If you have a disease that causes 50% of your nutrient intake to go to waste because it's being deposited as fat by a virus, then you have two options: 1) Eat twice as much and become fat, or 2) Eat as little as before and be a nice, lean corpse within a couple of years. This may be news to you, but running with considerably less nutrients than needed over an extended period of time _is_ a terminal condition.
It turns out that all attempts to domesticate the elk have been spectacular failures. If the mammoth was anything like the elephant, then destroying it would be a serious mistake as it is excellent for traction once properly trained. Perhaps not as ideal as donkeys and horsies, but far better than nothing. And in this context, moose and elk are both nothing:-)
The mastodon and mammoth were most likely made extinct from overhunting. This turned out pretty serious for the people who were hunting them as it left them without a lot of suitable mammals for food and traction. In the end, it meant that Spain overran and suppressed America rather than the other way around.
A universal death penalty would be much less effective than you think, and it would likely cause a rise in serious crimes. When all crimes are punishable by death, you will no longer see motorists just accepting a fine on the spot, or shop lifters accepting their sentence without appealing. Today, these things happen because the punishment they are facing is relatively small compared to the cost of going through with protests and appeals. When the sentence they are looking at is always death, then they will have the ultimate reason to put heaven and earth in motion to get off. The court system would be swamped with court cases (for fines and other that is usually handled with less protocol) and appeals (for all the desperate people who would otherwise just have sucked it up) and you'd be looking at a backlog of several decades. The end result is that even if you _did_ run a red light today and even if there _is_ ample evidence that you did so, your court date would be in 2042 and so it would still be a while before your execution.
In the mean time, the chaos caused by this mass of cases would make it much easier for serious criminals to fly below the radar. Since everyone does _something_ illegal every now and then (even if just whistling for yourself on the sidewalk after 10 in the evening), it would be clear to everyone that they are up for execution should anyone find out. Since they're practically doomed anyway, they might as well make it worth their while and rob a bank or something.
More likely, though, you'd get a rebellion. You can certainly get killed for being a rebel, but hey, they'll kill you for jaywalking too so what's the big deal?
Who had to renounce their citizenship? Do you mean Padilla? No, Yaser Hamdi. He was detained without charges for a number of years before they released him on condition of renouncing his US citizenship. More here: http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/14/hamdi/
A secret law in a free country. Now that should give you pause. Heh. What amuses _me_ (amuses because I'm a cynical bastard) is that a US federal organization (I have no idea which one) arrested a US citizen, held him illegally without providing legal counsel, without charging him with anything in particular and without even recognizing his human rights (much less any US constitutional rights), for an extended period of time, eventually concluded he probably wasn't all that dangerous anyway, and then finally released him on the explicit condition that he renounce his US citizenship. That this became publicly known and that no one in the US really cared much about it. Not only do US citizens not have any rights in the practical sense these days, but they don't even seem to care about it in the least. (The idealist in me is begging for someone to speak up and prove this story to be wrong in some important way . ..)
The judge in question may very well have seen it though. If so, he could presumably base his judgement upon it. The interesting question then becomes: if the law is secret, then shouldn't the judgements based upon it also be secret? After all, as the quantity of judgements based upon the law start to pile up, it will become easier and easier to reverse-engineer the secret law from these judgements. The existence of secret laws practically requires the existence of secret judgements.
If I'm on a plane, I expect that everyone's been searched and no KNOWN terrorists are on board. You may expect that, but not everyone will. Some will be happy to increase their privacy at the cost of a miniscule risk of becoming the victim of a hijacking. The correct approach to this problem would have been to let the consumers work this out themselves. Let the airlines handle it as they will, and the market will soon work out if it's the ones with cavity searches or the ones with "only one carry-on handgun per passanger please" policies that survive. Or both for that matter. The current approach leaves a taste of a control fetish more than of a desire to actually protect anyone from terrorism.
That may be the case. I recall a controversy about someone wanting to enforce copyright on a CD track with only silence, but I have no idea if that worked out or not. I rather hope it didn't. Anyway, if the **AA wanted to enforce copyright on the files, they would really only have to add some creative content to them. It should cost them no more than a few minutes to have some hack put together a few notes in a music program and put that in there in stead of blank files. Someone should patent this business method . . .:-) 1) Create "creative" content 2) Arrange to have it appear on P2P 3) Sue the hell out of everyone 4) $$$$ The plan seems to be lacking something though . . .
As I understand it, there isn't any actual nudity in the disabled minigame; just two clothed adults dry-humping eachother. If you want nudity, you apparantly need to install the graphics for that yourself. They're not in the actual game files. The whole thing seems very much like an early prototype that was deemed uninteresting and scrapped. Had it been intended as an easter egg, at least they would have added nude graphics to it.
I believe OJ was in a criminal case, while file sharing is a civil case? If so, many countries will apply a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard to the former but only a "preponderance of the evidence" standard to the latter. Therefore, less evidence is needed and more doubt is permitted when convicting someone of file sharing than when convicting them of murder.
On the other hand, if John Doe didn't realize that the actual files he was after were under copyright, and he ended up trading blank files, then presumably he could not be Ãpuished? First, he did not _intend_ to commit a crime and second, he did not _actually_ commit a crime . . . so ignorance can still be bliss:-)
What if you had one of those available? If the blank files were created by the **AA, they would hold the copyrights to them and so sharing them would violate copyright. The most interesting defense in this case, of course, would be to point out that the files were placed on P2P by the copyright holders and so they gave an implicit permission to copy them. I'Ãm not sure if that would hold up but it would be interesting to see it tried:-)
It seems to me that most stable nations have a two-party system. I could name some one-party nations that have been remarkably stable over long periods of time. They even have the benefit of not throwing the nation into regular wars of opinion every four or five years when it's time to vote. Anyway, the whole notion of political parties is at its core a corruption of the democratic ideal. You should vote for people (i.e., representatives), not parties. An ideal democracy would be an n-party system where n is potentially equal to the number of citizens(*). Of course, this represents some administrative difficulties that are difficult to overcome other than by introducing political parties. That's not a reason to overdo it though. (*) - that is, if everyone was prepared to run for office. In my country (Norway) you can't legally refuse to run for parliament if you get nominated, but I'm not sure if you have to actually show up should you win the seat.
Before you can start exploring whether or not our actions are results of free will, you need to start by defining what, exactly, you mean by "free will". It is such a beautifully ambiguous term:-)
Assuming for the moment that Iraq was a mistake, it is almost certain that it is not a fatal one for the US. It may be fatal to one or more other nations, but that is beside the point. The US will survive this adventure financially and politically (even if it does take a hit from it). If Bush had made a decision that would spell disaster for the US, chances are he'd be caught by someone along the way. Historically, this has not always been the case with China. Now, these days we are seeing intermittent bursts of openness in Chinese media (such as a recent brief period during the chemicals spill incident), so perhaps they will be able to avoid this danger. Mind you, the great power given to the federal government in the US _is_ a danger along these lines. The more power that goes to Washington (and, in particular, the President), the larger the scope for making large-scale monumental blunders. It hasn't quite happened yet, but it certainly might. And they do say that one or two times during the cold war, we got uncomfortably close to just that sort of blunder.
While they can "just do it", this also means they can "just do" arbitrarily stupid and damaging things. Like the cultural revolution, perhaps, or back in the day when they decided to stop building ocean-going ships and ended up being colonized (well, almost) by Europe rather than the other way around. China will be in great shape so long as its supreme rulers keep making good decisions. It's a very fragile state of affairs however, and one small mistake can quickly cascade into a national catastrophe simply because no one dares point out that the Leader made a mistake.
Is it necessary that the invention described in a patent actually works as advertised? I wouldn't actually think so, since this would put an impossible burden on the patent examiner: he would have to build and test a machine that even the inventor may not yet have the finances to construct. Assuming that the invention doesn't actually have to work, then granting patents on perpetual motion machines is unproblematic. Indeed, it is useful since it can help prevent others from repeating the same mistakes and so allowing them to build a completely new and original non-functional machine.
As I understand it, it's the publishers that are complaining rather than the authors. What the publishers are seeing, I suppose, is that in the future, Google will do their job for them. As electronic distribution increases in popularity among your readers, traditional paper publishers will fade into obscurity and modern electronic publishers (e.g., Google) will take over the market. Of course, it's probably all the same for the/authors/ who is publishing their material, so long as they're doing a good job about it. This conflict isn't really about authors at all (except to use their right to profit etc. as ammunition in the debate). It's about protecting an entrenched market position.
The moment they went public, their defining philosophy turned into maximizing profits for their share holders in any way lawfully possible. This is incorrect. Their defining philosophy now, as before, is to keep their owners happy. Some owners will, as you imply, be happy only with companies that aggressively pursue profits. Others, including, presumably, most of Google's current owners, have other happiness-criteria. It can be conjectured that in due time, Google ownership will have changed around enough that the pure profit-seekers will have become the majority. If you want to make the case that this has already happened, that is exactly what you should try to do: make the case.
Bah, that's old news. I can already patent (should I be so inclined) exciting new innovations such as: "Fire, on the Internet" "Fire, on a mobile communications device" "Wheels, on the Internet" "Wheels, on a mobile communications device"
A guy who can write good stories is infinitely more valuable than one single of his stories will ever be. Shafting him as you describe is financially the wrong thing to do for the publisher. Therefore, it will not happen with sufficient frequency for it to be something worth worrying about. And, indeed, once this guy can find a proper publisher, he will release his first book with this publisher and chances are that quite a few people who bought from the first publisher will buy the "proper" version also. Book audiences are, I believe, somewhat more loyal than many give them credit for.
Retailers will want to have the book on the shelf on launch day. It is unacceptable to have it 1-2 weeks later when the copy mill has managed to crank out its clones. If you want launch day books, the only way to get this is to work with the authors. You will still get retailers that sell the clones, but they won't be getting the first day sales, they won't be getting the preorders and they won't be getting promotional deals with the authors (book-signing, etc.). They will still make money, of course, but so will the "proper" retailers.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a disease that causes 50% of your nutrient intake to go to waste because it's being deposited as fat by a virus, then you have two options:
1) Eat twice as much and become fat, or
2) Eat as little as before and be a nice, lean corpse within a couple of years.
This may be news to you, but running with considerably less nutrients than needed over an extended period of time _is_ a terminal condition.
It turns out that all attempts to domesticate the elk have been spectacular failures. If the mammoth was anything like the elephant, then destroying it would be a serious mistake as it is excellent for traction once properly trained. Perhaps not as ideal as donkeys and horsies, but far better than nothing. And in this context, moose and elk are both nothing :-)
The mastodon and mammoth were most likely made extinct from overhunting. This turned out pretty serious for the people who were hunting them as it left them without a lot of suitable mammals for food and traction. In the end, it meant that Spain overran and suppressed America rather than the other way around.
A universal death penalty would be much less effective than you think, and it would likely cause a rise in serious crimes. When all crimes are punishable by death, you will no longer see motorists just accepting a fine on the spot, or shop lifters accepting their sentence without appealing. Today, these things happen because the punishment they are facing is relatively small compared to the cost of going through with protests and appeals. When the sentence they are looking at is always death, then they will have the ultimate reason to put heaven and earth in motion to get off. The court system would be swamped with court cases (for fines and other that is usually handled with less protocol) and appeals (for all the desperate people who would otherwise just have sucked it up) and you'd be looking at a backlog of several decades. The end result is that even if you _did_ run a red light today and even if there _is_ ample evidence that you did so, your court date would be in 2042 and so it would still be a while before your execution.
In the mean time, the chaos caused by this mass of cases would make it much easier for serious criminals to fly below the radar. Since everyone does _something_ illegal every now and then (even if just whistling for yourself on the sidewalk after 10 in the evening), it would be clear to everyone that they are up for execution should anyone find out. Since they're practically doomed anyway, they might as well make it worth their while and rob a bank or something.
More likely, though, you'd get a rebellion. You can certainly get killed for being a rebel, but hey, they'll kill you for jaywalking too so what's the big deal?
Who had to renounce their citizenship? Do you mean Padilla?
No, Yaser Hamdi. He was detained without charges for a number of years before they released him on condition of renouncing his US citizenship.
More here: http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/14/hamdi/
You referred to the lawyer providing doubt. If it's a civil case, then doubt isn't enough.
A secret law in a free country. Now that should give you pause. .)
Heh. What amuses _me_ (amuses because I'm a cynical bastard) is that a US federal organization (I have no idea which one) arrested a US citizen, held him illegally without providing legal counsel, without charging him with anything in particular and without even recognizing his human rights (much less any US constitutional rights), for an extended period of time, eventually concluded he probably wasn't all that dangerous anyway, and then finally released him on the explicit condition that he renounce his US citizenship. That this became publicly known and that no one in the US really cared much about it.
Not only do US citizens not have any rights in the practical sense these days, but they don't even seem to care about it in the least.
(The idealist in me is begging for someone to speak up and prove this story to be wrong in some important way . .
The judge in question may very well have seen it though. If so, he could presumably base his judgement upon it.
The interesting question then becomes: if the law is secret, then shouldn't the judgements based upon it also be secret? After all, as the quantity of judgements based upon the law start to pile up, it will become easier and easier to reverse-engineer the secret law from these judgements. The existence of secret laws practically requires the existence of secret judgements.
If I'm on a plane, I expect that everyone's been searched and no KNOWN terrorists are on board.
You may expect that, but not everyone will. Some will be happy to increase their privacy at the cost of a miniscule risk of becoming the victim of a hijacking.
The correct approach to this problem would have been to let the consumers work this out themselves. Let the airlines handle it as they will, and the market will soon work out if it's the ones with cavity searches or the ones with "only one carry-on handgun per passanger please" policies that survive. Or both for that matter.
The current approach leaves a taste of a control fetish more than of a desire to actually protect anyone from terrorism.
That may be the case. I recall a controversy about someone wanting to enforce copyright on a CD track with only silence, but I have no idea if that worked out or not. I rather hope it didn't. :-)
Anyway, if the **AA wanted to enforce copyright on the files, they would really only have to add some creative content to them. It should cost them no more than a few minutes to have some hack put together a few notes in a music program and put that in there in stead of blank files.
Someone should patent this business method . . .
1) Create "creative" content
2) Arrange to have it appear on P2P
3) Sue the hell out of everyone
4) $$$$
The plan seems to be lacking something though . . .
As I understand it, there isn't any actual nudity in the disabled minigame; just two clothed adults dry-humping eachother.
If you want nudity, you apparantly need to install the graphics for that yourself. They're not in the actual game files.
The whole thing seems very much like an early prototype that was deemed uninteresting and scrapped. Had it been intended as an easter egg, at least they would have added nude graphics to it.
I believe OJ was in a criminal case, while file sharing is a civil case? If so, many countries will apply a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard to the former but only a "preponderance of the evidence" standard to the latter. Therefore, less evidence is needed and more doubt is permitted when convicting someone of file sharing than when convicting them of murder.
On the other hand, if John Doe didn't realize that the actual files he was after were under copyright, and he ended up trading blank files, then presumably he could not be Ãpuished? First, he did not _intend_ to commit a crime and second, he did not _actually_ commit a crime . . . so ignorance can still be bliss :-)
What if you had one of those available? :-)
If the blank files were created by the **AA, they would hold the copyrights to them and so sharing them would violate copyright.
The most interesting defense in this case, of course, would be to point out that the files were placed on P2P by the copyright holders and so they gave an implicit permission to copy them. I'Ãm not sure if that would hold up but it would be interesting to see it tried
It seems to me that most stable nations have a two-party system.
I could name some one-party nations that have been remarkably stable over long periods of time. They even have the benefit of not throwing the nation into regular wars of opinion every four or five years when it's time to vote.
Anyway, the whole notion of political parties is at its core a corruption of the democratic ideal. You should vote for people (i.e., representatives), not parties. An ideal democracy would be an n-party system where n is potentially equal to the number of citizens(*). Of course, this represents some administrative difficulties that are difficult to overcome other than by introducing political parties. That's not a reason to overdo it though.
(*) - that is, if everyone was prepared to run for office. In my country (Norway) you can't legally refuse to run for parliament if you get nominated, but I'm not sure if you have to actually show up should you win the seat.
Before you can start exploring whether or not our actions are results of free will, you need to start by defining what, exactly, you mean by "free will". It is such a beautifully ambiguous term :-)
Sounds like a trademark suit. If so, then it is something else altogether.
Assuming for the moment that Iraq was a mistake, it is almost certain that it is not a fatal one for the US. It may be fatal to one or more other nations, but that is beside the point. The US will survive this adventure financially and politically (even if it does take a hit from it). If Bush had made a decision that would spell disaster for the US, chances are he'd be caught by someone along the way. Historically, this has not always been the case with China. Now, these days we are seeing intermittent bursts of openness in Chinese media (such as a recent brief period during the chemicals spill incident), so perhaps they will be able to avoid this danger.
Mind you, the great power given to the federal government in the US _is_ a danger along these lines. The more power that goes to Washington (and, in particular, the President), the larger the scope for making large-scale monumental blunders. It hasn't quite happened yet, but it certainly might. And they do say that one or two times during the cold war, we got uncomfortably close to just that sort of blunder.
While they can "just do it", this also means they can "just do" arbitrarily stupid and damaging things. Like the cultural revolution, perhaps, or back in the day when they decided to stop building ocean-going ships and ended up being colonized (well, almost) by Europe rather than the other way around.
China will be in great shape so long as its supreme rulers keep making good decisions. It's a very fragile state of affairs however, and one small mistake can quickly cascade into a national catastrophe simply because no one dares point out that the Leader made a mistake.
Is it necessary that the invention described in a patent actually works as advertised? I wouldn't actually think so, since this would put an impossible burden on the patent examiner: he would have to build and test a machine that even the inventor may not yet have the finances to construct.
Assuming that the invention doesn't actually have to work, then granting patents on perpetual motion machines is unproblematic. Indeed, it is useful since it can help prevent others from repeating the same mistakes and so allowing them to build a completely new and original non-functional machine.
As I understand it, it's the publishers that are complaining rather than the authors. What the publishers are seeing, I suppose, is that in the future, Google will do their job for them. As electronic distribution increases in popularity among your readers, traditional paper publishers will fade into obscurity and modern electronic publishers (e.g., Google) will take over the market. /authors/ who is publishing their material, so long as they're doing a good job about it. This conflict isn't really about authors at all (except to use their right to profit etc. as ammunition in the debate). It's about protecting an entrenched market position.
Of course, it's probably all the same for the
The moment they went public, their defining philosophy turned into maximizing profits for their share holders in any way lawfully possible.
This is incorrect. Their defining philosophy now, as before, is to keep their owners happy. Some owners will, as you imply, be happy only with companies that aggressively pursue profits. Others, including, presumably, most of Google's current owners, have other happiness-criteria.
It can be conjectured that in due time, Google ownership will have changed around enough that the pure profit-seekers will have become the majority. If you want to make the case that this has already happened, that is exactly what you should try to do: make the case.
Bah, that's old news. I can already patent (should I be so inclined) exciting new innovations such as:
"Fire, on the Internet"
"Fire, on a mobile communications device"
"Wheels, on the Internet"
"Wheels, on a mobile communications device"
A guy who can write good stories is infinitely more valuable than one single of his stories will ever be. Shafting him as you describe is financially the wrong thing to do for the publisher. Therefore, it will not happen with sufficient frequency for it to be something worth worrying about.
And, indeed, once this guy can find a proper publisher, he will release his first book with this publisher and chances are that quite a few people who bought from the first publisher will buy the "proper" version also. Book audiences are, I believe, somewhat more loyal than many give them credit for.
Retailers will want to have the book on the shelf on launch day. It is unacceptable to have it 1-2 weeks later when the copy mill has managed to crank out its clones. If you want launch day books, the only way to get this is to work with the authors.
You will still get retailers that sell the clones, but they won't be getting the first day sales, they won't be getting the preorders and they won't be getting promotional deals with the authors (book-signing, etc.). They will still make money, of course, but so will the "proper" retailers.