It isn't a standards problem. AOL published the protocol, which is why open-source groups, Yahoo, and Microsoft were able to write AIM-compatible applications in the first place.
There is a difference between protocol standardization and free access. Just because Telnet is a standard does not give you the right to log into any Telnet-speaking computer and use it however you like -- you must conform to the administrative policies of the computer's owner.
Similarly, being able to speak the AIM protocol does not give you the right to log on to AOL's server network and use it without conforming to the administrative policies of the server owner. The server owner is AOL, and its policy is you cannot use the MS client on its network.
Microsoft wants people using its client and AIM to be able to talk to each other? Then Microsoft can set up a network of AIM-compatible computers and publish the address. AIM, after all, allows you to specify the address of the server you wish to log into.
This has plenty of precedent. The Realtime Blackhole List is a prime example of standards-compliant messages being blocked from servers because the servers' owners do not want to accept the messgaes. Password-restricted FTP is another. Just because something is connected to the Internet does not mean you have the right to access it.
In fact, the Australian Supreme Court has cited U.S. Supreme Court rulings in a number of recent cases.
Generally, only rulings of higher courts are directly binding on courts under their jurisdiction. But the rulings of any court in a jurisdiction that has inherited the common law of England is (more or less) part of the body of common law and can be cited as precedent for a ruling.
In short, this case makes it easier to win similar cases anywhere in the U.K., Canada, Australia, the U.S. New Zealand, or any other common law jurisdiction; if it had ruled in the reverse, those cases would be harder to win.
Nope. Because/.'s moderation system requires the participation of the readers as well. You can choose not to filter, so the moderation is equivalent to a critic reviewing a movie, not a censor deleting parts of it.
Your argument seems to be that you have to keep on watching that all powerful government to make sure that it doesn't try to take away your liberty
Nope. If a government is all-powerful, you have no liberty to guard. And governments don't seek power -- the people in them do. If you can keep them busy taking power from each other, they won't threaten your liberty -- even though they're still spending all their time trying to expand their power.
If you're really lucky, one group will expand your liberty just to weaken their rivals. After all that's how the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments came to be -- Republicans after the Civil War trying to weaken the Democrats.
It's been said a few times. Being a History/Government Geek, I was actually quoting Wendell Phillips, who in a 1852 speech at Harvard said,
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or
esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
It raises government power, and sadly political focus (at least in the US) is largely centered around the wielding of power.
Trust me: the focus of all politics everywhere has always been on the wielding of power. (With the "categorical declarations are subject to a small but trivial degree of error" caveat.)
Bribery and corruption has always been a second-order effect that is often mistaken for the problem. People who primarily want money instead of power will not go into government unless the government has expanded itself to the point that you cannot make money outside of government.
People who want to do good and benefit the people are no exception -- they either aren't involved in politics, or they need to accumulate power to impose their vision of the good of the people. In fact, they can be even more tyrranical about it -- because they know they are doing the Right Thing.
Politics and government is entirely about power, always has been (everywhere), and always will be (everywhere). Which is why eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
The window of opportunity closed by mid-2000? Please.
First, Biil Gates, in the most recent issue of Forbes, admits that products other than W2K have been slowed by a diversion of resources to that product. Microsfot hasn't started any IE 6.0 hype yet, and no reports of even early IE 6.0 alphas have leaked out of Redmond yet. IE 6.0 is not going to be delivered in six months.
Second, on every non-MS platform, Mozilla will be far better than any version of IE available in six months. IE 5.0's codebase is very Windows-centric and its apparent speed advantage on MS OSes is because of OS integration. To get good performance on non-Windows platforms would require a re-architecting like the Netscape-Mozilla change, which would have been leaked if it were underway.
Third, the lighter-weight Mozilla will be a viable upgrade choice for the millions of 120 Mhz 16 MB RAM Win95 Pentiums out there; IE 5 isn't, and 6 will probably be worse. And they aren't going to all just dissapear anytime soon; many buisnesses (like General Motors) are just now finally getting rid of their 486es with Windows 3.1.
Fourth and finally, there is no network effect "window of opportunity" to close. Legacy browsers mean e-commerce sites need to be usable by a wide variety of browsers. Amazon.com still maintains Navigator 1.x compatibility; almost any mass-media type of site can still be rendered with Navigator 3.x. As a result, there will always be a lag effect that allows a new browser a chance to make a marketshare dent.
Hey! Every 31337 h4kk3r should be a d3v111's 4dv0ca73! 411 h4i1 5474N! ----------
Seriously, however:
If you have a rational argument, and it isn't one of those topics that generate more heat than light, then posting a position different than that of most posters is informative. And, in my experience, it's also more likely than an equally-well written "me-too" variant to get some karma points.
Why do you need to locate the stealth aircraft at all? Just fly your fighters around the places you don't want bombed, and have them blow up any stealth aircraft that try to attack.
Sending any kind of bomber (which, frankly, the F117A really is) unescorted against fighters has always been suicide. Just because stealth doesn't change that doesn't mean stealth is useless, just that it isn't a shield of invincibility.
The author in this case sent a message to hundreds of people he has never met. This author in this case has sufficient experience using mailing groups to know that the message he sent was going to be read by hundreds of people that he didn't know. As far as I care, if you knowingly announce something to hundreds of strangers, it's perfectly fair for somebody to repeat it to other people you don't know.
And, since I'm saying it on/., you can quote me. After all, I'm saying it in front of hundreds of strangers.
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said on the radio without consulting them first. Someone who speaks on the radio is probably only intending to communicate with people tuned into that station. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people.
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said on TV without consulting them first. Someone who speaks on TV is probably only intending to communicate with people tuned into that station. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people.
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said in a newspaper without consulting them first. Someone who writes for a magazine is probably only intending to communicate with people reading that newspaper. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people. ------
What? You don't realize that the Debian legal list is open to anyone with a valid e-mail address, just like a radio station's broadcast is open to anyone with a radio in recieving range?
Posting something to a publicly-accessable mailing list is not a private communication. It isn't even as private as shouting it out in the middle of the office Christmas party. Instead, it is as private as saying it on a radio call-in show, or in the op-ed page of your newspaper, or on public-access TV.
Who, then, gets credit for the liberation of Newfoundland from the British in 1949?
The British left because the British didn't have the ability to maintain an empire after fighting for survival in WWII and then being immediately plunged into a Cold War. Although Gandhi was an admirable man, the people responsible for Indian independence were Hitler and Stalin. The same men were responsible for Newfoundland being forced to choose between indpendence or becoming part of Canada.
Re-read my post. Carefully. As I already said in it, the astronomer's year 0 is the same as what is called by historians 1 BC/BCE.
That means this year is still 1999, since the year 1 AD/CE and the year 1 by the astronomical dating system are the same year. But the first denarius was minted by the Romans in 268 BC/BCE, but -267 by the astronomical dating system.
Millenium means "1000 years". 1000 years from the year 0 (1 BC/BCE), the starting point of the astronomical calendar, is the year 1000 AD/CE. 1000 years from that is 2000 AD/CE.
OTOH, 1000 years from the start of the common calendar, which begins at 1 AD, is 1001 AD/CE. 1000 years from that is the year 2001 AD/CE.
I am frankly amazed that I would have to post this follow-up to Slashdot. Apparently the poster quality is dropping like a rock -- anybody who's ever done even a hobbist level of programming is familiar with counting from zero. Apparently we've sunk to the knowledge level of Wired.
Heck, you just go down to the library and check out "Hiroshima", a detailed second-hand account from interviews with hundreds of 1st-hand witnessess.
(Kimono patterns apparently can be burned into human flesh by atomic weapons. How many people in modern America would wind up with scars of DKNY or the Nike swoosh on their chests? One more reason to avoid adwear.)
Actually, the astronomical millenium arguably does change one second after 1999-12-31 23:59:59 (ISO date/time format). Because the dating system used by astronomers includes a year 0, which is the same as the historians' year 1 BC/BCE.
Thus, one millenium changes in a few weeks, and another changes in a year and a few weeks, and several others won't change for hundreds of years (like on the Muslim and Jewish calendars, etc.).
Actually, we've never had experimental or observational evidence to determine if antimatter is affected by gravity in the same way as matter.
Standard theories generally have antimatter inherently less common than matter, asymetric weak force interactions, and both matter and antimatter affected by gravity in the same way. But none of those three items has a heck of a lot of observation to back it up.
There was absolutely nothing blocking Microsoft from having AIM and the Microsoft client to operate on the same servers and intercommunicate. Because the AIM client allows the user to input a server address (I've checked), Microsoft could have set up its own server that would serve both AIM and MS clients using the AOL-published protocol. They had all the necessary tools.
Microsoft instead tried to hijack the AOL IM servers with a client not authorized to access the AOL servers. This wasn't an "open standards" attempt -- it was an attempt to use the AOL systems for free, without permission, and without even a token nod to providing reciprocal access (like publishing the specs that would allow AOL to enable its clients to access the Micrsoft messaging system).
Microsfot, in short, was cracking the AOL systems and using stolen access for its own benefit. While that may be understandable behavior in a teenager, a multibillion-dollar corporation should be slammed hard for it.
Intolerance has no political bias -- both sides are equally intolerant, but of different things.
Intolerant cultural conservatives generally don't care about violence, they care about sex (unless glorified violence is directed at U.S. institutions/authority figures). Intolerant cultural liberals are the ones worried about violence, but they don't care about sex (except insofar as they believe a specific depiction is degrading to women and thus a no-no.)
To tell the difference: Intolerant cultural conservatives didn't like the fact that the hero's wife was a stripper in Independence Day, but thought that heroic combat was okay. The intolerant cultural liberals criticized Bob Dole for praising such a violent movie, but generally had no problem with the wife's profession.
Sooner or later there will be no acceptable logos left.
Later. Much later. (Note number names herein correspond to the American system, but I've also provided "e" notation.)
Let's assume all logos can be defined by eight colors (say red, yellow, green, blue, white, black, purple, and brown) as "blocks" on a 10x10 grid.
Then lets's assume that trademarking any one logo prohibits anyone from using the one septillion (10e24, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) logos most similar to that one.
That means there are then 2.037035976 x 10e66 trademarkable logos in the world, while there have been fewer than 4 x 10e9 people, in all of history.
Okay, let's modify this. Let's say that all trademarkable logos can be defined in two colors (black or white) on a 10x10 grid, and that trademarking any one bars the one sextillion (10e21) closest logos from being used. That still leaves 1.2676506 x 10e9 logos, or one for every four people alive today.
Now, that means with an artifically and tightly constricted subset of logos, there are still more logos around than would be needed, and most would be so obscure nobody would ever find out about the accidental duplication of most of them.
So, we don't need to worry about running out of logos. The only risk is running out of "meaningful" logos, but not protecting them eliminates the utility of having a "meaningful" logo in the first place.
The Peer Review System is a stifling and backwards way to attack something as complex and virtually limitless as the field of Physics (ok, perhaps science in general). I don't believe that it is a very logical approach to have established scientists, with set and narrow views, dictating the coarse of the sciences of tomorrow
[SARCASM] I agree absolutley. If it weren't for the peer review system, we'd have junked this "aether" nonsense and Newton's laws of motion defended by those old fuddy-duddy scientists a long time ago in favor of relativity and quantum mechanics. [/SARCASM]
That's selling him short -- what he had was the courage to actually go out and trust that he was right -- on penalty of death.
No, you don't get it. Columbus wasn't right and taking a risk, he was wrong and taking a risk. If America had not been there, Columbus would have starved to death before he reached Asia. Sure, he had courage -- but he was also one luck dumb bastard.
The equivalent was not going to the moon. It would be believing the moon was only five hundred miles up and lucking into an asteroid to land on before you didn't have enough fuel to turn around and get home.
You see, the circumference of the Earth was known to within 1% by Western Europeans of the fifteenth century, having been determined by the Greeks in classical times and having been transmitted to Western Europe by the Muslims when they invaded Spain.
So, the educated knew that Columbus was on a fool's errand, since China could only be reached by traveling tens of thousands of miles of sea if you sailed west. With no know islands past the Azores, that journey would be both expensive to provision and have no speed advanatges over the new around-Africa route.
Columbus, however, thought Japan was 3500 miles west of Spain and China was only 1500 miles past that. That would have been a fast route to Asia -- it was also idiocy. 5000 miles wast from Spain isn't China, it's Nebraska. You'd still have thousands of miles to go.
Fortunately for Columbus, while he didn't reach Japan when he went 3500 miles west, there was a contiental landmass there for him to stumble into. Otherwise he would have starved to death at sea.
And his crew weren't worried about falling off the edge of the world. What they were worried about was that they didn't have the provisions to go much further west and still return home. That was why they were on the brink of mutiny -- if they hadn't stumbled across America, the choice was to either turn around soon or die from starvation.
Anyway, Vasco de Gamma was blown off course on a trip to the Horn of Africa in 1500 and accidentally landed in Brazil. Such errors were actually likely given the nature of the fast out-and-down route around Africa to India. So Columbus's courage and stupidity did change history, but America would have been discovered by accident within a century anyway.
I have to say that, honestly, one of the best things about living near Canada is that you get Canadian broadcatsing. The National is news that's actually intelligent (contrast ABC/CBS/CNN/NBC), This Hour Has 22 Minutes is comedy that's actually funny (contrast SNL), Molson Hockey Night in Canada is sports programming that's actually entertaining (contrast any non-hockey sport), and CBC Radio 2 is music that isn't rock, pop, or country.
Just because your state didn't have the balls to be it's own Nation doesn't mean you have to whine about it.
Texas? That's the place that was so desperate to become a state that they gave up a whole bunch of land in order to get annexed, right? And then had to rely on Virginians to help it try to get out of the deal in 1861? And got stomped back into line anyway?
On the other hand, we here in Michigan mobilized the militia while we were still a territory to seize Toledo. We then didn't back down even in the face of Andrew Jackson (the guy who threatened to personally hang South Carolinan secessionists) until he offered us a huge chunk of Wisconsin Territory.
Hmm. We convinced a tough-as-nails retired general President to give us land as a condition of our joining the Union and not seizing land from our southern neighbor; you had to give a fairly mediocre politician President land to get him to let you become a state after years of begging, and then the U.S. Army had to help you enforce your border claims against your southern neighbor.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't a standards problem. AOL published the protocol, which is why open-source groups, Yahoo, and Microsoft were able to write AIM-compatible applications in the first place.
There is a difference between protocol standardization and free access. Just because Telnet is a standard does not give you the right to log into any Telnet-speaking computer and use it however you like -- you must conform to the administrative policies of the computer's owner.
Similarly, being able to speak the AIM protocol does not give you the right to log on to AOL's server network and use it without conforming to the administrative policies of the server owner. The server owner is AOL, and its policy is you cannot use the MS client on its network.
Microsoft wants people using its client and AIM to be able to talk to each other? Then Microsoft can set up a network of AIM-compatible computers and publish the address. AIM, after all, allows you to specify the address of the server you wish to log into.
This has plenty of precedent. The Realtime Blackhole List is a prime example of standards-compliant messages being blocked from servers because the servers' owners do not want to accept the messgaes. Password-restricted FTP is another. Just because something is connected to the Internet does not mean you have the right to access it.
In fact, the Australian Supreme Court has cited U.S. Supreme Court rulings in a number of recent cases.
Generally, only rulings of higher courts are directly binding on courts under their jurisdiction. But the rulings of any court in a jurisdiction that has inherited the common law of England is (more or less) part of the body of common law and can be cited as precedent for a ruling.
In short, this case makes it easier to win similar cases anywhere in the U.K., Canada, Australia, the U.S. New Zealand, or any other common law jurisdiction; if it had ruled in the reverse, those cases would be harder to win.
Nope. Because /.'s moderation system requires the participation of the readers as well. You can choose not to filter, so the moderation is equivalent to a critic reviewing a movie, not a censor deleting parts of it.
Your argument seems to be that you have to keep on watching that all powerful government to make sure that it doesn't try to take away your liberty
Nope. If a government is all-powerful, you have no liberty to guard. And governments don't seek power -- the people in them do. If you can keep them busy taking power from each other, they won't threaten your liberty -- even though they're still spending all their time trying to expand their power.
If you're really lucky, one group will expand your liberty just to weaken their rivals. After all that's how the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments came to be -- Republicans after the Civil War trying to weaken the Democrats.
It raises government power, and sadly political focus (at least in the US) is largely centered around the wielding of power.
Trust me: the focus of all politics everywhere has always been on the wielding of power. (With the "categorical declarations are subject to a small but trivial degree of error" caveat.)
Bribery and corruption has always been a second-order effect that is often mistaken for the problem. People who primarily want money instead of power will not go into government unless the government has expanded itself to the point that you cannot make money outside of government.
People who want to do good and benefit the people are no exception -- they either aren't involved in politics, or they need to accumulate power to impose their vision of the good of the people. In fact, they can be even more tyrranical about it -- because they know they are doing the Right Thing.
Politics and government is entirely about power, always has been (everywhere), and always will be (everywhere). Which is why eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
The window of opportunity closed by mid-2000? Please.
First, Biil Gates, in the most recent issue of Forbes, admits that products other than W2K have been slowed by a diversion of resources to that product. Microsfot hasn't started any IE 6.0 hype yet, and no reports of even early IE 6.0 alphas have leaked out of Redmond yet. IE 6.0 is not going to be delivered in six months.
Second, on every non-MS platform, Mozilla will be far better than any version of IE available in six months. IE 5.0's codebase is very Windows-centric and its apparent speed advantage on MS OSes is because of OS integration. To get good performance on non-Windows platforms would require a re-architecting like the Netscape-Mozilla change, which would have been leaked if it were underway.
Third, the lighter-weight Mozilla will be a viable upgrade choice for the millions of 120 Mhz 16 MB RAM Win95 Pentiums out there; IE 5 isn't, and 6 will probably be worse. And they aren't going to all just dissapear anytime soon; many buisnesses (like General Motors) are just now finally getting rid of their 486es with Windows 3.1.
Fourth and finally, there is no network effect "window of opportunity" to close. Legacy browsers mean e-commerce sites need to be usable by a wide variety of browsers. Amazon.com still maintains Navigator 1.x compatibility; almost any mass-media type of site can still be rendered with Navigator 3.x. As a result, there will always be a lag effect that allows a new browser a chance to make a marketshare dent.
Hey! Every 31337 h4kk3r should be a d3v111's 4dv0ca73! 411 h4i1 5474N!
----------
Seriously, however:
If you have a rational argument, and it isn't one of those topics that generate more heat than light, then posting a position different than that of most posters is informative. And, in my experience, it's also more likely than an equally-well written "me-too" variant to get some karma points.
Why do you need to locate the stealth aircraft at all? Just fly your fighters around the places you don't want bombed, and have them blow up any stealth aircraft that try to attack.
Sending any kind of bomber (which, frankly, the F117A really is) unescorted against fighters has always been suicide. Just because stealth doesn't change that doesn't mean stealth is useless, just that it isn't a shield of invincibility.
Okay, so maybe he sent that message prematurely, but he *didn't* send it to a million people like Slashdot did.
Damn straight.
He only sent it to several hundred people he didn't know.
The author in this case sent a message to hundreds of people he has never met. This author in this case has sufficient experience using mailing groups to know that the message he sent was going to be read by hundreds of people that he didn't know. As far as I care, if you knowingly announce something to hundreds of strangers, it's perfectly fair for somebody to repeat it to other people you don't know.
/., you can quote me. After all, I'm saying it in front of hundreds of strangers.
And, since I'm saying it on
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said on the radio without consulting them first. Someone who speaks on the radio is probably only intending to communicate with people tuned into that station. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people.
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said on TV without consulting them first. Someone who speaks on TV is probably only intending to communicate with people tuned into that station. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people.
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said in a newspaper without consulting them first. Someone who writes for a magazine is probably only intending to communicate with people reading that newspaper. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people.
------
What? You don't realize that the Debian legal list is open to anyone with a valid e-mail address, just like a radio station's broadcast is open to anyone with a radio in recieving range?
Posting something to a publicly-accessable mailing list is not a private communication. It isn't even as private as shouting it out in the middle of the office Christmas party. Instead, it is as private as saying it on a radio call-in show, or in the op-ed page of your newspaper, or on public-access TV.
Who, then, gets credit for the liberation of Newfoundland from the British in 1949?
The British left because the British didn't have the ability to maintain an empire after fighting for survival in WWII and then being immediately plunged into a Cold War. Although Gandhi was an admirable man, the people responsible for Indian independence were Hitler and Stalin. The same men were responsible for Newfoundland being forced to choose between indpendence or becoming part of Canada.
Re-read my post. Carefully. As I already said in it, the astronomer's year 0 is the same as what is called by historians 1 BC/BCE.
That means this year is still 1999, since the year 1 AD/CE and the year 1 by the astronomical dating system are the same year. But the first denarius was minted by the Romans in 268 BC/BCE, but -267 by the astronomical dating system.
Millenium means "1000 years". 1000 years from the year 0 (1 BC/BCE), the starting point of the astronomical calendar, is the year 1000 AD/CE. 1000 years from that is 2000 AD/CE.
OTOH, 1000 years from the start of the common calendar, which begins at 1 AD, is 1001 AD/CE. 1000 years from that is the year 2001 AD/CE.
I am frankly amazed that I would have to post this follow-up to Slashdot. Apparently the poster quality is dropping like a rock -- anybody who's ever done even a hobbist level of programming is familiar with counting from zero. Apparently we've sunk to the knowledge level of Wired.
Heck, you just go down to the library and check out "Hiroshima", a detailed second-hand account from interviews with hundreds of 1st-hand witnessess.
(Kimono patterns apparently can be burned into human flesh by atomic weapons. How many people in modern America would wind up with scars of DKNY or the Nike swoosh on their chests? One more reason to avoid adwear.)
Actually, the astronomical millenium arguably does change one second after 1999-12-31 23:59:59 (ISO date/time format). Because the dating system used by astronomers includes a year 0, which is the same as the historians' year 1 BC/BCE.
Thus, one millenium changes in a few weeks, and another changes in a year and a few weeks, and several others won't change for hundreds of years (like on the Muslim and Jewish calendars, etc.).
Nope. Because all the companies have different intents.
Actually, we've never had experimental or observational evidence to determine if antimatter is affected by gravity in the same way as matter.
Standard theories generally have antimatter inherently less common than matter, asymetric weak force interactions, and both matter and antimatter affected by gravity in the same way. But none of those three items has a heck of a lot of observation to back it up.
There was absolutely nothing blocking Microsoft from having AIM and the Microsoft client to operate on the same servers and intercommunicate. Because the AIM client allows the user to input a server address (I've checked), Microsoft could have set up its own server that would serve both AIM and MS clients using the AOL-published protocol. They had all the necessary tools.
Microsoft instead tried to hijack the AOL IM servers with a client not authorized to access the AOL servers. This wasn't an "open standards" attempt -- it was an attempt to use the AOL systems for free, without permission, and without even a token nod to providing reciprocal access (like publishing the specs that would allow AOL to enable its clients to access the Micrsoft messaging system).
Microsfot, in short, was cracking the AOL systems and using stolen access for its own benefit. While that may be understandable behavior in a teenager, a multibillion-dollar corporation should be slammed hard for it.
Intolerance has no political bias -- both sides are equally intolerant, but of different things.
Intolerant cultural conservatives generally don't care about violence, they care about sex (unless glorified violence is directed at U.S. institutions/authority figures). Intolerant cultural liberals are the ones worried about violence, but they don't care about sex (except insofar as they believe a specific depiction is degrading to women and thus a no-no.)
To tell the difference: Intolerant cultural conservatives didn't like the fact that the hero's wife was a stripper in Independence Day, but thought that heroic combat was okay. The intolerant cultural liberals criticized Bob Dole for praising such a violent movie, but generally had no problem with the wife's profession.
Sooner or later there will be no acceptable logos left.
Later. Much later. (Note number names herein correspond to the American system, but I've also provided "e" notation.)
Let's assume all logos can be defined by eight colors (say red, yellow, green, blue, white, black, purple, and brown) as "blocks" on a 10x10 grid.
Then lets's assume that trademarking any one logo prohibits anyone from using the one septillion (10e24, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) logos most similar to that one.
That means there are then 2.037035976 x 10e66 trademarkable logos in the world, while there have been fewer than 4 x 10e9 people, in all of history.
Okay, let's modify this. Let's say that all trademarkable logos can be defined in two colors (black or white) on a 10x10 grid, and that trademarking any one bars the one sextillion (10e21) closest logos from being used. That still leaves 1.2676506 x 10e9 logos, or one for every four people alive today.
Now, that means with an artifically and tightly constricted subset of logos, there are still more logos around than would be needed, and most would be so obscure nobody would ever find out about the accidental duplication of most of them.
So, we don't need to worry about running out of logos. The only risk is running out of "meaningful" logos, but not protecting them eliminates the utility of having a "meaningful" logo in the first place.
The Peer Review System is a stifling and backwards way to attack something as complex and virtually limitless as the field of Physics (ok, perhaps science in general). I don't believe that it is a very logical approach to have established scientists, with set and narrow views, dictating the coarse of the sciences of tomorrow
[SARCASM]
I agree absolutley. If it weren't for the peer review system, we'd have junked this "aether" nonsense and Newton's laws of motion defended by those old fuddy-duddy scientists a long time ago in favor of relativity and quantum mechanics.
[/SARCASM]
That's selling him short -- what he had was the courage to actually go out and trust that he was right -- on penalty of death.
No, you don't get it. Columbus wasn't right and taking a risk, he was wrong and taking a risk. If America had not been there, Columbus would have starved to death before he reached Asia. Sure, he had courage -- but he was also one luck dumb bastard.
The equivalent was not going to the moon. It would be believing the moon was only five hundred miles up and lucking into an asteroid to land on before you didn't have enough fuel to turn around and get home.
You see, the circumference of the Earth was known to within 1% by Western Europeans of the fifteenth century, having been determined by the Greeks in classical times and having been transmitted to Western Europe by the Muslims when they invaded Spain.
So, the educated knew that Columbus was on a fool's errand, since China could only be reached by traveling tens of thousands of miles of sea if you sailed west. With no know islands past the Azores, that journey would be both expensive to provision and have no speed advanatges over the new around-Africa route.
Columbus, however, thought Japan was 3500 miles west of Spain and China was only 1500 miles past that. That would have been a fast route to Asia -- it was also idiocy. 5000 miles wast from Spain isn't China, it's Nebraska. You'd still have thousands of miles to go.
Fortunately for Columbus, while he didn't reach Japan when he went 3500 miles west, there was a contiental landmass there for him to stumble into. Otherwise he would have starved to death at sea.
And his crew weren't worried about falling off the edge of the world. What they were worried about was that they didn't have the provisions to go much further west and still return home. That was why they were on the brink of mutiny -- if they hadn't stumbled across America, the choice was to either turn around soon or die from starvation.
Anyway, Vasco de Gamma was blown off course on a trip to the Horn of Africa in 1500 and accidentally landed in Brazil. Such errors were actually likely given the nature of the fast out-and-down route around Africa to India. So Columbus's courage and stupidity did change history, but America would have been discovered by accident within a century anyway.
I have to say that, honestly, one of the best things about living near Canada is that you get Canadian broadcatsing. The National is news that's actually intelligent (contrast ABC/CBS/CNN/NBC), This Hour Has 22 Minutes is comedy that's actually funny (contrast SNL), Molson Hockey Night in Canada is sports programming that's actually entertaining (contrast any non-hockey sport), and CBC Radio 2 is music that isn't rock, pop, or country.
Just because your state didn't have the balls to be it's own Nation doesn't mean you have to whine about it.
Texas? That's the place that was so desperate to become a state that they gave up a whole bunch of land in order to get annexed, right? And then had to rely on Virginians to help it try to get out of the deal in 1861? And got stomped back into line anyway?
On the other hand, we here in Michigan mobilized the militia while we were still a territory to seize Toledo. We then didn't back down even in the face of Andrew Jackson (the guy who threatened to personally hang South Carolinan secessionists) until he offered us a huge chunk of Wisconsin Territory.
Hmm. We convinced a tough-as-nails retired general President to give us land as a condition of our joining the Union and not seizing land from our southern neighbor; you had to give a fairly mediocre politician President land to get him to let you become a state after years of begging, and then the U.S. Army had to help you enforce your border claims against your southern neighbor.