That only works so long as all the contents they check out (and therefore also share) is under MPAA "control". If any of those files are owned by other organisations, the defence no longer holds.
In which case the defence is simply to produce some IP of your own, stick very clear "Copyright All Rights Reserved" notices on them, pad them out with random data to look like music or movie files and upload them as "hellboy.zip" or "myperogative.mp3". For extra credit, the actual contents should match the name, e.g., a review of Hellboy and a commentary on Britney's fashion statement.
There are more alternatives than just to kill those that don't fit in. Off the top of my head, you could:
1) Deport them 2) Brainwash them 3) Ignore them 4) Institutionalize them
Now, option (3) deserves some attention as that is basically how we treat most misfits in the west. Whatever system you have, there will be people who feel they don't fit in or for some reason or other falls outside of the system. Unless they break any laws, we tend to ignore them and they tend to remain miserable. The same thing would happen in a communist society, except it would be a different group of people feeling out of place.
Now, the _real_ problem in a communist society is what to do with those few (heh) who can _not_ put away their personal ambitions and greed and decide to exploit the system for their own personal benefit. Humans being what they are, this is likely to include a majority of the population (or at the very least, a significant minority). As we have seen, this also tends to include whoever eventually ends up in charge. Until we have magical brain reading technology that can police everyone's motivations, communism seems somewhat of an unlikely prospect.
I believe there is some legislation regarding trade secrets and what happens to people that misappropriate them. In your case, Alice can clearly be to blame for spreading them but this may be adequately handled trough contractual legislation. I am not sure to what extent any recipients can be held accountable for receiving them though.
Secrecry and patenting are mutually exclusive. That's rather the point with patents.
One of the problems with patents is that a patent holder must effectively be given limited power to control what thoughts other people can legally have and make use of.
In a democracy, the problem with is that maybe not everyone wants us to . What do we do with those that don't?
Well, we have several hundred years of experience with that sort of problem now. Very rarely does any given political decision have 100% support in the voting public. We seem to be able to cope.
The old hebrews din nothing but take stories from older religions and piecing them together to make a religion of their own.
I really don't see how this is relevant at all to the question of whether or not the Hebrew god exists. Believing in god is a fundamentally irrational position and there is little chance you are going to make any dent in that by logical means. All logical refutations are trivially put to death by the sheer irrationality that is at the foundation of the religion.
As a case in point, all your refutation does is suggest that the people who did the collecting were prophets directed by god to pick all the right pieces from other religions so that the new Hebrew religion became the correct one.
Likewise, there is sporadic criticism of the fact that the modern translations of the bible are faulty in a number of places and that this invalidates modern Christian faiths. That is, when the bible was translated to latin or greek or whatever, lots of translation errors crept in. But all this does, in the irrational world of the religious zealot, is promote the translator to the status of prophet, reinterpreting the word of god under His direction. Thus, the bible wasn't mangled in the translation, it was updated.
I believe that the best way to unprogram Christians is probably to teach them critical thinking, not to try and argue against their delusions.
The problem is that a subset of the religious crowd insist on taking the bible literally. And since it nowhere says explicitly that "and God told them that He was in charge of Evolution and when they asked Him what Evolution was He said unto them: ask you the great prophet Darwin who shall walk the earth and give you great knowledge of My grand designs", it's a no-go from the start.
A more sensible Christian might be closer to Thomas Aquinas and reserve only a few topics for unquestionable faith (e.g., the trinity, the sacraments, judgement day, etc.) and leave the easily disprovable topics to the realm of science. This way, at least he may be able to avoid insanity. And, as you point out, he is now in the desirable position where he can attribute all of existence's clever bits to his god.
You know, this could really take off. I can see drivers' training text books, with appropriate stickers adorning the sections on keeping distance and explaining braking lengths vs speed: "Remember, the theory of physics is only a theory, not a fact. There are competing theories saying that when you hit the brakes, the vehicle may come to an complete and immediate halt regardless of prior speed. Keep an open mind when you're speeding along the highway!"
Moreover, one might observe that the proposed unlikely event is in fact "life evolved out of chemical goo". It is _not_ "life evolved out of checmical goo _on Earth_". That it happened on our planet is not a coincidence at all - after all, if it had not, the question would never have been posed in the first place. Since the question cannot be posed on a planet where life happened to not evolve, the fact that it happened on "our" planet is a given.
Therefore, scale the probability of life evolving on an Earth-like planet by the number of Earth-like planets in the universe (likely to be a lot) and it's not at all amazing that it happened in at least one place. I'm not even sure it should be limited to only Earth-like planets.
While it may be technically correct to call the theory of evolution only a theory, you cannot include a message such as this in a science textbook without considering the target audience of the message. More likely than not, the target audience is not a bunch of scientists, but rather a bunch of kids who have not had a thorough introduction into the rigorous definition of "theory" in a scientific context. In stead, the target audience considers a "theory" to be something highly speculative. This is not consistent with the technical meaning of the word and so the message is highly likely to be misunderstood by the target audience. As such, the message is highly misleading and should be either removed or reworded.
I might add that if we should disregard the vocabulary of the target audience when writing text books, we might as well write them in Sumerian. Then at least they won't be doing much harm.
RF doesn't penetrate into metal; it travels along the outer surface of it. A Faraday cage completely encloses a volume and since there is no way for RF waves of the outer surface to travel to the inner surface (short of travelling through the metal, which they can't), the inner volume is shielded from the RF. A Faraday cage can have holes in it, but the bigger the holes, the more RF is let through. There is a relationship between the size of the holes and the wavelengths that seep through so if you know which wavelengths you want to keep out, you can tailor your cage to match your requirements. A simple Faraday cage experiment is to wrap your mobile phone in tin foil and try calling it.
Ignore the political biases of the Global Warming crowd, ignore everything but blatent self interest, and unless you want to be laughed at you must admit that scientists are human and subject to act in their self interest. At this point in the game, if someone DID debunk Global Warming and managed to get published, how many climatologists would still have careers since every last one of them has staked their professional reputations on this theory being fact? No, at this point is is illogical to expect reason from the scientists on this issue. Religion clouded their judgement and now they are in too deep to even consider whether they were wrong.
This exact argument can be used against _any_ well established scientific theory and if it had any significant amount of truth to it, it would seriously impede the progress of science from faulty theories to more correct theories. Yet, Newton's model of physics got suitably debunked by scientists mysteriously not afraid of losing their funding or destroying their careers. Bohr's model of the atom got suitably debunked by scientists mysteriously not afraid of losing their funding or destroying their careers.
What you seem unable to grasp is the fact that the scientific community values progress and the search for truth above just about anything else. An erroneous view simply isn't going to survive long in that kind of an environment once a superior view is presented.
In fact, if an established climatologist were to successfully disprove global warming, he would make such a name and such a career for himself so as to rival the likes of Einstein and Hawking in recognition. What self-centered, career-climbing, funding-driven scientist would pass up such an opportunity? And yet, they don't publish any such material - because they haven't actually found it.
There are no humans living in the air, or under water, or in space. We occasionally go there for brief periods of time but we cannot yet remain there on a permanent basis. There has been little or no development towards permanent habitation of the skies. There may have been a little more hope for permanent habitation of the seas but we appear to be moving towards increased robotization of subsea activities rather than placing people there to oversee things. Perhaps the international space station will help us develop technology for permanent habitation of space - who knows - but we're certainly not there yet.
All scientists once believed the Earth was flat, was supported on pillars or carried by Atlas etc. Ah, I see your problem. You are confusing "scientists" with "religious nuts". The former base their theories on observations and critical thinking while the latter just go on wonky rants for no reason whatsoever.
The point is rather that technical terms and jargon are largely meaningless in the context of this debate, as we are debating a PR stunt aimed at a mass audience. In the terminology accepted by his target audience, "Linux" is an operating system. "Kernel" is something you find in fruit. To the extent that we are actually going to discuss the message sent and how the target audience receives it, therefore, it is correct to base the discussion on the assumption that the term "Linux" encompasses everything that is included in a Red Hat distro. It may not be technically correct, but that has never stopped PR people nor people at large. We _could_ also be discussing how technical terms tend to get broader and more fuzzy meanings when used by non-technical people, of course. It would be a mistake, however, to tack the very narrow technical meanings on the the words used in the statement and interpret the contents from those definitions. This would not correspond with how the message was meant when written and it would not correspond with how it will be interpreted in the target audience.
We tend to put that information into the tooltip. Of course, that means you need to hover the mouse over the menu option to learn why it's unavailable so keyboard-only users still have the problem. It seems like a decent compromise, given that we don't want to break normal GUI conventions too much (i.e., we don't want to change grayed-out components to be keyboard navigable). Perhaps we should patent the technique:-)
If you do continuous save, or any kind of automatic backup saving, you basically need to always save to a fresh file and keep the previous file hanging around until you're sure your new save was successful. Failure to do so will result in the problem you bring up. This isn't a problem with automatic saving as such, it's a problem with faulty implementations of the concept. I doubt many applications would cause noticable performance degradations these days just by doing automatic saving. Save for a few specialty applications, there are more than enough idle cycles hanging around to do that work while the user picks his nose.
For reasonably small networks (up to a couple hundred units), I agree. And also for networks that don't really matter all that much (100,000 units running SETI@home), ditto. When you get a really large network that is critical to your operation, however, then the cost is well worth considering. The cost will tend to be large, but it is mostly dependant upon the number of different systems you wish to support. It is not all that dependant upon the number of units in your network. If your network is really large, therefore, the cost will tend to be very small compared to overall maintenance expenses. You main problem, of course, will be applications. You will need to find and use applications that can interoperate between different operating systems. For a system of this size, it is plausible that it might be possible to sink some money into finding cross-platform solutions that cover your needs. Smaller organisations might find this economically infeasible. As for your highway example, building multiple redundant highways is generally unnecessary because in the case of a major accident clogging the highway, there will always be smaller roads in the area through which traffic can be rerouted while the highway is cleared. If this redundance weren't already present, one would be well advised to consider explicit development of a redundant system. The same goes for power plants. The power system in your country will generally be so interconnected that if one single plant goes down, other plants will cover for it while it recovers. The redundancy is therefore already there. Were it not, then, yes, most civilian planners would consider the risk and I believe many of them would go for the redundant solution.
Slashdot Mirror
That only works so long as all the contents they check out (and therefore also share) is under MPAA "control". If any of those files are owned by other organisations, the defence no longer holds.
:-)
In which case the defence is simply to produce some IP of your own, stick very clear "Copyright All Rights Reserved" notices on them, pad them out with random data to look like music or movie files and upload them as "hellboy.zip" or "myperogative.mp3". For extra credit, the actual contents should match the name, e.g., a review of Hellboy and a commentary on Britney's fashion statement.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice
Top support to _their paying customers_ I expect, not top support to foreign companies trying to inconvenience same customers ...
There are more alternatives than just to kill those that don't fit in. Off the top of my head, you could:
1) Deport them
2) Brainwash them
3) Ignore them
4) Institutionalize them
Now, option (3) deserves some attention as that is basically how we treat most misfits in the west. Whatever system you have, there will be people who feel they don't fit in or for some reason or other falls outside of the system. Unless they break any laws, we tend to ignore them and they tend to remain miserable. The same thing would happen in a communist society, except it would be a different group of people feeling out of place.
Now, the _real_ problem in a communist society is what to do with those few (heh) who can _not_ put away their personal ambitions and greed and decide to exploit the system for their own personal benefit. Humans being what they are, this is likely to include a majority of the population (or at the very least, a significant minority). As we have seen, this also tends to include whoever eventually ends up in charge. Until we have magical brain reading technology that can police everyone's motivations, communism seems somewhat of an unlikely prospect.
Mother Nature's code was, is, and will be GPL.
:-)
No, it's BSD, which is why there is a problem.
I agree that we don't particularly disagree.
I believe there is some legislation regarding trade secrets and what happens to people that misappropriate them. In your case, Alice can clearly be to blame for spreading them but this may be adequately handled trough contractual legislation. I am not sure to what extent any recipients can be held accountable for receiving them though.
Secrecry and patenting are mutually exclusive. That's rather the point with patents.
One of the problems with patents is that a patent holder must effectively be given limited power to control what thoughts other people can legally have and make use of.
In a democracy, the problem with is that maybe not everyone wants us to . What do we do with those that don't?
Well, we have several hundred years of experience with that sort of problem now. Very rarely does any given political decision have 100% support in the voting public. We seem to be able to cope.
The old hebrews din nothing but take stories from older religions and piecing them together to make a religion of their own.
I really don't see how this is relevant at all to the question of whether or not the Hebrew god exists. Believing in god is a fundamentally irrational position and there is little chance you are going to make any dent in that by logical means. All logical refutations are trivially put to death by the sheer irrationality that is at the foundation of the religion.
As a case in point, all your refutation does is suggest that the people who did the collecting were prophets directed by god to pick all the right pieces from other religions so that the new Hebrew religion became the correct one.
Likewise, there is sporadic criticism of the fact that the modern translations of the bible are faulty in a number of places and that this invalidates modern Christian faiths. That is, when the bible was translated to latin or greek or whatever, lots of translation errors crept in. But all this does, in the irrational world of the religious zealot, is promote the translator to the status of prophet, reinterpreting the word of god under His direction. Thus, the bible wasn't mangled in the translation, it was updated.
I believe that the best way to unprogram Christians is probably to teach them critical thinking, not to try and argue against their delusions.
The problem is that a subset of the religious crowd insist on taking the bible literally. And since it nowhere says explicitly that "and God told them that He was in charge of Evolution and when they asked Him what Evolution was He said unto them: ask you the great prophet Darwin who shall walk the earth and give you great knowledge of My grand designs", it's a no-go from the start.
A more sensible Christian might be closer to Thomas Aquinas and reserve only a few topics for unquestionable faith (e.g., the trinity, the sacraments, judgement day, etc.) and leave the easily disprovable topics to the realm of science. This way, at least he may be able to avoid insanity. And, as you point out, he is now in the desirable position where he can attribute all of existence's clever bits to his god.
There's no shortage of accepted murder in the bible. Of course, most of it is done by god so I suppose that makes it ok.
...
But then, I never really could figure out why early Christians decided to hang on to so much of the old testament
You know, this could really take off. I can see drivers' training text books, with appropriate stickers adorning the sections on keeping distance and explaining braking lengths vs speed: "Remember, the theory of physics is only a theory, not a fact. There are competing theories saying that when you hit the brakes, the vehicle may come to an complete and immediate halt regardless of prior speed. Keep an open mind when you're speeding along the highway!"
This raises two questions:
1) Does the theory of evolution require that organisms should become "more complex"?
2) What does "more complex" mean, exactly?
It would be more interesting to investigate if the percentage of religious soldiers has increased since they're the ones doing the dying (or not).
Every creature is between evolutionary states.
:-)
With the possible exception of the last few dodos?
Moreover, one might observe that the proposed unlikely event is in fact "life evolved out of chemical goo". It is _not_ "life evolved out of checmical goo _on Earth_". That it happened on our planet is not a coincidence at all - after all, if it had not, the question would never have been posed in the first place. Since the question cannot be posed on a planet where life happened to not evolve, the fact that it happened on "our" planet is a given.
Therefore, scale the probability of life evolving on an Earth-like planet by the number of Earth-like planets in the universe (likely to be a lot) and it's not at all amazing that it happened in at least one place. I'm not even sure it should be limited to only Earth-like planets.
While it may be technically correct to call the theory of evolution only a theory, you cannot include a message such as this in a science textbook without considering the target audience of the message. More likely than not, the target audience is not a bunch of scientists, but rather a bunch of kids who have not had a thorough introduction into the rigorous definition of "theory" in a scientific context. In stead, the target audience considers a "theory" to be something highly speculative. This is not consistent with the technical meaning of the word and so the message is highly likely to be misunderstood by the target audience. As such, the message is highly misleading and should be either removed or reworded.
I might add that if we should disregard the vocabulary of the target audience when writing text books, we might as well write them in Sumerian. Then at least they won't be doing much harm.
RF doesn't penetrate into metal; it travels along the outer surface of it. A Faraday cage completely encloses a volume and since there is no way for RF waves of the outer surface to travel to the inner surface (short of travelling through the metal, which they can't), the inner volume is shielded from the RF.
A Faraday cage can have holes in it, but the bigger the holes, the more RF is let through. There is a relationship between the size of the holes and the wavelengths that seep through so if you know which wavelengths you want to keep out, you can tailor your cage to match your requirements.
A simple Faraday cage experiment is to wrap your mobile phone in tin foil and try calling it.
Ignore the political biases of the Global Warming crowd, ignore everything but blatent self interest, and unless you want to be laughed at you must admit that scientists are human and subject to act in their self interest. At this point in the game, if someone DID debunk Global Warming and managed to get published, how many climatologists would still have careers since every last one of them has staked their professional reputations on this theory being fact? No, at this point is is illogical to expect reason from the scientists on this issue. Religion clouded their judgement and now they are in too deep to even consider whether they were wrong.
This exact argument can be used against _any_ well established scientific theory and if it had any significant amount of truth to it, it would seriously impede the progress of science from faulty theories to more correct theories. Yet, Newton's model of physics got suitably debunked by scientists mysteriously not afraid of losing their funding or destroying their careers. Bohr's model of the atom got suitably debunked by scientists mysteriously not afraid of losing their funding or destroying their careers.
What you seem unable to grasp is the fact that the scientific community values progress and the search for truth above just about anything else. An erroneous view simply isn't going to survive long in that kind of an environment once a superior view is presented.
In fact, if an established climatologist were to successfully disprove global warming, he would make such a name and such a career for himself so as to rival the likes of Einstein and Hawking in recognition. What self-centered, career-climbing, funding-driven scientist would pass up such an opportunity? And yet, they don't publish any such material - because they haven't actually found it.
There are no humans living in the air, or under water, or in space. We occasionally go there for brief periods of time but we cannot yet remain there on a permanent basis.
There has been little or no development towards permanent habitation of the skies. There may have been a little more hope for permanent habitation of the seas but we appear to be moving towards increased robotization of subsea activities rather than placing people there to oversee things.
Perhaps the international space station will help us develop technology for permanent habitation of space - who knows - but we're certainly not there yet.
All scientists once believed the Earth was flat, was supported on pillars or carried by Atlas etc.
Ah, I see your problem. You are confusing "scientists" with "religious nuts". The former base their theories on observations and critical thinking while the latter just go on wonky rants for no reason whatsoever.
The point is rather that technical terms and jargon are largely meaningless in the context of this debate, as we are debating a PR stunt aimed at a mass audience. In the terminology accepted by his target audience, "Linux" is an operating system. "Kernel" is something you find in fruit.
To the extent that we are actually going to discuss the message sent and how the target audience receives it, therefore, it is correct to base the discussion on the assumption that the term "Linux" encompasses everything that is included in a Red Hat distro. It may not be technically correct, but that has never stopped PR people nor people at large.
We _could_ also be discussing how technical terms tend to get broader and more fuzzy meanings when used by non-technical people, of course. It would be a mistake, however, to tack the very narrow technical meanings on the the words used in the statement and interpret the contents from those definitions. This would not correspond with how the message was meant when written and it would not correspond with how it will be interpreted in the target audience.
Norway is mostly mountains.
We tend to put that information into the tooltip. Of course, that means you need to hover the mouse over the menu option to learn why it's unavailable so keyboard-only users still have the problem. It seems like a decent compromise, given that we don't want to break normal GUI conventions too much (i.e., we don't want to change grayed-out components to be keyboard navigable). :-)
Perhaps we should patent the technique
If you do continuous save, or any kind of automatic backup saving, you basically need to always save to a fresh file and keep the previous file hanging around until you're sure your new save was successful. Failure to do so will result in the problem you bring up. This isn't a problem with automatic saving as such, it's a problem with faulty implementations of the concept.
I doubt many applications would cause noticable performance degradations these days just by doing automatic saving. Save for a few specialty applications, there are more than enough idle cycles hanging around to do that work while the user picks his nose.
For reasonably small networks (up to a couple hundred units), I agree. And also for networks that don't really matter all that much (100,000 units running SETI@home), ditto. When you get a really large network that is critical to your operation, however, then the cost is well worth considering. The cost will tend to be large, but it is mostly dependant upon the number of different systems you wish to support. It is not all that dependant upon the number of units in your network. If your network is really large, therefore, the cost will tend to be very small compared to overall maintenance expenses. You main problem, of course, will be applications. You will need to find and use applications that can interoperate between different operating systems. For a system of this size, it is plausible that it might be possible to sink some money into finding cross-platform solutions that cover your needs. Smaller organisations might find this economically infeasible.
As for your highway example, building multiple redundant highways is generally unnecessary because in the case of a major accident clogging the highway, there will always be smaller roads in the area through which traffic can be rerouted while the highway is cleared. If this redundance weren't already present, one would be well advised to consider explicit development of a redundant system.
The same goes for power plants. The power system in your country will generally be so interconnected that if one single plant goes down, other plants will cover for it while it recovers. The redundancy is therefore already there. Were it not, then, yes, most civilian planners would consider the risk and I believe many of them would go for the redundant solution.