And we said--'OK. Security Council, they're not letting us in.' Nothing. Day goes by--'Excuse me, gentlemen, we're parked out in front of the agriculture ministry. They're not letting us in. We want to do an inspection.' Silence. Nothing.
This quote that you've copied is from an 1999 Frontline documentary, discussing events that happened in 1998 or before. You have to remember that a lot of things happened between the failure of the 1998 inspections and 2003. Operation Desert Fox was one such measure. The guy who said it is Scott Ritter, who back in 2002 also stated:
There's no doubt Iraq hasn't fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by the Security Council in its resolution. But on the other hand, since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity has been verifiably eliminated... We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesn't necessarily constitute a threat... It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesn't amount to much, but which is still prohibited... We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can't close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously, we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capacity worthy of war.
There is no doubt that no significant WMD capacity existed in Iraq, we know this for a fact for two reasons: 1. The US military wouldn't have went in if anything like that would have existed. 2. Noone found any WMDs in the past 7 years.
The case for war was thoroughly fabricated by supressing intelligence that didn't agree with the war and magnifying or fabricating intelligence that did. My favourite bits are:
In some cases, Cheney's office would leak the intelligence to news correspondents, who would cover it in such outlets as The New York Times. Cheney would subsequently appear on the Sunday political television talk shows to discuss the intelligence, pointing to The New York Times reportage as corroboration of his view.
The fact that Iraq's foreign minister under Saddam was an agent paid by the French who confirmed that no WMDs existed was completely ignored:
The CIA had contacted Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was being paid by the French as an agent. Sabri informed them that Saddam had hidden poison gas among Sunni tribesmen, had ambitions for a nuclear program but that it was not active, and that no biological weapons were being produced or stockpiled, although research was underway. According to Sidney Blumenthal, George Tenet briefed Bush on September 18, 2002 that Sabri had informed them that Iraq did not have WMD. Bush dismissed this top-secret intelligence from Hussein's inner circle which was approved by two senior CIA officers. The information was never shared with Congress or even CIA agents examining whether Saddam had such weapons.
What did the French get for their first hand intelligence that no WMDs existed in Iraq in 2003? Freedom fries, that's what.
Melkor spent his spirit in envy and hate, until at last he could make nothing save in mockery of the thought of others, and all their works he destroyed if he could
Like when people label me a "racist" because I belong to the local Tea Party.
I agree that's insulting. Of course you're not racist for being in the Tea Party movement, you're just retarded.
On a more serious note, although it's a bad generalization to say that Tea Partiers are racist, it is valid to say that more participants are racist than you'd expect from an average organization.
Actually, we could release all of it up into the air and still contribute to less radioactivity than coal burning does. The Yucca mountain stuff is so unbelievably overblown it's not funny.
And by the way, in Germany on sunny days there is more electricity produced by photovoltaics than by nuclear reactors.
That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.
Ok. Let's factor in the cost of transporting the energy or storing it to provide night time load handling capability and look at the costs again.
To be honest I don't buy the "nuclear is expensive" thing. It's expensive the way you're doing it. Learn from the French.
In Japan and France, construction costs and delays are significantly diminished because of streamlined government licensing and certification procedures. In France, one model of reactor was type-certified, using a safety engineering process similar to the process used to certify aircraft models for safety. That is, rather than licensing individual reactors, the regulatory agency certified a particular design and its construction process to produce safe reactors. U.S. law permits type-licensing of reactors, a process which is being used on the AP1000 and the ESBWR.
Cancer is a disease that affects organisms late in life. Generally speaking, they will have already had an opportunity to reproduce by the time that they develop cancer. The introduction of this mutation could have been completely coincidental and it would not have affected the reproductive fitness of the organisms that had it.
I was about to post something similar to what you wrote, but you were quicker. I'd just like to add the minor point that while cancer isn't that bad for the reproductive success of a mammal, it's effect is not zero or entirely negligible. Since we're really talking about the self-replication of genetic data, which is what actually let's us explain close-kin relations on a biological level, cancer's effect and protection against cancer does have effects on the successfulness of one bundle of genetic data against another one.
Someone developing cancer at an older age loses the possibility of reproduction. A human male is more than capable of fathering an offspring over the age of 45. Dieing of cancer can also have a bad impact on the success of your offspring, because they lose the father's/mother's support. It's not only about an organisms' direct reproductive success, but also about the success of the genetic data that lives on in genetically closely related members of a species.
"Science reporting organizations have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current literacy education. Meanwhile, tabloid reporting will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid science reporting replaces sensationalism -- if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how smart things can get with current society. Universities are going to have student density growth problems, just as other societies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the literacy problem for journalism doesn't end there. Buff Clayton, Editor in chief for The Onion at Delaware, notes that as literacy gets smaller, science reporting has more and more troubles -- the bullshit PR releases don't decrease, so the probability of causing accidental sensationalism goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the literacy and hope to not have reader confusion," notes Clayton.'"
Right before the Big Bang began, energy can be traced back to a singularity occupying zero space and infinite density. You Big Bangers want to blur the picture by creating a difference between 1 second after the Big Bang and 13 billion years, as if it would matter!
Therefor I'm going to fail to see any relevant differences between any form of energy or any form of timescale and definition of time and call that being smart.
A real name is a powerful little thing. It is my professional opinion as someone who's involved in the background check business, the past 3-4 years have seen a lot of automated tools arise that trawl a lot of publicly accessible content to find out a lot about a name.
Anything that is accessible by a browser is available, think beyond just Google. Think airline flight scraping sites done properly, querying a few thousand sources that are publicly available but not indexed by Google, only through a POST request. A lot of online games are already added, just to search for nicknames and related information. If things are linked on WoW to real names, it's a fucking goldmine to these services.
I take issue with this last line. I LIKE c#/.net. If I get to use it in more places, this is a good thing.
Isn't the whole shtick about open source the fact that we get more options?
Open source is about options, true. So you're saying that Mono should be included as a required dependency in the base system of Ubuntu because you like it, but fuck all the people who don't like Mono for various reasons? This clearly isn't about more options. Leaving Mono "optional" is about more options.
This is the reason I highly dislike the mainstream media. I guess it's okay for them to at least try to summarize research, even though they fail horribly most of the time, but for fuck's sake at least provide a link to the original research or at least the press release from the university!
A much better test would be to actually TEST their alertness, instead of relying on a subjective self-assessment.
They did that. From the press release:
Approximately half of the participants were non/low caffeine consumers and the other half were medium/high caffeine consumers. All were asked to rate their personal levels of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after being given either the caffeine or the placebo. They were also asked to carry out a series of computer tasks to test for their levels of memory, attentiveness and vigilance.
Then I apologise for not being clear enough. What I ment to say isn't "screw the little guy", but rather that the little guy already has lots of options to turn a profit from inventing something, without the artificial monopoly of a patent system. His ideas are worth a lot without a protection of the patent system and let me just add that I take issue with you saying "actually worth", because currently the inventor receives massive subsidies from the taxpayer in the form of the patent system. Those subsidies take away a lot more from the public than they give to the inventor.
I agree with the assessment that a lot of corporations are mindless soul sucking incarnations of evil, however exactly that makes the patent system so bad. It's 45% patent warfare, 45% milking the public with patents for bullshit improvements thus retarding progress and at best 5% use that could be called legitimate, although I pretty much think that even that 5% is detrimental on the medium to long term.
If the patent system would be a drug, no medical regulatory agency would approve it due to it's very severe sideeffects and unproven beneficial effects.
Quite the contrary, there are some areas that desparately need the patent system to continue and flourish. The medical industry in general, and the pharmaceutical industry specifically are a good example. R&D is extremely expensive and depends on the windfall of blockbuster drugs to sustain it. Drugs and medical devices are extrodinarily expensive to develop, but fairly easy to replicate. 20 years isn't that big of a price to pay.
You're misinformed. More than half of the medical research money comes from the government even in the US and of the remaining part, it constitutes less than 20% of the budgets of the large drug companies, dwarfed by the marketing budget. R&D might be expensive, but pharma companies these days are doing the wrong kind of research _because_ of the patent system. The "blockbuster" drugs in recent years have only been at best marginally better, at worst marketed better with worse sideeffects than the generic drugs, the only difference was the patent that allowed the drug companies to milk the consumer dry. Abolishing the patent regime would _benefit_ the medical industry, because it would force them to innovate or consolidate prices and stop chasing patent protection and instead look for truly innovative medical solutions. 20 years is a huge price to pay, because it's not only one device, but every small improvement on the device after that that gets patented. What would normally happen in 2-3 years with competition might take 40 in the patent system.
Software and engineering in general are bad areas for patents. Rarely is anything revolutionary generated, and nearly every software patent should be obvious to one skilled in the art. Furthermore, it is a case of many people simultaneously and independantly solving the same problems, further proof that these things should fail the obiousness test. The issue then, as I see it, is simply protecting the fruits of one's labors and that is easily handled by copyright.
I don't think you could name a single area where that wasn't a trend regarding patents.
My biggest complaint is that the patent system seems to not merely protect the how, but also the what
That's what you get for trying to monopolize the abstract.
Having a good idea is usually common, actually carrying it to fruition is a lot harder. I think that your viewpoint that we need patents to protect solitary inventors from a hypothetical scenario of a greedy corporation duplicating someone's idea well enough, is flawed. Sure, it's possible that it has happened or would happen to people, but we should be optimizing for the common case. Polihistors are a thing of the past, solitary invention is exceedingly rare. Inventions are evolutionary in the sense that it's a long line of small steps of improvements.
Your scenario of a big evil company swooping down and taking the lone hero's invention is more psychological than based on real concern. A big soul sucking company would probably hire the guy who invented stuff with a generous enough salary. He is the expert on the thing after all, since he managed to innovate in the field. The guy wouldn't get millions of dollars, but he would make a decent living, a good enough outcome for most people. Noone needs millions of dollars for a comfortable living.
The point is, even solitary inventors profit from innovation without having the protection of an artificial monopoly on abstract things that the patent system is. The vastly more common case is unfortunately the damage resulting from any patent system: patent trolls are not the problem I'm talking about, it's just a sympthom. The problem is slowing down the exchange of ideas and the feedback loop of step by step invention. A patent stops that loop. More than 99% of all patents are for small improvements on the already established knowledge base. You'd be hard pressed to find examples of innovation that wouldn't have been invented until the expiration of the patent describing something and are still useful after the expiry of the patent (maybe except cases where a patent retarded innovation so badly that most progress stopped in a field due to legal concerns).
We need to get the legal system out of the free proliferation of ideas. It's not only software patents or patents on living organisms that are the problem, it's the fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation occurs.
I propose a viewpoint. As opposed to keeping discussion specific to individual patents or details of a certain case, we should talk about nuking the whole patent system entirely. It is a net loss. It is an archaic system based on naíve economic ideas. It is time to euthanize it.
...and also risk the life of innocent bystanders on the ground? You know, if you throw up a few tonnes of metal and plastic, it'll come down eventually and potentially kill people when it lands on their heads.
So based on a few low altitude flights they want to reestablish about 20k flights / day? It's excellent that 5-10 testflights could manage in low altitude, however if only 0.1% flights drops out of the skies, that is still 20 flights downed per day. You don't establish safety based on limited tests.
Sure it's possible that the computer models establishing the extent of the dust cloud are conservative towards safety, however isn't that what you would expect no matter how much it costs the airlines? The Finnish incident clearly shows it's not safe, at this point I'm not even sure I'd trust the airlines to disclose whether they suffered damage in their test flights.
You're entirely missing the point. Moving over to SI in HDD storage space doesn't fucking make sense for 2 reasons:
1. SSDs are absolutely base 2. They are taking over everything lately, pushing from the mobile/laptop segment outwards to desktop/server.
2. Disk space doesn't exist in isolation, it's going to be fucking confusing for everyone to deal with RAM vs HDD data sizes. That kind of thing occurs a lot and especially since with bigger chunks of data the difference gets bigger percentage-wise. For application development or anything that requires you to know about data-on-disk vs data-in-memory, everyone will pretty much stay with base 2.
Slashdot Mirror
This quote that you've copied is from an 1999 Frontline documentary, discussing events that happened in 1998 or before. You have to remember that a lot of things happened between the failure of the 1998 inspections and 2003. Operation Desert Fox was one such measure. The guy who said it is Scott Ritter, who back in 2002 also stated:
There is no doubt that no significant WMD capacity existed in Iraq, we know this for a fact for two reasons: 1. The US military wouldn't have went in if anything like that would have existed. 2. Noone found any WMDs in the past 7 years.
The case for war was thoroughly fabricated by supressing intelligence that didn't agree with the war and magnifying or fabricating intelligence that did. My favourite bits are:
The fact that Iraq's foreign minister under Saddam was an agent paid by the French who confirmed that no WMDs existed was completely ignored:
What did the French get for their first hand intelligence that no WMDs existed in Iraq in 2003? Freedom fries, that's what.
Hmm. What does that remind me of?
I agree that's insulting. Of course you're not racist for being in the Tea Party movement, you're just retarded.
On a more serious note, although it's a bad generalization to say that Tea Partiers are racist, it is valid to say that more participants are racist than you'd expect from an average organization.
Actually, we could release all of it up into the air and still contribute to less radioactivity than coal burning does. The Yucca mountain stuff is so unbelievably overblown it's not funny.
That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.
To be honest I don't buy the "nuclear is expensive" thing. It's expensive the way you're doing it. Learn from the French.
I was about to post something similar to what you wrote, but you were quicker. I'd just like to add the minor point that while cancer isn't that bad for the reproductive success of a mammal, it's effect is not zero or entirely negligible. Since we're really talking about the self-replication of genetic data, which is what actually let's us explain close-kin relations on a biological level, cancer's effect and protection against cancer does have effects on the successfulness of one bundle of genetic data against another one.
Someone developing cancer at an older age loses the possibility of reproduction. A human male is more than capable of fathering an offspring over the age of 45. Dieing of cancer can also have a bad impact on the success of your offspring, because they lose the father's/mother's support. It's not only about an organisms' direct reproductive success, but also about the success of the genetic data that lives on in genetically closely related members of a species.
Don't let this "affect"-effect effect your self-worth!
"Science reporting organizations have been expanding dramatically in recent years, but this article says that's about to change, in part because of the limits of current literacy education. Meanwhile, tabloid reporting will continue to grow, which the author says will mean many years before solid science reporting replaces sensationalism -- if they ever do. From the article: 'The bottom line is that there are limits to how smart things can get with current society. Universities are going to have student density growth problems, just as other societies have had over the last 30 years. This should surprise no one. And the literacy problem for journalism doesn't end there. Buff Clayton, Editor in chief for The Onion at Delaware, notes that as literacy gets smaller, science reporting has more and more troubles -- the bullshit PR releases don't decrease, so the probability of causing accidental sensationalism goes up. "So at some point, you just can't reduce the literacy and hope to not have reader confusion," notes Clayton.'"
Hah! All of you Big Bangers!
Right before the Big Bang began, energy can be traced back to a singularity occupying zero space and infinite density. You Big Bangers want to blur the picture by creating a difference between 1 second after the Big Bang and 13 billion years, as if it would matter!
Therefor I'm going to fail to see any relevant differences between any form of energy or any form of timescale and definition of time and call that being smart.
A real name is a powerful little thing. It is my professional opinion as someone who's involved in the background check business, the past 3-4 years have seen a lot of automated tools arise that trawl a lot of publicly accessible content to find out a lot about a name.
Anything that is accessible by a browser is available, think beyond just Google. Think airline flight scraping sites done properly, querying a few thousand sources that are publicly available but not indexed by Google, only through a POST request. A lot of online games are already added, just to search for nicknames and related information. If things are linked on WoW to real names, it's a fucking goldmine to these services.
I'm not entirely sure if this is what you've intended, but someone already geeked out building a green home.
Open source is about options, true. So you're saying that Mono should be included as a required dependency in the base system of Ubuntu because you like it, but fuck all the people who don't like Mono for various reasons? This clearly isn't about more options. Leaving Mono "optional" is about more options.
They did that. From the press release:
Then I apologise for not being clear enough. What I ment to say isn't "screw the little guy", but rather that the little guy already has lots of options to turn a profit from inventing something, without the artificial monopoly of a patent system. His ideas are worth a lot without a protection of the patent system and let me just add that I take issue with you saying "actually worth", because currently the inventor receives massive subsidies from the taxpayer in the form of the patent system. Those subsidies take away a lot more from the public than they give to the inventor.
I agree with the assessment that a lot of corporations are mindless soul sucking incarnations of evil, however exactly that makes the patent system so bad. It's 45% patent warfare, 45% milking the public with patents for bullshit improvements thus retarding progress and at best 5% use that could be called legitimate, although I pretty much think that even that 5% is detrimental on the medium to long term.
If the patent system would be a drug, no medical regulatory agency would approve it due to it's very severe sideeffects and unproven beneficial effects.
You're misinformed. More than half of the medical research money comes from the government even in the US and of the remaining part, it constitutes less than 20% of the budgets of the large drug companies, dwarfed by the marketing budget. R&D might be expensive, but pharma companies these days are doing the wrong kind of research _because_ of the patent system. The "blockbuster" drugs in recent years have only been at best marginally better, at worst marketed better with worse sideeffects than the generic drugs, the only difference was the patent that allowed the drug companies to milk the consumer dry. Abolishing the patent regime would _benefit_ the medical industry, because it would force them to innovate or consolidate prices and stop chasing patent protection and instead look for truly innovative medical solutions. 20 years is a huge price to pay, because it's not only one device, but every small improvement on the device after that that gets patented. What would normally happen in 2-3 years with competition might take 40 in the patent system.
I don't think you could name a single area where that wasn't a trend regarding patents.
That's what you get for trying to monopolize the abstract.
This is like saying that without greed, communism would work :)
In other words, the patent scheme is broken at it's core.
Having a good idea is usually common, actually carrying it to fruition is a lot harder. I think that your viewpoint that we need patents to protect solitary inventors from a hypothetical scenario of a greedy corporation duplicating someone's idea well enough, is flawed. Sure, it's possible that it has happened or would happen to people, but we should be optimizing for the common case. Polihistors are a thing of the past, solitary invention is exceedingly rare. Inventions are evolutionary in the sense that it's a long line of small steps of improvements.
Your scenario of a big evil company swooping down and taking the lone hero's invention is more psychological than based on real concern. A big soul sucking company would probably hire the guy who invented stuff with a generous enough salary. He is the expert on the thing after all, since he managed to innovate in the field. The guy wouldn't get millions of dollars, but he would make a decent living, a good enough outcome for most people. Noone needs millions of dollars for a comfortable living.
The point is, even solitary inventors profit from innovation without having the protection of an artificial monopoly on abstract things that the patent system is. The vastly more common case is unfortunately the damage resulting from any patent system: patent trolls are not the problem I'm talking about, it's just a sympthom. The problem is slowing down the exchange of ideas and the feedback loop of step by step invention. A patent stops that loop. More than 99% of all patents are for small improvements on the already established knowledge base. You'd be hard pressed to find examples of innovation that wouldn't have been invented until the expiration of the patent describing something and are still useful after the expiry of the patent (maybe except cases where a patent retarded innovation so badly that most progress stopped in a field due to legal concerns).
We need to get the legal system out of the free proliferation of ideas. It's not only software patents or patents on living organisms that are the problem, it's the fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation occurs.
I propose a viewpoint. As opposed to keeping discussion specific to individual patents or details of a certain case, we should talk about nuking the whole patent system entirely. It is a net loss. It is an archaic system based on naíve economic ideas. It is time to euthanize it.
Indeed. I couldn't believe noone posted it yet when I checked, so I had to.
Zaphod, my buddy! Is that you?!
...and also risk the life of innocent bystanders on the ground? You know, if you throw up a few tonnes of metal and plastic, it'll come down eventually and potentially kill people when it lands on their heads.
There is satellite imagery however. Both NASA and ESA traces the ash cloud based on satellite data, ESA even compiled an informative animation.
So based on a few low altitude flights they want to reestablish about 20k flights / day? It's excellent that 5-10 testflights could manage in low altitude, however if only 0.1% flights drops out of the skies, that is still 20 flights downed per day. You don't establish safety based on limited tests.
Sure it's possible that the computer models establishing the extent of the dust cloud are conservative towards safety, however isn't that what you would expect no matter how much it costs the airlines? The Finnish incident clearly shows it's not safe, at this point I'm not even sure I'd trust the airlines to disclose whether they suffered damage in their test flights.
You're entirely missing the point. Moving over to SI in HDD storage space doesn't fucking make sense for 2 reasons:
1. SSDs are absolutely base 2. They are taking over everything lately, pushing from the mobile/laptop segment outwards to desktop/server.
2. Disk space doesn't exist in isolation, it's going to be fucking confusing for everyone to deal with RAM vs HDD data sizes. That kind of thing occurs a lot and especially since with bigger chunks of data the difference gets bigger percentage-wise. For application development or anything that requires you to know about data-on-disk vs data-in-memory, everyone will pretty much stay with base 2.