Honestly, how the fuck do you think the legal system works?? Badly. It should work as you describe, but then again, it doesn't. Otherwise, when the RIAA sues a grandmother who has never even used a computer, she'd just walk in on her court day and say "I've never used a computer." and that would be that. Too bad it doesn't work that way. Also, I was definitely talking (and still am) about civil courts, since copyright infringement is not usually a criminal offense (you have to break the law really hard to make it criminal). I would be very surprised if SE did not sue webcasters who don't dance to their tune, even if those webcasters are perfectly legal. Lawsuits, even when they have no basis whatsoever, can be dragged out as long as the party wanting to drag it out still has some money. It's an abuse of the legal system, and it is a nasty strongarm tactic, but it works. Bankrupt your opponent in court, and then everyone else will be cowed by the example, so you can collect more protection racket money.
Well, the OP claimed that actions being a product of genetics + environment, or else purely random, is only a legitimate dichotomy if the existence of the supernatural is excluded. If all truth were empirically discoverable, then the supernatural is excluded. Since the position that all truth is empirically discoverable is a quite common position, I made the assumption that that was the OP's position, and based my comment on that assumption.
Hey, aren't you the fellow who wrote the (net http) module for guile? Do you still have that code? If so, I'll give you an email address if you don't mind sending it to me.
There is nothing inherently contradictory about the notion of free will. There is something inherently contradictory between the notion of free will and the notion that all truth is empirically discoverable.
You didn't get it. White light is not any one frequency, but rather, all visible frequencies at equal intensity. The GP was not claiming that the entrenched RGB *ware was an obstacle to this new technology, but that either the article wasn't entirely clear on all the details (most likely) or that simple physics was an obstacle to this new technology.
First, you hijacked the thread. Don't do that. Second, your post doesn't even make sense. Yes, reading the title as Quantum DRM is a bit funny. Ha ha. But then you try to draw some extremely tenuous and frankly non-existent connection between memory capacity and DRM as an excuse for posting in this thread? Please.
Overall, I would say that having this network available has made things like network neutrality much less important to me, because I know if the ISP I am on should ever go evil, I can just make a quick phone call and switch to one of the other providers on the line. You should still worry about net neutrality, because the local ISPs are not really the problem. The backbone providers, that is, the big telcos, are the problem. (Of course, if the local telcos are your only option for the last mile, then the problem increases a bit, but only a bit.) The backbone providers want to move packets at different rates depending on their contents, and to charge both ends of each connection an extra fee in order to get better than crappy service.
UTOPIA does solve a lot of the problems with broadband access in the US today, but it doesn't solve net neutrality.
I think that having useless skills is a good thing, if what you are interested in is some actual role-playing, and not just making an uber-powerful character who can accomplish anything. Real people pretty much always have some useless or rarely-useful skills, and sometimes a large part of their interaction with other people involves those skills.
OTOH, there are other systems (Deadlands, for instance) that are much much more conducive to role playing than D&D, which is geared primarily towards combat.
A "could" sentence claims that the negation, "could not" is false. That's important. Also, the discovery of one mechanism by which interstellar dust could be "alive" is important because it allows us to begin to estimate the probability that such a mechanism is actually real.
"good business" is often evil. What makes you think "duty to their stockholders" supersedes "duty of the actual real human people running the company and making the decisions to their fellow human beings who are being hurt by their decisions"?
So the stockholders stand to lose a little bit of money. The people who are not receiving payment of their bills on time stand to lose a much much larger percentage of the their net worth.
You could keep going to the court, and upping the amount every time, until they decided to cut their own losses. Then you would (in principle) break even, rather than having losses of your own.
Unless you're the usual slashdot fuck - in which case - please die painfully, and nice and slow. Perhaps a fire, or a slow crushing. Fire ants are good to. Try to work them in somehow. Was this necessary? If I had modpoints right now....
Quenches of superconducting magnets are certainly problems. However, at least based on my experience at accelerator experiments, quenches usually do nothing more than vaporize a whole lot of liquid helium. Perhaps there are a couple orders of magnitude more energy stored in the magnetic fields for tokamaks than for HEP detector solenoids, but I'm a little bit skeptical that that is the case.
It is not unambiguous, but it certainly looks to me like he was saying "I'm not influenced by these things", or perhaps "I won't be influenced by these things". Your response comes across (nb: I did not say "is", but "comes across") as much ruder, with all the SHOUTING of KEY WORDS. Chill.
Right. Because as we all know, MS certainly lost a lot of marketshare due to their many FUD campaigns.
Claiming that FUD causes you to lose the persuasion is bs.
Or perhaps you were claiming that FUD doesn't work with you. Ok, I can't argue with that. But, you are not the general population of potential users/customers. Clearly, FUD at least doesn't hurt in the vast majority of cases.
These are very very different problems. Furthermore, the idea of using magnetic fields to confine plasma for fusion is not a new one at all. (Actually, the stellarator is not even a new design for a magnetic confinement reactor, so, without RTFA, I'm not sure why we have a/. story about it.)
I say, that if you want to control access to information, then don't put it up on the web and instead dole it out on an individual basis or through known secure channels.
I suspect that the internet just might be big enough for both of us. You can have a site which is designed for finding people with similar interests to yourself, and I can have a site which is designed to more easily facilitate communication with my friends. Certainly I can disseminate information by directly emailing my friends (or calling them, or running into them on the street, or, or, or...). However, social networking sites (set up the way I would like them) very clearly could ease that task, make it more pleasant. Similarly, you could go to bars/conventions/IRC/whatever and meet people with interests similar to your own. However, social networking sites (set up the way you want them) ease that task and make it more pleasant.
The web certainly can be turned to the purpose I want it to serve. So why shouldn't some small portion of it be devoted to such a purpose? It in no way interferes with your desired purpose. Perhaps my purpose is more difficult than yours, but as long as it isn't impossible or impractical (which it might turn out to be in the final analysis), I say, let's do it.
Currently, facebook has privacy controls that are just fine grained enough that it does what I want it to. Nobody but my "friend"s (a whitelist on which I have explicitly approved each item) can see my profile, so if I put a notice there that I am engaged, then anyone who cares enough to look and who is my "friend" can discover that I am engaged. The notice does not intrude upon their lives, but if they get curious about what I'm up to lately, they can find out whatever I'm willing to let them find out. This is pretty much exactly what I want it to do.
I'd rather not have this changed just so that you can use facebook to discover people with interests similar to your own. Instead, you should be using a different service (such as myspace, as I understand it), that allows anyone to see your profile, allows you to see anyone's profile, perhaps suggests to you a list of profiles with an interest list which is very like yours, and then facilitates communication between you and other people using the service. (If this is not how myspace works, then make up a different name to substitute for myspace and pretend it is a new site with the characteristics I describe.)
Blast radius my foot. A fusion reactor is immensely safer than a fission reactor. Furthermore, fission reactors are really very safe (far safer than, say, oil refineries). Even Chernobyl was primarily a/chemical/ explosion (although caused by problems with the reactor), which happened to scatter radioactive debris over half the globe. A chemical explosion at a fusion plant would scatter hydrogen. Oh boy. Even the unstable isotopes of hydrogen are still light enough that they would float to the top of the atmosphere and escape into space in very little time. A fusion reactor is not a controlled H-bomb. Unlike a fission reactor, which requires a carefully tuned reaction to walk the knife's edge between dying out and going critical, the hard part with fusion is keeping it going. Fusion is very fussy. If the density, and the temperature, and the composition of the plasma are not just exactly right, then reaction dies out in a fraction of a second, the time it takes to exhaust the really tiny amount of fuel that is available to it at any given time. To keep it going, you have to keep feeding it more fuel, as well as carefully tuning things. If there were even a very very tiny explosion, the worst it would do is damage the devices tuning the plasma's parameters, and then the reaction would die out. Even if the fuel feeders went crazy and started flooding hydrogen in as fast as they could, it would still just die out. There is no way that the reactor, even in an undamaged state, could bring enough hydrogen to the needed density and temperature quickly enough to cause a thermonuclear explosion even on the scale of a pipe bomb. So, I say, blast radius my foot, unless you want to compress the researchers down very very small and put them inside the plasma itself.
Researchers are not involved in corner cases that might never happen. Nor are they worried about reliability yet (in the sense of preventing another Chernobyl, as opposed to the sense of very little downtime). They are just trying to get the blamed thing to produce enough energy to sustain itself, with some left over. (Although, if you're feeling pessimistic enough, you might call that a corner case that might never happen!)
I agree that we need to get a lot of funding to fusion research, but throwing money at the problem won't necessarily solve it. It is a very hard problem. Furthermore, we'd need not just one crazy (I presume you refer to the office of the President), but a whole bunch of crazies (half of Congress), because Congress makes the budget.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the OP claimed that actions being a product of genetics + environment, or else purely random, is only a legitimate dichotomy if the existence of the supernatural is excluded. If all truth were empirically discoverable, then the supernatural is excluded. Since the position that all truth is empirically discoverable is a quite common position, I made the assumption that that was the OP's position, and based my comment on that assumption.
Hey, aren't you the fellow who wrote the (net http) module for guile? Do you still have that code? If so, I'll give you an email address if you don't mind sending it to me.
And most small webcasters probably don't have the money to spend N months in court just to say "Look, the artist gave me permission."
There is nothing inherently contradictory about the notion of free will. There is something inherently contradictory between the notion of free will and the notion that all truth is empirically discoverable.
You didn't get it. White light is not any one frequency, but rather, all visible frequencies at equal intensity. The GP was not claiming that the entrenched RGB *ware was an obstacle to this new technology, but that either the article wasn't entirely clear on all the details (most likely) or that simple physics was an obstacle to this new technology.
First, you hijacked the thread. Don't do that. Second, your post doesn't even make sense. Yes, reading the title as Quantum DRM is a bit funny. Ha ha. But then you try to draw some extremely tenuous and frankly non-existent connection between memory capacity and DRM as an excuse for posting in this thread? Please.
UTOPIA does solve a lot of the problems with broadband access in the US today, but it doesn't solve net neutrality.
I think that having useless skills is a good thing, if what you are interested in is some actual role-playing, and not just making an uber-powerful character who can accomplish anything. Real people pretty much always have some useless or rarely-useful skills, and sometimes a large part of their interaction with other people involves those skills.
OTOH, there are other systems (Deadlands, for instance) that are much much more conducive to role playing than D&D, which is geared primarily towards combat.
A "could" sentence claims that the negation, "could not" is false. That's important. Also, the discovery of one mechanism by which interstellar dust could be "alive" is important because it allows us to begin to estimate the probability that such a mechanism is actually real.
I'm guessing marvel comics.
"good business" is often evil. What makes you think "duty to their stockholders" supersedes "duty of the actual real human people running the company and making the decisions to their fellow human beings who are being hurt by their decisions"?
So the stockholders stand to lose a little bit of money. The people who are not receiving payment of their bills on time stand to lose a much much larger percentage of the their net worth.
You could keep going to the court, and upping the amount every time, until they decided to cut their own losses. Then you would (in principle) break even, rather than having losses of your own.
Quenches of superconducting magnets are certainly problems. However, at least based on my experience at accelerator experiments, quenches usually do nothing more than vaporize a whole lot of liquid helium. Perhaps there are a couple orders of magnitude more energy stored in the magnetic fields for tokamaks than for HEP detector solenoids, but I'm a little bit skeptical that that is the case.
It is not unambiguous, but it certainly looks to me like he was saying "I'm not influenced by these things", or perhaps "I won't be influenced by these things". Your response comes across (nb: I did not say "is", but "comes across") as much ruder, with all the SHOUTING of KEY WORDS. Chill.
thanks
They're trying to get the dupe in early.
Link? I'm interested. Maybe we should mail this report to Ballmer, and then he'd step down from the "umpty-fratz patents violated" campaign.
Right. Because as we all know, MS certainly lost a lot of marketshare due to their many FUD campaigns.
Claiming that FUD causes you to lose the persuasion is bs.
Or perhaps you were claiming that FUD doesn't work with you. Ok, I can't argue with that. But, you are not the general population of potential users/customers. Clearly, FUD at least doesn't hurt in the vast majority of cases.
These are very very different problems. Furthermore, the idea of using magnetic fields to confine plasma for fusion is not a new one at all. (Actually, the stellarator is not even a new design for a magnetic confinement reactor, so, without RTFA, I'm not sure why we have a /. story about it.)
The web certainly can be turned to the purpose I want it to serve. So why shouldn't some small portion of it be devoted to such a purpose? It in no way interferes with your desired purpose. Perhaps my purpose is more difficult than yours, but as long as it isn't impossible or impractical (which it might turn out to be in the final analysis), I say, let's do it.
Currently, facebook has privacy controls that are just fine grained enough that it does what I want it to. Nobody but my "friend"s (a whitelist on which I have explicitly approved each item) can see my profile, so if I put a notice there that I am engaged, then anyone who cares enough to look and who is my "friend" can discover that I am engaged. The notice does not intrude upon their lives, but if they get curious about what I'm up to lately, they can find out whatever I'm willing to let them find out. This is pretty much exactly what I want it to do.
I'd rather not have this changed just so that you can use facebook to discover people with interests similar to your own. Instead, you should be using a different service (such as myspace, as I understand it), that allows anyone to see your profile, allows you to see anyone's profile, perhaps suggests to you a list of profiles with an interest list which is very like yours, and then facilitates communication between you and other people using the service. (If this is not how myspace works, then make up a different name to substitute for myspace and pretend it is a new site with the characteristics I describe.)
Blast radius my foot. A fusion reactor is immensely safer than a fission reactor. Furthermore, fission reactors are really very safe (far safer than, say, oil refineries). Even Chernobyl was primarily a /chemical/ explosion (although caused by problems with the reactor), which happened to scatter radioactive debris over half the globe. A chemical explosion at a fusion plant would scatter hydrogen. Oh boy. Even the unstable isotopes of hydrogen are still light enough that they would float to the top of the atmosphere and escape into space in very little time. A fusion reactor is not a controlled H-bomb. Unlike a fission reactor, which requires a carefully tuned reaction to walk the knife's edge between dying out and going critical, the hard part with fusion is keeping it going. Fusion is very fussy. If the density, and the temperature, and the composition of the plasma are not just exactly right, then reaction dies out in a fraction of a second, the time it takes to exhaust the really tiny amount of fuel that is available to it at any given time. To keep it going, you have to keep feeding it more fuel, as well as carefully tuning things. If there were even a very very tiny explosion, the worst it would do is damage the devices tuning the plasma's parameters, and then the reaction would die out. Even if the fuel feeders went crazy and started flooding hydrogen in as fast as they could, it would still just die out. There is no way that the reactor, even in an undamaged state, could bring enough hydrogen to the needed density and temperature quickly enough to cause a thermonuclear explosion even on the scale of a pipe bomb. So, I say, blast radius my foot, unless you want to compress the researchers down very very small and put them inside the plasma itself.
Researchers are not involved in corner cases that might never happen. Nor are they worried about reliability yet (in the sense of preventing another Chernobyl, as opposed to the sense of very little downtime). They are just trying to get the blamed thing to produce enough energy to sustain itself, with some left over. (Although, if you're feeling pessimistic enough, you might call that a corner case that might never happen!)
I agree that we need to get a lot of funding to fusion research, but throwing money at the problem won't necessarily solve it. It is a very hard problem. Furthermore, we'd need not just one crazy (I presume you refer to the office of the President), but a whole bunch of crazies (half of Congress), because Congress makes the budget.