If Mills' theory actually predicts that these devices would act differently, then yes, his theory is clearly flawed. But if his generator does something different than quantum theory would predict, then quantum theory is also flawed. You don't compare two theories by counting the things each explains; you take the simplest one that explains all the data, and if niether Mills' theory nor quantum theory does that then you make a new one.
The important thing here is to first make sure of two premises:
That Mills has really got device that does what he says it does.
That the actions of Mills device cannot be explained by quantum theory.
As we know that the devices you listed work, we then need to look for a theory that accounts for both, acknowledging that it may be niether Mills' nor quantum theory.
The statutary limitation on copyright is defined in title 17 as:
In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.
And because 4 * $150,000 = $600,000, we get what they're asking. Now they'd be foolish if they expected to get the full $600,000, but wouldn't they also be foolish to ask less than they could?
Except that while the studios may claim in publicity that piracy it killing them, what they are claiming legally is that it is hurting them. Not putting them out of business, causing them harm. In that they have a pretty strong case.
The printer issues you state....you CAN work around those. Mac OS X's underlying print archetecture is CUPS. You can use the built in UI which should statisfy most things, but you can go in to a shell in a terminal and hand edit it if you like. I tried doing it that way and it worked fine.
I've always been afraid to edit the Mac CUPS files directly because it might be set up non-standardly. Lots of times (not all that well-written) GUI configuration programs don't like to have someone modify the config not through them. If the OS X printing system doesn't mind direct modification of CUPS, that's great and Apple has done another thing properly.
You get to use an intuitive, easy (and yes, aesthetically pleasing) interface for simple tasks. It saves you time and aggravation. It makes working on simple things simple, like they should be. I'm talking about stuff like printing, mounting an SMB share, synchronizing over Bluetooth with a cellphone, and so forth.
Doing a lot of tech work with Mac printing problems, it's not as simple as all that. Sure they usually set up fine, but when they don't work properly the GUI feels really very limited. Printing is something that you generally set up onces and want to keep working, so taking a little longer to properly set up config files seems worth it to me. It's really nice to be able to make a backup of your printer configuration. It's true that in these areas, nice automated tools are a good useful thing to have. The problem with such tools is that so often they're just not that good. In OS X they tend to fail in the direction of making it difficult to do uncommon setups and making it hard to fix them when they're not really working. In Linux they tend to fail in that they do try full generality of configurability but don't automate enough to be faster or more conveneint. A good automated system would be better, but in the mean time I'll take the reliability of config files.
This leaves you more time to spend on complicated, challenging things. And when you need to, you can just start a terminal window and (if needed) an X11 server, both of which come with the OS, and run essentially every application you can under Linux. I use LaTeX regularly on my PowerBook, and emacs is installed by default as well (though I personally avoid it).
You still have the Mac window manager, which is nice for consistency between X11 apps and OSX apps, but it's slower for working. Focus-follows-mouse, for example, is very fast, and while I could set this up in OSX, I think it would require running a window manager under X11 and would be substantially slower computer-wise than just running it on Linux.
For years I thought I wanted Linux on the desktop. That wasn't it. I wanted Unix on the desktop. And that's what Mac OS X brings me. It is the only operating system that doesn't trade power for user-friendliness (or vice-versa). Almost everything you can do in Linux, you can do in Mac OS X. The exceptions are few and far between, only due to proprietary applications or Linux-specific kernel features.
It's not power I want, but speed. I can configure my Linux system so that I can work quickly and efficiently. On OS X I really can't, and the default configuration has several things that slow me down. Also, just because you can do nearly everything in Linux with OS X, that does not translate into speed or efficiency.
Your complaints are valid for Mac OS 9 and below. But OS X is a completely different animal. I abhorred Macs until it was released, but I switched two years ago and have never looked back. And I'm not some luddite technophobe - I'm an EECS major at MIT.
I agree that OS 9 was far more troublesome in this regard, and I don't dislike OS X, it's just that for a computer I use several hours a day I want something optimized for usage speed over learning speed.
Refusing to define which libraries and functionality are a standard part of the OS, and then amassing huge interlinked OS/Middleware/Applications repositories to compensate for that deficiency seems a uniquely Linux phenomenon to me.
There are many problems with trying to standardize on one set of libraries. You want to have a standard set which is useful, but needed by everybody. The problem is, Linux is used for a huge number of tasks, some of which really don't need much more than the kernel. For example, consider an embedded system that monitors a sensor and collects data. In that case we want a kernel, perhaps some custom device drivers, and a shell to interface with it, but not too much else. This is the level at which Linux is standardized because there are these situations in which the rest is bloat.
We could make a standard just for desktop distros, but then how would we deal with the vast range of preferences? I have a desktop system running on 8 year old hardware that works fine because it's only running xterms and lightweight xlib software. It doesn't even have the diskspace for gtk or kde. Add to this that some people want to run light systems even on hardware that can manage heavier ones, and you again can't make a standard that includes enough to be of use.
Perhaps then a standard just for newbie distros? At this point we really are not much better off than with distro-specific standards, especially as there are very few newbie distros (Linspire's the only one I can think of off the top of my head).
If you think there is some level at which we could standardize more (which is quite possible), what sort of things should go into the standard, and which subset of Linux users/distros would you be aiming at? Perhaps a modular standard would work?
IMO when an installer looks at "uname -a" it should be able to parse "LSB 3.0" from that string if the distro is really LSB 3.0 compliant...similar to the way websites tell if they're dealing with "Mozilla 5.0". But right now they get back "GNU/Linux" and a kernel version, which mean almost nothing to someone packaging their software for distribution from their website or via CD-ROM.
If I send out my installer via CD-ROM, I need to include all the libraries my program needs to run. When the user runs my installer, it should be able to pick out which libraries are already installed on they system. Via the web is a different matter. Once you have internet access available, it seems to make much more sense to do program installation through the distribution-specific package repositories, such as gentoo's emerge and debian's apt. That way the people who know the distribution best can make the best install, and dependencies can best be resolved. It also does not require the user to trust the application developer as much, as they do not need to run some installation binary as root.
Remember also that any LSB compliant system must support RPM, so there's not really much of an issue of an installer needing to look at "uname -a". I don't think vendor packaged RPMs are really the best way to do things (I really like portage and apt), but it looks like Linux is standardized enough for them.
The problem is people are using the wrong criteria to decide what they want in a computer. They go for flashyness and ease of initial setup and learning, all of which Mac OS has. The point is, these things are not what really matter in a system you use hours a day. That people are not using Linux does not tell us that they wouldn't get more work done if they took the time to learn it.
I was recently given the opportunity to take the OS X plunge and I've had the OSX epiphany that goes along with it. It's changed the way I see user interfaces, and I finally understand why the mac "addict" types have been so rabid. It's _that_ good.
Macs are nice. Macs are pretty. Macs are intuitive, easy to learn, and allow you to configure things without learning much about them. All good for some people. The question is, which people?
Perhaps the casual home user who just wants a computer to check email and browse the web? For anyone who uses a computer a decent amount, it is worth the effort to learn some unintuitive but powerful programs. LaTeX with emacs would be a good example, in that you do need to go read some manuals, but once you start using them it becomes so much faster and they are so much more adaptable than standard GUI word processors. I use my computer every day. I rely on it for most of my work. As such, the initial experience and the amount of work that goes into learning how to use it effectively are very minor concerns compared to the benefit of being able to work faster, more efficiently, and with less UI sillyness. That OS X is intuitive and pretty is pleasant, but no real help in getting my work done.
So, it stands to reason that if piracy is indeed hurting them, we'd see their money shrivel up and disappear
If I punched you, and you didn't die, would it then stand to reason that you were not hurt by the punch because you remained alive?
And that we can't tell exactly how much the industry is hurt by piracy doesn't really matter. There are still statutory damages, and claiming that they were hurt at least some by the infringement seems reasonable.
It's not that I feel they are fully in the right or that suing one's customers is a good business model, but claiming that they are not hurt by piracy at all seems a bit extreem.
While it would be nice to make the VX30 people play nice, I think the way to do it is by suing them directly. Suing Geico would probably just make people more wary of open source software.
Fine, then you guys need to get your stories straight. Certain proponents of evolution do claim the phrase in quotes and claim it logically follows from evolutionary theory. See my response to the above poster. If evolution stands on its own merits, you should be able to cite experts who don't say obviously false things.
There are opponents of evolution who say silly things too. Niether the people in favor of evolution nor those against it are unified groups, and both have those who say unreasonable things. Anyways, it sounds like my claim that your argument was a straw man was unfair.
How can something be not useful but not harmful? The body must spend energy maintaining that organ, so vestigial organs are inherently disadvantageous. Evolutionary theory would predict species without them would dominate, so it's falsi......but what the fuck do I know, I'm just some hick?
No, you do have a point. These vestigial organs do use energy and so are evolutionarily somewhat disadvantageous. The amount of extra food an animal needs in order to maintain these organs is, however, pretty small, and not likely to have a very large effect on the number or survival of offspring. There should be some effect, but it would be very small and take a really long time. Evolution then does predict the existance of these organs, as we should expect there to be a long time between the loss of an organ's usefulness and its dissapearance. Without evolution, how do you explain them?
"No member of any species will act for the benefit of another with no benefit for its own" is falsified by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
That's a straw man argument. Evolution gives results on the scale of a species. Intellegence is a trait that helps our species over others. Intellegence is not uniformly a benefit over other species, as sometimes some groups will use it to determine that other species matter more (hence VHEM, ZPG, etc). On net, however, it helps the species and so is not in conflict with Evolution at all.
As for a claim, what about the claim that evolution will encourage the adoption of useful traits but not the removal of things no longer useful (but not harmful), that is, vestigial organs.
If the guy had had the maps up for several years, and then the MTA sued him, they would have to explain to the judge why they suddenly felt it was a copyright violation now, when they obviously didn't think so before
Perhaps, though I fail to see why this is a problem. If the guy copying the maps started doing something different (and disapproved of), then they would have their reason for why they suddenly felt there was a problem. If the guy didn't change anything, why would they switch their position?
for example, NeoClarityn was only invented because the patent on Clarityn was about to expire
This looks like a good thing to me. Either NeoClarityn is no better than standard Clarityn (and the generics should sell well), or NC is a better drug developed because we have limited patent times.
One main difference is that standard encyclopedias cite their sources, so you can then go read them. Wikipedia is closer to asking an informed acquaintance; their anwser is probably correct, they just might not remember where they learned it.
Even at 1440, that's not too good. I got a 14 ppm laser for ~200 bucks. So there's probably a reasonably simple way to make a machine that has 100 paralell laser printing components, each at ~$100, giving us 1440ppm printer at 1/10th the cost.
Other than by talking with friends (which isn't very scalable), it's hard to know who's good, and who is just some random loser thinking he's going to make a buck.
Why isn't this scalable? Of course everyone talking to the same friends doesn't scale, but everyone talking to their own friends seems to scale fine.
They too have a simple fix. Imagine the update containing not only code to keep pirated disks from playing but code needed to play the disk the patch is on. So you can aviod the update but can't watch the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
The important thing here is to first make sure of two premises:
As we know that the devices you listed work, we then need to look for a theory that accounts for both, acknowledging that it may be niether Mills' nor quantum theory.
Except that while the studios may claim in publicity that piracy it killing them, what they are claiming legally is that it is hurting them. Not putting them out of business, causing them harm. In that they have a pretty strong case.
I've always been afraid to edit the Mac CUPS files directly because it might be set up non-standardly. Lots of times (not all that well-written) GUI configuration programs don't like to have someone modify the config not through them. If the OS X printing system doesn't mind direct modification of CUPS, that's great and Apple has done another thing properly.
It looks like you mean something specific here with "a Desktop Linux" and I'm not really sure what.
Doing a lot of tech work with Mac printing problems, it's not as simple as all that. Sure they usually set up fine, but when they don't work properly the GUI feels really very limited. Printing is something that you generally set up onces and want to keep working, so taking a little longer to properly set up config files seems worth it to me. It's really nice to be able to make a backup of your printer configuration. It's true that in these areas, nice automated tools are a good useful thing to have. The problem with such tools is that so often they're just not that good. In OS X they tend to fail in the direction of making it difficult to do uncommon setups and making it hard to fix them when they're not really working. In Linux they tend to fail in that they do try full generality of configurability but don't automate enough to be faster or more conveneint. A good automated system would be better, but in the mean time I'll take the reliability of config files.
This leaves you more time to spend on complicated, challenging things. And when you need to, you can just start a terminal window and (if needed) an X11 server, both of which come with the OS, and run essentially every application you can under Linux. I use LaTeX regularly on my PowerBook, and emacs is installed by default as well (though I personally avoid it).
You still have the Mac window manager, which is nice for consistency between X11 apps and OSX apps, but it's slower for working. Focus-follows-mouse, for example, is very fast, and while I could set this up in OSX, I think it would require running a window manager under X11 and would be substantially slower computer-wise than just running it on Linux.
For years I thought I wanted Linux on the desktop. That wasn't it. I wanted Unix on the desktop. And that's what Mac OS X brings me. It is the only operating system that doesn't trade power for user-friendliness (or vice-versa). Almost everything you can do in Linux, you can do in Mac OS X. The exceptions are few and far between, only due to proprietary applications or Linux-specific kernel features.
It's not power I want, but speed. I can configure my Linux system so that I can work quickly and efficiently. On OS X I really can't, and the default configuration has several things that slow me down. Also, just because you can do nearly everything in Linux with OS X, that does not translate into speed or efficiency.
Your complaints are valid for Mac OS 9 and below. But OS X is a completely different animal. I abhorred Macs until it was released, but I switched two years ago and have never looked back. And I'm not some luddite technophobe - I'm an EECS major at MIT.
I agree that OS 9 was far more troublesome in this regard, and I don't dislike OS X, it's just that for a computer I use several hours a day I want something optimized for usage speed over learning speed.
There are many problems with trying to standardize on one set of libraries. You want to have a standard set which is useful, but needed by everybody. The problem is, Linux is used for a huge number of tasks, some of which really don't need much more than the kernel. For example, consider an embedded system that monitors a sensor and collects data. In that case we want a kernel, perhaps some custom device drivers, and a shell to interface with it, but not too much else. This is the level at which Linux is standardized because there are these situations in which the rest is bloat.
We could make a standard just for desktop distros, but then how would we deal with the vast range of preferences? I have a desktop system running on 8 year old hardware that works fine because it's only running xterms and lightweight xlib software. It doesn't even have the diskspace for gtk or kde. Add to this that some people want to run light systems even on hardware that can manage heavier ones, and you again can't make a standard that includes enough to be of use.
Perhaps then a standard just for newbie distros? At this point we really are not much better off than with distro-specific standards, especially as there are very few newbie distros (Linspire's the only one I can think of off the top of my head).
If you think there is some level at which we could standardize more (which is quite possible), what sort of things should go into the standard, and which subset of Linux users/distros would you be aiming at? Perhaps a modular standard would work?
IMO when an installer looks at "uname -a" it should be able to parse "LSB 3.0" from that string if the distro is really LSB 3.0 compliant ...similar to the way websites tell if they're dealing with "Mozilla 5.0". But right now they get back "GNU/Linux" and a kernel version, which mean almost nothing to someone packaging their software for distribution from their website or via CD-ROM.
If I send out my installer via CD-ROM, I need to include all the libraries my program needs to run. When the user runs my installer, it should be able to pick out which libraries are already installed on they system. Via the web is a different matter. Once you have internet access available, it seems to make much more sense to do program installation through the distribution-specific package repositories, such as gentoo's emerge and debian's apt. That way the people who know the distribution best can make the best install, and dependencies can best be resolved. It also does not require the user to trust the application developer as much, as they do not need to run some installation binary as root.
Remember also that any LSB compliant system must support RPM, so there's not really much of an issue of an installer needing to look at "uname -a". I don't think vendor packaged RPMs are really the best way to do things (I really like portage and apt), but it looks like Linux is standardized enough for them.
The problem is people are using the wrong criteria to decide what they want in a computer. They go for flashyness and ease of initial setup and learning, all of which Mac OS has. The point is, these things are not what really matter in a system you use hours a day. That people are not using Linux does not tell us that they wouldn't get more work done if they took the time to learn it.
Macs are nice. Macs are pretty. Macs are intuitive, easy to learn, and allow you to configure things without learning much about them. All good for some people. The question is, which people? Perhaps the casual home user who just wants a computer to check email and browse the web? For anyone who uses a computer a decent amount, it is worth the effort to learn some unintuitive but powerful programs. LaTeX with emacs would be a good example, in that you do need to go read some manuals, but once you start using them it becomes so much faster and they are so much more adaptable than standard GUI word processors. I use my computer every day. I rely on it for most of my work. As such, the initial experience and the amount of work that goes into learning how to use it effectively are very minor concerns compared to the benefit of being able to work faster, more efficiently, and with less UI sillyness. That OS X is intuitive and pretty is pleasant, but no real help in getting my work done.
If I punched you, and you didn't die, would it then stand to reason that you were not hurt by the punch because you remained alive?
And that we can't tell exactly how much the industry is hurt by piracy doesn't really matter. There are still statutory damages, and claiming that they were hurt at least some by the infringement seems reasonable.
It's not that I feel they are fully in the right or that suing one's customers is a good business model, but claiming that they are not hurt by piracy at all seems a bit extreem.
While it would be nice to make the VX30 people play nice, I think the way to do it is by suing them directly. Suing Geico would probably just make people more wary of open source software.
Perhaps people would go to local blogs for the information?
If you only have acess to one computer, you could do something like boot knoppix, load the base operating system inside QEMU, then watch what it does.
There are opponents of evolution who say silly things too. Niether the people in favor of evolution nor those against it are unified groups, and both have those who say unreasonable things. Anyways, it sounds like my claim that your argument was a straw man was unfair.
How can something be not useful but not harmful? The body must spend energy maintaining that organ, so vestigial organs are inherently disadvantageous. Evolutionary theory would predict species without them would dominate, so it's falsi... ...but what the fuck do I know, I'm just some hick?
No, you do have a point. These vestigial organs do use energy and so are evolutionarily somewhat disadvantageous. The amount of extra food an animal needs in order to maintain these organs is, however, pretty small, and not likely to have a very large effect on the number or survival of offspring. There should be some effect, but it would be very small and take a really long time. Evolution then does predict the existance of these organs, as we should expect there to be a long time between the loss of an organ's usefulness and its dissapearance. Without evolution, how do you explain them?
That's a straw man argument. Evolution gives results on the scale of a species. Intellegence is a trait that helps our species over others. Intellegence is not uniformly a benefit over other species, as sometimes some groups will use it to determine that other species matter more (hence VHEM, ZPG, etc). On net, however, it helps the species and so is not in conflict with Evolution at all.
As for a claim, what about the claim that evolution will encourage the adoption of useful traits but not the removal of things no longer useful (but not harmful), that is, vestigial organs.
He'll just restrict traffic by IP. Any legit user will not be making more than one request per second.
I guess what I'm saying is that in the situations where they wouldn't have a good case for complaining, they also wouldn't have a reason to complain.
Perhaps, though I fail to see why this is a problem. If the guy copying the maps started doing something different (and disapproved of), then they would have their reason for why they suddenly felt there was a problem. If the guy didn't change anything, why would they switch their position?
Nope. That's trademark. Copyright does not require enforcement.
Relatedly, I would expect that distribution of their maps would only help them, so why shut this guy down?
This looks like a good thing to me. Either NeoClarityn is no better than standard Clarityn (and the generics should sell well), or NC is a better drug developed because we have limited patent times.
One main difference is that standard encyclopedias cite their sources, so you can then go read them. Wikipedia is closer to asking an informed acquaintance; their anwser is probably correct, they just might not remember where they learned it.
Even at 1440, that's not too good. I got a 14 ppm laser for ~200 bucks. So there's probably a reasonably simple way to make a machine that has 100 paralell laser printing components, each at ~$100, giving us 1440ppm printer at 1/10th the cost.
And if a pirate publishing studio releases large scale copies of a work for substantial profit, all the author gets is this puny little revised fine?
Why isn't this scalable? Of course everyone talking to the same friends doesn't scale, but everyone talking to their own friends seems to scale fine.
They too have a simple fix. Imagine the update containing not only code to keep pirated disks from playing but code needed to play the disk the patch is on. So you can aviod the update but can't watch the movie.