Fricking seedy. If I'm buying the media, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want with it. If I'm buying the data, they should replace the media for free. They can't have it both ways.
Most software companies get this, and will provide you with a replacement disc if you can prove you own the original.
Most entertainment media companies do not get this, and have successfully convinced millions of customers that their only recourse is to buy a new copy/license. Disney is one of the few who will replace media for a $6.95 fee - probably because of all the kids destroying videotapes and DVDs. If the others do, I haven't been able to find any reference to it on their websites. I gave up trying to replace some audio CDs whose reflective layer started flaking off, and just downloaded flac copies off of bittorrent.
Posting here because I'm late. The idea that gender is completely cultural is a scam, perpetuated by Dr. John Money to make his theories about gender identity appear legitimate. He theorized that gender was completely learned. His central case involved an identical twin male who was surgically reassigned as a female after a botched circumcision. He was raised as female, while the other twin was raised as male.
The "female" twin acted like a boy, and was miserable with her treatment as a girl. Dr. Money however covered this up and continued to publish reports on how well the "female" twin was doing in her life, and how successful the sexual reassignment was. His "groundbreaking" work was widely publicized and accepted as true at the time, tragically leading to many other cases of sexual reassignments at young ages. The fraud finally came to light when the "female" twin went public so others wouldn't have to go through what he went through. Dr. Money's work has been discredited, and it is now widely accepted that there are strong genetic influences for gender-stereotyped behaviors.
The problem I noticed with XP (dunno if Vista does the same) is that it doesn't seem to give running apps priority over disk cache. So if you have your browser in the background and hit a lot of files (e.g. a virus scan), the browser would get paged to disk and would take forever to bring back to the foreground.
What would be great is a setting like, "disk cache should never exceed 256 MB unless there is free RAM". In other words, if the total memory footprint of the OS and my running apps is less than my physical RAM minus 256 MB, they will never be swapped to disk. As I start approaching the limit, the first thing to be scaled back should be disk cache. Disk cache >256 MB will not be preserved by swapping my apps to disk.
As it is, I set XP's swapfile manually to 128 MB (any smaller and I would get frequent complaints about it being too small even though I have 3 GB of RAM). If it really needs more memory, it will override my setting and increase the swapfile size. But 99% of the time this limits the amount of apps XP can swap to disk to just 128 MB, which for me results in a much speedier system.
Except controlling distribution of your creative work is a Constitutionally protected right:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
So to make your analogies work, it'd be like you setting up a large sign in front of a restaurant's doorway, blocking its customers and employees from entering - violating their right to operate and associate freely Or building the new highway on land owned by someone without compensating them - violating their right to property ownership.
This is why copyright reform has to happen at a Constitutional level, and why the Supreme Court cases are so important. As it stands right now, copyright holders are within their rights to protect their works using any passive means such as DRM, even if it ends up violating fair use rights. Someone using a fair use exemption is protected from prosecution for copyright infringement. It does not (currently) mean the copyright holder has to go out of their way to accommodate access for fair use.
Re:If you ever lived in a foreign country
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Censorship By Glut
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The U.S. is so large and economically dominant that it's very easy to live here without ever knowing what's going on in the outside world at large. Very few things that happen abroad have a noticeable effect here. The U.S. has a GDP of $14 trillion, but imports and exports account for just $3.1 trillion, a 4.5 to 1 ratio. (Please note that GDP is gross domestic product and calculates exports minus imports, not the sum of imports and exports.)
It's very different elsewhere. Most countries are small or have significant economic ties to their neighbors. Canada has a GDP of $1.3 trillion, with imports and exports accounting for $850 billion in trade - a 1.5 to 1 ratio. Germany has a $2.6 trillion GDP vs. $2.1 trillion in foreign trade - a 1.2 to 1 ratio. So international news and events have a much greater impact on their citizens' everyday lives.
That said, I do agree the news broadcasts here are pretty pathetic. It seems the news stations cater to what people want to watch, instead of what's important. In terms of marketability, it would seem the fluff piece about Annette's cat in the tree gets better ratings than coverage about some terrorist attack in Mumbai. It's the only explanation I can think of for the existence of such shows as Jerry Springer.
A: Batteries and ultracapacitors are much better, and can be woven into the present infrastructure at a far lower cost.
Actually, in terms of energy density per kg or per $, batteries are much, much worse than hydrogen. A typical 11V 6000 mAh laptop battery costs about $100 and holds 0.066 kWh of electricity (237,600 joules). Figure electricity costs $0.11 per kWh (average residential price for the U.S.) and your $120 battery is carry 0.726 cents worth of electricity - that's right, you pay a hundred dollars for your laptop battery to carry around less than a penny's worth of electricity. If you use it for 500 cycles (which is the typical life of a Li-ion battery pack), it's carried a whopping $3.63 worth of electricity in its lifetime.
Otherwise I don't disagree with anything specific you say. However, you're making the mistake of thinking that this is about making the cheapest fuel/battery possible. It's not. It's about making an energy storage medium which is a combination of cheap, lightweight, doesn't take much space, is safe, and doesn't destroy the world we live in. The best solution doesn't have to be the best in all those categories, heck it doesn't even have to be the best in any of those categories. The fuel/battery with the best mix will end up the winner. It can be sub-optimal in one or many of the categories as long as the combination is best. That's why petroleum is so ubiquitous - it fails miserably in the environmental category, but is or is near the best in all the others. Current electric vehicles can travel more than twice as far per dollar of energy as ICE vehicles, but the ICE still dominates because of its superior performance in the other factors.
Actually he sounds more like a T. Rex costume with the inevitable compromises necessary to put a human actor inside it. Add some modified spines from a stegosaurus, and fire-breathing from mythology and you're there.
It'd be awfully difficult to power this thing with a hand crank. 3 light bulbs I assume means 300 watts. That's 0.4 hp. A fit cyclist can maintain only a little more than 0.3 hp using his legs.
I believe it dates back to the colonial days. Back then, most Europeans declared loyalty to a sovereign like a king or queen (the whole royalty thing). Americans declared loyalty to a country, which was quite a novel concept back then (not so much anymore). Hanging a map of the country on the wall doesn't have quite the cachet as hanging a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, so people settled on the flag instead. Same thing with Northern Ireland - they're trying to make a show of support for a country, thus the emphasis on a flag.
This is a mountain in the eye of most journalists. Photojournalism is no different that journalism...you shouldn't be allowed to screw around with the facts, as mal-composed and uninteresting as they may be.
Problem is this was not photojournalism. Photojournalism would've been a photo of her accepting her 4th star at a promotion ceremony.
This was just a courtesy photo so the reader of a story would have some idea who the person in the story was. Whenever you see a story about some famous entertainer, their courtesy portrait accompanying it is virtually guaranteed to have been photoshopped to remove blemishes. They're not going to use the raw output from some paparazzi's camera for such purposes. And if it's a studio portrait, it's part of the photographer's job to post-process it to remove or tone down any blemishes.
Their "zero tolerance" policy is going to run into serious problems with pictures of people. I can guarantee you that 99% of all portraits of famous people have been digitally retouched or airbrushed in some way, whether it's pimple removal, erasing an annoying object in the background, or a wholesale changing of the person's complexion. It's just how it's done in the photo industry.
AP needs to make a distinction between journalistic news-breaking photos (like Iran's missile launch) where the photo is the story, and courtesy photos (like this one) which serve only as a reference for the story. What's next, they're going to reject a map accompanying a story because it's not a digitally unaltered satellite photo?
Some woman called Animal Control complaining that a bunch of us were letting our dogs pee at the park, where kids played. Guess she never really thought about where all the squirrels, rabbits, birds, rats, and other critters do their business.
The President traditionally submits a budget to set the agenda. Of course, the congress is free to totally ignore it, but in practice the President generally provides a roadmap of what he wants to see.
That's why I blame Reagan for the runaway budget during his years, even though conservatives tend to blame the Democrat congress. Reagan didn't even *try* to submit smaller government budgets, and he certainly didn't do any veto threats.
Current estimates put U.S. health care spending at approximately 15.2% of GDP, second only to the tiny Marshall Islands among all United Nations member nations. The health share of GDP is expected to continue its historical upward trend, reaching 19.5 percent of GDP by 2017. In 2007 the U.S. spent $2.26 trillion on health care, or $7,439 per person.
I've been wondering what the median spending on health care is, not the mean. The problem with using a mean is that if a bunch of rich guys want to pay $200k/yr for botox treatments, it'll inflate the mean spending on medical procedures even though most of the population isn't paying any more. The median is designed specifically to get around this problem by looking at how much the 50th percentile of the population pays. In a nationalized health care system which covers everyone, there isn't any appreciable difference between mean and median; but in a voluntary system like in the U.S., there could be a significant difference.
Even more confounding, some of the statistics I've seen on this use the mean for average U.S. health care cost, then compare it to the median of developed countries. If you're smart enough to use the median for one measure, then use it for the other as well.
It's really not a bad choice. Most of the people opposed to the ACLU do so because they don't care to admit that they might be wrong in their interpretation of the constitution. Many of them refuse to admit that there's more than one interpretation of the 2nd amendment that comes from reading it.
The problem with the ACLU's interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that in all the other Amendments of the Bill of Rights, the ACLU chooses an interpretation which favors citizens rights over that of the state. But with the 2nd Amendment, the ACLU chooses an interpretation which favors the rights of the state over that of the citizens. As the recent Supreme Court decision pointed out, if the 2nd Amendment really refers to the state's right to maintain a militia, WTF is an Amendment outlining a state's right doing in the Bill of Rights, where all 9 other Amendments outlines rights reserved for the people?
I actually admire most of the work they do. I agree with their stance of defending even lowlifes if it's a matter of principle over their civil liberties being violated. Anyone will go out on a limb for family or a friend. The true measure of whether you really believe in a principle is whether you'll go out on a limb for someone you don't care about or even hate. But their 2nd Amendment stance is blatantly politically motivated. They would be better off IMHO if they just dropped the facade and admitted it, and carried on defending the other 9 Amendments.
Furthermore, the housing crisis was largely a product of subprime lending. By law, F&F were prohibited from engaging in subprime lending. F&F didn't create the problem they fell victim to. F&F were engaging in legitimate lending, but they were not setup to be resilient against a national wide decline in home values.
I In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.
''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''
Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.
You're so full of misinformation. Barney Frank was the one who passed regulations on Freddie & Fannie. In July 2007 Frank became chairman and he and the Democrats passed regulations within two months. These regulations had been blocked by the house Republicans since 1994.
It's incredible that the Republicans claim the big mean Democrats prevented them from instituting a proper regulatory framework despite over a decade of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' - Barney Frank, 2003, speaking in opposition to a White House proposal to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Truth is both parties share blame for this. Republicans liked loosening credit for housing because they felt fewer regulations and more liquidity = good. Democrats liked it because they felt more houses for lower income people = good.
By July 2007 (when the credit crunch first began) it was obvious housing was a bubble set to burst, so both sides were rapidly backtracking from their previous positions. Democrats were disavowing having ever advocated housing for those with less than mediocre credit. Republicans however couldn't disavow their core belief that less government regulation is better, so ended up taking most of the blame. I give Barney Frank credit for recognizing his mistake and acting to rectify it in 2007, but that does not absolve him of blame for having helped originally cause the problem in the first half of the decade.
Actually, I think the RIAA wants the movie theater model. Where 100% of the revenue from ticket sales goes to the studio, and the theater has to sell overpiced food and drinks to stay in business.
I already covered this in my first reply. Your example is contrived such that the explanations are mutually exclusive - one explanation or the other must be true. Either the power must come from a hamster, or it must come from a battery. The same goes for round earth / flat earth. As I've already stated, in neither case are you directly disproving a theory. You are not disproving that a hamster powers the flashlight. You are proving that a battery powers the flashlight. But because the two theories are mutually exclusive, by logical extension the theory of hamster power is disproven. Like I've said in my first post, science proves the positive, logic via exclusivity proves the negative.
It does not however hold for evolution and creationism. They are not exclusive theories. Certain narrower interpretations of both can be exclusive, but the overall scope of either does not entirely preclude the other. A creationist can always argue that God created evolution, or that God created the world in its current state to test our faith by offering evolution as a plausible explanation. Likewise, if the situation were reversed (as it was in Darwin's day), one could argue that even if God created the universe, the mechanism he created to develop live was evolution. Neither of these creationist theories can be disproven by proving the theory of evolution. Your entire line of reasoning is based on the flawed premise that evolution and creationism are mutually exclusive.
When people who purport to support science put forth flawed arguments such as yours, it discredits science overall. Most lay persons can grok the concept that if two theories are not mutually exclusive, proving one does not automatically disprove the other. When you then proclaim in the name of science that it does, they conclude that you, and by proxy science, are logically flawed. They are consequently less likely to trust the words of scientists and their results in the future. Please be more careful in the future.
Dude you are embarrassing yourself. It apparently never occurred to you that evidence collected can also contradict many theories. Thus evidence can be "positive" for some theories, reinforcing them, and at the same time lead to discrediting of other theories, thus be "negative" for them. That is the very process of elimination which landed the "Turtles All The Way Down" idea along with the Flat Earth and Creationism in the same garbage bin of science.
Sigh. I'll try one last time before writing you off as lost. Since you apparently are so convinced of my wrongness you won't listen to my logic, let me quote renown skeptic James Randi in a guest lecture at Caltech. I presume you won't question his reasoning ability nor the institution he at which he gave the lecture:
We skeptics, as Michael Shermer clearly pointed out, are not in the business of debunking. If I were in the business of debunking, and I've often had that label pinned on me and I've always resented it and denied it - it means I would go into an investigation convinced that "this ain't so and I'm going to show you that it isn't." I'm not a lawyer; I don't have an advocacy position to take. I go into a situation as an investigator.
To be perfectly fair, I can't prove a negative, but I go into this thing prepared to be shown. Am I prejudiced against it? Oh, yes! I have to admit that. But if you've been sitting by a chimney for 63 years on the evening of December 24 and a fat man in a red suit has never bounced down that chimney, you can say, "One hundred percent of my evidence shows me that this claim is not necessarily so. I cannot prove that it isn't, but it's not very likely to be true, based on what we know."
The Santa Claus example may seem trivial and a little inappropriate, but it is actually a good metaphor for so many paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Another is flying reindeer. This one we can actually test. (Please don't tell the SPCA about this.) I don't really want to do the experiment, but let's walk through it as if I were doing it. It's a thought experiment. Let's select, by some randomizing process, a thousand reindeer. We'll number them and get them all together in a reindeer truck (I don't know what you put reindeer in) and take them to the top of the World Trade Center in New York. We are going to test whether or not reindeer can fly. You have your reindeer all lined up, a video-camera operator standing by, lots of pads of paper and pens at work. The time is now ten past ten in the morning.
OK, first experiment. Number one reindeer, please, up to the edge. Camera going? Good. Push. Uhh, write down "no". Really NO! Number two. Push. I don't know what the result of the experiment will be; I suspect strongly what it will be, based upon my meagre knowledge of the aerodynamics of the average reindeer, though I'm not an expert on it. But based upon previous accounts of what reindeer can and cannot do, I think we are going to end up with a pile of very unhappy and broken reindeer at the foot of the World Trade Center. And probably a couple of policemen will be standing by a squad car saying, "I don't know, but here comes another one."
What have we proven with this experiment? Have we proven that reindeer cannot fly? No, of course not. We have only shown that on this occasion, under these conditions of atmospheric pressure, temperature, radiation, at this position geographically, at this season, that these 1000 reindeer either could not or chose not to fly. (If the second is the case, then we certainly know something of the intelligence of the average reindeer.) However, we have not, and can not, prove the negative that reindeer cannot fly, technically, rationally, and philosophically speaking. People will often look at this example and say, "Well, how many reindeer would you have to test?" I'm not going to get into the statistics of the argument; I will only tell you that you cannot prove a negative.
Sure it can. Otherwise the "Turtles All the Way Down" idea would be viewed exactly on par with modern astronomy, geophysics and the like.
No it can't. Science builds positive evidence. It cannot generate negative evidence (nothing can except logical exclusion). Modern astronomy has greater standing than the "turtles all the way down" idea because it has considerable positive evidence. The "turtles all the way down" idea has none.
But there's still a significant difference between having no evidence and being logically disproven by exclusion. Someone could argue that the turtles don't show up in photos, or they turn invisible when we're looking. As outlandish as they are, they are still valid theories. Just like quantum physics was initially seen as outlandish ("God does not play dice") before becoming generally accepted.
It can't prove that reindeer cannot fly. It can't prove that bigfoot doesn't exist. It can't prove the world isn't flat. Science can't prove a negative.
Dude, you forfeited any credibility with that sentence. There is exactly zero evidence for "flying raindeer". Zero credible evidence for bigfoot. There is however plenty of evidence for earth not being flat. And science can quite conclusively prove that Earth is not flat. It can even demonstrate its actual shape.
At some point, every theory has zero credible evidence. They were just a brainstorm. If you put everything with zero credible evidence in the same category as disproven things, then science would never get anywhere because every theory by definition starts with zero credible evidence.
You are completely confused as to what "proving the negative" means. It refers to an idea of demonstrating that something does not exist, not to demonstrating that something is one way or another. Since neither "flying reindeer" nor bigfoot are proven to exist, nothing can be said about these, nor any other imaginary creatures.
Fine, then call it the theory that reindeer are able to fly, not the theory that flying reindeer exist. You cannot disprove the theory that reindeer are able to fly. The only thing you can do is prove the theory that reindeer are able to fly.
I weep for the future of science, and that your bizarre ideas are being modded insightful on slashdot of all places. I beg of you, please read up on positive and negative proof before you continue spreading your mistaken ideas and further damage the credibility of science.
No it is not since I did not replace the terms at random. I did replace Creationism with another equally scientifically discredited "theory". Not some random view.
There's your problem right there. Science cannot discredit. It can't prove that reindeer cannot fly. It can't prove that bigfoot doesn't exist. It can't prove the world isn't flat. Science can't prove a negative.
Science can only prove positives. If you find one reindeer that can fly, you've proven they can fly. But because they're logically exclusive, you've also disproven the theory that they can't fly. If you show that the world is round, you've disproven the theory that the world is flat because they're logically exclusive. But like it or not, evolution does not exclude the existence of God. So proof of evolution does not disprove the theory of creationism.
Of course the burden of proof is on the people advocating the theory. If creationists want to advance their theory as a science, they need to come up with experimental evidence supporting their theory. But it's important to understand exactly what science can and can't do before you start drawing invalid analogies like you did. This thing called continental drift was once considered "discredited" by people like you who misunderstand science.
No, there's plenty of natural gas. Known reserves worldwide are about 172 trillion m^3. One m^3 of gas has about as much energy as one liter of oil (38.4 MJ/m^3 vs 38.6 MJ/l).
So 172 trillion m^3 of gas is the energy equivalent of about 172 trillion liters of oil = 1.47 trillion barrels of oil.
So if we could instantaneously convert all our oil consumption into natural gas consumption, the known gas reserves would last us 49 years. There's plenty of gas.
The problem with natural gas is its extremely low volumetric energy density. That makes it expensive to store and transport. It's such a hassle that a lot of oil wells (especially offshore) simply burn any extraneous gas which comes up with the oil, instead of trying to capture and store it. The 3600 psi CNG tank in a Honda Civic GX CNG takes up most of the trunk, and only provides as much energy as 8 gallons of gasoline.
If the domain were just his name, none of this would matter. But the fact that the company's name matches the domain makes it a potential trademark dispute, so you must be mindful of ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. It explicitly lists several types of "bad faith" registrations, and the first one is acquiring a domain primarily for the purposes of selling it. If you throw out a number, that can be interpreted as evidence of intent to sell, and thus bad faith and grounds for losing your domain.
Instead, get them to make an offer first. Something like, "I hadn't really thought about selling it, but my bills have been getting kind of high recently. How much were you thinking?" Although the most bulletproof is, "Sorry, not interested" and hope they make an offer.
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Most software companies get this, and will provide you with a replacement disc if you can prove you own the original.
Most entertainment media companies do not get this, and have successfully convinced millions of customers that their only recourse is to buy a new copy/license. Disney is one of the few who will replace media for a $6.95 fee - probably because of all the kids destroying videotapes and DVDs. If the others do, I haven't been able to find any reference to it on their websites. I gave up trying to replace some audio CDs whose reflective layer started flaking off, and just downloaded flac copies off of bittorrent.
Posting here because I'm late. The idea that gender is completely cultural is a scam, perpetuated by Dr. John Money to make his theories about gender identity appear legitimate. He theorized that gender was completely learned. His central case involved an identical twin male who was surgically reassigned as a female after a botched circumcision. He was raised as female, while the other twin was raised as male.
The "female" twin acted like a boy, and was miserable with her treatment as a girl. Dr. Money however covered this up and continued to publish reports on how well the "female" twin was doing in her life, and how successful the sexual reassignment was. His "groundbreaking" work was widely publicized and accepted as true at the time, tragically leading to many other cases of sexual reassignments at young ages. The fraud finally came to light when the "female" twin went public so others wouldn't have to go through what he went through. Dr. Money's work has been discredited, and it is now widely accepted that there are strong genetic influences for gender-stereotyped behaviors.
The problem I noticed with XP (dunno if Vista does the same) is that it doesn't seem to give running apps priority over disk cache. So if you have your browser in the background and hit a lot of files (e.g. a virus scan), the browser would get paged to disk and would take forever to bring back to the foreground.
What would be great is a setting like, "disk cache should never exceed 256 MB unless there is free RAM". In other words, if the total memory footprint of the OS and my running apps is less than my physical RAM minus 256 MB, they will never be swapped to disk. As I start approaching the limit, the first thing to be scaled back should be disk cache. Disk cache >256 MB will not be preserved by swapping my apps to disk.
As it is, I set XP's swapfile manually to 128 MB (any smaller and I would get frequent complaints about it being too small even though I have 3 GB of RAM). If it really needs more memory, it will override my setting and increase the swapfile size. But 99% of the time this limits the amount of apps XP can swap to disk to just 128 MB, which for me results in a much speedier system.
Except controlling distribution of your creative work is a Constitutionally protected right:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
So to make your analogies work, it'd be like you setting up a large sign in front of a restaurant's doorway, blocking its customers and employees from entering - violating their right to operate and associate freely Or building the new highway on land owned by someone without compensating them - violating their right to property ownership.
This is why copyright reform has to happen at a Constitutional level, and why the Supreme Court cases are so important. As it stands right now, copyright holders are within their rights to protect their works using any passive means such as DRM, even if it ends up violating fair use rights. Someone using a fair use exemption is protected from prosecution for copyright infringement. It does not (currently) mean the copyright holder has to go out of their way to accommodate access for fair use.
The U.S. is so large and economically dominant that it's very easy to live here without ever knowing what's going on in the outside world at large. Very few things that happen abroad have a noticeable effect here. The U.S. has a GDP of $14 trillion, but imports and exports account for just $3.1 trillion, a 4.5 to 1 ratio. (Please note that GDP is gross domestic product and calculates exports minus imports, not the sum of imports and exports.)
It's very different elsewhere. Most countries are small or have significant economic ties to their neighbors. Canada has a GDP of $1.3 trillion, with imports and exports accounting for $850 billion in trade - a 1.5 to 1 ratio. Germany has a $2.6 trillion GDP vs. $2.1 trillion in foreign trade - a 1.2 to 1 ratio. So international news and events have a much greater impact on their citizens' everyday lives.
That said, I do agree the news broadcasts here are pretty pathetic. It seems the news stations cater to what people want to watch, instead of what's important. In terms of marketability, it would seem the fluff piece about Annette's cat in the tree gets better ratings than coverage about some terrorist attack in Mumbai. It's the only explanation I can think of for the existence of such shows as Jerry Springer.
Actually, in terms of energy density per kg or per $, batteries are much, much worse than hydrogen. A typical 11V 6000 mAh laptop battery costs about $100 and holds 0.066 kWh of electricity (237,600 joules). Figure electricity costs $0.11 per kWh (average residential price for the U.S.) and your $120 battery is carry 0.726 cents worth of electricity - that's right, you pay a hundred dollars for your laptop battery to carry around less than a penny's worth of electricity. If you use it for 500 cycles (which is the typical life of a Li-ion battery pack), it's carried a whopping $3.63 worth of electricity in its lifetime.
Otherwise I don't disagree with anything specific you say. However, you're making the mistake of thinking that this is about making the cheapest fuel/battery possible. It's not. It's about making an energy storage medium which is a combination of cheap, lightweight, doesn't take much space, is safe, and doesn't destroy the world we live in. The best solution doesn't have to be the best in all those categories, heck it doesn't even have to be the best in any of those categories. The fuel/battery with the best mix will end up the winner. It can be sub-optimal in one or many of the categories as long as the combination is best. That's why petroleum is so ubiquitous - it fails miserably in the environmental category, but is or is near the best in all the others. Current electric vehicles can travel more than twice as far per dollar of energy as ICE vehicles, but the ICE still dominates because of its superior performance in the other factors.
Actually he sounds more like a T. Rex costume with the inevitable compromises necessary to put a human actor inside it. Add some modified spines from a stegosaurus, and fire-breathing from mythology and you're there.
It'd be awfully difficult to power this thing with a hand crank. 3 light bulbs I assume means 300 watts. That's 0.4 hp. A fit cyclist can maintain only a little more than 0.3 hp using his legs.
I believe it dates back to the colonial days. Back then, most Europeans declared loyalty to a sovereign like a king or queen (the whole royalty thing). Americans declared loyalty to a country, which was quite a novel concept back then (not so much anymore). Hanging a map of the country on the wall doesn't have quite the cachet as hanging a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, so people settled on the flag instead. Same thing with Northern Ireland - they're trying to make a show of support for a country, thus the emphasis on a flag.
Problem is this was not photojournalism. Photojournalism would've been a photo of her accepting her 4th star at a promotion ceremony.
This was just a courtesy photo so the reader of a story would have some idea who the person in the story was. Whenever you see a story about some famous entertainer, their courtesy portrait accompanying it is virtually guaranteed to have been photoshopped to remove blemishes. They're not going to use the raw output from some paparazzi's camera for such purposes. And if it's a studio portrait, it's part of the photographer's job to post-process it to remove or tone down any blemishes.
Their "zero tolerance" policy is going to run into serious problems with pictures of people. I can guarantee you that 99% of all portraits of famous people have been digitally retouched or airbrushed in some way, whether it's pimple removal, erasing an annoying object in the background, or a wholesale changing of the person's complexion. It's just how it's done in the photo industry.
AP needs to make a distinction between journalistic news-breaking photos (like Iran's missile launch) where the photo is the story, and courtesy photos (like this one) which serve only as a reference for the story. What's next, they're going to reject a map accompanying a story because it's not a digitally unaltered satellite photo?
Some woman called Animal Control complaining that a bunch of us were letting our dogs pee at the park, where kids played. Guess she never really thought about where all the squirrels, rabbits, birds, rats, and other critters do their business.
Wouldn't it make more sense to blame both?
I've been wondering what the median spending on health care is, not the mean. The problem with using a mean is that if a bunch of rich guys want to pay $200k/yr for botox treatments, it'll inflate the mean spending on medical procedures even though most of the population isn't paying any more. The median is designed specifically to get around this problem by looking at how much the 50th percentile of the population pays. In a nationalized health care system which covers everyone, there isn't any appreciable difference between mean and median; but in a voluntary system like in the U.S., there could be a significant difference.
Even more confounding, some of the statistics I've seen on this use the mean for average U.S. health care cost, then compare it to the median of developed countries. If you're smart enough to use the median for one measure, then use it for the other as well.
Switch the data cables to optical fibers.
The problem with the ACLU's interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that in all the other Amendments of the Bill of Rights, the ACLU chooses an interpretation which favors citizens rights over that of the state. But with the 2nd Amendment, the ACLU chooses an interpretation which favors the rights of the state over that of the citizens. As the recent Supreme Court decision pointed out, if the 2nd Amendment really refers to the state's right to maintain a militia, WTF is an Amendment outlining a state's right doing in the Bill of Rights, where all 9 other Amendments outlines rights reserved for the people?
I actually admire most of the work they do. I agree with their stance of defending even lowlifes if it's a matter of principle over their civil liberties being violated. Anyone will go out on a limb for family or a friend. The true measure of whether you really believe in a principle is whether you'll go out on a limb for someone you don't care about or even hate. But their 2nd Amendment stance is blatantly politically motivated. They would be better off IMHO if they just dropped the facade and admitted it, and carried on defending the other 9 Amendments.
Are you sure that's the right bill? He's not on the list of sponsors (who are all Republicans), and he voted against it. While we're at it, McCain authored a similar regulation in the Senate in 2005, yet he's somehow being blamed for the lack of regulations that caused the mortgage failures.
Were prohibited. A 1999 New York Times article states:
You mean this Barney Frank?
Truth is both parties share blame for this. Republicans liked loosening credit for housing because they felt fewer regulations and more liquidity = good. Democrats liked it because they felt more houses for lower income people = good.
By July 2007 (when the credit crunch first began) it was obvious housing was a bubble set to burst, so both sides were rapidly backtracking from their previous positions. Democrats were disavowing having ever advocated housing for those with less than mediocre credit. Republicans however couldn't disavow their core belief that less government regulation is better, so ended up taking most of the blame. I give Barney Frank credit for recognizing his mistake and acting to rectify it in 2007, but that does not absolve him of blame for having helped originally cause the problem in the first half of the decade.
Actually, I think the RIAA wants the movie theater model. Where 100% of the revenue from ticket sales goes to the studio, and the theater has to sell overpiced food and drinks to stay in business.
I already covered this in my first reply. Your example is contrived such that the explanations are mutually exclusive - one explanation or the other must be true. Either the power must come from a hamster, or it must come from a battery. The same goes for round earth / flat earth. As I've already stated, in neither case are you directly disproving a theory. You are not disproving that a hamster powers the flashlight. You are proving that a battery powers the flashlight. But because the two theories are mutually exclusive, by logical extension the theory of hamster power is disproven. Like I've said in my first post, science proves the positive, logic via exclusivity proves the negative.
It does not however hold for evolution and creationism. They are not exclusive theories. Certain narrower interpretations of both can be exclusive, but the overall scope of either does not entirely preclude the other. A creationist can always argue that God created evolution, or that God created the world in its current state to test our faith by offering evolution as a plausible explanation. Likewise, if the situation were reversed (as it was in Darwin's day), one could argue that even if God created the universe, the mechanism he created to develop live was evolution. Neither of these creationist theories can be disproven by proving the theory of evolution. Your entire line of reasoning is based on the flawed premise that evolution and creationism are mutually exclusive.
When people who purport to support science put forth flawed arguments such as yours, it discredits science overall. Most lay persons can grok the concept that if two theories are not mutually exclusive, proving one does not automatically disprove the other. When you then proclaim in the name of science that it does, they conclude that you, and by proxy science, are logically flawed. They are consequently less likely to trust the words of scientists and their results in the future. Please be more careful in the future.
Sigh. I'll try one last time before writing you off as lost. Since you apparently are so convinced of my wrongness you won't listen to my logic, let me quote renown skeptic James Randi in a guest lecture at Caltech. I presume you won't question his reasoning ability nor the institution he at which he gave the lecture:
We skeptics, as Michael Shermer clearly pointed out, are not in the business of debunking. If I were in the business of debunking, and I've often had that label pinned on me and I've always resented it and denied it - it means I would go into an investigation convinced that "this ain't so and I'm going to show you that it isn't." I'm not a lawyer; I don't have an advocacy position to take. I go into a situation as an investigator.
To be perfectly fair, I can't prove a negative, but I go into this thing prepared to be shown. Am I prejudiced against it? Oh, yes! I have to admit that. But if you've been sitting by a chimney for 63 years on the evening of December 24 and a fat man in a red suit has never bounced down that chimney, you can say, "One hundred percent of my evidence shows me that this claim is not necessarily so. I cannot prove that it isn't, but it's not very likely to be true, based on what we know."
The Santa Claus example may seem trivial and a little inappropriate, but it is actually a good metaphor for so many paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Another is flying reindeer. This one we can actually test. (Please don't tell the SPCA about this.) I don't really want to do the experiment, but let's walk through it as if I were doing it. It's a thought experiment. Let's select, by some randomizing process, a thousand reindeer. We'll number them and get them all together in a reindeer truck (I don't know what you put reindeer in) and take them to the top of the World Trade Center in New York. We are going to test whether or not reindeer can fly. You have your reindeer all lined up, a video-camera operator standing by, lots of pads of paper and pens at work. The time is now ten past ten in the morning.
OK, first experiment. Number one reindeer, please, up to the edge. Camera going? Good. Push. Uhh, write down "no". Really NO! Number two. Push. I don't know what the result of the experiment will be; I suspect strongly what it will be, based upon my meagre knowledge of the aerodynamics of the average reindeer, though I'm not an expert on it. But based upon previous accounts of what reindeer can and cannot do, I think we are going to end up with a pile of very unhappy and broken reindeer at the foot of the World Trade Center. And probably a couple of policemen will be standing by a squad car saying, "I don't know, but here comes another one."
What have we proven with this experiment? Have we proven that reindeer cannot fly? No, of course not. We have only shown that on this occasion, under these conditions of atmospheric pressure, temperature, radiation, at this position geographically, at this season, that these 1000 reindeer either could not or chose not to fly. (If the second is the case, then we certainly know something of the intelligence of the average reindeer.) However, we have not, and can not, prove the negative that reindeer cannot fly, technically, rationally, and philosophically speaking. People will often look at this example and say, "Well, how many reindeer would you have to test?" I'm not going to get into the statistics of the argument; I will only tell you that you cannot prove a negative.
No it can't. Science builds positive evidence. It cannot generate negative evidence (nothing can except logical exclusion). Modern astronomy has greater standing than the "turtles all the way down" idea because it has considerable positive evidence. The "turtles all the way down" idea has none.
But there's still a significant difference between having no evidence and being logically disproven by exclusion. Someone could argue that the turtles don't show up in photos, or they turn invisible when we're looking. As outlandish as they are, they are still valid theories. Just like quantum physics was initially seen as outlandish ("God does not play dice") before becoming generally accepted.
At some point, every theory has zero credible evidence. They were just a brainstorm. If you put everything with zero credible evidence in the same category as disproven things, then science would never get anywhere because every theory by definition starts with zero credible evidence.
Fine, then call it the theory that reindeer are able to fly, not the theory that flying reindeer exist. You cannot disprove the theory that reindeer are able to fly. The only thing you can do is prove the theory that reindeer are able to fly.
I weep for the future of science, and that your bizarre ideas are being modded insightful on slashdot of all places. I beg of you, please read up on positive and negative proof before you continue spreading your mistaken ideas and further damage the credibility of science.
There's your problem right there. Science cannot discredit. It can't prove that reindeer cannot fly. It can't prove that bigfoot doesn't exist. It can't prove the world isn't flat. Science can't prove a negative.
Science can only prove positives. If you find one reindeer that can fly, you've proven they can fly. But because they're logically exclusive, you've also disproven the theory that they can't fly. If you show that the world is round, you've disproven the theory that the world is flat because they're logically exclusive. But like it or not, evolution does not exclude the existence of God. So proof of evolution does not disprove the theory of creationism.
Of course the burden of proof is on the people advocating the theory. If creationists want to advance their theory as a science, they need to come up with experimental evidence supporting their theory. But it's important to understand exactly what science can and can't do before you start drawing invalid analogies like you did. This thing called continental drift was once considered "discredited" by people like you who misunderstand science.
No, there's plenty of natural gas. Known reserves worldwide are about 172 trillion m^3. One m^3 of gas has about as much energy as one liter of oil (38.4 MJ/m^3 vs 38.6 MJ/l).
So 172 trillion m^3 of gas is the energy equivalent of about 172 trillion liters of oil = 1.47 trillion barrels of oil.
Worldwide oil consumption is about 80.29 million barrels per day, or about 30 billion barrels per year.
So if we could instantaneously convert all our oil consumption into natural gas consumption, the known gas reserves would last us 49 years. There's plenty of gas.
The problem with natural gas is its extremely low volumetric energy density. That makes it expensive to store and transport. It's such a hassle that a lot of oil wells (especially offshore) simply burn any extraneous gas which comes up with the oil, instead of trying to capture and store it. The 3600 psi CNG tank in a Honda Civic GX CNG takes up most of the trunk, and only provides as much energy as 8 gallons of gasoline.
If the domain were just his name, none of this would matter. But the fact that the company's name matches the domain makes it a potential trademark dispute, so you must be mindful of ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. It explicitly lists several types of "bad faith" registrations, and the first one is acquiring a domain primarily for the purposes of selling it. If you throw out a number, that can be interpreted as evidence of intent to sell, and thus bad faith and grounds for losing your domain.
Instead, get them to make an offer first. Something like, "I hadn't really thought about selling it, but my bills have been getting kind of high recently. How much were you thinking?" Although the most bulletproof is, "Sorry, not interested" and hope they make an offer.
Go to Moniker's domain auction site for some ballpark figures of how much domains similar to yours are selling for.