Linking to Yahoo News URLs in Slashdot article posts is a bad idea. You'd expect the Slashdot guys to already understand this, but apparently not: Yahoo News temporarily hosts articles that are available elsewhere on the Web. The URLs for those temporary articles die after about a month or two. All you have to do is just copy/paste the article headline into Google News to find a more permanent link. It's easy, mmkay?
What's the point of Slashdot having archives if the stuff in the archives is nothing but dead links? All URLs are "temporary", of course, just like everything else in the universe is. But when you link to Yahoo News URLs, you're guaranteeing that you're posting a URL that will be obsolete before all the other URLs where the article is hosted are.
When you link to Yahoo News on pages that are supposed to be archived, God kills a kitten.
This is kind of a crappy Slashdot item, as it links to a Yahoo-hosted news article that will be gone in a month. Yahoo collects and temporarily hosts news items. Their links are dead usually after about a month, in my experience. Future readers won't be able to use the link given in the OP. Wayback doesn't archive Yahoo-hosted articles either, so far as I know. Users can get the same Associated Press article here or here.
I find it annoying when I read a Slashdot item from yesteryear and the links are dead. When you link to Yahoo, you're ensuring that you're giving a link that'll be worthless in the not-too-distant future.
Just take a second to search for the name of the article in Google News or something to get a more permanent link. It's not hard.
To be clear, libel is not a crime. It's something for which the party claiming harm can sue, and that's about it.
I think what they're trying to do is track down and prosecute people commiting libel.
I don't think so. The article also mentions the sad fate that the poor, blameless manufacturers of the Bic pen-vulnerable Kryptonite bike locks suffered at the hands of bloggers. Those nefarious blog-bashers had the gall to post videos of people using ordinary pens to disable Kryptonite locks, which undoubtedly caused the company significant monetary harm. They should take this article's advice and go on a suing spree.
I think what the article actually is is a petulant reaction to the frequently immature nature of the way people's opinions are expressed on web logs. Don't like what they said? Complain to their ISP and shut 'em down! SUE! SUE!
The only people who can logically believe there exists non-manmade concepts are theists believing in divine revelation.
No. That is a fallacious generalization, and frankly I don't see how you can believe it. I believe that there exist non-manmade concepts because there is an objective, external reality that functions independently of human (or any other) thought or perception. If a tree falls in a forest with no observers, naturally it must make a sound because sound waves are generated by oscillations in compressible materials like air, earth, or wood.
Look, mathematics (except for the symbols and conventions used to express it) is not manmade, and neither are logic or memes. Two and two make four, no matter what. It isn't some divine revelation, it is simply necessarily true, regardless of whether conscious beings exist to comprehend it or not. Humans do not "make" mathematics, we discover it; we come to be aware of it through the power of reasoning. A valley that contains two large boulders which are later joined to two more will contain no other than four large boulders, irrespective of whether someone figures that out or not. Facts do not cease to be true simply because they are unknown. The same with logic. Logic and math (closely related fields) are what is necessarily true given a set of premises, and no one can "make" a valid line of reasoning untrue. There are schools of thought about logic that are manmade, but logic itself does not depend upon us.
Memes as a thing in themselves do not require humans for them to exist; they are the natural result of information processing systems, sentient or otherwise, propagating information in a larger system. You seem to have mistaken my meaning on this. I did not mean all memes are non-manmade, but that the things themselves (units of information propagating and duplicating through an information system) depend only on an information system in which they can exist. Here's an article on how apparently apes are capable of "socially transmitted behaviors." They can and will exist without human intervention.
Mathematics. Logic. Memes. Animals are capable of communication and even thinking up new ideas--for instance, the old monkey-trick of "fishing" for ants with twigs and the orcas' use of bubbles to trap schools of fish. Animals in test studies have been able to figure out solutions to various problems. Animals are capable of formulating and grasping concepts, though at a much more rudimentary level than that of humans.
The grandparent seems to be implying that copyright is an artificial notion imposed by Man. And it is. So are basically all other rules that makes the modern world function. Like those other rules, some of them may be ill-concieved (Somewhere in Kansas, there's a law that you have to fire a gun into the air at intersections to alert buggy drivers to your presence) or in need of repair.
What are the other measurement artifacts, and what do they measure? There's a book I'll probably never get around to reading (because I've got a stack of others to which I'm constantly adding things of more immediate interest), "The Measure of All Things" about the adventures that were had in attempting to properly measure and define the meter, which probably explores at least some of it.
This is certainly an admirable refinement of the experiment, but it is certainly not exactly new, either. It's a better robotic arm, a different monkey, and a different university (the original experiment was at Duke University, this one's at U. of Pittsburgh), but monkey robot arms are not a new phenomenon at all.
Teaching kids that it's okay to track them like cattle (really like cattle in this case, using the very same technology as is used to track cattle and merchandise) will cause them to tend to be docile and care little for their freedom.
Coming as this does at about the same time as that survey showing that kids don't care about or know much about the first amendment, this is somewhat worrisome.
I sincerely hope that this is an isolated occurrence that won't be repeated.
"The war in Iraq is spending about that much every 20 days. Cassini's cheap."
Are you sure about that? The war in Iraq is and has been phenomenally expensive and wrongheaded, but I'm not sure about that figure. Quick math: According to costofwar.com, the cost is up to about 150 billion right now. It's been not quite two years since March 20, 2003, so we take 150/365 and divide that by two for the two years, and find that the war in Iraq costs a little over.2 Billion dollars a day, or about... $4,100,000,000 every twenty days.
Holy crap, that's about right.
If my math is screwed up anywhere, somebody correct me.
Or "The _atmosphere_ is mostly nitrogen," I should say. The clouds are probably methane, but apparently there's a lot of uncertainty as to what all these clouds and gases really are.
Quick note: I'm siding with the Fryguy here. Have you ever had an economics class?...And were you paying attention?
Certainly, both parties to an exchange generally benefit from that exchange, though one might benefit more than another. The point Frymaster is making is one that economists (and ecologists, and lawmakers, and students of chaos theory, and...) always have to consider: In a complex system such as an economy, an action is likely to have unintended results. In your example, a possible negative externality resulting from the purchase of a house would be that the house's new owner takes extremely poor care of the house and yard, thus creating an eyesore and reducing property values of neighboring houses. A positive externality might be that the house's new owner takes excellent care of his house and yard, which would have the opposite effect.
...And nor can you trademark colors or soundwaves. You can trademark specific patterns of colors or soundwaves that are distinguishable as distinct and recognizable symbols, but smell and taste are both far too vague to have similar applications. Taste and smell are too rudimentary a pair of senses to function as specific symbols (to an unaided human not using this newly-discovered technique), and thus should not be considered viable as trademarks or copyrights, or any sort of intellectual property.
This is a really bad idea. Simply because a taste or smell can be clearly defined doesn't make it patentable. You can't patent colors or sounds, which can both be clearly defined, so why should you be able to patent smells or tastes? Eventually, this may lead to the patenting of feelings or sensations, or, stretching it a bit, emotions or thoughts. Ridiculous. Just because something is quantifiable doesn't make it patentable.
(ps: I also think gene patenting is a bad idea, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
I wish I didn't expect that, but I do because the world does. The U.S. and the world pretty much ignore the existence of such regimes except where paying attention actually furthers the U.S.'s or the respective nations' immediate aims. Have you ever heard of Sudan? Fifty thousand people died in the past year from the assault of the Sudanese-government-supported Janjaweed, yet Bush hasn't even mentioned it. Over one million people are now refugees fleeing the slaughter, yet still Bush's administration ignores it. There's dozens of other examples like this around the world.
Here's a Time Magazine article, The Tragedy of Sudan.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101041004/story.h tml
Brutalities far worse, more wanton, and more extensive than any that occurred under Saddam have been largely ignored.
I wouldn't say it wasn't about oil Only. It weakens your argument to narrow it so. Invading Iraq was also about the fact that America had been hit, and so was looking around for somebody to hit back. That's not a very rational way of forming a response to an attack, but that's the way it went. First, Afghanistan (A good move, I think.) Then, unfortunately, Iraq (apparently because Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other chickenhawk members of the Project for a New American Century were part of the decision process.)
So there's oil, and then there's also the strategic placement of the country, and a desire to replace Hussein with somebody more friendly (which unfortunately entails pissing off a whole new group in the Middle East), and the blind 9/11 terrified patriotic fervor of which the chickenhawks took advantage.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr2003 0509-depsecde
Here is an interview with Paul Wolfowitz in which he states his reasons for pushing the war in Iraq. They don't stand up to reason, but it's true that few of them are related to oil. He says that the American military presence in Saudi Arabia "and Bin Laden's rage about that" could be solved if the U.S. could keep its troops stationed in Iraq. He also argued that "how can removing this huge source of instability [Hussein] make things more unstable?" He had hoped the U.S. could set up a stable and friendly regime, station troops in Iraq as the new base for American presence in the Middle East, and thus avoid pissing off Saudis by not having troops in Saudi Arabia. The obvious flaw in that reasoning is that now we're pissing everybody off, and that Saddam was actually a stabilizing force once his military had been effectively castrated in the first Gulf War. And his arguments have clearly not been borne out by actual events.
Well, yeah, he "admitted" that.
Saddam's goal was to control oil in the region and to dominate his neighbors; to do that he had to project a tough guy appearance. So he "admitted" to the world that he was a big nasty scary man who had thousands of liters of every nasty thing you can imagine in an attempt to give the impression that he posed a severe threat, so that the world would take him seriously.
He also told the UN that he was in full accordance with UN resolutions. You shouldn't expect consistency from a power-mad dictator. Saddam's weapons scientists told him that they were making great strides in increasing Iraq's might through WMDs, when in fact Iraq's third-world-level funding, the internally hostile nature of the regime, and UN weapons inspections were all preventing any real progress. To back this up,
check the Kay Report. Charles Duelfer, David Kay's replacement, expected to find evidence of active weapons or at least active weapons systems. Yet still
Duelfer's report speaks only of "regime intent" to construct buildings to facilitate weapons programs, and Bush is left with the mouthful "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."
Also, you might want to look into what Hans Blix had to say.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of Slashdot having archives if the stuff in the archives is nothing but dead links? All URLs are "temporary", of course, just like everything else in the universe is. But when you link to Yahoo News URLs, you're guaranteeing that you're posting a URL that will be obsolete before all the other URLs where the article is hosted are.
When you link to Yahoo News on pages that are supposed to be archived, God kills a kitten.
Please, think of the kittens.
This is kind of a crappy Slashdot item, as it links to a Yahoo-hosted news article that will be gone in a month. Yahoo collects and temporarily hosts news items. Their links are dead usually after about a month, in my experience. Future readers won't be able to use the link given in the OP. Wayback doesn't archive Yahoo-hosted articles either, so far as I know. Users can get the same Associated Press article here or here.
I find it annoying when I read a Slashdot item from yesteryear and the links are dead. When you link to Yahoo, you're ensuring that you're giving a link that'll be worthless in the not-too-distant future.
Just take a second to search for the name of the article in Google News or something to get a more permanent link. It's not hard.
To be clear, libel is not a crime. It's something for which the party claiming harm can sue, and that's about it.
I don't think so. The article also mentions the sad fate that the poor, blameless manufacturers of the Bic pen-vulnerable Kryptonite bike locks suffered at the hands of bloggers. Those nefarious blog-bashers had the gall to post videos of people using ordinary pens to disable Kryptonite locks, which undoubtedly caused the company significant monetary harm. They should take this article's advice and go on a suing spree.
I think what the article actually is is a petulant reaction to the frequently immature nature of the way people's opinions are expressed on web logs. Don't like what they said? Complain to their ISP and shut 'em down! SUE! SUE!
Ridiculous.
I'm switching to Gaim anyway.
Look, mathematics (except for the symbols and conventions used to express it) is not manmade, and neither are logic or memes. Two and two make four, no matter what. It isn't some divine revelation, it is simply necessarily true, regardless of whether conscious beings exist to comprehend it or not. Humans do not "make" mathematics, we discover it; we come to be aware of it through the power of reasoning. A valley that contains two large boulders which are later joined to two more will contain no other than four large boulders, irrespective of whether someone figures that out or not. Facts do not cease to be true simply because they are unknown. The same with logic. Logic and math (closely related fields) are what is necessarily true given a set of premises, and no one can "make" a valid line of reasoning untrue. There are schools of thought about logic that are manmade, but logic itself does not depend upon us.
Memes as a thing in themselves do not require humans for them to exist; they are the natural result of information processing systems, sentient or otherwise, propagating information in a larger system. You seem to have mistaken my meaning on this. I did not mean all memes are non-manmade, but that the things themselves (units of information propagating and duplicating through an information system) depend only on an information system in which they can exist. Here's an article on how apparently apes are capable of "socially transmitted behaviors." They can and will exist without human intervention.
Sir, you have committed a fallacy of logic.
That is all.
Mathematics. Logic. Memes. Animals are capable of communication and even thinking up new ideas--for instance, the old monkey-trick of "fishing" for ants with twigs and the orcas' use of bubbles to trap schools of fish. Animals in test studies have been able to figure out solutions to various problems. Animals are capable of formulating and grasping concepts, though at a much more rudimentary level than that of humans.
The grandparent seems to be implying that copyright is an artificial notion imposed by Man. And it is. So are basically all other rules that makes the modern world function. Like those other rules, some of them may be ill-concieved (Somewhere in Kansas, there's a law that you have to fire a gun into the air at intersections to alert buggy drivers to your presence) or in need of repair.
What are the other measurement artifacts, and what do they measure? There's a book I'll probably never get around to reading (because I've got a stack of others to which I'm constantly adding things of more immediate interest), "The Measure of All Things" about the adventures that were had in attempting to properly measure and define the meter, which probably explores at least some of it.
Essentially the same thing was reported in the October 2002 issue of Scientific American. Time picked up on it the following year, as schmobag pointed out earlier.
This is certainly an admirable refinement of the experiment, but it is certainly not exactly new, either. It's a better robotic arm, a different monkey, and a different university (the original experiment was at Duke University, this one's at U. of Pittsburgh), but monkey robot arms are not a new phenomenon at all.
Teaching kids that it's okay to track them like cattle (really like cattle in this case, using the very same technology as is used to track cattle and merchandise) will cause them to tend to be docile and care little for their freedom.
Coming as this does at about the same time as that survey showing that kids don't care about or know much about the first amendment, this is somewhat worrisome.
I sincerely hope that this is an isolated occurrence that won't be repeated.
...Of course, the circular feature is probably another false alarm. Sigh.
I do hope that this isn't another false alarm. This comes at about the same time as this odd lichen-like feature was photographed: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_life_05 0216.html >. Fascinating developments.
On a slight tangent, I wonder if Larry Lemke is related to the savant Leslie Lemke.
I've done this, and it works fine for me. I'm on Firefox 1.0 using Windows 2000.
Uh.... "Trivial"?
"The war in Iraq is spending about that much every 20 days. Cassini's cheap." .2 Billion dollars a day, or about... $4,100,000,000 every twenty days.
Are you sure about that? The war in Iraq is and has been phenomenally expensive and wrongheaded, but I'm not sure about that figure. Quick math: According to costofwar.com, the cost is up to about 150 billion right now. It's been not quite two years since March 20, 2003, so we take 150/365 and divide that by two for the two years, and find that the war in Iraq costs a little over
Holy crap, that's about right.
If my math is screwed up anywhere, somebody correct me.
Or "The _atmosphere_ is mostly nitrogen," I should say. The clouds are probably methane, but apparently there's a lot of uncertainty as to what all these clouds and gases really are.
The clouds are mostly nitrogen, with a little methane. The rivers and "seas," if that's what they are, are supposed to be liquid methane.
Quick note: I'm siding with the Fryguy here. Have you ever had an economics class? ...And were you paying attention?
Certainly, both parties to an exchange generally benefit from that exchange, though one might benefit more than another. The point Frymaster is making is one that economists (and ecologists, and lawmakers, and students of chaos theory, and...) always have to consider: In a complex system such as an economy, an action is likely to have unintended results. In your example, a possible negative externality resulting from the purchase of a house would be that the house's new owner takes extremely poor care of the house and yard, thus creating an eyesore and reducing property values of neighboring houses. A positive externality might be that the house's new owner takes excellent care of his house and yard, which would have the opposite effect.
Let me just say that this is a really dumb service to be selling, and I hope it goes nowhere.
...And nor can you trademark colors or soundwaves. You can trademark specific patterns of colors or soundwaves that are distinguishable as distinct and recognizable symbols, but smell and taste are both far too vague to have similar applications. Taste and smell are too rudimentary a pair of senses to function as specific symbols (to an unaided human not using this newly-discovered technique), and thus should not be considered viable as trademarks or copyrights, or any sort of intellectual property.
This is a really bad idea. Simply because a taste or smell can be clearly defined doesn't make it patentable. You can't patent colors or sounds, which can both be clearly defined, so why should you be able to patent smells or tastes? Eventually, this may lead to the patenting of feelings or sensations, or, stretching it a bit, emotions or thoughts. Ridiculous. Just because something is quantifiable doesn't make it patentable. (ps: I also think gene patenting is a bad idea, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
I wish I didn't expect that, but I do because the world does. The U.S. and the world pretty much ignore the existence of such regimes except where paying attention actually furthers the U.S.'s or the respective nations' immediate aims. Have you ever heard of Sudan? Fifty thousand people died in the past year from the assault of the Sudanese-government-supported Janjaweed, yet Bush hasn't even mentioned it. Over one million people are now refugees fleeing the slaughter, yet still Bush's administration ignores it. There's dozens of other examples like this around the world.h tml
Here's a Time Magazine article, The Tragedy of Sudan. http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101041004/story.
Brutalities far worse, more wanton, and more extensive than any that occurred under Saddam have been largely ignored.
Whoops, here's the full link: http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr2003 0509-depsecdef0223.html
I wouldn't say it wasn't about oil Only. It weakens your argument to narrow it so. Invading Iraq was also about the fact that America had been hit, and so was looking around for somebody to hit back. That's not a very rational way of forming a response to an attack, but that's the way it went. First, Afghanistan (A good move, I think.) Then, unfortunately, Iraq (apparently because Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other chickenhawk members of the Project for a New American Century were part of the decision process.)
3 0509-depsecde
Here is an interview with Paul Wolfowitz in which he states his reasons for pushing the war in Iraq. They don't stand up to reason, but it's true that few of them are related to oil. He says that the American military presence in Saudi Arabia "and Bin Laden's rage about that" could be solved if the U.S. could keep its troops stationed in Iraq. He also argued that "how can removing this huge source of instability [Hussein] make things more unstable?" He had hoped the U.S. could set up a stable and friendly regime, station troops in Iraq as the new base for American presence in the Middle East, and thus avoid pissing off Saudis by not having troops in Saudi Arabia. The obvious flaw in that reasoning is that now we're pissing everybody off, and that Saddam was actually a stabilizing force once his military had been effectively castrated in the first Gulf War. And his arguments have clearly not been borne out by actual events.
So there's oil, and then there's also the strategic placement of the country, and a desire to replace Hussein with somebody more friendly (which unfortunately entails pissing off a whole new group in the Middle East), and the blind 9/11 terrified patriotic fervor of which the chickenhawks took advantage.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr200
But anyway, oil wasn't the only reason.
Well, yeah, he "admitted" that. Saddam's goal was to control oil in the region and to dominate his neighbors; to do that he had to project a tough guy appearance. So he "admitted" to the world that he was a big nasty scary man who had thousands of liters of every nasty thing you can imagine in an attempt to give the impression that he posed a severe threat, so that the world would take him seriously.
He also told the UN that he was in full accordance with UN resolutions. You shouldn't expect consistency from a power-mad dictator. Saddam's weapons scientists told him that they were making great strides in increasing Iraq's might through WMDs, when in fact Iraq's third-world-level funding, the internally hostile nature of the regime, and UN weapons inspections were all preventing any real progress. To back this up, check the Kay Report. Charles Duelfer, David Kay's replacement, expected to find evidence of active weapons or at least active weapons systems. Yet still Duelfer's report speaks only of "regime intent" to construct buildings to facilitate weapons programs, and Bush is left with the mouthful "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."
Also, you might want to look into what Hans Blix had to say.