Lesser-known organs? What, the Fleemus? I wouldn't wish a Dui-decimal Infarction of the Orbicular Fleemus on my worst enemy! (Even if they do go away from drinking a glass of warm, salty water).
Texas could probably poll PC techs to see what the typical rate of infection observed is, and then generalize that to the whole state, and still be within the law. Or they could document all cases where they find traces on a computer that is state property or owned by a state employeee, and generalize from there in the same way. Texas could spend money randomly sampling citizen's computers, and add that to other court costs and such in the suit so it would end up costing them nothing to get the data. Anything short of hiring a thousand extra full time employees to go door to door documenting every case of the root kit state wide, would most likely be held to be a reasonable legal cost for the state. If Sony doesn't like Texas's methods, they can appeal it to the Texas State Supreme Court, and then to the Federal courts. Trouble is, they would likely lose those appeals and pay all those costs too.
Soney is Screwed. 45-47 more states will jump on the bandwagon, then the Fed, and the European union if any of those CDs were sold overseas. The major stockholders are probably all trying to figure out how to unload their shares without risking getting charged with insider trading, based on the fact that their advisers have already told them to brace for more lawsuits and that can be considered not general knowledge just yet.
Congratulations RIAA, you've just advised one of your clients into losing at least 25 Billion dollars over the next three years.
Let me reccomend two "lesser" Brunner novels: 'The Stardroppers', and 'The Stone that Never Came Down'. Both are fairly short, tight works, and both involve an invention that starts off looking like it might be a very bad thing, twists in early mid-book, then twists a few more times to become something much bigger (and maybe better) by the end. Stone also has much the same feeling of ever-prescient (or at least perpetual) commentary on the human condition running along behind the surface plot as 'The Prisoner' TV show or Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit-451'.
Wikipedia is a big help in refining your searches enough to use Google. A few bad Google searches are all the proof I needed to believe Wiliam Gibson's assertion that for the first time in history, the new threat to civilzation is being overwhelmed by too much information to make meaningful choices.
In addition, I've noticed that any time I don't find much help on Google, invariably I can easily rephrase what I want as a series of very general questions, and then feeding a few of them to Ask Jeeves will get genuinely useful hits. The more I have only the simple, "obvious" lay-man's questions on the subject the more some of Google's alternatives are the way to go.
The last time for me was finding useful stuff on DIY satellite dishes. If you don't yet know any of the terms (which I didn't, then), like C-band, Ku-band, LNBF, Free To Air, and such, Google gives a huge number of useless to just plain evil links. It's not just lots of people who want to sell you a overpriced 'complete solution', but 6 year old, never updated web pages that want to sell you a dish 5 meters across at 30,000$, "Christian" Broadcasters who want you to help them buy more gear and have replaced all the standard terms with "It needs a new thingee, around here we just call it a Jesus-box, won't you please help?", and Utar Pradesh complaining about how Nepal either needs to translate their G2S's signal out of Hindi, or into it.
The only way around it starting from Google seems to be running across about 5 of the 'insider' terms, Wiki for every single one of them, look for what other terms are links, keep Wiki'ing, and thus fairly swiftly refine your search. Basically, without Wikipedia or some other shortcut, you have to get to about the depth where you know how (and WHY) global positioning works differently for civilian uses (like Onstar) and Military uses, and which idiots in Congress voted which way on it, just as a side effect of learning enough to build your own TV receiver (assuming you're already a fair solder jockey and don't need to learn what a MOSFET is). That's a terribly steep learning curve.
This is for a subject that's not really all that esoteric, but it has a half dozen facets, all of which Google can't sort out by simple searches - for just one example mistaking sites that are about beaming 'politally free' info into authoritarian countries for 'own instead of rent type free' consumer solutions. In the process, you are likely to still not know many things that might be of much more interest to most people wanting to build or just own a home satellite system, such as the existence of PC card recievers and motor controllers, or if you can combine satellite internet access with TV reception when you are trying to avoid just renting a dish.
Something like "How do I get satellite TV free?" on Ask Jeeves will get you that whole list of terms and some basic definitions and diagrams very quickly. Ask Jeeves seems to try and match the whole question if it can, before searching for phrases and keywords, and that leads to pages that are set up in question and answer format. In this case, the first link back when I tried it was to a "How things work" page that gave accurate and generally unbiased info, frequently updated.
(Warning, I haven't tried this lately, for all I know Ask Jeeves has gone out of business and I missed it).
Gondwondaland is one variant spelling of a name given to the primal supercontinent around 750 million years ago (give or take). You are more likely to find serious articles on it under other spellings, i.e. Gondwonaland (no second 'd'). A lot of sources have taken to calling it Pangaea instead. The basic idea is part of continental drift: under the theory, all the continents have gradually drifted apart to their present positions, and running the record backwards suggests they were all once united as a single mass. So the joke here (such as it is) is the phrase sounds like a political sentiment, like "Free Tibet", but is really a scientific reference. Well, it was hysterically funny for about 11 seconds the first time.
Eureka! We rebury Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill next to each other and swap their headstones. Put John Paul 2 next to Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah Khomeini (the original Ruhollah ibn Mustafa Musawi Khomeini Hindi, and not his kid) and do a three way swap. That last one ought to be good for at least 500 Mw continueous output (For the kvetchers, I Know Robertson's not dead yet, your point is?). Cover Eli Whitney's grave with dutch wooden shoes (let's see if anyone gets that one). Drop 55 gallon drums of tartar sauce into the abyssial trench at S. Lat. 49 degrees, 9 min, W. Long. 126 degrees, 43 min. (even more esoteric). Rotating Dead Guys based power generation will beat out fusion plants.
I've posted to threads several times with links to Skinnable Open Source applications, and found that the most common response to mentioning skins is people dismissing them as eye candy and a waste of programming to include in an inteface. I've had numerous slashdot users complain that skins are worse than useless, because a non-standard interface hinder's widepread corporate or government adoption of new programs.
Guess what - a skinnable interface is one that can easily be adapted to overcome a given visual handycap, and a non-skinable interface is one that will be effectivly unusable for some people with normal or better intelligence - period.
Instead of dissmissing skinnability, how about working on any of three things:
1. Skin deliberately to address at least some common visual disabilities. 2. Code an app that shows how persons with common visual impairments see things (i.e. click button 1 to see what this web-page or interface would look like to a person with red-green color blindness... click button 2 to see what it looks like to someone with blue color blindness, click button 3 to see how this looks to the average 50 year old, etc.). 3. publicize how OS is addressing these needs, if only to offset some of this "Open Source sounds like Communism" FUD you're so concerned about.
Now I'm going to have to go count all min, you insensitive clod! (Doesw this include the transparent blue 12 sider with the gold flecks that's been under the couch for the last three months?)
The above is one of the most insightful posts on this thread. This matter didn't develop in a vaccuum. The UN comittee didn't just suddenly realize this was an untapped source of taxation. There is no magic six year delay that means the UN is just now assimilating the idea there's money to be made in the internet, left over from the dot-com bubble era. If this were just about getting more power and funding, it would have come up during that bubble.
Internationalization is comeing up now because a number of other countries that were willing to trust the US with control over the net domain space system and many other things have lost that trust. These aren't just a few isolated countries such as North Korea that never trusted us, these are predominately nations that did, until recently. Now there's enough of them that don't that there's a chance this could win a general referendum, probably even a Security Counsil vote in the UN - six years ago, there wasn't a chance in hell.
You want to stop movements like this, first figure out why so many allies are hedging their bets that movements like this now have a chance of success.
Actually, the conventional interpretation based on General Relativity holds that the universe is finite but unbounded, and without a boundary to measure it from, a center is essentially meaningless.
However, just after WW2, Einstein himself worked with Kurt Godel and followed up some lines of thought that could make it very important to assign a center after all and then determine if the universe was fixed or rotating around it, but nothing ever really got nailed down before Godel died. Most established physics texts will still cover with some respect Godel's writing about "Time-like Geodesics" and the work of a few subsequent bright types like Frank Tippler about "causality violations entrained by orbital dynamics around rapidly rotating massive cylenders" that all come from the Einstein/Godel line of thought, but they draw only some conservative conclusions. They tend to interpret this whole line of thought as just an interesting arguement about thoretical time travel, with lots of practical obstacles to its ever being implementable in the real world. A few historians of science will claim that the original G/E work is a much more fundamental arguement that our whole view of what time is is somehow deeply flawed or illusory, but the whole line of thought doesn't seem popular with this generation of theoreticians.
So, if you really find something which definitely depends on where the center of mass for the whole universe is and how our local space is moving in relation to it and prove we can actually measure such things or rule out alternatives, please be aware that you will have validated Einstein's last major line of inquiry in his entire carreer, and set our notions of what time itself is reeling. If you become master of the universe from this, I want 10% as a finder's fee.
Just my personal take, but it seems like the experimenters acomplished something that was maybe a few percent of the process, and just maybe even less, and thought they had done by far ALL the harder parts. It's not that their data isn't meaningful or interesting. It's still a more significant experiment than a lot of typical science, but outside the body of the work itself they handwaved over the parts they hadn't gotten yet, and said in effect "this part is relatively trivial, and doesn't need much more explanation". When I first read up on the original experiment, I thought this came from some of the science popularizing type press, but reading the abstracts and even the papers directly shows many of the same problems, especially in the methodology and conclusions sections.
I know this makes me a dumb fundie, but All the necessary molecules for life most definitely haven't been created in labs, and Darwin's own arguements for natural selection do make it a very hard stretch to imagine that early genetic info evolved into the current encoding scheme.
If you check the molecular genesis experiments, in the early stages the researchers who actually did them expressed great confidence that continuing the bombardment of early atmospheric chemicals would soon build actual proteins. As they continued to run these experiments, the goal of actual protein synthesis kept recedeing the assigned probabilities kept dropping, and it is still an illusive goal today.
Darwin predicted, among other things, that a bad grade genetic code, that allowed very frequent mutation, would actually slow down the process of natural selection. Many hard evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins, have explained this why this should be so, in detail, and that's the standard theory, as also taught in most of the best college textbook (including the ones currently standard at all the ivy league schools, Cal Tech and MIT), not some 'wild-eyed intelligent design' book.
That means evolution was proceeding more slowly in DNA without the advanced error correction of multicelled life forms. It also means if RNA was the precessor of DNA, evolution was proceeding more slowly again before DNA itself evolved. Whatever came before RNA made so many copying errors that evolution proceeded at a comparative snail's pace.
Since DNA with additional error correction has been around for about 2 billion years by the fossil record, you have to cram all the earlier steps into that first two billion, because earth is only about 4 billion years old. Ooops, we used half the time available on the most recent step, but each earlier step supposedly took tens or hundreds of times longer than its successor. By actually calculating just how sloppy RNA is compared to DNA with error correction, we seem to be missing about 400 trillion years needed to make the theory work.
I'm thinking of Walter a John Williams novel, 'Hardwired'. The protagonist has cyber-eyes, and bought them just when the company had gotten most of the bugs out, but while they were still trying unusual features like sepia tone overlays, film nior settings, and the like to see where consumer interest lay. They then dropped all these features to make cheaper, more basic designs they could sell to the broadest possible market. I'm with Alexander Pope on this one:
"Be not the first by whom the new are tried - Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
Revealing that in Star Trek V, the Enterprise main viewer shows a shot of the shuttlecraft landed on the planet as though from a totally non-existant camera, at the exact same moment I walked out of the movie?
In the United States, contract law includes some special cases. One of these is a set of laws dating back to the 1920's and found in the Federal system and 44 of the 50 states, that hold a person buying a ticket to a film, play, or sporting event has entered into an implied contract. This means the movie theatre owner, for example, can prohibit the ticket buyer from bringing in food and drink from outside the theatre, even though there's no written document and signature system supporting it.
EULAs are based loosely on several such groups of laws that allow exemptions to the normal rules of contract, like requiring a written document, requiring the contract to be affirmed before any money actually changes hands, and other such rules. I specifically mention the theatre laws because they were interpreted to apply broadly to entertainment, and thus were assumed by some EULA writers as a model to apply to computer programs for entertainment purposes, so they have ended up having more influence over what corporate lawyers belive is allowable in a EULA than most of the other exceptions.
Is it a big lie? Read my sig if you're going to seriously consider a slashdot post as legal advice, but there look to be a lot of assumptions that have no legal merit what-so-ever:
1.asuuming law originally specifically targeted at preserving the 'mom-and-pop' theatre owner's livelyhood can stretch to cover entertaining computer programs, to the next stretch that extends it to ALL computer programs.
2. assuming state laws that allow or forbid anything related to copyright haven't been even slightly affected by the 1970's era Supreme Court decisions that make all copyright law federal.
3. assuming those same possibly now unenforcable state laws apply to interstate commerce, and that the way they apply is based entirely on what state the business granting the EULA incorporated under. (Many EULAs contain specific clauses about what state's laws are to be used to resolve disputes, even though (see pt. 2) court decisions seem to suggest any copyright portions of the EULA, at the very least, are not enforcable at any state's level, but only under the Federal system. Many other EULAs have clauses stating (very roughly) that the recipient may have other rights that are guarenteed by their state's constitution, but I have seen very few that mention there may be rights guarenteed by the Federal government regardless of state of sale).
Did you have your pinkie touching the corner of your lips as you wrote that? For some reason, that's important - courts won't touch this stuff without a pinkie. By reading this far down, you agree to seed me all your sharks with frickkin lasers.
Overall, I think we're in substantial agreement, but there is some reason for advocating windfall profit taxes. Ideally, a true "windfall" is an unpredictable event, whose causes (and particularly their replication in subsequent years) are outside of the company's control. Discouraging the corporation from over-relying on such things as a source of income if it's dumb enough to do so is at least vaguely rational, although a genuinely free market will do that well enough without additional taxation. The chief reasons why windfall taxes aren't accomplishing anything is the government just uses them to fuel yet more government growth, the definition of windfall is made arbitrary and not aimed at reinforcing the negative consequences that would naturally follow from making gambling on sheer dumb luck your core business model, and those consequences are usually severe enough to be all the reinforcement needed.
A real showdown will probably happen before that, over a software patent issue or gene patent. In a way I wish it would wait until something as rediculous as a storyline patent triggered it, because that would be harder for the patent holders to spin as 'those Nasty Socialist Euro-Frenchoid spooty heads have no respect for teh Law!'.
Hitler had a bout of temporary blindness during duty in WW1. Later, on hearing news about the armistice and just what Germany had to accede to in the peace treaty, he had a second episode, lasting by some accounts only a little over 24 hours, by others possibly two days to two weeks. This second episode definitely sounds psycological or "histerical", whether there was any component of that in the first one or not. There's even a theory that hypnosis possibly used in treating Hitler for this condition may have encouraged some sort of messianic complex and led to his latter activities in politics:
(I offer this for whatever its worth. The site has several obvious philosophical or religious axes to grind, and as the text points out, the Gestapo possibly destroyed a lot of records that might help confirm or refute the hypothesis (so it's conveniently untestable, and very handy for anyone who wants to interpret it according to their own bias). Still it's an interesting idea).
You may notice that the TV commercials for this product all show it being used on a matte white painted wall. If you'll give me my claim that a lot of pro-high tech early adopters who like 'cool-looking' TV devices that show themselves off, rather than finding them intrusive, are also just the sort to have really decorated their favorite viewing area, how many people right now, that pass all the other tests to become customers, are thinking it won't work as well with their paint or wallpaper?
Our media room has burgundy sound absorbing cloth, actually salvaged from an old movie theatre, covering all the forward walls. I can't imagine how that scene from Return of the King where the witch king's fortress suddenly lights up with that icy green glow would look on one of these, but then I can't really imagine what it feels like to be run through a sausage grinder alive either, and I don't want to get any better at imagining such things.
Classic Straw Man you've got there. Who's demanding more laws here? At a generous estimate to your claim, 80-90% of the posters here are 'demanding' only the uniform enforcement of meatspace related laws which have existed for hundreds of years in our system, laws against fraud, trespass, or other basic violations. A good portion of the 'slashdot set' is argueing for the exact opposite, the repeal of or more existing laws, such as the DCMA.
Oh, but they don't identify themselves as anarcho-capitalists. They aren't all stopping voting and thus allowing the businesses they disagree with to join with portions of the government in mischaracterizing them as apathetic consumers, 'pirates' or natural members of the criminal class.
If you, yourself, don't like the Sony rootkit, then you're committing the classic mistake that cripples and disempowers you, demanding ideological purity tests from people who actually agree with you on this point, instead of working from your area of agreement, and adopting whatever solutions seem most effective.
The "crying wolf" remark is equally telling here. You're about the third poster to this thread. The article itself seeems to be rather higher on actual hard facts than is slashdot standard (admittedly not a very tough test). Who's (figuratively) 'crying wolf'? Who even managed to post ahead of you? Even including earlier threads on the Sony DRM system these have also tended to have at least a few facts included, and the ratio of posters discussing actual facts has been pretty fair. How about waiting until someone actually yells "The sky is falling!" before you bring out that old chestnut about the chicken?
Slashdot Mirror
It gets to the Fed by trickle up economics, of course.
Lesser-known organs?
What, the Fleemus? I wouldn't wish a Dui-decimal Infarction of the Orbicular Fleemus on my worst enemy! (Even if they do go away from drinking a glass of warm, salty water).
Texas could probably poll PC techs to see what the typical rate of infection observed is, and then generalize that to the whole state, and still be within the law. Or they could document all cases where they find traces on a computer that is state property or owned by a state employeee, and generalize from there in the same way. Texas could spend money randomly sampling citizen's computers, and add that to other court costs and such in the suit so it would end up costing them nothing to get the data. Anything short of hiring a thousand extra full time employees to go door to door documenting every case of the root kit state wide, would most likely be held to be a reasonable legal cost for the state. If Sony doesn't like Texas's methods, they can appeal it to the Texas State Supreme Court, and then to the Federal courts. Trouble is, they would likely lose those appeals and pay all those costs too.
Soney is Screwed. 45-47 more states will jump on the bandwagon, then the Fed, and the European union if any of those CDs were sold overseas. The major stockholders are probably all trying to figure out how to unload their shares without risking getting charged with insider trading, based on the fact that their advisers have already told them to brace for more lawsuits and that can be considered not general knowledge just yet.
Congratulations RIAA, you've just advised one of your clients into losing at least 25 Billion dollars over the next three years.
Let me reccomend two "lesser" Brunner novels: 'The Stardroppers', and 'The Stone that Never Came Down'. Both are fairly short, tight works, and both involve an invention that starts off looking like it might be a very bad thing, twists in early mid-book, then twists a few more times to become something much bigger (and maybe better) by the end. Stone also has much the same feeling of ever-prescient (or at least perpetual) commentary on the human condition running along behind the surface plot as 'The Prisoner' TV show or Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit-451'.
"Ayn Rand is nothing like LeGuin."
Yes, but I'm genuinely not sure which one of them should take that as a complement (assuming both were still alive).
Wikipedia is a big help in refining your searches enough to use Google. A few bad Google searches are all the proof I needed to believe Wiliam Gibson's assertion that for the first time in history, the new threat to civilzation is being overwhelmed by too much information to make meaningful choices.
In addition, I've noticed that any time I don't find much help on Google, invariably I can easily rephrase what I want as a series of very general questions, and then feeding a few of them to Ask Jeeves will get genuinely useful hits. The more I have only the simple, "obvious" lay-man's questions on the subject the more some of Google's alternatives are the way to go.
The last time for me was finding useful stuff on DIY satellite dishes. If you don't yet know any of the terms (which I didn't, then), like C-band, Ku-band, LNBF, Free To Air, and such, Google gives a huge number of useless to just plain evil links. It's not just lots of people who want to sell you a overpriced 'complete solution', but 6 year old, never updated web pages that want to sell you a dish 5 meters across at 30,000$, "Christian" Broadcasters who want you to help them buy more gear and have replaced all the standard terms with "It needs a new thingee, around here we just call it a Jesus-box, won't you please help?", and Utar Pradesh complaining about how Nepal either needs to translate their G2S's signal out of Hindi, or into it.
The only way around it starting from Google seems to be running across about 5 of the 'insider' terms, Wiki for every single one of them, look for what other terms are links, keep Wiki'ing, and thus fairly swiftly refine your search. Basically, without Wikipedia or some other shortcut, you have to get to about the depth where you know how (and WHY) global positioning works differently for civilian uses (like Onstar) and Military uses, and which idiots in Congress voted which way on it, just as a side effect of learning enough to build your own TV receiver (assuming you're already a fair solder jockey and don't need to learn what a MOSFET is). That's a terribly steep learning curve.
This is for a subject that's not really all that esoteric, but it has a half dozen facets, all of which Google can't sort out by simple searches - for just one example mistaking sites that are about beaming 'politally free' info into authoritarian countries for 'own instead of rent type free' consumer solutions. In the process, you are likely to still not know many things that might be of much more interest to most people wanting to build or just own a home satellite system, such as the existence of PC card recievers and motor controllers, or if you can combine satellite internet access with TV reception when you are trying to avoid just renting a dish.
Something like "How do I get satellite TV free?" on Ask Jeeves will get you that whole list of terms and some basic definitions and diagrams very quickly. Ask Jeeves seems to try and match the whole question if it can, before searching for phrases and keywords, and that leads to pages that are set up in question and answer format. In this case, the first link back when I tried it was to a "How things work" page that gave accurate and generally unbiased info, frequently updated.
(Warning, I haven't tried this lately, for all I know Ask Jeeves has gone out of business and I missed it).
"Reunite Gondwondaland!"
Gondwondaland is one variant spelling of a name given to the primal supercontinent around 750 million years ago (give or take). You are more likely to find serious articles on it under other spellings, i.e. Gondwonaland (no second 'd'). A lot of sources have taken to calling it Pangaea instead. The basic idea is part of continental drift: under the theory, all the continents have gradually drifted apart to their present positions, and running the record backwards suggests they were all once united as a single mass. So the joke here (such as it is) is the phrase sounds like a political sentiment, like "Free Tibet", but is really a scientific reference. Well, it was hysterically funny for about 11 seconds the first time.
Eureka! We rebury Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill next to each other and swap their headstones. Put John Paul 2 next to Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah Khomeini (the original Ruhollah ibn Mustafa Musawi Khomeini Hindi, and not his kid) and do a three way swap. That last one ought to be good for at least 500 Mw continueous output (For the kvetchers, I Know Robertson's not dead yet, your point is?). Cover Eli Whitney's grave with dutch wooden shoes (let's see if anyone gets that one). Drop 55 gallon drums of tartar sauce into the abyssial trench at S. Lat. 49 degrees, 9 min, W. Long. 126 degrees, 43 min. (even more esoteric). Rotating Dead Guys based power generation will beat out fusion plants.
I've posted to threads several times with links to Skinnable Open Source applications, and found that the most common response to mentioning skins is people dismissing them as eye candy and a waste of programming to include in an inteface. I've had numerous slashdot users complain that skins are worse than useless, because a non-standard interface hinder's widepread corporate or government adoption of new programs.
Guess what - a skinnable interface is one that can easily be adapted to overcome a given visual handycap, and a non-skinable interface is one that will be effectivly unusable for some people with normal or better intelligence - period.
Instead of dissmissing skinnability, how about working on any of three things:
1. Skin deliberately to address at least some common visual disabilities.
2. Code an app that shows how persons with common visual impairments see things (i.e. click button 1 to see what this web-page or interface would look like to a person with red-green color blindness... click button 2 to see what it looks like to someone with blue color blindness, click button 3 to see how this looks to the average 50 year old, etc.).
3. publicize how OS is addressing these needs, if only to offset some of this "Open Source sounds like Communism" FUD you're so concerned about.
Now I'm going to have to go count all min, you insensitive clod!
(Doesw this include the transparent blue 12 sider with the gold flecks that's been under the couch for the last three months?)
The above is one of the most insightful posts on this thread. This matter didn't develop in a vaccuum. The UN comittee didn't just suddenly realize this was an untapped source of taxation. There is no magic six year delay that means the UN is just now assimilating the idea there's money to be made in the internet, left over from the dot-com bubble era. If this were just about getting more power and funding, it would have come up during that bubble.
Internationalization is comeing up now because a number of other countries that were willing to trust the US with control over the net domain space system and many other things have lost that trust. These aren't just a few isolated countries such as North Korea that never trusted us, these are predominately nations that did, until recently. Now there's enough of them that don't that there's a chance this could win a general referendum, probably even a Security Counsil vote in the UN - six years ago, there wasn't a chance in hell.
You want to stop movements like this, first figure out why so many allies are hedging their bets that movements like this now have a chance of success.
Actually, the conventional interpretation based on General Relativity holds that the universe is finite but unbounded, and without a boundary to measure it from, a center is essentially meaningless.
However, just after WW2, Einstein himself worked with Kurt Godel and followed up some lines of thought that could make it very important to assign a center after all and then determine if the universe was fixed or rotating around it, but nothing ever really got nailed down before Godel died. Most established physics texts will still cover with some respect Godel's writing about "Time-like Geodesics" and the work of a few subsequent bright types like Frank Tippler about "causality violations entrained by orbital dynamics around rapidly rotating massive cylenders" that all come from the Einstein/Godel line of thought, but they draw only some conservative conclusions. They tend to interpret this whole line of thought as just an interesting arguement about thoretical time travel, with lots of practical obstacles to its ever being implementable in the real world. A few historians of science will claim that the original G/E work is a much more fundamental arguement that our whole view of what time is is somehow deeply flawed or illusory, but the whole line of thought doesn't seem popular with this generation of theoreticians.
So, if you really find something which definitely depends on where the center of mass for the whole universe is and how our local space is moving in relation to it and prove we can actually measure such things or rule out alternatives, please be aware that you will have validated Einstein's last major line of inquiry in his entire carreer, and set our notions of what time itself is reeling. If you become master of the universe from this, I want 10% as a finder's fee.
Just my personal take, but it seems like the experimenters acomplished something that was maybe a few percent of the process, and just maybe even less, and thought they had done by far ALL the harder parts. It's not that their data isn't meaningful or interesting. It's still a more significant experiment than a lot of typical science, but outside the body of the work itself they handwaved over the parts they hadn't gotten yet, and said in effect "this part is relatively trivial, and doesn't need much more explanation". When I first read up on the original experiment, I thought this came from some of the science popularizing type press, but reading the abstracts and even the papers directly shows many of the same problems, especially in the methodology and conclusions sections.
I know this makes me a dumb fundie, but All the necessary molecules for life most definitely haven't been created in labs, and Darwin's own arguements for natural selection do make it a very hard stretch to imagine that early genetic info evolved into the current encoding scheme.
If you check the molecular genesis experiments, in the early stages the researchers who actually did them expressed great confidence that continuing the bombardment of early atmospheric chemicals would soon build actual proteins. As they continued to run these experiments, the goal of actual protein synthesis kept recedeing the assigned probabilities kept dropping, and it is still an illusive goal today.
Darwin predicted, among other things, that a bad grade genetic code, that allowed very frequent mutation, would actually slow down the process of natural selection. Many hard evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins, have explained this why this should be so, in detail, and that's the standard theory, as also taught in most of the best college textbook (including the ones currently standard at all the ivy league schools, Cal Tech and MIT), not some 'wild-eyed intelligent design' book.
That means evolution was proceeding more slowly in DNA without the advanced error correction of multicelled life forms. It also means if RNA was the precessor of DNA, evolution was proceeding more slowly again before DNA itself evolved. Whatever came before RNA made so many copying errors that evolution proceeded at a comparative snail's pace.
Since DNA with additional error correction has been around for about 2 billion years by the fossil record, you have to cram all the earlier steps into that first two billion, because earth is only about 4 billion years old.
Ooops, we used half the time available on the most recent step, but each earlier step supposedly took tens or hundreds of times longer than its successor. By actually calculating just how sloppy RNA is compared to DNA with error correction, we seem to be missing about 400 trillion years needed to make the theory work.
I'm thinking of Walter a John Williams novel, 'Hardwired'. The protagonist has cyber-eyes, and bought them just when the company had gotten most of the bugs out, but while they were still trying unusual features like sepia tone overlays, film nior settings, and the like to see where consumer interest lay. They then dropped all these features to make cheaper, more basic designs they could sell to the broadest possible market. I'm with Alexander Pope on this one:
"Be not the first by whom the new are tried -
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
Talking like Yoda does not your point support!
Revealing that in Star Trek V, the Enterprise main viewer shows a shot of the shuttlecraft landed on the planet as though from a totally non-existant camera, at the exact same moment I walked out of the movie?
In the United States, contract law includes some special cases. One of these is a set of laws dating back to the 1920's and found in the Federal system and 44 of the 50 states, that hold a person buying a ticket to a film, play, or sporting event has entered into an implied contract. This means the movie theatre owner, for example, can prohibit the ticket buyer from bringing in food and drink from outside the theatre, even though there's no written document and signature system supporting it.
EULAs are based loosely on several such groups of laws that allow exemptions to the normal rules of contract, like requiring a written document, requiring the contract to be affirmed before any money actually changes hands, and other such rules. I specifically mention the theatre laws because they were interpreted to apply broadly to entertainment, and thus were assumed by some EULA writers as a model to apply to computer programs for entertainment purposes, so they have ended up having more influence over what corporate lawyers belive is allowable in a EULA than most of the other exceptions.
Is it a big lie? Read my sig if you're going to seriously consider a slashdot post as legal advice, but there look to be a lot of assumptions that have no legal merit what-so-ever:
1.asuuming law originally specifically targeted at preserving the 'mom-and-pop' theatre owner's livelyhood can stretch to cover entertaining computer programs, to the next stretch that extends it to ALL computer programs.
2. assuming state laws that allow or forbid anything related to copyright haven't been even slightly affected by the 1970's era Supreme Court decisions that make all copyright law federal.
3. assuming those same possibly now unenforcable state laws apply to interstate commerce, and that the way they apply is based entirely on what state the business granting the EULA incorporated under. (Many EULAs contain specific clauses about what state's laws are to be used to resolve disputes, even though (see pt. 2) court decisions seem to suggest any copyright portions of the EULA, at the very least, are not enforcable at any state's level, but only under the Federal system. Many other EULAs have clauses stating (very roughly) that the recipient may have other rights that are guarenteed by their state's constitution, but I have seen very few that mention there may be rights guarenteed by the Federal government regardless of state of sale).
Did you have your pinkie touching the corner of your lips as you wrote that? For some reason, that's important - courts won't touch this stuff without a pinkie.
By reading this far down, you agree to seed me all your sharks with frickkin lasers.
... they do Nothing!
Overall, I think we're in substantial agreement, but there is some reason for advocating windfall profit taxes. Ideally, a true "windfall" is an unpredictable event, whose causes (and particularly their replication in subsequent years) are outside of the company's control. Discouraging the corporation from over-relying on such things as a source of income if it's dumb enough to do so is at least vaguely rational, although a genuinely free market will do that well enough without additional taxation. The chief reasons why windfall taxes aren't accomplishing anything is the government just uses them to fuel yet more government growth, the definition of windfall is made arbitrary and not aimed at reinforcing the negative consequences that would naturally follow from making gambling on sheer dumb luck your core business model, and those consequences are usually severe enough to be all the reinforcement needed.
A real showdown will probably happen before that, over a software patent issue or gene patent. In a way I wish it would wait until something as rediculous as a storyline patent triggered it, because that would be harder for the patent holders to spin as 'those Nasty Socialist Euro-Frenchoid spooty heads have no respect for teh Law!'.
Hitler had a bout of temporary blindness during duty in WW1. Later, on hearing news about the armistice and just what Germany had to accede to in the peace treaty, he had a second episode, lasting by some accounts only a little over 24 hours, by others possibly two days to two weeks. This second episode definitely sounds psycological or "histerical", whether there was any component of that in the first one or not.
There's even a theory that hypnosis possibly used in treating Hitler for this condition may have encouraged some sort of messianic complex and led to his latter activities in politics:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/hitlernuz.htm
(I offer this for whatever its worth. The site has several obvious philosophical or religious axes to grind, and as the text points out, the Gestapo possibly destroyed a lot of records that might help confirm or refute the hypothesis (so it's conveniently untestable, and very handy for anyone who wants to interpret it according to their own bias). Still it's an interesting idea).
You may notice that the TV commercials for this product all show it being used on a matte white painted wall. If you'll give me my claim that a lot of pro-high tech early adopters who like 'cool-looking' TV devices that show themselves off, rather than finding them intrusive, are also just the sort to have really decorated their favorite viewing area, how many people right now, that pass all the other tests to become customers, are thinking it won't work as well with their paint or wallpaper?
Our media room has burgundy sound absorbing cloth, actually salvaged from an old movie theatre, covering all the forward walls. I can't imagine how that scene from Return of the King where the witch king's fortress suddenly lights up with that icy green glow would look on one of these, but then I can't really imagine what it feels like to be run through a sausage grinder alive either, and I don't want to get any better at imagining such things.
Classic Straw Man you've got there. Who's demanding more laws here? At a generous estimate to your claim, 80-90% of the posters here are 'demanding' only the uniform enforcement of meatspace related laws which have existed for hundreds of years in our system, laws against fraud, trespass, or other basic violations. A good portion of the 'slashdot set' is argueing for the exact opposite, the repeal of or more existing laws, such as the DCMA.
Oh, but they don't identify themselves as anarcho-capitalists. They aren't all stopping voting and thus allowing the businesses they disagree with to join with portions of the government in mischaracterizing them as apathetic consumers, 'pirates' or natural members of the criminal class.
If you, yourself, don't like the Sony rootkit, then you're committing the classic mistake that cripples and disempowers you, demanding ideological purity tests from people who actually agree with you on this point, instead of working from your area of agreement, and adopting whatever solutions seem most effective.
The "crying wolf" remark is equally telling here. You're about the third poster to this thread. The article itself seeems to be rather higher on actual hard facts than is slashdot standard (admittedly not a very tough test). Who's (figuratively) 'crying wolf'? Who even managed to post ahead of you? Even including earlier threads on the Sony DRM system these have also tended to have at least a few facts included, and the ratio of posters discussing actual facts has been pretty fair. How about waiting until someone actually yells "The sky is falling!" before you bring out that old chestnut about the chicken?