"I'm claiming that neither should be taught as fact. Both (or neither) can be given as possible explanations for the origin of life. Of course, other theories would then need to be included for it to be fair at all.
"
Ahh. This is the sort of misinformation fluff that drives me nuts. This whole "theory vs fact" misinformation is the root of the problem. Those of us who studied, for instance, gas turbine theory wonder if someone out there actually thinks that gas turbines are just an unproven concept. Facts are not theories that were proven to be true. Why people think that I don't know. Perhaps they had bad science teachers. Perhaps poor media explanation, though that might be a chicken and egg thing.
There is really no such thing as a fact in science. Science is a methodology. It develops models of naturally occuring behaviour through testing hypotheses and their derived predictions against obseved phenomena. All scientific knowledge consists of models that are the most consistent with observed phenomena. That a model does not meet all observed phenomena does not make it invalid and to be thrown away. It means some areas of details of the model still require further understanding and development. "Theory" is a description of the principles behind the model, which is why, for instance, "gas turbine theory" doesn't refer to some people's crazy idea that gas turbines might exist. This whole "fact vs theory" is a hoax. It's made up. It doesn't exist.
"One only needs to show that there are fossils either side of it mutation-wise."
Again, poor understanding of the situation. All living beings, now or in the past, are in mutation. There seems to be this idea in some people's minds that evolution consists of a bunch of static species with well-defined boundaries that suddenly mutate into a different species (or something else). First, the exact differentiation of species is a product of man in an attempt to classify. While there are some clear differentiators, others are vague. Not everyone agrees where to draw boundaries. Second, the point of evolution is that no species is ever static. There is no before and after. There is no "half-mutated". There is just constantly changing. If changes in the environment happen more drastically over a short time, the evolutionary changes this envokes mike change faster, but is still isn't a sudden flip from one thing to another.
What I find the most humorous, and yet most annoying, is this picking on evolution as "controversial". It is only "controversial" to those who want something else to be used to describe how life got here the way it is. If they were truly being objective and picking on scientific theories (meaning princples behind a model, not meaning "guess"), why not pick on basic physic. Hell, we know Newtonian physics is wrong and yet keep teaching it in science class. Why? Because the model works for most practical applications the students will use it for. And it is simpler than relativity which has been shown to be a better model. However, we know relativity and quantum physics are incompatable, so both can't be right but both are the best working models for their respective applications. If indeed this isn't a religious driven objective, why is teaching evolution controversial and not basic physics?
The fact of the matter is, this is entirely driven by religious beliefs and by people who don't fully understand the reasoning or importance behind the separation of Church and State. You can dress it up in sheeps clothing, but it's still a wolf. I don't mean to come of as insulting, which I'm sure this does somewhat, but these principles have been understood for a long time and it is frustrating that people don't do their homework before opening their mouths. (I'm talking about Kansas and those behind ID, for instance, not anyone here. Everyonerequire a designer. The fact ID also fails to meet other basic requirements to fit the scientific method (testable, fals
Out of curiosity, what in the article changed your mind about being pissed? I read it and it still says they can only offer it for 90 more days and then it's over, and no new customers for it starting from the decision date.
"Science isn't about being right...it is about continually asking questions."
Bang on. Unfortunately, in the world we live in today it seems almost everybody is misunderstanding this, including many scientists. I think that people inherently defend their beliefs no matter what we do for a living. Science (the process) is objective. People are not naturally objective, including scientists.
That still doesn't excuse the whole "fact versus theory" issues going on. This completely misunderstands the scientific process, the meaning of "fact", and the meaning of "theory". Unfortunately, most people misunderstand all of these as well, so it's easy to play up on that to get wild hypotheses included with the best models derived from the objective scientific process.
"Be expected to answer your PHBs emails during lunch? I'll pass on that."
Yeah, that's what I thought for awhile. I re-thought this while I was sitting on the beach in the sun, answering my emails, during the work day (not on vacation) and realized my alternative was to do this same thing sitting in a cubicle like all my co-workers. Tough choice. (By "tough" I mean "holy freakin' easy".)
"Quite to the contrary: you do not get to pick and choose what people can do with your copyrighted works."
First, that has nothing to do with what I said. What I said was that there is no law that requires to you provide a license to share your works. And there isn't. If you can find a law that says you must include a license with all copyrighted works, please provide a link to it.
Second, I'm at a loss to understand your statement. Copyright does indeed exactly allow you to pick and choose what people can do with your copyrighted works, with the exception of Fair Use.
The danger in the Limewire approach is that it plays into, rather than fixes, the problems with existing copyright law. We are very quickly coming to a point where everything people say, do, write, draw, suggestion, or even mumble is automatically protected and requires a license to repeat, use, improve, add to, and so forth. This is the wrong direction. The law should require that things are automatically not protected unless some positive action by the creator is undertaken to protect them. In fact, my post here is, in all likelihood, protected in some way. Are you saying I should attach a license to it for you to read it? Is that a reasonable direction for society to head? That's the slippery slope we're on.
Oh, and by the way, the Limewire approach doesn't say anything about a particular license, it's just to require a license. So people can put on whatever restrictive license they want.
Re:This sort of thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 4, Interesting
"And, in the processes, depriving the copyright holders of income."
And this is where this argument always fails for a variety of reasons. Income is only deprived if the person receiving the "free" copy would have paid for it in the first place had they not been able to get the free copy. I would love to see someone argue that a 14 year old kid with $10,000 "worth" of songs would have paid $10,000 for them had they not been able to download.
Also, depriving potential income is not theft. People are deprived of potential income all the time, from the city doing roadwork in front of a store, to boycotts, to simply a new competitor moving in. Deprivation of potential income is not a valid argument because it relies on an invalid assumption of what people would have intended under different circumstances. It's the deprivation of the property from which the income is derived that matters, and that's the difference between theft and copyright infringement. The former deprives the owner of the use of the property. The latter just means you violated their right to decide how something is copied.
One other point. There is no inherent right to earn income from a creative work, and that is not the intention of copyright law. For example, this post I am writing is actually a creative work, and usually something like this is automatically copyrighted under the law. Should you guys pay me? The intent of copyright law is to encourage content creators to share their works publically. The "limited time" (which it isn't really anymore) protection is merely the incentive for sharing the work. It's not a bad concept for promoting cultural development, but has become too distorted and abused to be a useful anymore.
"Although one has to wonder whether this is going to work out."
I'm more wondering about the "slippery slope" of this approach by Limewire. There is nothing in any law, copyright or otherwise, that requires you to provide a license to share your own works. In fact, this action tends to remove rights from copyright owners, who will now be forced to provide some license with their works if they want to distribute their works this way. Granted, they can chose not to use Limewire, but if this catches on in P2P in general then there is little choice left (hence the "slippery slope). I hope it doesn't catch on.
"The only reason this will effect you is if you were using Limewire to download illegal materials."
No. It will affect anyone who downloads perfectly legal material for which Limewire cannot find a valid license for. It now moves the state of legality in file-trading towards "guilty until proven innocent". If this becomes the norm, there will be a de facto requirement that all files come with some sort of license attached. In other words, it is a literal case of the "authorities" stating "Papers please" to allow you to pass, just applied to files instead of people.
Ironically, information is one of few things that are essentially impossible to keep from being free (as in freedom), and yet people keep trying.
As does any reviewer of books, movies, art, or whatever. They are selling newspapers, magazines, TV shows, with commercial spots, all without paying the creators of the works. All of these, including Google, are offering a service that provides information on copyrighted works without actually providing the copyrighted work. It can be good (e.g., increased sales or exposure) or bad (poor reviews) for the authour. Google is less likely to be bad because it doesn't provide a review, just makes it easier to find books or references.
I'm not really sure what the guild's problem with this is. Their own explanation is just that (they believe) it is a violation of copyright law. Not that it is harmful, just that it is a violation. I guess the worry is the "slippery slope" of potential lost rights. It'll be interesting to watch.
"I think just the fact that someone in Germany can access your article was the problem here."
I think it was even a lot more complicated than that. In this case, the Washington Post slandered a person. That it was slander was not in question, and slander is illegal in both Washington and Ontario. The problem is slander is a law of circumstances, in which reputation is harmed. The person in question was not harmed in Washington has he had no reputation there, not having any friends, family, or colleagues. Even by Washington law, the harm happened in Ontario. There were a bunch of other contributing factors as well such as availability of witnesses. In essense, neither Washington nor Ontario seemed the right venue, yet that would allow the Post to get away with it.
This is not so much a internet jurisdiction problem as it is a general problem with laws in which the act happens in one location but the harm happens in another. This isn't new, and there's plenty of case law from telephone, mail, and so forth. It is an interesting problem with no easy answers though. The internet just makes it all the more common and visible.
"As noted by many posters, spread is just a function of angle. "
Ironically, you've actually harmed, not helped, anyone who hadn't read the article. The main point of this work is that distance AND angle are the wrong things. The quadrance (square of distance) and spread (effectively, the square of the sine of the angle -- though help points out 'angle' is a handwaving concept to begin with) should be the fundamental elements and makes the trigonometry meaningful and easy. That quadrance and spread are (independently) functions of distance and angle is trivially obvious, but it is exactly the difference that is his point that makes the math so much simpler.
Perhaps a more specific example for those programmers out there. No more need for lookup tables or Taylor expansion for trig functions unless a human at some point needs an angle value at which case it can be converted in the final step before output. (Internally, programs would never need them.)
"Au contraire, what you are seeing is the true raison d'être of IP law."
No. The intent of IP law is the publication and dissemination of innovations, not the protection of them. From the USPTO's own words: "Through the preservation, classification, and dissemination of patent information, the Office promotes the industrial and technological progress of the nation and strengthens the economy." Notice there's no mention of protection or helping the creators, it's about helping everyone else learn how things work and advance the ideas. The limited time protection is merely the means by which creators are given incentive to disseminate the information; it is not the intended purpose.
A world without IP laws is a world of secrets, which stiffles innovation. It is unfortunate that poor application and understanding of the principles behind IP -- both at the legislative and approval levels, and abuse by the industry for unintended purposes -- has lead us to the mess we have today that also stiffles innovation. Clearly reform is necessary.
"The point of the poster you quoted is that it is still illegal, and that the semantics of the argument used to justify breaking that law are absurd."
You are correct that this was the original point. What (mostly) everybody has been saying is that this is (a) incorrect, and (b) not a good point. It is incorrect because people don't use the argument to justify breaking the law, they use it to argue the severity of the problem. It is not a good point because it presents the issue as a binary problem -- either it is something illegal or it isn't. Both murder and speeding are illegal, but that does not make them equivalent. The severity, or even existence, of the harm is very important and relevant to discussions on this topic, and passing them off as mere "excuses" to break the law simply shows a lack of understanding of the actual issues.
"...there are legal definitions and social definitions..."
I'm going to have to call you on this too. While it's true definitions can vary, the connotations associated with theft and piracy are much worse than for the actual act of copyright infringment, and it is those associated connotations that is at the forefront of the RIAA/MPAA campaign against copyright infringement. Even their commercials talk say "You wouldn't steal a purse. You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a CD. So why would you steal music by downloading?" They are running a campaign to get people to think about copyright infringement as equivalent to actual theft of material goods, which is isn't. Writing it off as semantics misses the point that the semantics are very important here because of the connations which affect public perception, severity of penalties that get written into law, and even removal of rights such as fair use.
"...but why couldn't Hitler (specifically) be an environmentalist"
Because, anything Hitler believed is automatically evil and wrong because he believed it. You wouldn't want to be associated with the beliefs of someone as evil as Hitler, would you? I hear he believed in gravity so I personally do not believe in it anymore. I mean, come on, an unseen force pulling things together. Get real.
"Ok, but why speak of canceling flights now? Because a few bits of fabric are poking out?"
You seem a little mixed up on what's been going on. First, no flights are canceled. There will be likely delays until a few things are looked at and fixed, but nothing has been canceled. The media just likes to sensationalized things with words like "shuttle fleet grounded". There is no regular schedule for shuttles so the words "grounded" are meaningless here. No launch happens without a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) which says all identified problems have been fixed, or accepted as not a safety issue, and everything appears to be ready to go. Even then, they find problems on the launch pad and delay more, and sometimes even bring it back to the VAB. The FRR for the next flight (STS-121) cannot allow it to fly until the tank problem is fixed or identified as a non-safety issue. (Pretty hard to do since it brought down Columbia.)
Second, it is the external tank foam shedding problem that is causing the delay, not the fabric.
Third, shuttle flights have always been delayed until problems have been fixed. This is an experimental vehicle with just over 100 flights. This delay in launch schedule for the next flight(s) is normal but just has higher visibility because it is the same problem that caused the Columbia disaster (foam coming off of tank) and was a main focus of things to be fixed for return-to-flight and it wasn't.
Fourth, it is the Columbia Accident Investigation Report that identifies and recommends that they fix this problem and quit being cavalier about these problems. NASA has signed up to implement the CAIB recommendations.
Fifth, it is exactly that NASA has been cavalier about these problems that the CAIB identified as a cultural problem at NASA. It is good that they are paying close attention to these things. You can't use their past lack of concern as an argument for continued lack of concern.
"I feel excited as GP too... and I wish to express it. I dont think there is anything wrong with that."
Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson! Expressing your personal feelings on/. only invites ridicule and bad joke references. In this case I understand your excitement because those sounds must remind you so much of your travels to all those far strange planets in the 1950s when you were a kid with your family and that creepy Dr. Smith.
"The point, Captain Obvious, is to provide the most daylight during waking hours for the average diurnal person."
Hmm. The sun rises here between 6:40 AM and 7:20 AM in November, meaning I don't turn on any lights when I get up in the morning. If DST is extended the sun will now rise between 7:40 AM and 8:20 AM so I will have lights on in the morning. True, in the evening I'll use them less, but these cancel each other out. In the end, no net gain.
However, this doesn't apply to everyone so it will probably end up saving some energy. But the point is it only works if you take sunlight out of the time people are asleep, which applies less an less in winter months, so there's dimminishing returns as it is pushed further. I wonder if the energy savings is worth the coordination headaches it'll cause.
"The less "natural" and more refined a product is the less likely it is to be good for you."
Hey, you're right. I'm giving up my granola bar snack and going to eat dog shit instead. It's much more natural and less refined. If I can't find dog shit I might try a scoop of mud. OK, I'm carrying it too far. In reality I'll just eat more natural vegetables like rhubarb. It can't possibly be harmful to me because it's natural.
"The study says you should get about 10 to 15 minutes of sun exposure a day."
Not exactly. That's a quote on what "many scientists believe", not an outcome of the study(-ies). Other quotes from the article include that skin cancer has only been linked to chronic long-term suntanning, as in many hours per day over decades, and that "The skin can handle it, just like the liver can handle alcohol," suggesting that occasional multi-hour exposure to the sun (say a few times per month) might not be problematic at all. That being said, I don't think anybody would suggest enough exposure for sunburns is good.
"Method One is to forcibly deprive it of paper. Method Two is to forcibly deprive it of electricity."
I've always wondered why printers don't seem to come with emergency stops, even if in software. Canceling a print job is pretty useless for making it stop. It needs to be something that stops it immediately. I have used Method One a variety of times and Method Two a few times. Even after that, it can still take 5-10 minutes to convince the printer to not start printing it again from memory when it starts back up.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh. This is the sort of misinformation fluff that drives me nuts. This whole "theory vs fact" misinformation is the root of the problem. Those of us who studied, for instance, gas turbine theory wonder if someone out there actually thinks that gas turbines are just an unproven concept. Facts are not theories that were proven to be true. Why people think that I don't know. Perhaps they had bad science teachers. Perhaps poor media explanation, though that might be a chicken and egg thing.
There is really no such thing as a fact in science. Science is a methodology. It develops models of naturally occuring behaviour through testing hypotheses and their derived predictions against obseved phenomena. All scientific knowledge consists of models that are the most consistent with observed phenomena. That a model does not meet all observed phenomena does not make it invalid and to be thrown away. It means some areas of details of the model still require further understanding and development. "Theory" is a description of the principles behind the model, which is why, for instance, "gas turbine theory" doesn't refer to some people's crazy idea that gas turbines might exist. This whole "fact vs theory" is a hoax. It's made up. It doesn't exist.
"One only needs to show that there are fossils either side of it mutation-wise."
Again, poor understanding of the situation. All living beings, now or in the past, are in mutation. There seems to be this idea in some people's minds that evolution consists of a bunch of static species with well-defined boundaries that suddenly mutate into a different species (or something else). First, the exact differentiation of species is a product of man in an attempt to classify. While there are some clear differentiators, others are vague. Not everyone agrees where to draw boundaries. Second, the point of evolution is that no species is ever static. There is no before and after. There is no "half-mutated". There is just constantly changing. If changes in the environment happen more drastically over a short time, the evolutionary changes this envokes mike change faster, but is still isn't a sudden flip from one thing to another.
What I find the most humorous, and yet most annoying, is this picking on evolution as "controversial". It is only "controversial" to those who want something else to be used to describe how life got here the way it is. If they were truly being objective and picking on scientific theories (meaning princples behind a model, not meaning "guess"), why not pick on basic physic. Hell, we know Newtonian physics is wrong and yet keep teaching it in science class. Why? Because the model works for most practical applications the students will use it for. And it is simpler than relativity which has been shown to be a better model. However, we know relativity and quantum physics are incompatable, so both can't be right but both are the best working models for their respective applications. If indeed this isn't a religious driven objective, why is teaching evolution controversial and not basic physics?
The fact of the matter is, this is entirely driven by religious beliefs and by people who don't fully understand the reasoning or importance behind the separation of Church and State. You can dress it up in sheeps clothing, but it's still a wolf. I don't mean to come of as insulting, which I'm sure this does somewhat, but these principles have been understood for a long time and it is frustrating that people don't do their homework before opening their mouths. (I'm talking about Kansas and those behind ID, for instance, not anyone here. Everyonerequire a designer. The fact ID also fails to meet other basic requirements to fit the scientific method (testable, fals
Out of curiosity, what in the article changed your mind about being pissed? I read it and it still says they can only offer it for 90 more days and then it's over, and no new customers for it starting from the decision date.
These people are also known as "premature ejaculators".
Bang on. Unfortunately, in the world we live in today it seems almost everybody is misunderstanding this, including many scientists. I think that people inherently defend their beliefs no matter what we do for a living. Science (the process) is objective. People are not naturally objective, including scientists.
That still doesn't excuse the whole "fact versus theory" issues going on. This completely misunderstands the scientific process, the meaning of "fact", and the meaning of "theory". Unfortunately, most people misunderstand all of these as well, so it's easy to play up on that to get wild hypotheses included with the best models derived from the objective scientific process.
Yeah, that's what I thought for awhile. I re-thought this while I was sitting on the beach in the sun, answering my emails, during the work day (not on vacation) and realized my alternative was to do this same thing sitting in a cubicle like all my co-workers. Tough choice. (By "tough" I mean "holy freakin' easy".)
First, that has nothing to do with what I said. What I said was that there is no law that requires to you provide a license to share your works. And there isn't. If you can find a law that says you must include a license with all copyrighted works, please provide a link to it.
Second, I'm at a loss to understand your statement. Copyright does indeed exactly allow you to pick and choose what people can do with your copyrighted works, with the exception of Fair Use.
The danger in the Limewire approach is that it plays into, rather than fixes, the problems with existing copyright law. We are very quickly coming to a point where everything people say, do, write, draw, suggestion, or even mumble is automatically protected and requires a license to repeat, use, improve, add to, and so forth. This is the wrong direction. The law should require that things are automatically not protected unless some positive action by the creator is undertaken to protect them. In fact, my post here is, in all likelihood, protected in some way. Are you saying I should attach a license to it for you to read it? Is that a reasonable direction for society to head? That's the slippery slope we're on.
Oh, and by the way, the Limewire approach doesn't say anything about a particular license, it's just to require a license. So people can put on whatever restrictive license they want.
And this is where this argument always fails for a variety of reasons. Income is only deprived if the person receiving the "free" copy would have paid for it in the first place had they not been able to get the free copy. I would love to see someone argue that a 14 year old kid with $10,000 "worth" of songs would have paid $10,000 for them had they not been able to download.
Also, depriving potential income is not theft. People are deprived of potential income all the time, from the city doing roadwork in front of a store, to boycotts, to simply a new competitor moving in. Deprivation of potential income is not a valid argument because it relies on an invalid assumption of what people would have intended under different circumstances. It's the deprivation of the property from which the income is derived that matters, and that's the difference between theft and copyright infringement. The former deprives the owner of the use of the property. The latter just means you violated their right to decide how something is copied.
One other point. There is no inherent right to earn income from a creative work, and that is not the intention of copyright law. For example, this post I am writing is actually a creative work, and usually something like this is automatically copyrighted under the law. Should you guys pay me? The intent of copyright law is to encourage content creators to share their works publically. The "limited time" (which it isn't really anymore) protection is merely the incentive for sharing the work. It's not a bad concept for promoting cultural development, but has become too distorted and abused to be a useful anymore.
I'm more wondering about the "slippery slope" of this approach by Limewire. There is nothing in any law, copyright or otherwise, that requires you to provide a license to share your own works. In fact, this action tends to remove rights from copyright owners, who will now be forced to provide some license with their works if they want to distribute their works this way. Granted, they can chose not to use Limewire, but if this catches on in P2P in general then there is little choice left (hence the "slippery slope). I hope it doesn't catch on.
No. It will affect anyone who downloads perfectly legal material for which Limewire cannot find a valid license for. It now moves the state of legality in file-trading towards "guilty until proven innocent". If this becomes the norm, there will be a de facto requirement that all files come with some sort of license attached. In other words, it is a literal case of the "authorities" stating "Papers please" to allow you to pass, just applied to files instead of people.
Ironically, information is one of few things that are essentially impossible to keep from being free (as in freedom), and yet people keep trying.
I wasn't aware that Google would allow people to read the whole book. I though this was just a search feature.
As does any reviewer of books, movies, art, or whatever. They are selling newspapers, magazines, TV shows, with commercial spots, all without paying the creators of the works. All of these, including Google, are offering a service that provides information on copyrighted works without actually providing the copyrighted work. It can be good (e.g., increased sales or exposure) or bad (poor reviews) for the authour. Google is less likely to be bad because it doesn't provide a review, just makes it easier to find books or references.
I'm not really sure what the guild's problem with this is. Their own explanation is just that (they believe) it is a violation of copyright law. Not that it is harmful, just that it is a violation. I guess the worry is the "slippery slope" of potential lost rights. It'll be interesting to watch.
I think it was even a lot more complicated than that. In this case, the Washington Post slandered a person. That it was slander was not in question, and slander is illegal in both Washington and Ontario. The problem is slander is a law of circumstances, in which reputation is harmed. The person in question was not harmed in Washington has he had no reputation there, not having any friends, family, or colleagues. Even by Washington law, the harm happened in Ontario. There were a bunch of other contributing factors as well such as availability of witnesses. In essense, neither Washington nor Ontario seemed the right venue, yet that would allow the Post to get away with it.
This is not so much a internet jurisdiction problem as it is a general problem with laws in which the act happens in one location but the harm happens in another. This isn't new, and there's plenty of case law from telephone, mail, and so forth. It is an interesting problem with no easy answers though. The internet just makes it all the more common and visible.
Ironically, you've actually harmed, not helped, anyone who hadn't read the article. The main point of this work is that distance AND angle are the wrong things. The quadrance (square of distance) and spread (effectively, the square of the sine of the angle -- though help points out 'angle' is a handwaving concept to begin with) should be the fundamental elements and makes the trigonometry meaningful and easy. That quadrance and spread are (independently) functions of distance and angle is trivially obvious, but it is exactly the difference that is his point that makes the math so much simpler.
Perhaps a more specific example for those programmers out there. No more need for lookup tables or Taylor expansion for trig functions unless a human at some point needs an angle value at which case it can be converted in the final step before output. (Internally, programs would never need them.)
No. The intent of IP law is the publication and dissemination of innovations, not the protection of them. From the USPTO's own words: "Through the preservation, classification, and dissemination of patent information, the Office promotes the industrial and technological progress of the nation and strengthens the economy." Notice there's no mention of protection or helping the creators, it's about helping everyone else learn how things work and advance the ideas. The limited time protection is merely the means by which creators are given incentive to disseminate the information; it is not the intended purpose.
A world without IP laws is a world of secrets, which stiffles innovation. It is unfortunate that poor application and understanding of the principles behind IP -- both at the legislative and approval levels, and abuse by the industry for unintended purposes -- has lead us to the mess we have today that also stiffles innovation. Clearly reform is necessary.
You are correct that this was the original point. What (mostly) everybody has been saying is that this is (a) incorrect, and (b) not a good point. It is incorrect because people don't use the argument to justify breaking the law, they use it to argue the severity of the problem. It is not a good point because it presents the issue as a binary problem -- either it is something illegal or it isn't. Both murder and speeding are illegal, but that does not make them equivalent. The severity, or even existence, of the harm is very important and relevant to discussions on this topic, and passing them off as mere "excuses" to break the law simply shows a lack of understanding of the actual issues.
"...there are legal definitions and social definitions..."
I'm going to have to call you on this too. While it's true definitions can vary, the connotations associated with theft and piracy are much worse than for the actual act of copyright infringment, and it is those associated connotations that is at the forefront of the RIAA/MPAA campaign against copyright infringement. Even their commercials talk say "You wouldn't steal a purse. You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a CD. So why would you steal music by downloading?" They are running a campaign to get people to think about copyright infringement as equivalent to actual theft of material goods, which is isn't. Writing it off as semantics misses the point that the semantics are very important here because of the connations which affect public perception, severity of penalties that get written into law, and even removal of rights such as fair use.
Because, anything Hitler believed is automatically evil and wrong because he believed it. You wouldn't want to be associated with the beliefs of someone as evil as Hitler, would you? I hear he believed in gravity so I personally do not believe in it anymore. I mean, come on, an unseen force pulling things together. Get real.
You seem a little mixed up on what's been going on. First, no flights are canceled. There will be likely delays until a few things are looked at and fixed, but nothing has been canceled. The media just likes to sensationalized things with words like "shuttle fleet grounded". There is no regular schedule for shuttles so the words "grounded" are meaningless here. No launch happens without a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) which says all identified problems have been fixed, or accepted as not a safety issue, and everything appears to be ready to go. Even then, they find problems on the launch pad and delay more, and sometimes even bring it back to the VAB. The FRR for the next flight (STS-121) cannot allow it to fly until the tank problem is fixed or identified as a non-safety issue. (Pretty hard to do since it brought down Columbia.)
Second, it is the external tank foam shedding problem that is causing the delay, not the fabric.
Third, shuttle flights have always been delayed until problems have been fixed. This is an experimental vehicle with just over 100 flights. This delay in launch schedule for the next flight(s) is normal but just has higher visibility because it is the same problem that caused the Columbia disaster (foam coming off of tank) and was a main focus of things to be fixed for return-to-flight and it wasn't.
Fourth, it is the Columbia Accident Investigation Report that identifies and recommends that they fix this problem and quit being cavalier about these problems. NASA has signed up to implement the CAIB recommendations.
Fifth, it is exactly that NASA has been cavalier about these problems that the CAIB identified as a cultural problem at NASA. It is good that they are paying close attention to these things. You can't use their past lack of concern as an argument for continued lack of concern.
I hope that clears it up a bit.
Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson! Expressing your personal feelings on /. only invites ridicule and bad joke references. In this case I understand your excitement because those sounds must remind you so much of your travels to all those far strange planets in the 1950s when you were a kid with your family and that creepy Dr. Smith.
Technically, in a legal sense, you own an interest in it. But this is all arguing semantics.
That deserves a "Zing". I'm glad I don't have mod points right now. Then I'd have to decide whether to mod it Funny or Insightful.
"Hey ... feels warm ... kinda nice."
- Abe Simpson
Hmm. The sun rises here between 6:40 AM and 7:20 AM in November, meaning I don't turn on any lights when I get up in the morning. If DST is extended the sun will now rise between 7:40 AM and 8:20 AM so I will have lights on in the morning. True, in the evening I'll use them less, but these cancel each other out. In the end, no net gain.
However, this doesn't apply to everyone so it will probably end up saving some energy. But the point is it only works if you take sunlight out of the time people are asleep, which applies less an less in winter months, so there's dimminishing returns as it is pushed further. I wonder if the energy savings is worth the coordination headaches it'll cause.
Hey, you're right. I'm giving up my granola bar snack and going to eat dog shit instead. It's much more natural and less refined. If I can't find dog shit I might try a scoop of mud. OK, I'm carrying it too far. In reality I'll just eat more natural vegetables like rhubarb. It can't possibly be harmful to me because it's natural.
Not exactly. That's a quote on what "many scientists believe", not an outcome of the study(-ies). Other quotes from the article include that skin cancer has only been linked to chronic long-term suntanning, as in many hours per day over decades, and that "The skin can handle it, just like the liver can handle alcohol," suggesting that occasional multi-hour exposure to the sun (say a few times per month) might not be problematic at all. That being said, I don't think anybody would suggest enough exposure for sunburns is good.
I've always wondered why printers don't seem to come with emergency stops, even if in software. Canceling a print job is pretty useless for making it stop. It needs to be something that stops it immediately. I have used Method One a variety of times and Method Two a few times. Even after that, it can still take 5-10 minutes to convince the printer to not start printing it again from memory when it starts back up.