Overall, you make a good arguement, except on one point where you put it one way in your first paragraph, and the other in the last sentence. Your second version is right, where you inculd raising and not just bearing the offspring.
For mammals, there is selection pressure well after offspring are produced. For humans in particular, far more children tend to survice until they themselves can reproduce if those children have good parenting. Alternately, this can be expressed as: People who die before they get their children raised to self sufficiency represent a bad trait that natural selection theoretically should put some pressure against. This probably is the explanaiton why humans are unusual among mammals in that they often live well past menopause ages, as even grand-parents or great grand-parents may be able to increase the survivability of subsequent generations.
However, there are some alternatives that help soften the selection process. A lot of human social institutions are developed to shift this load from biological parents to the rest of the species: Orphanages (obviously), but also schools, adoption/fosterage, and in some cultures, even military service (i.e. 11 year old tribal soldiers in places like Somalia or Riwanda). Probably even prehistoric humans had some of these institutions - for example there are Neandertal examples that show some seriously geriatric types, with advanced arthritis, osteoporosis, and injuries sustained 30 or more years before death, who were still kept alive by the rest of the tribe. Humans have been finding some advantages in what would seem at first glance a disadvantagous situation for apparently upwards of 100,000 years.
Unfortunately, Even though all these conditions such as heart disease do greatly impact survival, they aren't common without abundant food. Nature hasn't had many generations to select against them. The gene primarily involved wouldn't be eliminated even if it did pose a threat chiefly to just the raising to maturity part, as that threat was largely masked by other genes that were under more pressure at the time, because they threatened even initial reproduction.
It's been said that future generations will regard the next few decades as a dark age, where the culture lost most of its common heritage. This will supposedly come about because so much audio and video is mouldering away (sometimes literally), locked in vaults where it will rot before anyone can recover it. While such factors as copyrights much longer than the physical life of the archival media are likely to contribute to this, the loss of these tapes is an example of another cause.
Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't. Will Neal Armstrong be the Lief Ericson of the 26th century, and some one from the Chinese, Indian or Nigerian space program get all the credit, because they kept thir records?
Ahh, but "Implemented Universally" means more than just through one industry. It really means "Everywhere people can spend their entertainment dollars". If people can preview something else entertaining besides games, and can't preview games, money goes elsewhere. Even if every game company, every music company and every movie company has some sort of lock in, what's to stop people from doing something else?
Are powerboat makers going to keep people from trying out a friends boat, and lose sales to them, just to encourage them to keep giving game makers money? Will the local TV stations stop airing sports shows, so no one is encouraged to get out and play baseball, golf, bowl, or fish? Will Disneyland stop trying to attract tourists, just to keep money flowing to the game makers (or even Disney's own movie dept.)? Will the local playhouse stop doing live entertainment so people have fewer choices besides staying home and playing games? Will the local night spots stop trying to make dining out worth the extra cost above cooking at home, and deliberately try to lose business so Sony gets it all instead? Are all the Jazz Clubs, Comedy Clubs, and dance spots closing down? Will all print publishing cease so the only remaining choice is electronic entertainment that can be DRM'ed or otherwise hyper-controlled? Is someone going door to door to break everyone's kneecaps so they can't hike in the national parks?
No? Then game publishers better realize quickly, they don't want to waste money developing this further.
There are some other things that can be used to guesstimate quasar distances - for just one, gravitational lensing effects accumulate if there are more galaxise between us and the observed quasar, and so the quasars with the most complex total lensing are likely to also be exceptionally far. (The comparison would be a statistical average methodology for a laege sample of quasars, rather than serving to predict distances for any individual quasar). There are probably enough observations already on record to compare total lensing complexity with the doppler formula predictions with pre-existing data, and it shouldn't be too calculation intensive. (Just imagine a Beowulf Cluster of old cheap boxes, six months actual processing, and a grad student looking for a good doctoral thesis). I wouldn't be at all surprised if this has already been done.
Offhand, there are probably also different ratios for the really high energy cosmic rays emitted (Particularly cosmic rays over the theoretical maximum predicted for an extra galactic source) These last have been observed coming from extra galactic sources such as quasars. The theoretical maximum is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit, and is derived from GR. It's a puzzle for cosmologists that the GZK limit doesn't match real world observations, but I don't know if anyone has actually matched sources with other distance prediction methods on a large scale. Cosmics over the GZK limit are rare, but not ultra rare events, and it may take a decade or so to amass enough data to be able to draw significant conclusions, but more data gathering here would probably give us some distance checks on the relativistic doppler method faster than it will explain the failure of GZK itself.
I'm glad you mentioned the Hummer - Cars are probably the oldest example of product placement, certainly the oldest that quickly became widespread. You jogged my memory, and it dredged up the following tid-bit.
The New Avengers was a British spy show, a spin off from the original Avengers. A requirement that the show use British made cars for the near ubiquitous car chases and such needed in a spy type show is probably the biggest single factor in sinking that show after only two shortened seasons (13 episodes each). All the major cast members have told numerous anecdotes about the problems of working with the cars, as the ones they used often had to have 4 or 5 'stand-ins' due to constant breakdowns. The set would borrow a brand new model from the factory, and have to have three of them just so they could shoot from different angles without revealing huge dents in the side panels, straight off the assembly line.
There were whole extra days of shooting scheduled just to refilm car scenes. Production repeatedly fell behind schedule. A stuntman was injured by a car in a rather routine stunt, then another. The makers sent over two similar models in the same color, because that was the only color they were making that month (just try filming an extended scene where the good guy and bad guy are driving cars that look damned near identical).
The limited selection ment viewers were sometimes expected to believe six brawny thugs had arrived outside the heroine's door in a tiny two seater, or that a high end sports car was having trouble outrunning a station wagon (hardly the image the car companies wanted, yet they took steps that essentially ensured such counter-productive imagery).
The only reasons the producers tolerated it, despite some money they were getting from some of the car makers, was there were actual laws requiring them to film with British made cars, use new models, and so on.
This is what worries me about the way the TV industry works it the U.S. today. Content makers trying to control the hardware makers (and indirectly the consumers), looks like it goes with not fixing the problems in their own product first. This time, it's the TV studios dishing it out, but the underlieng problems still seem similar.
Add 3) If your researchers get patents, they remain competitive with their civilian counterparts in the same tier, and can leave the service (or service affiliation) with an equivalent chance of better paying jobs and other such opportunities. If they don't get patents, publish and otherwise participate in the technological culture, they end up penalized for having served their country in their early careers.
And 4) When someone asks what 'all that money' spent on government research went to, you have a nice simple answer.
I'm sure "easily and without effort" is hyperbole, but as one prison guard/weekend warrior I knew put it: "War on Drugs - The dealers around here all wear red bandannas, and don't let anyone else wear them. If it was a real war, it would be over in 15 minutes - me 20, gang 0!"
This guy used to show up for basic weapons qualification on rifle ranges I was adminning, fire 38 rounds, put the M-16 down with 2 rounds left, and insist on sticking with a score of 38 out of a possible 40. He never missed, that I saw, but didn't want a bunch of eagle eye scores on his military record, because if he ever had to shoot in a prison hostage situation or something, he was worried about some lawyer getting that record and grilling him about why he didn't just shoot the shiv out of someone's hand at 800 meters.
Even so, it would be harder than he or you make it sound. Gangs usually have a few older members who know how to keep a lower profile. There's a hard core that often includes some people who are military or police trained, access to some long range weapons of their own (even if it's likely to be single shot stuff) and often some sort of compartmentalization or cell-like structure, so the outer layer of street punks couldn't identify the whole core even if they wanted to. Don't mistake the dumb, cheap and expendable outer layers for the whole problem.
There's a lot of good reasons why Copyright Infringement is not Theft. You've cited one of them, but for the unconvinced, here's a few others. (from a non-lawyer's perspective - a real lawyer may be able to do a much better job, but this point keeps being raised and I don't see any of them tackling it).
1. Some Infringment is non-criminal (in the U. S. at least), and falls under civil law only. There is simply no such thing as non-criminal theft. Even a theft to trivial to prosecute isn't, in principle, a non-criminal act.
2. The basis for most international law on copyright is still the Berne treaty. Berne has clauses that explain how it controls civil penalties between nations, but not criminal law. If Infringment=theft, huge parts of Berne have no subjects, and it becomes a treaty regulating essentially nothing.
Berne also has a section that supports "3rd world" nations copying educationally useful materials to elevate themselves to the point where they can reasonably become part of the international marketplace of ideas, without paying liscencing costs. That's also not a limitation that other treaties would support if all infringment is criminal.
3. In the U.S., all copyright law is federal. The individual states cannot judge infringment. If copyright infringment equalled theft, the Federal government would only have power to regulate actions under the interstate commerce clause, and:
a. all violations would involve showing some criminal action crossed state lines as a precondition (or this would be another abuse of the interstate commerce clause - it's far from the first time that's been done, but that doesn't make it right, and I'd argue we don't need more of it).
b. If Infringement=Theft was accepted, the federal government would still, by default, be prohibiting states from implementing and enforcing criminal and civil laws re. copyright. These include laws that in some cases predated the founding of the Union and came from English common law. But now the prohibition would be by invoking the ICC - that's a whole nother level re. constitutional amendments and would again be stretching the hell out of the existing legal principles. As it stands, it's the principle that the U. S. Congress is the only body the constitution empowers to control copyright, AND that the constitution doesn't let congress delegate that power to the states, that makes state laws on copyright invalid. There's no principle in the constitution that says congress cannot delegate laws about theft or tolerate 'competing' state laws.
In fact, the individual state's theft laws don't originate with the federal congress at all. There's not even a legal principle that the federal government is required to pass its own laws about theft.
4. Triple damages in civil suits for such things as criminal negligence is a well established principle. This includes theft, and/or distruction of property as part of another crime. Current civil law imposes a 5x multiple for infringement that is merely willful. If Infringement=theft, then it equals a special kind of theft that is penalized more harshly and with a lower standard of proof under civil law than other kinds of theft. Unfortunately, civil law isn't regulated by the cruel and unusual punisment principle in most cases, so that an interpretation that allows stiffer penalties for some kinds of theft than others (even within the same range of value) could easily be declared legal by SCOTUS, but again, I'd argue that's not really just. It certainly hasn't happened yet despite the other things the court has done, and some of the existing decisions would seem to be counter precidents to such a decision.
I'm not a lawyer. The above is only a lay-person's opinion as to what the law might entail, and a series of hypotheticals. If you need advice relevant to an actual case with which you are personally involved, you should most certainly consult a professional and not be guided by this.
You are certainly not the only one. On just about all the piracy and most of the other 'your rights online' issues, I keep seeing some people who want to do something currently questionable to illegal, and those people either have explanations that make good sense to me (like wanting their documents to stay readable through software "upgrades"), or they are trying to legitimize something they too (IMHO) think is wrong (like wanting to use photoshop without paying for it). Against these are some corporations that I would probably sympathize more with, but the corps keep giving out explanations that don't make any sense, and so I end up deciding they MUST have ulterior motives at least as bad as the WORST of the other side.
Why won't any of the RIAA/MPAA/Propriatary Software types just come forward and say "We support your right to have a backup copy, to timeshift or spaceshift, to produce your own files in formats others you choose can access, and to treat your immediate family like they also can use your purchase without buying a seperate liscence*. In return we expect you to actually buy a copy." Since they don't show any signs of doing something like this (with whatever variations for the type of "IP" seem appropriate), I have to assume they have something else in mind, something nasty . (I'm doubtless exaggerating here - surely some of the software houses or RIAA members have endorsed at least some consumer rights - even though none come to mind offhand).
Maybe Microsoft, etc. just want what I would consider excessive control. Maybe they want to drive me away from buying "IP" and force me to always rent it instead. Maybe they want to sell me the sizzle and not the steak. Maybe they want to never be legally liable for any mistake they make, no matter how justified. Maybe they want me to have to select from the most popular music and films only, so they don't have to carry any unusual acts to get my dollars. Maybe they want to drive me to use propriatary formats only, and make whomever I want to communicate with have to buy a copy of their software too. Maybe they are in collusion with a government that wants to give us all an echo, not a choice. I've heard all these theories, and which ones are true is still up in the air to me in many cases, but these industries keep sounding as though they have some rather nasty ulterior motives, and I don't have to know all the details to vote with my pocketbook.
* The RIAA/MPAA have generally spoken like a married couple with minor children consists of several independant consumers. The legal principle that a family is, in many respects, one entity, is very basic to our society (and is supposed to be one of the pillars of principle of the Republican right). For example, by refusing to recognize such rights as are needed for a husband and wife to make a copy of a recording so that one of them can listen to it on the drive in to work while the other listens at home, the RIAA has, in effect, said, society, the government and the law may hold that the two of you are legally one, but we don't. Why is the RIAA anti-family? (I could make a similar arguement about the MPAA, etc., but you really shouldn't watch movies or write letters while driving.):-)
I haven't seen this last arguement used at all on Slashdot. I offer it half-whimsically, but:
If anyone wants to use it to build a genuine case that the RIAA, et. all. are anti-family, you are certainly welcome to milk it for all its worth.
Q2&3: Are working conditions good enough by their standards? Are working conditions better than, for example, working on a peasant farm? A: Yes, otherwise why would they work there? There's plenty of peasant farms in China -- people are leaving them in droves.
It's worth noting that this isn't an automatically safe assumption. Much of Africa, right now, has a huge influx of people from the farms to the cities, but there is little or no economic growth (often there's profoundly negative growth instead), and it doesn't seem increased job opportunities or quality of life are driving it at all. It also doesn't seem to be driven by agri-business taking over land formerly held by families, or any of the other causes usually cited in other cases. The same goes for parts of South America.
One guess is that African urbanization is being driven almost totally by non-economic factors, such as fear of mercenary bandit forces invading rural villages. This is a very real risk in some places, but also an incredibly overhyped risk in others where it is geographically unfeasable and not historically seen, yet waves of rumors seem to spring up from nowhere, and people respond to them in states of near panic by moving to the citys even with no prospect of employment or socal services.
China, and most of Asia, seems to be roughly following the model of the west, where flight to the urban centers is at least sometimes driven by desire to better oneself. However, they also have concurrent pressures the 'first world' didn't. In the US and Europe, we had songs and jokes (How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paris?) ever since the 1910's, while big Agribusiness presures lagged that by 50 years or so. In China, the two are nearly running in sync.
.NET is a pretty spectacular exception though (glad you called it excellent). It impresses me that you can take an old Win 98 box that gets incredibly flaky, unstable and slow when you enable Active Desktop, put.NET 1.1 or even 2.0 on it, and a little 3rd party software will give you tons of Active Desktop type services for the end user and yet it will run fast and stable. (In fact, it can be configured to be more stable than before). It's not that writing something better than Active Desktop should be all that hard (or add 200 Mb + to the install, which it unfortunately does), but I really doubt Microsoft had any intention at all of improving support for a Windows version that's about to officially expire (July 11th). It doubtless wasn't an official design goal of the program at all.
Google makes some people concerned (not me personally, mind you, but some people), because they are getting increasingly good at correlating apparently unrelated or distantly related data. Yahoo may have more user data that's an obvious risk, info that's at least roughly like a SSN or pay voucher in that some potential abuses are obvious, but Google shows some real ability at taking lots of normally innocuous data, i.e. the equivalent of shoe size and brand of pet food, and getting something unexpected from some of the combinations.
As an example - Google is where people discovered searching for certain strings let 'outsiders' access security cameras made by at least two major manufacturers, if they were installed with default setups, and just at a guess at least 100,000 people now know the tricks involved (and it's still a workable exploit). If you don't know what those strings are, just Google. I'd submit that when this became public knowledge most black hats thoughts swiftly turned to possible misuses of a security camera they can control, so unlike many exploits, the 'what?'s' and 'why?'s' were already answered in a way obvious to the script kiddee, and the next step was to master the 'how?'
Yahoo has info that many people shouldn't have given out in their profiles, and certainly, the more frequently and variously portal services are accessed, the more really sensitive data a typical user will be risking. I'd go so far as to say a clueful and concerned user will still have a great deal of trouble avoiding some risks. But, most of the illicit uses for that info are less obvious than for a SSN or PIN, and often, finding out how to abuse such info is best done by turning back to (you guessed it) Google for instructions.
Paranoia about this is easy (just look at those people who think Google Earth is showing real time updated sattelite data, and could be used to see who's parked in someone's driveway at that exact moment). Still, not all such concerns are paranoid - there's a reasonable residuum that justifies caution.
Except that
a. most of the vehicles were kept in a specialized lease program that generally didn't allow the leaser to purchase them at expiration even if they wanted to. You're claiming to know how people who weren't allow to vote would have voted there. Very few of these vehilces are in the hands of actual owners today. There are people wanting to purchase one even today who simply can't get one. GM isn't selling, even at prices above the initial new value.
b. The State of California decided in the middle of the 3 year lease program, that inductive charging was out, and only conductive charging would qualify a vehicle for the state's 0-emissions tax breaks. (That's from GMs own letter to EV1 leasers)
c. At that time, there were about 210 stations with inductive paddle charging in the state of California, and about 80 stations in Ga. and Fla. If you lived in any of the other 47 states, you couldn't get charging. Over 1/2 the Ca. stations were in the process of converting to a smaller paddle size when the Ca. board announced its decision, and GM had to eat all those costs at once, plus in some cases drivers had to deal with their local stations being down for days or weeks as part of the policy turn-around.
d. GM mentioned in their same letter that some people had asked to get out of the lease program early. Yes, that might support your statement, but there has never been an automobile leased in numbers where some people didn't want out early. GM hasn't disclosed what the percentages were, and saying that less than absolute perfect consumer satisfaction was a factor in their decisions isn't really telling the rest of us anything. You can infer suckage from that if you want, but there are several alternate inferences. Ca's decision alone was certainly enough to make the program unprofitable, so this and other subsidiary factors cited in the letters seem to be just additional justifications for a decision already made.
e. The 1997 model 1 had very poor range, with some leasers reporting as little as 40 miles on a charge. Suckage indeed. However the 1999 Model 2 used a Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery array, and was officially rated for 100 Miles. A substantial number of users reported it did far better than the rated milage, typically reporting 140 to 180 miles/charge for mixed highway/city. This is the origin of some of the claims that the project was deliberately screwed up - why would GM underate its own product? Leasers also praised the car's pickup and sportscar like handling. Apparently there were weight savings from NiMH that made the second generation quite a bit better in multiple respects.
e. The design had near instantanious heating and cooling for the passenger cabin, and, at least for the Model 2, near noiseless driving (I don't know that the first designe wasn't quiet as well, just that I haven't seen leters specifically praising it as I have the 2nd. generation). Offsetting this was charging time and limited range, but just offhand I'd suspect that the charging station problem, making that range more for round trips than one way, was a more important factor, and that came almost entirely from the state government's actions.
Thee was this little thing called the Protestant Reformation, sorry you didn't get the memo. (Plus all those Greek, Ethiopian, and Russian Orthodox branches that were never part of the church of Rome, and I've doubtless left out a few others). Roman Catholics represent much less than half of Christians out there.
Worse still, Galileo was first asked to write an arguement to present directly to the Pope, to be written in Latin, and only after the request to submit paers directly to the court did he write it in Italian instead, along with publishing it for the general public. Just try appearing before a court today, and releasing parts of your legal papers to the press while the trial is still going on. Those modern judges may be secular, but they will still immediately declare you in contempt. G even got house arrest instead of a regular jail cell out of it.
As you also point out, Galileo alsp introduced a character called in Italian "simpleton" in his arguement. Going before a modern, oh so secular judge (or worse yet, the U.S. Congress) and saying, in effect "Even an idiot would agree I'm right - so if you disagree, you must be dumber than an idiot" is another very good way to find yourself in contempt and facing time.
I agree with most of your post, except for the "They weren't big about democracy and freedom of speech back then..." It's true too, but it's really not relevant, as even now, what Galileo did will still get you thrown in jail. The only real difference is the religious authorities are not among the people with the power to do it anymore. We still give that authority to some of our fellows, and most of us even think that is justified. The big change is only that religious groups aren't on the list of those able to impose secular penalties.
When the Big Bang theory was first proposed, it was in competition with the Steady State theory, and the scientific community in general believed one of the two theorys must be right. Steady State was frequently used to "prove' God didn't exist, by people such as Sir Bertrand Russell. The short version of their arguement was in essence "Universe has been around forever = no moment of creation = no need for a creator". Since just about every prediction made by the Big Bang theory was the opposite of the matching prediction for the Steady State, then the BB does predict God, in that anyone claiming it doesn't has in effect also claimed that these two theories are opposite in so many other respects, but they have just this one property (God-opposition) in common, instead of being opposite in this way, too.
That's a strong claim that requires equally strong proof, and unless someone formally can make that proof, the BB is a pro-God theory. Problem is, it's not just religious types advancing that claim, it's all the Atheists who tried to use SS as a disproof, only to be disappointed when BB won out on other grounds. The people complaining that the Pope should stay out of a scientific discussion didn't object, by and large, to a lot of agnostic or Atheist philosophers injecting themselves into the same discussion with no more (or no less)qualifications than the Pope.
Cosmology has moved well beyond the basic BB, and it's not very clear now whether the inflationary model or any of the proposed successors says anything much one way or the other about God. If any do, it's certainly not as clear cut as with the BB/SS debate. I don't see much point in using the BB as a proof of God, now that the BB itself is just a very simplified version of the modern theories, but back in the 50's and 60's, a whole lot of SS supporters made arguements that justified their Atheism based on a theory, the opposite theory won out for the next 20 years or so, and (to my admittedly limited knowledge), not one of them changed their opinion one iota.
Precisely - Reading the whole of John Paul 2's own comments and even a few of the other things he wrote to scientists shows that he was well aware of what Hawking and others were claiming and why it wasn't science. Hawking is one of a number of Cosmologists that have started from the assumption that many fundamental variables must be randomly selected, and from that assumption, an untestable (and therefore non-scientific) prediction commonly follows, mascarading as science. Hawking's made it, Sagan's made it (although he at least qualified (in Cosmos) that it was speculative), Guth's made it, and half the people pushing String theory or various Brane theories have made it, while the other half have been tweaking their theories to avoid explicitly making it.
This is the prediction that an infinite number of 'parellel' universes must exist. Note that the scientists, unlike SF authors, are careful to say these are likely to be forever unobservable. I'd argue that the prediction that the fundamental constants nust be random is itself unscientific, but why bother, when there is such a common tenedency in the scientists that start from that premise to jump to the consequent and proclaim infinite parellels.
Now I don't personally believe in the whole heirarchial structure of angelic beings postulated by some parts of the Roman Catholc church, with Powers, Seraphim, and Thrones, etc. - but even a claim involving a detailed listing of what every single one of fiftyfive billion angels did every moment of creation would be simpler than a theory that predicts an infinite number of unobservable phenomina, by Occam's Razor. A theory that blames the universe on a conspiracy between Olive (Santa's other reindeer), and Sagan's Invisible Garage Dwelling Dragon is still more scientific than one that makes an infinite number of untestable predictions. It at least has the virtue of testability.
For more on this,/.'ers might want to read "The Infinte Book", by John D. Barrow, FRS and professor of Math at Cambridge. He has some great arguements about just what must inevitably exist if the universe (or multiverse if you prefer) is truely infinite in either time or space, and these show just how most of the Cosmology speculation is rooted in niave models of infinity similar to an uneducated layman's, and not real math. Without real math behind it, it ain't science.
If you actually had any morals, you would have realized that in the first place.
Or, just as a wild hypothetical, the Google agreement with China was based on just what the Chinese government claimed it intended to censor, not what it ended up actually censoring. Perhaps Google chose to let the relationship go on for a time to see whether China would stick to that without pressure, or if it didn't could China at least be induced to adjust its stance under the tiny amount of pressure Google could bring to bear. Perhaps Google was of the opinion that the US government would oppose abuses by the PRC and bring pressure of its own to bear. Google quite possibly had no idea just how firmly and selectively China wanted to enforce just which rules. I say just as a hypothetical, but China did openly mention censoring porn and scammers by its own standards when this all first came up, and some of their decisions since have been allegedly for such reasons.
Is PRC opposition to Falun Gong more similar to: a. religious oppression, in a manner totally incompatable with either the US first amendment or the UN Declaration of Rights b. the FDA forcing the Dianetics organization to stop claiming their E-meters actually had health benefits, only to have Dianetics reform as the religious movement, Scientology, to get around it.
At this point, the PRC says 'b.' - evidence for that is mixed, but the initial moves against Falun Gong did originate in government organizations relating to scams and particularly medical fraud. Sure there could be a high ranking party member deciding Falun Gong was a destabilizing political influence first, and directing the government to find an excuse second, but there's no public paper trail showing that that even now, and Google sure didn't have that information when they started helping the PRC censor FG related sites. Personally, I think there's at least some 'a.' included, but even as more allegations fly back and forth, I still see evidence for 'b.', and I'm sure some government officials genuinely think the censorship was solely for type 'b.' reasons even now.
Analogies are tricky things, but here's one. Let's say I am in a position to choose to cooperate willingly and even enthusiasticly with local law enforcement in providing some records, with appropriate legal safeguards, i.e. a warrent signed by an judge, or not. Assume I have some real power to drag my feet on this if I want, or at least some realistic hope that complaints via the press could rein in abuses or at least get an investigation from higher authorities started if I made them. At some point, the authorities arrest a man based at least in part on the evidence I have provided, and I have other reasons to think they are overreaching themselves or committing a technical error in that case. Do I do evil if I continue to cooperate in other cases? How about if I choose to talk to the officials involved rather than go to the press first? How about talking to the higher authorities second and considering the press as a third alternative? How about if I wait 6 months for the trial itself to conclude before I pick some actions? I grant you, there are situations where I could clearly cross a sharp line, for example, if it became obvious that a corrupt judge was targeting political enemies of his affiliated party, and I didn't immediately start taking steps to oppose this, but the question is, how do you get from a person being in a situation with many fuzzy boundaries and that person deciding at some point THE evil line had definitely been crossed, to "You have no morals, because you decided this at point C, not point A".? Moral != 20/20 foresight.
OT: Looks more like parent poster is claiming the combination Troll AND Offtopic is unfair - that + is more likely to mean an 'and' than an 'or'. Makes a certain amount of sense, as a troll just about has to address the actual topic in some way. There are probably some exceptions, but I can't think of any examples offhand. In fact, O.P.'s arguement seems to fit other combinations, such as Flamebait and OT, that may not be, by absolute logical rigor, abuse, but are defacto abuse of the system at least 9 times in 10.
A: In many, but not all cases, Yes. Yes. (ignoring intentional termination, as answer 1). None what-so-ever, unless you want to run the process 1 more time and get details on the bug to be sure it's the logfile size that crashed it. Yes, but you might want to restart the FTP server to see just who is placing demands on it, and particularly if they are an authorized user.
I'm not trying to be flip here, by answering what are obviously rhetorical questions, but I want to make a point, which is you probably are answering those questions without all the qualifications I just used, and that and the rest of your comment suggests you are thinking only in terms of a two valued logical system - autorespawn EVERYthing or manually admin ALL processes.
There's at least three whole categories of solutions that are feasable, depending on the process, and these have lots of subcategories: 1. respawn automatically, if the admin is confident this won't lead to problems such as the one you describe, particularly the combination of recursive respawn and resource drain. Note - this is not the same as respawn automatically only if it will lead to no problems at all, some problems are small enough to bear with until time x (where x is for example, until the weekend's over). 2. the admin does the work him/herself, under (I hope) intelligent control.
(This is best for either:
a. problems such as the ones you described
or
b. lesser problems that may thus get fixed, (i.e. if the admin files a bug report) 3. automatic respawn runs under controlled circumstances only, such as:
a. notify admin always.
b. respawn X number of times only.
c. log processes at X (increasing) level of verbosity
d. combinations of the above, i.e. respawn no more than 6x in 24 hrs, stop respawning if system load exceeds 75%, number logged in users greter than 120 or free memory less than 1 Gb, e-mail admin after second respawn in same period, e-mail again if any of the limiting conditions cause the respawn process to quit.
It's only once you work out what options you need as an admin that you can decide whether Munin, (for example) can help you, and this often ends up being influenced more by real world questions such as whether the boss even wants you to cancel taking the kid to Six Flags over Foo just to support the guys in shipping and recieving that are the only people there on Saturdays, than by the desire to see that every process runs properly and all bad code gets fixed.
Of course in movies our hero generally doesn't make little white mistakes like illegally wiretapping or torturing some innocent suspect. Heh.
In movies like True Lies, an untrained goodguy can drop a machinepistol and it will bounce down a flight of stairs in such a way as to kill 11 villians. In a lot of these films and shows, GOD takes charge of all randomly fired bullets, so the good guy hits every criminal he really needs to, and they are all wounded or killed as dictated by Divine justice. The minor bad guys get wounded and surrender, the more serious ones die, and the really uber-bad villians, the bullet misses, but severs a cable so the perp drops 90 stories into a passing tank of rabid electric eels. Guns don't kill people, they are just the tools people use to invoke God's own perfect, infallable justice.
True Lies is far from the worst of these - at least they show why firing rocket launchers in confined spaces is a bad thing, that nukes don't go of from being near conventional explosions, and a few other things they got right. But there really are a lot of 'action' films out there where the heros are protected from all the normal consequences of making normally lethal mistakes. When real people believe the real world works like that, you get big body counts, 4 year olds that change their names from Jeffey to Colateral Damage, and usually, eventually, a public outcry to pass laws limiting what those in power can do.
I'm willing to assume that, by right to welfare, healthcare or education, you are referring to those cases where some person gets funding to support welfare, healthcare or education services where they have not actually met the conditions set. I'll also assume you are referring to both cases where the money gets spent on the proper service and ones where it gets spent somewhere else, like an impersonator's wide screen TV or crack habit, but emphasizing the latter. Yes, these are real problems.
Even so, just who are these people who have no right to law enforcement services? What the hell does that mean? "He's an Illegal alien, so he has no right to report being robbed?" "She's a petty criminal herself, so when we find her body dumped in an alley, there's no need to file a homicide report?"
This is not unique to the United States, and in fact most of the world offers at least 50 years past the death of the author
Most of the world derived there modern copyright laws from their own earlier systems. That may be for worse or for better - there are some interesting ideas involved in what's called "moral copyright", where the law is attempting to protect a creator from having his ideas used to support causes he or she diametrically opposes.
However, U.S. citizens should remember that the constitution set out to craft a copyright system that was in many ways directly opposed to the way copyright was handled in Europe at the time, and that modern European copyright law is not revolutionary, but evolutionary in this respect. The whole idea that the U.S. needs to bring its copyright system into line with Europe's is rather similar to saying we need to make the office of highest leader a lifetime job, like Europe used to do in the Age of Kings.
You've given a good arguement against the "life" part of "life plus" copyright terms, and I've given some arguements against the "plus" part earlier in this thread. Soulds like what's left would be a fixed term, just like the founding fathers said.
It's the new, current system where the lawmakers have gained whole new "rights" to give or take away.
From reading what Jefferson, in particular, wrote, copyright in the U.S. constitution derived from natural rights - people could physically copy works because people's physical nature itself made them able to do so. In order to promote science and the useful arts, people were expected to give up a portion of that right to encourage the creator. Please note that even those crafters of the constitution (such as Madison) who didn't ordinarily put much credence in "natural rights", rights "derived from nature and nature's god", and the like generally agreed it was the mechanism behind patents and copyrightc, or else their letters and writings are silent on the subject. This strongly suggests that the founding fathers were totally unable in debate to conceive of a mechanism other than transfer of a natural right to explain what they were doing with copyright.
(So there's an answer to your first question, The nature of Men and the nature of Ideas is what allows us to use them freely. Your rephrase is therefore a leading question, as the word "entitles" assunes a title to works must exist before the fact of the works own existence rather than after. A right is not the same thing as an entitlement, and you would have a natural right to make copies even if there was no government to grant titles.)
Now your or my natural right to produce a copy ceases at the moment of our deaths, if not before. No one can choose to make a copy one single second after his or her death. How, then, can copyright be extended to life plus 70 years or similar periods? Simply, Copyright must become something originated as the gift of a beneficent body of lawmakers, rather than transferred from the citizens. As you put it, the lawmakers give and take away. The point being if there is nothing but either law or subjective morality to grant you a right, then 1. we get the present situation where the lawmakers are doing a whole heaping lot of taking away, and 2. from your own assumptions, you have also lost the grounds to complain about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Overall, you make a good arguement, except on one point where you put it one way in your first paragraph, and the other in the last sentence. Your second version is right, where you inculd raising and not just bearing the offspring.
For mammals, there is selection pressure well after offspring are produced. For humans in particular, far more children tend to survice until they themselves can reproduce if those children have good parenting. Alternately, this can be expressed as: People who die before they get their children raised to self sufficiency represent a bad trait that natural selection theoretically should put some pressure against. This probably is the explanaiton why humans are unusual among mammals in that they often live well past menopause ages, as even grand-parents or great grand-parents may be able to increase the survivability of subsequent generations.
However, there are some alternatives that help soften the selection process. A lot of human social institutions are developed to shift this load from biological parents to the rest of the species: Orphanages (obviously), but also schools, adoption/fosterage, and in some cultures, even military service (i.e. 11 year old tribal soldiers in places like Somalia or Riwanda). Probably even prehistoric humans had some of these institutions - for example there are Neandertal examples that show some seriously geriatric types, with advanced arthritis, osteoporosis, and injuries sustained 30 or more years before death, who were still kept alive by the rest of the tribe. Humans have been finding some advantages in what would seem at first glance a disadvantagous situation for apparently upwards of 100,000 years.
Unfortunately, Even though all these conditions such as heart disease do greatly impact survival, they aren't common without abundant food. Nature hasn't had many generations to select against them. The gene primarily involved wouldn't be eliminated even if it did pose a threat chiefly to just the raising to maturity part, as that threat was largely masked by other genes that were under more pressure at the time, because they threatened even initial reproduction.
It's been said that future generations will regard the next few decades as a dark age, where the culture lost most of its common heritage. This will supposedly come about because so much audio and video is mouldering away (sometimes literally), locked in vaults where it will rot before anyone can recover it. While such factors as copyrights much longer than the physical life of the archival media are likely to contribute to this, the loss of these tapes is an example of another cause.
Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't. Will Neal Armstrong be the Lief Ericson of the 26th century, and some one from the Chinese, Indian or Nigerian space program get all the credit, because they kept thir records?
Ahh, but "Implemented Universally" means more than just through one industry. It really means "Everywhere people can spend their entertainment dollars". If people can preview something else entertaining besides games, and can't preview games, money goes elsewhere. Even if every game company, every music company and every movie company has some sort of lock in, what's to stop people from doing something else?
Are powerboat makers going to keep people from trying out a friends boat, and lose sales to them, just to encourage them to keep giving game makers money? Will the local TV stations stop airing sports shows, so no one is encouraged to get out and play baseball, golf, bowl, or fish? Will Disneyland stop trying to attract tourists, just to keep money flowing to the game makers (or even Disney's own movie dept.)? Will the local playhouse stop doing live entertainment so people have fewer choices besides staying home and playing games? Will the local night spots stop trying to make dining out worth the extra cost above cooking at home, and deliberately try to lose business so Sony gets it all instead? Are all the Jazz Clubs, Comedy Clubs, and dance spots closing down? Will all print publishing cease so the only remaining choice is electronic entertainment that can be DRM'ed or otherwise hyper-controlled? Is someone going door to door to break everyone's kneecaps so they can't hike in the national parks?
No? Then game publishers better realize quickly, they don't want to waste money developing this further.
There are some other things that can be used to guesstimate quasar distances - for just one, gravitational lensing effects accumulate if there are more galaxise between us and the observed quasar, and so the quasars with the most complex total lensing are likely to also be exceptionally far. (The comparison would be a statistical average methodology for a laege sample of quasars, rather than serving to predict distances for any individual quasar). There are probably enough observations already on record to compare total lensing complexity with the doppler formula predictions with pre-existing data, and it shouldn't be too calculation intensive. (Just imagine a Beowulf Cluster of old cheap boxes, six months actual processing, and a grad student looking for a good doctoral thesis). I wouldn't be at all surprised if this has already been done.
Offhand, there are probably also different ratios for the really high energy cosmic rays emitted (Particularly cosmic rays over the theoretical maximum predicted for an extra galactic source) These last have been observed coming from extra galactic sources such as quasars. The theoretical maximum is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit, and is derived from GR. It's a puzzle for cosmologists that the GZK limit doesn't match real world observations, but I don't know if anyone has actually matched sources with other distance prediction methods on a large scale. Cosmics over the GZK limit are rare, but not ultra rare events, and it may take a decade or so to amass enough data to be able to draw significant conclusions, but more data gathering here would probably give us some distance checks on the relativistic doppler method faster than it will explain the failure of GZK itself.
I'm glad you mentioned the Hummer - Cars are probably the oldest example of product placement, certainly the oldest that quickly became widespread. You jogged my memory, and it dredged up the following tid-bit.
The New Avengers was a British spy show, a spin off from the original Avengers. A requirement that the show use British made cars for the near ubiquitous car chases and such needed in a spy type show is probably the biggest single factor in sinking that show after only two shortened seasons (13 episodes each). All the major cast members have told numerous anecdotes about the problems of working with the cars, as the ones they used often had to have 4 or 5 'stand-ins' due to constant breakdowns. The set would borrow a brand new model from the factory, and have to have three of them just so they could shoot from different angles without revealing huge dents in the side panels, straight off the assembly line.
There were whole extra days of shooting scheduled just to refilm car scenes. Production repeatedly fell behind schedule. A stuntman was injured by a car in a rather routine stunt, then another. The makers sent over two similar models in the same color, because that was the only color they were making that month (just try filming an extended scene where the good guy and bad guy are driving cars that look damned near identical).
The limited selection ment viewers were sometimes expected to believe six brawny thugs had arrived outside the heroine's door in a tiny two seater, or that a high end sports car was having trouble outrunning a station wagon (hardly the image the car companies wanted, yet they took steps that essentially ensured such counter-productive imagery).
The only reasons the producers tolerated it, despite some money they were getting from some of the car makers, was there were actual laws requiring them to film with British made cars, use new models, and so on.
This is what worries me about the way the TV industry works it the U.S. today. Content makers trying to control the hardware makers (and indirectly the consumers), looks like it goes with not fixing the problems in their own product first. This time, it's the TV studios dishing it out, but the underlieng problems still seem similar.
Add 3) If your researchers get patents, they remain competitive with their civilian counterparts in the same tier, and can leave the service (or service affiliation) with an equivalent chance of better paying jobs and other such opportunities. If they don't get patents, publish and otherwise participate in the technological culture, they end up penalized for having served their country in their early careers.
And 4) When someone asks what 'all that money' spent on government research went to, you have a nice simple answer.
I'm sure "easily and without effort" is hyperbole, but as one prison guard/weekend warrior I knew put it:
"War on Drugs - The dealers around here all wear red bandannas, and don't let anyone else wear them. If it was a real war, it would be over in 15 minutes - me 20, gang 0!"
This guy used to show up for basic weapons qualification on rifle ranges I was adminning, fire 38 rounds, put the M-16 down with 2 rounds left, and insist on sticking with a score of 38 out of a possible 40. He never missed, that I saw, but didn't want a bunch of eagle eye scores on his military record, because if he ever had to shoot in a prison hostage situation or something, he was worried about some lawyer getting that record and grilling him about why he didn't just shoot the shiv out of someone's hand at 800 meters.
Even so, it would be harder than he or you make it sound. Gangs usually have a few older members who know how to keep a lower profile. There's a hard core that often includes some people who are military or police trained, access to some long range weapons of their own (even if it's likely to be single shot stuff) and often some sort of compartmentalization or cell-like structure, so the outer layer of street punks couldn't identify the whole core even if they wanted to. Don't mistake the dumb, cheap and expendable outer layers for the whole problem.
There's a lot of good reasons why Copyright Infringement is not Theft. You've cited one of them, but for the unconvinced, here's a few others. (from a non-lawyer's perspective - a real lawyer may be able to do a much better job, but this point keeps being raised and I don't see any of them tackling it).
1. Some Infringment is non-criminal (in the U. S. at least), and falls under civil law only. There is simply no such thing as non-criminal theft. Even a theft to trivial to prosecute isn't, in principle, a non-criminal act.
2. The basis for most international law on copyright is still the Berne treaty. Berne has clauses that explain how it controls civil penalties between nations, but not criminal law. If Infringment=theft, huge parts of Berne have no subjects, and it becomes a treaty regulating essentially nothing.
Berne also has a section that supports "3rd world" nations copying educationally useful materials to elevate themselves to the point where they can reasonably become part of the international marketplace of ideas, without paying liscencing costs. That's also not a limitation that other treaties would support if all infringment is criminal.
3. In the U.S., all copyright law is federal. The individual states cannot judge infringment. If copyright infringment equalled theft, the Federal government would only have power to regulate actions under the interstate commerce clause, and:
a. all violations would involve showing some criminal action crossed state lines as a precondition (or this would be another abuse of the interstate commerce clause - it's far from the first time that's been done, but that doesn't make it right, and I'd argue we don't need more of it).
b. If Infringement=Theft was accepted, the federal government would still, by default, be prohibiting states from implementing and enforcing criminal and civil laws re. copyright. These include laws that in some cases predated the founding of the Union and came from English common law. But now the prohibition would be by invoking the ICC - that's a whole nother level re. constitutional amendments and would again be stretching the hell out of the existing legal principles. As it stands, it's the principle that the U. S. Congress is the only body the constitution empowers to control copyright, AND that the constitution doesn't let congress delegate that power to the states, that makes state laws on copyright invalid. There's no principle in the constitution that says congress cannot delegate laws about theft or tolerate 'competing' state laws.
In fact, the individual state's theft laws don't originate with the federal congress at all. There's not even a legal principle that the federal government is required to pass its own laws about theft.
4. Triple damages in civil suits for such things as criminal negligence is a well established principle. This includes theft, and/or distruction of property as part of another crime. Current civil law imposes a 5x multiple for infringement that is merely willful. If Infringement=theft, then it equals a special kind of theft that is penalized more harshly and with a lower standard of proof under civil law than other kinds of theft. Unfortunately, civil law isn't regulated by the cruel and unusual punisment principle in most cases, so that an interpretation that allows stiffer penalties for some kinds of theft than others (even within the same range of value) could easily be declared legal by SCOTUS, but again, I'd argue that's not really just. It certainly hasn't happened yet despite the other things the court has done, and some of the existing decisions would seem to be counter precidents to such a decision.
I'm not a lawyer. The above is only a lay-person's opinion as to what the law might entail, and a series of hypotheticals. If you need advice relevant to an actual case with which you are personally involved, you should most certainly consult a professional and not be guided by this.
You are certainly not the only one. On just about all the piracy and most of the other 'your rights online' issues, I keep seeing some people who want to do something currently questionable to illegal, and those people either have explanations that make good sense to me (like wanting their documents to stay readable through software "upgrades"), or they are trying to legitimize something they too (IMHO) think is wrong (like wanting to use photoshop without paying for it). Against these are some corporations that I would probably sympathize more with, but the corps keep giving out explanations that don't make any sense, and so I end up deciding they MUST have ulterior motives at least as bad as the WORST of the other side.
:-)
Why won't any of the RIAA/MPAA/Propriatary Software types just come forward and say "We support your right to have a backup copy, to timeshift or spaceshift, to produce your own files in formats others you choose can access, and to treat your immediate family like they also can use your purchase without buying a seperate liscence*. In return we expect you to actually buy a copy." Since they don't show any signs of doing something like this (with whatever variations for the type of "IP" seem appropriate), I have to assume they have something else in mind, something nasty . (I'm doubtless exaggerating here - surely some of the software houses or RIAA members have endorsed at least some consumer rights - even though none come to mind offhand).
Maybe Microsoft, etc. just want what I would consider excessive control. Maybe they want to drive me away from buying "IP" and force me to always rent it instead. Maybe they want to sell me the sizzle and not the steak. Maybe they want to never be legally liable for any mistake they make, no matter how justified. Maybe they want me to have to select from the most popular music and films only, so they don't have to carry any unusual acts to get my dollars. Maybe they want to drive me to use propriatary formats only, and make whomever I want to communicate with have to buy a copy of their software too. Maybe they are in collusion with a government that wants to give us all an echo, not a choice. I've heard all these theories, and which ones are true is still up in the air to me in many cases, but these industries keep sounding as though they have some rather nasty ulterior motives, and I don't have to know all the details to vote with my pocketbook.
* The RIAA/MPAA have generally spoken like a married couple with minor children consists of several independant consumers. The legal principle that a family is, in many respects, one entity, is very basic to our society (and is supposed to be one of the pillars of principle of the Republican right). For example, by refusing to recognize such rights as are needed for a husband and wife to make a copy of a recording so that one of them can listen to it on the drive in to work while the other listens at home, the RIAA has, in effect, said, society, the government and the law may hold that the two of you are legally one, but we don't. Why is the RIAA anti-family? (I could make a similar arguement about the MPAA, etc., but you really shouldn't watch movies or write letters while driving.)
I haven't seen this last arguement used at all on Slashdot. I offer it half-whimsically, but:
If anyone wants to use it to build a genuine case that the RIAA, et. all. are anti-family, you are certainly welcome to milk it for all its worth.
Q2&3: Are working conditions good enough by their standards? Are working conditions better than, for example, working on a peasant farm?
A: Yes, otherwise why would they work there? There's plenty of peasant farms in China -- people are leaving them in droves.
It's worth noting that this isn't an automatically safe assumption. Much of Africa, right now, has a huge influx of people from the farms to the cities, but there is little or no economic growth (often there's profoundly negative growth instead), and it doesn't seem increased job opportunities or quality of life are driving it at all. It also doesn't seem to be driven by agri-business taking over land formerly held by families, or any of the other causes usually cited in other cases. The same goes for parts of South America.
One guess is that African urbanization is being driven almost totally by non-economic factors, such as fear of mercenary bandit forces invading rural villages. This is a very real risk in some places, but also an incredibly overhyped risk in others where it is geographically unfeasable and not historically seen, yet waves of rumors seem to spring up from nowhere, and people respond to them in states of near panic by moving to the citys even with no prospect of employment or socal services.
China, and most of Asia, seems to be roughly following the model of the west, where flight to the urban centers is at least sometimes driven by desire to better oneself. However, they also have concurrent pressures the 'first world' didn't. In the US and Europe, we had songs and jokes (How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paris?) ever since the 1910's, while big Agribusiness presures lagged that by 50 years or so. In China, the two are nearly running in sync.
.NET is a pretty spectacular exception though (glad you called it excellent). It impresses me that you can take an old Win 98 box that gets incredibly flaky, unstable and slow when you enable Active Desktop, put .NET 1.1 or even 2.0 on it, and a little 3rd party software will give you tons of Active Desktop type services for the end user and yet it will run fast and stable. (In fact, it can be configured to be more stable than before). It's not that writing something better than Active Desktop should be all that hard (or add 200 Mb + to the install, which it unfortunately does), but I really doubt Microsoft had any intention at all of improving support for a Windows version that's about to officially expire (July 11th). It doubtless wasn't an official design goal of the program at all.
Google makes some people concerned (not me personally, mind you, but some people), because they are getting increasingly good at correlating apparently unrelated or distantly related data. Yahoo may have more user data that's an obvious risk, info that's at least roughly like a SSN or pay voucher in that some potential abuses are obvious, but Google shows some real ability at taking lots of normally innocuous data, i.e. the equivalent of shoe size and brand of pet food, and getting something unexpected from some of the combinations.
As an example - Google is where people discovered searching for certain strings let 'outsiders' access security cameras made by at least two major manufacturers, if they were installed with default setups, and just at a guess at least 100,000 people now know the tricks involved (and it's still a workable exploit). If you don't know what those strings are, just Google. I'd submit that when this became public knowledge most black hats thoughts swiftly turned to possible misuses of a security camera they can control, so unlike many exploits, the 'what?'s' and 'why?'s' were already answered in a way obvious to the script kiddee, and the next step was to master the 'how?'
Yahoo has info that many people shouldn't have given out in their profiles, and certainly, the more frequently and variously portal services are accessed, the more really sensitive data a typical user will be risking. I'd go so far as to say a clueful and concerned user will still have a great deal of trouble avoiding some risks. But, most of the illicit uses for that info are less obvious than for a SSN or PIN, and often, finding out how to abuse such info is best done by turning back to (you guessed it) Google for instructions.
Paranoia about this is easy (just look at those people who think Google Earth is showing real time updated sattelite data, and could be used to see who's parked in someone's driveway at that exact moment). Still, not all such concerns are paranoid - there's a reasonable residuum that justifies caution.
Except that
a. most of the vehicles were kept in a specialized lease program that generally didn't allow the leaser to purchase them at expiration even if they wanted to. You're claiming to know how people who weren't allow to vote would have voted there. Very few of these vehilces are in the hands of actual owners today. There are people wanting to purchase one even today who simply can't get one. GM isn't selling, even at prices above the initial new value.
b. The State of California decided in the middle of the 3 year lease program, that inductive charging was out, and only conductive charging would qualify a vehicle for the state's 0-emissions tax breaks. (That's from GMs own letter to EV1 leasers)
c. At that time, there were about 210 stations with inductive paddle charging in the state of California, and about 80 stations in Ga. and Fla. If you lived in any of the other 47 states, you couldn't get charging. Over 1/2 the Ca. stations were in the process of converting to a smaller paddle size when the Ca. board announced its decision, and GM had to eat all those costs at once, plus in some cases drivers had to deal with their local stations being down for days or weeks as part of the policy turn-around.
d. GM mentioned in their same letter that some people had asked to get out of the lease program early. Yes, that might support your statement, but there has never been an automobile leased in numbers where some people didn't want out early. GM hasn't disclosed what the percentages were, and saying that less than absolute perfect consumer satisfaction was a factor in their decisions isn't really telling the rest of us anything. You can infer suckage from that if you want, but there are several alternate inferences. Ca's decision alone was certainly enough to make the program unprofitable, so this and other subsidiary factors cited in the letters seem to be just additional justifications for a decision already made.
e. The 1997 model 1 had very poor range, with some leasers reporting as little as 40 miles on a charge. Suckage indeed. However the 1999 Model 2 used a Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery array, and was officially rated for 100 Miles. A substantial number of users reported it did far better than the rated milage, typically reporting 140 to 180 miles/charge for mixed highway/city. This is the origin of some of the claims that the project was deliberately screwed up - why would GM underate its own product? Leasers also praised the car's pickup and sportscar like handling. Apparently there were weight savings from NiMH that made the second generation quite a bit better in multiple respects.
e. The design had near instantanious heating and cooling for the passenger cabin, and, at least for the Model 2, near noiseless driving (I don't know that the first designe wasn't quiet as well, just that I haven't seen leters specifically praising it as I have the 2nd. generation). Offsetting this was charging time and limited range, but just offhand I'd suspect that the charging station problem, making that range more for round trips than one way, was a more important factor, and that came almost entirely from the state government's actions.
Here you go:
http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html
I'm keeping Cruithne itself for my own Uber-secret plan for world domination, but the article lists several others - Happy Bwaaahhh-hah-hah-hah'ing!
Thee was this little thing called the Protestant Reformation, sorry you didn't get the memo. (Plus all those Greek, Ethiopian, and Russian Orthodox branches that were never part of the church of Rome, and I've doubtless left out a few others). Roman Catholics represent much less than half of Christians out there.
Worse still, Galileo was first asked to write an arguement to present directly to the Pope, to be written in Latin, and only after the request to submit paers directly to the court did he write it in Italian instead, along with publishing it for the general public. Just try appearing before a court today, and releasing parts of your legal papers to the press while the trial is still going on. Those modern judges may be secular, but they will still immediately declare you in contempt. G even got house arrest instead of a regular jail cell out of it.
As you also point out, Galileo alsp introduced a character called in Italian "simpleton" in his arguement. Going before a modern, oh so secular judge (or worse yet, the U.S. Congress) and saying, in effect "Even an idiot would agree I'm right - so if you disagree, you must be dumber than an idiot" is another very good way to find yourself in contempt and facing time.
I agree with most of your post, except for the "They weren't big about democracy and freedom of speech back then..." It's true too, but it's really not relevant, as even now, what Galileo did will still get you thrown in jail. The only real difference is the religious authorities are not among the people with the power to do it anymore. We still give that authority to some of our fellows, and most of us even think that is justified. The big change is only that religious groups aren't on the list of those able to impose secular penalties.
When the Big Bang theory was first proposed, it was in competition with the Steady State theory, and the scientific community in general believed one of the two theorys must be right. Steady State was frequently used to "prove' God didn't exist, by people such as Sir Bertrand Russell. The short version of their arguement was in essence "Universe has been around forever = no moment of creation = no need for a creator". Since just about every prediction made by the Big Bang theory was the opposite of the matching prediction for the Steady State, then the BB does predict God, in that anyone claiming it doesn't has in effect also claimed that these two theories are opposite in so many other respects, but they have just this one property (God-opposition) in common, instead of being opposite in this way, too.
That's a strong claim that requires equally strong proof, and unless someone formally can make that proof, the BB is a pro-God theory. Problem is, it's not just religious types advancing that claim, it's all the Atheists who tried to use SS as a disproof, only to be disappointed when BB won out on other grounds. The people complaining that the Pope should stay out of a scientific discussion didn't object, by and large, to a lot of agnostic or Atheist philosophers injecting themselves into the same discussion with no more (or no less)qualifications than the Pope.
Cosmology has moved well beyond the basic BB, and it's not very clear now whether the inflationary model or any of the proposed successors says anything much one way or the other about God. If any do, it's certainly not as clear cut as with the BB/SS debate. I don't see much point in using the BB as a proof of God, now that the BB itself is just a very simplified version of the modern theories, but back in the 50's and 60's, a whole lot of SS supporters made arguements that justified their Atheism based on a theory, the opposite theory won out for the next 20 years or so, and (to my admittedly limited knowledge), not one of them changed their opinion one iota.
Precisely - Reading the whole of John Paul 2's own comments and even a few of the other things he wrote to scientists shows that he was well aware of what Hawking and others were claiming and why it wasn't science. Hawking is one of a number of Cosmologists that have started from the assumption that many fundamental variables must be randomly selected, and from that assumption, an untestable (and therefore non-scientific) prediction commonly follows, mascarading as science. Hawking's made it, Sagan's made it (although he at least qualified (in Cosmos) that it was speculative), Guth's made it, and half the people pushing String theory or various Brane theories have made it, while the other half have been tweaking their theories to avoid explicitly making it. /.'ers might want to read "The Infinte Book", by John D. Barrow, FRS and professor of Math at Cambridge. He has some great arguements about just what must inevitably exist if the universe (or multiverse if you prefer) is truely infinite in either time or space, and these show just how most of the Cosmology speculation is rooted in niave models of infinity similar to an uneducated layman's, and not real math. Without real math behind it, it ain't science.
This is the prediction that an infinite number of 'parellel' universes must exist. Note that the scientists, unlike SF authors, are careful to say these are likely to be forever unobservable. I'd argue that the prediction that the fundamental constants nust be random is itself unscientific, but why bother, when there is such a common tenedency in the scientists that start from that premise to jump to the consequent and proclaim infinite parellels.
Now I don't personally believe in the whole heirarchial structure of angelic beings postulated by some parts of the Roman Catholc church, with Powers, Seraphim, and Thrones, etc. - but even a claim involving a detailed listing of what every single one of fiftyfive billion angels did every moment of creation would be simpler than a theory that predicts an infinite number of unobservable phenomina, by Occam's Razor. A theory that blames the universe on a conspiracy between Olive (Santa's other reindeer), and Sagan's Invisible Garage Dwelling Dragon is still more scientific than one that makes an infinite number of untestable predictions. It at least has the virtue of testability.
For more on this,
If you actually had any morals, you would have realized that in the first place.
Or, just as a wild hypothetical, the Google agreement with China was based on just what the Chinese government claimed it intended to censor, not what it ended up actually censoring. Perhaps Google chose to let the relationship go on for a time to see whether China would stick to that without pressure, or if it didn't could China at least be induced to adjust its stance under the tiny amount of pressure Google could bring to bear. Perhaps Google was of the opinion that the US government would oppose abuses by the PRC and bring pressure of its own to bear. Google quite possibly had no idea just how firmly and selectively China wanted to enforce just which rules. I say just as a hypothetical, but China did openly mention censoring porn and scammers by its own standards when this all first came up, and some of their decisions since have been allegedly for such reasons.
Is PRC opposition to Falun Gong more similar to:
a. religious oppression, in a manner totally incompatable with either the US first amendment or the UN Declaration of Rights
b. the FDA forcing the Dianetics organization to stop claiming their E-meters actually had health benefits, only to have Dianetics reform as the religious movement, Scientology, to get around it.
At this point, the PRC says 'b.' - evidence for that is mixed, but the initial moves against Falun Gong did originate in government organizations relating to scams and particularly medical fraud. Sure there could be a high ranking party member deciding Falun Gong was a destabilizing political influence first, and directing the government to find an excuse second, but there's no public paper trail showing that that even now, and Google sure didn't have that information when they started helping the PRC censor FG related sites. Personally, I think there's at least some 'a.' included, but even as more allegations fly back and forth, I still see evidence for 'b.', and I'm sure some government officials genuinely think the censorship was solely for type 'b.' reasons even now.
Analogies are tricky things, but here's one. Let's say I am in a position to choose to cooperate willingly and even enthusiasticly with local law enforcement in providing some records, with appropriate legal safeguards, i.e. a warrent signed by an judge, or not. Assume I have some real power to drag my feet on this if I want, or at least some realistic hope that complaints via the press could rein in abuses or at least get an investigation from higher authorities started if I made them. At some point, the authorities arrest a man based at least in part on the evidence I have provided, and I have other reasons to think they are overreaching themselves or committing a technical error in that case. Do I do evil if I continue to cooperate in other cases? How about if I choose to talk to the officials involved rather than go to the press first? How about talking to the higher authorities second and considering the press as a third alternative? How about if I wait 6 months for the trial itself to conclude before I pick some actions? I grant you, there are situations where I could clearly cross a sharp line, for example, if it became obvious that a corrupt judge was targeting political enemies of his affiliated party, and I didn't immediately start taking steps to oppose this, but the question is, how do you get from a person being in a situation with many fuzzy boundaries and that person deciding at some point THE evil line had definitely been crossed, to "You have no morals, because you decided this at point C, not point A".? Moral != 20/20 foresight.
OT: Looks more like parent poster is claiming the combination Troll AND Offtopic is unfair - that + is more likely to mean an 'and' than an 'or'. Makes a certain amount of sense, as a troll just about has to address the actual topic in some way. There are probably some exceptions, but I can't think of any examples offhand. In fact, O.P.'s arguement seems to fit other combinations, such as Flamebait and OT, that may not be, by absolute logical rigor, abuse, but are defacto abuse of the system at least 9 times in 10.
A:
In many, but not all cases, Yes.
Yes. (ignoring intentional termination, as answer 1).
None what-so-ever, unless you want to run the process 1 more time and get details on the bug to be sure it's the logfile size that crashed it.
Yes, but you might want to restart the FTP server to see just who is placing demands on it, and particularly if they are an authorized user.
I'm not trying to be flip here, by answering what are obviously rhetorical questions, but I want to make a point, which is you probably are answering those questions without all the qualifications I just used, and that and the rest of your comment suggests you are thinking only in terms of a two valued logical system - autorespawn EVERYthing or manually admin ALL processes.
There's at least three whole categories of solutions that are feasable, depending on the process, and these have lots of subcategories:
1. respawn automatically, if the admin is confident this won't lead to problems such as the one you describe, particularly the combination of recursive respawn and resource drain. Note - this is not the same as respawn automatically only if it will lead to no problems at all, some problems are small enough to bear with until time x (where x is for example, until the weekend's over).
2. the admin does the work him/herself, under (I hope) intelligent control.
(This is best for either:
a. problems such as the ones you described
or
b. lesser problems that may thus get fixed, (i.e. if the admin files a bug report)
3. automatic respawn runs under controlled circumstances only, such as:
a. notify admin always.
b. respawn X number of times only.
c. log processes at X (increasing) level of verbosity
d. combinations of the above, i.e. respawn no more than 6x in 24 hrs, stop respawning if system load exceeds 75%, number logged in users greter than 120 or free memory less than 1 Gb, e-mail admin after second respawn in same period, e-mail again if any of the limiting conditions cause the respawn process to quit.
It's only once you work out what options you need as an admin that you can decide whether Munin, (for example) can help you, and this often ends up being influenced more by real world questions such as whether the boss even wants you to cancel taking the kid to Six Flags over Foo just to support the guys in shipping and recieving that are the only people there on Saturdays, than by the desire to see that every process runs properly and all bad code gets fixed.
Of course in movies our hero generally doesn't make little white mistakes like illegally wiretapping or torturing some innocent suspect. Heh.
In movies like True Lies, an untrained goodguy can drop a machinepistol and it will bounce down a flight of stairs in such a way as to kill 11 villians. In a lot of these films and shows, GOD takes charge of all randomly fired bullets, so the good guy hits every criminal he really needs to, and they are all wounded or killed as dictated by Divine justice. The minor bad guys get wounded and surrender, the more serious ones die, and the really uber-bad villians, the bullet misses, but severs a cable so the perp drops 90 stories into a passing tank of rabid electric eels. Guns don't kill people, they are just the tools people use to invoke God's own perfect, infallable justice.
True Lies is far from the worst of these - at least they show why firing rocket launchers in confined spaces is a bad thing, that nukes don't go of from being near conventional explosions, and a few other things they got right. But there really are a lot of 'action' films out there where the heros are protected from all the normal consequences of making normally lethal mistakes. When real people believe the real world works like that, you get big body counts, 4 year olds that change their names from Jeffey to Colateral Damage, and usually, eventually, a public outcry to pass laws limiting what those in power can do.
I'm willing to assume that, by right to welfare, healthcare or education, you are referring to those cases where some person gets funding to support welfare, healthcare or education services where they have not actually met the conditions set. I'll also assume you are referring to both cases where the money gets spent on the proper service and ones where it gets spent somewhere else, like an impersonator's wide screen TV or crack habit, but emphasizing the latter. Yes, these are real problems.
Even so, just who are these people who have no right to law enforcement services? What the hell does that mean? "He's an Illegal alien, so he has no right to report being robbed?" "She's a petty criminal herself, so when we find her body dumped in an alley, there's no need to file a homicide report?"
This is not unique to the United States, and in fact most of the world offers at least 50 years past the death of the author
Most of the world derived there modern copyright laws from their own earlier systems. That may be for worse or for better - there are some interesting ideas involved in what's called "moral copyright", where the law is attempting to protect a creator from having his ideas used to support causes he or she diametrically opposes.
However, U.S. citizens should remember that the constitution set out to craft a copyright system that was in many ways directly opposed to the way copyright was handled in Europe at the time, and that modern European copyright law is not revolutionary, but evolutionary in this respect. The whole idea that the U.S. needs to bring its copyright system into line with Europe's is rather similar to saying we need to make the office of highest leader a lifetime job, like Europe used to do in the Age of Kings.
You've given a good arguement against the "life" part of "life plus" copyright terms, and I've given some arguements against the "plus" part earlier in this thread. Soulds like what's left would be a fixed term, just like the founding fathers said.
It's the new, current system where the lawmakers have gained whole new "rights" to give or take away.
From reading what Jefferson, in particular, wrote, copyright in the U.S. constitution derived from natural rights - people could physically copy works because people's physical nature itself made them able to do so. In order to promote science and the useful arts, people were expected to give up a portion of that right to encourage the creator. Please note that even those crafters of the constitution (such as Madison) who didn't ordinarily put much credence in "natural rights", rights "derived from nature and nature's god", and the like generally agreed it was the mechanism behind patents and copyrightc, or else their letters and writings are silent on the subject. This strongly suggests that the founding fathers were totally unable in debate to conceive of a mechanism other than transfer of a natural right to explain what they were doing with copyright.
(So there's an answer to your first question, The nature of Men and the nature of Ideas is what allows us to use them freely. Your rephrase is therefore a leading question, as the word "entitles" assunes a title to works must exist before the fact of the works own existence rather than after. A right is not the same thing as an entitlement, and you would have a natural right to make copies even if there was no government to grant titles.)
Now your or my natural right to produce a copy ceases at the moment of our deaths, if not before. No one can choose to make a copy one single second after his or her death. How, then, can copyright be extended to life plus 70 years or similar periods? Simply, Copyright must become something originated as the gift of a beneficent body of lawmakers, rather than transferred from the citizens. As you put it, the lawmakers give and take away. The point being if there is nothing but either law or subjective morality to grant you a right, then 1. we get the present situation where the lawmakers are doing a whole heaping lot of taking away, and 2. from your own assumptions, you have also lost the grounds to complain about it.