Your point on markets isn't invalidated by it, but the whole point of Natural Selection is that humans aren't an epitome of evolution, and there just isn't really any pinnacle or focal point to evolution. Those cockroaches we share our buildings with have been evolving precisely as long as we have. They have survived various evolutionary selection mechanisms just as well as we have. Nature isn't seeking to produce intelligence, or any other feature we might find can let us divide organisms into 'higher' and 'lower'. Everything we are evolving along side of is equally fit.
The problem I have with your using an evolutionary metaphor is that applying it to capitalism is just what leads to social Darwinism. Microsoft probably firmly believes it, to the extent they belive that being selected by the forces of the market is the same as being at the predestined peak of the natural order.
It isn't. If ignoring security is really that potent a failing to nature, then nature will select against Microsoft. If millions of people were wrong about the relative importance of security, then nature will select against them too. Public opinion is not a court of no appeal - Natural Selection is.
Can you imagine an average user needing a Terabite of storage for all _legally_ purchased material they are downloading? These specs sound like Microsoft is assuming the average user wants to store Ted Turner's complete film library.
If you beat me and I refuse to press charges the case will be dropped."
In all US states and federal jurisdictions, this is simply no longer true. Current law requires police, health care personnel, teachers,day care workers, military authorities, and many other persons in various lines of work to report evidience indicating various types of domestic abuse, crimes against children, crimes against the elderly, racially motivated crimes or violence relating to organized crime and the RICO act. That person then becomes the complaining party, and the case may be persued. In some cases, that persuit will result in the judge assigning a new complainant, i.e. the battered spouse will be treated as both the victim/complainant and a potentially hostile witness at the trial. Only if your beating does not fall in any such category can you expect charges to be dropped if you don't agree to be a complainant.
Now as to whether RIAA actions would require a complaining party, and whether they can indemnify accused persons - There was nothing in the RIAA's agreement that would prevent the complaining party being a single RIAA member, or a recoding artist or songwriter. For that matter, no one has yet determined whether the RIAA could be successfully sued by one of its own menbers for not acting as an agressive watchdog in this case. The RIAA's offer doesn't provide any means to see if it is in line with their member contracts,and this is one of the reasons it is widely reccomended not to trust the offer.
So you're saying "Violating Copyright is wrong. Violating the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is also wrong. Violating the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishments is also wrong." Gee, I don't koow... That first part sounds good, but the RIAA tells me those other points are going to kill babies.
What's worse, the companies go above 100%. I'm not downloading any pirated.MP3s, I'm just buying less music, but the companies are blaming their declining revenues entirely on piracy. If I boycott one or more for political reasons (for the sake of arguement, let's say I am one of the people offended by Janet Jackson's jujubees), they will claim that there is no boycott, that I am instead a pirate and they need more financial compensation to make up for my non-existant crime.
If there were zero piracy going on, it would still be good business sense to claim it existed. The company can discredit various protests and avoid those protests getting that nasty free publicity, while simultaneously seeking assistance from the government to do what it would otherwise have to pay for itself (i.e. hire lawyers for civil cases), so why should it ever stop.
Since the 1940's most states in the USA have laws that say purchasing a theatre ticket IS a contract. You agree to not smuggle in food, but to buy from the theatre instead if you want anything. While this is by law, a contract, you never see it written down, and never sign it before it applies to you. That distortion of normal principles of law came about because of extensive lobbying by the entertainment industry sixty odd years ago. Which is worse, cumbersome contracts or hidden ones?
Wake up people, you have lost many more rights than you know, and it's getting worse. (In this case, it's not about a 'right' to smuggle in your own pepsi, it's about a right to know when you are entering into a contract.).
Uhm, because they support trademarks, copyrights, patents amd suc, but disagree with the WIPO about them all falling under a common category that is not found in common law or the US constitution.
I don't think there should be special penalties for killing left handed people, so by your logic, I'm pro murder.
In the same way, I don't want patents to last forever, just because "they're IP" and one type of thing some people cass as IP (Trademarks) can last forever.
I don't want trademarks to become something the user doesn't have to defend, just because "they're IP", and "Some types of IP" (Copyright) don't have to be defended, so now no type should.
I don't want more court cases like SCO vrs. IBM where the arguement over just what is being violated keeps shifting as SCO looks for a way to claim some sort of generic IP violation instead of a specific issue.
I don't want there to be a law that has no constitutional authority behind it and that gives any "IP" holder half a dozen of what were my legitimate rights. I don't think an author's copyright extends to forcibly recalling all copies of his book because he has changed his views. If he made an ass of himself publicly, tough. I don't think that copyright extends to me not being able to quote even a small portion of a work, or to prohibiting me from transcribing it to another medium, or otherwise making the work more acessable to me.
While we're at it, what does the law say about geographical indications? Do they expire? Do they have to be registered? Do they have to be painted in bright orange, in letters visible from orbit? Am I legallly required to say "Deutschland" and not "Germany"? Worse, do I owe somebody a fee for saying either? How can geographical indications be part of something called IP law, if there aren't laws protecting someone's right to own geographical indications?
In the USA, at this point, several communities have brought in broadband service as a public utility for half or less than what Broadband corporations want to charge. In one case already discussed here on slashdot, the private sector cost estimates were high by a factor of no less than five over the utility model. Several Broadband providers have sought legislation or gone to court to stop high speed access from becoming a public utility in some areas(monopoly mercantilism at its finest).
Sorry, but your "apparently they will not" translates into "Apparently they will not subsidize an inefficent private corporation further, after already having paid to build a huge infrastructure for that corporation to capitalize on, and seen that corporation dawdle at exploiting the golden goose it has been handed, because that corporation couldn't spot a money making opportunity if it was raining Krugerrands.".
"Game companies have a responsibility to their investors to charge the profit-maximizing price, as best they can judge it."
One of the underlieing causes of the current antagonism is that cost benefit analysis is a black art that masquerades as a science. The MBAs who come up with price points are by and large the same guys who were advising the dot coms before the bubble burst, using an inadiquate tool that ignores a lot of really useful math because it's seen as too complex to teach to MBAs.
Cost benefit analysis, applied classically, 'proves" that any negative consequence, no matter how bad, is a good deal if it comes far enough in the future. A medicine that ups the average lifespan by 10 years, but will eventually sterilize the whole species within in a few hundred? Mathematically, species extinction looks like an acceptable trade off if it just takes a few hundred years to get here.
These prices are being set by the same system that shows managers how to maximize the next quarter's profits and drive the company into the ground two years later. What happpens to customers as a result has many similarities to what happens to the society as a whole when the stock market gets unsteady, and it ought to be viewed as a 'bad thing' for much the same reasons.
Blaming the user is the least productive approach. For the sake of arguement, let's say currently a full 90% of users are totally clueless, and it is somehow possible to wave a magic wand and make 90% clueful, leaving only 10% of them blameworthy.
What happens?
DDoS type attacks can't find nearly as many machines to work from. So the writers use a trojan, and have to increase the delay between propagation and activation. Because infection is typically a non-linear process, often approaching a square or logarythmic function for some parts of the process, the delay has to be increased from, say, a week to two weeks. Meanwhile, the patch for the trojan takes its usual month to develop, and the social structures that be are reluctant to tell even the clueful about a threat that is still unpatched as yet.
So long as the Trojan writer has abundant extra time to maneuver within, 'he' isn't strongly affected by the improvement in user cluefulness. Yes, it creates some extra stumbling blocks, such as a better chance of the Trojan being detected earlier in the process, but professional Trojan writers have shown serious ability to work around these obstacles.
In addition, although its an unrelated point to yours, these particular attacks are also supposed to be related to blackmail. Successful blackmail doesn't require a real threat, but merely one the victim believes is real.
It would make it impossible for God to exist IF He has to fit totally inside a finite universe. Last I looked, most claims for God also include Him being outside/before the universe.
Some of the assumptions they use are reasonable but also have reasonable alteratives. As just one example, it's possible from some current theories that the universe is not only expanding but the expansion is accelerating, but it's also far from proven, and it's quite reasonable to think the universe is expanding at the decreasing rate other theories imply. Whatever the conclusions the authors reach, they can only be as good as what someone else could come up with starting from some of the other reasonable assumptions, and this theory won't become reliable unless some evidence makes those contrary assumptions no longer reasonable.
I can't quite agree with you on this. 1. The world is not almost unimaginably old. It's about 13.2 Billion years if you mean the whole universe, or only 4.5 Billion if you mean the planet. We can imagine that, although maybe not in elaborate detail. 2. The big bang didn't happen. Instead, there was an event that looks like a big bang until you look back to a tiny fraction of a second afterwards, but that in that first 10 to the negative 36th power seconds or so, quantum mechanics rules. Inflationary cosmology supersedes the classical big bang model. (A pity in a way, as the classic big bang was a pretty good proof of the existence of God, and the inflationary model isn't quite so clearcut.). 3. Life (here) didn't evolve from "simple seeds" but from just one common seed. If there is life on other worlds, then probably you are correct to use the plural, but that's still an if. I think it likely myself, but have absolutely no evidence of it.
The real point I want to make is I can nit-pick what you wrote, while still being very largely in agreement with what you meant. The same is quite possible for religion. Look at the claim for the Trinity. 3 that are 1 sounds illogical, particularly if the debater visualizes the Holy spirit as a human-like ghost, and God the father as a bearded older guy in a robe. Trouble is, by that same logic, the telephone can't work, as it would imply that I can exist as two separate things at once, and 2 cannot equal 1. Applying to much literalism to a point can make most points look silly.
The real questions as re. expeditions to find Noah's ark, are simple questions of fact. Either someone will find something or they won't. If they do, that something will either stand up to some solid testing (i.e. it will pass Radiocarbon dating tests in an iteresting way), or it won't. Some things just won't be decidable, based on any concevable find - even if the searchers somehow find a largly intact ark that can have its volume measured, it won't tell us much about what animals were on board, or prove that it rained for 40 days in Noah's area, let alone also raining the same over Idaho or Bejing.
Re:Military Potential of D&D
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 1
"My God... do you think the Commander-in-Chief knows about this?"
Yeah, He wanted to bring in a Half-Elf/Half-Orc/Half-halfling Druid 7/Ninja 6/Necromancer 11, with a longsword +9 of 'things he didn't like' killing, so we didn't let him join.
"I know the latter is the case for copyright claims, but does IP fall in the same category?"
Copyright DOES NOT require the holder to actively persue violators. Neither do patents or trade secrets. Only TRADEMARKS have any requirement for the holder to actively persue violations. Even that isn't a requirement to go to court, and often trademarks can be defended just by reminding people who use them as though they were generic that they are not. IP can't fall in the same category, as it is the broader category that (according to some theories of law), covers all the others just mentioned. The written law doesn't deal directly with IP, but instead deals seperately with those specific parts. That way, there is no such thing as a generic IP violation. This is a good thing, or more lawyers would be trying to stretch the law so they could sue over some sort of unlimited time, no requirements to register, my client doesn't have to prove anything cause it's secret Generic IP violation. So far, SCO is the only bunch to try for soemthing like that.
But if you used European Nukes, the Soviets had at least a 54 Megaton test device, and the package size works out to produce a lever of them not much more than 25 light minutes long. Without knowing what the proposed 71 Mt design they never really tested looked like, that's about the best we can do. African Nukes are limited to a relatively modest 0.5 to 2 Mt for the ones allegedly tested off the South African coast, so in this area, the European version clearly beats the African (vis-a-vis Swallows)
Escort is a bit of an understatement, don't you think?
That's the first time I've heard going up against F-15's, which are guarding a target important enough to justify full racks of Phoenix C's as interdict weapons, described as a fairly easy task.
If this system becomes fully functional at all, the 747-400 will take on an aircraft carrier like role, where it won't operate solo, but at the center of an airborne fleet. Initially, I would expect a few F-15s for fighter escorts, but operational practice is likely to lead to it also being linked to an AWACs type craft or some sort of separate command unit (as it probably can't fulfill a carrier's command function, due to lack of room for extra personnel on board). If the laser can be miniaturized somewhat, then the second generation or so from now should become the full equivalent of a naval fleet in structure, with this thing both projecting force and coordinating an attached fleet, and its escort craft evolving to become the rough arial equivalent of the missile cruisers, pickets and destroyers, and even escort attack subs of the modern navy.
One of the reasons for this is that many ranking air-force personnel would love it if their service had more flying spots for full bird colonels and generals, and this structure would need roughly the equal of a vice admiral at the helm (er, yolk).
Whether they would or not, today's news out of North Korea shows the real problem. The NK government apparently just told a big lie about a liquified natural gas and fuel oil train or possibly two trains coliding, to hide the fact that it was actually military grade high explosives that were in two boxcars. This lie lasted less than 24 hours before the next story, and relates to a situation where the international culture is interested in helping, not war.
So, what's the rational response to a government that tells whoppers both when it is against their own interests and when they are bound to be swiftly detected? Yes many governments lie, but at least it is usually possible to guess what motivates the lie. Many governments carefully craft a story, and often any lies are based on real truth, but filtered rather selectively by the views of the government. Politics becomes a task of finding the truth, while conceding that the other side may actually believe what they say, even if its 'obviously' wrong from our viewpoint.
But here the attitude seems to be that it is better to lie automatically and quickly than to only lie when there is a good chance it will gain you something.
Imagine if Secretary Powell had gone before the UN and claimed that Elvis had hidden Saddam's weapons of mass distruction in a passing UFO, and seemed to be expecting everyone else to believe him. The question stops being "Is he lieing?" or "Does he belive what he's saying, but is he still wrong?", and starts being "Where are the strong guys with the butterfly nets and funky white jacket?". All talk of North Korea's plans for Nuclear war is currently in that category.
What scares me is not living under a genuine free market - It's moving towards a free market selectively, with those currently towards the bottom expected to pay the prices while those currently towards the top don't face an equal obligation to change.
I'm a bit confused by your last remark - What Unionized Terrorists have been repalced by under qualified non-union Terrorists? (And picturing a Terrorist trying to figure out which end of the RPG is the 'bang'y part, why is it a bad thing?).
Your point about air traffic controllers is rather good though. Remember the Pilot's union strikes of the late 80's - early 90's? Military budget cuts were rapidly making it so that most new pilots were suddenly civilian trained, and had to pay off 80,000 to 120,000 student loans for big jet certification, but somehow that point never made it out to most of the public.
Rearden's mills had a union, which got along pretty well with management until the government stepped in later in the novel. In the real world, some corporations, such as Ford, are known for 20 year or more periods where they negotiated pay and benefits above pervailing union rates, in exchange for more ability to pick the best employees and discharge the worst. Those were often the same periods when the company was doing its best financially. Unions don't by any means have to support pay by seniority, and many of them don't.
Around where I live, there was a big negotiation involving some of the most major unions, like electricians, carpenters, and plumbers, with the biggest employer in the area. Management wanted union workers to cross jobs when it could save substantial delay (They didn't want an electrician to have to climb down from a 30 foot ladder, let a carpenter go up it to pull a nail holding a piece of conduit, have him climb down and let a plumber go up to disconnect the now loose conduit, then have the electrician go back up to finish the job). The unions as a group asked that such changes be limited to people whose jobs included working high off the ground, or around high voltage electricity, rad-waste, or whatever the safety concern was (So the secretaries union wasn't included in the deal), and similar situations.
Overall, the unions showed they were legitmately interested in safety far more than gouging extra time for loafing on the job. Management was quite happy to include a rider that supervisors always had the authority to limit workmen to their normal job description if they were claiming a safety situation existed and workers were generally happy to cross specialities by loosening a nail or painting a spot of patched plaster. The times a foreman steps in and says 'get down and let the electrician do that' are probably about 1 time in 20 or less. This was all in an environment with a very high amount of DOE regulation, and both the unions and management had to submit all agreements to DOE for final approval. They had lots of problems with the government micromanaging the agreement, but few between themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point on markets isn't invalidated by it, but the whole point of Natural Selection is that humans aren't an epitome of evolution, and there just isn't really any pinnacle or focal point to evolution. Those cockroaches we share our buildings with have been evolving precisely as long as we have. They have survived various evolutionary selection mechanisms just as well as we have. Nature isn't seeking to produce intelligence, or any other feature we might find can let us divide organisms into 'higher' and 'lower'. Everything we are evolving along side of is equally fit.
The problem I have with your using an evolutionary metaphor is that applying it to capitalism is just what leads to social Darwinism. Microsoft probably firmly believes it, to the extent they belive that being selected by the forces of the market is the same as being at the predestined peak of the natural order.
It isn't. If ignoring security is really that potent a failing to nature, then nature will select against Microsoft. If millions of people were wrong about the relative importance of security, then nature will select against them too. Public opinion is not a court of no appeal - Natural Selection is.
As Bill Murray once said "I love this plan!". Please send me my nubile females for an immediate rehearsal.
Can you imagine an average user needing a Terabite of storage for all _legally_ purchased material they are downloading? These specs sound like Microsoft is assuming the average user wants to store Ted Turner's complete film library.
"Umm your wrong..
If you beat me and I refuse to press charges the case will be dropped."
In all US states and federal jurisdictions, this is simply no longer true. Current law requires police, health care personnel, teachers,day care workers, military authorities, and many other persons in various lines of work to report evidience indicating various types of domestic abuse, crimes against children, crimes against the elderly, racially motivated crimes or violence relating to organized crime and the RICO act. That person then becomes the complaining party, and the case may be persued. In some cases, that persuit will result in the judge assigning a new complainant, i.e. the battered spouse will be treated as both the victim/complainant and a potentially hostile witness at the trial. Only if your beating does not fall in any such category can you expect charges to be dropped if you don't agree to be a complainant.
Now as to whether RIAA actions would require a complaining party, and whether they can indemnify accused persons - There was nothing in the RIAA's agreement that would prevent the complaining party being a single RIAA member, or a recoding artist or songwriter. For that matter, no one has yet determined whether the RIAA could be successfully sued by one of its own menbers for not acting as
an agressive watchdog in this case. The RIAA's offer doesn't provide any means to see if it is in line with their member contracts,and this is one of the reasons it is widely reccomended not to trust the offer.
So you're saying "Violating Copyright is wrong. Violating the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is also wrong. Violating the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishments is also wrong." Gee, I don't koow... That first part sounds good, but the RIAA tells me those other points are going to kill babies.
What's worse, the companies go above 100%. I'm not downloading any pirated .MP3s, I'm just buying less music, but the companies are blaming their declining revenues entirely on piracy. If I boycott one or more for political reasons (for the sake of arguement, let's say I am one of the people offended by Janet Jackson's jujubees), they will claim that there is no boycott, that I am instead a pirate and they need more financial compensation to make up for my non-existant crime.
If there were zero piracy going on, it would still be good business sense to claim it existed. The company can discredit various protests and avoid those protests getting that nasty free publicity, while simultaneously seeking assistance from the government to do what it would otherwise have to pay for itself (i.e. hire lawyers for civil cases), so why should it ever stop.
Since the 1940's most states in the USA have laws that say purchasing a theatre ticket IS a contract. You agree to not smuggle in food, but to buy from the theatre instead if you want anything. While this is by law, a contract, you never see it written down, and never sign it before it applies to you. That distortion of normal principles of law came about because of extensive lobbying by the entertainment industry sixty odd years ago. Which is worse, cumbersome contracts or hidden ones?
Wake up people, you have lost many more rights than you know, and it's getting worse. (In this case, it's not about a 'right' to smuggle in your own pepsi, it's about a right to know when you are entering into a contract.).
Uhm, because they support trademarks, copyrights, patents amd suc, but disagree with the WIPO about them all falling under a common category that is not found in common law or the US constitution.
I don't think there should be special penalties for killing left handed people, so by your logic, I'm pro murder.
In the same way, I don't want patents to last forever, just because "they're IP" and one type of thing some people cass as IP (Trademarks) can last forever.
I don't want trademarks to become something the user doesn't have to defend, just because "they're IP", and "Some types of IP" (Copyright) don't have to be defended, so now no type should.
I don't want more court cases like SCO vrs. IBM where the arguement over just what is being violated keeps shifting as SCO looks for a way to claim some sort of generic IP violation instead of a specific issue.
I don't want there to be a law that has no constitutional authority behind it and that gives any "IP" holder half a dozen of what were my legitimate rights. I don't think an author's copyright extends to forcibly recalling all copies of his book because he has changed his views. If he made an ass of himself publicly, tough. I don't think that copyright extends to me not being able to quote even a small portion of a work, or to prohibiting me from transcribing it to another medium, or otherwise making the work more acessable to me.
While we're at it, what does the law say about geographical indications? Do they expire? Do they have to be registered? Do they have to be painted in bright orange, in letters visible from orbit? Am I legallly required to say "Deutschland" and not "Germany"? Worse, do I owe somebody a fee for saying either? How can geographical indications be part of something called IP law, if there aren't laws protecting someone's right to own geographical indications?
In the USA, at this point, several communities have brought in broadband service as a public utility for half or less than what Broadband corporations want to charge. In one case already discussed here on slashdot, the private sector cost estimates were high by a factor of no less than five over the utility model. Several Broadband providers have sought legislation or gone to court to stop high speed access from becoming a public utility in some areas(monopoly mercantilism at its finest).
Sorry, but your "apparently they will not" translates into "Apparently they will not subsidize an inefficent private corporation further, after already having paid to build a huge infrastructure for that corporation to capitalize on, and seen that corporation dawdle at exploiting the golden goose it has been handed, because that corporation couldn't spot a money making opportunity if it was raining Krugerrands.".
"Game companies have a responsibility to their investors to charge the profit-maximizing price, as best they can judge it."
One of the underlieing causes of the current antagonism is that cost benefit analysis is a black art that masquerades as a science. The MBAs who come up with price points are by and large the same guys who were advising the dot coms before the bubble burst, using an inadiquate tool that ignores a lot of really useful math because it's seen as too complex to teach to MBAs.
Cost benefit analysis, applied classically, 'proves" that any negative consequence, no matter how bad, is a good deal if it comes far enough in the future. A medicine that ups the average lifespan by 10 years, but will eventually sterilize the whole species within in a few hundred? Mathematically, species extinction looks like an acceptable trade off if it just takes a few hundred years to get here.
These prices are being set by the same system that shows managers how to maximize the next quarter's profits and drive the company into the ground two years later. What happpens to customers as a result has many similarities to what happens to the society as a whole when the stock market gets unsteady, and it ought to be viewed as a 'bad thing' for much the same reasons.
Blaming the user is the least productive approach.
For the sake of arguement, let's say currently a full 90% of users are totally clueless, and it is somehow possible to wave a magic wand and make 90% clueful, leaving only 10% of them blameworthy.
What happens?
DDoS type attacks can't find nearly as many machines to work from. So the writers use a trojan, and have to increase the delay between propagation and activation. Because infection is typically a non-linear process, often approaching a square or logarythmic function for some parts of the process, the delay has to be increased from, say, a week to two weeks. Meanwhile, the patch for the trojan takes its usual month to develop, and the social structures that be are reluctant to tell even the clueful about a threat that is still unpatched as yet.
So long as the Trojan writer has abundant extra time to maneuver within, 'he' isn't strongly affected by the improvement in user cluefulness. Yes, it creates some extra stumbling blocks, such as a better chance of the Trojan being detected earlier in the process, but professional Trojan writers have shown serious ability to work around these obstacles.
In addition, although its an unrelated point to yours, these particular attacks are also supposed to be related to blackmail. Successful blackmail doesn't require a real threat, but merely one the victim believes is real.
It would make it impossible for God to exist IF He has to fit totally inside a finite universe. Last I looked, most claims for God also include Him being outside/before the universe.
Some of the assumptions they use are reasonable but also have reasonable alteratives. As just one example, it's possible from some current theories that the universe is not only expanding but the expansion is accelerating, but it's also far from proven, and it's quite reasonable to think the universe is expanding at the decreasing rate other theories imply. Whatever the conclusions the authors reach, they can only be as good as what someone else could come up with starting from some of the other reasonable assumptions, and this theory won't become reliable unless some evidence makes those contrary assumptions no longer reasonable.
I can't quite agree with you on this.
1. The world is not almost unimaginably old. It's about 13.2 Billion years if you mean the whole universe, or only 4.5 Billion if you mean the planet. We can imagine that, although maybe not in elaborate detail.
2. The big bang didn't happen. Instead, there was an event that looks like a big bang until you look back to a tiny fraction of a second afterwards, but that in that first 10 to the negative 36th power seconds or so, quantum mechanics rules. Inflationary cosmology supersedes the classical big bang model. (A pity in a way, as the classic big bang was a pretty good proof of the existence of God, and the inflationary model isn't quite so clearcut.).
3. Life (here) didn't evolve from "simple seeds" but from just one common seed. If there is life on other worlds, then probably you are correct to use the plural, but that's still an if. I think it likely myself, but have absolutely no evidence of it.
The real point I want to make is I can nit-pick what you wrote, while still being very largely in agreement with what you meant. The same is quite possible for religion. Look at the claim for the Trinity. 3 that are 1 sounds illogical, particularly if the debater visualizes the Holy spirit as a human-like ghost, and God the father as a bearded older guy in a robe. Trouble is, by that same logic, the telephone can't work, as it would imply that I can exist as two separate things at once, and 2 cannot equal 1. Applying to much literalism to a point can make most points look silly.
The real questions as re. expeditions to find Noah's ark, are simple questions of fact. Either someone will find something or they won't. If they do, that something will either stand up to some solid testing (i.e. it will pass Radiocarbon dating tests in an iteresting way), or it won't. Some things just won't be decidable, based on any concevable find - even if the searchers somehow find a largly intact ark that can have its volume measured, it won't tell us much about what animals were on board, or prove that it rained for 40 days in Noah's area, let alone also raining the same over Idaho or Bejing.
"My God ... do you think the Commander-in-Chief knows about this?"
Yeah, He wanted to bring in a Half-Elf/Half-Orc/Half-halfling Druid 7/Ninja 6/Necromancer 11, with a longsword +9 of 'things he didn't like' killing, so we didn't let him join.
Apparently, this IS just a remark by the writer. Whether it is sarcastic or humorous is a question of taste.
"I know the latter is the case for copyright claims, but does IP fall in the same category?"
Copyright DOES NOT require the holder to actively persue violators. Neither do patents or trade secrets.
Only TRADEMARKS have any requirement for the holder to actively persue violations. Even that isn't a requirement to go to court, and often trademarks can be defended just by reminding people who use them as though they were generic that they are not.
IP can't fall in the same category, as it is the broader category that (according to some theories of law), covers all the others just mentioned. The written law doesn't deal directly with IP, but instead deals seperately with those specific parts. That way, there is no such thing as a generic IP violation. This is a good thing, or more lawyers would be trying to stretch the law so they could sue over some sort of unlimited time, no requirements to register, my client doesn't have to prove anything cause it's secret Generic IP violation. So far, SCO is the only bunch to try for soemthing like that.
But if you used European Nukes, the Soviets had at least a 54 Megaton test device, and the package size works out to produce a lever of them not much more than 25 light minutes long. Without knowing what the proposed 71 Mt design they never really tested looked like, that's about the best we can do. African Nukes are limited to a relatively modest 0.5 to 2 Mt for the ones allegedly tested off the South African coast, so in this area, the European version clearly beats the African (vis-a-vis Swallows)
Escort is a bit of an understatement, don't you think?
That's the first time I've heard going up against F-15's, which are guarding a target important enough to justify full racks of Phoenix C's as interdict weapons, described as a fairly easy task.
If this system becomes fully functional at all, the 747-400 will take on an aircraft carrier like role, where it won't operate solo, but at the center of an airborne fleet. Initially, I would expect a few F-15s for fighter escorts, but operational practice is likely to lead to it also being linked to an AWACs type craft or some sort of separate command unit (as it probably can't fulfill a carrier's command function, due to lack of room for extra personnel on board). If the laser can be miniaturized somewhat, then the second generation or so from now should become the full equivalent of a naval fleet in structure, with this thing both projecting force and coordinating an attached fleet, and its escort craft evolving to become the rough arial equivalent of the missile cruisers, pickets and destroyers, and even escort attack subs of the modern navy.
One of the reasons for this is that many ranking air-force personnel would love it if their service had more flying spots for full bird colonels and generals, and this structure would need roughly the equal of a vice admiral at the helm (er, yolk).
That pesky cleric who has just said "May Allah strike me dead if He does not truely want a Jehad!"?
Whether they would or not, today's news out of North Korea shows the real problem. The NK government apparently just told a big lie about a liquified natural gas and fuel oil train or possibly two trains coliding, to hide the fact that it was actually military grade high explosives that were in two boxcars. This lie lasted less than 24 hours before the next story, and relates to a situation where the international culture is interested in helping, not war.
So, what's the rational response to a government that tells whoppers both when it is against their own interests and when they are bound to be swiftly detected? Yes many governments lie, but at least it is usually possible to guess what motivates the lie. Many governments carefully craft a story, and often any lies are based on real truth, but filtered rather selectively by the views of the government. Politics becomes a task of finding the truth, while conceding that the other side may actually believe what they say, even if its 'obviously' wrong from our viewpoint.
But here the attitude seems to be that it is better to lie automatically and quickly than to only lie when there is a good chance it will gain you something.
Imagine if Secretary Powell had gone before the UN and claimed that Elvis had hidden Saddam's weapons of mass distruction in a passing UFO, and seemed to be expecting everyone else to believe him. The question stops being "Is he lieing?" or "Does he belive what he's saying, but is he still wrong?", and starts being "Where are the strong guys with the butterfly nets and funky white jacket?". All talk of North Korea's plans for Nuclear war is currently in that category.
What scares me is not living under a genuine free market - It's moving towards a free market selectively, with those currently towards the bottom expected to pay the prices while those currently towards the top don't face an equal obligation to change.
I'm a bit confused by your last remark - What Unionized Terrorists have been repalced by under qualified non-union Terrorists? (And picturing a Terrorist trying to figure out which end of the RPG is the 'bang'y part, why is it a bad thing?).
Your point about air traffic controllers is rather good though. Remember the Pilot's union strikes of the late 80's - early 90's? Military budget cuts were rapidly making it so that most new pilots were suddenly civilian trained, and had to pay off 80,000 to 120,000 student loans for big jet certification, but somehow that point never made it out to most of the public.
Rearden's mills had a union, which got along pretty well with management until the government stepped in later in the novel. In the real world, some corporations, such as Ford, are known for 20 year or more periods where they negotiated pay and benefits above pervailing union rates, in exchange for more ability to pick the best employees and discharge the worst. Those were often the same periods when the company was doing its best financially. Unions don't by any means have to support pay by seniority, and many of them don't.
Around where I live, there was a big negotiation involving some of the most major unions, like electricians, carpenters, and plumbers, with the biggest employer in the area. Management wanted union workers to cross jobs when it could save substantial delay (They didn't want an electrician to have to climb down from a 30 foot ladder, let a carpenter go up it to pull a nail holding a piece of conduit, have him climb down and let a plumber go up to disconnect the now loose conduit, then have the electrician go back up to finish the job). The unions as a group asked that such changes be limited to people whose jobs included working high off the ground, or around high voltage electricity, rad-waste, or whatever the safety concern was (So the secretaries union wasn't included in the deal), and similar situations.
Overall, the unions showed they were legitmately interested in safety far more than gouging extra time for loafing on the job. Management was quite happy to include a rider that supervisors always had the authority to limit workmen to their normal job description if they were claiming a safety situation existed and workers were generally happy to cross specialities by loosening a nail or painting a spot of patched plaster. The times a foreman steps in and says 'get down and let the electrician do that' are probably about 1 time in 20 or less. This was all in an environment with a very high amount of DOE regulation, and both the unions and management had to submit all agreements to DOE for final approval. They had lots of problems with the government micromanaging the agreement, but few between themselves.