The audio recording industry has a non-sustainable business model, and they now claim customers are not buying a real product or service but simply acquiring a licence. Sounds like they are about two thirds of the way to being a pyramid scheme. They aren't promising any payment for enrolling others, at least yet. You could argue that pushers offer pyramid schemes, discounting drugs to get new 'members' to enroll as junkies, yet pushing heroin doesn't quite fit the pyramid scheme definition. Maybe what we need to focus on here is that it may take several forms of bad behavior to add up to a pyramid scheme, but having only some percentage of those features does not make something sound business, ethical, or often even legal.
You have an intreguing point in that you've presented the first part of the logical argument that using God as an explanation for how the world was created entails explaining something simpler by resort to something more complicated.
I must ask you, however, why does the Universe supposedly needing a creator lead to an infinte regress such as you're describing in the next sentence? Science was perfectly willing to treat an infinitely old universe as a possibility - that was the 'Steady State' model from the late 1800's to the 1950's. Eventually, the 'Big Bang' won out, but nobody (or nearly nobody) in the scientific community rejected the steady state just because it was illogical to think the Universe might have no edge, go on forever or be infinitely old. Science says something that has been around forever is a perfectly logical possibility. It's a valid hypothesis until some evidence contradicts it. The cosmic microwave background evidence comes along and, in effect, says "sure, but we don't happen to live in that sort of universe, we live in one that has a moment of creation". This is all well and absolutely bloody marvelous, and in my better moments I rejoice to be made of starstuff, but science definitely has not said, "and now we should start rejecting the possibility of any and all things which exist eternally, just because we have reason to think one thing that might have been eternal isn't." We don't think the universe had a start because scientists did some abstract speculating and found an abstract, logical reason to think all things have to have starts, but because specific evidence says the real universe we live in does have a start, and in fact is only about 13 billion years old, etc.
Science doesn't consider "God did it" hypothesi very often, if only for the reason that it looks very unlikely that such a hypothesis can ever be testable and so fall under the domain of science. Repeatability is also a problem, especially if the hypothesis becomes "God did it, and He's probably only going to do it this once". But that's a limitation that comes up under many circumstances besides Theology. Godel showed that there absolutely have to be things outside of any sufficiently powerful formal system that are true but can't be proved by that system.
I can think of at least one completely naturalist hypothesis that cannot actually be disproved by the scientific method (any time we consider the possibility of sufficiently intelligent and advanced aliens - they don't have to be omnescient, just having a perfectly natural brain with 1,000 times the neural connections of a typical human's would mean such a being could not be subjected to the scientific method - that is, they are so smart they could doubtless trick us into concluding whatever they wanted us to conclude). Similarly, most of the scientists who have speculated about parallel universes have been careful to remind readers that they are not a scientific hypothesis, as there's no apparent method possible to test for their existence.
I suspect the parent poster is falling into one of the intellectual traps of Atheism. That is, the tendency to point out that a. Atheists are a tiny minority, and b. Gifted and above intelligences are a tiny minority of about the same size, and then take a logical leap and claim THEREFORE c. Atheists are all of gifted or above intelligence.
In America, where close to 80% of people identify as at least nominallly Christian, the reverse mistake is unlikely to hold much attraction for that majority. After all, if every single Christian was somehow smarter than any Atheist, and all the members of various nonchristian faiths as well, that would still just mean a given individual Christian was proven to be somewhere above the bottom 20%, not much to brag about.
Unfortunately, so long as Atheists are a tiny percentage of the population, there's a temptation to treat Atheism as a shortcut to proving that one is part of the intellectual elite. Just as Christians, in a majority setting such as the USA, may be tempted to think Christianity must be right because so many believe it, or that they should believe just to fit in with the herd, so people attracted to Atheism may have their own emotional, ego driven and often subconsiously held reasons, and some of those reasons come into being just because they are a minority.
There's no evidence that another person exists who has both the encription key and physical access to the drives, but how hard would it usually be for the accused to make that claim? What's stopping the accused from saying 'Bob Jones' had the drive in his possession for a time and must be the person who encripted the drive? At that point, a grand jury or court could end up with an original accused person, with pretty limited evidence against him, and a new suspect, with not much less evidence against him. And, this could go on, with Bob Jones claiming Alice Smith had a chance to access the drive, and so on.
There's been a hell of a lot of money spent on homeland security since 2001. That same common sense you invoke is what leads most of us to expect some of those literal trillions went into raising emergency capacity above the normal use limits, and it's also common sense to think that a place such as Boston would be fairly high on the list of areas to shore up. (Especially since there were specific ties to Boston in the original event that inspired all that spending).
Finally, several other countries have implemented all sorts of special procedures for cell phone networks in emergencies (The UK, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt all come to mind). These sometimes include shutting down cell services once a bombing occurs, but in some of these cases also include using the local version of E-911 as a priority search mechanism for people possibly trapped in rubble after a building bomb or an earthquake, and various other services that mean the system as a whole needs to stay up and function resilently under increased loads. "Common sense" would suggest that the US should have some of these protocols in place too, especially since we have spent literally 10,000.00 % of what some of these other countries have.
We could, however, grade where the facts aren't in despute. Is the person in an interview what the media describes them as? Is he really the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, or is he just an assistant professor at stamford? Is person X really a psychiatrist or does she really just have a bachelors in psychology? Is the disgraced politician really a (R), a (D), or an (I)? Various studies from sources such as the Columbia School of Journalism have shown some news sources are much less reliable on such points than others. What about the many cases where there's no real disagreement over the facts, where both 'official from the current government' sources and respected private sources, plus public records going back to previous administrations and such all generally agree?
Moreover, people who focus mostly on tech in their day to day lives will generally have better resources to blog, post or whatever on tech specialty sites. If they instead go to a site they don't normally visit much, because a particular event has happened and that event is being covered there, they don't have those same resources. It's perfectly natural for people to want to post where they already know who at least some of the trolls are, how to do bold face or italics, and where they have an existing ID, or other options such as AC. Some people, particularly ones who are not in or from the US, may have the opinion that catastrophies and other major news that involves the US gets more attention on Slashdot than they deserve, that the barrier to becoming important enough to override the usual "news for nerds" rule is lower. I can understand that, but it's different from expecting that barrier to be made of unobtanium.
The general idea for 'hate crimes' is a person commits a major felony, from a select list of violent felonies, AND the evidence indicates there are additional consequences to many other people AND the perp meant to produce those consequences. That's how these laws are written in the overwhelming majority of cases, that the prosecution has to prove ALL those things. I.e Criminal X committed, for example, Murder One, and Criminal X also indicated there was intention to make many other people suffer, fear for their lives, stop exercising their rights, or otherwise be injured. Whether it's a klansman hanging a black man for having made efforts to get more black people to the polls on election day, or a rapist sending a letter to the local paper warning all women to get back to the home or be presumed whores who deserve what he's dishing out, the person charged has to commit a major felony, and has to make threats or otherwise indicate they are trying to do additional harm to others by it. So why is it a conservative position to be soft on particularly violent murderers and rapists who are trying to add more victims to their talley? How did the conservative movement ever become the appologists for the worst of the worst? How does this idea that liberals are the ones soft on crime persist when self appointed spokesmen for the right are reduced to trying to oppose punishing murderers and rapists for aggravating circumstances? Read the actual laws, not what some nut such as Coulter has said about them, and decide for yourself.
"Fair use" is about the recipient (a.k.a. the user, the buyer, the reseller and such terms), and other second and possibly third parties, holding some limits on the rights holder's ability to enforce copyright under certain circumstances. Saying Google's actions pass "no test of fair use whatsoever" because they might be opposed by the rights holder, or even cause some objectively verifiable problems for the rights holder, is like saying 'innocent until proven guilty' should be abolished because it doesn't help the state get convictions.
If your only goal is that the copyright holder be able to act without checks and balances, you've already answered the question you posed, your way. If a "user's standpoint" doesn't count from a "copyright standpoint", then the only rights left to count are the copyright holder's. You've just redefined fair use into non-existence, and moved it completey out of copyright law. For the rest of us, the user's rights are part of copyright law. People who have no philosophical opposition to copyright in general can still be opposed to taking away the checks and balances given by fair use doctrine. People who really know a bit about the law know that fair use exceptions stem from common law, including, (for the US), unchallenged English common law from pre- constitutional times, and are at least partially codified in Title 17 along with the rest of copyright law. Some of us also know about the fair use clauses in the Berne treaty. That means your "from a copyright standpoint" really means 'from a copyright standpoint, but ignoring all the common law outside that section, and all current US copyright treaties, and any references inside Title 17 I don't like'.
I note too you put 'caching' in double quotes, so you're apparently claiming Google isn't really caching, they're really doing X and calling it caching. Saying the people you disagree with are lieing wihout actually calling it lieing is a basic dirty trick in rhetoric. Just what are you claiming it should be called instead? There are way to many people here on Slashdot that understand such tricks to let it go unchallenged. You did the same trick with "philosophically" as well.
That's sad, because I think you have a valid point about the differences between opt-in and opt-out. Why aren't you sticking to fair methods to try and make that point?
It's a useful hypothetical for training. For example, I just recently saw a bit of some TV show about firefighters, where they were trying to rescue a trapped person in a warehouse accident, and some worker there assured them none of the materials stored there were flammable. They got out an acetylene torch to cut the trapped person free of fallen shelves and such, and found out the hard way the worker was wrong. Zombie scenarios give the designer an excuse to present the trainees with lots of people who won't cooperate (i.e. the parents who have locked zombie Little Suzie in the basement rather than reporting her, hopeing it's just a phase she's going through), or who can't cooperate (the living but injured man who the trainees supposedly should identify as not a zombie even though he is blood splattered and staggering). There are plenty of other ways to craft a tough scenario, for example having some people play-act as though they don't speak any language the trainees try.
I've got mixed feelings about using zombies in training scenarios. First, the usual goal of such training is supposedly best met by 'tough, realistic scenarios', and zombies may add to the tough part but they certainly take away from the realistic part. Second, it involves dehumanising part of the problem set, so it's somewhat like older era military training, where the enemy was called gooks or ckinks or whatever. A realistic scenario might be a post-disaster confrontation with survivors who are from a minority population and that don't trust the civil authorities. Using zombie scenarios in such ways sends a seriously wrong message.
Granted freely, but the majority of those parasites occur in insect hosts. The only exception I can think of is a parasitic isopod that causes a host fish's tongue to atrophy and the isopod resides in that spot as it grows. The fish may just arguably have a psychological change - that is, it may think that what is occasionally touching the roof of its mouth is still just its normal tongue. I don't know offhand how you would prove or disprove that.
As to whether a 'zombie' inducing parasite is far fetched in 'higher' species though, isn't there something seemingly very odd about the concept of a tiny creature with at most a very limited nural system, trying to get evolutionary advantages out of controlling something that is normally controlled by a human grade brain? That's still assuming the host isn't actually damaged much by whatever caused its death, and that the body hasn't taken further damage by post death processes before the parasite can take over. From your post, I'm visualizing a tiny worm-like parasite spread by bite, and weighing, say half an ounce. Then I'm imagining it developing a five ounce brain, just to be able to control basic bodily functions in a case where the host has, say, suffered a broken arm during the zombie apocalypse, so it's smart enough to keep that host body walking without that broken arm flopping around, turning itself into a compound fracture with protruding bone ends, and causing the host to rapidly bleed out.
When you try to come up with a naturalistic mechanism that could allow zombies as they are seen in movies, you end up with a lot of unexplained parts. When you stick to what seems reasonable by real science, you end up with something I wouldn't call a zombie, i.e. a host that has vital signs, appears more as though it was a rabid animal, at worst, rather than undead, and that would still be subject to death from blood loss if you shot it somewhere else besides the head.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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Ultimately, claiming that the only way to ensure accountability is the profit motive is claiming that government itself doesn't and can't work. If criminal law can't ensure accountabilty, if elections and recalls can't ensure accountability, then there's no rationale for ANY form of democratic government. So how do you figure the profit motive will work where civil law can't ensure the sanctity of contract? Isn't that an accountability issue? (And you're posting as AC and insulting people to boot - might want to rethink that)
The only way the 'physical CD was never what you were buying' is if you never sold a used CD, never loaned a CD to someone else, and never used that CD in both your home and car players. If you really did that, for every single CD you bought, you are one in a million, or rarer. Now why are you posting on slashdot to advocate that a law which only suits one person in a million is somehow defensable? Why on Earth are you thinking that the other 999,999 people in your situation shouldn't feel like they have lost any rights just because you are the one in a million who never bothered to exercise any of yours? You're a weird statistical anomaly, one in a million. The law isn't about you and only you. You're like the guy who smokes 2 packs a day and still lives to be 90 saying that you don't see the problem with cigarettes and what does that word 'cancer' mean?
You got in quick with a valid point, and completely shot yourself down with unsupported opinions. Why? Why say, in effect, "This is a proveably avoidabble mistake, and now I'm going to throw around vague hints of some totally unspecified complaint list, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing in particular.", and so make everyone ignore the part that is both a defensible point and the only point actually pertenant to the article? Why shoot yourself in the foot like that?
There are some really strange cases of the Placebo effect, for example getting subjects to use Placebo opiates for pain relief for a week or more and then giving them an opiate inhibitor without telling them, and having it turn out to inhibit uptake of the fake opiates. There's some old research that can't be replicated now because of modern ethical guidelines (Which raises the question, is it still science if it becomes irreproducable, not because of a technical limitation but because of increased moral standards?). After reading up on some of these oddities, I've come to the opinion Science does not understand the general Placebo effect nearly as well as individual researchers think they understand how it applies to their special cases. It's fair to say double-blind studies have proven many times that people are claming auditory abilities they simply don't posess, but that really doesn't necessarily mean we can jump from that point to conclude there's some aspect of the Placebo effect involved.
The law is generally based on the idea that multiple parties can be at fault. We frequently try the guy who drove the getaway car for murder when his buddy is the one who actually pulled the trigger on the bank guard. There are whole categories of crime where someone only did whatever they did after the original crime and we call it such things as conspiracy after the fact, yet we still find people guilty. In civil law, it's frequent to see a party declared 55% responsible, or 10%, or many variations on how much fault is shared in multiple ways. Here, you seem to be arguing that suicide is a felony, but there cannot be multiple parties contributing to that particular felony, or having multiple asignments of guilt, or even tortuous responsibility. That's actually an unusual position to hold, and there's a lot of common law against it. There is some law where you could openly add the clause "if the person is an agent of the state" and find matching precedents, but then, that's what most of us are debating, whether putting on a law enforcement hat makes persons immune from personal responsibilty.
Driving a car with a passenger who has committed a robbery recently does not necessarily involve guilt. Lying to a suspect in an official capacity does not necessarily involve guilt. But, a driver can have guilty knowledge that the other persons in the car were committing an armed robbery before they got in, and an investigator can have guilty knowledge that he is not actually sticking to charges in line with the law if unreasonable charges can improve his conviction rate. We shouldn't find some third party responsible every time someone commits suicide, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever find anyone else at fault any time someone commits suicide.
This happens because there are serious cases where it's "only" 90% of the idiots making the rest of the team look bad. For example, when President Obama took office, death threats and such passed to the secret service took literally a tenfold jump over the last few presidents cases. 100,000+ death threats using the N word, in the first month alone, convinced me there are still a lot of racists out there. So when I hear somebody on the Tea-party style right claim they haven't noticed a lot of racism at meetings, or any racist incidents at all, or similar statements, I just assume they are either incredibly clueless or deliberately lying. There's just too much for it to go unnoticed by anyone of normal capabilities. I'll freely admit there are at least occasional crazies and jerks on my side in most arguments, but I still see a difference when the amount on any side sometimes becomes a whole lot more than occasional.
There's an old Astounding Science Fiction article by John W. Campbell junior that talks about "Gestalt Logic". His argument was you don't judge that a man is a criminal just because his means of support isn't obvious, or because he drives a flashy car and wears flashy clothes, or because somebody else he knows is a criminal. But what should you do when a whole lot of those circumstances line up? If the person has no obvious means of support, seems to be in areas where crimes were committed at those times on a regular basis, knows and associates with dozens of other people who have criminal records, and so on, how much of that is enough that it's fair for you, as a private individual, to assume the person really is a criminal, even if they've never been actually convicted of anything?
I suspect we all set individual thresholds. Equally, I doubt most of us are consistent about just where we set them.
I don't really see why you got a "redundant" mod, but I'm going to risk one by spelling some things out which you left unsaid. Elon's aiming for the long term, and probably counts a even permanent colony on Mars as only intermediate term. He has little interest in parachute return because eventually, he wants systems that can take off and return to planets such as Mars where chutes have little to work with. Mars also having lower gravity, it would be great if we already had a way to get there and could develop a reusable vehicle suitable for Martian use in situ, but guess what? We don't currently have a Martian colony!!!!!
Testing here on Earth is the only alternative we have, and anyone talking about the cost and potential uses (as at least half a dozen posters have done), should realize that they are comparing the wrong alternatives - it's not Earth with Fueled return VS Earth with Parachute return, it's (over)design for testing some parts on Earth VS do all the construction on Mars, with Mars first developed enough to provide the infrastructure and Earth developed enough to both put that infrastructure there and provide an alternative method of return from Mars while the bugs are worked out of the reusables.
The real question is, why are the people who have at least figured out that it will cost more than the bank bailouts to put a permanent colony on Mars with current tech being modded down for it, instead of the people posing false equvalencies that show they don't even get that?
Pile of rubble asteroids are effectively self solving, as the pebbles make great fuel for a solar panel powered mass driver, which only has to chuck pellets at a rather modest velocity so single firings don't accelerate the remaining masses fast enough to cause them to lose their tenuous gravitational grip on each other (and even that may not be a necessary constraint, see below). Transferring the mass driver's acquired momentum to the gravels, without it digging itself in, is an exercise I leave for the reader (hint: if broad footpads don't seem sufficient, lets look at epoxying the masses together, surrounding them in a fine net, or letting them drift apart and slowly recongregate between firings).
Do we really need to keep a rubbleroid together? Or is it actually enough to spread it out so much of its bulk arrives over a period of several minutes, drawing an 8 Km line across Earth's upper atmosphere, instead of all arriving over one location?
Right now, there's an assault case in Texas waiting on somebody coming forward. A young lesbian parent at a public playground was seriously beaten by a much larger male parent. This case has not been classified as a hate crime by local authorities despite that being clearly in line with Texas law, and those same authorities appear to be quite comfortable with letting this become a cold case. It looks like the case will only come to justice if some non-police person fingers the perp, and does so loudly enough that the local prosecutor can't ignore it.
It's laudable that Texas is taking steps to clear some cold case murders, but it will be up to some of the very same people who implemented this to figure out what their state government should do when a local government clearly doesn't want to help and thinks it has unlimited authority to decide which laws to follow, and judging by this recent assault case, they had better start planning for that problem yesterday.
The thing is, you can't actually know the things you have just claimed. There are hidden 'black box' projects throughout the budget. All of them originate on the Defense/Homeland Security/Spy side of the budget, but many of them are hidden in civilian department programs. There are known and now openly admitted cases, such as the CIA, for just one example, hiding spending in the National Endowment for the Arts. There just aren't any civil 'black box' programs hidden in the military or security budgets in turn. So long as this is the case, all anyone without Top Secret classification and active need to know can be sure of is the real civilian budget is smaller than what they are told, and the real military/security budget is larger, and this goes for waste at the very least proportionately, since the sytem can't possibly be doing more to conceal waste on the civil side than the fanatical near- total concealment of the 'black box' projects. So, either you're just unthinkingly parroting the current Corporate side Republican party line, or you got modded insightful for violating an above Top Secret clearance. I wouldn't recommed being that desperate for mod points, myself.
Meteorite was originally coined as a mineral name, specifically for the high nickle iron content meteors that were effectively an iron ore, like magnetite, hematite or siderite. The people who adapted this word to mean just any rock that fell from space were going against the more precise use. It's like somebody had an at least fairly precise term, such as bird, and people adapted it to include many other things that fly (bats, pterosaurs, maple-seeds and certain types of origami), and then half of them got all Grammer Nazi on people who used the phrase 'dead birds' and the rest on the ones who wanted to lump DC-3s in with those other things, and yet none of the Grammer Nazis could admit they had stolen a term from a bunch of biologists and really mangled its use to where it's not surprising the general public isn't going along 'properly'. Here, the astronomers 'stole' the term from metalurgy and mangled the definition, then within a few generations we have astronomers and fans all upset with the public for not sticking with this misuse.
It's probably quite rare, but I'm a living counter-example. With my daughter driving and me in the front passenger seat, we found ourselves gaining on a bus in one of the middle lanes of a 5 lane interstate section. The bus braked for no particular reason and as my daughter considered dropping back, she realized a pick-up truck and another van, within two car lengths back, in both adjacent lanes, were both still accelerating and were simultaniously signaling they were attempting to merge into the exact spot she currently occupied.
She goosed the accelerator enough that we passed the braking bus at 85 MPH, as it dropped all the way to 30, veered around it all the way onto the gravel outer shoulder, and managed to avoid the accident, as both those other vehicles both rear ended the bus and sideswiped each other simutaniously trying to grab that same lane, before overcorrecting and nudging other vehicles, spinning out into guard rails, and so on, in a beautiful display of the new Olympic sport of syncronized crash test dummying (spoiled only because the car that went to the inside clipped concrete instead of steel and so slowed quicker).
One of the drivers (the bus in front) turned out to be intoxicated and had a lengthy screw up record, but the other two just felt like changing lanes, etc, on a simultanious whim. Both of them swore they had not seen our bright blue big honkin van in the spot before they aimed right for it (nor had they evidently spotted each other across the one lane clear air gap between them). We got to hear it all when we pulled over and came back to render assistance as possible. When the police responded and one of these drivers complained to the Highway Patrol officer for not citing my daughter for speeding, since she had just 'admitted' to it, it caused the officer to say that he was not going to ticket her for being the only skilled driver there and doing the one thing that probably reduced the overall severity of the accident for everybody. He pointed out we would have been at ground zero for all three impacts otherwise and he'd probably have been charging at least one other driver with vehicular homicide.
There's something about the word deres that just doesn't look right. Yes, it makes more sense that way than if you spelled it derez, but I keep wanting to read it as a single syllable word with the second e silent. Is this really how it gets spelled in the Troniverse?
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The audio recording industry has a non-sustainable business model, and they now claim customers are not buying a real product or service but simply acquiring a licence. Sounds like they are about two thirds of the way to being a pyramid scheme. They aren't promising any payment for enrolling others, at least yet. You could argue that pushers offer pyramid schemes, discounting drugs to get new 'members' to enroll as junkies, yet pushing heroin doesn't quite fit the pyramid scheme definition. Maybe what we need to focus on here is that it may take several forms of bad behavior to add up to a pyramid scheme, but having only some percentage of those features does not make something sound business, ethical, or often even legal.
You have an intreguing point in that you've presented the first part of the logical argument that using God as an explanation for how the world was created entails explaining something simpler by resort to something more complicated.
I must ask you, however, why does the Universe supposedly needing a creator lead to an infinte regress such as you're describing in the next sentence? Science was perfectly willing to treat an infinitely old universe as a possibility - that was the 'Steady State' model from the late 1800's to the 1950's. Eventually, the 'Big Bang' won out, but nobody (or nearly nobody) in the scientific community rejected the steady state just because it was illogical to think the Universe might have no edge, go on forever or be infinitely old. Science says something that has been around forever is a perfectly logical possibility. It's a valid hypothesis until some evidence contradicts it. The cosmic microwave background evidence comes along and, in effect, says "sure, but we don't happen to live in that sort of universe, we live in one that has a moment of creation". This is all well and absolutely bloody marvelous, and in my better moments I rejoice to be made of starstuff, but science definitely has not said, "and now we should start rejecting the possibility of any and all things which exist eternally, just because we have reason to think one thing that might have been eternal isn't." We don't think the universe had a start because scientists did some abstract speculating and found an abstract, logical reason to think all things have to have starts, but because specific evidence says the real universe we live in does have a start, and in fact is only about 13 billion years old, etc.
Science doesn't consider "God did it" hypothesi very often, if only for the reason that it looks very unlikely that such a hypothesis can ever be testable and so fall under the domain of science. Repeatability is also a problem, especially if the hypothesis becomes "God did it, and He's probably only going to do it this once". But that's a limitation that comes up under many circumstances besides Theology. Godel showed that there absolutely have to be things outside of any sufficiently powerful formal system that are true but can't be proved by that system.
I can think of at least one completely naturalist hypothesis that cannot actually be disproved by the scientific method (any time we consider the possibility of sufficiently intelligent and advanced aliens - they don't have to be omnescient, just having a perfectly natural brain with 1,000 times the neural connections of a typical human's would mean such a being could not be subjected to the scientific method - that is, they are so smart they could doubtless trick us into concluding whatever they wanted us to conclude). Similarly, most of the scientists who have speculated about parallel universes have been careful to remind readers that they are not a scientific hypothesis, as there's no apparent method possible to test for their existence.
I suspect the parent poster is falling into one of the intellectual traps of Atheism. That is, the tendency to point out that a. Atheists are a tiny minority, and b. Gifted and above intelligences are a tiny minority of about the same size, and then take a logical leap and claim THEREFORE c. Atheists are all of gifted or above intelligence.
In America, where close to 80% of people identify as at least nominallly Christian, the reverse mistake is unlikely to hold much attraction for that majority. After all, if every single Christian was somehow smarter than any Atheist, and all the members of various nonchristian faiths as well, that would still just mean a given individual Christian was proven to be somewhere above the bottom 20%, not much to brag about.
Unfortunately, so long as Atheists are a tiny percentage of the population, there's a temptation to treat Atheism as a shortcut to proving that one is part of the intellectual elite. Just as Christians, in a majority setting such as the USA, may be tempted to think Christianity must be right because so many believe it, or that they should believe just to fit in with the herd, so people attracted to Atheism may have their own emotional, ego driven and often subconsiously held reasons, and some of those reasons come into being just because they are a minority.
There's no evidence that another person exists who has both the encription key and physical access to the drives, but how hard would it usually be for the accused to make that claim? What's stopping the accused from saying 'Bob Jones' had the drive in his possession for a time and must be the person who encripted the drive? At that point, a grand jury or court could end up with an original accused person, with pretty limited evidence against him, and a new suspect, with not much less evidence against him. And, this could go on, with Bob Jones claiming Alice Smith had a chance to access the drive, and so on.
James Dyson is going to be even more pissed. Freeman Dyson probably will be too. Why is the AC trying to piss off all sorts of Dysons?
There's been a hell of a lot of money spent on homeland security since 2001. That same common sense you invoke is what leads most of us to expect some of those literal trillions went into raising emergency capacity above the normal use limits, and it's also common sense to think that a place such as Boston would be fairly high on the list of areas to shore up. (Especially since there were specific ties to Boston in the original event that inspired all that spending).
Finally, several other countries have implemented all sorts of special procedures for cell phone networks in emergencies (The UK, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt all come to mind). These sometimes include shutting down cell services once a bombing occurs, but in some of these cases also include using the local version of E-911 as a priority search mechanism for people possibly trapped in rubble after a building bomb or an earthquake, and various other services that mean the system as a whole needs to stay up and function resilently under increased loads. "Common sense" would suggest that the US should have some of these protocols in place too, especially since we have spent literally 10,000.00 % of what some of these other countries have.
We could, however, grade where the facts aren't in despute. Is the person in an interview what the media describes them as? Is he really the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, or is he just an assistant professor at stamford? Is person X really a psychiatrist or does she really just have a bachelors in psychology? Is the disgraced politician really a (R), a (D), or an (I)? Various studies from sources such as the Columbia School of Journalism have shown some news sources are much less reliable on such points than others. What about the many cases where there's no real disagreement over the facts, where both 'official from the current government' sources and respected private sources, plus public records going back to previous administrations and such all generally agree?
Moreover, people who focus mostly on tech in their day to day lives will generally have better resources to blog, post or whatever on tech specialty sites. If they instead go to a site they don't normally visit much, because a particular event has happened and that event is being covered there, they don't have those same resources. It's perfectly natural for people to want to post where they already know who at least some of the trolls are, how to do bold face or italics, and where they have an existing ID, or other options such as AC.
Some people, particularly ones who are not in or from the US, may have the opinion that catastrophies and other major news that involves the US gets more attention on Slashdot than they deserve, that the barrier to becoming important enough to override the usual "news for nerds" rule is lower. I can understand that, but it's different from expecting that barrier to be made of unobtanium.
The general idea for 'hate crimes' is a person commits a major felony, from a select list of violent felonies, AND the evidence indicates there are additional consequences to many other people AND the perp meant to produce those consequences. That's how these laws are written in the overwhelming majority of cases, that the prosecution has to prove ALL those things. I.e Criminal X committed, for example, Murder One, and Criminal X also indicated there was intention to make many other people suffer, fear for their lives, stop exercising their rights, or otherwise be injured. Whether it's a klansman hanging a black man for having made efforts to get more black people to the polls on election day, or a rapist sending a letter to the local paper warning all women to get back to the home or be presumed whores who deserve what he's dishing out, the person charged has to commit a major felony, and has to make threats or otherwise indicate they are trying to do additional harm to others by it. So why is it a conservative position to be soft on particularly violent murderers and rapists who are trying to add more victims to their talley? How did the conservative movement ever become the appologists for the worst of the worst? How does this idea that liberals are the ones soft on crime persist when self appointed spokesmen for the right are reduced to trying to oppose punishing murderers and rapists for aggravating circumstances? Read the actual laws, not what some nut such as Coulter has said about them, and decide for yourself.
"Fair use" is about the recipient (a.k.a. the user, the buyer, the reseller and such terms), and other second and possibly third parties, holding some limits on the rights holder's ability to enforce copyright under certain circumstances. Saying Google's actions pass "no test of fair use whatsoever" because they might be opposed by the rights holder, or even cause some objectively verifiable problems for the rights holder, is like saying 'innocent until proven guilty' should be abolished because it doesn't help the state get convictions.
If your only goal is that the copyright holder be able to act without checks and balances, you've already answered the question you posed, your way. If a "user's standpoint" doesn't count from a "copyright standpoint", then the only rights left to count are the copyright holder's. You've just redefined fair use into non-existence, and moved it completey out of copyright law. For the rest of us, the user's rights are part of copyright law. People who have no philosophical opposition to copyright in general can still be opposed to taking away the checks and balances given by fair use doctrine. People who really know a bit about the law know that fair use exceptions stem from common law, including, (for the US), unchallenged English common law from pre- constitutional times, and are at least partially codified in Title 17 along with the rest of copyright law. Some of us also know about the fair use clauses in the Berne treaty. That means your "from a copyright standpoint" really means 'from a copyright standpoint, but ignoring all the common law outside that section, and all current US copyright treaties, and any references inside Title 17 I don't like'.
I note too you put 'caching' in double quotes, so you're apparently claiming Google isn't really caching, they're really doing X and calling it caching. Saying the people you disagree with are lieing wihout actually calling it lieing is a basic dirty trick in rhetoric. Just what are you claiming it should be called instead? There are way to many people here on Slashdot that understand such tricks to let it go unchallenged. You did the same trick with "philosophically" as well.
That's sad, because I think you have a valid point about the differences between opt-in and opt-out. Why aren't you sticking to fair methods to try and make that point?
It's a useful hypothetical for training. For example, I just recently saw a bit of some TV show about firefighters, where they were trying to rescue a trapped person in a warehouse accident, and some worker there assured them none of the materials stored there were flammable. They got out an acetylene torch to cut the trapped person free of fallen shelves and such, and found out the hard way the worker was wrong. Zombie scenarios give the designer an excuse to present the trainees with lots of people who won't cooperate (i.e. the parents who have locked zombie Little Suzie in the basement rather than reporting her, hopeing it's just a phase she's going through), or who can't cooperate (the living but injured man who the trainees supposedly should identify as not a zombie even though he is blood splattered and staggering). There are plenty of other ways to craft a tough scenario, for example having some people play-act as though they don't speak any language the trainees try.
I've got mixed feelings about using zombies in training scenarios. First, the usual goal of such training is supposedly best met by 'tough, realistic scenarios', and zombies may add to the tough part but they certainly take away from the realistic part. Second, it involves dehumanising part of the problem set, so it's somewhat like older era military training, where the enemy was called gooks or ckinks or whatever. A realistic scenario might be a post-disaster confrontation with survivors who are from a minority population and that don't trust the civil authorities. Using zombie scenarios in such ways sends a seriously wrong message.
Granted freely, but the majority of those parasites occur in insect hosts. The only exception I can think of is a parasitic isopod that causes a host fish's tongue to atrophy and the isopod resides in that spot as it grows. The fish may just arguably have a psychological change - that is, it may think that what is occasionally touching the roof of its mouth is still just its normal tongue. I don't know offhand how you would prove or disprove that.
As to whether a 'zombie' inducing parasite is far fetched in 'higher' species though, isn't there something seemingly very odd about the concept of a tiny creature with at most a very limited nural system, trying to get evolutionary advantages out of controlling something that is normally controlled by a human grade brain? That's still assuming the host isn't actually damaged much by whatever caused its death, and that the body hasn't taken further damage by post death processes before the parasite can take over. From your post, I'm visualizing a tiny worm-like parasite spread by bite, and weighing, say half an ounce. Then I'm imagining it developing a five ounce brain, just to be able to control basic bodily functions in a case where the host has, say, suffered a broken arm during the zombie apocalypse, so it's smart enough to keep that host body walking without that broken arm flopping around, turning itself into a compound fracture with protruding bone ends, and causing the host to rapidly bleed out.
When you try to come up with a naturalistic mechanism that could allow zombies as they are seen in movies, you end up with a lot of unexplained parts. When you stick to what seems reasonable by real science, you end up with something I wouldn't call a zombie, i.e. a host that has vital signs, appears more as though it was a rabid animal, at worst, rather than undead, and that would still be subject to death from blood loss if you shot it somewhere else besides the head.
Ultimately, claiming that the only way to ensure accountability is the profit motive is claiming that government itself doesn't and can't work. If criminal law can't ensure accountabilty, if elections and recalls can't ensure accountability, then there's no rationale for ANY form of democratic government. So how do you figure the profit motive will work where civil law can't ensure the sanctity of contract? Isn't that an accountability issue? (And you're posting as AC and insulting people to boot - might want to rethink that)
The only way the 'physical CD was never what you were buying' is if you never sold a used CD, never loaned a CD to someone else, and never used that CD in both your home and car players. If you really did that, for every single CD you bought, you are one in a million, or rarer. Now why are you posting on slashdot to advocate that a law which only suits one person in a million is somehow defensable? Why on Earth are you thinking that the other 999,999 people in your situation shouldn't feel like they have lost any rights just because you are the one in a million who never bothered to exercise any of yours? You're a weird statistical anomaly, one in a million. The law isn't about you and only you. You're like the guy who smokes 2 packs a day and still lives to be 90 saying that you don't see the problem with cigarettes and what does that word 'cancer' mean?
You got in quick with a valid point, and completely shot yourself down with unsupported opinions. Why? Why say, in effect, "This is a proveably avoidabble mistake, and now I'm going to throw around vague hints of some totally unspecified complaint list, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing in particular.", and so make everyone ignore the part that is both a defensible point and the only point actually pertenant to the article? Why shoot yourself in the foot like that?
There are some really strange cases of the Placebo effect, for example getting subjects to use Placebo opiates for pain relief for a week or more and then giving them an opiate inhibitor without telling them, and having it turn out to inhibit uptake of the fake opiates. There's some old research that can't be replicated now because of modern ethical guidelines (Which raises the question, is it still science if it becomes irreproducable, not because of a technical limitation but because of increased moral standards?). After reading up on some of these oddities, I've come to the opinion Science does not understand the general Placebo effect nearly as well as individual researchers think they understand how it applies to their special cases. It's fair to say double-blind studies have proven many times that people are claming auditory abilities they simply don't posess, but that really doesn't necessarily mean we can jump from that point to conclude there's some aspect of the Placebo effect involved.
The law is generally based on the idea that multiple parties can be at fault. We frequently try the guy who drove the getaway car for murder when his buddy is the one who actually pulled the trigger on the bank guard. There are whole categories of crime where someone only did whatever they did after the original crime and we call it such things as conspiracy after the fact, yet we still find people guilty. In civil law, it's frequent to see a party declared 55% responsible, or 10%, or many variations on how much fault is shared in multiple ways. Here, you seem to be arguing that suicide is a felony, but there cannot be multiple parties contributing to that particular felony, or having multiple asignments of guilt, or even tortuous responsibility. That's actually an unusual position to hold, and there's a lot of common law against it. There is some law where you could openly add the clause "if the person is an agent of the state" and find matching precedents, but then, that's what most of us are debating, whether putting on a law enforcement hat makes persons immune from personal responsibilty.
Driving a car with a passenger who has committed a robbery recently does not necessarily involve guilt. Lying to a suspect in an official capacity does not necessarily involve guilt. But, a driver can have guilty knowledge that the other persons in the car were committing an armed robbery before they got in, and an investigator can have guilty knowledge that he is not actually sticking to charges in line with the law if unreasonable charges can improve his conviction rate. We shouldn't find some third party responsible every time someone commits suicide, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever find anyone else at fault any time someone commits suicide.
This happens because there are serious cases where it's "only" 90% of the idiots making the rest of the team look bad. For example, when President Obama took office, death threats and such passed to the secret service took literally a tenfold jump over the last few presidents cases. 100,000+ death threats using the N word, in the first month alone, convinced me there are still a lot of racists out there. So when I hear somebody on the Tea-party style right claim they haven't noticed a lot of racism at meetings, or any racist incidents at all, or similar statements, I just assume they are either incredibly clueless or deliberately lying. There's just too much for it to go unnoticed by anyone of normal capabilities. I'll freely admit there are at least occasional crazies and jerks on my side in most arguments, but I still see a difference when the amount on any side sometimes becomes a whole lot more than occasional.
There's an old Astounding Science Fiction article by John W. Campbell junior that talks about "Gestalt Logic". His argument was you don't judge that a man is a criminal just because his means of support isn't obvious, or because he drives a flashy car and wears flashy clothes, or because somebody else he knows is a criminal. But what should you do when a whole lot of those circumstances line up? If the person has no obvious means of support, seems to be in areas where crimes were committed at those times on a regular basis, knows and associates with dozens of other people who have criminal records, and so on, how much of that is enough that it's fair for you, as a private individual, to assume the person really is a criminal, even if they've never been actually convicted of anything?
I suspect we all set individual thresholds. Equally, I doubt most of us are consistent about just where we set them.
I don't really see why you got a "redundant" mod, but I'm going to risk one by spelling some things out which you left unsaid. Elon's aiming for the long term, and probably counts a even permanent colony on Mars as only intermediate term. He has little interest in parachute return because eventually, he wants systems that can take off and return to planets such as Mars where chutes have little to work with. Mars also having lower gravity, it would be great if we already had a way to get there and could develop a reusable vehicle suitable for Martian use in situ, but guess what? We don't currently have a Martian colony!!!!!
Testing here on Earth is the only alternative we have, and anyone talking about the cost and potential uses (as at least half a dozen posters have done), should realize that they are comparing the wrong alternatives - it's not Earth with Fueled return VS Earth with Parachute return, it's (over)design for testing some parts on Earth VS do all the construction on Mars, with Mars first developed enough to provide the infrastructure and Earth developed enough to both put that infrastructure there and provide an alternative method of return from Mars while the bugs are worked out of the reusables.
The real question is, why are the people who have at least figured out that it will cost more than the bank bailouts to put a permanent colony on Mars with current tech being modded down for it, instead of the people posing false equvalencies that show they don't even get that?
Pile of rubble asteroids are effectively self solving, as the pebbles make great fuel for a solar panel powered mass driver, which only has to chuck pellets at a rather modest velocity so single firings don't accelerate the remaining masses fast enough to cause them to lose their tenuous gravitational grip on each other (and even that may not be a necessary constraint, see below). Transferring the mass driver's acquired momentum to the gravels, without it digging itself in, is an exercise I leave for the reader (hint: if broad footpads don't seem sufficient, lets look at epoxying the masses together, surrounding them in a fine net, or letting them drift apart and slowly recongregate between firings).
Do we really need to keep a rubbleroid together? Or is it actually enough to spread it out so much of its bulk arrives over a period of several minutes, drawing an 8 Km line across Earth's upper atmosphere, instead of all arriving over one location?
Right now, there's an assault case in Texas waiting on somebody coming forward. A young lesbian parent at a public playground was seriously beaten by a much larger male parent. This case has not been classified as a hate crime by local authorities despite that being clearly in line with Texas law, and those same authorities appear to be quite comfortable with letting this become a cold case. It looks like the case will only come to justice if some non-police person fingers the perp, and does so loudly enough that the local prosecutor can't ignore it.
It's laudable that Texas is taking steps to clear some cold case murders, but it will be up to some of the very same people who implemented this to figure out what their state government should do when a local government clearly doesn't want to help and thinks it has unlimited authority to decide which laws to follow, and judging by this recent assault case, they had better start planning for that problem yesterday.
The thing is, you can't actually know the things you have just claimed. There are hidden 'black box' projects throughout the budget. All of them originate on the Defense/Homeland Security/Spy side of the budget, but many of them are hidden in civilian department programs. There are known and now openly admitted cases, such as the CIA, for just one example, hiding spending in the National Endowment for the Arts. There just aren't any civil 'black box' programs hidden in the military or security budgets in turn. So long as this is the case, all anyone without Top Secret classification and active need to know can be sure of is the real civilian budget is smaller than what they are told, and the real military/security budget is larger, and this goes for waste at the very least proportionately, since the sytem can't possibly be doing more to conceal waste on the civil side than the fanatical near- total concealment of the 'black box' projects. So, either you're just unthinkingly parroting the current Corporate side Republican party line, or you got modded insightful for violating an above Top Secret clearance. I wouldn't recommed being that desperate for mod points, myself.
Meteorite was originally coined as a mineral name, specifically for the high nickle iron content meteors that were effectively an iron ore, like magnetite, hematite or siderite. The people who adapted this word to mean just any rock that fell from space were going against the more precise use. It's like somebody had an at least fairly precise term, such as bird, and people adapted it to include many other things that fly (bats, pterosaurs, maple-seeds and certain types of origami), and then half of them got all Grammer Nazi on people who used the phrase 'dead birds' and the rest on the ones who wanted to lump DC-3s in with those other things, and yet none of the Grammer Nazis could admit they had stolen a term from a bunch of biologists and really mangled its use to where it's not surprising the general public isn't going along 'properly'. Here, the astronomers 'stole' the term from metalurgy and mangled the definition, then within a few generations we have astronomers and fans all upset with the public for not sticking with this misuse.
It's probably quite rare, but I'm a living counter-example. With my daughter driving and me in the front passenger seat, we found ourselves gaining on a bus in one of the middle lanes of a 5 lane interstate section. The bus braked for no particular reason and as my daughter considered dropping back, she realized a pick-up truck and another van, within two car lengths back, in both adjacent lanes, were both still accelerating and were simultaniously signaling they were attempting to merge into the exact spot she currently occupied.
She goosed the accelerator enough that we passed the braking bus at 85 MPH, as it dropped all the way to 30, veered around it all the way onto the gravel outer shoulder, and managed to avoid the accident, as both those other vehicles both rear ended the bus and sideswiped each other simutaniously trying to grab that same lane, before overcorrecting and nudging other vehicles, spinning out into guard rails, and so on, in a beautiful display of the new Olympic sport of syncronized crash test dummying (spoiled only because the car that went to the inside clipped concrete instead of steel and so slowed quicker).
One of the drivers (the bus in front) turned out to be intoxicated and had a lengthy screw up record, but the other two just felt like changing lanes, etc, on a simultanious whim. Both of them swore they had not seen our bright blue big honkin van in the spot before they aimed right for it (nor had they evidently spotted each other across the one lane clear air gap between them). We got to hear it all when we pulled over and came back to render assistance as possible. When the police responded and one of these drivers complained to the Highway Patrol officer for not citing my daughter for speeding, since she had just 'admitted' to it, it caused the officer to say that he was not going to ticket her for being the only skilled driver there and doing the one thing that probably reduced the overall severity of the accident for everybody. He pointed out we would have been at ground zero for all three impacts otherwise and he'd probably have been charging at least one other driver with vehicular homicide.
There's something about the word deres that just doesn't look right. Yes, it makes more sense that way than if you spelled it derez, but I keep wanting to read it as a single syllable word with the second e silent. Is this really how it gets spelled in the Troniverse?