As you point out, there should be no real need to debate whether it's a copy.
There are some more interesting questions, for example: Is a copy that exists in a very temporary fashion automatically trivial and so not worth the court's time? Are temporary copies of this particular type trivial?
Is a copy that can't be directly read/viewed/listened to or otherwise be used by a human, and is only needed as an intermediate step in getting to a version the human can do something with, a separate copyright law violation? Is it an agrievating circumstance? Should such additional copies have any effect on penalties for illegal copying in general?
Can a EULA make a normally trivial act something worthy of the court's attention. Can a EULA elevate the legal status of these internal copies to where the court must consider what it might otherwise declare trivial?
How does the willfulness test apply to these copies? Can a EULA define copies in RAM in such a way as to control the willfulness test? (I.e. "by receiving this EULA, customer agrees that they fully understand how a computer uses cache memory and RAM and how their OS controls these devices, and so had willful intent where any copies of the program are placed into cache or RAM.").
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo
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Microsoft's Lost Decade
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If understanding means seeing a deep set of relationships and being able to prioritise them, more than just having a lot of information, I'd have to give the nod to Bill for this one example:
When Bill gates was building his home, with the 10 car garage, and the library that displays DaVinci's codex, and all those other neat features, Martha Stewart actually got a look at some of it, and commented that Bill was running all the home networking through seriously hardened wiring channels that made it very hard to reroute as his needs changed. She mentioned how the guy ought to have heard about wireless networking by then.
Skip forward a few years, and Martha Stewart has been busted in a case where e-mail evidence was a major factor. Bill Gates, however, has not, and there's no sign that he had corporate espionage problems with his home set up either. I'd submit that Bill thought about it a bit, and decided that at least some of his competitors, maybe the DoJ or SEC, and maybe some foreign governments would think paying literally millions to crack his communications might still be cost effective, and wireless wasn't up to that sort of pressure.
Is Gates a technology lover? Probably not much of one. His admiration for a sweet hack may be low or nil. But understanding doesn't always imply admiration or love.
There have been some interesting major shifts in what gets made into horror movies, (and books, radio, or TV horror)
For one, for about 20 years just before the stage production of Dracula took off, Mummies were really big, with dozens of stories in horror magazines and such each year. Vampires were practically unknown. A lot of things Stoker originated just sort of collectively jumped into people's minds after that - Vampires took on distinctive fictional features such as not crossing running water, or turning into mists or bats, for the first time. Within a decade, just about anyone you polled had heard of them, and most thought that Stoker's additions to the legends were centuries old parts of the original legends instead.
Zombies did something similar. There were a few films with voodoo style zombies, animated by a Hougan (usually called a witch doctor). There were lots of references to New orleans style Voodoo (Fewer to Haiti or African roots of vodou), and a whole lot of superficial references to Vodou beliefs and practices. If one of those zombies killed somebody, it probably slowly shambled over to the victim as a witch doctor directed it, and crushed or strangled the victim. Night of the Living Dead rebuilt the zombie, giving them an appetite, which soon became focused on brains. Now, I suspect if you surveyed a lot of people, most of them know of the Zombies - Brains connection, but most of those think it's something from original myths and legends, not George Romero.
Alien Invaders and Atomic Mutants caught on in the 50's, but there was a more general common trend, to horror that didn't involve the supernatural. Hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of or read H. P. Lovecraft seem to have found themselves agreeing with his arguments from 20 years before about horror without religious overtones.
When people suddenly shift positions to a new focus, in vast numbers, and they don't know where the new idea comes from and instead talk as though the idea has always been around, that's why psychologists think there are deeper meanings. A huge shift in what is sometimes called the zeitgist happens, AND many people in the middle of the shift claim things haven't changed, attribute new ideas to fictitious or ancient sources, and often, deny vehemently that they themselves have changed their opinions in the slightest. A hundred million adult people read a series of books about a boy wizard written for young readers, when five years before they would have had no interest in such things and the idea of such a series making the author the richest author ever would have sounded totally absurd to them.
If there's no deeper meaning behind such shifts, maybe there's also no 'deeper meaning' behind election landslides, stock market crashes, or political witch hunt movements either. Maybe such things just happen, with no underlying causes. That, if you really follow the train of thought to its logical end, is scarier than real zombies.
Thanks, now I wont be able to get the image out of my head all day of Tauren jumping out of black helicopters onto this guy's lawn, as their Goblin pilot screams "For the Horde!".
The counter argument is, if it looks and sounds real enough, it will be treated as real by deep levels of your brain, levels which can drive you subconsiously, and all the claims by the verbal and logical centers that it isn't real won't stop you from responding as though it is on some level, often a level where you have no consious control and so actually more dangerous.
They will point out how you can literally jump out of your chair when a fictitious alien demonoid drops on your character from a dark recess, even though you know you are not on Phobos, you don't believe in supernatural posession, supernatural possession that makes people into huge pink dog-demons and such is really kinda silly sounding, real life horror doesn't have a soundtrack, and you survived everything that happened to your space marine in multiple prequels. They will point out that knowing all those things doesn't stop your pulse from racing, your mouth from getting dry, or your heart from jumping in your chest.
This is, of course ridiculous. If it were true, people would be able to have sexual responses to videos of prospective partners engaging in various sexual acts. So long as people can't get aroused just by looking at high definition video footage of attractive other people indicating a willingness to have sex with any and all viewers, there's no reason to worry about fictive violence having any negative effects what-so-ever. Why, there would be pictures of naked people on millions of hard drives if it wasn't that that little voice telling you it's not really happening to you for real, personally, didn't dampen all sexual response for everybody but a few known highly delusional psychopaths.
Next, some of you will be claiming advertizing sells products. No, I take that back, nobody here would believe anything that absurd.
There's some weird evidence that placebos don't do what 'everyone' thinks they do.* It's not conclusive, but maybe we literally don't have a method to test your suspicion.
* Short form, opiate blocking drugs also block placebos if these are given as pain relievers, and maybe don't block them if they are given for other reasons.
So, maybe placebos don't work better on some people than others. Worse, maybe what you've said looks like one of those obvious things where some silly researchers deserve an ignoble prize for doing trivial research to confirm what everybody knows, only they came up with a real puzzler instead. Based on the research, it could be impossible to design an experiment that really disproves the claim "placebos have psychological effects", yet it could be untrue. It's becoming a sort of Godel's paradox in pharmacology.
I'm sure you didn't intend to be serious, but I'm glad you got modded interesting instead of funny.
There are all sorts of things that have been theoretically known of for quite some time. Still, if you come up with a new, reliable engineering application with major economic consequences, for the Edison or Peltier effects, Superconductivity, Raleigh scattering, or Frame Dragging, that's quite an accomplishment. Hell, if someone finds a genuinely new application for Archimedes model of a waterscrew as an inclined plane wrapped around a cylender, or Thag's heat from rubbing two sticks together theorem, it's still worth respect.
I've been beating this drum over "Correlation does not equal Causation" and the related form used here, but damnit, unlike a dead horse, the drum needs some more beating.
Take two events or implications that seem to be highly correlated. If one doesn't cause the other, certain things will happen. For one, continuing to check correlation over a longer timeframe or in other circumstances will build up enough data to stop showing it (In which case you've just proved the original correlation was a statistical fluke).
(If you're not sure lack of Iodine in the soil causes Goiter just because it seems to work that way in Kansas, look at the incidence of Goiter in other inland regions vs seashores, or ship some Iodized salt to Kansas and see if the incidence goes down.).
Another thing may happen - somebody will propose at least one specific mechanism to explain the correlation, i.e. a common cause. There will be ways to check that mechanism too, i.e. logic or scientific experiment.
So what has anyone done by invoking the phrase "Correlation does not imply Causation"? Causation is frequently the best fit for the existing data. The claim amounts to, "If we gather more data, that could change.". Unless you can propose how to gather that data, the claim in itself means nothing. Or perhaps you mean "There could be a common cofactor.". Unless you can propose what that cofactor could possibly be, and how to test it, and usually how to decide among multiple competing cofactors, it still means nothing.
If it's possible to take some more measurements, by all means take them. But if there's negative consequences to being wrong, negative consequences to delaying, and you have some data, there's a point where you have to go with what you already have.
I understand the problem with taxing revenues or, for that matter, gross profits. Technically, Washington State's tax is on Gross Income, which can be slightly different from the usual legal definition of revenues, but probably isn't in Microsoft's case. Most of MS's income would fall under either Manufacture or Wholesaling, with a tax rate of .00484 in either case.
Microsoft certainly also could get the High Technology credit against this base, and while I won't bother to look up enough of their public records to be sure, I would say, offhand, they could probably qualify for some of the community empowerment credits and related in a way that would be quite advantageous. I'm not one of Microsoft's accountants, and I wouldn't venture to guess whether their research costs would make a significant dent in that total rate or not - The total rate is still trivial, But I agree, the principle of taxing gross instead of an honestly figured net is neither moral, nor pragmatically the most functional method.
But the whole argument against double taxation of corporations is itself a fallacy. A "C" corporation exists under law as a separate person in itself. It gets taxed once. In exchange, it gets benefits such as legal person-hood, and perhaps more significantly, shareholder's limited liability. Any stockholders get taxed on their income, not the corporation's. Those stockholders could vote to convert the "C" corp to one or more Partnerships, "S" corporations or other pass-throughs. While there are some limits on this, it's generally doable even for a company the size of Microsoft any time they sufficiently don't like the "burden of double taxation".
With its vast number of stockholders, Microsoft would have to restructure as multiple "S" corps and particularly as a structure of parellel holding companies and other fairly complex systems, and they would have to do some special shuffling of options to move foreign investors out of some sub-corps, but any divisions they split off this way could exist without taxation, and some of their divisions are small enough the conversion becomes rather simple, yet MS has no interest in avoiding this 'double taxation' even in those cases.
That's certainly understandable, both because a voluntary split up still feels just like being busted up under anti-trust to many investors, and because the independent sub-corps would become direct competitors in some cases, but if the taxes involved really hurt the way some corporations claim, they'd be willing to pay such prices.
The chief reason not to is the owners of "S"'s and other pass through entities can't take an active role in managing the company without also having full liability for what their company does.
Incidentally, Washington state fully recognises the usual federal tax entities such as Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships. It allows all major non-C structures - Limited Partnerships, Limited Liability Partnerships, Limited Liability Corporations. And it allows for the use of the Massachusetts Trust structure.
There are a lot of industries moving to rental related models. So many people make monthly payments for rent, utilities, cable TV, Internet access, land-line and cell phones, online games, and the list goes on.
The law (in the US and Britain at least), generally recognises more rights for an actual owner than a renter. A man's home is only his castle if he owns it. Even in places where the landlord can't simply walk in unannounced, the law tends to be strongly biased in favor of the actual property owner over the renter. Plus, it's far from everywhere that tenants have any written rights under law.
Having dealt with rental agreements for serious property a few times suggests to me that even a trivial sort of rental style agreement tends to be written to favor the other guy, and just making a habit of avoiding as many as possible is a sensible precaution.
I'm not saying I would never use Steam or play WoW, but I have a little thing called right of first sale protecting me if I want to sell my old copy of Diablo 2 to someone. Maybe that won't ever really matter, but it seems like saying "That's OK, I'll never want that legal right anyway." is something to think about carefully. And the default should be "I want to keep all my rights, not just the ones I think I'll need.".
I see what you're saying, but I think it's very important to correct your parenthetical clause. If you really lose the value of a game when you sell it, then if you just toss it in the trash instead, you would have somehow lost more than 100% of the value. Even by your definition of lose, selling something used at less than what you paid for it still means at least you didn't lose as much. More, the total value you got out of owning something was really the sum of what you sold it for and the utility value it gave you while you owned it, and presumably, that was a good deal on average or the price of new games would drop.
If the decision to sell was what economists call a rational market transaction on your side, then you looked at how much value you would get out of keeping the game and playing it some more, and sold it because you decided what the used game store offered was more than that remaining play value. That's all you are comparing, not the value you once paid. Thinking the full original value somehow needs to be taken into account again, is like thinking you have lost something because a game you bought the day it came out shows up at discount six months later at Wally World, and so becomes a game which is no longer new and hot and so people wouldn't pay as much for a brand new copy still in the shrink-wrap any more. It's irrelevant to your real situation. It doesn't change what you have gained or lost.
Sorry to be a bit strident about this, but what you are claiming falls in the general class of 'broken window' models of economics. Those are economic fallacies which collectively do an incredible lot of harm, and getting people thinking about when they are falling for one is probably all to the good.
'Equally rewarding' is a mistaken premise. People may derive internal brain rewards from learning things with no immediate use, but they also get negative feedback when they don't know things that are useful, AND people have some ability (also learned) to forsee negative consequences, so they experience a foreshadowing of 'karma' or alarm at even considering the future at the same time as the initial reward. Rare is the person who puts off doing something yet never blames themselves for procrastination, and rare indeed is the person who finds unearned rewards as sweet as earned ones.
The equally rewarded claim ignores the difference between somebody who has honestly earned a reward, and somebody who gets the same reward but has a fear they will eventually be found out not to deserve it, with unpleasant to dreadful consequences. It assumes people can't really time bind enough to project getting caught at lies. It describes, in other words, immature people's behavior as typical of mature adults.
If you really, honestly think knowing how our political system works is as nonsensical, stupid, and unrewarding as celebrity gossip, then that word, immature, applies to you. I don't blame you if you're angry at my saying that, just so you read on. The actions of that system can be nonsensical or stupid, but your knowing more about how the system works, or doesn't, is both sensible and smart for you. You may not need many parts of it, but there are bound to be important lessons for you in the sphere of politics. Dealing with idiots does not make you an idiot - but not dealing with idiots because you're afraid some of it will rub off on you, may. You can escape from being an idiot - In fact you probably have most of the time. I don't think any of us can claim to have escaped it all the time, I know I haven't.
But when it comes to politics, there are parts of it where you can master a subject that helps you protect yourself from idiots, so you don't need to escape from them, you can make them leave you alone. There's an escape from idiocy here or there in the political system, but only in re. each one of us, not from idiocy's being loose in the world. How big an escape matters to you?
The early adopters would pay a lot more, but their obsolete systems would be built like bricks and come with a bunch of quirky features that would be dropped from latter tech generations because they didn't appeal to a broad enough section of the market. (See Walter John Williams novel "Hardwired", where early artificial retina designs came with Sepia-tone and Film Noir menu items, but only a few people liked them).
1. Quantum is too often a buzzword used on a par with 'synergizing syncronicities to leverage deflector dish rerouting'.
2. Quantum bits are now a real concept, and this use conflicts with that.
Now if 'sexconker' had said something along the lines of: Since bits are physically base 2, and many operations in a machine are physically faster or more functional if done on integral exponents of 2 numbers of bits, measuring bits in base 2 is more meaningful...
I might have agreed.
There are other operations besides cryptography where powers of 2 figure into it. For just two examples: paging memory, sectoring drives (i.e. look at LBA, if anyone still has hard drives small enough that addressing is a choice. Whether fdisk (or similar) gave you certain partitioning options (and whether the drive actually worked afterwards) were base 2 dependent issues). Back when people still used Windows 98, it had a system to organise frequently loaded programs into '4 K' blocks, and it used that size even if the hard drive sectors were '16 K' or '32 K'. All those numbers were actually base 2, regardless of how Microsoft reported them on screen. If you're talking software, saying it's not fundamental is fair enough, but when you have to talk hardware, the special cases where it matters multiply rapidly.
The debate reminds me of comparing American and French unemployment figures. Personally, I think people who have been out of work for a long time and given up reporting their status to the government should still be counted as best we can estimate them. Some formulas for reporting unemployment simply look better than others, or more basic to what we are measuring.
There are some complex forms of unemployment measurement, such as estimating numbers of 'underemployed' people, or people who want a job with health insurance and cant move up into one, but those seem more ambiguous and of less general use. That's also how I see measuring memory in base 10.
Right now, one of the political parties in my country has taken the position that we can spend literally trillions of dollars on wars on multiple fronts, tens of billions more on a war against drugs, more on keeping a tremendous fraction of its population in prison, AND THAT DOING THIS WHILE REDUCING THE SIZE OF GOVERNMENT TO A TRIVIAL FRACTION IS POSSIBLE.
The other major party just might be addressing these problems a little, and they generally don't advocate actually reducing the government to a tiny fraction of what's needed, but they agree with the first party that they can keep up these programs WHILE EVENTUALLY AVOIDING ANY MORE DEFICIT SPENDING.
Neither is a sane, healthy position, even though one is obviously a full blown delusional psychosis and the other might marginally qualify as just a case of being neurotic enough to only function at a modest percentage of potential, if things stay routine and the stress doesn't get too bad.
It's called cognitive dissonance. A news channel simultaneously says they're the most popular source in the world, AND their viewers are a small, persecuted minority. Businesses say they want free markets but need special government protections for their business models.
That's why I dislike it when people say "in the real world" about these things. If that much of the real world really believes such self contradictory ideas, that doesn't somehow magically make them sustainable. It just means 'the real world' is headed for chaos.
It doesn't sound like the 250 lb. trike could actually make nearly the whole journey, but it could photograph some stretches adjacent to where the trail crosses roads or skirts towns, at least. There are even a few places in the Smoky Mountains national park that come to mind, where the AT's grades are light and the trail moderately broad, so the cam could photograph some of trail markers, places where other Smokies trails cross, join or split, and some of the hiking shelters, for a few practical uses in helping AT hikers plan.
Then maybe in a few years, there will be a lighter, more maneuverable system to do more. Eventually, there could be trail photos for all the National Parks, at least for the most major routes.
It's very hard not to anthropomorphize natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins, who is about the last person in the world who would attribute evolution to some sort of intelligence, has pointed out many times how phenomenally hard it is to talk about the subject without constantly imputing goals and desires to the process.
Stross is a professional author of note. Not as many people talk about print SF as TV, but the people who are talking about him are the people who give awards, such as the Hugo he got for Glasshouse. They're people such as Gardner Dozois (who edits Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), who said "Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow.". Publisher's Weekly called Stross "One of the hottest short story writers in the field" in reviewing his first novel, and critically lauded every novel since. That's a tip of the iceberg description of who's talking about Stross, as the man has literally over a hundred favorable reviews from pro sources even at casual inspection. John Carmack (ID games), and Bruce Schneier (who you damned well ought to have heard of on Slashdot), read Stross with praise. His books get reviewed outside the normal SF field boundaries, for example by Popular Science and Scientific American.
So if Stross doesn't have enough chops to talk about Trek, I seriously doubt if you have enough to talk about Stross, by your own argument. If it's fair to demand he have a presence in TV and not just books, then it's equally fair to demand you have at least one professionally published SF work, or STFU.
Trek communicators AREN'T cell phones. Look, did you see the Enterprise build funky metal towers all over a strange planet before they let anybody beam down? Does Spock ever have to go outside to get four bars?
What may be because of Trek is the shape. Just arguably, the flip open look for most cell-phones happened to become more popular because of the resemblance to Trek technology. Even there, it's not a universal part of the design.
When they get the salt shakers working like in original Star Trek, let me know.
I really think Star Trek took it much, much farther than most shows.
On Babylon Five, it got convenient to have artificial gravity, but they did show spin based pseudo-gravity quite a bit, the station itself always ran on it, and they had an explanation of why the advanced aliens shared the AG tech big enough for the change over to make sense when Sheridan's bunch started flying Whitestars.
On original series Star Trek, there's at least Four different ways to travel in time! In only three seasons! Before you get to the episodes where everyone is dressed like a Nazi, an Armageddon survivor, or a Gangster! Two of those ways are invented by cultures which evidently couldn't leave their home planets yet!
Take all your consumer electronics to the movies once a year. Set them on the couch, give them a bowl of popcorn buttered with WD40, and let them watch "The Brave Little Toaster". (Popcorn is optional).
Every power supply which I've found failed was visibly broken once you opened it up, and it was always the capacitors. No Exceptions - capacitors had sprayed gunk all over, their Aluminium cans had popped off the bases, etc. Typical electrolytic fluid is white-ish, but once it bakes dry will scorch, and so gradually turn reddish brown. Many capacitors have grooves scored into the tops which form sort of impromptu blow out panels, and often you will see them bulging, with traces of fluid escaping from these grooves where they are actually splitting open, or scorched fluid forming a red-brown powdery residue outlining them. The grooves are usually in either an X (or Plus) or a sort of K shape. The PSUs are often still working (somewhat) at that point, and often, the PSU may be putting out nominally correct voltages when cool but deviating when it heats up. I had one client's PC that made a loud bang twice over a period of about a week, but the PC didn't really start acting funny until the third bang. Opening the PSU revealed three small caps that had blown completely off the board. It had probably kept running with no obvious symptoms through the first two.
Of course, only a trained pro with good tools should ever examine the inside of a power supply while live. But, if you are willing to unplug one and take it out of the PC and let it sit overnight, just to make sure the larger capacitors have fully drained, I recommend examining them. Yes, that voids the warranty if you aren't a pro, but if you were going to junk it and buy a new one anyway, so what? But before you open one, read this:
DON"T EVER OPEN A PLUGGED IN POWER SUPPLY. IF THIS DOESN"T APPLY TO YOU YOU ALREADY HAVE AN ELECTRICIANS LICENCE, A EE DEGREE, OR SIMILAR. DON"T OPEN A POWER SUPPLY UNLESS YOU KNOW THE LARGE CAPACITORS INSIDE ARE DISCHARGED - THEY CAN MAKE YOUR ARM MUSCLES CONTRACT HARD ENOUGH TO BREAK YOUR BONES. GIVE THEM AT LEAST AN HOUR TO RUN DOWN, THEN USE AN INSULATED TOOL TO CROSS THE PLUG PRONGS BEFORE YOU OPEN THE CASE.
Split caps or scorched ones will confirm you are right in your guess that it's the PSU. While you're at it, if you think the problem is the motherboard, check for capacitor damage there too, as it's not all that uncommon for that to be why a mainboard fails. Cheap electrolytics are probably responsible for more than half of all consumer electronics failures, they are by far the most likely source of intermittent failures, ones that come and go with temperature, or glitches that only partly disable something, and they are detectable.
I'm not saying Steam is an example, but why can't a voluntary service be exploitative? People volunteer to do business with a high speed ISP, for example, but that ISP may be the only provider in the area, and lobby for laws to keep municipalities from establishing a competing service, so as to keep the price up, while also getting subsidies from the federal government. You volunteer to do buisiness directly with the company, but you also have financial involvement with them you didn't volunteer for - surely there can be exploitation there even by libertarian argument?
Many of us believe a company can also exploit a relationship just as an individual can, even without government coercion being involved. Individual exploitation can take many forms. People get married voluntarily (at least in most parts of the world), but what if one person is a lazy bum who has broken many promises made, and constantly reminds the other person that their religion forbids divorce except for adultery? Sure the other person could change their religion (again in many parts of the world), or ignore what the preacher says. But if they don't, is it wrong to say "Girlfriend, that lazy bum is just exploiting you - tell him to get a job and pay his share of the rent or get out!".
Personally, I can think of many things a company can do that are exploitative. Employment is a voluntary relationship, but when a company asks its employees to do additional unpaid labor to keep their jobs, that's exploitation. Customer is a voluntary relationship, but what if the business sells rebranded knockoffs as the real thing?
Slashdot Mirror
As you point out, there should be no real need to debate whether it's a copy.
There are some more interesting questions, for example:
Is a copy that exists in a very temporary fashion automatically trivial and so not worth the court's time? Are temporary copies of this particular type trivial?
Is a copy that can't be directly read/viewed/listened to or otherwise be used by a human, and is only needed as an intermediate step in getting to a version the human can do something with, a separate copyright law violation? Is it an agrievating circumstance? Should such additional copies have any effect on penalties for illegal copying in general?
Can a EULA make a normally trivial act something worthy of the court's attention. Can a EULA elevate the legal status of these internal copies to where the court must consider what it might otherwise declare trivial?
How does the willfulness test apply to these copies? Can a EULA define copies in RAM in such a way as to control the willfulness test? (I.e. "by receiving this EULA, customer agrees that they fully understand how a computer uses cache memory and RAM and how their OS controls these devices, and so had willful intent where any copies of the program are placed into cache or RAM.").
If understanding means seeing a deep set of relationships and being able to prioritise them, more than just having a lot of information, I'd have to give the nod to Bill for this one example:
When Bill gates was building his home, with the 10 car garage, and the library that displays DaVinci's codex, and all those other neat features, Martha Stewart actually got a look at some of it, and commented that Bill was running all the home networking through seriously hardened wiring channels that made it very hard to reroute as his needs changed. She mentioned how the guy ought to have heard about wireless networking by then.
Skip forward a few years, and Martha Stewart has been busted in a case where e-mail evidence was a major factor. Bill Gates, however, has not, and there's no sign that he had corporate espionage problems with his home set up either. I'd submit that Bill thought about it a bit, and decided that at least some of his competitors, maybe the DoJ or SEC, and maybe some foreign governments would think paying literally millions to crack his communications might still be cost effective, and wireless wasn't up to that sort of pressure.
Is Gates a technology lover? Probably not much of one. His admiration for a sweet hack may be low or nil. But understanding doesn't always imply admiration or love.
There have been some interesting major shifts in what gets made into horror movies, (and books, radio, or TV horror)
For one, for about 20 years just before the stage production of Dracula took off, Mummies were really big, with dozens of stories in horror magazines and such each year. Vampires were practically unknown. A lot of things Stoker originated just sort of collectively jumped into people's minds after that - Vampires took on distinctive fictional features such as not crossing running water, or turning into mists or bats, for the first time. Within a decade, just about anyone you polled had heard of them, and most thought that Stoker's additions to the legends were centuries old parts of the original legends instead.
Zombies did something similar. There were a few films with voodoo style zombies, animated by a Hougan (usually called a witch doctor). There were lots of references to New orleans style Voodoo (Fewer to Haiti or African roots of vodou), and a whole lot of superficial references to Vodou beliefs and practices. If one of those zombies killed somebody, it probably slowly shambled over to the victim as a witch doctor directed it, and crushed or strangled the victim. Night of the Living Dead rebuilt the zombie, giving them an appetite, which soon became focused on brains. Now, I suspect if you surveyed a lot of people, most of them know of the Zombies - Brains connection, but most of those think it's something from original myths and legends, not George Romero.
Alien Invaders and Atomic Mutants caught on in the 50's, but there was a more general common trend, to horror that didn't involve the supernatural. Hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of or read H. P. Lovecraft seem to have found themselves agreeing with his arguments from 20 years before about horror without religious overtones.
When people suddenly shift positions to a new focus, in vast numbers, and they don't know where the new idea comes from and instead talk as though the idea has always been around, that's why psychologists think there are deeper meanings. A huge shift in what is sometimes called the zeitgist happens, AND many people in the middle of the shift claim things haven't changed, attribute new ideas to fictitious or ancient sources, and often, deny vehemently that they themselves have changed their opinions in the slightest. A hundred million adult people read a series of books about a boy wizard written for young readers, when five years before they would have had no interest in such things and the idea of such a series making the author the richest author ever would have sounded totally absurd to them.
If there's no deeper meaning behind such shifts, maybe there's also no 'deeper meaning' behind election landslides, stock market crashes, or political witch hunt movements either. Maybe such things just happen, with no underlying causes. That, if you really follow the train of thought to its logical end, is scarier than real zombies.
We don't allow real Irony here, this is Slashdot.
Thanks, now I wont be able to get the image out of my head all day of Tauren jumping out of black helicopters onto this guy's lawn, as their Goblin pilot screams "For the Horde!".
The counter argument is, if it looks and sounds real enough, it will be treated as real by deep levels of your brain, levels which can drive you subconsiously, and all the claims by the verbal and logical centers that it isn't real won't stop you from responding as though it is on some level, often a level where you have no consious control and so actually more dangerous.
They will point out how you can literally jump out of your chair when a fictitious alien demonoid drops on your character from a dark recess, even though you know you are not on Phobos, you don't believe in supernatural posession, supernatural possession that makes people into huge pink dog-demons and such is really kinda silly sounding, real life horror doesn't have a soundtrack, and you survived everything that happened to your space marine in multiple prequels. They will point out that knowing all those things doesn't stop your pulse from racing, your mouth from getting dry, or your heart from jumping in your chest.
This is, of course ridiculous. If it were true, people would be able to have sexual responses to videos of prospective partners engaging in various sexual acts. So long as people can't get aroused just by looking at high definition video footage of attractive other people indicating a willingness to have sex with any and all viewers, there's no reason to worry about fictive violence having any negative effects what-so-ever. Why, there would be pictures of naked people on millions of hard drives if it wasn't that that little voice telling you it's not really happening to you for real, personally, didn't dampen all sexual response for everybody but a few known highly delusional psychopaths.
Next, some of you will be claiming advertizing sells products. No, I take that back, nobody here would believe anything that absurd.
There's some weird evidence that placebos don't do what 'everyone' thinks they do.* It's not conclusive, but maybe we literally don't have a method to test your suspicion.
* Short form, opiate blocking drugs also block placebos if these are given as pain relievers, and maybe don't block them if they are given for other reasons.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T0K-3W0NBP2-1C&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1067752221&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=da2d59bff82ca9795853596a37df11bb
So, maybe placebos don't work better on some people than others. Worse, maybe what you've said looks like one of those obvious things where some silly researchers deserve an ignoble prize for doing trivial research to confirm what everybody knows, only they came up with a real puzzler instead. Based on the research, it could be impossible to design an experiment that really disproves the claim "placebos have psychological effects", yet it could be untrue. It's becoming a sort of Godel's paradox in pharmacology.
I'm sure you didn't intend to be serious, but I'm glad you got modded interesting instead of funny.
There are all sorts of things that have been theoretically known of for quite some time. Still, if you come up with a new, reliable engineering application with major economic consequences, for the Edison or Peltier effects, Superconductivity, Raleigh scattering, or Frame Dragging, that's quite an accomplishment. Hell, if someone finds a genuinely new application for Archimedes model of a waterscrew as an inclined plane wrapped around a cylender, or Thag's heat from rubbing two sticks together theorem, it's still worth respect.
I've been beating this drum over "Correlation does not equal Causation" and the related form used here, but damnit, unlike a dead horse, the drum needs some more beating.
Take two events or implications that seem to be highly correlated. If one doesn't cause the other, certain things will happen.
For one, continuing to check correlation over a longer timeframe or in other circumstances will build up enough data to stop showing it (In which case you've just proved the original correlation was a statistical fluke).
(If you're not sure lack of Iodine in the soil causes Goiter just because it seems to work that way in Kansas, look at the incidence of Goiter in other inland regions vs seashores, or ship some Iodized salt to Kansas and see if the incidence goes down.).
Another thing may happen - somebody will propose at least one specific mechanism to explain the correlation, i.e. a common cause. There will be ways to check that mechanism too, i.e. logic or scientific experiment.
So what has anyone done by invoking the phrase "Correlation does not imply Causation"? Causation is frequently the best fit for the existing data. The claim amounts to, "If we gather more data, that could change.". Unless you can propose how to gather that data, the claim in itself means nothing. Or perhaps you mean "There could be a common cofactor.". Unless you can propose what that cofactor could possibly be, and how to test it, and usually how to decide among multiple competing cofactors, it still means nothing.
If it's possible to take some more measurements, by all means take them. But if there's negative consequences to being wrong, negative consequences to delaying, and you have some data, there's a point where you have to go with what you already have.
I understand the problem with taxing revenues or, for that matter, gross profits. Technically, Washington State's tax is on Gross Income, which can be slightly different from the usual legal definition of revenues, but probably isn't in Microsoft's case. Most of MS's income would fall under either Manufacture or Wholesaling, with a tax rate of .00484 in either case.
Microsoft certainly also could get the High Technology credit against this base, and while I won't bother to look up enough of their public records to be sure, I would say, offhand, they could probably qualify for some of the community empowerment credits and related in a way that would be quite advantageous. I'm not one of Microsoft's accountants, and I wouldn't venture to guess whether their research costs would make a significant dent in that total rate or not - The total rate is still trivial, But I agree, the principle of taxing gross instead of an honestly figured net is neither moral, nor pragmatically the most functional method.
But the whole argument against double taxation of corporations is itself a fallacy. A "C" corporation exists under law as a separate person in itself. It gets taxed once. In exchange, it gets benefits such as legal person-hood, and perhaps more significantly, shareholder's limited liability. Any stockholders get taxed on their income, not the corporation's. Those stockholders could vote to convert the "C" corp to one or more Partnerships, "S" corporations or other pass-throughs. While there are some limits on this, it's generally doable even for a company the size of Microsoft any time they sufficiently don't like the "burden of double taxation".
With its vast number of stockholders, Microsoft would have to restructure as multiple "S" corps and particularly as a structure of parellel holding companies and other fairly complex systems, and they would have to do some special shuffling of options to move foreign investors out of some sub-corps, but any divisions they split off this way could exist without taxation, and some of their divisions are small enough the conversion becomes rather simple, yet MS has no interest in avoiding this 'double taxation' even in those cases.
That's certainly understandable, both because a voluntary split up still feels just like being busted up under anti-trust to many investors, and because the independent sub-corps would become direct competitors in some cases, but if the taxes involved really hurt the way some corporations claim, they'd be willing to pay such prices.
The chief reason not to is the owners of "S"'s and other pass through entities can't take an active role in managing the company without also having full liability for what their company does.
Incidentally, Washington state fully recognises the usual federal tax entities such as Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships. It allows all major non-C structures - Limited Partnerships, Limited Liability Partnerships, Limited Liability Corporations. And it allows for the use of the Massachusetts Trust structure.
There are a lot of industries moving to rental related models. So many people make monthly payments for rent, utilities, cable TV, Internet access, land-line and cell phones, online games, and the list goes on.
The law (in the US and Britain at least), generally recognises more rights for an actual owner than a renter. A man's home is only his castle if he owns it. Even in places where the landlord can't simply walk in unannounced, the law tends to be strongly biased in favor of the actual property owner over the renter. Plus, it's far from everywhere that tenants have any written rights under law.
Having dealt with rental agreements for serious property a few times suggests to me that even a trivial sort of rental style agreement tends to be written to favor the other guy, and just making a habit of avoiding as many as possible is a sensible precaution.
I'm not saying I would never use Steam or play WoW, but I have a little thing called right of first sale protecting me if I want to sell my old copy of Diablo 2 to someone. Maybe that won't ever really matter, but it seems like saying "That's OK, I'll never want that legal right anyway." is something to think about carefully. And the default should be "I want to keep all my rights, not just the ones I think I'll need.".
I see what you're saying, but I think it's very important to correct your parenthetical clause. If you really lose the value of a game when you sell it, then if you just toss it in the trash instead, you would have somehow lost more than 100% of the value. Even by your definition of lose, selling something used at less than what you paid for it still means at least you didn't lose as much. More, the total value you got out of owning something was really the sum of what you sold it for and the utility value it gave you while you owned it, and presumably, that was a good deal on average or the price of new games would drop.
If the decision to sell was what economists call a rational market transaction on your side, then you looked at how much value you would get out of keeping the game and playing it some more, and sold it because you decided what the used game store offered was more than that remaining play value. That's all you are comparing, not the value you once paid. Thinking the full original value somehow needs to be taken into account again, is like thinking you have lost something because a game you bought the day it came out shows up at discount six months later at Wally World, and so becomes a game which is no longer new and hot and so people wouldn't pay as much for a brand new copy still in the shrink-wrap any more. It's irrelevant to your real situation. It doesn't change what you have gained or lost.
Sorry to be a bit strident about this, but what you are claiming falls in the general class of 'broken window' models of economics. Those are economic fallacies which collectively do an incredible lot of harm, and getting people thinking about when they are falling for one is probably all to the good.
'Equally rewarding' is a mistaken premise. People may derive internal brain rewards from learning things with no immediate use, but they also get negative feedback when they don't know things that are useful, AND people have some ability (also learned) to forsee negative consequences, so they experience a foreshadowing of 'karma' or alarm at even considering the future at the same time as the initial reward. Rare is the person who puts off doing something yet never blames themselves for procrastination, and rare indeed is the person who finds unearned rewards as sweet as earned ones.
The equally rewarded claim ignores the difference between somebody who has honestly earned a reward, and somebody who gets the same reward but has a fear they will eventually be found out not to deserve it, with unpleasant to dreadful consequences. It assumes people can't really time bind enough to project getting caught at lies. It describes, in other words, immature people's behavior as typical of mature adults.
If you really, honestly think knowing how our political system works is as nonsensical, stupid, and unrewarding as celebrity gossip, then that word, immature, applies to you. I don't blame you if you're angry at my saying that, just so you read on. The actions of that system can be nonsensical or stupid, but your knowing more about how the system works, or doesn't, is both sensible and smart for you. You may not need many parts of it, but there are bound to be important lessons for you in the sphere of politics. Dealing with idiots does not make you an idiot - but not dealing with idiots because you're afraid some of it will rub off on you, may. You can escape from being an idiot - In fact you probably have most of the time. I don't think any of us can claim to have escaped it all the time, I know I haven't.
But when it comes to politics, there are parts of it where you can master a subject that helps you protect yourself from idiots, so you don't need to escape from them, you can make them leave you alone. There's an escape from idiocy here or there in the political system, but only in re. each one of us, not from idiocy's being loose in the world. How big an escape matters to you?
The early adopters would pay a lot more, but their obsolete systems would be built like bricks and come with a bunch of quirky features that would be dropped from latter tech generations because they didn't appeal to a broad enough section of the market.
(See Walter John Williams novel "Hardwired", where early artificial retina designs came with Sepia-tone and Film Noir menu items, but only a few people liked them).
Agreed:
1. Quantum is too often a buzzword used on a par with 'synergizing syncronicities to leverage deflector dish rerouting'.
2. Quantum bits are now a real concept, and this use conflicts with that.
Now if 'sexconker' had said something along the lines of:
Since bits are physically base 2, and many operations in a machine are physically faster or more functional if done on integral exponents of 2 numbers of bits, measuring bits in base 2 is more meaningful...
I might have agreed.
There are other operations besides cryptography where powers of 2 figure into it. For just two examples: paging memory, sectoring drives (i.e. look at LBA, if anyone still has hard drives small enough that addressing is a choice. Whether fdisk (or similar) gave you certain partitioning options (and whether the drive actually worked afterwards) were base 2 dependent issues). Back when people still used Windows 98, it had a system to organise frequently loaded programs into '4 K' blocks, and it used that size even if the hard drive sectors were '16 K' or '32 K'. All those numbers were actually base 2, regardless of how Microsoft reported them on screen. If you're talking software, saying it's not fundamental is fair enough, but when you have to talk hardware, the special cases where it matters multiply rapidly.
The debate reminds me of comparing American and French unemployment figures. Personally, I think people who have been out of work for a long time and given up reporting their status to the government should still be counted as best we can estimate them. Some formulas for reporting unemployment simply look better than others, or more basic to what we are measuring.
There are some complex forms of unemployment measurement, such as estimating numbers of 'underemployed' people, or people who want a job with health insurance and cant move up into one, but those seem more ambiguous and of less general use. That's also how I see measuring memory in base 10.
Right now, one of the political parties in my country has taken the position that we can spend literally trillions of dollars on wars on multiple fronts, tens of billions more on a war against drugs, more on keeping a tremendous fraction of its population in prison, AND THAT DOING THIS WHILE REDUCING THE SIZE OF GOVERNMENT TO A TRIVIAL FRACTION IS POSSIBLE.
The other major party just might be addressing these problems a little, and they generally don't advocate actually reducing the government to a tiny fraction of what's needed, but they agree with the first party that they can keep up these programs WHILE EVENTUALLY AVOIDING ANY MORE DEFICIT SPENDING.
Neither is a sane, healthy position, even though one is obviously a full blown delusional psychosis and the other might marginally qualify as just a case of being neurotic enough to only function at a modest percentage of potential, if things stay routine and the stress doesn't get too bad.
It's called cognitive dissonance. A news channel simultaneously says they're the most popular source in the world, AND their viewers are a small, persecuted minority. Businesses say they want free markets but need special government protections for their business models.
That's why I dislike it when people say "in the real world" about these things. If that much of the real world really believes such self contradictory ideas, that doesn't somehow magically make them sustainable. It just means 'the real world' is headed for chaos.
It doesn't sound like the 250 lb. trike could actually make nearly the whole journey, but it could photograph some stretches adjacent to where the trail crosses roads or skirts towns, at least. There are even a few places in the Smoky Mountains national park that come to mind, where the AT's grades are light and the trail moderately broad, so the cam could photograph some of trail markers, places where other Smokies trails cross, join or split, and some of the hiking shelters, for a few practical uses in helping AT hikers plan.
Then maybe in a few years, there will be a lighter, more maneuverable system to do more. Eventually, there could be trail photos for all the National Parks, at least for the most major routes.
It's very hard not to anthropomorphize natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins, who is about the last person in the world who would attribute evolution to some sort of intelligence, has pointed out many times how phenomenally hard it is to talk about the subject without constantly imputing goals and desires to the process.
Stross is a professional author of note. Not as many people talk about print SF as TV, but the people who are talking about him are the people who give awards, such as the Hugo he got for Glasshouse. They're people such as Gardner Dozois (who edits Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), who said "Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow.". Publisher's Weekly called Stross "One of the hottest short story writers in the field" in reviewing his first novel, and critically lauded every novel since. That's a tip of the iceberg description of who's talking about Stross, as the man has literally over a hundred favorable reviews from pro sources even at casual inspection. John Carmack (ID games), and Bruce Schneier (who you damned well ought to have heard of on Slashdot), read Stross with praise. His books get reviewed outside the normal SF field boundaries, for example by Popular Science and Scientific American.
So if Stross doesn't have enough chops to talk about Trek, I seriously doubt if you have enough to talk about Stross, by your own argument. If it's fair to demand he have a presence in TV and not just books, then it's equally fair to demand you have at least one professionally published SF work, or STFU.
Trek communicators AREN'T cell phones. Look, did you see the Enterprise build funky metal towers all over a strange planet before they let anybody beam down? Does Spock ever have to go outside to get four bars?
What may be because of Trek is the shape. Just arguably, the flip open look for most cell-phones happened to become more popular because of the resemblance to Trek technology. Even there, it's not a universal part of the design.
When they get the salt shakers working like in original Star Trek, let me know.
I really think Star Trek took it much, much farther than most shows.
On Babylon Five, it got convenient to have artificial gravity, but they did show spin based pseudo-gravity quite a bit, the station itself always ran on it, and they had an explanation of why the advanced aliens shared the AG tech big enough for the change over to make sense when Sheridan's bunch started flying Whitestars.
On original series Star Trek, there's at least Four different ways to travel in time! In only three seasons! Before you get to the episodes where everyone is dressed like a Nazi, an Armageddon survivor, or a Gangster! Two of those ways are invented by cultures which evidently couldn't leave their home planets yet!
Take all your consumer electronics to the movies once a year. Set them on the couch, give them a bowl of popcorn buttered with WD40, and let them watch "The Brave Little Toaster". (Popcorn is optional).
Every power supply which I've found failed was visibly broken once you opened it up, and it was always the capacitors. No Exceptions - capacitors had sprayed gunk all over, their Aluminium cans had popped off the bases, etc. Typical electrolytic fluid is white-ish, but once it bakes dry will scorch, and so gradually turn reddish brown. Many capacitors have grooves scored into the tops which form sort of impromptu blow out panels, and often you will see them bulging, with traces of fluid escaping from these grooves where they are actually splitting open, or scorched fluid forming a red-brown powdery residue outlining them. The grooves are usually in either an X (or Plus) or a sort of K shape. The PSUs are often still working (somewhat) at that point, and often, the PSU may be putting out nominally correct voltages when cool but deviating when it heats up. I had one client's PC that made a loud bang twice over a period of about a week, but the PC didn't really start acting funny until the third bang. Opening the PSU revealed three small caps that had blown completely off the board. It had probably kept running with no obvious symptoms through the first two.
Of course, only a trained pro with good tools should ever examine the inside of a power supply while live. But, if you are willing to unplug one and take it out of the PC and let it sit overnight, just to make sure the larger capacitors have fully drained, I recommend examining them. Yes, that voids the warranty if you aren't a pro, but if you were going to junk it and buy a new one anyway, so what? But before you open one, read this:
DON"T EVER OPEN A PLUGGED IN POWER SUPPLY. IF THIS DOESN"T APPLY TO YOU YOU ALREADY HAVE AN ELECTRICIANS LICENCE, A EE DEGREE, OR SIMILAR. DON"T OPEN A POWER SUPPLY UNLESS YOU KNOW THE LARGE CAPACITORS INSIDE ARE DISCHARGED - THEY CAN MAKE YOUR ARM MUSCLES CONTRACT HARD ENOUGH TO BREAK YOUR BONES. GIVE THEM AT LEAST AN HOUR TO RUN DOWN, THEN USE AN INSULATED TOOL TO CROSS THE PLUG PRONGS BEFORE YOU OPEN THE CASE.
Split caps or scorched ones will confirm you are right in your guess that it's the PSU. While you're at it, if you think the problem is the motherboard, check for capacitor damage there too, as it's not all that uncommon for that to be why a mainboard fails. Cheap electrolytics are probably responsible for more than half of all consumer electronics failures, they are by far the most likely source of intermittent failures, ones that come and go with temperature, or glitches that only partly disable something, and they are detectable.
Just until Hiro Protagonist makes them listen to Reason.
I'm not saying Steam is an example, but why can't a voluntary service be exploitative? People volunteer to do business with a high speed ISP, for example, but that ISP may be the only provider in the area, and lobby for laws to keep municipalities from establishing a competing service, so as to keep the price up, while also getting subsidies from the federal government. You volunteer to do buisiness directly with the company, but you also have financial involvement with them you didn't volunteer for - surely there can be exploitation there even by libertarian argument?
Many of us believe a company can also exploit a relationship just as an individual can, even without government coercion being involved. Individual exploitation can take many forms. People get married voluntarily (at least in most parts of the world), but what if one person is a lazy bum who has broken many promises made, and constantly reminds the other person that their religion forbids divorce except for adultery? Sure the other person could change their religion (again in many parts of the world), or ignore what the preacher says. But if they don't, is it wrong to say "Girlfriend, that lazy bum is just exploiting you - tell him to get a job and pay his share of the rent or get out!".
Personally, I can think of many things a company can do that are exploitative. Employment is a voluntary relationship, but when a company asks its employees to do additional unpaid labor to keep their jobs, that's exploitation. Customer is a voluntary relationship, but what if the business sells rebranded knockoffs as the real thing?