"That's what happens when things that should be socially funded get turned into a money making scheme."
Well, in my opinion, prisons should be neither privately funded and run nor government-funded and run. The whole concept that the prison is some magical society-healing, attitude adjustment ward that takes bad people and turns them into good people by treating them as zoo animals and laboratory experiments is absurd. Prisons are simply a modern extension of the dungeons that were so popular in the Medieval period -- places to keep political prisoners. For most real criminals, the punishment of prison does not fit the crime; it's too harsh a sentence for petty crimes, it's too soft for serious crimes like murder, and prisons have no business being used to enforce some corrupt politician's idea of what drugs we're allowed to ingest or what ideas we're allowed to share. Prison makes far more criminals than it "rehabilitates", and to make things worse, it forces the victim to pay for the food, lodging, and health care of his assailant. There are better ways of dealing with almost every crime and social problem; other societies have found and effectively applied them in the past.
There are very few things tyrannies and police states cannot function without. A vast prison system is one of them.
You're right, of course. The blame is shared by practically everyone in Congress, in addition to a White House that hasn't heard of the Constitution, and a hand-picked judiciary that doesn't care about the Constitution.
There is still at least one man on Capitol Hill who doesn't want to sell out your rights to a corporation. You Americans would do well to vote in Ron Paul next year; he'll veto any un-Constitution crap like DRM and content-filtering laws that come along.
After reading this discussion, I actually found some diagrams at the NASA site showing how an atmospheric entry vehicle could use a parachute and heat shield for the first portion of its descent, and then deploy a large helium balloon while losing the heat shield. The balloon would gently descend to the surface, deposit its main load, and go aloft again with a smaller package (perhaps communications equipment).
Maybe I'm wrong here, but while Mars's thin atmosphere makes for faster descents, wouldn't it also make for a lower ratio of velocity to parachute stress? The same parachute materials should be able to withstand stronger descent speeds on Mars than on Earth because the atmosphere is thinner.
However, it does seem clear that a much larger chute would be needed to provide the same amount of drag. Is there a practical argument against a really, really big parachute? Or multiple parachutes?
Your ignorant, trollish comment is hardly worth replying, too, but others might find this informative.
"Huh? News to science - they've long believed that fat is designed to store excess calories against lean times, like pretty much all of the animal kingdom."
Your oversimplification is incorrect. Certain modes of eating trigger your body's "calorie conservation mode", causing it to store extra energy in fat. These triggers include sugar intake (treated by your body as a fast-absorbing, emergency food source) and going long periods without eating.
However, when you eat a reasonably high-calorie diet that is low in sugars and starches, your body assumes there is no threat of starving, and thus gets rid of excess calories instead of storing them.
"(From the remainder of your message it appears you get your information the diet industry, and parrot it without understanding.)"
Most of the diet industry parrots the same misinformation you appear to support. My information is based on personal experience, as well as those of other people I know. I lost 75 pounds in two years from changing my eating habits.
"There are plenty of ways to get obese and, yes, shockingly, the most common ones include eating all sorts of calorie rich food without giving your body a way to expend those calories."
That's true to an extent, but our bodies are in fact designed to expel unneeded calories. The sensitivity of these triggers seems to differ from person to person, which is one reason some people can eat anything they want without gaining weight, while others can count calories and still become obese.
I was in the latter group. Exercising daily and eating quite well, yet ending up in my mid-twenties at an overweight 230 pounds. It turns out carbohydrates -- and especially sugars like fructose -- cause a rapid blood sugar spike and insulin production, which in turn triggers your body to conserve excess calories in fat cells. At last, I stopped eating less and started eating differently -- no sugars and starches, but plenty of protein and fat -- and dropped 75 pounds so quickly I astonished everyone I knew. Without the carb/insulin trigger, your body naturally uses only the calories it needs and eliminates the rest.
You're quite right. I live in Japan at the moment, and as far as I can tell, Japan is barely a democracy. There's one party that always gets elected and decides everything, and the average person neither cares nor talks about politics. That doesn't mean people don't have a sense of civic duty; au contraire, they're very active in the nighbourhood and in their kids' schools.
Japan's culture is different, and I suspect it's the possibility of public shame and humiliation that restrains corruption -- the minister who recently committed suicide over what in the West would be a minor scandal comes to mind. The people don't seem to "believe" in democracy, "making their vote matter", or foisting their views on others; they simply live and let live, and I think that's a healthier attitude than many people in the West have, who seem to think life is all about politics and electing a government that gives you what you want.
"I'm not unsympathetic to your position. But there are cases when making and using a copy of a physical object are strictly illegal and at least arguably immoral. Like making a duplicate of a twenty dollar bill."
Making a counterfeit $20 bill isn't immoral. Owning a counterfeit $20 bill isn't immoral. Trying to use it to buy stuff is immoral, because you're (presumably) defrauding the vendor into thinking it's real currency when it isn't.
Morality is the domain of actions -- hurting a person physically, or depriving him of his physical property, for example. What possessions I own, or what music I listen to, cannot possibly be construed as immoral.
I can't think of an instance where making or owning a copy of something, real or intangible, could be immoral. If any examples exist, the immorality lies with some other factor than mere ownership.
Broadly speaking, that's very much not true. Here in Japan, everything can be done with cash, and usually is. None of my friends have credit cards or debit cards, to my knowledge.
I used to live in Canada, and we got swept up in debit-card mania much more quickly than most countries. I lived off a plastic card for several years, but eventually realized the headaches exceeded the advantages and went back to always carrying cash. (What headaches? Stuff like hidden or unexpected user fees at both the retail and bank end; debit machines that stop working; cards that stop working; being stranded at the till when your card fails to have enough balance; debit networks that go down during power outages and peak shopping times; check-out queues that slow to a crawl as people try all the cards in their wallet to make a purchase; etc.)
"Last but not least, I am yet to see an anti-piracy statement that admits to the positive effects of pirating."
Not to mention the biggest one: the enormous benefit billions (yes, billions) of people of enjoy by the act of "pirating", using the word in its widest and most abusive sense. Every single day -- nay, hour -- I observe images and videos, hear sounds and music, enjoy technology and inventions I have not come up with myself, nor paid to enjoy. All these things enrich my life, and they enrich yours too. That includes not only the MP3s I may download, but the books I read which lift ideas and plots from older works; the software I use that is undoubtedly violating hundreds of patents; the movies I watch at the homes of my friends; the renditions of "Happy Birthday" I am a party to from time to time -- yes, even that is considered an illegal act of "piracy" by these copyright tyrants.
Copyright is not about theft, because ideas and data are copyable with no loss of the original. Copyright is the ultimate in anti-charity; let's punish anyone who benefits from what we do or create. Let's broadcast TV on the radio waves and punish people for capturing it. Let's publish pictures on the Internet and punish people for saving them.
The so-called owners of copyrights and patents, of course, borrow heavily from history, from culture, and from us. But they dream themselves our masters in a relationship that is parasitic at its core. We *must* pay them ever-increasing piles of lucre to maintain their extravagant lifestyles, and they have all the compunctions of a mindless robot when it comes to destroying poor folks' lives with lawsuits and jail sentences for crimes that have no victim.
As far as I'm concerned, "intellectual property" is a too-clever-for-its-own-good idea that's been tried, and failed miserably. Let's put a bullet in it and move on. It'll be one of those weird quirks of history people read about in books a hundred years from now.
To elaborate: countries where Chinese is widely spoken and the traditional characters are used include Taiwan, Hong Kong (part of China but I doubt the censorship applies), Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and even Canada.
I've always suspected that "junk DNA" was the key to micro-evolution and speciation. I read an article once about how bacteria that could not metabolize lactose were cultured in a lactose-rich liquid. After about 60 generations, some bacteria that could metabolize lactose appeared. It turns out, they had non-functional genes for metabolizing lactose in their junk DNA, and somehow those genes were re-activated.
I remember using email gateways to send Telnet and FTP commands to servers, and then wait for the response hoping I did it right.:) I was a kid too, and waiting a day or two just to see if my cool new Star Trek wallpaper -- broken up into UUencoded pieces, of course -- had arrived successfully was as much as I could bear.
So anyway, using telnet through an email gateway to read Websites, that's how a man does it.;)
You're absolutely right. I wish I had mod points, and I wish my friends list weren't limited to 200 names -- you deserve a spot.
Americans have become so used to their loss of freedoms in day-to-day life, they forget how absolutely invasive and totalitarian their government has become. Want to be innovative with your fuel or save a little money? Big Brother didn't get his cut, so here's a fine for $2000, and if you do it again, we'll toss you in jail as a threat to "society". It's just like the mafia telling the new business owner on the block that he needs to pay a hefty protection fee like his neighbours do, and it would be a shame if someone burnt down his shop otherwise.
The sad thing is, I fully expect to see many misguided Slashdotters stand up for the state here and defend this ridiculous fine.
In order for something to meet the standard of being patentable, isn't it required that someone be able to duplicate the patented device from the descriptions and information revealed in the patent? Otherwise, the information is deemed either too vague, or outright incorrect, and thus invalid.
Somehow, I doubt anyone can, by following the instructions in this patent, actually go and make a synthetic life-form today. That makes it, er, patently un-patentable.
(Not that I agree with patents in the first place, but still...)
I don't know where the meme started that copyright tells you what you can *use*. It's purely about distribution (which puts the "copy" in "copyright").
We can point out how vague the EULA is, and how EULAs are all bullcrap unenforceable, non-binding legalese anyway.
I don't see how that has much to do with it, though. This guy is distributing his own software, not Microsoft's. It merely happens to work with MS's software. That's Microsoft's problem, not his. It sounds like Ford complaining to me because I make some kind of add-on part that competes with their own factory parts.
Speaking as a non-American, I observe that the problem is not lobbying. The problem is you have a system where any kind of immoral or oppressive law can be be imposed, for a period of infinite duration, by a small group of people (Congress) who bear no responsibility for the crap they bury their country in. And by definition, every single law that is added to the books takes away your liberty in some way. Everything that's actually bad was already a crime 200 years ago.
No, the slim possibility of not being re-elected is not an example of a Congressman "bearing responsibility" when it comes to laws that take away your freedom.
Your Constitution was designed to prevent this problem, but no one pays it any attention (except Dr. Ron Paul), so it's worthless.
Naturally, having this enormous power, and no corresponding responsibility, in the hands of a small group of people attracts the very worst people, and the very worst laws. Lobbying isn't the problem. The fact that your system seems expressly built to invite corruption and abuse is. Compare the freedom a typical American 150 years ago had compared to today. In most respects, viewed on a large scale, the decline of the US has proceeded at an extraordinarily fast rate. If fascist and socialist legislators keep passing hundreds of stupid laws every year and spending trillions of your great-grandchildren's money, where do you think the country will be in 50 years?
Slashdot Mirror
"That's what happens when things that should be socially funded get turned into a money making scheme."
Well, in my opinion, prisons should be neither privately funded and run nor government-funded and run. The whole concept that the prison is some magical society-healing, attitude adjustment ward that takes bad people and turns them into good people by treating them as zoo animals and laboratory experiments is absurd. Prisons are simply a modern extension of the dungeons that were so popular in the Medieval period -- places to keep political prisoners. For most real criminals, the punishment of prison does not fit the crime; it's too harsh a sentence for petty crimes, it's too soft for serious crimes like murder, and prisons have no business being used to enforce some corrupt politician's idea of what drugs we're allowed to ingest or what ideas we're allowed to share. Prison makes far more criminals than it "rehabilitates", and to make things worse, it forces the victim to pay for the food, lodging, and health care of his assailant. There are better ways of dealing with almost every crime and social problem; other societies have found and effectively applied them in the past.
There are very few things tyrannies and police states cannot function without. A vast prison system is one of them.
Iraq War: $1,300 billion
You're right, of course. The blame is shared by practically everyone in Congress, in addition to a White House that hasn't heard of the Constitution, and a hand-picked judiciary that doesn't care about the Constitution.
There is still at least one man on Capitol Hill who doesn't want to sell out your rights to a corporation. You Americans would do well to vote in Ron Paul next year; he'll veto any un-Constitution crap like DRM and content-filtering laws that come along.
After reading this discussion, I actually found some diagrams at the NASA site showing how an atmospheric entry vehicle could use a parachute and heat shield for the first portion of its descent, and then deploy a large helium balloon while losing the heat shield. The balloon would gently descend to the surface, deposit its main load, and go aloft again with a smaller package (perhaps communications equipment).
Now, that's an interesting idea -- a lighter-than-air lander. But is it even possible in an atmosphere as thin as Mars?
Maybe I'm wrong here, but while Mars's thin atmosphere makes for faster descents, wouldn't it also make for a lower ratio of velocity to parachute stress? The same parachute materials should be able to withstand stronger descent speeds on Mars than on Earth because the atmosphere is thinner.
However, it does seem clear that a much larger chute would be needed to provide the same amount of drag. Is there a practical argument against a really, really big parachute? Or multiple parachutes?
In Japanese, "miro" (or the closest phonetic equivalent) is the imperative form of "look", so it works there too.
Your ignorant, trollish comment is hardly worth replying, too, but others might find this informative.
"Huh? News to science - they've long believed that fat is designed to store excess calories against lean times, like pretty much all of the animal kingdom."
Your oversimplification is incorrect. Certain modes of eating trigger your body's "calorie conservation mode", causing it to store extra energy in fat. These triggers include sugar intake (treated by your body as a fast-absorbing, emergency food source) and going long periods without eating.
However, when you eat a reasonably high-calorie diet that is low in sugars and starches, your body assumes there is no threat of starving, and thus gets rid of excess calories instead of storing them.
"(From the remainder of your message it appears you get your information the diet industry, and parrot it without understanding.)"
Most of the diet industry parrots the same misinformation you appear to support. My information is based on personal experience, as well as those of other people I know. I lost 75 pounds in two years from changing my eating habits.
"There are plenty of ways to get obese and, yes, shockingly, the most common ones include eating all sorts of calorie rich food without giving your body a way to expend those calories."
That's true to an extent, but our bodies are in fact designed to expel unneeded calories. The sensitivity of these triggers seems to differ from person to person, which is one reason some people can eat anything they want without gaining weight, while others can count calories and still become obese.
I was in the latter group. Exercising daily and eating quite well, yet ending up in my mid-twenties at an overweight 230 pounds. It turns out carbohydrates -- and especially sugars like fructose -- cause a rapid blood sugar spike and insulin production, which in turn triggers your body to conserve excess calories in fat cells. At last, I stopped eating less and started eating differently -- no sugars and starches, but plenty of protein and fat -- and dropped 75 pounds so quickly I astonished everyone I knew. Without the carb/insulin trigger, your body naturally uses only the calories it needs and eliminates the rest.
You're quite right. I live in Japan at the moment, and as far as I can tell, Japan is barely a democracy. There's one party that always gets elected and decides everything, and the average person neither cares nor talks about politics. That doesn't mean people don't have a sense of civic duty; au contraire, they're very active in the nighbourhood and in their kids' schools.
Japan's culture is different, and I suspect it's the possibility of public shame and humiliation that restrains corruption -- the minister who recently committed suicide over what in the West would be a minor scandal comes to mind. The people don't seem to "believe" in democracy, "making their vote matter", or foisting their views on others; they simply live and let live, and I think that's a healthier attitude than many people in the West have, who seem to think life is all about politics and electing a government that gives you what you want.
"I'm not unsympathetic to your position. But there are cases when making and using a copy of a physical object are strictly illegal and at least arguably immoral. Like making a duplicate of a twenty dollar bill."
Making a counterfeit $20 bill isn't immoral. Owning a counterfeit $20 bill isn't immoral. Trying to use it to buy stuff is immoral, because you're (presumably) defrauding the vendor into thinking it's real currency when it isn't.
Morality is the domain of actions -- hurting a person physically, or depriving him of his physical property, for example. What possessions I own, or what music I listen to, cannot possibly be construed as immoral.
I can't think of an instance where making or owning a copy of something, real or intangible, could be immoral. If any examples exist, the immorality lies with some other factor than mere ownership.
In Canadian English, and presumably American, small fireworks are called firecrackers.
In Australian, isn't "cracker" slang for something or someone good?
Well, most of Russia is located in the Asian continent.
However, in this case, the blurb is slightly inaccurate. The ESA actually wants two citizens of ESA countries and four Russians.
"No one wants to deal in cash any more"
Broadly speaking, that's very much not true. Here in Japan, everything can be done with cash, and usually is. None of my friends have credit cards or debit cards, to my knowledge.
I used to live in Canada, and we got swept up in debit-card mania much more quickly than most countries. I lived off a plastic card for several years, but eventually realized the headaches exceeded the advantages and went back to always carrying cash. (What headaches? Stuff like hidden or unexpected user fees at both the retail and bank end; debit machines that stop working; cards that stop working; being stranded at the till when your card fails to have enough balance; debit networks that go down during power outages and peak shopping times; check-out queues that slow to a crawl as people try all the cards in their wallet to make a purchase; etc.)
"Last but not least, I am yet to see an anti-piracy statement that admits to the positive effects of pirating."
Not to mention the biggest one: the enormous benefit billions (yes, billions) of people of enjoy by the act of "pirating", using the word in its widest and most abusive sense. Every single day -- nay, hour -- I observe images and videos, hear sounds and music, enjoy technology and inventions I have not come up with myself, nor paid to enjoy. All these things enrich my life, and they enrich yours too. That includes not only the MP3s I may download, but the books I read which lift ideas and plots from older works; the software I use that is undoubtedly violating hundreds of patents; the movies I watch at the homes of my friends; the renditions of "Happy Birthday" I am a party to from time to time -- yes, even that is considered an illegal act of "piracy" by these copyright tyrants.
Copyright is not about theft, because ideas and data are copyable with no loss of the original. Copyright is the ultimate in anti-charity; let's punish anyone who benefits from what we do or create. Let's broadcast TV on the radio waves and punish people for capturing it. Let's publish pictures on the Internet and punish people for saving them.
The so-called owners of copyrights and patents, of course, borrow heavily from history, from culture, and from us. But they dream themselves our masters in a relationship that is parasitic at its core. We *must* pay them ever-increasing piles of lucre to maintain their extravagant lifestyles, and they have all the compunctions of a mindless robot when it comes to destroying poor folks' lives with lawsuits and jail sentences for crimes that have no victim.
As far as I'm concerned, "intellectual property" is a too-clever-for-its-own-good idea that's been tried, and failed miserably. Let's put a bullet in it and move on. It'll be one of those weird quirks of history people read about in books a hundred years from now.
To elaborate: countries where Chinese is widely spoken and the traditional characters are used include Taiwan, Hong Kong (part of China but I doubt the censorship applies), Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and even Canada.
I've always suspected that "junk DNA" was the key to micro-evolution and speciation. I read an article once about how bacteria that could not metabolize lactose were cultured in a lactose-rich liquid. After about 60 generations, some bacteria that could metabolize lactose appeared. It turns out, they had non-functional genes for metabolizing lactose in their junk DNA, and somehow those genes were re-activated.
I remember using email gateways to send Telnet and FTP commands to servers, and then wait for the response hoping I did it right. :) I was a kid too, and waiting a day or two just to see if my cool new Star Trek wallpaper -- broken up into UUencoded pieces, of course -- had arrived successfully was as much as I could bear.
;)
So anyway, using telnet through an email gateway to read Websites, that's how a man does it.
You're absolutely right. I wish I had mod points, and I wish my friends list weren't limited to 200 names -- you deserve a spot.
Americans have become so used to their loss of freedoms in day-to-day life, they forget how absolutely invasive and totalitarian their government has become. Want to be innovative with your fuel or save a little money? Big Brother didn't get his cut, so here's a fine for $2000, and if you do it again, we'll toss you in jail as a threat to "society". It's just like the mafia telling the new business owner on the block that he needs to pay a hefty protection fee like his neighbours do, and it would be a shame if someone burnt down his shop otherwise.
The sad thing is, I fully expect to see many misguided Slashdotters stand up for the state here and defend this ridiculous fine.
In order for something to meet the standard of being patentable, isn't it required that someone be able to duplicate the patented device from the descriptions and information revealed in the patent? Otherwise, the information is deemed either too vague, or outright incorrect, and thus invalid.
Somehow, I doubt anyone can, by following the instructions in this patent, actually go and make a synthetic life-form today. That makes it, er, patently un-patentable.
(Not that I agree with patents in the first place, but still...)
I don't know where the meme started that copyright tells you what you can *use*. It's purely about distribution (which puts the "copy" in "copyright").
We can point out how vague the EULA is, and how EULAs are all bullcrap unenforceable, non-binding legalese anyway.
I don't see how that has much to do with it, though. This guy is distributing his own software, not Microsoft's. It merely happens to work with MS's software. That's Microsoft's problem, not his. It sounds like Ford complaining to me because I make some kind of add-on part that competes with their own factory parts.
Sounds like the US government to me. :)
Mac OS X handles JPEG2000 natively; no problems here.
"Lobbying, in itself, is not the problem."
I agree with you up to that point.
Speaking as a non-American, I observe that the problem is not lobbying. The problem is you have a system where any kind of immoral or oppressive law can be be imposed, for a period of infinite duration, by a small group of people (Congress) who bear no responsibility for the crap they bury their country in. And by definition, every single law that is added to the books takes away your liberty in some way. Everything that's actually bad was already a crime 200 years ago.
No, the slim possibility of not being re-elected is not an example of a Congressman "bearing responsibility" when it comes to laws that take away your freedom.
Your Constitution was designed to prevent this problem, but no one pays it any attention (except Dr. Ron Paul), so it's worthless.
Naturally, having this enormous power, and no corresponding responsibility, in the hands of a small group of people attracts the very worst people, and the very worst laws. Lobbying isn't the problem. The fact that your system seems expressly built to invite corruption and abuse is. Compare the freedom a typical American 150 years ago had compared to today. In most respects, viewed on a large scale, the decline of the US has proceeded at an extraordinarily fast rate. If fascist and socialist legislators keep passing hundreds of stupid laws every year and spending trillions of your great-grandchildren's money, where do you think the country will be in 50 years?