At the point that we decide that we don't want to exploit the rest of our system, then learning about it becomes nothing but an exercise in intellectual masturbation. It becomes knowledge that might make a few intellectual elites feel good, entertain and astound a few more outside that clique, and a colossal waste of money for the rest of us. Pure knowledge that is NEVER going to be turned into practical application isn't worth the effort.
This point is valid up until the point that we get a discovery that blows all of our current knowledge out of the water, like someone figuring out based on the astrophysics principles learned from Hubble's science how FTL travel might actually be possible, opening up the universe in a way that's not possible now.
The ISS/shuttle/moon/Mars are incremental steps. Those programs should not preclude the (admittedly remote) possibility of a discovery that will make a vast change in our capabilities.
A successful R&D operation needs the opportunity to persue the ridiculous as well as the plebian, just in case the phenomenal reward is not where we thought we should be looking. We're talking about hedging our bets with a tiny investment. Penny-pinching here would be extremely short-sighted.
That Thomas Butler thing would make a good movie, since there's a lot of interest in law shows right now. It's got all the ingredients - the naive but brilliant scientist, wrongfully accused by the vengeful woman who is his superior, hounded by the feds. The ending's no good though. It'd have to be changed. Justice should prevail! No anti-establishment stories in today's climate!
Surely having and raising kids is the only component of evolution? What else is there?
We have failed if our children are only as intelligent as we are.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit.
In evolutionary terms, if our children aren't in any way superior, we have failed. If the previous poster chooses to believe that intelligence is an important factor in terms of "fitness", then the statement is perfectly fair.
There are many medications that aren't known to be safe for use during pregnancy, because their effects on a developing child aren't known. Those effects will never be known, because no parent will take the risk of using them unless they have no choice. This new supplement is a less extreme case. Who's going to experiment with their children? A fairly small number of people. Over a very large number of generations, the effects will become known.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea. We can either be people who are willing to risk the health of our individual children for the "betterment" of the race, or we can be restricted to whatever changes evolution comes up with for us on its own, never using our intelligence to speed up the process.
Some people will decide one way, and some the other. Just like democracy, really. And about as well-informed.
What makes space exploration go? Money. Where do we get money from? Mostly from the public. How do we inspire the public? With showmanship, fantasies and bold plans - not with dry science.
...
Survival comes first - pretty pictures come next.
Hubble is the best showmanship (excepting the rovers, which won't be good forever) that NASA has. The way to get the public interested is the pretty pictures. I contend that Hubble has done more for NASA's publicity over the last few years than any other program. Well, their positive publicity, anyway...
There's an auction site I visit. The auctions with pictures end up with better prices than those without. People are visual creatures. If the rovers weren't returning pictures of Mars, no-one would care about them.
Pretty pictures first. Then money. Then we've got a shot at survival.
Yes indeed. It looked as though the original poster was attempting to protect the message, rather than the messenger; which is (I think) a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet (and of people in general.)
Just one problem - if you automatically respond to the 'sender' of any email with a zip file, asking them to resend, you're going to send to a lot of spoofed 'From' addresses every time a virus is going around.
ISP's provide a service, allowing people infected with a virus to spread that virus to hundreds and thousands of other people on the internet.
ISP's provide a general service, which includes that possibility. Fuel includes the possibility of it being in a car while the car has an accident and it being partly ""responsible"" (I wouldn't call it that).
Terrible analogy. Unlike the gas station, the ISP is continuously providing you with the service that allows you to cause harm (i.e. send viruses).
Hrmm without fuel, a car doesn't drive, hence can't (in any practical sense) cause accidents. Same as the ISP, it 'includes that possibility'.
The analogy would be the car that drove up to the gas station with an obviously inebriated driver, and the gas station owner sells him the gas anyway. The owner bears some moral responsibility for the outcome.
A better analogy would be a barman continuing to serve a drunk customer who is making a nuisance of him/herself, which is illegal in some places.
The phone company will eventually cut you off if you make abusive calls. The barman is supposed to stop serving you if you're drunk. An ISP is capable of determining whether you're causing a nuisance to other users, but does nothing about it.
I don't know if ISPs monitoring their customers' traffic is the 'correct' solution, but it is certainly a possible one.
I remember looking for a replacement AV solution earlier this year. One of the products (NOT Norton) claimed to have this kind of predictive ability - detecting viruses not through signatures but by analysis. I think it was Kaspersky, but I'm not sure. (In the end, I decided to put off my decision.) I was looking at the AV products listed on Virus Bulletin, in case you want to find out which one ot was.
Now SCO can sue Microsoft for unspecified damages to their reputation due to a security flaw in Word. They will have a secret settlement out of court, with Microsoft then able to legitimately give SCO some more secret money, but the settlement will include both SCO and Microsoft publicly stating that a. there is not security flaw in Microsoft Word and b. security flaws are not grounds for a lawsuit even if they were.
I'm sure that all the people who have been unable to find a new job after the old one was outsourced are much comforted by your argument. As long as you can still afford a computer, I guess they don't need food or shelter.
Having your imports exceed your export is not sustainable. Having too many displaced people makes society more expensive for the remainder who have jobs - you've either got to pay welfare or hire more cops to fight the crime that starving and homeless people must eventually turn to.
It seems to take longer today for people to migrate to new jobs than the job opportunities of a first-world take to change in nature. That's a problem, even though macroeconomics suggests that it will sort itself out in the long run.
I wouldn't have thought of the US legal system as particularly efficient. What would be the hallmarks of an efficient legal system? Quick settlement of cases? Few appeals? Few appeals that result in an overturn? Large awards? Small awards? Something I haven't thought of?
It will be copyrightable, not copyrighted. New publications of it would be copyrighted unless specific disclaimers were put on it. But if they weren't, no-one would be able to use it, so those disclaimers would probably go on there.
The owner of a database can often sell single records or small numbers of records to a customer. They can therefore retain obscurity over the remaineder of the data.
Very few novelists have succeeded by selling single sentences of a novel.
The OED is the standard arbiter for scrabble (at least in my grandmother's home.) If the OED introduced false words to catch out those who copy its work, those words might be usable in scrabble. Except that presumably the made-up words would be copy-rightable, and their use restricted, in order to be able to prosecute the copiers. So they wouldn't be usable in scrabble, because technically it'd be an infringement to use them at all.
So they'd have to be marked somehow, in the dictionary, soas not to be confused with words that could be used in scrabble - because that might be considered entrapment. So they'd have to come up with a word that meant 'a false word; not usable in a scrabble context'. And that word would also have to be in the dictionary.
So then you'd have this word that was also created by OED, 'licensed' for public use. And its definition would go something like:
contraverbal (adj.) - false (of words); not usable in a scrabble context.
[apologies to lingusts; I'm sure there are much better constructs for this definition]
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The ISS/shuttle/moon/Mars are incremental steps. Those programs should not preclude the (admittedly remote) possibility of a discovery that will make a vast change in our capabilities.
A successful R&D operation needs the opportunity to persue the ridiculous as well as the plebian, just in case the phenomenal reward is not where we thought we should be looking. We're talking about hedging our bets with a tiny investment. Penny-pinching here would be extremely short-sighted.
That Thomas Butler thing would make a good movie, since there's a lot of interest in law shows right now. It's got all the ingredients - the naive but brilliant scientist, wrongfully accused by the vengeful woman who is his superior, hounded by the feds. The ending's no good though. It'd have to be changed. Justice should prevail! No anti-establishment stories in today's climate!
Except that any time she stands up for NZ, she takes it back the next day - or pretends it never happened - or claims she was misunderstood...
The big black monolith might get us if we do that!
There are many medications that aren't known to be safe for use during pregnancy, because their effects on a developing child aren't known. Those effects will never be known, because no parent will take the risk of using them unless they have no choice. This new supplement is a less extreme case. Who's going to experiment with their children? A fairly small number of people. Over a very large number of generations, the effects will become known.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea. We can either be people who are willing to risk the health of our individual children for the "betterment" of the race, or we can be restricted to whatever changes evolution comes up with for us on its own, never using our intelligence to speed up the process.
Some people will decide one way, and some the other. Just like democracy, really. And about as well-informed.
There's an auction site I visit. The auctions with pictures end up with better prices than those without. People are visual creatures. If the rovers weren't returning pictures of Mars, no-one would care about them.
Pretty pictures first. Then money. Then we've got a shot at survival.
Fortunately we don't have to choose the lesser of the two evils, but can decide we want neither. Neat, huh!
Yes indeed. It looked as though the original poster was attempting to protect the message, rather than the messenger; which is (I think) a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet (and of people in general.)
Perhaps you might enjoy The Encyclopedia of Arda. It has quite a good discussion of who / what TB was.
Nonsense. It is very obviously named 'Beowulf'.
Just one problem - if you automatically respond to the 'sender' of any email with a zip file, asking them to resend, you're going to send to a lot of spoofed 'From' addresses every time a virus is going around.
A better analogy would be a barman continuing to serve a drunk customer who is making a nuisance of him/herself, which is illegal in some places.
The phone company will eventually cut you off if you make abusive calls. The barman is supposed to stop serving you if you're drunk. An ISP is capable of determining whether you're causing a nuisance to other users, but does nothing about it.
I don't know if ISPs monitoring their customers' traffic is the 'correct' solution, but it is certainly a possible one.
I remember looking for a replacement AV solution earlier this year. One of the products (NOT Norton) claimed to have this kind of predictive ability - detecting viruses not through signatures but by analysis. I think it was Kaspersky, but I'm not sure. (In the end, I decided to put off my decision.) I was looking at the AV products listed on Virus Bulletin, in case you want to find out which one ot was.
You heard it here first!
Having your imports exceed your export is not sustainable. Having too many displaced people makes society more expensive for the remainder who have jobs - you've either got to pay welfare or hire more cops to fight the crime that starving and homeless people must eventually turn to.
It seems to take longer today for people to migrate to new jobs than the job opportunities of a first-world take to change in nature. That's a problem, even though macroeconomics suggests that it will sort itself out in the long run.
Resulting in the pipe event horizon...
This is /. - you can't go around accusing people of being rational! ;-)
I thought of another one - did you mean universal availability (where universal means the same as in 'universal suffrage')?
I wouldn't have thought of the US legal system as particularly efficient. What would be the hallmarks of an efficient legal system? Quick settlement of cases? Few appeals? Few appeals that result in an overturn? Large awards? Small awards? Something I haven't thought of?
It will be copyrightable, not copyrighted. New publications of it would be copyrighted unless specific disclaimers were put on it. But if they weren't, no-one would be able to use it, so those disclaimers would probably go on there.
Very few novelists have succeeded by selling single sentences of a novel.
The OED is the standard arbiter for scrabble (at least in my grandmother's home.) If the OED introduced false words to catch out those who copy its work, those words might be usable in scrabble. Except that presumably the made-up words would be copy-rightable, and their use restricted, in order to be able to prosecute the copiers. So they wouldn't be usable in scrabble, because technically it'd be an infringement to use them at all.
So they'd have to be marked somehow, in the dictionary, soas not to be confused with words that could be used in scrabble - because that might be considered entrapment. So they'd have to come up with a word that meant 'a false word; not usable in a scrabble context'. And that word would also have to be in the dictionary.
So then you'd have this word that was also created by OED, 'licensed' for public use. And its definition would go something like:
contraverbal (adj.) - false (of words); not usable in a scrabble context.
[apologies to lingusts; I'm sure there are much better constructs for this definition]
So would this word be a valid word for scrabble?
So cloning would become illegal under copyright law, as well as whatever else might make it illegal... kewl.
That German judge told them they were only allowed to sue their own customers. Maybe they thought that sounded like really good advice...
Degenerate!