Even if they could predict human behavior reliably, a counter would be simply to use a dice or random number generator to determine a range of actions that one may perform. This would presumably cause you to pursue a strategy that is worse than what you otherwise would have (unless you're a really crappy strategist so that random choice outperforms conscious planning). If so, then mark that down as a victory for the prediction system.
It becomes a bit like land mines: it forces you to use a less optimal route to your target than what you would have preferred. There must be a term waiting to be coined here. Idea space denial?
Yes, they do, and they have all the rights on their side too. If I give you rights to make exactly two copies of a picture that I hold the copyrights to, and you make three, you have broken my copyrights, and I can take you to court. In my part of the world - and I wouldn't expect this to be entirely uncommon in other nations - private reproduction of copyrighted works for personal, non-commercial use doesn't violate copyright. This is subject to some ifs and buts of course (most notably software). Books and pictures are quite ok though, as is generally music.
Anyone still running D1 is a sucker. Ah yes, insulting your readership. I see that Slashdot's grasp of the finer points of customer relations remains as firm as ever... Slashdot is based on ad revenue. We, the readers, are the product(*) and the ad servers are the customers.
It seems to me that if we were clever and well-organised, and if the chemistry behind antibiotics was all nice and cuddly (which I'm sure it is not), then we should do something like the following:
Assume that we have 4 different antibiotics we can use. Call them A, B, C and D.
1. Use A for 30 years. By the end of this time, a number of germs will have developed resistance to A. 2. Discontinue all use of A and use B for 30 years. By the end of this time, a number of germs will have developed resistance to B but since A is no longer around, resistance to A is starting to fade from their gene pool. 3. Discontinue all use of B and use C for 30 years. 4. Discontinue all use of C and use D for 30 years. 5. go to 1. By this time, resistance to A should have been reduced to background noise in the germ gene pool since there has been no selecting for it and so it will take them 30 years to get it back to the forefront.
Of course, in the real world, different antibiotics are effective against different germs so this scheme might not be very practical.
I'll simply adopt the viewpoint that you get involved with cretins like the RIAA at your own risk and by so doing I'll have no qualms stealing from you. A definite case of "if you team up with the devil, expect to become collateral damage":-)
But should a trademark last from 1887 to 2007? A trademark should last for so long as it remains useful to the public. If this is ten thousand years, then it is ten thousand years.
what the heck; those laser designators are dual use, no? Reminds me of the Night's Dawn trilogy in which the protagonist has a number of communications lasers fitted on his starship. Very long range, very powerful "communications" lasers.
It strikes me as kind of silly that we'd all get together and settle on the "rules of warfare," instead of just getting together and making warfare itself unlawful. Outlawing warfare will have no effect so no one bothers to try and do it. It is, however, possible to set up some reasonable limitations on warfare and have a number of nations adhere to them, so that is what is being done.
(you all know what quote just begs to be in the reply, right?) No, no, no, it's not begging the reply, it's raising the reply, and . . . wait . . . ummm . . .
But what we got instead was robots taking our jobs without a safety net for the displaced workers. Humans, it seems, don't fit in the future. Let us all join together and march on these metal monsters, usurpers of our jobs, and throw our wooden clogs at them!
And you didn't even specifically mention Mars in your original post. I was just pointing out that in this case we would need to talk about leaving the solar system. It really is much more difficult than this. We will not only have to disperse ourselves throughout the stars so as to secure against locally catastrophic events, but we will also have to sever all communications between the different societies so as to prevent the propagation of biological, social and electronic catastrophies.
Of course, this means it might be very beneficial to us if FTL travel and communication really is impossible (including any loopholes) since this causes natural isolation.
Okay, but tell them to please cut down on that anal probe shit. It is/your/ responsibility to refrain from eating in the 24 hours preceding the probe - if you can't follow such simple directions, expect some inconvenience.
It's not often that I run across another person who notices that the commandment states that "you shall have no other gods before me", instead of the more forceful "there are no other gods",. The actual text implies strongly that there ARE other gods -- just that you are not to worship them, or place them at a higher status. Now we're getting into the details of how to interpret words however. Even if we leave aside the issue of translation (which is something of a messy situation wrt the bible), "god" can easily be understood to be "something that you worship" or even "an imagined divine being" rather than "an actual divine being".
I am also not sure if the bible necessarily equates being "a god" with being omnipotent, etc., just because "God" claims to be so. There could be that Christian theology recognizes that there are many "gods" but only one "God". I consider that a group of people which can come up with the whole trinity scam is capable of any amount of word trickery:-)
You missed Fermi's point. They should be here NOW. If this is the case, then the answer is simple: we are the first ones. We have to be since if we were not, we'd be seeing aliens. More powerfully, perhaps, if we were not the first, the ones who/were/ would have annihilated us or otherwise kept us from becoming sentient as a precautionary measure (they only need to have one single Bush-like leader throughout our multi-million year evolution period for this to happen, which seems a probably occurrence as we have had multiple ones like Bush and much much worse only during the last 100).
It's the same way you can prove that time travel can't work. If it did we'd see time travellers from the future. We don't see them. Time travel appears to be subject to a form of time travel singularity: when a society develops time travel, it will eventually become opportune for some group or other to travel back in time and prevent time travel from having been discovered. Sooner or later, such efforts will succeed and as a result, time travel never actually existed. Based on this, it appears to me that a universe in which time travel can exist is indistinguishable from one in which it cannot.
(I am of course referring to time travel into the past, beyond the development of time travel, with the ability to affect and alter that past. Other modes of time travel tech are certainly conceivable.)
RMS not only thinks that the private property is a bad economic model for immaterial things That would be because immaterial things aren't property. Private property is a bad economic model for intellectual works for much the same reason that private property is a bad economic model for the colour red.
It is a communistic idea that there should not be private property. Did RMS ever say that people shouldn't be allowed to own their own toothbrushes, houses, etc.? If so, do you have a link?
The SCOTUS isn't about to throw capitalism in the trash can for some biazarro inverted socialist system where the workers are owned by the means of production! Sheesh. That sounds slightly like feudalism, in which the unfree tenants would be attached to their land.
That means people can go the salon, learn all about how awesome the cream is, and then go buy it on ebay for half the price. Where does that leave my friend? It leaves her with a seriously broken business model. Which is also what she started with. If what she is really selling is a service (training, information, whatever) then that is what she should charge for. Loss leaders aren't actually mandated by or protected by the law, nor should they be.
We are not talking about people being told they can't sell they're stuff. We are talking about nasty cut-throat business practices. (that should be illegal) Meanwhile, the rest of us call it competition in a free market.
How do you prove that the experiment was successful in sending an appropriate signal rather than it showing some false signal based upon noise or some other failure? You ask a statistician how many times you will have to repeat it for it to be accepted by your peers. Then you publish it in a journal and wait for a sufficient number of your peers to repeat it and confirm your results. Then you bask in the glory of having discovered something new.
So what you are saying is that the value of patents truly lies in the ability to disarm other patent holders? What a beautiful example of the fallacy of a circular argument;) That would have been a circular argument if it was presented as an argument in favour of the patent system as such, but it isn't. It is an argument for a business to take out patents given that the patent regime is in effect.
The argument is analogous to the argument for sovereign nations to arm themselves: so as to protect themselves from other armed nations. (Abolishing weapons altogether might be a better idea overall if it were feasible, but that is a different debate.)
IBM clearly cares who writes that.... it's one of the most profitable parts of the business. I expect that they foresee that this will no longer be the case in the future. As the open source movement has shown, it is very efficient at creating infrastructure software and this will inevitably extend into middleware with full force in the near future. Both Apache and JBoss are harbingers of this development.
I expect that IBM is positioning itself as the integrator and customizer that will take whatever middleware is opportune, stitch together whatever general system the customer desires, and finally develop whatever custom adaptations the customer needs. IBM's expertise then boils down to knowing what sort of software is out there to be used, being able to divine what the customer actually needs (rather than what he thinks he needs), and designing a professional strength system out of all of this. The more of this that can be built from commodity components, the better.
In management speak, IBM wants to be an integrator and farm out most of the programming activities.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is the payback for the "User Product" language in part 6 of GPL3 ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html ) - which seems to be aimed at making GPL software cooptable for purely business purposes.
The more rational side of me observes that IBM probably sees itself writing the business logic side of the web services architecture in the future, and doesn't really care much who wrote the middleware so long as it just works. Letting people write middleware without fear of IP lawsuits would tend to facilitate this.
Slashdot Mirror
It becomes a bit like land mines: it forces you to use a less optimal route to your target than what you would have preferred. There must be a term waiting to be coined here. Idea space denial?
Ah yes, insulting your readership. I see that Slashdot's grasp of the finer points of customer relations remains as firm as ever... Slashdot is based on ad revenue. We, the readers, are the product(*) and the ad servers are the customers.
* - With the notable exception of subscribers.
It seems to me that if we were clever and well-organised, and if the chemistry behind antibiotics was all nice and cuddly (which I'm sure it is not), then we should do something like the following:
Assume that we have 4 different antibiotics we can use. Call them A, B, C and D.
1. Use A for 30 years. By the end of this time, a number of germs will have developed resistance to A.
2. Discontinue all use of A and use B for 30 years. By the end of this time, a number of germs will have developed resistance to B but since A is no longer around, resistance to A is starting to fade from their gene pool.
3. Discontinue all use of B and use C for 30 years.
4. Discontinue all use of C and use D for 30 years.
5. go to 1. By this time, resistance to A should have been reduced to background noise in the germ gene pool since there has been no selecting for it and so it will take them 30 years to get it back to the forefront.
Of course, in the real world, different antibiotics are effective against different germs so this scheme might not be very practical.
Of course, this means it might be very beneficial to us if FTL travel and communication really is impossible (including any loopholes) since this causes natural isolation.
Geez, anal probees these days . . .
I am also not sure if the bible necessarily equates being "a god" with being omnipotent, etc., just because "God" claims to be so. There could be that Christian theology recognizes that there are many "gods" but only one "God". I consider that a group of people which can come up with the whole trinity scam is capable of any amount of word trickery
(I am of course referring to time travel into the past, beyond the development of time travel, with the ability to affect and alter that past. Other modes of time travel tech are certainly conceivable.)
Where does that leave my friend? It leaves her with a seriously broken business model. Which is also what she started with. If what she is really selling is a service (training, information, whatever) then that is what she should charge for.
Loss leaders aren't actually mandated by or protected by the law, nor should they be. We are not talking about people being told they can't sell they're stuff.
We are talking about nasty cut-throat business practices. (that should be illegal) Meanwhile, the rest of us call it competition in a free market.
What a beautiful example of the fallacy of a circular argument
The argument is analogous to the argument for sovereign nations to arm themselves: so as to protect themselves from other armed nations. (Abolishing weapons altogether might be a better idea overall if it were feasible, but that is a different debate.)
I expect that IBM is positioning itself as the integrator and customizer that will take whatever middleware is opportune, stitch together whatever general system the customer desires, and finally develop whatever custom adaptations the customer needs. IBM's expertise then boils down to knowing what sort of software is out there to be used, being able to divine what the customer actually needs (rather than what he thinks he needs), and designing a professional strength system out of all of this. The more of this that can be built from commodity components, the better.
In management speak, IBM wants to be an integrator and farm out most of the programming activities.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is the payback for the "User Product" language in part 6 of GPL3 ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html ) - which seems to be aimed at making GPL software cooptable for purely business purposes.
The more rational side of me observes that IBM probably sees itself writing the business logic side of the web services architecture in the future, and doesn't really care much who wrote the middleware so long as it just works. Letting people write middleware without fear of IP lawsuits would tend to facilitate this.