How about the idiots who, for example, think Bush is comparable to Hitler? That's just as stupid as not believing in evolution, or believing the earth is flat, or whatever. We're surrounded every day by idiots who believe in bizarre things.
Well, Gandhi is comparable to Hitler. I'd say he compares rather favourably, of course, but comparable, still.
Problem is, the "word of mouth" pool is finite. You only really get a superior candidate pool with at most two degrees of separation - you either hire someone you know, or someone recommended by someone you know. Go further apart and the social mechanisms that makes the method work (personal trust and obligations) fall apart, and you're no better off than advertising in a trade publication.
And you only know so many people in the business - and they only know so many - that the pool of competent and available candidates isn't large. You can fill one or two positions at a time by word of mouth, but if you're looking for a dozen people it's no longer any better than other ways.
But they do have a moral imperative and a duty not to promote dictatorship.
Sure they do, as much as any American company or person.
Um, do they? As far as I know, being a citizen (corporate or individual) of a country requires you to follow its laws. Nothing more and nothing less. If there really is a "moral imperative" to behave, or refrain from behaving, in a certain manner across the entire population, then encode that into law. If not, then get off people's backs about it.
If you want your companies to take the level of democracy and human rights' record into account when doing business in foreign countries, then write a law saying so (and accept the disruption to your relationships with similarily burdened dictatorships that happen to be military allies).
This ranks up there with certain folk refering to the slang term for Mathematics as 'Math', when it is infact 'Maths'
Since when is slang supposed to follow rules of grammar and usage?
If people use "math" as an informal shorthand for "mathematics" then that's the term, any individual with a grammar lexicon reposited in a painful location nonwidthstanding.
I got the impression the poster was talking about choosing the right language for a given project, rather than mixing languages within the same project - or mixing languages within a single binary.
Now, embedding an interpreter can be a very good idea in some cases (Think Emacs - or a game like Neverwinter Nights for that matter) - but of course only if the benefits outweigh the pretty daunting drawbacks that you point out.
By contrast, having more than one language in a project may make perfectly good sense if the project itself is heterogenous; you may want to write the web backend in Java while having thin client UI glue as client-side Javascript (and of course access the database with SQL).
And choosing proper tools for a new project rather than habitually, thoughtlessly use whatever you used on the last one is a no-brainer.
My argument is one of philosophy...not law. Rights are not decrees of government. There are real and fundamental human rights, including the right not to be forced to act against your will. The Quebec law you reference while probably existient, is morally wrong.
So, who decides what _is_ a fundamental human right, and what is morally right or wrong? I happen to think your take on this is the morally unsound one; that doesn't carry much weight for you of course, but in the very same way, your assertion of what is and is not morally right has very little value to me.
I believe you, but he is the originator of the argument you make (down to the shoes).
The "save a drowning man" situation is an old trope in moral philosophy (and barroom arguments all over the world). Adding shoes (or, as I almost did instead, an expensive watch) is a pretty obvious embellishment, just to make the injury specific.
As for the situation, we are living in a world and society where we _do_ have obligations, and these do include obligations to act. We are for instance usually required to report a crime to the authorities if we find out about it, any minor inconvenience or injury to ourselves nonwidthstanding. Similarily, it is AFAIK entirely possible to be convicted if you did not prevent an injury from happening if you could easily have prevented it and did know it was about to occur.
In your hypothetical world, we would have no society period. There would be no requirement to pay taxes, or fulfil any contracts, or aid anybody in any way ever. Of course, that world is impossible; we face daily situations where no course of action would leave all parties with their liberties (as you define them) intact. Trivial example: I'm sitting in this sunspotted porch, and you have no right to have me move aside from this nice, sunny spot. On the other hand, your apartment is in the building, and I have no right to prevent you from entering it.
When you steal an argument from someone, in this case Peter Singer, it's good form to say so.
I've never read anything he's written, or know anything more than that he argues for euthanasia (or is it the other way around?), so I'm pretty sure I haven't stolen anything from him.
If by "owner" you mean the people that invested the money and did the hard work to make it happen, then I hope they can do whatever they please.
Well, arguably "maybe".
Take this situation: A person is standing on a river bank, with his new blue suede shoes, say. Suddenly he sees a child drowning some small distance out. It would not be putting himself in any danger to wade out and grab the child. He does not do so, however, arguing that he _is_ free to help people or not, as he pleases. He's not a life guard, and besides, his new shoes would be ruined and who's going to pay for that.
He may be right - or a court may judge that not helping was an act of negligence resulting in a wroingful death. Two pretty important principles are colliding here.
And arguably the same situation persists with a medication that can save the life of people. This is pretty much what, for example, the US did with the anthrax scare, when they overrode the ownership claims of anthrax vaccine makers in order to protect the public - and what several poor nations are doing when the allow unlicensed copying of AIDS drugs in the face of an epidemic.
You might, in other words, get to the situation where, in the interests of public health, they may see legalized copying of their substance in several parts of the world, perhaps with a court-imposed "reasonable" payout that is not at the level they would have wanted.
Design the system so hoarding doesn't pay, then. That's the idea of designing for the worst case. How, in this case, I don't know - but there are any number of possible ways to discourage it. Allow no more in yearly patent royalties per licensee than the owner is earning from the technology in the patent themselves; make it legally binding to "sell" the use of the patent for a set one-time fee once the technology has become an ISO standard (that would encourage the use of standards as well) - there's many ways.
The thing to keep in mind is to focus on minimizing the downside. If, after lots of trying, you can't make for a reasonable downside and still make patents attractive to use, then perhaps pantents aren't the right tool for the problems we're trying to solve.
I suspect economical, political and social systems are best built the same way you do strategy analysis.
Forget about maximizing the best possible outcome in the best possible world. It's not going to happen anyway, so why worry about it? Instead, focus on the worst possible outcome, and create your system so as to minimize that. Any outcome that turns out better than that pessimistic minimum is then just a happy bonus.
So, make rules for patents that discourages fluff patents and extortion (you need to deposit a substantial sum that is returned upon a successful grant, but witheld if turned down?). Make it reasonably easy to challenge patents when invalid grants have slipped through, but that discourages vapid challenges (loser pays, for example).
And why don't I hear anyone making the argument "But BMW are just acting to maximise the profits of their shareholders, as they are required to do by law" that I have heard so often recently in Google's favour?
Trying to circumvent Google's rules for indexing sites and getting delisted as a result does not strike me as contributing hugely to BMW:s profits; quite the opposite, in fact.
Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.
Um, duh.
If you want to be indexed well, you have to make the site friendly to indexers. You are _always_ limited in your design by the pesky, inconvenient issue of people (and search engines) actually wanting access to your content. You're free to make a site that is difficult to navigate, or that search engine bots can't get easy access to, but don't go bitching about your lousy pagerank, low visit count or high user dissatisfaction afterwards.
'In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,' And 640K should be enough for everyone!
The difference, you're rapidly running into some fairly definite optical limits here. Given a small sensor (which you need to have a small lens, and thus a compact, pocketable camera, which is what people want), increasing resolution also increases noise sensitivity, something pocket cameras are already pretty bad at. Also, you're rapidly running out of lens quality. Increasing resolution does not help if the lens you use can't resolve detail at that level anyway. You can fix it to some extent by higher-quality optics, but you have some hard limits coming up. That can only be fixed by increasing the size of the optics, which is limited by the need to make the camera pocketable.
So while perhaps 8Mp is not the limit, it's fairly close. I doubt you'll see a 12Mp pocket camera anytime soon if ever.
What are you doing that you need more than 8 megapixels? Unless you're doing high end product or portrait work, an 8mp camera is more than adequate for your needs.
Higher resolution does give you more latitude for cropping, which is a good thing for anyone. That said, the drawbacks of very high density sensors are enough that I'm very happy with my 8Mp resolution already.
I'm not saying that this shouldn't be used here, but why weren't they tested at, say, a regular Lions game beforehand? It's the same number of people in the same location, just not as many of them are VIPs with the associated security concerns in case of evacuation.
This has little to do with the technology, or any actual threat. It is a fairly high-profile event, and so it is widely perceived as a target for an attack. If you stage public, high-profile events creating the perception of security you calm people down, and the event can proceed as planned.
It's just like scanners at airports - you counter the perception of a threat with the perception of security and everybody walks away happy. It means that a technology to, for example, scan passengers at airports without any visible organization or inconvenience is actually a lot less useful than a largely inneffective - but public - display of zeal. If you had an effective, unobtrusive way to scan people, you'd probably still need to keep sham security stations active, hassling people and delaying proceedings, just for the needed visibility.
What's more important to you - your principles or your job?
If you are principally against the idea of software patents, and yet work on applying and shoring up new ones, then no, there is no way around it - you're breaking your own principles. It is much like a pacifist having a job designing anti-personnel grenades, a PETA member working as a furrier, or a fundamentalist christian working on the production line for the day-after pill.
You don't have an "out"; you'll have to choose. Which, is of course up to you.
'putting profits before American principles of free speech'
Well, a publicly traded company is supposed to put profits first. If your politicians want them to put some other principle over and above that, all they have to is change the law, making it mandatory.
As you hint, and others like to point out, there is no way we could have widespread personal flying transportation like that due to legal issues.
But of course, would the car be invented today, it would most likely not be allowed either - having tons of steel hurtle down the streets as high speed, only inches from where people are walking - there'd be a class-action lawsuit happening within ten second of the first vehicle hitting anything.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the idiots who, for example, think Bush is comparable to Hitler? That's just as stupid as not believing in evolution, or believing the earth is flat, or whatever. We're surrounded every day by idiots who believe in bizarre things.
Well, Gandhi is comparable to Hitler. I'd say he compares rather favourably, of course, but comparable, still.
Problem is, the "word of mouth" pool is finite. You only really get a superior candidate pool with at most two degrees of separation - you either hire someone you know, or someone recommended by someone you know. Go further apart and the social mechanisms that makes the method work (personal trust and obligations) fall apart, and you're no better off than advertising in a trade publication.
And you only know so many people in the business - and they only know so many - that the pool of competent and available candidates isn't large. You can fill one or two positions at a time by word of mouth, but if you're looking for a dozen people it's no longer any better than other ways.
But they do have a moral imperative and a duty not to promote dictatorship.
Sure they do, as much as any American company or person.
Um, do they? As far as I know, being a citizen (corporate or individual) of a country requires you to follow its laws. Nothing more and nothing less. If there really is a "moral imperative" to behave, or refrain from behaving, in a certain manner across the entire population, then encode that into law. If not, then get off people's backs about it.
If you want your companies to take the level of democracy and human rights' record into account when doing business in foreign countries, then write a law saying so (and accept the disruption to your relationships with similarily burdened dictatorships that happen to be military allies).
I don't think the 's' in "mathematics" is a plural form. You're not talking about more than one, after all.
This ranks up there with certain folk refering to the slang term for Mathematics as 'Math', when it is infact 'Maths'
Since when is slang supposed to follow rules of grammar and usage?
If people use "math" as an informal shorthand for "mathematics" then that's the term, any individual with a grammar lexicon reposited in a painful location nonwidthstanding.
if x - y (100, 200, 300)
The other way around, I think (I haven't used Fortran IV for many years by now):
if (x-y) 100, 200, 300
I forget - does Fortran 66 still have the neato three-way conditional goto?
I got the impression the poster was talking about choosing the right language for a given project, rather than mixing languages within the same project - or mixing languages within a single binary.
Now, embedding an interpreter can be a very good idea in some cases (Think Emacs - or a game like Neverwinter Nights for that matter) - but of course only if the benefits outweigh the pretty daunting drawbacks that you point out.
By contrast, having more than one language in a project may make perfectly good sense if the project itself is heterogenous; you may want to write the web backend in Java while having thin client UI glue as client-side Javascript (and of course access the database with SQL).
And choosing proper tools for a new project rather than habitually, thoughtlessly use whatever you used on the last one is a no-brainer.
My argument is one of philosophy...not law. Rights are not decrees of government. There are real and fundamental human rights, including the right not to be forced to act against your will. The Quebec law you reference while probably existient, is morally wrong.
So, who decides what _is_ a fundamental human right, and what is morally right or wrong? I happen to think your take on this is the morally unsound one; that doesn't carry much weight for you of course, but in the very same way, your assertion of what is and is not morally right has very little value to me.
I believe you, but he is the originator of the argument you make (down to the shoes).
The "save a drowning man" situation is an old trope in moral philosophy (and barroom arguments all over the world). Adding shoes (or, as I almost did instead, an expensive watch) is a pretty obvious embellishment, just to make the injury specific.
As for the situation, we are living in a world and society where we _do_ have obligations, and these do include obligations to act. We are for instance usually required to report a crime to the authorities if we find out about it, any minor inconvenience or injury to ourselves nonwidthstanding. Similarily, it is AFAIK entirely possible to be convicted if you did not prevent an injury from happening if you could easily have prevented it and did know it was about to occur.
In your hypothetical world, we would have no society period. There would be no requirement to pay taxes, or fulfil any contracts, or aid anybody in any way ever. Of course, that world is impossible; we face daily situations where no course of action would leave all parties with their liberties (as you define them) intact. Trivial example: I'm sitting in this sunspotted porch, and you have no right to have me move aside from this nice, sunny spot. On the other hand, your apartment is in the building, and I have no right to prevent you from entering it.
When you steal an argument from someone, in this case Peter Singer, it's good form to say so.
I've never read anything he's written, or know anything more than that he argues for euthanasia (or is it the other way around?), so I'm pretty sure I haven't stolen anything from him.
If by "owner" you mean the people that invested the money and did the hard work to make it happen, then I hope they can do whatever they please.
Well, arguably "maybe".
Take this situation: A person is standing on a river bank, with his new blue suede shoes, say. Suddenly he sees a child drowning some small distance out. It would not be putting himself in any danger to wade out and grab the child. He does not do so, however, arguing that he _is_ free to help people or not, as he pleases. He's not a life guard, and besides, his new shoes would be ruined and who's going to pay for that.
He may be right - or a court may judge that not helping was an act of negligence resulting in a wroingful death. Two pretty important principles are colliding here.
And arguably the same situation persists with a medication that can save the life of people. This is pretty much what, for example, the US did with the anthrax scare, when they overrode the ownership claims of anthrax vaccine makers in order to protect the public - and what several poor nations are doing when the allow unlicensed copying of AIDS drugs in the face of an epidemic.
You might, in other words, get to the situation where, in the interests of public health, they may see legalized copying of their substance in several parts of the world, perhaps with a court-imposed "reasonable" payout that is not at the level they would have wanted.
Design the system so hoarding doesn't pay, then. That's the idea of designing for the worst case. How, in this case, I don't know - but there are any number of possible ways to discourage it. Allow no more in yearly patent royalties per licensee than the owner is earning from the technology in the patent themselves; make it legally binding to "sell" the use of the patent for a set one-time fee once the technology has become an ISO standard (that would encourage the use of standards as well) - there's many ways.
The thing to keep in mind is to focus on minimizing the downside. If, after lots of trying, you can't make for a reasonable downside and still make patents attractive to use, then perhaps pantents aren't the right tool for the problems we're trying to solve.
I suspect economical, political and social systems are best built the same way you do strategy analysis.
Forget about maximizing the best possible outcome in the best possible world. It's not going to happen anyway, so why worry about it? Instead, focus on the worst possible outcome, and create your system so as to minimize that. Any outcome that turns out better than that pessimistic minimum is then just a happy bonus.
So, make rules for patents that discourages fluff patents and extortion (you need to deposit a substantial sum that is returned upon a successful grant, but witheld if turned down?). Make it reasonably easy to challenge patents when invalid grants have slipped through, but that discourages vapid challenges (loser pays, for example).
And why don't I hear anyone making the argument "But BMW are just acting to maximise the profits of their shareholders, as they are required to do by law" that I have heard so often recently in Google's favour?
Trying to circumvent Google's rules for indexing sites and getting delisted as a result does not strike me as contributing hugely to BMW:s profits; quite the opposite, in fact.
Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.
Um, duh.
If you want to be indexed well, you have to make the site friendly to indexers. You are _always_ limited in your design by the pesky, inconvenient issue of people (and search engines) actually wanting access to your content. You're free to make a site that is difficult to navigate, or that search engine bots can't get easy access to, but don't go bitching about your lousy pagerank, low visit count or high user dissatisfaction afterwards.
Define "blogosphere", please, in such a way that you can do a neat division between it and other pages.
'In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,' And 640K should be enough for everyone!
The difference, you're rapidly running into some fairly definite optical limits here. Given a small sensor (which you need to have a small lens, and thus a compact, pocketable camera, which is what people want), increasing resolution also increases noise sensitivity, something pocket cameras are already pretty bad at. Also, you're rapidly running out of lens quality. Increasing resolution does not help if the lens you use can't resolve detail at that level anyway. You can fix it to some extent by higher-quality optics, but you have some hard limits coming up. That can only be fixed by increasing the size of the optics, which is limited by the need to make the camera pocketable.
So while perhaps 8Mp is not the limit, it's fairly close. I doubt you'll see a 12Mp pocket camera anytime soon if ever.
What are you doing that you need more than 8 megapixels? Unless you're doing high end product or portrait work, an 8mp camera is more than adequate for your needs.
Higher resolution does give you more latitude for cropping, which is a good thing for anyone. That said, the drawbacks of very high density sensors are enough that I'm very happy with my 8Mp resolution already.
Just for clarification, Romero never made brain eating zombies. His particular breed just ate people alive.
Well, eating people alive would tend to include the brains as well. Unless, you know, the zombies are concerned about Kreuzfelt-Jacobs of course.
I'm not saying that this shouldn't be used here, but why weren't they tested at, say, a regular Lions game beforehand? It's the same number of people in the same location, just not as many of them are VIPs with the associated security concerns in case of evacuation.
This has little to do with the technology, or any actual threat. It is a fairly high-profile event, and so it is widely perceived as a target for an attack. If you stage public, high-profile events creating the perception of security you calm people down, and the event can proceed as planned.
It's just like scanners at airports - you counter the perception of a threat with the perception of security and everybody walks away happy. It means that a technology to, for example, scan passengers at airports without any visible organization or inconvenience is actually a lot less useful than a largely inneffective - but public - display of zeal. If you had an effective, unobtrusive way to scan people, you'd probably still need to keep sham security stations active, hassling people and delaying proceedings, just for the needed visibility.
What's more important to you - your principles or your job?
If you are principally against the idea of software patents, and yet work on applying and shoring up new ones, then no, there is no way around it - you're breaking your own principles. It is much like a pacifist having a job designing anti-personnel grenades, a PETA member working as a furrier, or a fundamentalist christian working on the production line for the day-after pill.
You don't have an "out"; you'll have to choose. Which, is of course up to you.
If you go to Amsterdam an smoke a joint, you're not accountable for that when you go back to the US.
'putting profits before American principles of free speech'
Well, a publicly traded company is supposed to put profits first. If your politicians want them to put some other principle over and above that, all they have to is change the law, making it mandatory.
I was promised a flying car, dangit!
As you hint, and others like to point out, there is no way we could have widespread personal flying transportation like that due to legal issues.
But of course, would the car be invented today, it would most likely not be allowed either - having tons of steel hurtle down the streets as high speed, only inches from where people are walking - there'd be a class-action lawsuit happening within ten second of the first vehicle hitting anything.