplies he needs to keep creating. He has to IMPORT supplies to create that solar car, I'm quite positive that Afghanistan has no semi-conductor industry to speak of. Don't confuse income gaps in differing economies with standard of living. The person making ~$500,000/y is living a MUCH more comfortable life.
And even if he's not purchasing the supplies himself, the fact that he's doing something for $200/mo. that it takes teams of professionals years of work and MILLIONS of dollars to do is incredible. Don't be such a nay-sayer.
My original argument still stands: to protect your work for posterity, to fully maximise distribution, not profit, you need to have established the primacy of your idea at the patent office. IOW: In order for Mr. Wardak to give his ideas away, he must establish that he owns the monopoly. Until that happens, his ideas are still 'up-for-grabs' because he cannot prove that his ideas came before someone else's.
I agree with you. From what I read of the article (shocking, in'it?) he needs to patent his work to prevent someone less altruistic from doing so and using their monopoly to maximise profit, as opposed to availability.
By gaining the official stamp of approval on his IP, Mr. Wardak gains exactly what he says he wants to do (and nobody can say that he hasn't already put his money where his mouth is): the power to ensure widest dissemination of his inventions.
Just my $0.02. With his work patented Mr. Wardak can dictate licenses: "Feel free to use this invention of mine to improve your lot in life, whether by use or sale". Without the patents, he has no control.
There's plenty of oil still left on the earth... you know those numbers that the 'death, doom and destruction' crowd keep throwing around, the 'We'll be out of oil in the next 20 years!' stuff? That's based upon an estimate of what's available that is as EASY to get at as what is currently being used. The nations of the world know of vast amounts of oil that can be used, it's just that currently, the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela and a couple other countries have stocks that are far, far cheaper to process.
The Canadiens have known about that oil field for a long time now, decades at least. There's just one problem with it: it's not in caverns that can be overpressured like the Saudi fields, it's locked up in sand, you litterally have to mine it. It's just recently that that field is beginning to look profitable. That's a combination of a) rising oil prices and b) advancing technology.
The oil that is easy to process (read: cheap) WILL be gone in 30-40 years. The oil that's just a little harder to process will take up the slack. We, the world, won't suffer a true shortage of oil for a long, long time.
Does that mean that we shouldn't be searching for alternatives? Not at all. As a matter of fact, as the price of oil rises, alternate energy sources will become cheaper and cheaper by comparison, if not in actuality. For exactly the same two reasons listed above, there will come a time when there is actual INCENTIVE to put large amounts of funding towards finding different ways to power our transportation/electrical systems: a) rising oil prices and b) advancing technology, but this time in fields unrelated to processing oil. Until then, however, most of the monies spent looking for alternatives can probably be better spent on technologies to cheapen refining the more difficult oil reserves.
Please note: I'm completely ignoring what using fossil fuels does to the environment in this post as it's not germane to the discussion. That, and for whatever reason, ecological reasons don't sit well with U.S. consumers. But that too, will sort itself out as oil prices rise.
Have you updated your extensions? The API tends to change in minor ways between relaeases, breaking some extensions. check mozilla.org for the updates.
People need to use something that isn't going to expose them needlessly* to the seamy underside of the internet.
You say it's needed one time in a million, and I think it's much, much more often, but even so, how many millions of people use the internet each day? What percentage of people use IE to do so? I'd hazard a guess at upwards of 90%. So, even pulling a lowball figure out of my... errmm... gluteous maximus... of 6 million people on the internet on any given day, that means that 6 people every day get hit by an IE exploit. It's not fair to them and it's not fair of you to say that they shouldn't be using a '4x4' to go shopping for groceries.
If I were in the analogy bending department, I'd be extorting everyone to use a Land Rover (firefox or other moz clone) because the internet is a freakin' jungle and anything less will get you stuck and in loads of trouble eventually.
* I say needlessly because MS is well known for:
A) Ignoring security flaws until they're good and ready to do something about it and...
B) Lazy, insecure programming practices in the first place.
heh, yeah, sorry 'bout that... umm... it was late? yeah! that's it!
seriously, I know I was reading into your statement a bit (ok, a whole lot...) but I'll reiterate: I wasn't singling you out, and there are a LOT more reationary answers in a similar vein down the thread-list. By the time I got to writing my little essay, I was piping mad. I'm sorry I took it out on you.
GAH! no matter how many times you use the dang 'Preview' button, something always slips by. grrrrr.
[The following text is public domain and may be used without attribution]
I have just read over your proposed policy change, as well as Barry Meyer's response, available at this address: http://www.weatherindustry.org/BARRYMYERS-AMS-0318 04.doc . I must say that I cannot possibly disagree with Mr. Meyer more. The NOAA is a publicly funded institution providing data that could never possibly contain anything that would be classified.
Accordingly, I am of the firm belief that any data collected by the NOAA should be made available to the public (i.e. the general population, not merely other agencies) as soon as is practicable, in whatever format is easiest for the public to consume.
Mr. Meyer, and for that matter, the rest of the private weather sector, need to realize that they should never be the sole beneficiaries of the collective tax dollars spent each year by the U.S. in providing such a vitally important service.
I am tempted to make the comparison of the difficulties that the RIAA and MPAA are currently having with the digital revolution. Mr. Meyer and the PWS need to update their business models, not attempt to change the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the problem with this line of reasoning is that in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology, God is omni-potent and omni-benevolent (also omniscient, but that's a whole 'nother ball of impossibilities), and hence has a positive responsibility to affect good within the world. The existence of evil and harm in the world doesn't disprove the existence of God per-se, but it does disprove his omni-benevolence.
Basically, it boils down to: If you have the ability to do good, failure to do so is evil. And that is a perfectly reasonable judgment because as God is characterized as omni-potent then it is impossible to give credence to the idea that 'this person had to come to harm so God's plan could work out.'
"Which book did you file without reading it?"
This is correct because in this case the 'it' is a reference to the book.
"Which book did you file without reading?"
In this case, you don't need the pronoun because the word 'reading' very obviously does not refer to the verb 'file'.
"John was killed when a rock fell on him."
In this sentence, 'him' refers to what the rock fell onto. The whole verb in this sentence is actually 'fell on to', though by a quirk of the English language, you can omit the 'to' part. Further complicating the matter is the choice between 'on to' and 'onto', which is a style difference, not one of meaning.
"John was killed when a rock fell on. "
What is wrong in this case is that you have an incomplete verb-structure. Rocks don't 'fall on' they 'fall on to something'. You could just as easily rewrite the sentence:
"John was killed when a rock fell."
Which is similar in construction to the second sentence - "Which book...", though there are a couple of differences.
Chomsky was trying to trick people, there is no 'mystery'.
Ummm... what part of the synonymous words govern and use are you missing out on? That is exactly what they are trying to do. Here's the deal: DRM disallows your right to use (govern) the media you purchased as you see fit. Notice the separation of media and content there. The content (the music) is only licensed to you, but you have purchased the media it is placed on (the CD, the hard drive you download the music onto, whatever). DRM interferes with your fundamental right to operate your own property in the way you see fit. You don't have a problem with that? I certainly do.
Actually, incorrect.
/just/ play the AH, then that person is reasonably well insulated from inflation, but the problem is that not everyone /can/ just play the AH - otherwise where do the goods for them to play with come from?
/depresses/ the price of low-end goods. Inflation happens at the top end of the economic scale: the good stuff is very heavily affected, the mediocre stuff is not and bad (or basic) stuff is actually DEflated. The basic stuff, like herbs for making potions and whatnot, actually earns you less money because the professional farmers are competing with you and their jobs depend on it, while yours does not.
That there is more gold per character in a system causes inflation, but since there has been no change in the previous posters ability to aquire gold, the epic mount is actually HARDER to get.
Now, if a player were to
So, the people out gathering (not professional farmers) suddenly have LESS earning power because of inflated prices. Why? Because inflation is not equalized over the spread of goods available. The ones pouring money into the economy (the professional farmers) do so mainly by selling many low-cost items (hence the term: farmer) which actually
It's a case of the 10/90's: 10% of the goods are responsible for 90% of the economy's inflation.
The Greek and Norse Mythos', for a couple of examples. Basically any polytheistic mythos who's gods are exaggerations of human traits could be described as 'inadequate' when comparing to more modern belief systems.
One can put a lot of the 'fun' back in fundamentalism by educating them on the evolution of religious belief systems.
In defense of the OP, they were most definitely using definition two of inchoate:
Imperfectly formed or developed: a vague, inchoate idea.
Most modern conceptions of 'God' have several glaring problems, the most famous being the paradoxes invited by their absolute attributes like omnipotence and omnibenevolence - Can an omnipotent being do something he cannot do? or Can an omnibenevolent being actually allow evil to exist? You'll get a lot of wishy-washyness from theologians about those, they've had thousands of years to come up with good answers and haven't yet. They like to side-track you with discussions about 'what's the point?' and 'God's essence is such that these things do not occur'. Wikipedia featured just this issue on the front page on the 9th of January.
Awesome SMAC reference!
Best. Game. Evar.
Alpha Centauri already is what Civ IV could have been. Too bad the game was released during a decline in the popularity of 4x games.
I was only being slightly facetious. Acutally, I think that putting emacs in with the 'minimum necessary' section is a good idea because it gives you just about everything you would need to get productive fairly quickly: vi-alike editor, shell, browser, file manager , and when it all inevitably goes horribly wrong, psychologist.
/config make a LOT of sense?
/config. Having X's config file in the same location as Bash's and SAMBA's makes sense. Making even more sense is putting links to the actual files in /config. If it's a per-user config file put it in /config/usrname.
I was just thinking about this very topic the other day as I contemplated installing linux on my roomie's computer after several abortive attempts to get various versions of Windows installed on it. As an itermediate step for all of these well thought out plans for re-arranging the *nix program methodology, wouldn't adding a top level directory called
If it's got a configuration file, put it in
Does anyone have a handy list of all the flat files used in the distributions of Linux and their 'customary' locations?
Again crops up the misunderstanding between the definitions of 'theory' and 'fact'. One does not move from 'hypothesis' to 'theory' to 'fact'.
In layman's terms:
A Hypothesis is what you have BEFORE you conduct an experiment. In this case: Species are related to one another by descent was the starting hypothesis.
A Fact is what you collect when testing a Hypothesis. In this case: Fossil records of 'inbetween' species, known examples of speciation, observable changes in structure due to differing environments, etc.
A Theory is a Hypothesis supported by facts. In this case, the Hypothesis of Evolution has moved to the Theory of Evolution because the facts so far collected support the Hypothesis. If the facts had not supported it, it would have been dropped.
That's it, really. Unfortunately, English (and language in general) is ambiguous, words can have several meanings and it is not always easy to use context to determine which meaning is being used.
To add to the confusion you have a 'Law'. A Law is a Theory that the community at large has chosen not to argue about. We still talk about Newton's 'Law' of gravity, even though it's well known that Einstein's General Relativity is more accurate.
Now, off on a tangent...
Let's contrast with 'Intelligent Design'.
Hypothesis: God created life because life is too complex for it to be otherwise.
Facts:
Theory:
See what biologists are getting at? Creationism is not a theory, it isn't even a very good hypothesis, IMO because while a god being involved IS an answer, it's an answer that's more cop-out than anything else. What further knowledge does one gain by proclaiming that a god 'did it'? None. The phrase 'god did it' has zero information content. When religion clashes with science, the track record is obvious:
Science: 100%
Religion: 0%
no no no, you got it all wrong... :)
/bin /lib /sbin /etc /man.
Base system (everything needed to get the system up into a usuable at all state, but no serious apps beyond emacs) in
see, once you do that, you're done. Simple really.
Except that 'God did it,' isn't really an answer. If we accepted that, we'd still be carrying around sharpened sticks. The religious mind-set has a terrible track record with this line of thought. Every time someone crops up with 'God did it,' they turn out to be wrong. 100% of the time.
'God did it,' by being the answer to, literally, everything is meaningless. What is there to learn when you already know the answers to all the "why's" out there? Unfortunately, one of religion's major faults is basic anti-intellectualism.
"The funny thing is that there is no more evidence supporting evelution as a creation of life"
P ages/S/Speciation.html
Actually, evolution, as a theory, has about as much to say about the creation of life as the big bang theory has to say about the creation of the universe: not much.
Once both of these things got their start, THEN do these theories have a bunch of things to say.
As for this supposed dichotomy between macro- and micro- evolution, the line between separate species is extremely blurry. The most common criteria for speciation is inability for populations to interbreed [1] and it's not hard to accomplish, IIRC, it takes only a few months to speciate fruit flies. You might want to look into some of the more pop-culture oriented books by Stephen J. Gould.
To 'see' speciation in action, one must remember that truly massive differentiation takes hundreds of thousands of years. It hasn't stop, and as long as life exists on earth, it'll continue to do so.
[1] Here's the very first link on Google for 'speciation': http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/Biology
Windows. Most of their computer labs are centrally administrated by the same servers that the admin. staff uses. Take that for what you will.
"a) The server hosting a page about bees got fed up, spontaneously developed advanced intelligence and went nutty."
:)
Umm... shouldn't that be: spontaneously developed advanced intelligence, got fed up and went nutty?
As long as something can be turned into competition, it's a sport, even if it's only an endurance contest. Let's take for our examples, chess and Le Tour de France.
The Tour is primarily an endurance sport, other abilities are tested too, but primarily endurance. Stages (and the whole race, FTM) are decided primarily by who has the most endurance, period.
Now, let's take chess: has a match ever been decided because of a lack of endurance? yup. It's cost tournaments.
As long as there is the potential to turn something into a contest, it's a sport by even your definition, because, strictly (by your standards, even though from your post you obviously consider it one) speaking, NASCAR racers shouldn't be considered sportsmen, all they do is hold on to a wheel while sitting down the whole time! Wait, wait, you say, what about reflexes!? what about the 'ability' to know how cars react in airstreams at 180mph!?... sorry, reflexes are primarily a mental activity, and knowledge of one's job is no different that that of a chessmaster or mathlete. NASCAR drivers do nothing, the car does all the work, but it's obviously a sport. Hell, the primary driver for Ferrari (his name escapes me ATM) is the highest paid athlete in the WORLD, he makes more money than God for just sitting behind the wheel, and that's ALL he does: sit behind the wheel.
You're so off base with this, you're not even wrong.
No no no: : x E N} Mathematicians do it over the integers.
: x E R} Mathematicians do it infinitely, and to prove it, they do it diagonally!
{X
{X
Oh for some mod points...
Fortunately, only seven pages later, you too can have the answer:
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
Amazingly, Asimov is the only person who has books in all major sections of the Dewey Decimal System. How's that for geekish trivia?
He's written history books, general science books (Check out his Physics book(s), B&N is selling a 3-in-1 compendium - Motion, Sound and Heat; Light, Magnetism and Electricity; and The Electron, Proton and Neutron: absolutely the most readable exposition of physics, ever. If you can do HS Algebra - even barely - you will understand everything in this book), books on language... The man was the quintessential renaissance man of the 20th century.
Of course, now that I take a closer look, it seems that bn.com is out of stock of the 3-in-1 (used copies available), but I saw it on the shelves (in the bargian section, no less!) of my local B&N just the other day, so you should be able to find it. It's one of those must have books for every geekish library. Asimov is my hero. Of course, I wouldn't want to be him, him being dead and all, but if there were anyone who ever lived that I would want to be compared to, it would be him.
I'm embarrased, it's true... I read MOST of the articles...
That said, just because SOME (some != all) of his ideas have already been thought of by other people, he should just give it up and not try? No no no. That's what the patent system is FOR. The patent office says "Sorry sir, someone already thought of the bread slicing machine," and you move on to the next wonderful idea. No biggie. However, that's exactly what Mr. Wardak SHOULD be doing, so that when Big Bad Corporate Entity shows up with something that Wardak beat them to, the patent office can say "Sorry Mr. Entity, Mr. Wardak already has a patent for the wheel. But he says that you are free to use it for the betterment of all, you just don't get to have a monopoly on it."
As for the money issue, one can't really compare standards of living between third world countries and industrialized ones. So he gets $200/month, which is a similar percentage gap to someone making $4000+/month here in the US, all that tells me is that someone thought it was necessary that he have a small amount of money to purchase the supplies he needs to keep creating. He has to IMPORT supplies to create that solar car, I'm quite positive that Afghanistan has no semi-conductor industry to speak of. Don't confuse income gaps in differing economies with standard of living. The person making ~$500,000/y is living a MUCH more comfortable life.
And even if he's not purchasing the supplies himself, the fact that he's doing something for $200/mo. that it takes teams of professionals years of work and MILLIONS of dollars to do is incredible. Don't be such a nay-sayer.
My original argument still stands: to protect your work for posterity, to fully maximise distribution, not profit, you need to have established the primacy of your idea at the patent office. IOW: In order for Mr. Wardak to give his ideas away, he must establish that he owns the monopoly. Until that happens, his ideas are still 'up-for-grabs' because he cannot prove that his ideas came before someone else's.
I agree with you. From what I read of the article (shocking, in'it?) he needs to patent his work to prevent someone less altruistic from doing so and using their monopoly to maximise profit, as opposed to availability.
By gaining the official stamp of approval on his IP, Mr. Wardak gains exactly what he says he wants to do (and nobody can say that he hasn't already put his money where his mouth is): the power to ensure widest dissemination of his inventions.
Just my $0.02. With his work patented Mr. Wardak can dictate licenses: "Feel free to use this invention of mine to improve your lot in life, whether by use or sale". Without the patents, he has no control.
There's plenty of oil still left on the earth... you know those numbers that the 'death, doom and destruction' crowd keep throwing around, the 'We'll be out of oil in the next 20 years!' stuff? That's based upon an estimate of what's available that is as EASY to get at as what is currently being used. The nations of the world know of vast amounts of oil that can be used, it's just that currently, the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela and a couple other countries have stocks that are far, far cheaper to process.
The Canadiens have known about that oil field for a long time now, decades at least. There's just one problem with it: it's not in caverns that can be overpressured like the Saudi fields, it's locked up in sand, you litterally have to mine it. It's just recently that that field is beginning to look profitable. That's a combination of a) rising oil prices and b) advancing technology.
The oil that is easy to process (read: cheap) WILL be gone in 30-40 years. The oil that's just a little harder to process will take up the slack. We, the world, won't suffer a true shortage of oil for a long, long time.
Does that mean that we shouldn't be searching for alternatives? Not at all. As a matter of fact, as the price of oil rises, alternate energy sources will become cheaper and cheaper by comparison, if not in actuality. For exactly the same two reasons listed above, there will come a time when there is actual INCENTIVE to put large amounts of funding towards finding different ways to power our transportation/electrical systems: a) rising oil prices and b) advancing technology, but this time in fields unrelated to processing oil. Until then, however, most of the monies spent looking for alternatives can probably be better spent on technologies to cheapen refining the more difficult oil reserves.
Please note: I'm completely ignoring what using fossil fuels does to the environment in this post as it's not germane to the discussion. That, and for whatever reason, ecological reasons don't sit well with U.S. consumers. But that too, will sort itself out as oil prices rise.
Have you updated your extensions? The API tends to change in minor ways between relaeases, breaking some extensions. check mozilla.org for the updates.
Quoth SimianOverlord:
"Anyway I just wanted to say most users don't need Firefox despite what you might read."
I beg to differ.
People need to use something that isn't going to expose them needlessly* to the seamy underside of the internet.
You say it's needed one time in a million, and I think it's much, much more often, but even so, how many millions of people use the internet each day? What percentage of people use IE to do so? I'd hazard a guess at upwards of 90%. So, even pulling a lowball figure out of my... errmm... gluteous maximus... of 6 million people on the internet on any given day, that means that 6 people every day get hit by an IE exploit. It's not fair to them and it's not fair of you to say that they shouldn't be using a '4x4' to go shopping for groceries.
If I were in the analogy bending department, I'd be extorting everyone to use a Land Rover (firefox or other moz clone) because the internet is a freakin' jungle and anything less will get you stuck and in loads of trouble eventually.
* I say needlessly because MS is well known for:
A) Ignoring security flaws until they're good and ready to do something about it and...
B) Lazy, insecure programming practices in the first place.
Fuck!
heh, yeah, sorry 'bout that... umm... it was late? yeah! that's it!
seriously, I know I was reading into your statement a bit (ok, a whole lot...) but I'll reiterate: I wasn't singling you out, and there are a LOT more reationary answers in a similar vein down the thread-list. By the time I got to writing my little essay, I was piping mad. I'm sorry I took it out on you.
Roger.
GAH! no matter how many times you use the dang 'Preview' button, something always slips by. grrrrr.
8 04.doc . I must say that I cannot possibly disagree with Mr. Meyer more. The NOAA is a publicly funded institution providing data that could never possibly contain anything that would be classified.
[The following text is public domain and may be used without attribution]
I have just read over your proposed policy change, as well as Barry Meyer's response, available at this address: http://www.weatherindustry.org/BARRYMYERS-AMS-031
Accordingly, I am of the firm belief that any data collected by the NOAA should be made available to the public (i.e. the general population, not merely other agencies) as soon as is practicable, in whatever format is easiest for the public to consume.
Mr. Meyer, and for that matter, the rest of the private weather sector, need to realize that they should never be the sole beneficiaries of the collective tax dollars spent each year by the U.S. in providing such a vitally important service.
I am tempted to make the comparison of the difficulties that the RIAA and MPAA are currently having with the digital revolution. Mr. Meyer and the PWS need to update their business models, not attempt to change the law.
[End of Public Domain Section]