I think this is evidence of a couple phenomena in modern business:
The first is what I guess I'll call push vs pull, and that's the difference between business that cater to people who have a specific need "Hey, I need food, so I'm going to look for a place where I can get it" and businesses that create things they try to sell that people don't necessarily need but will buy on impulse - for instance, those businesses that are always sending fliers in the mail to get you to buy things you might not otherwise need.
The other issue here is what I would call demand density - if a business has to be online to reach people across the globe, that means that demand density is very low. However, a grocery store has very high demand density - advertising is only necessary (if at all) over a very small geographic location because the market is local.
Now, I'm not sure if I fully understand all the pros and cons of trying to support businesses with very low demand density - is society as a whole better off with the mechanism to provide goods and service to very disperse locations, or is the effort required to distribute the goods / services over such a large location really worse than not supplying that demand and eliminating the transportation / communications infrastructure overhead?
More to the article's point, though, if I had to depend on a search service to get my business revenue, I would rethink my business plan. While I understand the ideas behind 'global economy' I am still a bit conservative in my belief in the merits of self-sufficiency; relying on a search service means that my business would be at the mercy of that service which I may not be able to control. Control is fairly important in businesses, I would think.
Seems dumb to base this based only on the playlist which isn't music at all but a list of instructions for the order of playing songs.
If the music files are stored on the customer's local device, then there should be no licensing at all required no matter where the playlist originates.
Now, if the data files themselves are on the server, and the playlist controls the order in which those datafiles are transmitted, then I can see why some folks might want a distinction. In one case I'd say there is indeed a music-related broadcast, but in the other there is not.
(I'm explicitly ignoring the fact that many people, including myself, don't think a binary sequence of numbers is really 'music' in the first place. I think 'music' is the emotional response to particular sensed air and body vibrations, which is beyond instructions for playing an instrument or instructions for causing a speaker to vibrate.)
One other point: the questions "prove the direction vectors of each line are perpendicular" or "find the angle between the direction vectors of the lines" are solvable.
I don't think it's just about the spatial reasoning. The Chinese test questions are asking things that depend on a different definition of 'perpendicular' and 'angle', because the lines they are asking to prove perpendicular don't intersect, and the lines they are asking to find an angle between don't intersect either. As far as I know, definitions of perpendicular and angle require lines (or planes) to intersect. (so says Mathworld on angles and Mathworld on perpendicular, anyway)
So, unless the correct answers are "cannot be proven with Euclidean geometry" or to define a new geometry or new measure of angle, then this is a poorly translated test. (I can solve these easily if the questions were "prove the projections of the lines on each other such that they intersect are perpendicular" and "find the angle between the projection of the lines into the same plane.")
You've hit on something that I've been pondering for a while...I've been thinking that one of the qualifications for 'sentience' needs to be "willfully and knowingly acts in opposition to instinct or trained behavior". The problem with that, I realize, is how do you know that it's willful and not also just part of some other training...
I have to agree here - this is a horrible development.
In my view, the extreme solution is this:
No patents will exist as of 2025.
You can get new patents up to 2025
Any patent existing before 2025 will be in effect but expire on 2025.
A more agreeable solution would be this: Patents only last 5 years.
That will truly spawn innovation, because for anyone to make a buck, they will have to create new novel things. And the consumer will benefit, because innovations in manufacturing efficiency will mean that things take fewer resources to manufacture and last longer - differentiation will be in the product attributes, not in the patent portfolio. Sure, some people will claim they won't be able to recoup development costs or whatever, but that will just mean that development costs will have to come down or people will actually have to *gasp* do something truly innovative to get business. This is mostly Big Medicine, and if Big Medicine can't manage to be profitable at the prices the public is willing to pay (generic prices) without patent protection, then they (and the public) need to rethink the model: The public can either have new drugs and pay a lot to support the development costs, or have cheap generic drugs and no new ones. Supply and demand, free-market style (without the protectionism of patents).
Except that's not at all how the government controls money supply: The Federal Reserve is the source/sink of dollars, not the IRS.
Money supply is controlled by the sale and purchase of bonds and the interest rate, not through taxes. This is why the Fed uses the interest rate to affect inflation. It's the effect on the amount of cash the Fed has to pay out to 'buy back' its bonds. Basically, if the Fed wants more cash in the market, it buys bonds more than it sells them; if it wants to curtail the money supply, it buys fewer bonds back than it sells. Note that the Fed target interest rate is based on the supply and demand for the notes. Also note that it's a target rate - the media and literature always calls it "the target federal funds rate". Because to get that rate, the Fed has to buy or sell its bonds. To increase the rate and "slow down" the economy, the Fed sells more bonds. The reason this increases the rate is because to sell more bonds, it has to make them more lucrative to the purchaser which means a higher interest rate. What happens then is the buyer gives dollars to the Fed in exchange for a bond. Note that a bond is not money, so money has effectively left the money supply.
When the Fed wants to reduce the interest rate, it starts selling fewer and fewer bonds (or buying bonds back). This reduces the supply of bonds so, for a given demand, the "price" the buyers are willing to pay (a lower interest rate) increases. Either way, this either puts dollars directly back into the economy via a buy-back, or indirectly because fewer people are buying the bonds so their cash stays in the system. Buying back takes bonds out of the free market and replaces them with dollars.
This mechanism, while not perfect, also helps adjust the money supply to a larger economy, because when real wealth is created in the economy, the creator of that wealth gets more dollars and more bonds are purchased. When those bonds are purchased back or redeemed for face value plus interest, there is an increase in available dollars. Inflation happens when the market guesses wrong at the interest rate, and more dollars are paid out during redemption than is representative of the current actual wealth. Similarly, if the economy contracts the money supply can also contract because eventually the interest rates on the bonds will fall and less additional money is required to redeem the notes; this will reduce the money supply relative to the amount of wealth. Stagflation happens when the nasty effect of a shrinking economy is paired with increasing inflation. (Yay for basic macroeconomic theory).
Another key thing to remember is that the Fed and money supply only control the tokens representing value in the US; they don't directly control wealth (and, as is important to note, value and wealth are not the same thing).
First of all, this site is not typically representative of the general population so opinions expressed here are often skewed.
Second, what many people don't remember is that when we had the attacks on September 11, a large vocal fraction of the population screamed "Government, please do something to make us feel like this won't ever happen again."
The result of that is the government says, "Ok, that means you'll have to let us take some of your freedoms, because in order to check and see if someone might do these Bad Things, we have to be able to learn about them without them knowing that they are being examined."
Which is actually the only way you could even attempt to prevent such things from happening. The problem is that people are now starting to realize that hey, that's not really fun, but we still don't want to have some Bad People come in and mess us up.
You really have to find balance and pick your posion: you can either live with freedoms and protection from unannounced surveillance with the real risk of unwanted activity, or you can give up freedom and allow such "nasty" governmental behavior with the very small additional security that gives.
There is no practical way to have both security and freedom; they are diametrically opposed concepts by definition.
Yeah, sounds great, until you realize that gasoline (petrol) has 45 MJ per KILOGRAM - the same order of magnitude as coal, 10 times as much as TNT, and over 80 times that of the best batteries.
The reason? Things like coal and gasoline don't carry a heavy oxidizer with them. "Air-breathing" fuels will always be better than "rocket" type fuels for transportation because of the weight and storage expense of carrying both the oxidizer and the fuel on the vehicle. That's a substantial feature for "battery-like" technology to overcome for everyone who is not a short-distance commuter.
This is exactly the reason why I will never, ever, ever want any hardware that is more "soft" than my own flesh and blood. That has enough of its own susceptibility to viruses, bacteria, getting smashed, getting clobbered by radiation, etc. for me!
"...(its capable of starting..." Should read, "...(it's capable of starting..."
"... in a fixed-wing aircraft the airstream is always flowing..." should read "...for a fixed-wing aircraft traveling in its normal forward direction the airstream is always flowing..."
Everyone I know calls this simply, go figure, a "windmilling prop". You don't even have to go into a dive - windmilling speeds with no power on even something as small as a C172 at best glide - around 60kts - is over 1000 RPM, which is more than enough to start the engine (its capable of starting at less than 100 RPM).
And for the other poster here that thinks you have to "reverse the pitch" of prop blades to get it to windmill...nope. You can do this with a prop that can't change its pitch at all. It's a different mechanism than helicopter auto-rotation because in a helicopter the airstream is flowing opposite the desired direction to create lift when falling (which is why pitch must be reversed); in an fixed-wing aircraft the airstream is always flowing in the correct direction to create thrust.
You find it too hard to determine why mentally handicapped people should be accorded rights, but chimps shouldn't be, so you've taken the easy option of just saying "such and such is a member of this class".
I don't think I was being lazy there, I was given a possible explanation as to why, for instance, handicapped are afforded rights whereas, say, an earthworm is not. The entire reason is because they are human; there is no other reason. So somewhere along the line, someone set the classification at 'human'. Now there is an apparent proposal to move where the line is from 'human' to 'certain classes of hominids'. That leaves me with one conclusion: one or both of those delineating distinctions is incorrect. I think the outcry here is that people don't understand why a non-human should be afforded the same protections as a human. Is that appropriate thinking, well, I don't know. But where do you stop, and, if so, why? Dogs? Insects? Bacteria? Viruses? Does "everything" alive have a right to live? This is very very precarious ground, as others have mentioned.
Fundamentally, I don't think there should be such a concept as a "right" as most people define it. However, and I wish I could say this more loudly, I do think there is a necessity and a good that comes from having enforced social order. I think that's all that a "right" really is - basically it is something that, when violated, will cause some authority to respond. It may even be something that an authority will try and prevent to be violated.
Note, again, that there is the requirement of some 'authority' which can uphold these "rights". There is no such thing as a 'right' without an authority to uphold that 'right'.
I guess that's an important point, though it is kind of orthogonal to the discussion of how you choose what groups of entities get what rights.
For example various racial and religious minorities are disproportionately represented in prisons. Maybe other members of these groups outside of prison should also be punished too, after all they are members of the same class.
I think that's an invalid logical proposition. It ignores the fact that the class of people in jail is ideally 'criminal' , not 'member of some ethnic or economic group'. Incidentally I think that the description 'disproportionate' is incorrectly assuming that the population is homogeneous. It's like complaining that the NBA has a disproportionate number of tall people compared to the entire population.
I think you've confused "right and wrong" with "legal right" here. Those are distinct concepts. For instance, I think you have the legal right to do certain things which certain groups think are morally wrong. Big topics might be smoking, drinking alcohol, abortion, sexuality, inter-racial marriage, etc. While my opinion differs on each of those things as to whether they are morally right or wrong, I strongly believe that people have the legal right to choose if they do those things.
Put another way, "legal rights" are determined by courts. Moral rights, well, there is much controversy surrounding moral right and wrong, especially the fundamental question of "are they absolute or relative", and I don't think that's the discussion here, other than the fact that ideally legal right and moral right would coincide, but that's not always the case.
My personal view is that rights are not granted unless there is a reciprocal responsibility. This is because a right has no meaning without some sort of context. What the article describes is actually not a 'right' for animals like chimps, it's more a restriction on human activity so should just be called that. There is nothing that will keep chimps from recognizing the 'rights' of other chimps, and I think that is the key here: Not the ability to request rights, but the ability to recognize rights. (Now there are cases where handicapped members of a species may not be able to do this, but that doesn't mean the rights don't apply; what I mean is that, as a class, a species must have the capability.)
If it can be shown that other animals have the capacity to understand, recognize, and uphold rights, then I'd be willing to accept granting them rights. Same goes for artificial intelligence: rights should only be granted when the entity receiving the rights is able to recognize the rights of others. So far as I've been able to observe, only humans have the concept of 'rights'. In the greater animal kingdom it's all about dominance and hereditary hierarchies, not 'rights'.
(Pity that was an AC post - it's pretty interesting!)
I didn't mean to imply that food is the only currency, I was just using that simple example to show that specialization and efficiencies give rise to otherwise "illogical" situations, like people who can survive while only providing services rather than directly producing wealth.
It's a fascinating thing to see how services do facilitate the creation of wealth. What it all boils down to, though, is that there has to be wealth to support services. The fact that modern economies are very complex doesn't change that fact.
This is just a result of the fact that, for a significant portion of the population, it takes so little effort to generate necessities that some means of justification to give people who aren't producing the necessities those necessities must arise.
Wow, that was a mouthful. Basically, in many countries it is so easy to produce food that not everyone needs to produce food. However, everyone still needs to consume food. So what happens is people decide they're willing to give people food if they do certain things. In this instance, people are willing to give gamers food in exchange for saying that they are playing the game because of the guy giving them food.
It's slightly more complex than that because monetary systems remove many activities quite far from actual food production, but the basic concept holds.
If it were much more difficult to produce food, you couldn't have this type of society, because nobody would be able to have enough extra food to just give to people for playing games. I'd say this is just a natural consequence of sufficient advances in farming and services trade.
I don't think it has to do with acceleration of galactic centers. I think it has to do more with the effective radius used in the calculations.
For instance, in a traditional central-body problem, you have a very basic set of equations that says the path of any body around another body will be a conic section, with modifications due to more than two bodies in a system.
What I've never seen in literature, and I've seen the plot of angular velocity versus radius that "flattens out" for galaxies, is just what that angular velocity is? Is it angular velocities for individual stars, or an average?
If it is just an average, then I wonder is it an effect due to observation. What I mean is this: when looking at a gas here on earth, the average temperature is a good measure for its properties. However, only a small portion of the individual molecules in the gas actually have that exact temperature. The same for a stream of exhaust from a jet - the jet has a general average velocity, but each individual particle has some other velocity that contributes to the bulk average velocity.
I am wondering if the aggregate motion of a galaxy is like gas temperature or velocity; that is, it may be a superposition of the individual accelerations of the individual starts and nebulae in the galaxy. That is, is it possible to generate a system only with particles that obey classical (relativistic) gravity but can appear, in aggregate, to disobey the mass proportionality of Newton's Second Law? I suspect that 'galactic' measurements are like measuring bulk properties of a gas rather than looking at the kinetic model. Something perhaps like the recent storm on Saturn / water in a spinning bucket articles where simple motion of individual particles gives rise to more complex aggregate behavior.
For some definitions of 'innovation' I would agree that DRM might be an enabler. I consider the the definition of 'innovation' as "1) something that allows you to do the same thing as before with less effort; 2) maintain what you were doing before with no increase in effort even though environmental conditions have changed; 3) do more than you're currently doing with no increase in effort."
Hrm, looking at that, DRM could be considered an innovation for the distribution industry because it enables them to keep some lock on their product/service in light of a changing market landscape.
So I guess I don't have a problem with the concept of DRM being innovation. I think the more important question is "innovation for the benefit of whom?"
Publishing something on the web might be more like broadcasting on the airwaves. The FCC already has rules about what you can broadcast, and there are already rules on the internet about warnings for content that you might be providing.
Considering that putting a link on the internet does not restrict who can use it, it really is a broadcast, so that means that anyone can use it.
Unless you put the images behind an https link or something else that requires authorization, the entire point of the 'net is "available to all".
I guess it isn't a nice clean issue like we'd all think. The line between knowing that if I change an image it will go unnoticed for some time and potentially have "prank" value and the responsibility for me to continuously monitor everything to which I link is not very well defined, but as I said in another post, abusing the trust to keep same-named links having constant-meaning content is just going to cause problems.
Also, if you post on the 'net you expect to get visitors. What do you mean, "too many"? Or "Hey, I didn't want *that* group of people to use up all my bandwidth!". Too bad; you should have put restrictions up to select who can use your bandwidth.
You can't have both pieces of the pie; either your information is free for whomever uses it, or you have to restrict it so only certain people can use it.
I've got to believe there's a better way to serve pictures so that they are only viewable from the appropriate website than a straight http request for the image file. That is how to prevent people from hotlinking, not changing a file so they get something unwanted from their link (because that doesn't prevent them from hotlinking, does it? What if they just hotlink on purpose to the image but set it off-screen or something so it doesn't display but is still fetched just to use your bandwidth out of spite?).
How about trying to solve the actual problem rather than addressing the symptoms?
There's a sign on the fence, if you get bit it's your own dumbass fault.
You would think so, but our courts tend to (rightly) disagree. It's not a property-owner's responsibility or right to prosecute trespassers. That's the responsibility of law enforcement.
Because it's popular to do so around here, here's my attempt at an analog analogy. Let's say somebody is consistently taking paper from your stack of letterhead paper, and draining your supply of it. In frustration, you change the letterhead in the pile to read, in small print, "From the desk of Mr. Dumbass".
Unfortunately it's not like that. In the case of letterhead, the offender has the opportunity to not distribute whatever it is would require the letterhead; in the "instantly live" world of the Internet such a change immediately reaches the public with no requirement for intervention.
While I don't condone misuse of letterhead or Internet links, abusing the responsibility of respecting the way links are supposed to work (e.g., same-named links are supposed to always have the same general content) is just asking to have the freedom to choose your links taken away.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is evidence of a couple phenomena in modern business:
The first is what I guess I'll call push vs pull, and that's the difference between business that cater to people who have a specific need "Hey, I need food, so I'm going to look for a place where I can get it" and businesses that create things they try to sell that people don't necessarily need but will buy on impulse - for instance, those businesses that are always sending fliers in the mail to get you to buy things you might not otherwise need.
The other issue here is what I would call demand density - if a business has to be online to reach people across the globe, that means that demand density is very low. However, a grocery store has very high demand density - advertising is only necessary (if at all) over a very small geographic location because the market is local.
Now, I'm not sure if I fully understand all the pros and cons of trying to support businesses with very low demand density - is society as a whole better off with the mechanism to provide goods and service to very disperse locations, or is the effort required to distribute the goods / services over such a large location really worse than not supplying that demand and eliminating the transportation / communications infrastructure overhead?
More to the article's point, though, if I had to depend on a search service to get my business revenue, I would rethink my business plan. While I understand the ideas behind 'global economy' I am still a bit conservative in my belief in the merits of self-sufficiency; relying on a search service means that my business would be at the mercy of that service which I may not be able to control. Control is fairly important in businesses, I would think.
Seems dumb to base this based only on the playlist which isn't music at all but a list of instructions for the order of playing songs.
If the music files are stored on the customer's local device, then there should be no licensing at all required no matter where the playlist originates.
Now, if the data files themselves are on the server, and the playlist controls the order in which those datafiles are transmitted, then I can see why some folks might want a distinction. In one case I'd say there is indeed a music-related broadcast, but in the other there is not.
(I'm explicitly ignoring the fact that many people, including myself, don't think a binary sequence of numbers is really 'music' in the first place. I think 'music' is the emotional response to particular sensed air and body vibrations, which is beyond instructions for playing an instrument or instructions for causing a speaker to vibrate.)
Ah, I'm not alone! I just posted a similar thought that angles are undefined between non-intersecting lines (so they can't be perpendicular).
One other point: the questions "prove the direction vectors of each line are perpendicular" or "find the angle between the direction vectors of the lines" are solvable.
I don't think it's just about the spatial reasoning. The Chinese test questions are asking things that depend on a different definition of 'perpendicular' and 'angle', because the lines they are asking to prove perpendicular don't intersect, and the lines they are asking to find an angle between don't intersect either. As far as I know, definitions of perpendicular and angle require lines (or planes) to intersect. (so says Mathworld on angles and Mathworld on perpendicular, anyway)
So, unless the correct answers are "cannot be proven with Euclidean geometry" or to define a new geometry or new measure of angle, then this is a poorly translated test. (I can solve these easily if the questions were "prove the projections of the lines on each other such that they intersect are perpendicular" and "find the angle between the projection of the lines into the same plane.")
You've hit on something that I've been pondering for a while...I've been thinking that one of the qualifications for 'sentience' needs to be "willfully and knowingly acts in opposition to instinct or trained behavior". The problem with that, I realize, is how do you know that it's willful and not also just part of some other training...
Nobody, because it's "obvious to one skilled in the art"?
Actually, if two people develop it, it's no longer 'novel' by definition and so fails the validity tests.
I have to agree here - this is a horrible development.
In my view, the extreme solution is this:
A more agreeable solution would be this: Patents only last 5 years.
That will truly spawn innovation, because for anyone to make a buck, they will have to create new novel things. And the consumer will benefit, because innovations in manufacturing efficiency will mean that things take fewer resources to manufacture and last longer - differentiation will be in the product attributes, not in the patent portfolio. Sure, some people will claim they won't be able to recoup development costs or whatever, but that will just mean that development costs will have to come down or people will actually have to *gasp* do something truly innovative to get business. This is mostly Big Medicine, and if Big Medicine can't manage to be profitable at the prices the public is willing to pay (generic prices) without patent protection, then they (and the public) need to rethink the model: The public can either have new drugs and pay a lot to support the development costs, or have cheap generic drugs and no new ones. Supply and demand, free-market style (without the protectionism of patents).
Except that's not at all how the government controls money supply: The Federal Reserve is the source/sink of dollars, not the IRS.
Money supply is controlled by the sale and purchase of bonds and the interest rate, not through taxes. This is why the Fed uses the interest rate to affect inflation. It's the effect on the amount of cash the Fed has to pay out to 'buy back' its bonds. Basically, if the Fed wants more cash in the market, it buys bonds more than it sells them; if it wants to curtail the money supply, it buys fewer bonds back than it sells. Note that the Fed target interest rate is based on the supply and demand for the notes. Also note that it's a target rate - the media and literature always calls it "the target federal funds rate". Because to get that rate, the Fed has to buy or sell its bonds. To increase the rate and "slow down" the economy, the Fed sells more bonds. The reason this increases the rate is because to sell more bonds, it has to make them more lucrative to the purchaser which means a higher interest rate. What happens then is the buyer gives dollars to the Fed in exchange for a bond. Note that a bond is not money, so money has effectively left the money supply.
When the Fed wants to reduce the interest rate, it starts selling fewer and fewer bonds (or buying bonds back). This reduces the supply of bonds so, for a given demand, the "price" the buyers are willing to pay (a lower interest rate) increases. Either way, this either puts dollars directly back into the economy via a buy-back, or indirectly because fewer people are buying the bonds so their cash stays in the system. Buying back takes bonds out of the free market and replaces them with dollars.
This mechanism, while not perfect, also helps adjust the money supply to a larger economy, because when real wealth is created in the economy, the creator of that wealth gets more dollars and more bonds are purchased. When those bonds are purchased back or redeemed for face value plus interest, there is an increase in available dollars. Inflation happens when the market guesses wrong at the interest rate, and more dollars are paid out during redemption than is representative of the current actual wealth. Similarly, if the economy contracts the money supply can also contract because eventually the interest rates on the bonds will fall and less additional money is required to redeem the notes; this will reduce the money supply relative to the amount of wealth. Stagflation happens when the nasty effect of a shrinking economy is paired with increasing inflation. (Yay for basic macroeconomic theory).
Another key thing to remember is that the Fed and money supply only control the tokens representing value in the US; they don't directly control wealth (and, as is important to note, value and wealth are not the same thing).
First of all, this site is not typically representative of the general population so opinions expressed here are often skewed.
Second, what many people don't remember is that when we had the attacks on September 11, a large vocal fraction of the population screamed "Government, please do something to make us feel like this won't ever happen again."
The result of that is the government says, "Ok, that means you'll have to let us take some of your freedoms, because in order to check and see if someone might do these Bad Things, we have to be able to learn about them without them knowing that they are being examined."
Which is actually the only way you could even attempt to prevent such things from happening. The problem is that people are now starting to realize that hey, that's not really fun, but we still don't want to have some Bad People come in and mess us up.
You really have to find balance and pick your posion: you can either live with freedoms and protection from unannounced surveillance with the real risk of unwanted activity, or you can give up freedom and allow such "nasty" governmental behavior with the very small additional security that gives.
There is no practical way to have both security and freedom; they are diametrically opposed concepts by definition.
Yeah, sounds great, until you realize that gasoline (petrol) has 45 MJ per KILOGRAM - the same order of magnitude as coal, 10 times as much as TNT, and over 80 times that of the best batteries.
The reason? Things like coal and gasoline don't carry a heavy oxidizer with them. "Air-breathing" fuels will always be better than "rocket" type fuels for transportation because of the weight and storage expense of carrying both the oxidizer and the fuel on the vehicle. That's a substantial feature for "battery-like" technology to overcome for everyone who is not a short-distance commuter.
This is exactly the reason why I will never, ever, ever want any hardware that is more "soft" than my own flesh and blood. That has enough of its own susceptibility to viruses, bacteria, getting smashed, getting clobbered by radiation, etc. for me!
"...(its capable of starting..." Should read, "...(it's capable of starting..."
"... in a fixed-wing aircraft the airstream is always flowing..." should read "...for a fixed-wing aircraft traveling in its normal forward direction the airstream is always flowing..."
"bump-starting" eh?
Everyone I know calls this simply, go figure, a "windmilling prop". You don't even have to go into a dive - windmilling speeds with no power on even something as small as a C172 at best glide - around 60kts - is over 1000 RPM, which is more than enough to start the engine (its capable of starting at less than 100 RPM).
And for the other poster here that thinks you have to "reverse the pitch" of prop blades to get it to windmill...nope. You can do this with a prop that can't change its pitch at all. It's a different mechanism than helicopter auto-rotation because in a helicopter the airstream is flowing opposite the desired direction to create lift when falling (which is why pitch must be reversed); in an fixed-wing aircraft the airstream is always flowing in the correct direction to create thrust.
I don't think I was being lazy there, I was given a possible explanation as to why, for instance, handicapped are afforded rights whereas, say, an earthworm is not. The entire reason is because they are human; there is no other reason. So somewhere along the line, someone set the classification at 'human'. Now there is an apparent proposal to move where the line is from 'human' to 'certain classes of hominids'. That leaves me with one conclusion: one or both of those delineating distinctions is incorrect. I think the outcry here is that people don't understand why a non-human should be afforded the same protections as a human. Is that appropriate thinking, well, I don't know. But where do you stop, and, if so, why? Dogs? Insects? Bacteria? Viruses? Does "everything" alive have a right to live? This is very very precarious ground, as others have mentioned.
Fundamentally, I don't think there should be such a concept as a "right" as most people define it. However, and I wish I could say this more loudly, I do think there is a necessity and a good that comes from having enforced social order. I think that's all that a "right" really is - basically it is something that, when violated, will cause some authority to respond. It may even be something that an authority will try and prevent to be violated.
Note, again, that there is the requirement of some 'authority' which can uphold these "rights". There is no such thing as a 'right' without an authority to uphold that 'right'.
I guess that's an important point, though it is kind of orthogonal to the discussion of how you choose what groups of entities get what rights.
I think that's an invalid logical proposition. It ignores the fact that the class of people in jail is ideally 'criminal' , not 'member of some ethnic or economic group'. Incidentally I think that the description 'disproportionate' is incorrectly assuming that the population is homogeneous. It's like complaining that the NBA has a disproportionate number of tall people compared to the entire population.
I think you've confused "right and wrong" with "legal right" here. Those are distinct concepts. For instance, I think you have the legal right to do certain things which certain groups think are morally wrong. Big topics might be smoking, drinking alcohol, abortion, sexuality, inter-racial marriage, etc. While my opinion differs on each of those things as to whether they are morally right or wrong, I strongly believe that people have the legal right to choose if they do those things.
Put another way, "legal rights" are determined by courts. Moral rights, well, there is much controversy surrounding moral right and wrong, especially the fundamental question of "are they absolute or relative", and I don't think that's the discussion here, other than the fact that ideally legal right and moral right would coincide, but that's not always the case.
My personal view is that rights are not granted unless there is a reciprocal responsibility. This is because a right has no meaning without some sort of context. What the article describes is actually not a 'right' for animals like chimps, it's more a restriction on human activity so should just be called that. There is nothing that will keep chimps from recognizing the 'rights' of other chimps, and I think that is the key here: Not the ability to request rights, but the ability to recognize rights. (Now there are cases where handicapped members of a species may not be able to do this, but that doesn't mean the rights don't apply; what I mean is that, as a class, a species must have the capability.)
If it can be shown that other animals have the capacity to understand, recognize, and uphold rights, then I'd be willing to accept granting them rights. Same goes for artificial intelligence: rights should only be granted when the entity receiving the rights is able to recognize the rights of others. So far as I've been able to observe, only humans have the concept of 'rights'. In the greater animal kingdom it's all about dominance and hereditary hierarchies, not 'rights'.
(Pity that was an AC post - it's pretty interesting!)
I didn't mean to imply that food is the only currency, I was just using that simple example to show that specialization and efficiencies give rise to otherwise "illogical" situations, like people who can survive while only providing services rather than directly producing wealth.
It's a fascinating thing to see how services do facilitate the creation of wealth. What it all boils down to, though, is that there has to be wealth to support services. The fact that modern economies are very complex doesn't change that fact.
This is just a result of the fact that, for a significant portion of the population, it takes so little effort to generate necessities that some means of justification to give people who aren't producing the necessities those necessities must arise.
Wow, that was a mouthful. Basically, in many countries it is so easy to produce food that not everyone needs to produce food. However, everyone still needs to consume food. So what happens is people decide they're willing to give people food if they do certain things. In this instance, people are willing to give gamers food in exchange for saying that they are playing the game because of the guy giving them food.
It's slightly more complex than that because monetary systems remove many activities quite far from actual food production, but the basic concept holds.
If it were much more difficult to produce food, you couldn't have this type of society, because nobody would be able to have enough extra food to just give to people for playing games. I'd say this is just a natural consequence of sufficient advances in farming and services trade.
I don't think it has to do with acceleration of galactic centers. I think it has to do more with the effective radius used in the calculations.
For instance, in a traditional central-body problem, you have a very basic set of equations that says the path of any body around another body will be a conic section, with modifications due to more than two bodies in a system.
What I've never seen in literature, and I've seen the plot of angular velocity versus radius that "flattens out" for galaxies, is just what that angular velocity is? Is it angular velocities for individual stars, or an average?
If it is just an average, then I wonder is it an effect due to observation. What I mean is this: when looking at a gas here on earth, the average temperature is a good measure for its properties. However, only a small portion of the individual molecules in the gas actually have that exact temperature. The same for a stream of exhaust from a jet - the jet has a general average velocity, but each individual particle has some other velocity that contributes to the bulk average velocity.
I am wondering if the aggregate motion of a galaxy is like gas temperature or velocity; that is, it may be a superposition of the individual accelerations of the individual starts and nebulae in the galaxy. That is, is it possible to generate a system only with particles that obey classical (relativistic) gravity but can appear, in aggregate, to disobey the mass proportionality of Newton's Second Law? I suspect that 'galactic' measurements are like measuring bulk properties of a gas rather than looking at the kinetic model. Something perhaps like the recent storm on Saturn / water in a spinning bucket articles where simple motion of individual particles gives rise to more complex aggregate behavior.
For some definitions of 'innovation' I would agree that DRM might be an enabler. I consider the the definition of 'innovation' as "1) something that allows you to do the same thing as before with less effort; 2) maintain what you were doing before with no increase in effort even though environmental conditions have changed; 3) do more than you're currently doing with no increase in effort."
Hrm, looking at that, DRM could be considered an innovation for the distribution industry because it enables them to keep some lock on their product/service in light of a changing market landscape.
So I guess I don't have a problem with the concept of DRM being innovation. I think the more important question is "innovation for the benefit of whom?"
Interesting argument.
Publishing something on the web might be more like broadcasting on the airwaves. The FCC already has rules about what you can broadcast, and there are already rules on the internet about warnings for content that you might be providing.
Considering that putting a link on the internet does not restrict who can use it, it really is a broadcast, so that means that anyone can use it.
Unless you put the images behind an https link or something else that requires authorization, the entire point of the 'net is "available to all".
I guess it isn't a nice clean issue like we'd all think. The line between knowing that if I change an image it will go unnoticed for some time and potentially have "prank" value and the responsibility for me to continuously monitor everything to which I link is not very well defined, but as I said in another post, abusing the trust to keep same-named links having constant-meaning content is just going to cause problems.
Also, if you post on the 'net you expect to get visitors. What do you mean, "too many"? Or "Hey, I didn't want *that* group of people to use up all my bandwidth!". Too bad; you should have put restrictions up to select who can use your bandwidth.
You can't have both pieces of the pie; either your information is free for whomever uses it, or you have to restrict it so only certain people can use it.
You cannot have freedom without responsibility.
I've got to believe there's a better way to serve pictures so that they are only viewable from the appropriate website than a straight http request for the image file. That is how to prevent people from hotlinking, not changing a file so they get something unwanted from their link (because that doesn't prevent them from hotlinking, does it? What if they just hotlink on purpose to the image but set it off-screen or something so it doesn't display but is still fetched just to use your bandwidth out of spite?).
How about trying to solve the actual problem rather than addressing the symptoms?
You would think so, but our courts tend to (rightly) disagree. It's not a property-owner's responsibility or right to prosecute trespassers. That's the responsibility of law enforcement.
Unfortunately it's not like that. In the case of letterhead, the offender has the opportunity to not distribute whatever it is would require the letterhead; in the "instantly live" world of the Internet such a change immediately reaches the public with no requirement for intervention.
While I don't condone misuse of letterhead or Internet links, abusing the responsibility of respecting the way links are supposed to work (e.g., same-named links are supposed to always have the same general content) is just asking to have the freedom to choose your links taken away.