Right, he would lose. Then he picks out the guy he wants for small town mayor or whatever. Next election, he donates 10 Million he won in the last suit to that guy's campaign, and waits to sue whoever reveals the source of the pre-election funding and mentions porn again, while being the power behind the public office. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Sooner or later, People start respecting the law, or they end up endlessly seeing their money bankroll the guys they don't want in office.
One thing I've never heard the Libertarian party address: If they ever get the highest office, they are unlikely to also have a majority in both houses, some state governors and such all ready to back them. So they are likely to have enough support to, for example, abolish some individual welfare programs. But with that, they will have used up their leverage. They won't have nearly enough of a mandate to also abolish any corporate welfare, or fix the tax laws, or put education back in the hands of the states, or do anything else, really.
What's the Libertarian plan if John Galt himself won't run and pull that 90% majority he would doubtless get? What if they barely squeek into office the first time? If they don't have the leverage to make a lot of really big changes, what do they change first, and how do they avoid some one group paying all the prices while other groups get a free pass for another generation?
Wow, not just any terrorist, but an "unapoligetic terrorist". Is Ayers even a former terrorist? He originally set a bomb to blow up a statue in Chicago, a statue commemorating the police for their actions in the DNC riot. He's admitted to that. He may have helped after that, to target the pentagon and other sites, but a. that's unproved, all we have to go on there is what he himself has stated, which is a mixed bag, and b. would be aiming only at military sites and not even military personnel, so are you really comfortable with calling that terrorism? (I'm pretty down with this, actually. I'm 13 years former military, and freely admit that I felt personally terrified every time somebody tried to blow up something I was standing near, but I suspect they felt just as terrified of me, or at least I damn well tried to make them feel that way. Anyway, it's not really most people's idea of terrorism.).
Does his expressing satisfaction that nobody got hurt and only property was damaged, back at that time and not just years later, really sound like terrorism? Remember, the FBI, still under Jay Edgar Hoover at that time, eventually dropped all charges against Ayers. Know much about COINTELPRO? There's lots of evidence that the FBI tried to make non-violent members of these groups look like problems to the more violently inclined, frame them, or inspire acts of violence in groups that were not already choosing that approach. It went well into the range of entrapment, perjury to entice false prosecution, and by some accounts assassination. Ayer's could admittedly have gone a lot farther than the official record shows. It's at least possible he personally injured or even killed some people with explosives, either by making them or being the one to plant them, or by having some involvement in directing an operation. But it's not proved to any legal standard at all, and it's the government's own fault that it cannot ever be proven. There's equal justice for saying that G Gordon Liddy or Oliver North could have killed innocent people, even kids, or blown up buildings and such, as part of their role in history. Yeah, we couldn't have proved those in court either, but it's just as reasonable to assume, given the facts we do have, the things they have admitted to, the statements they have made. Is it fair to say McCain associates with known terrorist Oliver North?
As for the 'unapoligetic' part: Chicago Magazine reported that "just before the September 11th attacks," Richard Elrod, a city lawyer injured in the Weathermen's Chicago "Days of Rage," received an apology from Ayers and Dohrn for their part in the violence. "[T]hey were remorseful," Elrod says.
(this last is a direct quote from the Wikipedia article on Bill Ayers, which is currently locked against further editing). People wanting to really know more should probably read a good book on COINTELLPRO, and not just Wiki it.
A year or so ago, you may remember the whole north-east quadrant of the US power grids got into an expanding wave of blackouts, as one part of the grid after another failed catastropically. It took roughly three minutes for the wave of transformer explosions, switching system failures, and response failures that physically damaged some power plants themselves to reach the border which marks the TVA area of influence. At which point, it was stopped cold. The TVA systems didn't crash, in fact, it took them 11 seconds to analyze the failure pattern and start spinning up the first idle turbines to begin pumping extra power west and help stabilize the Southwestern grids too.
The vast majority of elements that failed first and quickest in the north-east were privately constructed and privately held power-plants. TVA is one of those 'socialist' projects built under FDR, although there are a few small privately constructed and owned hydroelectric plants integrated into its domain, and they did just as good a job of helping stabilize the national and transnational grids as the publicly owned plants. (They had to, because everything is on the same expert software systems, If Alcoa corp's management had decided not to sell power to the western states, all they could have done was kept their four dams out of the financial deal-making, and other plants would have still been available. If the n-e grids had kept trying to restart and dragging the rest of the continent down long enough, TVA could have ramped up output from the coal and nuclear plants and not just hydroelectric.). Surely this is an example of big government getting something right.
I can see how you can blame the financial bailout problem on big government, even though it started solely in the private sector, and Fannie and Freddy didn't really start making the problem worse until 2003 or so. I'll give you that the two F's involvement made the resulting debacle much worse. But, the Bush administration's stated policy of privatizing profits and socializing losses seems to explain why they made the resulting crash worse quite nicely. Why claim there are inherent problems with the system when somebody in control announced in advance the meant to use the system for 'X', and they ended up achieving exactly 'X', they just got a lot of collateral damage they didn't forsee? And isn't that likely what the AC poster meant by "deliberately elect someone into office who doesn't understand what government does or how to use it effectively"? Or are you claiming the Bush administration cold- bloodedly and deliberately threw us into a second great depression, with full understanding that that was precisely what they were doing?
It's not a very faint hope, it will happen. It may take a few lifetimes, eons in the pit of fire, or whatever, or it could come in a flash... I personally hope that every single person suffers only the absolute minimum of tragedy that is absolutely necessary for them to find real happiness and love. If the poster was trolling, and is getting off on how some people respond, I hope he realizes, right this instant, that he could contribute something genuinely productive, and it would actually end up being more fun for him than trolling.
If the trolling seems to re-affirm some old childhood trauma, and being called an insensitive clod on Slashdot reminds him of all the times his mama said cruel things, then I hope he makes the connection consciously this time, and gets whatever help will work him through it, whether that's professional therapy or just a true friend that will help him see mama was wrong and he can stop believing her now and endlessly replaying an old tragedy.
If the poster actually believes that junk, I hope he sees enough counter examples to learn, whether that takes being the victim of a crime himself, or just meeting people who are having to deal with it. I hope he learns as fast and painlessly as possible. Yes, he deserves to be called down in public. He deserves to experience all the pain some of the people reading this thread feel at his words. I'm sure I deserve just as much, but an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
I've never been the victim of a murder, and I don't see why my taxes should go to support those lazy people who couldn't dodge better. Let them get jobs and pay the costs of prosecuting their murderers themselves.
(For the humor impaired, the above post is tongue in cheek, dammit!!!, and get off my lawn)
Which is why the article says 'co-creator of the internet', rather than 'guy who has an engineering degree and therefore could be expected to be somewhat smart and rational', for the people who are whining about that. It's the more rational voters who know that not everybody with a degree or title is competent. When a person has lived a significant fraction of their life, you talk about their successes or failures, not their degree. Credentials help somewhat to predict competence, actual deeds demonstrate it.
Try this: 2 guys with MBAs endorse opposed candidates. One has 30 years experience, the other 5. One has built a medium sized firm into a Fortune 500 member, weathered the dot-com crisis with exceptional success, etc. the other hasn't. Which one's opinion is more likely to be worth listening to?
Or: Two Hollywood actresses speak out on animal rights issues. One has some arguably good films to her credit, and was in a movie with a chimp once, but nothing else, the other actually runs a big cat sanctuary and does real animal rescue work. Again, which one might be worth listening to?
Cerf has been involved in a big project that actually expanded far beyond what was initially envisioned. Arguably, the net, for all its flaws, is the biggest engineering success of its century. If you wouldn't consider what he says on net neutrality because 'that's politics and not engineering', then you shouldn't consider what the people who designed the US interstate highways say about infrastructure needs, because these days that's politics too. You should ignore what the various generals say about the war in Iraq, because now that's politics too.
Their have been TV shows where people tested cell phone subjects, i.e. driving in a parking with cones laid out, or at a track, and pretty frequently, people using cell phones have reaction times similar to people who are legally drunk, and make similar numbers and types of mistakes. I've even seen examples where the reporter or host has told a driver, "What you've just done compares to a person who's driving with a BAQ of about 0.18 or 0.22." So don't be too sure drunk driving is a much bigger problem. It might just be that the drunk is drunk the whole journey, and the cell phone user is only an increased risk while they are actually on the phone, and most calls don't last the whole trip.
Actually NYC is screwed up compared to many U.S. cities. Since they built the very first subways in the US, and a lot of other cities learned from their mistakes. Washington DC for example, has really good public transit, and the parts I've seen of Atlanta, while a pretty limited sample around the airport and convention centers and hotels, look very good too. New York isn't nearly as bad as most US tourists think, but having the terminals underground to give a smaller surface footprint makes it harder for the police to keep problems out - there's places that have solidly licked that particular problem just by putting the turnstyle level above ground with plenty of glass around it, and others that feel they can afford enough beat cops to really watch the entrances.
I really think you're oversimplifying to make your point. For one, it answers the call. Instead of somebody calling and thinking that you may just be out of coverage or you forgot to turn your ringer back on, they get told what the situation really is. If they are a friend or relative, they probably know you well enough to estimate when to try again. Of course, you may not want just anyone to know even that much about you, you may not have a parent or child who worries if they just don't get an answer, etc. But for people with a minor child, or a mother who can get a bit irrationally worried if they can't get in touch, or a job which requires them to respond, within reason, if the office calls, this could be very useful.
Another way of putting that is: If your brain holds positions simply because the laws of physics have imposed them, how do you show that they correspond to reality? You could be unarguably convinced of anything the colliding billiard balls have lead to, and that is, by definition, utterly contingent. So how do you show that the colliding billiard balls themselves are real? Because they told you so?
As I understand it, the more common assumption is that there is nothing that can manipulate the laws of nature from outside, because if there were it would be subject to its own rules and so part of (an expanded understanding of) nature. That's a metaphysical assumption, of course, but one that allows them to retain their naturalism.
That's essentially a matter of how you define 'natural', itself. There's a difference between saying "there are no black swans" because nobody in your acquaintance has been to Australia yet, and continuing to say it once someone has, because they've found black swans, but you prefer to redefine swans so those damned things have to be something else. Right now, I'm claiming that many scientists are taking the position that supernatural explanations are by fiat impossible, by the existing definitions that proceed from the initial concept of science itself, before any data is actually gathered to test it. Now you're saying, "If that somehow turns out not to be the case, it's OK to change those definitions." Sounds like you are making my point for me.
The argument that a supernatural being can't be a scientific hypothesis because it creates an untestable condition is itself faulty under some circumstances. Followed strictly, the following also become non-scientific hypothesi:
Aliens with tens or thousands of times the neural capacity of humans.
Aliens with human-like mental abilities, but which have lifespans of hundreds or thousands of times our own.
Aliens with human-like mental abilities, but which have had a technological civilization for many, many times longer than ours.
Just as a supernatural creator could supposedly use miracles to trick a scientist into believing whatever 'He" wants, a 'sufficiently capable' alien could doubtless pull the wool over any researcher's eyes, even if all its powers were, strictly speaking 'natural'. All hypothesi about a sufficiently advanced alien become contingent upon unverifiables, ergo, science should never use the explanation that something is the result of advanced aliens, even if the damned saucer just landed on the White House lawn.
Followed strictly enough, you could get really, incredibly nit picky. Rigid application of the rule would be absurd. i.e. no one can study Albert Einstein. (Einstein is smarter than the researcher, ergo, he can figure out any double-blind experiment the researcher can create. If Einstein decides not to cooperate, he can mislead the researcher into an erroneous conclusion. The validity of any hypothesis about Einstein depends on whether he honestly cooperated. Since we can't be sure he is cooperating, we can't theorize about Einstein unless we find someone smarter than him to do it. (Then we can't theorize about that guy).).
Why am I bringing up such an extreme interpretation? Is it a straw man? I don't think so. Methodological naturalism doesn't require strict adherence to a rule. If there's a problem with the method, you do what works, or publish what you have and admit there may be some problems with your methodology. Scientists have published papers where they stipulated they couldn't eliminate all conflicting models before. But, epistemological materialism does require absolute adherence. If your rule-set says something can't possibly be the case, then you never consider it as a hypothesis at all. Fudging your definition is, effectively, going completely outside the scientific method.
Again, as far as I am aware, QM doesn't assume any such thing; it uses it as a metaphor.
Nope, the very basis of the real math, i.e. Feynman diagrams and the calculations that are derived from them, is that the operations are reversable with regard to time. In the models, a positron is just an electron going the other way in time. Enthropy is literally non-existent in the quantum realm, or the math doesn't work at all. It's not a metaphor or even an analogy, in the way that quantum 'spin' is a metaphorical or analogous term
I agree with you that the preface clause doesn't limit Congress to only establishing copyright if the material counts as a useful art or science, nor does it limit terms to only those durations that result in a net gain to the art or science involved. I disagree that SCOTUS is right (not that they will listen to me). I think that the founders, when they wrote about a limited time, were treating copyright as derived from a natural right to copy, which everyone posessed by Nature, for the agnostic founders (or grant of Nature's God, for the deistic founders). That natural right was of course naturally limited, by death. No one could exercise their right to copy even a fraction of a second after they died. If that's true, then 'for a limited time' would have to mean less than a natural lifespan. Life+50, 70 and so on type limits violate this, AND they make copyright a created right, not a transferred one. By its very definition, a Life+70 type right has to be created at least in part by the government, by fiat, and not exist as a transfer.
The real downside of this is, if Congress ever shortens copyright, the remaining time now doesn't have to revert to the public. If Congress were to decide tomorrow that authors could only enjoy, say, a 14 year copyright, they could give the remainder to anybody, the public, the federal government, the organized publishing industry as a whole, or whatever, and it wouldn't be a taking without just compensation, anymore than the original extension was a taking from the public (again, as SCOTUS sees it). A lot of authors who think the government is on their side may get a rude shock.
One last point - while, as far as I can see, it doesn't hurt your argument or mine, there's a real shift in what English meant then and means now. That is, useful arts mostly meant technologies and practical applications, not arts like painting or playwriting, and a lot of things we'd call arts, i.e. literature, rhetoric and philosophy, were more firmly regarded as part of the Sciences in Madison's and Jefferson's days.
Right now, the Idol comment box takes up the whole screen width. I'm using Firefox on Kubuntu (Hardy). Recently, I've had a few cases where a Slashdot comment box extended all the way out of browser frame and over onto my second monitor. It's been sporadic - I might have been browsing with Konqueror at the time, might be before I upgraded to FF3 or patched, etc.).
Note: My last post on this thread was (intended to be) humorous. Here, I'm serious. I don't know if anyone else is occasionally seeing gynormous comment boxes or not, but I really have, and now that I think back, occasional ones that seemed narrow, too.
I'm only logged on today, because if I only log on to Slashdot 2 to 3 times a week, I get mod points every time. Sometimes I get 'em in groups of 15, sometimes just 5's. 50's are uncommon, but once a month or so I get them. I metamod whenever its offered (at least 1x/week), and occasionally (well frequently, of late), I get extra mod points just afterwards, and even some of those special points that you can use in a discussion you've already posted to, or at least the ones that don't expire for a month. I've only seen the ones that let you push a comment below -1 twice. Everybody knows about those extra-special mod points that also let you steal a user's Id if theirs is lower than yours and you mod them down, but I only got one of those once, and little did I suspect that it would work in reverse when I modded up instead. Otherwise I'd still have a three digit ID. Whatever happened to those mod points that let you perma-ban a poster? Haven't seen one of them in months.
Sure we can. I for one, don't believe any single source uncritically. I keep my links to the BBC, the Berlin server of the World News Network, CNN and others, in a folder called "News - Trust but Verify". My link to Fox is in "News - Strong Politicization) (Along with the Moscow Times, The Nation, and other such sources). There are no links in "News - Trust Absolutely". None.
The decision to put Fox in the second category came when they kept 'accidentally' labeling republican politicians as (D) just after they were arrested or put under investigation, but never made the reverse mistake. Since then, I've seen industry studies that showed Fox basically made certain mistakes more often than most of their competition (like miss-attributing a source, i.e. saying some 'expert' was a liscenced and practicing psychiatrist when all they had was a basic 4 year psychology degree).
So, no, not everyone here is taking this story very seriously. I'll get more serious about it if everything Fox reported is confirmed from some of the other sources I trust a little more. If even a good portion of what Fox reports holds up, I'll give them due credit for having broken the story first.
Oh, I speak 2 non-English languages, and so I often check relevant news on native language sites. If Chinese was one of my languages, I'd have some Chinese speaking sites bookmarked, and when Fox (or any English language source), blamed China for something, I'd check them. (Note that I didn't say those sites should or shouldn't be under control of the PRC. If you don't trust the People's Republic of China, you could check sources opposed to them, and see if they agree with Fox that the attacks originated in the PRC or have their own opinions. Even if you only speak English, you could do more than check Fox against American sites, or the BBC. Look up some sites in Australia or Canada, or English speaking sources from Eastern Europe or South America, and see what they say.
...gentlemen in Webland now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That was here when the Satan's Rectum meme was borne.
(William Shakecyber)
In Korea, only old people have Satan's Rectums poised over them...
What you're suggesting sounds almost like Military grade security, where there is often a 'two man rule', and no single person can be alone at the only terminals physically connected to certain assets. I'd amend your suggestion in just that way, not only is the data too critical to allow any single person to have any guarantee of privacy while it is accessed, there should be a positive lack of privacy, both via logging, and via physical presence of at least two operators or an operator and supervisor team, in the room. And of course, teams should be rotated frequently, physical ID systems used as well, meaningful background checks done, and so on.
Remember, for some military situations, this is taken as far as 'immediate armed response' and "If you are here legally, you have given up your right to a civil trial" and even "If you open this door, you will die" rules. We're discussing going about half way to that level of security, for financial institutions that have enough significance in the modern world their collapse could effectively ruin just as many people's lives as a whole nation physically falling to an outside army. Probably a lot less than half way if you still allow some remote access, and particularly removable media use. If the low budget approach you suggest still looks too pricy to the businesses involved, it's a fair question to ask "Compared to what?"
One of the reasons the doctrine of fair use was created was to support scholarship. There are other reasons too, i.e.: criticism, news reporting, teaching or research. There's also a rule that is pretty nuanced, and IMHO isn't always being treated consistently by the courts, that goes into whether a use is transformative or not.
You can call the larger work the music was attached to propaganda, instead of news or political speech, if you want. (I can just see the US government issuing a court decision that all publication relating to intelligent design is not newsworthy and is instead all automatically propaganda). If it is propaganda, then using some musical work to create, for just one example, an ironic or sardonic tone in the larger work is transformative of the musical work, so it still passes one of the fair use tests. If the documentary counts as political speech, then fair use rights are broader than for commercial speech, so it would probably pass simply on that grounds instead.
So no, maybe an AC who's started off by simply saying he 'doesn't see how something could be fair use' should just be informed of various ways that it might be, not modded +5. I'm not opposed to him being modded up as interesting, mind you, he raised a genuinely interesting point - you can't automatically use something in just any context you want.
Density isn't exactly dimensionless, but if you set things up so the density of water is 1 in a system of measurements, the densities of other things (i.e. Lead, Iridium, or this planet) will come out the same numbers, regardless of the units used. So it's not necessary to really specify the units, just that H2O at STP = 1 in whatever system you are using.
A usual property of fractal dimensions is they aren't integers. Cases with interger dimensionality in articles and books on fractals are simplified or 'degenerate' fractals. If scientists found themselves relying on math that involved non-integral dimensions to describe planetary systems, I could definitely see there being 'fractal planetary arrangements', but baring that, similarities across scales aren't enough to throw around a word such as fractals.
The idea sounds like an extension of Bode's law, by people who are trying to modernize the old model. The original Bode's law may have been a case of people seeing patterns that aren't really there in reality at all, simply an overfunctioning of the brain's pattern detecting apparatus. Knowing there's a temptation to interpret the data this way, I'd be cautious trying to stretch fractal math to fit unless all of it fits.
Flamebait is a mod that assumes there was a reasonable set of arguments going in the thread, and what somebody wrote made the thread, as a whole, less reasonable, or tending to veer off of polite and rational discussion into emotionalism, name calling, irrelevance, and perhaps more use of logical fallacies. Some discussions start out with more polarization and emotion than others, and sometimes the point where a thread veers of into the weeds is earlier than the point most people want to mod it flamebait. I really recommend avoiding flamebait mods for some discussions completely - Vi vs Emacs arguments don't veer into flame territory, they start there. Just think of any highly charged topic, i.e. politics, and ask, "Did somebody really steer a productive, civilized thread in an unwelcome direction, or was it innately full of the same stuff, twenty posts back, just not so concentrated as to be obvious?"
I personally have some real problems with Dawkins - for one, when he first proposed the idea of Memes in "The Blind Watchmaker", he himself pointed out some really big problems with the theory, but expressed the hope that they could be overcome. They never really got addressed by him, or any of the other sources on Memetic theory I've seen widely considered as standard, since, just ignored or glossed over in subsequent works. Accusing the other guy in debate of being motivated by controlling Memes instead of real, reasoned ideas has become a great way of making an Ad Hom attack while pretending one is still being rational, so to me, we're talking about a guy who helped make reason itself harder to practice, and gave the bastards who will use any rhetorical device to win, instead of caring first about truth, another bolt for their quivers. All to often, within a few posts of the first mention of Dawkins, somebody is stooping to calling the other guy a "meme-puppet".
'Twat', obviously, can't be literally true in this case, and is an abusive words to use in at least most cases where it is accurate. If I'd been metamodding a flamebait mod for that, I'd definitely let it stand in any thread where people weren't already letting off F-bombs right and left. Maybe the parent poster feels it is intended to be understood as obviously metaphorical by the average slashdotter.
Im not sure but what moving the problem is a significant advance, maybe one Penrose didn't intend. One problem strict philosophical materialism has in practice is it tends to reject all 'supernatural' phenomina, but it does so dishonestly. That is, most believers in it claim to simply be naturalists as a method, because it's pragmatically difficult, perhaps impossible, to apply science to something that can manipulate the very laws of nature. But then, the same people claim to 'know' in advance, that science can eventually explain all reality, extending the argument from method to baseline assumption, so it's not just a matter of an observed problem with applying science to some things if they exist, it becomes an axiomatic, preexisting truth that they can't possibly exist, so science needn't even look for them.
Some versions of strict materialism have used this technique, not just with God, but with consciousness, self awareness, or even temporal causation.
Quantum Mechanical explanations aren't technically supernatural, but they tend to certain properties that supernatural explanations also have (Multiple interpretations may have equal validity, some odd things are explicitly allowed because they are happening 'outside' of our scale space-time, and the real root causes of phenomena can't possibly be determinate in a strict Newtonian sense.). While the quantum realm is often conceptualized as underlying ours, phrases such as 'collapse of the state vector' imply a realm superior to mundane existence, and just abut all QM assumes this realm is timeless/eternal/non-enthropic. (Sounds kind of like heaven, doesn't it?).
So, opening up the discourse to accept possible explanations with such properties proves that science can deal with some things it once thought it couldn't address at all (the contrary argument being that QM itself isn't scientific.)
I'd say: at the start, you are buying an obligation for them to send you those magazines, but the obligation converts, at 1/12 of the total each month, to actual possession of those magazines. So you're correct, what you are really buying isn't those future magazines, but that's because by the time you take delivery, that magazine is a present magazine, not a future one.
That's the point about future debt having value. Some future debts can be described, in terms of what will likely happen as the future becomes the present. In most cases, there are many reasonable and knowable limitations, i.e. overproduction of pork may decrease the expected value of those pork belly futures. The more limitations on our knowledge that cannot be predicted, the less value can be estimated. That ties into what you are saying about fraud - person X buys as though the question of whether person Y will have the stock to sell is settled, but in fact, it's another one of the uncertanties.
But, people get tax breaks for long term capital gains because they are investing. If the overall uncertanties in investing make it effectively just gambling for X and Y is lying about those uncertanties, it doesn't really matter which of them makes money (although it's obviously likely to be Y, at least in the long run). If X 'wins' he gets a break not for wise investing that presumably creates markets, values and jobs for the rest of us, but for being lucky. Y's profits come from being crooked. It's not just the fraud that makes that wrong - there's no advantages to the rest of society to give breaks based solely on luck either.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, he would lose. Then he picks out the guy he wants for small town mayor or whatever. Next election, he donates 10 Million he won in the last suit to that guy's campaign, and waits to sue whoever reveals the source of the pre-election funding and mentions porn again, while being the power behind the public office. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Sooner or later, People start respecting the law, or they end up endlessly seeing their money bankroll the guys they don't want in office.
One thing I've never heard the Libertarian party address:
If they ever get the highest office, they are unlikely to also have a majority in both houses, some state governors and such all ready to back them. So they are likely to have enough support to, for example, abolish some individual welfare programs. But with that, they will have used up their leverage. They won't have nearly enough of a mandate to also abolish any corporate welfare, or fix the tax laws, or put education back in the hands of the states, or do anything else, really.
What's the Libertarian plan if John Galt himself won't run and pull that 90% majority he would doubtless get? What if they barely squeek into office the first time? If they don't have the leverage to make a lot of really big changes, what do they change first, and how do they avoid some one group paying all the prices while other groups get a free pass for another generation?
Wow, not just any terrorist, but an "unapoligetic terrorist".
Is Ayers even a former terrorist? He originally set a bomb to blow up a statue in Chicago, a statue commemorating the police for their actions in the DNC riot. He's admitted to that. He may have helped after that, to target the pentagon and other sites, but a. that's unproved, all we have to go on there is what he himself has stated, which is a mixed bag, and b. would be aiming only at military sites and not even military personnel, so are you really comfortable with calling that terrorism? (I'm pretty down with this, actually. I'm 13 years former military, and freely admit that I felt personally terrified every time somebody tried to blow up something I was standing near, but I suspect they felt just as terrified of me, or at least I damn well tried to make them feel that way. Anyway, it's not really most people's idea of terrorism.).
Does his expressing satisfaction that nobody got hurt and only property was damaged, back at that time and not just years later, really sound like terrorism? Remember, the FBI, still under Jay Edgar Hoover at that time, eventually dropped all charges against Ayers. Know much about COINTELPRO? There's lots of evidence that the FBI tried to make non-violent members of these groups look like problems to the more violently inclined, frame them, or inspire acts of violence in groups that were not already choosing that approach. It went well into the range of entrapment, perjury to entice false prosecution, and by some accounts assassination. Ayer's could admittedly have gone a lot farther than the official record shows. It's at least possible he personally injured or even killed some people with explosives, either by making them or being the one to plant them, or by having some involvement in directing an operation. But it's not proved to any legal standard at all, and it's the government's own fault that it cannot ever be proven. There's equal justice for saying that G Gordon Liddy or Oliver North could have killed innocent people, even kids, or blown up buildings and such, as part of their role in history. Yeah, we couldn't have proved those in court either, but it's just as reasonable to assume, given the facts we do have, the things they have admitted to, the statements they have made. Is it fair to say McCain associates with known terrorist Oliver North?
As for the 'unapoligetic' part:
Chicago Magazine reported that "just before the September 11th attacks," Richard Elrod, a city lawyer injured in the Weathermen's Chicago "Days of Rage," received an apology from Ayers and Dohrn for their part in the violence. "[T]hey were remorseful," Elrod says.
(this last is a direct quote from the Wikipedia article on Bill Ayers, which is currently locked against further editing).
People wanting to really know more should probably read a good book on COINTELLPRO, and not just Wiki it.
A year or so ago, you may remember the whole north-east quadrant of the US power grids got into an expanding wave of blackouts, as one part of the grid after another failed catastropically. It took roughly three minutes for the wave of transformer explosions, switching system failures, and response failures that physically damaged some power plants themselves to reach the border which marks the TVA area of influence. At which point, it was stopped cold. The TVA systems didn't crash, in fact, it took them 11 seconds to analyze the failure pattern and start spinning up the first idle turbines to begin pumping extra power west and help stabilize the Southwestern grids too.
The vast majority of elements that failed first and quickest in the north-east were privately constructed and privately held power-plants. TVA is one of those 'socialist' projects built under FDR, although there are a few small privately constructed and owned hydroelectric plants integrated into its domain, and they did just as good a job of helping stabilize the national and transnational grids as the publicly owned plants. (They had to, because everything is on the same expert software systems, If Alcoa corp's management had decided not to sell power to the western states, all they could have done was kept their four dams out of the financial deal-making, and other plants would have still been available. If the n-e grids had kept trying to restart and dragging the rest of the continent down long enough, TVA could have ramped up output from the coal and nuclear plants and not just hydroelectric.). Surely this is an example of big government getting something right.
I can see how you can blame the financial bailout problem on big government, even though it started solely in the private sector, and Fannie and Freddy didn't really start making the problem worse until 2003 or so. I'll give you that the two F's involvement made the resulting debacle much worse. But, the Bush administration's stated policy of privatizing profits and socializing losses seems to explain why they made the resulting crash worse quite nicely. Why claim there are inherent problems with the system when somebody in control announced in advance the meant to use the system for 'X', and they ended up achieving exactly 'X', they just got a lot of collateral damage they didn't forsee? And isn't that likely what the AC poster meant by "deliberately elect someone into office who doesn't understand what government does or how to use it effectively"? Or are you claiming the Bush administration cold- bloodedly and deliberately threw us into a second great depression, with full understanding that that was precisely what they were doing?
It's not a very faint hope, it will happen. It may take a few lifetimes, eons in the pit of fire, or whatever, or it could come in a flash...
I personally hope that every single person suffers only the absolute minimum of tragedy that is absolutely necessary for them to find real happiness and love.
If the poster was trolling, and is getting off on how some people respond, I hope he realizes, right this instant, that he could contribute something genuinely productive, and it would actually end up being more fun for him than trolling.
If the trolling seems to re-affirm some old childhood trauma, and being called an insensitive clod on Slashdot reminds him of all the times his mama said cruel things, then I hope he makes the connection consciously this time, and gets whatever help will work him through it, whether that's professional therapy or just a true friend that will help him see mama was wrong and he can stop believing her now and endlessly replaying an old tragedy.
If the poster actually believes that junk, I hope he sees enough counter examples to learn, whether that takes being the victim of a crime himself, or just meeting people who are having to deal with it. I hope he learns as fast and painlessly as possible. Yes, he deserves to be called down in public. He deserves to experience all the pain some of the people reading this thread feel at his words. I'm sure I deserve just as much, but an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
I've never been the victim of a murder, and I don't see why my taxes should go to support those lazy people who couldn't dodge better. Let them get jobs and pay the costs of prosecuting their murderers themselves.
(For the humor impaired, the above post is tongue in cheek, dammit!!!, and get off my lawn)
Which is why the article says 'co-creator of the internet', rather than 'guy who has an engineering degree and therefore could be expected to be somewhat smart and rational', for the people who are whining about that. It's the more rational voters who know that not everybody with a degree or title is competent. When a person has lived a significant fraction of their life, you talk about their successes or failures, not their degree. Credentials help somewhat to predict competence, actual deeds demonstrate it.
Try this: 2 guys with MBAs endorse opposed candidates. One has 30 years experience, the other 5. One has built a medium sized firm into a Fortune 500 member, weathered the dot-com crisis with exceptional success, etc. the other hasn't. Which one's opinion is more likely to be worth listening to?
Or: Two Hollywood actresses speak out on animal rights issues. One has some arguably good films to her credit, and was in a movie with a chimp once, but nothing else, the other actually runs a big cat sanctuary and does real animal rescue work. Again, which one might be worth listening to?
Cerf has been involved in a big project that actually expanded far beyond what was initially envisioned. Arguably, the net, for all its flaws, is the biggest engineering success of its century. If you wouldn't consider what he says on net neutrality because 'that's politics and not engineering', then you shouldn't consider what the people who designed the US interstate highways say about infrastructure needs, because these days that's politics too. You should ignore what the various generals say about the war in Iraq, because now that's politics too.
Their have been TV shows where people tested cell phone subjects, i.e. driving in a parking with cones laid out, or at a track, and pretty frequently, people using cell phones have reaction times similar to people who are legally drunk, and make similar numbers and types of mistakes. I've even seen examples where the reporter or host has told a driver, "What you've just done compares to a person who's driving with a BAQ of about 0.18 or 0.22." So don't be too sure drunk driving is a much bigger problem. It might just be that the drunk is drunk the whole journey, and the cell phone user is only an increased risk while they are actually on the phone, and most calls don't last the whole trip.
Actually NYC is screwed up compared to many U.S. cities. Since they built the very first subways in the US, and a lot of other cities learned from their mistakes. Washington DC for example, has really good public transit, and the parts I've seen of Atlanta, while a pretty limited sample around the airport and convention centers and hotels, look very good too. New York isn't nearly as bad as most US tourists think, but having the terminals underground to give a smaller surface footprint makes it harder for the police to keep problems out - there's places that have solidly licked that particular problem just by putting the turnstyle level above ground with plenty of glass around it, and others that feel they can afford enough beat cops to really watch the entrances.
I really think you're oversimplifying to make your point. For one, it answers the call. Instead of somebody calling and thinking that you may just be out of coverage or you forgot to turn your ringer back on, they get told what the situation really is. If they are a friend or relative, they probably know you well enough to estimate when to try again. Of course, you may not want just anyone to know even that much about you, you may not have a parent or child who worries if they just don't get an answer, etc. But for people with a minor child, or a mother who can get a bit irrationally worried if they can't get in touch, or a job which requires them to respond, within reason, if the office calls, this could be very useful.
Another way of putting that is: If your brain holds positions simply because the laws of physics have imposed them, how do you show that they correspond to reality? You could be unarguably convinced of anything the colliding billiard balls have lead to, and that is, by definition, utterly contingent. So how do you show that the colliding billiard balls themselves are real? Because they told you so?
As I understand it, the more common assumption is that there is nothing that can manipulate the laws of nature from outside, because if there were it would be subject to its own rules and so part of (an expanded understanding of) nature. That's a metaphysical assumption, of course, but one that allows them to retain their naturalism.
That's essentially a matter of how you define 'natural', itself. There's a difference between saying "there are no black swans" because nobody in your acquaintance has been to Australia yet, and continuing to say it once someone has, because they've found black swans, but you prefer to redefine swans so those damned things have to be something else. Right now, I'm claiming that many scientists are taking the position that supernatural explanations are by fiat impossible, by the existing definitions that proceed from the initial concept of science itself, before any data is actually gathered to test it. Now you're saying, "If that somehow turns out not to be the case, it's OK to change those definitions."
Sounds like you are making my point for me.
The argument that a supernatural being can't be a scientific hypothesis because it creates an untestable condition is itself faulty under some circumstances. Followed strictly, the following also become non-scientific hypothesi:
Aliens with tens or thousands of times the neural capacity of humans.
Aliens with human-like mental abilities, but which have lifespans of hundreds or thousands of times our own.
Aliens with human-like mental abilities, but which have had a technological civilization for many, many times longer than ours.
Just as a supernatural creator could supposedly use miracles to trick a scientist into believing whatever 'He" wants, a 'sufficiently capable' alien could doubtless pull the wool over any researcher's eyes, even if all its powers were, strictly speaking 'natural'. All hypothesi about a sufficiently advanced alien become contingent upon unverifiables, ergo, science should never use the explanation that something is the result of advanced aliens, even if the damned saucer just landed on the White House lawn.
Followed strictly enough, you could get really, incredibly nit picky. Rigid application of the rule would be absurd. i.e. no one can study Albert Einstein. (Einstein is smarter than the researcher, ergo, he can figure out any double-blind experiment the researcher can create. If Einstein decides not to cooperate, he can mislead the researcher into an erroneous conclusion. The validity of any hypothesis about Einstein depends on whether he honestly cooperated. Since we can't be sure he is cooperating, we can't theorize about Einstein unless we find someone smarter than him to do it. (Then we can't theorize about that guy).).
Why am I bringing up such an extreme interpretation? Is it a straw man? I don't think so. Methodological naturalism doesn't require strict adherence to a rule. If there's a problem with the method, you do what works, or publish what you have and admit there may be some problems with your methodology. Scientists have published papers where they stipulated they couldn't eliminate all conflicting models before. But, epistemological materialism does require absolute adherence. If your rule-set says something can't possibly be the case, then you never consider it as a hypothesis at all. Fudging your definition is, effectively, going completely outside the scientific method.
Again, as far as I am aware, QM doesn't assume any such thing; it uses it as a metaphor.
Nope, the very basis of the real math, i.e. Feynman diagrams and the calculations that are derived from them, is that the operations are reversable with regard to time. In the models, a positron is just an electron going the other way in time. Enthropy is literally non-existent in the quantum realm, or the math doesn't work at all. It's not a metaphor or even an analogy, in the way that quantum 'spin' is a metaphorical or analogous term
I agree with you that the preface clause doesn't limit Congress to only establishing copyright if the material counts as a useful art or science, nor does it limit terms to only those durations that result in a net gain to the art or science involved.
I disagree that SCOTUS is right (not that they will listen to me). I think that the founders, when they wrote about a limited time, were treating copyright as derived from a natural right to copy, which everyone posessed by Nature, for the agnostic founders (or grant of Nature's God, for the deistic founders). That natural right was of course naturally limited, by death. No one could exercise their right to copy even a fraction of a second after they died. If that's true, then 'for a limited time' would have to mean less than a natural lifespan. Life+50, 70 and so on type limits violate this, AND they make copyright a created right, not a transferred one. By its very definition, a Life+70 type right has to be created at least in part by the government, by fiat, and not exist as a transfer.
The real downside of this is, if Congress ever shortens copyright, the remaining time now doesn't have to revert to the public. If Congress were to decide tomorrow that authors could only enjoy, say, a 14 year copyright, they could give the remainder to anybody, the public, the federal government, the organized publishing industry as a whole, or whatever, and it wouldn't be a taking without just compensation, anymore than the original extension was a taking from the public (again, as SCOTUS sees it). A lot of authors who think the government is on their side may get a rude shock.
One last point - while, as far as I can see, it doesn't hurt your argument or mine, there's a real shift in what English meant then and means now. That is, useful arts mostly meant technologies and practical applications, not arts like painting or playwriting, and a lot of things we'd call arts, i.e. literature, rhetoric and philosophy, were more firmly regarded as part of the Sciences in Madison's and Jefferson's days.
Right now, the Idol comment box takes up the whole screen width. I'm using Firefox on Kubuntu (Hardy). Recently, I've had a few cases where a Slashdot comment box extended all the way out of browser frame and over onto my second monitor. It's been sporadic - I might have been browsing with Konqueror at the time, might be before I upgraded to FF3 or patched, etc.).
Note: My last post on this thread was (intended to be) humorous. Here, I'm serious. I don't know if anyone else is occasionally seeing gynormous comment boxes or not, but I really have, and now that I think back, occasional ones that seemed narrow, too.
I'm only logged on today, because if I only log on to Slashdot 2 to 3 times a week, I get mod points every time. Sometimes I get 'em in groups of 15, sometimes just 5's. 50's are uncommon, but once a month or so I get them. I metamod whenever its offered (at least 1x/week), and occasionally (well frequently, of late), I get extra mod points just afterwards, and even some of those special points that you can use in a discussion you've already posted to, or at least the ones that don't expire for a month. I've only seen the ones that let you push a comment below -1 twice. Everybody knows about those extra-special mod points that also let you steal a user's Id if theirs is lower than yours and you mod them down, but I only got one of those once, and little did I suspect that it would work in reverse when I modded up instead. Otherwise I'd still have a three digit ID. Whatever happened to those mod points that let you perma-ban a poster? Haven't seen one of them in months.
Sure we can. I for one, don't believe any single source uncritically. I keep my links to the BBC, the Berlin server of the World News Network, CNN and others, in a folder called "News - Trust but Verify". My link to Fox is in "News - Strong Politicization) (Along with the Moscow Times, The Nation, and other such sources). There are no links in "News - Trust Absolutely". None.
The decision to put Fox in the second category came when they kept 'accidentally' labeling republican politicians as (D) just after they were arrested or put under investigation, but never made the reverse mistake. Since then, I've seen industry studies that showed Fox basically made certain mistakes more often than most of their competition (like miss-attributing a source, i.e. saying some 'expert' was a liscenced and practicing psychiatrist when all they had was a basic 4 year psychology degree).
So, no, not everyone here is taking this story very seriously. I'll get more serious about it if everything Fox reported is confirmed from some of the other sources I trust a little more. If even a good portion of what Fox reports holds up, I'll give them due credit for having broken the story first.
Oh, I speak 2 non-English languages, and so I often check relevant news on native language sites. If Chinese was one of my languages, I'd have some Chinese speaking sites bookmarked, and when Fox (or any English language source), blamed China for something, I'd check them. (Note that I didn't say those sites should or shouldn't be under control of the PRC. If you don't trust the People's Republic of China, you could check sources opposed to them, and see if they agree with Fox that the attacks originated in the PRC or have their own opinions. Even if you only speak English, you could do more than check Fox against American sites, or the BBC. Look up some sites in Australia or Canada, or English speaking sources from Eastern Europe or South America, and see what they say.
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That was here when the Satan's Rectum meme was borne.
(William Shakecyber)
In Korea, only old people have Satan's Rectums poised over them...
What you're suggesting sounds almost like Military grade security, where there is often a 'two man rule', and no single person can be alone at the only terminals physically connected to certain assets. I'd amend your suggestion in just that way, not only is the data too critical to allow any single person to have any guarantee of privacy while it is accessed, there should be a positive lack of privacy, both via logging, and via physical presence of at least two operators or an operator and supervisor team, in the room. And of course, teams should be rotated frequently, physical ID systems used as well, meaningful background checks done, and so on.
Remember, for some military situations, this is taken as far as 'immediate armed response' and "If you are here legally, you have given up your right to a civil trial" and even "If you open this door, you will die" rules. We're discussing going about half way to that level of security, for financial institutions that have enough significance in the modern world their collapse could effectively ruin just as many people's lives as a whole nation physically falling to an outside army. Probably a lot less than half way if you still allow some remote access, and particularly removable media use. If the low budget approach you suggest still looks too pricy to the businesses involved, it's a fair question to ask "Compared to what?"
One of the reasons the doctrine of fair use was created was to support scholarship. There are other reasons too, i.e.: criticism, news reporting, teaching or research. There's also a rule that is pretty nuanced, and IMHO isn't always being treated consistently by the courts, that goes into whether a use is transformative or not.
You can call the larger work the music was attached to propaganda, instead of news or political speech, if you want. (I can just see the US government issuing a court decision that all publication relating to intelligent design is not newsworthy and is instead all automatically propaganda). If it is propaganda, then using some musical work to create, for just one example, an ironic or sardonic tone in the larger work is transformative of the musical work, so it still passes one of the fair use tests. If the documentary counts as political speech, then fair use rights are broader than for commercial speech, so it would probably pass simply on that grounds instead.
So no, maybe an AC who's started off by simply saying he 'doesn't see how something could be fair use' should just be informed of various ways that it might be, not modded +5. I'm not opposed to him being modded up as interesting, mind you, he raised a genuinely interesting point - you can't automatically use something in just any context you want.
Yeah, well all you people born with Sedna in Puppis think astrology is bunk. Bet you've got Quaor in your House of Pancakes too.
Density isn't exactly dimensionless, but if you set things up so the density of water is 1 in a system of measurements, the densities of other things (i.e. Lead, Iridium, or this planet) will come out the same numbers, regardless of the units used. So it's not necessary to really specify the units, just that H2O at STP = 1 in whatever system you are using.
A usual property of fractal dimensions is they aren't integers. Cases with interger dimensionality in articles and books on fractals are simplified or 'degenerate' fractals. If scientists found themselves relying on math that involved non-integral dimensions to describe planetary systems, I could definitely see there being 'fractal planetary arrangements', but baring that, similarities across scales aren't enough to throw around a word such as fractals.
The idea sounds like an extension of Bode's law, by people who are trying to modernize the old model. The original Bode's law may have been a case of people seeing patterns that aren't really there in reality at all, simply an overfunctioning of the brain's pattern detecting apparatus. Knowing there's a temptation to interpret the data this way, I'd be cautious trying to stretch fractal math to fit unless all of it fits.
Flamebait is a mod that assumes there was a reasonable set of arguments going in the thread, and what somebody wrote made the thread, as a whole, less reasonable, or tending to veer off of polite and rational discussion into emotionalism, name calling, irrelevance, and perhaps more use of logical fallacies. Some discussions start out with more polarization and emotion than others, and sometimes the point where a thread veers of into the weeds is earlier than the point most people want to mod it flamebait. I really recommend avoiding flamebait mods for some discussions completely - Vi vs Emacs arguments don't veer into flame territory, they start there. Just think of any highly charged topic, i.e. politics, and ask, "Did somebody really steer a productive, civilized thread in an unwelcome direction, or was it innately full of the same stuff, twenty posts back, just not so concentrated as to be obvious?"
I personally have some real problems with Dawkins - for one, when he first proposed the idea of Memes in "The Blind Watchmaker", he himself pointed out some really big problems with the theory, but expressed the hope that they could be overcome. They never really got addressed by him, or any of the other sources on Memetic theory I've seen widely considered as standard, since, just ignored or glossed over in subsequent works. Accusing the other guy in debate of being motivated by controlling Memes instead of real, reasoned ideas has become a great way of making an Ad Hom attack while pretending one is still being rational, so to me, we're talking about a guy who helped make reason itself harder to practice, and gave the bastards who will use any rhetorical device to win, instead of caring first about truth, another bolt for their quivers. All to often, within a few posts of the first mention of Dawkins, somebody is stooping to calling the other guy a "meme-puppet".
'Twat', obviously, can't be literally true in this case, and is an abusive words to use in at least most cases where it is accurate. If I'd been metamodding a flamebait mod for that, I'd definitely let it stand in any thread where people weren't already letting off F-bombs right and left. Maybe the parent poster feels it is intended to be understood as obviously metaphorical by the average slashdotter.
Im not sure but what moving the problem is a significant advance, maybe one Penrose didn't intend. One problem strict philosophical materialism has in practice is it tends to reject all 'supernatural' phenomina, but it does so dishonestly. That is, most believers in it claim to simply be naturalists as a method, because it's pragmatically difficult, perhaps impossible, to apply science to something that can manipulate the very laws of nature. But then, the same people claim to 'know' in advance, that science can eventually explain all reality, extending the argument from method to baseline assumption, so it's not just a matter of an observed problem with applying science to some things if they exist, it becomes an axiomatic, preexisting truth that they can't possibly exist, so science needn't even look for them.
Some versions of strict materialism have used this technique, not just with God, but with consciousness, self awareness, or even temporal causation.
Quantum Mechanical explanations aren't technically supernatural, but they tend to certain properties that supernatural explanations also have (Multiple interpretations may have equal validity, some odd things are explicitly allowed because they are happening 'outside' of our scale space-time, and the real root causes of phenomena can't possibly be determinate in a strict Newtonian sense.). While the quantum realm is often conceptualized as underlying ours, phrases such as 'collapse of the state vector' imply a realm superior to mundane existence, and just abut all QM assumes this realm is timeless/eternal/non-enthropic. (Sounds kind of like heaven, doesn't it?).
So, opening up the discourse to accept possible explanations with such properties proves that science can deal with some things it once thought it couldn't address at all (the contrary argument being that QM itself isn't scientific.)
I'd say: at the start, you are buying an obligation for them to send you those magazines, but the obligation converts, at 1/12 of the total each month, to actual possession of those magazines. So you're correct, what you are really buying isn't those future magazines, but that's because by the time you take delivery, that magazine is a present magazine, not a future one.
That's the point about future debt having value. Some future debts can be described, in terms of what will likely happen as the future becomes the present. In most cases, there are many reasonable and knowable limitations, i.e. overproduction of pork may decrease the expected value of those pork belly futures. The more limitations on our knowledge that cannot be predicted, the less value can be estimated. That ties into what you are saying about fraud - person X buys as though the question of whether person Y will have the stock to sell is settled, but in fact, it's another one of the uncertanties.
But, people get tax breaks for long term capital gains because they are investing. If the overall uncertanties in investing make it effectively just gambling for X and Y is lying about those uncertanties, it doesn't really matter which of them makes money (although it's obviously likely to be Y, at least in the long run). If X 'wins' he gets a break not for wise investing that presumably creates markets, values and jobs for the rest of us, but for being lucky. Y's profits come from being crooked. It's not just the fraud that makes that wrong - there's no advantages to the rest of society to give breaks based solely on luck either.