Let's see - I'm on the record as qualified (Marksman or better, mostly a damned sight better) with M-16 (-A1 or -A2, either), SAW, M-203 grenade launcher, M72-A2 LAW (with coupler), M-2 and M-60 machine guns, the old M-3 "grease gun", and various.45 or 9 mm pistols. I'm 'familiarized' with a bunch of the more modern anti-tank weapons, machine guns, and a bunch of European equivalents too. Can I have one of each? (And really I should get a 1/4 share of an M1-A2 Abrams MBT too, as I've qualified in all four seats at various times. We could probably rotate that one, leave it parked in a different guy's driveway each month or something. So does my state need to start issueing driver's liscences for those?)
The RIAA would probably hate to sue everybody. There's that risk of getting people with enough money to fight it out in court and them setting a nasty precedent. Bust a senator's kid, and see if he listens to your lobbyists anymore.
Good answer, But it's not just about the 'privilege' of not being mugged. The land of sunshine and rainbows bit extends to a really sick utopian fantasyland where,
a. when poor people starve, there's no bodies left behind, and so no threat of diseases if nobody gets paid to bury them. They just neatly and tidily vanish, taking their slums with them. b. these poor will eventually lay down and die peacefully instead of trying to kill you to survive. c. middle class people like me defend our betters from these not so peaceful poor people for free, even though they want the rich dead more than us. d. the companies these taxpayers are invested in keep selling 20 million of this and 50 million of that even when only a few rich, frugal investors have any money for anything except absolute necessities.
I know a guy whos whole income for the last five years comes from stock in a 'bank' that runs nothing but check into cash places, and he bitches all the time about what a drain the poor are on the economy. I've heard the same from people who own parts of businesses marketing Jerry Springer videos, sports team jackets, fancy athletic shoes, or public lotteries. What is it with these people?
You know, those schools would probably be keeping more people from turning into muggers and crackheads if they weren't being increasingly geared towards turning out mindless consumer drones to keep a market for all that stuff poor people buy and a cheap work force to crank it out. Mindless drones don't really even make good consumers long term, let alone safe neighbors.
No, it's not. You have a sale of stock at $10.00, with a basis in the stock of, guess what, $10.00. Income is zero. Basis is normally determined by you picking either the opening or closing price for the day of purchase to work from, but there are several exceptions. Now try this. Your uncle leaves you 1,000 Linden-dollars, valued at a remarkable U.S. $173.37 when he dies. He purchased them when value was only U.S. $2.07. On the day the will was actually probated, they were back down to U.S. $2.07. Do you have investment income?
There's not anything directly under Department of Commerce's oversight duties, but there is something else under IRS and possibly its state equivalents that looks intriguing to me. (Warning: I am most seriously not a lawyer. I am a tax professional, but this is not my professional tax advice, it's mere speculation. I specifically have absolutely no knowledge of whether the IRS, or the taxation services of any U.S. states is/are currently considering any such interpretations or rulings as I discuss below. If you consider the following as investment advice, I can be held in no way responsible. That would be dumb, m'kay?)
Corporations normally enjoy advantagious tax status for just about all their investments, if for no other reason than because they can usually represent them as long term, and long term capital gains (over one year) has a much better base rate. If, however, IRS were to rule that selling a given domain name for a large markup was a pure 'windfall profit', this could in theory result in seperate windfall profit taxes, a higher base tax rate, and/or quite possibly even penalties on previous year's fileings. Costs of compliance with any such ruling would likely be entirely born by the corporation involved, and would likely need to be accomplished in no more than two quarters, with obvious risks to corporate liquidity and future profitability.
You ask (approximately) 'is there anything that says they can't?' - They still technically 'could', but under those circumstances, making money at it would be near impossible. Would such a ruling stand up long term, in tax court? Ask a fully trained legal specialist in the field, and if this impinges on your investment plans, my personal advice is to please make certain he or she is liscenced to practice both in your state or the state of incorporation and before the SEC and federal tax courts.
You're not argueing about passing on the business, you're argueing about passing on the business's patents forever. Nothing stops Paul McCartney right now from leaving his interest in Apple records to his heirs, and them to their's, and so on, forever, no matter how you change copyright law. Sir Paul gets to do all the things I can do. He can invest his money and make out a will leaving things to his kids (or to someone else). He can save when profits are high, and invest in other things besides his own creations if he chooses, and leave all that too.
So what's this got to do with creativity? Are you telling me you have a job where you don't do anything creative at all? Are you claiming my job isn't creative at all, without knowing what I do? Yet all I get to use to provide for my kid is normal things such as insurance, savings, a will, investments, anuities, etc. I don't get a copyright on everything I create, I get a paycheck.
Well, you could make that analogy, but does it hold? Maxwell's set of equations did predict some things its predecessors didn't, which I'll freely grant you also fits natural selection. Natural selection has explanitory power.
But Maxwell's equations don't make anything else that we have observational data on less probable. They do predict that if the nucleus of an atom fits something like the 'electron is a little thing, rapidly orbiting a bigger thing' model, there's a problem, and it takes quantum mechanics to give us a model different enough to overcome that problem, but we never had photos of an electron as a small discrete object, orbiting a larger nucleus as a planet orbits its sun. Even when this first became a 'crisis' in physics, many people simply proposed alternate models. People such as Einstein suggested that light had some sort of wave/particle duality by about 1906, and everybody was pretty patient until the 20's when it all shook down into QM.
Here, we have observations that do seem to dictate some probabilities. (for just one example, counting backwards, the period between artificial selection and sex being 'invented' is about 700-800 million years. The period between the 'invention' of sex and cell nucleation is longer, about 1.2 billion years. The period between the 'invention' of cells and DNA itself is longer again, about 1.6 billion years. We're trying to deal with the fact that data, such as lead/uranium isotope ratios, doesn't seem to allow enough time for the next step in that that sequence, let alone the half dozen steps we seem to think we need at minimum. The problem is, doing something analogous to QM here might involve claiming that the funamental physical laws were pretty seriously different on a macroscopic level, only about 4 billion years ago, well after the universe had settled down to being fundamentally as it is today. Unlike non-existant photos of orbital model electron structure, we have Hubble photos of honkin big objects we think are quite a bit more than 4 billion years old to argue against that, plus lots of red-shift data, spectroscopic comparisons, etc, that all have to be rewritten unless the universe has been functioning on our scale level pretty much like it does now, for about 12 billion years.
If all we've done with natural selection is make some things that once seemed improbable look more likely, but at a cost of making other things necessarily less likely, then a lot of people are drawing some very bad conclusions. That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it does make a lot of the interpretation flawed to completely bogus. It means professionals in the field have been saying things that are about as well grounded as all those half assed physics metaphors that compare QM to ancient Hindu teachings and Yogic sayings are in real physics.
I really don't want to get into a religious arguement, but as just one point, many agnostics have criticized the way religion sometimes seems to be in constant retreat, assigning God as a buzzword to cover whatever we can't explain without 'him' yet. As knowledge grows, the gaps get smaller, and so the need for a supernatural explanation shrinks. This is usually called the God of the Gaps arguement. But if we have explained one thing only by making another less explainable, overall human knowledge hasn't grown - instead the gap has gotten smaller in one area, but only by becoming proportionately bigger in another, so there goes the idea that the supernatural explanation may have looked valid for primative people but we don't need it as much any more.
Perhaps more fundamentally, if we can't reduce the gaps in human knowledge beyond a certain point, then what are we doing by doing science?
This same problem applies to many other ideas besides religious ones, such as progress. If we just made scientific progress by inventing the theory of natural selection, but we just
Bullshit? - great intelligent rebuttal there. Sorry, but that's precisely the point. Genes don't spread through a population in a single generation. They spread diferentially over tens of thousands of years or more and through millions or billions of organisms. Humans for example, tend to have about 0.34 mutant genes per organism, and only about 30,000 total genes. So in a population of 30 million humans, there are about 340 who get a mutation on the same gene (not necessarily the same mutation) in the same generation. Now as I've already pointed out for the learning impaired an advantagious gene has only a small positive effect on reproductive success. There has never been a single mutation that made every creature that had it 100% successful at reproducing and every one that didn't a 100% failure. Do the math from just those two factors, and it proves there absolutely have to be some cancelations, and we're just arguing over what it affects, not whether it exists.
While you're at it, I said that was just one reason, and referred you to Dawkins for others that are a little long to go into on slashdot. Did you read the assignment? Obviously not - to busy to pick up even a laymans idea of the subject before you opened your yap.
If what I am saying is true then bacteria mutate faster than humans (some bacteria, particularly the ones without ennucleated cells and no sexual reproduction). This means by my arguement they respond less quickly to selection pressure and so prokerotes and archaeobacteria don't evolve new types as fast as eukerotes, which is in fact precisely what happens. Duh! While we are at it, the genes in your mitochondria are not passed on from both parents, and they evolve much less quickly than the genes in your cell nuclei, again exactly as predicted. You are simply wrong. Go talk to a real biologist on this point - you are simply and utterly wrong. You don't have time to argue this point because you don't know jack about evolution or biology and think that the more rapidly evolving bacteria are the types which don't have sexual reproduction. You're confusing a lot of things here. Are you arguing that bacteria do evolve faster than humans, that is they need fewer generations to change than advanced organisms do? Remember they don't take 20 years between generations, more like 20 minutes, and maybe you'll see where you went off track. You're looking at organisms that don't have nearly the same numbers of genes or the same lifespans as multicelled creatures, and saying those tremendous differences produces no effects what-so-ever, so the effect this guy is talking about doesn't exist. While you're at it, what about bacterial sex? You do know that for bacteria, Sex and Reproduction are not likely to be the same thing? Don't you think being able to steal genes from entirely different species has some effect on how fast bacteria adapt to antibiotics and such?
In the end, you're argueing with me on the very point all reputable geneticists agree is true, not the point I derived from it that many disagree with. That makes you a crackpot with some weird non-standard model of evolution.
Yes - do not eat the Americium-241 in your smoke detector. Its half life is around 240 years, so it is not nearly as hot as the Po-210 we are talking about, but it's not good for you and might increase your 20 year down the road risk of colon cancer. It's also chemically toxic, about like lead, and the sulfate is pretty easily absorbable. Oh, and do not machine a spherical solid with over 60 Kg. mass of Americium 241 either. In those quantities it fissions like Plutonium or uranium. The only reason we don't make Nukes out of it is it takes more than Pu, and so costs a lot more.
No, it certainly isn't. But getting more self reliant and not letting the suspected poisoner keep his leverage does mean you have more options on how to deal with it.
Zeros and Fours man, zeros and fours. Alpha drops the isotope number by four, and changes the element name. Beta changes the number by zero, but also changes the element name. The whole chain is alpha and beta emissions. Now do you feel nitpicked?
Po-210 is a daughter product of Bi-210, by beta decay. Halflife for this is only about 5 days, so if you start with Bismuth-210, you will very rapidly get a material that is mostly polonium-210, and then the 138 day half-life for that is a choke point that will give you an increasing percentage of both Po-210 and Lead-206. Whoever is testing the Po-210 technically had to check for Bi-20, and Pb-210 to see if the original source was something higher up the chain. The didn't really need to test for Po-214, Bi-214 and other very short lived intermediates (and probably couldn't), but probably had to test for Radon-222, as that has a half-life of just less than 4 days, long enough for traces to remain if that's where the reaction started.
It's really a fascinating risk issue (although I'm sure fascinating is not a word a person on the receiving end would use). If someone was originally poisoned with anything above Lead-210, then whoever handled it had to act very quickly from isolating mostly pure any one form to delivery. Lead-210 is technically doable, but if some spy had to take it from a reactor to the target, would be half decayed to Po-210 by the time he could get there. Po-210 is the first step in the chain where you have something relatively hot, but not decaying so quickly that refining a relatively pure amount is near impossible, and at the same time, for the same reasons, it's the first place in the chain where the refined substance would be optimally safe to handle for long enough to carry it to the target and deploy it.
Natural Selection has EVERYTHING to do with the First Spark of Life".
1. Standard evolutionary theory says that a lower mutation rate, (down to some minimum that is greater than zero) actually increases selection speed. That sounds counter-intuitive, but it is straight from Dawkins and similar sources. One reason here is that mutations are occuring in organisms that are already pretty close to perfectly adapted to their environments or they'd be dead. The few mutations that are improvements are generally small improvements, that take generations of testing to prosper. A high enough mutation rate, and a new mutation overwrites the last one before the first had time to be tested. To see this a little more clearly, just imagine a mutation that makes an annual type plant a little better able to resist drought. If droughts only happen in that area about every 20 years, the mutation only helps a carrier survive every twenty generations or so. There are several other arguements for this point, which can be found in the Dawkin's The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker, or in a typical college textbook on the subject.
(Anyone who doubts this is standard theory is welcome to write somebody such as Dr. Dawkins and ask, or for God's sakes read a little. Usually when I get this far, someone insists this isn't the standard theory of evolution at all, and proposes some kind of Lysenkoism as the standard instead. I am very sick and tired of proposing this and having people who think evolution means the X-men try to prove I'm wrong.).
2. Modern organisms use DNA, with both advanced error correction and mutation reduction. One form of correction is sexual reproduction, by using a second copy of most genes. One form of reduction is putting the DNA in a central nucleus where it is less exposed to chemical mutagens.
3. Fully modern DNA in sexual organisms has been around for at least 700 Million years (see Dr. Simon Conway Morris's estimates for the age of the earliest Ediacaran fauna. If he's not THE greatest still living expert on this, he's at least number 2.).
4. Less modern DNA, but still with error protection in the form of nucleated cells, has been inside the oldest fossil eukarotes since, at the absolute very least, 2.1 Billion years ago (again Morris's timetable). That's also about half the age of the Earth (4.2 Billion years).
5. Really primative DNA with no correction or protection, has been found, again at the very least, as far back as the first stromatolites (2.9 billion years). Most paleontologists (admittedly not all), point to earlier fossils, as early as 3.5 billion years old, for the first DNA based organisms.
6. DNA is believed to have developed from RNA. RNA is still used by most life as a messenger chemical, but is only found as a heredity chemical in some very primative viruses. The error rates for RNA are well known, and indicate evolution must have been proceeding very slowly, even compared to the most primative DNA based life. The living record agrees with this, as do extensive tests comparing generalized eukarotes with all surviving types of non-eukarotes. While it's not as universally agreed by biologists as the earlier points, it's still generally agreed that RNA did predate DNA. You can find a few recognized biologists who don't support this last point, but they are a distinct minority, under 5%.
7. This means, we have counted back to within about 700 million years of the time Earth formed, just for the three stages of DNA based life. That's about 84% of all the time we have to explain life. The RNA dominant period, when evolution was much slower, has to fit into that last 16%. Whatever came before RNA has to fit into what's left after RNA gets its share, and so on.
8. By the standard theory's best guess, there are at least a dozen stages, each with more primative molecules involved, going back to the beginnings of life. The earliest ones might have been non-living clay-like substances, where natural selection operated only
I am most definitely not a lawyer, but I'll bite on this one anyway.
The whole "protect shareholder value" bit is vastly over-rated by the general run of small investors as a legal excuse. Name a successful suit by shareholders against a corporate management that didn't do something to maximize profits because it was unethical or illegal. The majority of shareholder suits lose, and that includes more vaguely reasonable ones such as the Disney severance pay to Eisner lawsuit.
I just did a simple Google lookabout for currently as yet unsettled shareholder lawsuits. Nothing fancy, just typed in "Shareholder lawsuits", and then looked to see if the case appeared still in process. There were none mentioned on the first four pages (which is where I quit) that did not involve the board having allegedly either restated earnings and projected profits (always with a big decline in projected earnings) or incurred SEC fines. There's not a single one I could find this way that is even about a board simply having picked a bad business approach, so long as they did so openly, let alone one about not having entered any ethically 'gray' areas that could have led to profits. There are no shareholder lawsuits over such decisions as not laying off personnel in a decline, not selling non-exportable tech to nations on prohibited lists or other such actions revealed (at least in this search) either. I've heard of both such cases before, and am actually surprised that I couldn't find such a gase in the quick search. Still, I think this says something useful about how uncommon such cases are, at least.
In many states, the only way a court will even proceed with any shareholder lawsuit is if there is a SEC related decision first, and in some states, these decisions have to result in fines of various minimum values. In such cases, violating the law to maximize profits is the only way to become vulnerable to lawsuits over shareholder profits. That's right, in many cases, you have to break the law in an attempt to increase profits before you can be sued for the attempt failing! There, boards that use this as an excuse are saying, in effect, they had to give in before a threat that only becomes a threat if they give in! Amazing!
In over half of lawsuits of this general type, the shareholders sueing didn't do the most basic steps required before the court would even hear the case. For one example, many consistently failed to either try to get the board of directors to act on complaints before resorting to lawsuits, or to show the board was in some way biased or not sufficiently disinterested before proceeding to litigation. Of lawsuits that make it past such hurdles, most of the remainder failed automatically when the petitioner in effect asked the court to ignore that a violation of criminal law would be required for the board of directors to be in civil compliance. This frequently resulted in the suit being dismissed with prejudice.
A few years ago, a major shareholder in the pharma industry sued over just such an issue, claiming a corporation should have violated U.S. law by bribing Chinese (PRC) officials, since the fines would have been less than the profits. The arguements advanced got his lawyer disbarred, his own LLC dissolved and him convicted of racketeering so he could never form another one (at least in most jurisdictions).
That's doubtless an extreme case, but it shows the real problem here. Some people will sue over absurd, totally meritless claims, and concoct the most bizarre legal justifications. Some people will even go to civil court and argue their own case in such a way as to make it abundantly clear they are committing criminal acts, all the while thinking they are going to win big bucks. Some people will do the equivalent of shooting their parents and then absolutely demanding that the judge must show them mercy because they are an orphan.
Various studies have shown that a book or film usually makes over 90% of its overally money within a year of release. Music is a bit less likely to drop off that sharply, but it's not much better, and new technology, such as re-releasing LPs as CDs, may have caused much of the extension we see in the curve there. Even there, most of the money is made in the firt year, and the 90% margin is usually reached within 3 years.
One estimate I've seen is that going from the U.S.'s current Life+70 copyright to completely unlimited will have no effect at all on over 98% of author's estates, and the remaining small percentage will see a modest average 3% average additional income. An author who banks a modest 5% of his income for posterity at the time he or she makes it can take advantage of compound interest and much less inflated money to easly beat everything copyright extensions are likely to do for his kids and grand kids by a factor of at least two orders of magnetude. Statistically, only about three artists from the 20th century are likely to see significant potential profits more than 70 years from their deaths. Since we already have J.R.R. Tolkien, Steven King, and George Lucas, what's with those musicians, film-makers and writers who seem convinced they are also one of that tiny elite fraction? At best, a lot more of them are deluded than right. For them, a clue - just because you are a better artist than these guys, doesn't mean your work will be more commercial than theirs 70 years after your death - in fact it practically precludes it.
The price authors, musicians, and others pay for that slight chance of bettering their great-great-grand children's lives by a bit? "Life plus" can't be treated as the transfer of a natural right to copy, as no one has a natural right to copy after they die. So now, copyright isn't based on one of those "inallienable rights" that come from "Nature and Nature's God", as the US founding fathers so quaintly put it - instead, it's a right the government manufactures from nothing by politically divine fiat. Ergo, the government can now take away what they have created, with no legal principles to require any checks or balances. If copyright is later shortened, the government has already laid all the necessary groundwork for the claim the additional time (and control over publication) reverts to the government, and not to the people.
I know that was tongue-in-cheek, but it's worth noting. You can always make the same arguement at any time, so it leads to totally unlimited copyright. What about the grand-children benefiting from the creations and hard work of their grand-parents?
To those artists who actually support this. Frankly, if you're an artist, and you want your heirs unto the fifth generation to have a special advantage over everyone else's equally remote descendants, you're a lunatic megalomaniac, with some kind of fixation about founding imperial dynasties, and it's about time your fans told you off. I'm still contributing to an anuity for my kid, hope you do something similar. I worked hard when she was growing up too - instead of complaining that she wouldn't continue to receive money if I died, I carried lots of life insurance. I carry less now that she's grown, educated and mostly independant. Shouldn't she benefit some more from that money I spent on life insurance earlier? And if not her, well she's gonna make me a grandfather someday (or so she says) - why can't I pass on some of the fruits of my old carreer to those cute little hypothetical grandkids?
"Ooohhh! Ooohhh! I want my highly evolved descendants living in the Omega Centauri region a million years from now to benefit from my hard work, won't someone please think of the 19 ft. tall, cylendrical, neutronium sheathed, stardrive-up-the-spine fitted trans-transhuman children?".
That question probably comes from a European. (I didn't look). Europe (overall) has been using their forests very carefully since about the time the first Theign or Jarl ordered all his peasants to stop cutting firewood from live trees in his woods. The US uses wood more (a lot more) for construction because for a while it was incredibly cheap and plentiful compared to European availablity, and now that it's getting more like it's been in Europe for the last 1400 years or so, the trades are still catching up. People build with what they know. One drawback is there are less decently durable, low maintenance and inexpensive to heat buildings for many of our poorer people. One advantage is more homes are in houses on owned land, rather than in apartment complexes where the land belongs to someone else. There are lots of trade offs, both ways. (And of course both the USA and Europe are huge places with lots of regional exceptions to what I just wrote).
"So every attempt to sue will result in a smaller useful portfolio."
(emphasis mine)
You're correct, but what the poster above you wrote emphasized, in effect, that way to many investors aren't looking enough at whether a patent is useful, just whether it exists. In the long run, this triggers a 'correction', which is what government economists call millions of people in breadlines.
If the market corrected quickly and smoothly there would be little threat, either to open source or to overall economic health, but as Keynes said "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." By the time this gets fixed to the open source community's satisfaction, most of us will have bigger worries, and your "And there will be no overall winning." will be a millenial understatement.
Worse than that. Poster is not just advocating the same standards, but the same penalties. I could agree with holding 13 year olds to adult standards on some things, particularly behavior they really should have outgrown by the time they were six, but what's with the idea of automatically using penalties as severe as we would impose for adults?
On question 1, anybody who has legal hassles and does any charity work will generally cite it in negotiations with authorities. If nothing else, it helps refute the alegations of 'selfish motives'. Remember Martha Stewart's case? She brought up her various volunteer activities before sentencing. The judge pointed out that Stewart hadn't really done all that much for a woman of her means, and a lot of what she mentioned was for personal friends and relatives rather than true charities. That same judge mentioned how he did take charity, community service, and such into account where there was significant amounts, and his rejection of Stewart's plea bargain attempt didn't mean charity in general was irrelevant - he'd seen cases where the past charitable record justified completely suspending a criminal sentence.
Gates may well have been trying to make a case for something such as another delay on what is still just a civil case, (where charity will have more impact if anything), but that's very different from adjusting the foundation's giving to manipulate markets. If the Gates foundation had, for example, suddenly picked up a cause such as studies of French minority unemploynment issues (and the resulting riots), knowing that several of the EU representitves who originally raised the fuss about Windows monopoly status were also involved in political wrangling over just that issue, that's more the sort of thing the grandparent posts were suggesting might be happening. On question 2, I'm not sure it's even a coincidence, let alone a conspiracy. First, the Gates foundation announced plans to donate to AIDs prevention all over the world, all at the same time. That was one of the very first causes they picked up, years before Gates apparently started perceiving Open Source as a threat to Microsoft dominance. The Gates's delivered checks to African and Asian countries that weren't making any particular statements about open source as well.
Second, India, or more accurately some government persons or corporations in India, have been talking about going open source pretty continually for years now. If you follow Linux on Slashdot regularly, you see an article every time this comes up, so of course it sticks in your mind. But if the Gates can't hand out a check in Delhi when somebody such as the Administrative Transportation Department of Hyderabad has mentioned switching to Open Source in the last fiscal quarter without it being an attempt at market manipulation, then you're only counting the hits and skipping a lot of misses. Just how many months have to pass between what personages in India saying what about open source before it stops counting as significant correlation? Despite your stooping to sarcasm with your last question, I don't think you have a very clear picture of a specific time frame.
If you can show press releases where the Indian government as a whole changed policy on OS, and the Gates foundation apparently responded with a new round of donations (or at least a realocation of existing ones), you could probably claim it was more than just coincidence right there, but do you really know of that? If you've got some hard numbers, figures on how much Microsoft was projected to lose in business from OS adoption, or something tieing government purchase trends to Gates Foundation decisions, again, a reasonably good correlation would make me suspect more than just coincidence. I tend to doubt coincidence when it comes to the word "Billions", unless it's Carl Sagan saying it. But if you just remember somebody somewhere in India said something relating to switching to some open source program, and the Gates Foundation did something publicity oriented somewhere around that time, that's different. "When did someone actually first discuss giving the money" is more significant by far than when the little ceremony was held.
I'm starting to take that seriously, although technically, you mean men are more closely related to male chimps than to women.
From your numbers, male humans have about 1% of their genes that simply do not exist in female humans. If some genes truely code for behavioral modifiers, then there is a very good chance some of those are found on the Y chromosome. Women can't have those genes, by definition. Ergo, the conclusion should be: If genes sometimes code for behavior, men have a wider range of possible behaviors than women, and men really can understand women (at least on a statistical average basis), but women will never understand men.
(Males as a group have at least one copy of every gene females as a group have. Females may have two copies of some from having two X's, but can't have any copies at all of what's only found on the Y)
a. modern science has shown us why men are superior to women.
or b. genes don't really code in any way that influences behaviors whatsoever.
or c. by an extreme statistical fluke, no gene that affects behavior is found only on the Y, AND no gene that affects behavior is linked in expression to any of the genes that are only found on the Y.
500 mg is about equivalent to 10 cups of instant coffee, or 5-6 of fresh ground drip brewed. Suddenly going to this will leave a person needing to drink more water to offset dehydration, and for obvious reasons, taking lots of pee breaks. The body will adjust on the dehydration issue in about 1-2 months, but until that point, the user is at increased risk of heatstroke, particularly while active in hot conditions. Going on and off caffeine (like not guzzleing it on the weekends) will lengthen this period of adatation. Side effects will also likely include headaches from withdrawl, irritability, and twitches. Unless you are one of that very rare breed who has what they sometimes call gunfighter's nerves, this level of caffeine use will impair some fine motor movements with twitching. However, none of this appears nearly as bad as a drug such as Methamphetamine - not even close. If somebody really kicked meth by overusing caffeine (as per this thread), they have probably added decades to their lives.
Mine are going to have eyes that turn blue when the Evil bit is on, and red when its off. They will also turn off their audio sensors and shoot first automatically when either William Shatner or Patrick McGoohan enters the area.
I agree that originally, this was tainted money, in the ways Microsoft originally made it, but I don't think the Gates foundation is a front for more manipulation. I think this really is from his heart, maybe with an occasional nudge from Melinda.
If Bill Gates was just milking his donations for maximum publicity or leverage, would he have picked the causes he has? He could focus totally on those medical causes that matter most to the industrialized world, for example. He could avoid all the more politically controversial causes out there. When it comes to willingness to let the chips fall where they may, I'd say the Gates Foundation compares favorably to two of the biggest alternatives, the MacArthur and Ford Foundations:
(Info on both the Ford Foundation's Sexuality and Religion divisions, and the MacArthur Foundation's Copyright law related work is accessable through these links. The latter may be of special interest to many Slashdotters. Both programs are examples of a foundation not shying away from doing what it thinks is right for fear of alienating business partners, funding sources or sections of the general public.)
Mr. Gates could increase giving to Europe, where Microsoft has had the most trouble, and he could focus on causes that are likely to be dear to the very politicians that have pushed hardest for fines. He doesn't appear to be doing this.
Bill Gates could also just about ignore Africa, or at least give a much smaller percentage of totals there, and still reap the same sort of publicity. Instead of his saying that computers aren't what's needed first in developing nations, he could encourage someone else to pay for more hardware everywhere, just so he could 'give' away lots of software and count that in press releases as donations worth the full retail value, even though it would actually cost him very little. His whole computer initiative goes exactly the other way. The Gates foundation only pushes computerization in areas developed enough to have libraries and similar locations, and actively avoids treating computerization as a solution where basic infrastructure such as reliable food sources, roads or water filtration are more pressing needs. They also avoid pushing computerization where political stability is suspect or obviously lacking. They don't support 'computer in every classroom' or 'every student's home' type programs, and they do pay for both machines and networking, including some pretty long haul wiring runs.
"Shit, every child has a book telling you have to make explosives - they're called textbooks."
And when the press gets ahold of the arrest story, it's quite possible for either cops or reporters to spin that fact, describing those books not as High School Chemestry texts but as Unnamed manuals that describe preparing explosives and poisons. (just think what they can say about a College grade text on even basic physics, after all, that doubtless uses the word nuclear a few places).
I was U.S. military for a few years. I just looked up at the bookself over my desk, and in sight currently are manuals for Combat Infantry/11 bang-bang stuff, through senior NCO levels, A ring binder full of tables for calculating nuclear device yields and associated fallout ranges and rad dosages (I was an NBC defense officer for a while), surveilance and reconnaisance handbooks, a book subtitled "Killing Tanks is Fun and Easy", and so on. None of this is even classified stuff - I turned all that in properly, and it NEVER went home with me. If I'm ever booked for so much as overtime parking, I'm going to dissapear forever.
Yeah, this gal doesn't have my excuses. The significance of her having those books is for a court to decide, and they MAY WELL be relevant to a very serious crime. Still, the reasons for restraint in publicizing such evidence are: 1. The press can spin this sort of thing some very wierd ways. It's hard to get a fair tril after they do it. This spinning can happen from the urge to sell news, from a personal grudge, or just from incompetence, 2. Cops or DAs can spin this too, and then claim they were misquoted and it's the presses fault not theirs. This situation is tailor made for bad cops or crooked DAs to abuse with near impunity if they aren't completely stupid about it.
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Let's see - I'm on the record as qualified (Marksman or better, mostly a damned sight better) with M-16 (-A1 or -A2, either), SAW, M-203 grenade launcher, M72-A2 LAW (with coupler), M-2 and M-60 machine guns, the old M-3 "grease gun", and various .45 or 9 mm pistols. I'm 'familiarized' with a bunch of the more modern anti-tank weapons, machine guns, and a bunch of European equivalents too. Can I have one of each?
(And really I should get a 1/4 share of an M1-A2 Abrams MBT too, as I've qualified in all four seats at various times. We could probably rotate that one, leave it parked in a different guy's driveway each month or something. So does my state need to start issueing driver's liscences for those?)
The RIAA would probably hate to sue everybody. There's that risk of getting people with enough money to fight it out in court and them setting a nasty precedent. Bust a senator's kid, and see if he listens to your lobbyists anymore.
Good answer, But it's not just about the 'privilege' of not being mugged. The land of sunshine and rainbows bit extends to a really sick utopian fantasyland where,
a. when poor people starve, there's no bodies left behind, and so no threat of diseases if nobody gets paid to bury them. They just neatly and tidily vanish, taking their slums with them.
b. these poor will eventually lay down and die peacefully instead of trying to kill you to survive.
c. middle class people like me defend our betters from these not so peaceful poor people for free, even though they want the rich dead more than us.
d. the companies these taxpayers are invested in keep selling 20 million of this and 50 million of that even when only a few rich, frugal investors have any money for anything except absolute necessities.
I know a guy whos whole income for the last five years comes from stock in a 'bank' that runs nothing but check into cash places, and he bitches all the time about what a drain the poor are on the economy. I've heard the same from people who own parts of businesses marketing Jerry Springer videos, sports team jackets, fancy athletic shoes, or public lotteries. What is it with these people?
You know, those schools would probably be keeping more people from turning into muggers and crackheads if they weren't being increasingly geared towards turning out mindless consumer drones to keep a market for all that stuff poor people buy and a cheap work force to crank it out. Mindless drones don't really even make good consumers long term, let alone safe neighbors.
No, it's not. You have a sale of stock at $10.00, with a basis in the stock of, guess what, $10.00. Income is zero. Basis is normally determined by you picking either the opening or closing price for the day of purchase to work from, but there are several exceptions.
Now try this. Your uncle leaves you 1,000 Linden-dollars, valued at a remarkable U.S. $173.37 when he dies. He purchased them when value was only U.S. $2.07. On the day the will was actually probated, they were back down to U.S. $2.07. Do you have investment income?
There's not anything directly under Department of Commerce's oversight duties, but there is something else under IRS and possibly its state equivalents that looks intriguing to me. (Warning: I am most seriously not a lawyer. I am a tax professional, but this is not my professional tax advice, it's mere speculation. I specifically have absolutely no knowledge of whether the IRS, or the taxation services of any U.S. states is/are currently considering any such interpretations or rulings as I discuss below. If you consider the following as investment advice, I can be held in no way responsible. That would be dumb, m'kay?)
Corporations normally enjoy advantagious tax status for just about all their investments, if for no other reason than because they can usually represent them as long term, and long term capital gains (over one year) has a much better base rate. If, however, IRS were to rule that selling a given domain name for a large markup was a pure 'windfall profit', this could in theory result in seperate windfall profit taxes, a higher base tax rate, and/or quite possibly even penalties on previous year's fileings. Costs of compliance with any such ruling would likely be entirely born by the corporation involved, and would likely need to be accomplished in no more than two quarters, with obvious risks to corporate liquidity and future profitability.
You ask (approximately) 'is there anything that says they can't?' - They still technically 'could', but under those circumstances, making money at it would be near impossible. Would such a ruling stand up long term, in tax court? Ask a fully trained legal specialist in the field, and if this impinges on your investment plans, my personal advice is to please make certain he or she is liscenced to practice both in your state or the state of incorporation and before the SEC and federal tax courts.
You're not argueing about passing on the business, you're argueing about passing on the business's patents forever. Nothing stops Paul McCartney right now from leaving his interest in Apple records to his heirs, and them to their's, and so on, forever, no matter how you change copyright law. Sir Paul gets to do all the things I can do. He can invest his money and make out a will leaving things to his kids (or to someone else). He can save when profits are high, and invest in other things besides his own creations if he chooses, and leave all that too.
So what's this got to do with creativity? Are you telling me you have a job where you don't do anything creative at all? Are you claiming my job isn't creative at all, without knowing what I do? Yet all I get to use to provide for my kid is normal things such as insurance, savings, a will, investments, anuities, etc. I don't get a copyright on everything I create, I get a paycheck.
Well, you could make that analogy, but does it hold? Maxwell's set of equations did predict some things its predecessors didn't, which I'll freely grant you also fits natural selection. Natural selection has explanitory power.
But Maxwell's equations don't make anything else that we have observational data on less probable. They do predict that if the nucleus of an atom fits something like the 'electron is a little thing, rapidly orbiting a bigger thing' model, there's a problem, and it takes quantum mechanics to give us a model different enough to overcome that problem, but we never had photos of an electron as a small discrete object, orbiting a larger nucleus as a planet orbits its sun. Even when this first became a 'crisis' in physics, many people simply proposed alternate models. People such as Einstein suggested that light had some sort of wave/particle duality by about 1906, and everybody was pretty patient until the 20's when it all shook down into QM.
Here, we have observations that do seem to dictate some probabilities. (for just one example, counting backwards, the period between artificial selection and sex being 'invented' is about 700-800 million years. The period between the 'invention' of sex and cell nucleation is longer, about 1.2 billion years. The period between the 'invention' of cells and DNA itself is longer again, about 1.6 billion years. We're trying to deal with the fact that data, such as lead/uranium isotope ratios, doesn't seem to allow enough time for the next step in that that sequence, let alone the half dozen steps we seem to think we need at minimum. The problem is, doing something analogous to QM here might involve claiming that the funamental physical laws were pretty seriously different on a macroscopic level, only about 4 billion years ago, well after the universe had settled down to being fundamentally as it is today. Unlike non-existant photos of orbital model electron structure, we have Hubble photos of honkin big objects we think are quite a bit more than 4 billion years old to argue against that, plus lots of red-shift data, spectroscopic comparisons, etc, that all have to be rewritten unless the universe has been functioning on our scale level pretty much like it does now, for about 12 billion years.
If all we've done with natural selection is make some things that once seemed improbable look more likely, but at a cost of making other things necessarily less likely, then a lot of people are drawing some very bad conclusions. That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it does make a lot of the interpretation flawed to completely bogus. It means professionals in the field have been saying things that are about as well grounded as all those half assed physics metaphors that compare QM to ancient Hindu teachings and Yogic sayings are in real physics.
I really don't want to get into a religious arguement, but as just one point, many agnostics have criticized the way religion sometimes seems to be in constant retreat, assigning God as a buzzword to cover whatever we can't explain without 'him' yet. As knowledge grows, the gaps get smaller, and so the need for a supernatural explanation shrinks. This is usually called the God of the Gaps arguement. But if we have explained one thing only by making another less explainable, overall human knowledge hasn't grown - instead the gap has gotten smaller in one area, but only by becoming proportionately bigger in another, so there goes the idea that the supernatural explanation may have looked valid for primative people but we don't need it as much any more.
Perhaps more fundamentally, if we can't reduce the gaps in human knowledge beyond a certain point, then what are we doing by doing science?
This same problem applies to many other ideas besides religious ones, such as progress. If we just made scientific progress by inventing the theory of natural selection, but we just
Bullshit? - great intelligent rebuttal there. Sorry, but that's precisely the point. Genes don't spread through a population in a single generation. They spread diferentially over tens of thousands of years or more and through millions or billions of organisms. Humans for example, tend to have about 0.34 mutant genes per organism, and only about 30,000 total genes. So in a population of 30 million humans, there are about 340 who get a mutation on the same gene (not necessarily the same mutation) in the same generation. Now as I've already pointed out for the learning impaired an advantagious gene has only a small positive effect on reproductive success. There has never been a single mutation that made every creature that had it 100% successful at reproducing and every one that didn't a 100% failure. Do the math from just those two factors, and it proves there absolutely have to be some cancelations, and we're just arguing over what it affects, not whether it exists.
While you're at it, I said that was just one reason, and referred you to Dawkins for others that are a little long to go into on slashdot. Did you read the assignment? Obviously not - to busy to pick up even a laymans idea of the subject before you opened your yap.
If what I am saying is true then bacteria mutate faster than humans (some bacteria, particularly the ones without ennucleated cells and no sexual reproduction). This means by my arguement they respond less quickly to selection pressure and so prokerotes and archaeobacteria don't evolve new types as fast as eukerotes, which is in fact precisely what happens. Duh! While we are at it, the genes in your mitochondria are not passed on from both parents, and they evolve much less quickly than the genes in your cell nuclei, again exactly as predicted. You are simply wrong. Go talk to a real biologist on this point - you are simply and utterly wrong. You don't have time to argue this point because you don't know jack about evolution or biology and think that the more rapidly evolving bacteria are the types which don't have sexual reproduction. You're confusing a lot of things here. Are you arguing that bacteria do evolve faster than humans, that is they need fewer generations to change than advanced organisms do? Remember they don't take 20 years between generations, more like 20 minutes, and maybe you'll see where you went off track. You're looking at organisms that don't have nearly the same numbers of genes or the same lifespans as multicelled creatures, and saying those tremendous differences produces no effects what-so-ever, so the effect this guy is talking about doesn't exist. While you're at it, what about bacterial sex? You do know that for bacteria, Sex and Reproduction are not likely to be the same thing? Don't you think being able to steal genes from entirely different species has some effect on how fast bacteria adapt to antibiotics and such?
In the end, you're argueing with me on the very point all reputable geneticists agree is true, not the point I derived from it that many disagree with. That makes you a crackpot with some weird non-standard model of evolution.
I really think the whole M$ bit looks a little silly, although I understand it's because there's no schwastika in most standard fonts.
Yes - do not eat the Americium-241 in your smoke detector. Its half life is around 240 years, so it is not nearly as hot as the Po-210 we are talking about, but it's not good for you and might increase your 20 year down the road risk of colon cancer. It's also chemically toxic, about like lead, and the sulfate is pretty easily absorbable.
Oh, and do not machine a spherical solid with over 60 Kg. mass of Americium 241 either. In those quantities it fissions like Plutonium or uranium. The only reason we don't make Nukes out of it is it takes more than Pu, and so costs a lot more.
No, it certainly isn't. But getting more self reliant and not letting the suspected poisoner keep his leverage does mean you have more options on how to deal with it.
Zeros and Fours man, zeros and fours. Alpha drops the isotope number by four, and changes the element name. Beta changes the number by zero, but also changes the element name. The whole chain is alpha and beta emissions. Now do you feel nitpicked?
Po-210 is a daughter product of Bi-210, by beta decay. Halflife for this is only about 5 days, so if you start with Bismuth-210, you will very rapidly get a material that is mostly polonium-210, and then the 138 day half-life for that is a choke point that will give you an increasing percentage of both Po-210 and Lead-206. Whoever is testing the Po-210 technically had to check for Bi-20, and Pb-210 to see if the original source was something higher up the chain. The didn't really need to test for Po-214, Bi-214 and other very short lived intermediates (and probably couldn't), but probably had to test for Radon-222, as that has a half-life of just less than 4 days, long enough for traces to remain if that's where the reaction started.
It's really a fascinating risk issue (although I'm sure fascinating is not a word a person on the receiving end would use). If someone was originally poisoned with anything above Lead-210, then whoever handled it had to act very quickly from isolating mostly pure any one form to delivery. Lead-210 is technically doable, but if some spy had to take it from a reactor to the target, would be half decayed to Po-210 by the time he could get there. Po-210 is the first step in the chain where you have something relatively hot, but not decaying so quickly that refining a relatively pure amount is near impossible, and at the same time, for the same reasons, it's the first place in the chain where the refined substance would be optimally safe to handle for long enough to carry it to the target and deploy it.
Natural Selection has EVERYTHING to do with the First Spark of Life".
1. Standard evolutionary theory says that a lower mutation rate, (down to some minimum that is greater than zero) actually increases selection speed. That sounds counter-intuitive, but it is straight from Dawkins and similar sources. One reason here is that mutations are occuring in organisms that are already pretty close to perfectly adapted to their environments or they'd be dead. The few mutations that are improvements are generally small improvements, that take generations of testing to prosper. A high enough mutation rate, and a new mutation overwrites the last one before the first had time to be tested. To see this a little more clearly, just imagine a mutation that makes an annual type plant a little better able to resist drought. If droughts only happen in that area about every 20 years, the mutation only helps a carrier survive every twenty generations or so. There are several other arguements for this point, which can be found in the Dawkin's The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker, or in a typical college textbook on the subject.
(Anyone who doubts this is standard theory is welcome to write somebody such as Dr. Dawkins and ask, or for God's sakes read a little. Usually when I get this far, someone insists this isn't the standard theory of evolution at all, and proposes some kind of Lysenkoism as the standard instead. I am very sick and tired of proposing this and having people who think evolution means the X-men try to prove I'm wrong.).
2. Modern organisms use DNA, with both advanced error correction and mutation reduction. One form of correction is sexual reproduction, by using a second copy of most genes. One form of reduction is putting the DNA in a central nucleus where it is less exposed to chemical mutagens.
3. Fully modern DNA in sexual organisms has been around for at least 700 Million years (see Dr. Simon Conway Morris's estimates for the age of the earliest Ediacaran fauna. If he's not THE greatest still living expert on this, he's at least number 2.).
4. Less modern DNA, but still with error protection in the form of nucleated cells, has been inside the oldest fossil eukarotes since, at the absolute very least, 2.1 Billion years ago (again Morris's timetable). That's also about half the age of the Earth (4.2 Billion years).
5. Really primative DNA with no correction or protection, has been found, again at the very least, as far back as the first stromatolites (2.9 billion years). Most paleontologists (admittedly not all), point to earlier fossils, as early as 3.5 billion years old, for the first DNA based organisms.
6. DNA is believed to have developed from RNA. RNA is still used by most life as a messenger chemical, but is only found as a heredity chemical in some very primative viruses. The error rates for RNA are well known, and indicate evolution must have been proceeding very slowly, even compared to the most primative DNA based life. The living record agrees with this, as do extensive tests comparing generalized eukarotes with all surviving types of non-eukarotes. While it's not as universally agreed by biologists as the earlier points, it's still generally agreed that RNA did predate DNA. You can find a few recognized biologists who don't support this last point, but they are a distinct minority, under 5%.
7. This means, we have counted back to within about 700 million years of the time Earth formed, just for the three stages of DNA based life. That's about 84% of all the time we have to explain life. The RNA dominant period, when evolution was much slower, has to fit into that last 16%. Whatever came before RNA has to fit into what's left after RNA gets its share, and so on.
8. By the standard theory's best guess, there are at least a dozen stages, each with more primative molecules involved, going back to the beginnings of life. The earliest ones might have been non-living clay-like substances, where natural selection operated only
I am most definitely not a lawyer, but I'll bite on this one anyway.
The whole "protect shareholder value" bit is vastly over-rated by the general run of small investors as a legal excuse. Name a successful suit by shareholders against a corporate management that didn't do something to maximize profits because it was unethical or illegal. The majority of shareholder suits lose, and that includes more vaguely reasonable ones such as the Disney severance pay to Eisner lawsuit.
I just did a simple Google lookabout for currently as yet unsettled shareholder lawsuits. Nothing fancy, just typed in "Shareholder lawsuits", and then looked to see if the case appeared still in process. There were none mentioned on the first four pages (which is where I quit) that did not involve the board having allegedly either restated earnings and projected profits (always with a big decline in projected earnings) or incurred SEC fines. There's not a single one I could find this way that is even about a board simply having picked a bad business approach, so long as they did so openly, let alone one about not having entered any ethically 'gray' areas that could have led to profits. There are no shareholder lawsuits over such decisions as not laying off personnel in a decline, not selling non-exportable tech to nations on prohibited lists or other such actions revealed (at least in this search) either. I've heard of both such cases before, and am actually surprised that I couldn't find such a gase in the quick search. Still, I think this says something useful about how uncommon such cases are, at least.
In many states, the only way a court will even proceed with any shareholder lawsuit is if there is a SEC related decision first, and in some states, these decisions have to result in fines of various minimum values. In such cases, violating the law to maximize profits is the only way to become vulnerable to lawsuits over shareholder profits. That's right, in many cases, you have to break the law in an attempt to increase profits before you can be sued for the attempt failing! There, boards that use this as an excuse are saying, in effect, they had to give in before a threat that only becomes a threat if they give in! Amazing!
In over half of lawsuits of this general type, the shareholders sueing didn't do the most basic steps required before the court would even hear the case. For one example, many consistently failed to either try to get the board of directors to act on complaints before resorting to lawsuits, or to show the board was in some way biased or not sufficiently disinterested before proceeding to litigation. Of lawsuits that make it past such hurdles, most of the remainder failed automatically when the petitioner in effect asked the court to ignore that a violation of criminal law would be required for the board of directors to be in civil compliance. This frequently resulted in the suit being dismissed with prejudice.
A few years ago, a major shareholder in the pharma industry sued over just such an issue, claiming a corporation should have violated U.S. law by bribing Chinese (PRC) officials, since the fines would have been less than the profits. The arguements advanced got his lawyer disbarred, his own LLC dissolved and him convicted of racketeering so he could never form another one (at least in most jurisdictions).
That's doubtless an extreme case, but it shows the real problem here. Some people will sue over absurd, totally meritless claims, and concoct the most bizarre legal justifications. Some people will even go to civil court and argue their own case in such a way as to make it abundantly clear they are committing criminal acts, all the while thinking they are going to win big bucks. Some people will do the equivalent of shooting their parents and then absolutely demanding that the judge must show them mercy because they are an orphan.
Various studies have shown that a book or film usually makes over 90% of its overally money within a year of release. Music is a bit less likely to drop off that sharply, but it's not much better, and new technology, such as re-releasing LPs as CDs, may have caused much of the extension we see in the curve there. Even there, most of the money is made in the firt year, and the 90% margin is usually reached within 3 years.
One estimate I've seen is that going from the U.S.'s current Life+70 copyright to completely unlimited will have no effect at all on over 98% of author's estates, and the remaining small percentage will see a modest average 3% average additional income. An author who banks a modest 5% of his income for posterity at the time he or she makes it can take advantage of compound interest and much less inflated money to easly beat everything copyright extensions are likely to do for his kids and grand kids by a factor of at least two orders of magnetude. Statistically, only about three artists from the 20th century are likely to see significant potential profits more than 70 years from their deaths. Since we already have J.R.R. Tolkien, Steven King, and George Lucas, what's with those musicians, film-makers and writers who seem convinced they are also one of that tiny elite fraction? At best, a lot more of them are deluded than right. For them, a clue - just because you are a better artist than these guys, doesn't mean your work will be more commercial than theirs 70 years after your death - in fact it practically precludes it.
The price authors, musicians, and others pay for that slight chance of bettering their great-great-grand children's lives by a bit? "Life plus" can't be treated as the transfer of a natural right to copy, as no one has a natural right to copy after they die. So now, copyright isn't based on one of those "inallienable rights" that come from "Nature and Nature's God", as the US founding fathers so quaintly put it - instead, it's a right the government manufactures from nothing by politically divine fiat. Ergo, the government can now take away what they have created, with no legal principles to require any checks or balances. If copyright is later shortened, the government has already laid all the necessary groundwork for the claim the additional time (and control over publication) reverts to the government, and not to the people.
I know that was tongue-in-cheek, but it's worth noting. You can always make the same arguement at any time, so it leads to totally unlimited copyright. What about the grand-children benefiting from the creations and hard work of their grand-parents?
To those artists who actually support this. Frankly, if you're an artist, and you want your heirs unto the fifth generation to have a special advantage over everyone else's equally remote descendants, you're a lunatic megalomaniac, with some kind of fixation about founding imperial dynasties, and it's about time your fans told you off. I'm still contributing to an anuity for my kid, hope you do something similar. I worked hard when she was growing up too - instead of complaining that she wouldn't continue to receive money if I died, I carried lots of life insurance. I carry less now that she's grown, educated and mostly independant. Shouldn't she benefit some more from that money I spent on life insurance earlier? And if not her, well she's gonna make me a grandfather someday (or so she says) - why can't I pass on some of the fruits of my old carreer to those cute little hypothetical grandkids?
"Ooohhh! Ooohhh! I want my highly evolved descendants living in the Omega Centauri region a million years from now to benefit from my hard work, won't someone please think of the 19 ft. tall, cylendrical, neutronium sheathed, stardrive-up-the-spine fitted trans-transhuman children?".
That question probably comes from a European. (I didn't look). Europe (overall) has been using their forests very carefully since about the time the first Theign or Jarl ordered all his peasants to stop cutting firewood from live trees in his woods. The US uses wood more (a lot more) for construction because for a while it was incredibly cheap and plentiful compared to European availablity, and now that it's getting more like it's been in Europe for the last 1400 years or so, the trades are still catching up. People build with what they know.
One drawback is there are less decently durable, low maintenance and inexpensive to heat buildings for many of our poorer people. One advantage is more homes are in houses on owned land, rather than in apartment complexes where the land belongs to someone else. There are lots of trade offs, both ways. (And of course both the USA and Europe are huge places with lots of regional exceptions to what I just wrote).
"So every attempt to sue will result in a smaller useful portfolio."
(emphasis mine)
You're correct, but what the poster above you wrote emphasized, in effect, that way to many investors aren't looking enough at whether a patent is useful, just whether it exists. In the long run, this triggers a 'correction', which is what government economists call millions of people in breadlines.
If the market corrected quickly and smoothly there would be little threat, either to open source or to overall economic health, but as Keynes said "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." By the time this gets fixed to the open source community's satisfaction, most of us will have bigger worries, and your "And there will be no overall winning." will be a millenial understatement.
Worse than that. Poster is not just advocating the same standards, but the same penalties. I could agree with holding 13 year olds to adult standards on some things, particularly behavior they really should have outgrown by the time they were six, but what's with the idea of automatically using penalties as severe as we would impose for adults?
On question 1, anybody who has legal hassles and does any charity work will generally cite it in negotiations with authorities. If nothing else, it helps refute the alegations of 'selfish motives'. Remember Martha Stewart's case? She brought up her various volunteer activities before sentencing. The judge pointed out that Stewart hadn't really done all that much for a woman of her means, and a lot of what she mentioned was for personal friends and relatives rather than true charities. That same judge mentioned how he did take charity, community service, and such into account where there was significant amounts, and his rejection of Stewart's plea bargain attempt didn't mean charity in general was irrelevant - he'd seen cases where the past charitable record justified completely suspending a criminal sentence.
Gates may well have been trying to make a case for something such as another delay on what is still just a civil case, (where charity will have more impact if anything), but that's very different from adjusting the foundation's giving to manipulate markets. If the Gates foundation had, for example, suddenly picked up a cause such as studies of French minority unemploynment issues (and the resulting riots), knowing that several of the EU representitves who originally raised the fuss about Windows monopoly status were also involved in political wrangling over just that issue, that's more the sort of thing the grandparent posts were suggesting might be happening.
On question 2, I'm not sure it's even a coincidence, let alone a conspiracy. First, the Gates foundation announced plans to donate to AIDs prevention all over the world, all at the same time. That was one of the very first causes they picked up, years before Gates apparently started perceiving Open Source as a threat to Microsoft dominance. The Gates's delivered checks to African and Asian countries that weren't making any particular statements about open source as well.
Second, India, or more accurately some government persons or corporations in India, have been talking about going open source pretty continually for years now. If you follow Linux on Slashdot regularly, you see an article every time this comes up, so of course it sticks in your mind. But if the Gates can't hand out a check in Delhi when somebody such as the Administrative Transportation Department of Hyderabad has mentioned switching to Open Source in the last fiscal quarter without it being an attempt at market manipulation, then you're only counting the hits and skipping a lot of misses. Just how many months have to pass between what personages in India saying what about open source before it stops counting as significant correlation? Despite your stooping to sarcasm with your last question, I don't think you have a very clear picture of a specific time frame.
If you can show press releases where the Indian government as a whole changed policy on OS, and the Gates foundation apparently responded with a new round of donations (or at least a realocation of existing ones), you could probably claim it was more than just coincidence right there, but do you really know of that? If you've got some hard numbers, figures on how much Microsoft was projected to lose in business from OS adoption, or something tieing government purchase trends to Gates Foundation decisions, again, a reasonably good correlation would make me suspect more than just coincidence. I tend to doubt coincidence when it comes to the word "Billions", unless it's Carl Sagan saying it. But if you just remember somebody somewhere in India said something relating to switching to some open source program, and the Gates Foundation did something publicity oriented somewhere around that time, that's different. "When did someone actually first discuss giving the money" is more significant by far than when the little ceremony was held.
I'm starting to take that seriously, although technically, you mean men are more closely related to male chimps than to women.
From your numbers, male humans have about 1% of their genes that simply do not exist in female humans. If some genes truely code for behavioral modifiers, then there is a very good chance some of those are found on the Y chromosome. Women can't have those genes, by definition. Ergo, the conclusion should be: If genes sometimes code for behavior, men have a wider range of possible behaviors than women, and men really can understand women (at least on a statistical average basis), but women will never understand men.
(Males as a group have at least one copy of every gene females as a group have. Females may have two copies of some from having two X's, but can't have any copies at all of what's only found on the Y)
a. modern science has shown us why men are superior to women.
or
b. genes don't really code in any way that influences behaviors whatsoever.
or
c. by an extreme statistical fluke, no gene that affects behavior is found only on the Y, AND no gene that affects behavior is linked in expression to any of the genes that are only found on the Y.
500 mg is about equivalent to 10 cups of instant coffee, or 5-6 of fresh ground drip brewed.
Suddenly going to this will leave a person needing to drink more water to offset dehydration, and for obvious reasons, taking lots of pee breaks. The body will adjust on the dehydration issue in about 1-2 months, but until that point, the user is at increased risk of heatstroke, particularly while active in hot conditions. Going on and off caffeine (like not guzzleing it on the weekends) will lengthen this period of adatation. Side effects will also likely include headaches from withdrawl, irritability, and twitches. Unless you are one of that very rare breed who has what they sometimes call gunfighter's nerves, this level of caffeine use will impair some fine motor movements with twitching. However, none of this appears nearly as bad as a drug such as Methamphetamine - not even close. If somebody really kicked meth by overusing caffeine (as per this thread), they have probably added decades to their lives.
Mine are going to have eyes that turn blue when the Evil bit is on, and red when its off. They will also turn off their audio sensors and shoot first automatically when either William Shatner or Patrick McGoohan enters the area.
I agree that originally, this was tainted money, in the ways Microsoft originally made it, but I don't think the Gates foundation is a front for more manipulation. I think this really is from his heart, maybe with an occasional nudge from Melinda.
2 9/k.CC2B/Home.htm
If Bill Gates was just milking his donations for maximum publicity or leverage, would he have picked the causes he has? He could focus totally on those medical causes that matter most to the industrialized world, for example. He could avoid all the more politically controversial causes out there. When it comes to willingness to let the chips fall where they may, I'd say the Gates Foundation compares favorably to two of the biggest alternatives, the MacArthur and Ford Foundations:
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.8552
http://www.fordfound.org/
(Info on both the Ford Foundation's Sexuality and Religion divisions, and the MacArthur Foundation's Copyright law related work is accessable through these links. The latter may be of special interest to many Slashdotters. Both programs are examples of a foundation not shying away from doing what it thinks is right for fear of alienating business partners, funding sources or sections of the general public.)
Mr. Gates could increase giving to Europe, where Microsoft has had the most trouble, and he could focus on causes that are likely to be dear to the very politicians that have pushed hardest for fines. He doesn't appear to be doing this.
Bill Gates could also just about ignore Africa, or at least give a much smaller percentage of totals there, and still reap the same sort of publicity. Instead of his saying that computers aren't what's needed first in developing nations, he could encourage someone else to pay for more hardware everywhere, just so he could 'give' away lots of software and count that in press releases as donations worth the full retail value, even though it would actually cost him very little. His whole computer initiative goes exactly the other way. The Gates foundation only pushes computerization in areas developed enough to have libraries and similar locations, and actively avoids treating computerization as a solution where basic infrastructure such as reliable food sources, roads or water filtration are more pressing needs. They also avoid pushing computerization where political stability is suspect or obviously lacking. They don't support 'computer in every classroom' or 'every student's home' type programs, and they do pay for both machines and networking, including some pretty long haul wiring runs.
"Shit, every child has a book telling you have to make explosives - they're called textbooks."
And when the press gets ahold of the arrest story, it's quite possible for either cops or reporters to spin that fact, describing those books not as High School Chemestry texts but as Unnamed manuals that describe preparing explosives and poisons. (just think what they can say about a College grade text on even basic physics, after all, that doubtless uses the word nuclear a few places).
I was U.S. military for a few years. I just looked up at the bookself over my desk, and in sight currently are manuals for Combat Infantry/11 bang-bang stuff, through senior NCO levels, A ring binder full of tables for calculating nuclear device yields and associated fallout ranges and rad dosages (I was an NBC defense officer for a while), surveilance and reconnaisance handbooks, a book subtitled "Killing Tanks is Fun and Easy", and so on. None of this is even classified stuff - I turned all that in properly, and it NEVER went home with me. If I'm ever booked for so much as overtime parking, I'm going to dissapear forever.
Yeah, this gal doesn't have my excuses. The significance of her having those books is for a court to decide, and they MAY WELL be relevant to a very serious crime. Still, the reasons for restraint in publicizing such evidence are:
1. The press can spin this sort of thing some very wierd ways. It's hard to get a fair tril after they do it. This spinning can happen from the urge to sell news, from a personal grudge, or just from incompetence,
2. Cops or DAs can spin this too, and then claim they were misquoted and it's the presses fault not theirs. This situation is tailor made for bad cops or crooked DAs to abuse with near impunity if they aren't completely stupid about it.