Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work.
It's might be easy, but it isn't cheap to add more cache. Cache accounts for something like 50% of the die surface of a modern chip, and a larger die means a lower yield and less chips per wafer.
If you removed the fans from your computer...I'm pretty sure you could bathe your computer in gasoline
Hmm, I hope you don't have a modern CPU in that computer of yours. A CPU with no fan can get quite hot and will eventually melt. I wonder what happens when molten plastic and silicon meets gasoline? Perhaps the gasoline acts like a coolant and the CPU doesn't need a fan?
There is one aircraft with a greater gross weight - the Airbus 380A. It hasn't been flown yet, but the first one was unveiled sometime last month, so it has been built.
I just love it when people say open source is anti-capitalist and unamerican. I think quite the opposite. It embodies the spirit of America. Capitalism is about maximising profit. Open source achieves that by being free (as in beer) on the whole.
After hearing at least this argument and the opposite argument (that it's communist) 1,000 times, I've got a neat theory: Open source combines the best aspects of both systems. You get the cheapness, efficiency, and transparency of a free market and you also get the equality and sharing of a communist model.
Ideal communism (as opposed to Soviet and Chinese communism) doesn't allow for copyrights (it would fly straight in the face of the communal model of sharing), and while the GPL relies on copyright for keeping the source open, under communism you would have to share source code you write, since it belongs to the state for everyone's use, so both achieve the same noble end.
Free-market capitalism (as opposed to our crony capitalism and corporatism) maximizes efficiency by setting marginal cost to marginal price, which in the case of software, movies, music, etc., is very close to zero. If you supply the resources, like with P2P, it would be free.
Open source also avoids the pitfalls of both systems. It gets around the state censorship problem by distributing control - anyone can fork off a project is she/he feels like it. It also avoids the problems of monopolists, rent-seekers, corporate censors, and other dirtbags that you find in capitalism.
How do you know that you don't have any kiddie stuff? 17 year olds look very similar to 18 year olds (which seems to be the age of a lot of porn models). I'm guessing that at least a percent or two of P2P porn is kiddie porn that passes for normal porn or is mislabeled. Even porn from the store isn't 100% certified legal. The studios can get duped sometimes. Might be a good idea to have that porn-shredding Bash script ready just in case.
For that reason (and that it's a thought crime), I don't think that privately possesing kiddie porn should be a crime. While it might be sick, it makes a criminal out of too many of us (most who don't even want the stuff), and noone is directly hurt (the act of making the junk is a another crime unto itself, unless you can do it without using minors).
Metric benefits: Measures everything relative to a single lump of iridium kept in Paris and on the incorrect original French calculation of the size of the earth. Good if you really like the number 10... except for time... and angles.
The Iridium rod is no longer what defines the metre. A metre is defined by how far light goes in specific amount of time (about 1/300,000,000th of a second).
There are metric units for angles and time. Gradients are used for angles (400 gradients to a circle, 100 gradients to a right angle), but they don't seem to have caught on. There is also a metric system for time, with 10 days in a week, 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute (might be mistaken, but the ratios are powers of 10), but it was only in use for a short time during the French Revolution.
Engineers (as apposed to Computer Science majors) typically need to take a number of professional development classes where we learn such things as conflict resolution, how to work on a team, and... well, let's just leave it at not being a jerk.
Being serious, how do you go about making an college-level course for conflict resolution and not being a jerk. They seem like things that are best taught at the primary school level, and that by the time kids reach college, it would be very hard to change these sorts of behaviors.
I'm being serious because I'm not very good at these skills, being your stereotypical Slashdotter, but this seems more of a social problem, best attacked through play-dates, mentoring, peer groups, and other socializing oriented attacks. I wonder how such a class would be structured.
If copyright is repealed (for example) 30% of the economy vanishes overnight. Think the last recession was bad? Think the Great Depression was bad? The number of people who would lose jobs that depend on copyright, patent and trademarks is incredible.
I guess you would argue that mechanizing the workforce was a bad idea too. Imagine all the employment if crops were grown by hand and thread spun with a manual spinning wheel. Or what about all the jobs that useless government pork generate.
Jobs are a liability, not an asset, for a country. The goods and services that they produce are the asset. If those goods and services can be attained using less labor, than it is good for the economy as wages can be raised without raising unit labor costs, which means that either the workweek can be shortened for the same pay (more leisure time), or additional goods and services can be made (more stuff).
Copyright is horribly inefficient (over 80% of labor in copyright industries can be considered waste, lost either in the marketing and legal departments, in the losses attributable to proprietary and closed development and a tiny public domain, or in losses related to selling (as oposed to giving) works such as cashiers and security gaurds). Why not replace it with a more efficient system.
Information anarchy would work quite well for many copyright industries (music, many books, much softwarem, painting). In some cases, people create plenty of quality works without expecting compensation, like music and open source software. In other cases, like university textbooks, organizations would make sure that new books are made even if there are no copyrights, since they are critical to their organizations.
Perhaps the gaps could be filled in by philantrophy and government grants. The internet and digital technology greatly reduce the raw distribution cost, and without megabucks to drive up salaries for stars, movies would not take a huge amount of money to make. Government organizations like PBS would survive any transition intact, since they don't rely on copyrights for their revenues.
I'm not sure of the best way to encourage the production of useful works without copyrights, but considering their cost to society (over 80% of the dollars put into the industry, plus the social and moral costs), most any other way would be better.
I don't have any problems burning on my 8x CDR burner (750 MHz Athlon CPU) and running other programs at the same time.
Perhaps it's because I'm running GNU/Linux (Mandrake 9.1) instead of MS Windows. Perhaps my burning program (K3b) is well designed.
Some stuff, like heavy computation (ie., compiling), is risky, but my computer is very responsive and if you pay attention to the little buffer indicator, you can get feedback and Ctrl-C the offending app before you buffer underrun.
Unlike RAM, there is a substantial cost to having the CPU run at all times - electricity. Right now there is something like a 60 watt difference between full-steam and idle on modern Pentium IVs, and the split is likely to grow over time as CPU power draw goes up. I wouldn't leave a light bulb on when it's not in use (most of my bulbs are 60 watts), so why would I want my computer wasting that much power for calculations that are unlikely to be used anyway.
YYYY/MM/DD is good for computers, since it's easy to sort (just a simple 32-bit subcc instruction in SPARC does the comparison, using either binary coded decimal or straight binary), and I would write computer code using that format.
I use DD-MMM-YYYY (ie., 24-Mar-1562) when writing it for human consumption though, because the day is the most commonly needed part, followed by the month, followed by the year. The first two digits of the year are almost looked at, and a lot of people omit it, but I use 4-digit years and spell out the first three letters of the month so that people make no mistakes about what format I'm using. Only years have 4 digits, "Mar" can only be a month, and the remaining number must be the day.
For spoken, I'll say "The first of May, eighteen ninety-nine" (for a date) or "cinco de mayo" or "le quatorze juillet" (for a yearly event, or when the year is obvious). There are exceptions... 11/9 just sounds weird since everyone seems to refer to it by 9/11, so I'll reverse the order and say "september eleventh" while the day before is "the tenth of september". For US holidays, I mix it up, some times it is "July fourth", and other times it is "the fourth of July".
It's usable for me. Mplayer and Kaboodle both play incomplete.avi's just fine. I know because I'm very impatient and often watch stuff before it's done downloading.
You don't need a full copy to be infringing copyright. It just has to be long enough to not be fair use, and the DMCA has no provision for fair use, so maybe not even that.
That's not the only problem I see. The lights are pointing upwards, of all directions. Aim the lights downwards and you'll save plenty of light and energy. Flourescents are diffuse enough to be okay without light shades, so aim the light directly towards where it will be used.
Aiming light upwards, both outside and indoors, seems to be a new trend. What's the big benefit of doing so? Will planes crash into buildings if they're not lit up by 20 floodlights which spill most of their light into the sky? Will students not learn right if the ceiling isn't flooded with light? Is it a way of being a snob by showing off how much energy you can waste?
But on another note, the elevator shafts provided a lovely rappelling trip... to bad they had to install elevators in them. (Which I mananged to crash and get stuck on the 3rd floor...like software-wise not bloody death crash)
How do you manage to do that. First of all, since elevator controls are a pure hardware implementation (at least the one in my building), it would be impossible to have a software error. Second, an elevator uses perhaps a dozen flip-flops and a few hundred transistors, diodes, and capacitors, so it's small enough to exhaustively test. There is no excuse for a bug in such a simple design that has been in use for so many decades. Intel manages to make CPUs with hundreds of millions of transistors and only a handful of bugs, and the CPU design didn't exist a few years ago.
Of course, perhaps they decided to dump the old and proven technology. I can't see why you would need a CPU + software to control an elevator, but if they put computers in the rest of the building, perhaps they figured an extra one couldn't hurt.
Here's Turing's counter-example to bust Penrose's theorem:
If a machine (human in this case) can simulate a single Turing machine, and a Turing machine can simulate it, then it is exactly as capable (though perhaps not as quick) as any other Turing machine.
The first part is easy to prove: Any student who has learned Automata Theory should be able to simulate a Turing machine in their head, though it will be VERY slow and tedious.
The second is harder, but there is no reason to think that a simulation of every particle that makes up a human, plus a small environment (air, ground, food, water) around her/him will successfully simulate consciousness. The fact that today's computers are not strong enough doesn't invalidate humans being bound to a Turing machine's capabilities.
Any Turing machine is computational, therefore if the applications of Turing's thesis to humans holds, humans, and every part of them, including consciousness, are computational.
As far as Heisenburg's uncertainty theorem and quantum mechanics goes, it can be inserted into the simulator using rand().
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem doesn't apply to Turing's Theorem. Godel is talking about that there exists inconsistencies in any sufficiently complex langage (ie., the statement "this statement is a lie."). It doesn't contradict Turing's Theorem, since to disprove Turing's Theorem, we'd need to find a Turing machine that is incapable of simulating another Turing machine. All Godel says is that there will be non-sensical or impossible states in any Turing machine, but the machine can still work. (the proof that they exist is that English syntax can be programmed into any Turing machine, and the "this statement is a lie." statement inputted into the machine).
And as far a philosophy goes, so what if I'm limited to 2^2^40 states. I'll never get anywhere near experiencing all of them in the life of the universe, assuming I live that long. And in the same way that computers can execute computer games with fantasy themes, a computation human has nothing interfering with dreaming, pretending, or religion (though it might point out the silliness of latter).
Generally, when you have words with multiple meanings, the multiple meanings typically reinforce each other (like a drive in football, to drive a car, and to drive a nail). The meanings typically come from someone using an existing word to describe a new action or thing, or because of chance (Sioux Indians and sue as in lawsuit).
In the case of piracy, it's using a loaded word to chance public perception. If planes were instead refered to as flying bombs, and the media constantly kept calling them flying bombs, people's perceptions of planes would be very different.
Piracy applied to copyrights might be an old term, but it's still a very biased term. It would be a very good thing to see the word restored to it's original meaning, so, even if it is in the dictionary, I'm not going to use it. Copyright infringement isn't that great a term either, so why not just call it copying or making copies. That term is not loaded and is descriptive.
BTW, cache is perfectly usable to mean a hidden stash.
High altitude doesn't effect the decay rate (other than minuscule relativistic effects related to being further outside the gravity well of planet Earth).
You're right that it will help your country's balance of payments and strengthen your country.
Furthermore, the most efficient price point for software (or any other good with a marginal cost of $0) is exactly $0. The benefits of giving software away vs. charging are so strong that the government could stick its nose into software design, waste 3/4 of the money on government waste, and still outdo the current system. The music, movie, and TV industries are even worse.
Copyrights (along with patents and trade secrets) are one area where communism/socialism shines. The alternative of copyrights is just so horribly inefficient (2/3 of movie and game budgets going to ads, and factor in the market distortion from pricing far above marginal cost).
As far as jobs go, the ideal solution would be to either donate your savings to a free software group (which will be far more efficient at converting the money to software) to have the government tax it and spend it making free software. Either way people are employed.
Note: I have't touched the legal aspect, and I won't because that would be circular reasoning (using the existance of a law to support keeping that law).
You're forgetting coal, shale oil, tar sands (bitumen), and peat. All four are very plentiful and emit copius amounts of CO2. Each one alone contains more carbon than we have released into the atmosphere from burning all fossil fuels combined. We could easily get this planet hotter than when the dinosaurs were around with the amount of CO2 in those four resources combined, and back then there were no ice caps and the only temperate region was at the south pole.
Also, given the world's exponential increase in energy demand, it won't take very long for these massive carbon stockpiles to be burnt. Another century like the 20th century and they'll be running low.
And if the companies producing these products are so despicable, why don't you stand behind your words and not use them at all?
You're right, they are despicable and I don't buy their products anymore. I've also stopped downloading their stuff (I play too much computer as it is anyway). I'm running Linux (Mandrake 9.1), so no need for bootleg software.
I do watch TV, but I do boycott certain channels, like FOX and all the Viacom channels. PBS gets most of my viewer time, but I still view them as sleazy (they run advertisements for really slimy companies, and even though they are non-profit and funded by the government [in part], they retain 'all rights reserved' on their media). They won't be getting any donations from me. Naturally, all the for-profit networks rank even lower.
Copies do deprive someone of something- they deprive the copyright holder of the right to control how their work is copied.
I can also say that "copyright does deprive someone of something - the right to do what they want with their information", 'their information' being defined as what is in their hands.
There are many people, like me, who are just opposed to wars on foreign soil, but would be fine with defending the land within our borders.
While I am opposed to war in general, not defending one's country means that it becomes very profitable for a belligerant nation to invade, which would actually lead to war.
However, defending one's country means defending against foreign troops entering across the border, not defending puppet regimes in faraway lands.
The US is blessed with two huge oceans and only two neighbors, neither of which have any intentions of invading, so we should have one of the smallest armies relative to GDP in the world, not the largest.
That sounds like a very good idea. Considering that they're cheap, they give a feeling of safety, and are probably effective (they are used in race cars), why aren't they used for consumer cars? The simple seat belt has saved far more lives than air bags, so intuition would be that a better seat belt would be better than air bags.
Does anyone know why they are not in use? Are there safety/design issues that I don't understand?
That $50k is probably after adding in air conditioning, sunroof, rust-proofing, extended warranty, power windows, power seats, heated seats, DVD player, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work.
It's might be easy, but it isn't cheap to add more cache. Cache accounts for something like 50% of the die surface of a modern chip, and a larger die means a lower yield and less chips per wafer.
If you removed the fans from your computer...I'm pretty sure you could bathe your computer in gasoline
Hmm, I hope you don't have a modern CPU in that computer of yours. A CPU with no fan can get quite hot and will eventually melt. I wonder what happens when molten plastic and silicon meets gasoline? Perhaps the gasoline acts like a coolant and the CPU doesn't need a fan?
There is one aircraft with a greater gross weight - the Airbus 380A. It hasn't been flown yet, but the first one was unveiled sometime last month, so it has been built.
I just love it when people say open source is anti-capitalist and unamerican. I think quite the opposite. It embodies the spirit of America. Capitalism is about maximising profit. Open source achieves that by being free (as in beer) on the whole.
After hearing at least this argument and the opposite argument (that it's communist) 1,000 times, I've got a neat theory: Open source combines the best aspects of both systems. You get the cheapness, efficiency, and transparency of a free market and you also get the equality and sharing of a communist model.
Ideal communism (as opposed to Soviet and Chinese communism) doesn't allow for copyrights (it would fly straight in the face of the communal model of sharing), and while the GPL relies on copyright for keeping the source open, under communism you would have to share source code you write, since it belongs to the state for everyone's use, so both achieve the same noble end.
Free-market capitalism (as opposed to our crony capitalism and corporatism) maximizes efficiency by setting marginal cost to marginal price, which in the case of software, movies, music, etc., is very close to zero. If you supply the resources, like with P2P, it would be free.
Open source also avoids the pitfalls of both systems. It gets around the state censorship problem by distributing control - anyone can fork off a project is she/he feels like it. It also avoids the problems of monopolists, rent-seekers, corporate censors, and other dirtbags that you find in capitalism.
How do you know that you don't have any kiddie stuff? 17 year olds look very similar to 18 year olds (which seems to be the age of a lot of porn models). I'm guessing that at least a percent or two of P2P porn is kiddie porn that passes for normal porn or is mislabeled. Even porn from the store isn't 100% certified legal. The studios can get duped sometimes. Might be a good idea to have that porn-shredding Bash script ready just in case.
For that reason (and that it's a thought crime), I don't think that privately possesing kiddie porn should be a crime. While it might be sick, it makes a criminal out of too many of us (most who don't even want the stuff), and noone is directly hurt (the act of making the junk is a another crime unto itself, unless you can do it without using minors).
Metric benefits: Measures everything relative to a single lump of iridium kept in Paris and on the incorrect original French calculation of the size of the earth. Good if you really like the number 10... except for time... and angles.
The Iridium rod is no longer what defines the metre. A metre is defined by how far light goes in specific amount of time (about 1/300,000,000th of a second).
There are metric units for angles and time. Gradients are used for angles (400 gradients to a circle, 100 gradients to a right angle), but they don't seem to have caught on. There is also a metric system for time, with 10 days in a week, 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute (might be mistaken, but the ratios are powers of 10), but it was only in use for a short time during the French Revolution.
Engineers (as apposed to Computer Science majors) typically need to take a number of professional development classes where we learn such things as conflict resolution, how to work on a team, and ... well, let's just leave it at not being a jerk.
Being serious, how do you go about making an college-level course for conflict resolution and not being a jerk. They seem like things that are best taught at the primary school level, and that by the time kids reach college, it would be very hard to change these sorts of behaviors.
I'm being serious because I'm not very good at these skills, being your stereotypical Slashdotter, but this seems more of a social problem, best attacked through play-dates, mentoring, peer groups, and other socializing oriented attacks. I wonder how such a class would be structured.
If copyright is repealed (for example) 30% of the economy vanishes overnight. Think the last recession was bad? Think the Great Depression was bad? The number of people who would lose jobs that depend on copyright, patent and trademarks is incredible.
I guess you would argue that mechanizing the workforce was a bad idea too. Imagine all the employment if crops were grown by hand and thread spun with a manual spinning wheel. Or what about all the jobs that useless government pork generate.
Jobs are a liability, not an asset, for a country. The goods and services that they produce are the asset. If those goods and services can be attained using less labor, than it is good for the economy as wages can be raised without raising unit labor costs, which means that either the workweek can be shortened for the same pay (more leisure time), or additional goods and services can be made (more stuff).
Copyright is horribly inefficient (over 80% of labor in copyright industries can be considered waste, lost either in the marketing and legal departments, in the losses attributable to proprietary and closed development and a tiny public domain, or in losses related to selling (as oposed to giving) works such as cashiers and security gaurds). Why not replace it with a more efficient system.
Information anarchy would work quite well for many copyright industries (music, many books, much softwarem, painting). In some cases, people create plenty of quality works without expecting compensation, like music and open source software. In other cases, like university textbooks, organizations would make sure that new books are made even if there are no copyrights, since they are critical to their organizations.
Perhaps the gaps could be filled in by philantrophy and government grants. The internet and digital technology greatly reduce the raw distribution cost, and without megabucks to drive up salaries for stars, movies would not take a huge amount of money to make. Government organizations like PBS would survive any transition intact, since they don't rely on copyrights for their revenues.
I'm not sure of the best way to encourage the production of useful works without copyrights, but considering their cost to society (over 80% of the dollars put into the industry, plus the social and moral costs), most any other way would be better.
I don't have any problems burning on my 8x CDR burner (750 MHz Athlon CPU) and running other programs at the same time.
Perhaps it's because I'm running GNU/Linux (Mandrake 9.1) instead of MS Windows. Perhaps my burning program (K3b) is well designed.
Some stuff, like heavy computation (ie., compiling), is risky, but my computer is very responsive and if you pay attention to the little buffer indicator, you can get feedback and Ctrl-C the offending app before you buffer underrun.
Unlike RAM, there is a substantial cost to having the CPU run at all times - electricity. Right now there is something like a 60 watt difference between full-steam and idle on modern Pentium IVs, and the split is likely to grow over time as CPU power draw goes up. I wouldn't leave a light bulb on when it's not in use (most of my bulbs are 60 watts), so why would I want my computer wasting that much power for calculations that are unlikely to be used anyway.
YYYY/MM/DD is good for computers, since it's easy to sort (just a simple 32-bit subcc instruction in SPARC does the comparison, using either binary coded decimal or straight binary), and I would write computer code using that format.
... 11/9 just sounds weird since everyone seems to refer to it by 9/11, so I'll reverse the order and say "september eleventh" while the day before is "the tenth of september". For US holidays, I mix it up, some times it is "July fourth", and other times it is "the fourth of July".
I use DD-MMM-YYYY (ie., 24-Mar-1562) when writing it for human consumption though, because the day is the most commonly needed part, followed by the month, followed by the year. The first two digits of the year are almost looked at, and a lot of people omit it, but I use 4-digit years and spell out the first three letters of the month so that people make no mistakes about what format I'm using. Only years have 4 digits, "Mar" can only be a month, and the remaining number must be the day.
For spoken, I'll say "The first of May, eighteen ninety-nine" (for a date) or "cinco de mayo" or "le quatorze juillet" (for a yearly event, or when the year is obvious). There are exceptions
It's usable for me. Mplayer and Kaboodle both play incomplete .avi's just fine. I know because I'm very impatient and often watch stuff before it's done downloading.
You don't need a full copy to be infringing copyright. It just has to be long enough to not be fair use, and the DMCA has no provision for fair use, so maybe not even that.
I've seen this post before. How does it get modded at +5 Insignful.
-1 Redundant and -1 Troll seems more appropriate
That's not the only problem I see. The lights are pointing upwards, of all directions. Aim the lights downwards and you'll save plenty of light and energy. Flourescents are diffuse enough to be okay without light shades, so aim the light directly towards where it will be used. Aiming light upwards, both outside and indoors, seems to be a new trend. What's the big benefit of doing so? Will planes crash into buildings if they're not lit up by 20 floodlights which spill most of their light into the sky? Will students not learn right if the ceiling isn't flooded with light? Is it a way of being a snob by showing off how much energy you can waste?
But on another note, the elevator shafts provided a lovely rappelling trip... to bad they had to install elevators in them. (Which I mananged to crash and get stuck on the 3rd floor...like software-wise not bloody death crash)
How do you manage to do that. First of all, since elevator controls are a pure hardware implementation (at least the one in my building), it would be impossible to have a software error. Second, an elevator uses perhaps a dozen flip-flops and a few hundred transistors, diodes, and capacitors, so it's small enough to exhaustively test. There is no excuse for a bug in such a simple design that has been in use for so many decades. Intel manages to make CPUs with hundreds of millions of transistors and only a handful of bugs, and the CPU design didn't exist a few years ago.
Of course, perhaps they decided to dump the old and proven technology. I can't see why you would need a CPU + software to control an elevator, but if they put computers in the rest of the building, perhaps they figured an extra one couldn't hurt.
Here's Turing's counter-example to bust Penrose's theorem:
If a machine (human in this case) can simulate a single Turing machine, and a Turing machine can simulate it, then it is exactly as capable (though perhaps not as quick) as any other Turing machine.
The first part is easy to prove: Any student who has learned Automata Theory should be able to simulate a Turing machine in their head, though it will be VERY slow and tedious.
The second is harder, but there is no reason to think that a simulation of every particle that makes up a human, plus a small environment (air, ground, food, water) around her/him will successfully simulate consciousness. The fact that today's computers are not strong enough doesn't invalidate humans being bound to a Turing machine's capabilities.
Any Turing machine is computational, therefore if the applications of Turing's thesis to humans holds, humans, and every part of them, including consciousness, are computational.
As far as Heisenburg's uncertainty theorem and quantum mechanics goes, it can be inserted into the simulator using rand().
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem doesn't apply to Turing's Theorem. Godel is talking about that there exists inconsistencies in any sufficiently complex langage (ie., the statement "this statement is a lie."). It doesn't contradict Turing's Theorem, since to disprove Turing's Theorem, we'd need to find a Turing machine that is incapable of simulating another Turing machine. All Godel says is that there will be non-sensical or impossible states in any Turing machine, but the machine can still work. (the proof that they exist is that English syntax can be programmed into any Turing machine, and the "this statement is a lie." statement inputted into the machine).
And as far a philosophy goes, so what if I'm limited to 2^2^40 states. I'll never get anywhere near experiencing all of them in the life of the universe, assuming I live that long. And in the same way that computers can execute computer games with fantasy themes, a computation human has nothing interfering with dreaming, pretending, or religion (though it might point out the silliness of latter).
Generally, when you have words with multiple meanings, the multiple meanings typically reinforce each other (like a drive in football, to drive a car, and to drive a nail). The meanings typically come from someone using an existing word to describe a new action or thing, or because of chance (Sioux Indians and sue as in lawsuit).
In the case of piracy, it's using a loaded word to chance public perception. If planes were instead refered to as flying bombs, and the media constantly kept calling them flying bombs, people's perceptions of planes would be very different.
Piracy applied to copyrights might be an old term, but it's still a very biased term. It would be a very good thing to see the word restored to it's original meaning, so, even if it is in the dictionary, I'm not going to use it. Copyright infringement isn't that great a term either, so why not just call it copying or making copies. That term is not loaded and is descriptive.
BTW, cache is perfectly usable to mean a hidden stash.
High altitude doesn't effect the decay rate (other than minuscule relativistic effects related to being further outside the gravity well of planet Earth).
You're right that it will help your country's balance of payments and strengthen your country.
Furthermore, the most efficient price point for software (or any other good with a marginal cost of $0) is exactly $0. The benefits of giving software away vs. charging are so strong that the government could stick its nose into software design, waste 3/4 of the money on government waste, and still outdo the current system. The music, movie, and TV industries are even worse.
Copyrights (along with patents and trade secrets) are one area where communism/socialism shines. The alternative of copyrights is just so horribly inefficient (2/3 of movie and game budgets going to ads, and factor in the market distortion from pricing far above marginal cost).
As far as jobs go, the ideal solution would be to either donate your savings to a free software group (which will be far more efficient at converting the money to software) to have the government tax it and spend it making free software. Either way people are employed.
Note: I have't touched the legal aspect, and I won't because that would be circular reasoning (using the existance of a law to support keeping that law).
You're forgetting coal, shale oil, tar sands (bitumen), and peat. All four are very plentiful and emit copius amounts of CO2. Each one alone contains more carbon than we have released into the atmosphere from burning all fossil fuels combined. We could easily get this planet hotter than when the dinosaurs were around with the amount of CO2 in those four resources combined, and back then there were no ice caps and the only temperate region was at the south pole.
Also, given the world's exponential increase in energy demand, it won't take very long for these massive carbon stockpiles to be burnt. Another century like the 20th century and they'll be running low.
And if the companies producing these products are so despicable, why don't you stand behind your words and not use them at all?
You're right, they are despicable and I don't buy their products anymore. I've also stopped downloading their stuff (I play too much computer as it is anyway). I'm running Linux (Mandrake 9.1), so no need for bootleg software.
I do watch TV, but I do boycott certain channels, like FOX and all the Viacom channels. PBS gets most of my viewer time, but I still view them as sleazy (they run advertisements for really slimy companies, and even though they are non-profit and funded by the government [in part], they retain 'all rights reserved' on their media). They won't be getting any donations from me. Naturally, all the for-profit networks rank even lower.
Copies do deprive someone of something- they deprive the copyright holder of the right to control how their work is copied.
I can also say that "copyright does deprive someone of something - the right to do what they want with their information", 'their information' being defined as what is in their hands.
There are many people, like me, who are just opposed to wars on foreign soil, but would be fine with defending the land within our borders.
While I am opposed to war in general, not defending one's country means that it becomes very profitable for a belligerant nation to invade, which would actually lead to war.
However, defending one's country means defending against foreign troops entering across the border, not defending puppet regimes in faraway lands.
The US is blessed with two huge oceans and only two neighbors, neither of which have any intentions of invading, so we should have one of the smallest armies relative to GDP in the world, not the largest.
I'll throw in a five point harness
That sounds like a very good idea. Considering that they're cheap, they give a feeling of safety, and are probably effective (they are used in race cars), why aren't they used for consumer cars? The simple seat belt has saved far more lives than air bags, so intuition would be that a better seat belt would be better than air bags.
Does anyone know why they are not in use? Are there safety/design issues that I don't understand?
That $50k is probably after adding in air conditioning, sunroof, rust-proofing, extended warranty, power windows, power seats, heated seats, DVD player, etc.
Options can add a lot to the cost of the car.