What's been ruled is that in some situations, the API itself is not copyrightable. That is, I can take an API that you wrote and implement a compatible version of that for my product.
This ruling has nothing to do with access to the API on a particular device/software. You still need to have Apple's permission to write something for iOS, though you can (probably - IANAL) build a compatible version of CocoaTouch for yourPhone...
You do realize that you're talking about Dino-times there, don't you?
When CO2 levels were significantly higher, the order of the world was megafauna and an entirely different ecosystem. One in which there were no human beings, and in which human beings couldn't survive.
Joking aside, too much of anything in the environment is pollution. Increasing the water content in, say, a brackish water swamp or backwater would make difficult conditions for certain life-forms that require a particular salinity to survive. Stuff like shellfish, certain fish, etc. which are eaten by birds. If the salinity is too high, the eggs don't hatch, and the birds are left without food. Ecosystem collapse due to DHMO pollution!
Others claim that the amount of this toxin ingested - a few micrograms - is insufficient to make any difference to such large mammals that usually weigh upto 100 kilos and beyond.
Think of EVERY SINGLE medicine or drug in the world! Your dosage is usually in exactly the same ratio to your body mass as CO2 in the atmosphere - that is to say, it's in parts per million. Yet, they produce powerful, often fast-acting effects in the body.
The climate system is similarly complex. A "small" change in one of its components can produce powerful, fast-acting feedbacks. I think that should be fairly obvious!
The point is that a change in composition of 0.01% is actually quite high for CO2. What you should be looking at is the amount of forcing it introduces into the system per unit of change, not how big or small the change is. Take a look here. Your intuition is irrelevant. Model and actual results matter.
Again, what I'd like to see is some real data from your side, in the place of passive-aggressiveness, insults and wild speculation in support of not doing anything.
This conversation just becomes one-sided; every time we provide data, you just go on a tangent without addressing the issues involved.
The reason I picked CO2 and sulphur is that both were available on gapminder. If I want other pollutants, I'd have to hunt a lot deeper, and then the conversation would be stale. I'm all for looking at more data if we can find it.
Again, it's not my argument that the rest of the world needs to do nothing. I'm just saying that the guy I replied to was fundamentally saying that the US needs to do nothing. That, I think is specious.
In any case, I showed two - CO2 and sulphur, which are both correlated quite well. I don't have the data to dig up on other pollutants, but my expectation is that the others will correlate too.
Look, I'm in no way claiming that India or China (or any other place) is perfect, but the the GP was saying that US pollution is a "blessing". I'm disputing that to show that the US is hardly perfect. I've argued elsewhere in this thread that we need stricter standards all around, not just the US. But the US has to do its bit too. Mutual suicide pacts are stupid!
The differences are about 1 billion tonnes, I think, give or take. Imagine if we could halve the US's per capita emissions - that's about 3 billion tonnes of CO2 right there!
Of course, I agree that reductions, especially for China, wouldn't be a bad thing, but let's not put the blame on just one country. The current ranking is something like 20% each for the US and China, 15% for the EU and India and Russia coming in far lower at 5%.
I assume you didn't read TFA, this being Slashdot and all... Second para down:
Some forms of pollution—especially light-colored aerosols such as sulfates that spew from power plants and volcanoes—scatter light back into space, cooling Earth. But dark aerosols, such as soot from diesel engines and power plants, absorb more sunlight than they scatter, gaining heat and warming the air around them. Rapidly developing countries, especially China, India, and those in southeastern Asia, are prolific sources of such aerosols. Over the past few decades, the pall hanging over the region has come to be known as "the Asian brown cloud."
I do live in India, but I will not make a comparison to the US because I have never been there.
Compared to Japan and Europe (where I have been), I'd rank us somewhere in the middle - mostly because of Tokyo, which is something like the inside of a refinery smokestack...
But the numbers really do speak for themselves. The US is much higher than India per capita; and recall, much of this - CO2 especially, is invisible. Visible particulates, I'd have to go search for the numbers...
And its a gift to the rest of the world. Our emissions are actually quite clean; I"ll bet first world car exhaust is safer to breathe than 3rd world standard air.
Did you just literally say that your shit smells like roses?
The US is in the top bracket of polluting countries! Check this out...
Taking just CO2, the US is four times higher per capita, but China's higher overall. Same story with Sulphur... Here, the US is about 3 times as much as China.
In both cases, India is far behind both the US and China.
Again, let me repeat that our country is so clean that our piddly bit of pollution is cleaner than daily life in these countries.
Its a blessing to them to get our exhaust gasses. Its like manna from the gods.
The highest per-capita emissions, and the second highest totals - that's some pretty interesting mana you gods are giving us!
And now don't switch tactics and try to claim that it's necessary for your standard of living; just look at the UK and Germany with far lower levels of both CO2 and Sulphur per capita. It's possible, as long as you give your SUVs up.
Who said anything about wood fires? I'd say that a large proportion of the population uses Kerosene, and a smaller minority uses LPG (basically methane, IIRC)...
I think most of the pollution per se comes from the millions of vehicles on the roads; inefficient roads designed for much smaller loads - mostly pedestrians and the occasional bullock cart. A good portion comes from industry, and a (very) small percentage from people cooking, whether over wood or otherwise.
Anyway, reading TFA (yeah, I know), it seems to me that what they're talking about is the potential for effects if emissions go up another 6-10 times by 2024; a scenario that may well happen, but I don't know...
And Valhalla will burn, the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu will appear and destroy the wicked, and "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift sword against nation and they will no longer study warfare"...
Yeah, yeah! Show me practical nuclear fusion first...
To quote an Indian-born programmmer friend of mine (who grew up from age 2 here in an afluent "western" country), after he went back there recently for a visit, "a lot of people still shit in the ditch there".
That kind of said it all to me.
Yes, but it's not like people aren't aware that this isn't the best thing to do.
The problem is that infrastructure development takes time and effort and vision. What we've got is a bunch of do-gooders and money-grubbing politicians. And a few people like Sreedharan who are really trying to do the right thing!
In the meantime, there's no reason we can't work towards both sanitation and Internet freedom, don't you? One of the advantages of a huge population is that we can split the work-load to different groups!
It's the ruling Indian Congress Party which is supporting moves to crack down on the internet, because they view the internet as a threat to their continued rule. The Indian Congress Party likes to outwardly market itself to the world as democratic, but inwardly they really want a One Party State, with a mere token opposition as a figleaf.
I won't pretend that certain politicians *cough*Chidu*cough* wouldn't have wet dreams, but that's hardly the reality; their current standing is below even a simple majority, and they need coalition partners to survive. These coalition partners are basically a bunch of regionals who have their own agendas, and probably aren't that strong in the states anyway (DMK was booted out of power, for example. They won't get much in the next General Elections). They're also notoriously unreliable and difficult to control (Trinamool). I think I just named the two biggest members of the UPA besides the INC.
This government is being propped up by strange deals with "outside supporters" like the Samajwadi, who aren't reliable in the best of circumstances, and now? Ha!
The ruling party has been making a lot of predatory moves since it took office - like trying to get its own men onto the Election Commission, which under the constitution is supposed to be an independent oversight body for elections. They've also brought in dubious new inventions like Electronic Voting Machines, which they claim will allow elections to be conducted more efficiently, but which could dangerously be used to rig votes, since they could easily be tampered with while offering no paper trail.
The EC is appointed "by the President" according to the constitution. This (India being a Westminister-style democracy) effectively means by the Cabinet. The interesting thing is that one of the strongest ECs (Gopalaswami) was appointed during the Congress tenure! To be fair, they also appointed Chawla, who's a rat's ass...
The EVMs were introduced (on the national level) in the 2004 General Election, when the BJP was in power. But thanks for playing that game anyway...
The Congress Party has increasingly been using the courts to harass members of political opposition parties, even while blocking any criminal investigation into their own party members.
Kalmadi investigation was blocked? Spectrum was blocked?
Yeah, they try to defend their own people and vilify their opposition. Which political party doesn't? The BJP tried the same tactics in Karnataka and are in trouble over it...
The ruling party also wants to create new security agencies which are directly under the control of the central govt where the party currently holds power, while diminishing the rights of the states.
Um, they haven't exactly been successful, have they? Anyway, sharing of intelligence on a national level may not be a bad thing, if we can enforce separation from the politicians...
They are doing all these things because they want to keep themselves in power in perpetuity.
Which is the end-game of every political party...
Oh, and this is the same party that invokes Mahatma Gandhi's name at every opportunity, since they figure that by doing so, it gives them unlimited carte blanche to do whatever they want. They're just trying to keep India safely in the arms of Gandhi, you see.:p
Which party wouldn't tout its most famous leader?
They also have enough opposition from the actual Gandhian community.
Anyway, they haven't been very successful in the last couple of decades, have they? I count the VP Singh government, the 3rd front government in the late 90s, two bouts of BJP/NDA rule, and three of Congress rule. Not something that screams "one party state", eh?
Don't forget 3: It plays to a LOT of prejudices of the target audience - a black Democrat as president - the core audience for the lie was probably looking for anything that would justify it not being so...
Apparently you think it's not that difficult to fool Slashdot either; that PDF's a bunch of mails about reviewing Enterprise Java Beans and whether they should help Sun or not. Not a word about security or the Internet, or for that matter, Windows NT in there!
Slashdot Mirror
Fantastic reading comprehension!
What's been ruled is that in some situations, the API itself is not copyrightable. That is, I can take an API that you wrote and implement a compatible version of that for my product.
This ruling has nothing to do with access to the API on a particular device/software. You still need to have Apple's permission to write something for iOS, though you can (probably - IANAL) build a compatible version of CocoaTouch for yourPhone...
You do realize that you're talking about Dino-times there, don't you?
When CO2 levels were significantly higher, the order of the world was megafauna and an entirely different ecosystem. One in which there were no human beings, and in which human beings couldn't survive.
Joking aside, too much of anything in the environment is pollution. Increasing the water content in, say, a brackish water swamp or backwater would make difficult conditions for certain life-forms that require a particular salinity to survive. Stuff like shellfish, certain fish, etc. which are eaten by birds. If the salinity is too high, the eggs don't hatch, and the birds are left without food. Ecosystem collapse due to DHMO pollution!
If I may be permitted to make an analogy:
There's a certain chemical, (6aR,9R)- N,N- diethyl- 7-methyl- 4,6,6a,7,8,9- hexahydroindolo- [4,3-fg] quinoline- 9-carboxamide, which some claim produces hallucinations and other related physical and psychological effects in large mammals.
Others claim that the amount of this toxin ingested - a few micrograms - is insufficient to make any difference to such large mammals that usually weigh upto 100 kilos and beyond.
Think of EVERY SINGLE medicine or drug in the world! Your dosage is usually in exactly the same ratio to your body mass as CO2 in the atmosphere - that is to say, it's in parts per million. Yet, they produce powerful, often fast-acting effects in the body.
The climate system is similarly complex. A "small" change in one of its components can produce powerful, fast-acting feedbacks. I think that should be fairly obvious!
The point is that a change in composition of 0.01% is actually quite high for CO2. What you should be looking at is the amount of forcing it introduces into the system per unit of change, not how big or small the change is. Take a look here. Your intuition is irrelevant. Model and actual results matter.
Again, what I'd like to see is some real data from your side, in the place of passive-aggressiveness, insults and wild speculation in support of not doing anything.
This conversation just becomes one-sided; every time we provide data, you just go on a tangent without addressing the issues involved.
Poor scaling... Take a look at a zoomed-in-version
The reason I picked CO2 and sulphur is that both were available on gapminder. If I want other pollutants, I'd have to hunt a lot deeper, and then the conversation would be stale. I'm all for looking at more data if we can find it.
Again, it's not my argument that the rest of the world needs to do nothing. I'm just saying that the guy I replied to was fundamentally saying that the US needs to do nothing. That, I think is specious.
It's one of the most worrying, long-term.
In any case, I showed two - CO2 and sulphur, which are both correlated quite well. I don't have the data to dig up on other pollutants, but my expectation is that the others will correlate too.
Look, I'm in no way claiming that India or China (or any other place) is perfect, but the the GP was saying that US pollution is a "blessing". I'm disputing that to show that the US is hardly perfect. I've argued elsewhere in this thread that we need stricter standards all around, not just the US. But the US has to do its bit too. Mutual suicide pacts are stupid!
Every time you deniers "call us on it", we link again and again and again to the real science. You ask for the data, the data is available. You cast aspersions on the data, and it's independently verified. You fund studies meant to show that there's no warming, the study shows that there really is warming.
When we "call you on it", you disappear into the woods.
The differences are about 1 billion tonnes, I think, give or take. Imagine if we could halve the US's per capita emissions - that's about 3 billion tonnes of CO2 right there!
Of course, I agree that reductions, especially for China, wouldn't be a bad thing, but let's not put the blame on just one country. The current ranking is something like 20% each for the US and China, 15% for the EU and India and Russia coming in far lower at 5%.
I assume you didn't read TFA, this being Slashdot and all... Second para down:
Some forms of pollution—especially light-colored aerosols such as sulfates that spew from power plants and volcanoes—scatter light back into space, cooling Earth. But dark aerosols, such as soot from diesel engines and power plants, absorb more sunlight than they scatter, gaining heat and warming the air around them. Rapidly developing countries, especially China, India, and those in southeastern Asia, are prolific sources of such aerosols. Over the past few decades, the pall hanging over the region has come to be known as "the Asian brown cloud."
I do live in India, but I will not make a comparison to the US because I have never been there.
Compared to Japan and Europe (where I have been), I'd rank us somewhere in the middle - mostly because of Tokyo, which is something like the inside of a refinery smokestack...
But the numbers really do speak for themselves. The US is much higher than India per capita; and recall, much of this - CO2 especially, is invisible. Visible particulates, I'd have to go search for the numbers...
And its a gift to the rest of the world. Our emissions are actually quite clean; I"ll bet first world car exhaust is safer to breathe than 3rd world standard air.
Did you just literally say that your shit smells like roses?
The US is in the top bracket of polluting countries! Check this out...
Taking just CO2, the US is four times higher per capita, but China's higher overall. Same story with Sulphur... Here, the US is about 3 times as much as China.
In both cases, India is far behind both the US and China.
Again, let me repeat that our country is so clean that our piddly bit of pollution is cleaner than daily life in these countries.
Its a blessing to them to get our exhaust gasses. Its like manna from the gods.
The highest per-capita emissions, and the second highest totals - that's some pretty interesting mana you gods are giving us!
And now don't switch tactics and try to claim that it's necessary for your standard of living; just look at the UK and Germany with far lower levels of both CO2 and Sulphur per capita. It's possible, as long as you give your SUVs up.
That's because the US at least has some standards, and not Chinese-style hypercapi... err sorry, I meant "Socialist Market Economy", of course...
Unholy between laissez-faire capitalists and totalitarian states rarely end well...
Who said anything about wood fires? I'd say that a large proportion of the population uses Kerosene, and a smaller minority uses LPG (basically methane, IIRC)...
I think most of the pollution per se comes from the millions of vehicles on the roads; inefficient roads designed for much smaller loads - mostly pedestrians and the occasional bullock cart. A good portion comes from industry, and a (very) small percentage from people cooking, whether over wood or otherwise.
Anyway, reading TFA (yeah, I know), it seems to me that what they're talking about is the potential for effects if emissions go up another 6-10 times by 2024; a scenario that may well happen, but I don't know...
And Valhalla will burn, the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu will appear and destroy the wicked, and "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift sword against nation and they will no longer study warfare"...
Yeah, yeah! Show me practical nuclear fusion first...
I'm burning my mod points, but I've got to ask; any citation of that
Keep in mind that correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
And then they send you goatse, if Slashdot's any indication...
If the measure of a troll is how seriously people take it, GP's doing very well...
*ahem*
Who divided the country, you mean...
Unless you're talking about Satyagraha, in which case that was one peaceful, disciplined "rampage" there...
We've got about 120 million Internet users in India. Chances are, a large proportion of those people would care...
That's larger than most countries, for those of you keeping track at home...
To quote an Indian-born programmmer friend of mine (who grew up from age 2 here in an afluent "western" country), after he went back there recently for a visit, "a lot of people still shit in the ditch there".
That kind of said it all to me.
Yes, but it's not like people aren't aware that this isn't the best thing to do.
The problem is that infrastructure development takes time and effort and vision. What we've got is a bunch of do-gooders and money-grubbing politicians. And a few people like Sreedharan who are really trying to do the right thing!
In the meantime, there's no reason we can't work towards both sanitation and Internet freedom, don't you? One of the advantages of a huge population is that we can split the work-load to different groups!
What a lot of crap in a single post!
It's the ruling Indian Congress Party which is supporting moves to crack down on the internet, because they view the internet as a threat to their continued rule. The Indian Congress Party likes to outwardly market itself to the world as democratic, but inwardly they really want a One Party State, with a mere token opposition as a figleaf.
I won't pretend that certain politicians *cough*Chidu*cough* wouldn't have wet dreams, but that's hardly the reality; their current standing is below even a simple majority, and they need coalition partners to survive. These coalition partners are basically a bunch of regionals who have their own agendas, and probably aren't that strong in the states anyway (DMK was booted out of power, for example. They won't get much in the next General Elections). They're also notoriously unreliable and difficult to control (Trinamool). I think I just named the two biggest members of the UPA besides the INC.
This government is being propped up by strange deals with "outside supporters" like the Samajwadi, who aren't reliable in the best of circumstances, and now? Ha!
The ruling party has been making a lot of predatory moves since it took office - like trying to get its own men onto the Election Commission, which under the constitution is supposed to be an independent oversight body for elections. They've also brought in dubious new inventions like Electronic Voting Machines, which they claim will allow elections to be conducted more efficiently, but which could dangerously be used to rig votes, since they could easily be tampered with while offering no paper trail.
The EC is appointed "by the President" according to the constitution. This (India being a Westminister-style democracy) effectively means by the Cabinet. The interesting thing is that one of the strongest ECs (Gopalaswami) was appointed during the Congress tenure! To be fair, they also appointed Chawla, who's a rat's ass...
The EVMs were introduced (on the national level) in the 2004 General Election, when the BJP was in power. But thanks for playing that game anyway...
The Congress Party has increasingly been using the courts to harass members of political opposition parties, even while blocking any criminal investigation into their own party members.
Kalmadi investigation was blocked? Spectrum was blocked?
Yeah, they try to defend their own people and vilify their opposition. Which political party doesn't? The BJP tried the same tactics in Karnataka and are in trouble over it...
The ruling party also wants to create new security agencies which are directly under the control of the central govt where the party currently holds power, while diminishing the rights of the states.
Um, they haven't exactly been successful, have they? Anyway, sharing of intelligence on a national level may not be a bad thing, if we can enforce separation from the politicians...
They are doing all these things because they want to keep themselves in power in perpetuity.
Which is the end-game of every political party...
Oh, and this is the same party that invokes Mahatma Gandhi's name at every opportunity, since they figure that by doing so, it gives them unlimited carte blanche to do whatever they want. They're just trying to keep India safely in the arms of Gandhi, you see. :p
Which party wouldn't tout its most famous leader?
They also have enough opposition from the actual Gandhian community.
Anyway, they haven't been very successful in the last couple of decades, have they? I count the VP Singh government, the 3rd front government in the late 90s, two bouts of BJP/NDA rule, and three of Congress rule. Not something that screams "one party state", eh?
Don't forget 3: It plays to a LOT of prejudices of the target audience - a black Democrat as president - the core audience for the lie was probably looking for anything that would justify it not being so...
Apparently you think it's not that difficult to fool Slashdot either; that PDF's a bunch of mails about reviewing Enterprise Java Beans and whether they should help Sun or not. Not a word about security or the Internet, or for that matter, Windows NT in there!
But anyway, thanks for playing...