The bushmen are in Australia, which last I looked has pretty good net access. Most bushmen with net access use wireless, of course, so that it doesn't compromise their nomadic lifestyle. There's not much point in talking about "giving" them access, as, as a group, they have their own funds, which the Australian government is pretty much constrained to use as the bushmen decide.
There are really three classes here - the industrial nations, the developing nations, and the not developing nations. The "truly stagnant, not going anywhere except repetitious famine and civil war nations" won't really benefit from the internet, which I gather is your point. Some of them won't benefit from anything. They won't get basic industries, because they are destroying their existing infrastructure at a frightening pace, and no one from outside will build a factory where the roads are vanshing. Some are borderline failures, which don't need public net access until they get a literacy rate of 10% or so, or at least a small middle class. For some it's not even industrial development they need, until they get agricultural practices such as "slash and burn" or "grow something illegal and don't pay taxes" under better control.
One reason developing nations can benefit from the net is they are trying to leapfrog over some parts of industrialization, with some success. For example, many of these countries don't want to run copper phone line outside their major cities. Towers and repeaters actually look cheaper, but if they're going to put those up, might as well bundle some form of net access with them.
Full rural electrification is expensive, but dishes and solar power let a government broadcast news or educational programming to the rural community centers. They let it tie those rural communities together enough to hold voting, and an open political process is probably worth at least as much as technic infrastructure in improving a nation. Again, if there's unused bandwidth in those dish arrays, might as well give some people net access with it.
I could have sworn I mentioned cubic volumes in my post:-)
Moore's law was originally about transistor type IC systems getting smaller. Going 3D with transistors the same size is a potentially great way to improve chip design, but the component size stops changing, so if you're referring to the original law, that still counts as hitting a wall. There's no reason to think 3D archetecture will allow a change in the minimum size of each component, it will just let designers stack more same sized components on a chip.
Plenty of people have broadened Moore's law to apply it to designs where you are getting away from transister type logic entirely - i.e. trinary logic, quantum quibits, reversible logic operations, and other ideas have all been suggested. Any of them may be a winner, but it's unlikely they will happen in such a way as to keep on Moore's doubling timetable. Obviously, If we are debating two different versions of Moore's law, we could both be right about our own version, but come to different conclusions about how history actually unfolds.
I kept nodding my head in agreement as I read through these, and thinking, if it was Richard Stallman, I would have run across at least one that really bugged me by the end, but then it hit me:
Jerry Springer!
Let's see - Darl can sue for defamation for being compared to Springer. Springer can sue for being compared to Darl. Both can then sue each other for the comments each made over the first suit. None of the lawsuits will be worth a hill of beans, but that's no guarentee these days. Even if they don't, both could try to milk it for publicity a dozen other ways. (Can't you just see Jerry inviting Linus and Darl to appear together on his show? With a "supprise guest" claiming to be Darl's love-child/Linus's Stripper Ex-girlfriend?)
In legal matters, it's a good rule: Don't mention Jerry Springer, Rosanne Barr, Rush Limbaugh, Carmen Electra, Kato or Don Imus if they are not already involved.
Yes, but you're not a pointy haired idiot. (Sorry if that compromises your career). One reason the union seems upset about this is the state official who might try to enforce that 30 min. arrival widow at the rally point, by doing just the equivalent of meaning arrive at 7:05 instead of 7:00.
I'll assume your definition of emergency service calls is properly related to your customers, as well. One problem with the state doing this is everyone counts as a customer, for every service the state provides. Would you use the GPS to check whether one of your installers just might have been in a location where they were witness to a crime, and include whether they were sufficiently cooperative with police in their quarterly performance review? (or whatever you use).
It's not random, but it's got some variable elements. Semiconductors involve dopeing a bit of roughly pure element with one or more others. Starting from Silicon, the covalent radius is 1.17 angstrom units, and Germanium is almost the same at 1.22. Most of the dopants are very close to the same size (Arsenic at 1.21), or bigger, (i.e. indium at 1.62), so they don't change the picture much except to possibly RAISE the limits. Since impurities are less than 1 part per million, this effect can be dismissed as trivial.
Converting Angstroms to nanometers gives us 1 Angstrom = 1 x 10E-10 meters = 1 x 10E-1 nm.
Since diameter is 2x radius, and the crystals are tetrahedral, a 1 nanometer cube holds approximately 100 Si atoms. A four nm process would create links where the number of atoms in a scale length was only about 800, with a 16 nm process having 64 times that many, or about 50,000 atoms. In a given plane, a 4 nm process leaves a cross section of only about 76 atoms.
(Whew, Its been 20 years since I got out my old college chemistry text - I just hope I'm within an order of magnetude by the end.)
These numbers are definitely getting small enough that quantum mechanics rules. Electron tunneling is increasingly predominate. Beyond that, someone who really does physics on a professional level will have to give you more exact numbers and cover the possibilities of various voltages, operating temperatures and such as they apply. I'm just an amateur, and I would have to spend days on the net finding some of that data.
After doing that set of quick approximations, I'll revise my first position. I'd be willing to bet the process will scale below 16 nm, barring problems with production costs and such rather than really fundamental reasons. I'd also bet the best possible threshold is at least 4 nm and might still be as high as 10.
Why is the only explanation for one dimensional minor characters Weber's hand? First, any author is going to invest less effort in developing minor characters than major ones. When they don't, the author tends to say "X started out as a minor character, but by the time I has written 200 pages, her story took over the book.". There are only two ways to avoid this. 1. Write a book with only a few characters. 2. Write a book with a hundred characters, that is 3,000 pages long. Add five pages for every additional character, including the guy who just operates the elevator.
(I think Shakespeare has David Weber's hand up his butt - The guard on the wall is such a one dimensional character in Hamlet. And what about the troupe of players - the ones who start off as hams and scene stealers stay that way, as though performing at the royal court in those tumultuous times has no effect on them.)
How's this for an alternate explanation - What's the first thing editors cut? Could it be that most editors tend to cut scenes developing secondary characters before shorting the principals of the story?
Or, the author wanted to develop some novel ideas about how long a decadent civilisation could rule without an external challenge. That took some doing. Writing the major characters, he had to show how that background affected their lives and careers. In the process, he developed most of the ideas that seemed to flow from his premise. He realized that showing growth or failure of some of the other characters, he would be having his minor characters just imitate, in small, what the major ones were going through. That sounded preachy.
The supreme court has held for many years that courts have the ability and responsibiity to interpret scientific truth. This comes from obscenty law, where the possible tests for not-obscene works include "having redeeming social, artistic, or scientific value".
One of the problems with this legal principle is that federal obscenity law cases just about have to involve interstate distribution, hence there is a coupling of the ideas of profit and science - in that any time the court has ruled something lacks scientific merit, it has been a ruling against a for profit corporation, and its ruling overides that corporations ability to seek a profit.
I would say this is invariably true, but there may have been a few scientific merit in obscenity cases involving non-profits. None, however, come to mind. (IANAL).
In obscenity law, by the court's rulings, scientific merit IS promoted by the motive of profit, and it's a short step from there to reversing the clauses and generalizing.
Pirate-talk, at least in the era of the really great pirates such as Morgan (and just possibly Dread Roberts), indeed incorporates much of the southwestern coastal English of its time. However, in the interest of even greater precision than the abundance you have alreay provided, there are also some elements of southeast English (think London) slang (what is sometimes referred to as Thieve's Cant).
These get weaker as the "legendary" Pirates are replaced by more bland types (think SOBs just as bloody and cruel, but without the style and pinache of Morgan or even Teach/Blackbeard), possibly because fewer impressed sailors from the British Navy managed to desert in places where they could swing over to the pirate side.
How do you come by the principle "the only way to grant machines rights is to take rights away from human beings"? If you mean that granting a machine a right to continued existence means taking a human's right to terminate that machine away, then yes you're correct. Granting a human the right to live means taking away the "right" of other humans to kill him or her in the same way. The question is what rights trump what others? Perhaps a human right to reproduce might conflict with a machine's right to build copies of itself, or something along those lines. You seem to be suggesting that such a situation is inevitable.
What's this idea of granted rights anyway? Some of us still believe in the idea of "reasoning beings, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" (and the ultimate creator here is not a human, any more than I can claim to have bestowed inalienable rights on my daughter).
For the rest of your arguement - Feelings in the sense of making ones own independant decisions or being controlled equates to opinions. Feelings in the sense of requiring live cells to experience equates to emotions (and only the more glandular ones at that). You're conflating opinions and emotions, and not even mentioning reason in the process.
Then there's the NASA version - Uploading is to the thing in space, Downloading is from the thing in space, regardless of whichever initiates it and whichever is the bigger machine. (But I think it's fairly obvious why many NASA engineering types are prone to a non-standard usage here).
Approximately true, but you can't make a transistor less than N atoms thick, where N is "thin enough to allow a significant probability of electrons tunneling". Depending on whether you want to allow a 5% error rate or 1%, or less, N is at a guess about 4 to as much as 16 nanometers (nm). The exact cut off is hard to fix, because it depends on just how much of the design you want to devote to error correction, but it's definitely there. Finding a way around it will take making small groups of atoms behave deterministically instead of according to Quantum Mechanics. That is unfortunately a hard problem. No one has a real clue as to how to solve it.
What isn't yet clear is just what error correction itself means. Could a designer get a bit smaller scaling, but only by making the chip unable to run any existing programs? Could we turn quantum effects to our advantage with what is called Quantum based computing? Will Intel or IBM want to make a computer that needs a completely different approach to writing every last bit of software it can run?
The answers to the first two questions are unknown. The third, however, is an obvious NO! Mor's law will stop, either because we can't make the switches any smaller, or because we stop using transistors.
I like your post, and tend to agree with most of it, but about that "Better Idea eventually Wins" part, until BSD users all agree on VI vrs. EMACs seems to be one very long "eventually"
The potential benefits of superconductivity are very large. Take New York city, for example. Some months half the electricity they buy is used pushing the other half across hundreds or even thousands of miles of high-tension lines. What would be the financial benefit of saving 50% on your electric bill for the entire city of New York?
Superconductivity is a pipe dream, in that even that absolutely enormous potential savings, multiplied by all the similar situations elsewhere in the world, isn't motivating anyone to build a working superconducting transmission system and save that enormous amount of wasted power. If it's feasable, why hasn't a demand that large produced a result? The theoretical benefits of superconductivity certainly ARE large enough to matter - ergo, the limitation must be practice, not theory.
As a lesser example, Superconducting Magnetic Levitation was supposed to enable a generation of high speed trains that could compete with the aircraft industry. The Japanese just set a train speed record of 585 Km/h. They did it with a non-supercoducting system. Why did they do it the "hard way", if superconducting technology is more than a laboratory curiosity?
Britain - A nation where a small, but vocal and politicized percentage thinks the British are English, while the rest are well aware of their manifold roots, from the ancient Celtic cultures to modern Pakistanis.
Western Europe - A nation where the majority of people still think of themselves primarily as members of one of its components, but the minority that don't is growing rapidly.
Earth - As a whole, a people that are only about 50 to 100 years behind the above sections in getting the wake up call. Some sections may be ahead of the western states mentioned above.
Alabama, Iran, and North Korea (or sections of these) - See "Earth" above, and add a generation.
The original Galactica relied heavily on a plotline borrowed from the UFO cultist types, about how ancient earth civilizations were actually built up by space aliens.
From interviews ad TV guide articles, I gathered the producers, having not actually read any "Sci-Fi" what-so-ever, thought that the aliens built the pyramids idea was pretty central to SF. To them, most fans, if asked to name a famous SF author, would have said Von Daneikin instead of Asimov, and a great original idea in SF, that nobody had used before, would be something along the lines of "The last man and woman on earth discover they are Adam and Eve".
This new series is being written and controlled by people who know something of the genre. They may still turn out utter c**p, but there are at least some mistakes they won't make.
(I was glad John Colecos got work though.)
I for one would like to welcome our sexually ravenous Cylon overlords. Just imagine a beowulf cluster**** of sexy Cylons. In Soviet Russia, Cylons still have one monolithic red eye.
1. Cover Cylons in flesh toned vinyl. 2. Give them visene. 3. Open Cylon house of ill repute. 4. Profit!
(Sorry there's no step N. ???)
The problem with that is, the US congress put copyright law in a completely different title than theft. Congress and President Bush 1 ratified the original Berne treaty, which claims that all copyright law regulated under its auspicies is civil. Ex-presidents Reagan and Clinton both signed treaties (including NAFTA codicils for Bill C.), that also include clauses that help keep copyright violation seperate from theft.
The supreme court ruled that copyright violation could not be prosecuted as an interstate commerce violation, in part because if copyright violation were theft, individual states could prosecute intrastate violations, instead of all cases being federal. All copyright law IS federal only. You can have any opinion you want here, but when the congress, the supreme court, and the executive branch all disagree with your opinion, on a matter of law, you are just plain wrong.
Don't like that? Put your action behind your words. Don't just accuse private citizens on slashdot of playing semantic games. Get up a recall petition for all those congressmen who ratified Berne, or supported the DMCA. Start another one demanding the immediate recall of at least five of the current supremes. Maybe you could even seek to have charges brought against all living ex-presidents except possibly Ford, because they have all signed treaties or federal laws with some of these provisions.
I'm not sure if you missed something or not. You do understand that they can only send you to prison for being a criminal, not a pointy haired incompetent, don't you? As Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark once said, "An insanity defense is almost impregnable - but you have to get started on it pretty early." From Darl's perspective, incompetent isn't a bad thing, it's reasonable doubt.
With IP lawyers and EULA's often trying to claim the consumer has bought something that has whichever set of properties the corporate owner wants at the moment (it's a physical medium - it's a limited right of access - it's informatainment), SCO's actions suddenly make more sense. All they have really done here is try to treat the rest of the law in the same manner as a EULA, or a music or film company's definition of IP.
We sold you only whatever will get us in the least trouble. Your rights are whatever will make us the most money. We bought whatever parts of the business are on the black side of the ledger.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the scientist's prime directive: Don't screw up anything that might someday keep a fellow scientist from publishing.
The bushmen are in Australia, which last I looked has pretty good net access. Most bushmen with net access use wireless, of course, so that it doesn't compromise their nomadic lifestyle. There's not much point in talking about "giving" them access, as, as a group, they have their own funds, which the Australian government is pretty much constrained to use as the bushmen decide.
There are really three classes here - the industrial nations, the developing nations, and the not developing nations. The "truly stagnant, not going anywhere except repetitious famine and civil war nations" won't really benefit from the internet, which I gather is your point. Some of them won't benefit from anything. They won't get basic industries, because they are destroying their existing infrastructure at a frightening pace, and no one from outside will build a factory where the roads are vanshing. Some are borderline failures, which don't need public net access until they get a literacy rate of 10% or so, or at least a small middle class. For some it's not even industrial development they need, until they get agricultural practices such as "slash and burn" or "grow something illegal and don't pay taxes" under better control.
One reason developing nations can benefit from the net is they are trying to leapfrog over some parts of industrialization, with some success. For example, many of these countries don't want to run copper phone line outside their major cities. Towers and repeaters actually look cheaper, but if they're going to put those up, might as well bundle some form of net access with them.
Full rural electrification is expensive, but dishes and solar power let a government broadcast news or educational programming to the rural community centers. They let it tie those rural communities together enough to hold voting, and an open political process is probably worth at least as much as technic infrastructure in improving a nation. Again, if there's unused bandwidth in those dish arrays, might as well give some people net access with it.
Cringely closes this week's column with:
This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?
Next week: the answer.
I could have sworn I mentioned cubic volumes in my post :-)
Moore's law was originally about transistor type IC systems getting smaller. Going 3D with transistors the same size is a potentially great way to improve chip design, but the component size stops changing, so if you're referring to the original law, that still counts as hitting a wall. There's no reason to think 3D archetecture will allow a change in the minimum size of each component, it will just let designers stack more same sized components on a chip.
Plenty of people have broadened Moore's law to apply it to designs where you are getting away from transister type logic entirely - i.e. trinary logic, quantum quibits, reversible logic operations, and other ideas have all been suggested. Any of them may be a winner, but it's unlikely they will happen in such a way as to keep on Moore's doubling timetable. Obviously, If we are debating two different versions of Moore's law, we could both be right about our own version, but come to different conclusions about how history actually unfolds.
Yes, but its disingenious of us to claim to be be charitable when we are actually expecting a nice return on our investment.
I kept nodding my head in agreement as I read through these, and thinking, if it was Richard Stallman, I would have run across at least one that really bugged me by the end, but then it hit me:
Jerry Springer!
Let's see - Darl can sue for defamation for being compared to Springer. Springer can sue for being compared to Darl. Both can then sue each other for the comments each made over the first suit. None of the lawsuits will be worth a hill of beans, but that's no guarentee these days. Even if they don't, both could try to milk it for publicity a dozen other ways. (Can't you just see Jerry inviting Linus and Darl to appear together on his show? With a "supprise guest" claiming to be Darl's love-child/Linus's Stripper Ex-girlfriend?)
In legal matters, it's a good rule: Don't mention Jerry Springer, Rosanne Barr, Rush Limbaugh, Carmen Electra, Kato or Don Imus if they are not already involved.
Yes, but you're not a pointy haired idiot. (Sorry if that compromises your career). One reason the union seems upset about this is the state official who might try to enforce that 30 min. arrival widow at the rally point, by doing just the equivalent of meaning arrive at 7:05 instead of 7:00.
I'll assume your definition of emergency service calls is properly related to your customers, as well. One problem with the state doing this is everyone counts as a customer, for every service the state provides. Would you use the GPS to check whether one of your installers just might have been in a location where they were witness to a crime, and include whether they were sufficiently cooperative with police in their quarterly performance review? (or whatever you use).
Johnny found some dynomite -
Never understood it quite,
Curiosity never pays -
It rained Johnny seven days.
It's not random, but it's got some variable elements. Semiconductors involve dopeing a bit of roughly pure element with one or more others. Starting from Silicon, the covalent radius is 1.17 angstrom units, and Germanium is almost the same at 1.22. Most of the dopants are very close to the same size (Arsenic at 1.21), or bigger, (i.e. indium at 1.62), so they don't change the picture much except to possibly RAISE the limits. Since impurities are less than 1 part per million, this effect can be dismissed as trivial.
Converting Angstroms to nanometers gives us 1 Angstrom = 1 x 10E-10 meters = 1 x 10E-1 nm.
Since diameter is 2x radius, and the crystals are tetrahedral, a 1 nanometer cube holds approximately 100 Si atoms. A four nm process would create links where the number of atoms in a scale length was only about 800, with a 16 nm process having 64 times that many, or about 50,000 atoms.
In a given plane, a 4 nm process leaves a cross section of only about 76 atoms.
(Whew, Its been 20 years since I got out my old college chemistry text - I just hope I'm within an order of magnetude by the end.)
These numbers are definitely getting small enough that quantum mechanics rules. Electron tunneling is increasingly predominate. Beyond that, someone who really does physics on a professional level will have to give you more exact numbers and cover the possibilities of various voltages, operating temperatures and such as they apply. I'm just an amateur, and I would have to spend days on the net finding some of that data.
After doing that set of quick approximations, I'll revise my first position. I'd be willing to bet the process will scale below 16 nm, barring problems with production costs and such rather than really fundamental reasons. I'd also bet the best possible threshold is at least 4 nm and might still be as high as 10.
Why is the only explanation for one dimensional minor characters Weber's hand? First, any author is going to invest less effort in developing minor characters than major ones. When they don't, the author tends to say "X started out as a minor character, but by the time I has written 200 pages, her story took over the book.". There are only two ways to avoid this.
1. Write a book with only a few characters.
2. Write a book with a hundred characters, that is 3,000 pages long. Add five pages for every additional character, including the guy who just operates the elevator.
(I think Shakespeare has David Weber's hand up his butt - The guard on the wall is such a one dimensional character in Hamlet. And what about the troupe of players - the ones who start off as hams and scene stealers stay that way, as though performing at the royal court in those tumultuous times has no effect on them.)
How's this for an alternate explanation - What's the first thing editors cut? Could it be that most editors tend to cut scenes developing secondary characters before shorting the principals of the story?
Or, the author wanted to develop some novel ideas about how long a decadent civilisation could rule without an external challenge. That took some doing. Writing the major characters, he had to show how that background affected their lives and careers. In the process, he developed most of the ideas that seemed to flow from his premise. He realized that showing growth or failure of some of the other characters, he would be having his minor characters just imitate, in small, what the major ones were going through. That sounded preachy.
The supreme court has held for many years that courts have the ability and responsibiity to interpret scientific truth. This comes from obscenty law, where the possible tests for not-obscene works include "having redeeming social, artistic, or scientific value".
One of the problems with this legal principle is that federal obscenity law cases just about have to involve interstate distribution, hence there is a coupling of the ideas of profit and science - in that any time the court has ruled something lacks scientific merit, it has been a ruling against a for profit corporation, and its ruling overides that corporations ability to seek a profit.
I would say this is invariably true, but there may have been a few scientific merit in obscenity cases involving non-profits. None, however, come to mind. (IANAL).
In obscenity law, by the court's rulings, scientific merit IS promoted by the motive of profit, and it's a short step from there to reversing the clauses and generalizing.
#11. Thou shalt not place pieces having more than the total weight of a yearling lamb of refined U-235 in close proximity to each other.
Pirate-talk, at least in the era of the really great pirates such as Morgan (and just possibly Dread Roberts), indeed incorporates much of the southwestern coastal English of its time. However, in the interest of even greater precision than the abundance you have alreay provided, there are also some elements of southeast English (think London) slang (what is sometimes referred to as Thieve's Cant).
These get weaker as the "legendary" Pirates are replaced by more bland types (think SOBs just as bloody and cruel, but without the style and pinache of Morgan or even Teach/Blackbeard), possibly because fewer impressed sailors from the British Navy managed to desert in places where they could swing over to the pirate side.
How do you come by the principle "the only way to grant machines rights is to take rights away from human beings"?
If you mean that granting a machine a right to continued existence means taking a human's right to terminate that machine away, then yes you're correct. Granting a human the right to live means taking away the "right" of other humans to kill him or her in the same way. The question is what rights trump what others? Perhaps a human right to reproduce might conflict with a machine's right to build copies of itself, or something along those lines. You seem to be suggesting that such a situation is inevitable.
What's this idea of granted rights anyway? Some of us still believe in the idea of "reasoning beings, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" (and the ultimate creator here is not a human, any more than I can claim to have bestowed inalienable rights on my daughter).
For the rest of your arguement - Feelings in the sense of making ones own independant decisions or being controlled equates to opinions. Feelings in the sense of requiring live cells to experience equates to emotions (and only the more glandular ones at that). You're conflating opinions and emotions, and not even mentioning reason in the process.
But we do appreciate it. Thanks for your daily syncronizing of the interweb, how about I take next Tuesday so you can bowl?
Then there's the NASA version - Uploading is to the thing in space, Downloading is from the thing in space, regardless of whichever initiates it and whichever is the bigger machine. (But I think it's fairly obvious why many NASA engineering types are prone to a non-standard usage here).
Approximately true, but you can't make a transistor less than N atoms thick, where N is "thin enough to allow a significant probability of electrons tunneling". Depending on whether you want to allow a 5% error rate or 1%, or less, N is at a guess about 4 to as much as 16 nanometers (nm). The exact cut off is hard to fix, because it depends on just how much of the design you want to devote to error correction, but it's definitely there. Finding a way around it will take making small groups of atoms behave deterministically instead of according to Quantum Mechanics. That is unfortunately a hard problem. No one has a real clue as to how to solve it.
What isn't yet clear is just what error correction itself means. Could a designer get a bit smaller scaling, but only by making the chip unable to run any existing programs? Could we turn quantum effects to our advantage with what is called Quantum based computing? Will Intel or IBM want to make a computer that needs a completely different approach to writing every last bit of software it can run?
The answers to the first two questions are unknown. The third, however, is an obvious NO! Mor's law will stop, either because we can't make the switches any smaller, or because we stop using transistors.
I like your post, and tend to agree with most of it, but about that "Better Idea eventually Wins" part, until BSD users all agree on VI vrs. EMACs seems to be one very long "eventually"
The potential benefits of superconductivity are very large. Take New York city, for example. Some months half the electricity they buy is used pushing the other half across hundreds or even thousands of miles of high-tension lines. What would be the financial benefit of saving 50% on your electric bill for the entire city of New York?
Superconductivity is a pipe dream, in that even that absolutely enormous potential savings, multiplied by all the similar situations elsewhere in the world, isn't motivating anyone to build a working superconducting transmission system and save that enormous amount of wasted power. If it's feasable, why hasn't a demand that large produced a result? The theoretical benefits of superconductivity certainly ARE large enough to matter - ergo, the limitation must be practice, not theory.
As a lesser example, Superconducting Magnetic Levitation was supposed to enable a generation of high speed trains that could compete with the aircraft industry. The Japanese just set a train speed record of 585 Km/h. They did it with a non-supercoducting system. Why did they do it the "hard way", if superconducting technology is more than a laboratory curiosity?
Britain - A nation where a small, but vocal and politicized percentage thinks the British are English, while the rest are well aware of their manifold roots, from the ancient Celtic cultures to modern Pakistanis.
Western Europe - A nation where the majority of people still think of themselves primarily as members of one of its components, but the minority that don't is growing rapidly.
Earth - As a whole, a people that are only about 50 to 100 years behind the above sections in getting the wake up call. Some sections may be ahead of the western states mentioned above.
Alabama, Iran, and North Korea (or sections of these) - See "Earth" above, and add a generation.
The original Galactica relied heavily on a plotline borrowed from the UFO cultist types, about how ancient earth civilizations were actually built up by space aliens.
From interviews ad TV guide articles, I gathered the producers, having not actually read any "Sci-Fi" what-so-ever, thought that the aliens built the pyramids idea was pretty central to SF. To them, most fans, if asked to name a famous SF author, would have said Von Daneikin instead of Asimov, and a great original idea in SF, that nobody had used before, would be something along the lines of "The last man and woman on earth discover they are Adam and Eve".
This new series is being written and controlled by people who know something of the genre. They may still turn out utter c**p, but there are at least some mistakes they won't make.
(I was glad John Colecos got work though.)
I for one would like to welcome our sexually ravenous Cylon overlords.
Just imagine a beowulf cluster**** of sexy Cylons.
In Soviet Russia, Cylons still have one monolithic red eye.
1. Cover Cylons in flesh toned vinyl.
2. Give them visene.
3. Open Cylon house of ill repute.
4. Profit!
(Sorry there's no step N. ???)
The problem with that is, the US congress put copyright law in a completely different title than theft. Congress and President Bush 1 ratified the original Berne treaty, which claims that all copyright law regulated under its auspicies is civil. Ex-presidents Reagan and Clinton both signed treaties (including NAFTA codicils for Bill C.), that also include clauses that help keep copyright violation seperate from theft.
The supreme court ruled that copyright violation could not be prosecuted as an interstate commerce violation, in part because if copyright violation were theft, individual states could prosecute intrastate violations, instead of all cases being federal. All copyright law IS federal only. You can have any opinion you want here, but when the congress, the supreme court, and the executive branch all disagree with your opinion, on a matter of law, you are just plain wrong.
Don't like that? Put your action behind your words. Don't just accuse private citizens on slashdot of playing semantic games. Get up a recall petition for all those congressmen who ratified Berne, or supported the DMCA. Start another one demanding the immediate recall of at least five of the current supremes. Maybe you could even seek to have charges brought against all living ex-presidents except possibly Ford, because they have all signed treaties or federal laws with some of these provisions.
I'm not sure if you missed something or not. You do understand that they can only send you to prison for being a criminal, not a pointy haired incompetent, don't you? As Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark once said, "An insanity defense is almost impregnable - but you have to get started on it pretty early." From Darl's perspective, incompetent isn't a bad thing, it's reasonable doubt.
With IP lawyers and EULA's often trying to claim the consumer has bought something that has whichever set of properties the corporate owner wants at the moment (it's a physical medium - it's a limited right of access - it's informatainment), SCO's actions suddenly make more sense. All they have really done here is try to treat the rest of the law in the same manner as a EULA, or a music or film company's definition of IP.
We sold you only whatever will get us in the least trouble. Your rights are whatever will make us the most money. We bought whatever parts of the business are on the black side of the ledger.