If you actually wanted to, you could very well do something.
The international arrest warrent exists, and it would dramatically reduce Zuckerbergs mobility. It would hit him where it really hurts, because you can't be part of the international elite if you can't travel internationally anymore.
And you can block Facebook in the EU without any Internet filters. Did you forget what their business is? In Zuckerbergs own words: "Senator, we run ads". If they can't sell ads in Europe anymore, that's their business in Europe gone. It would also drop their stock price through the floor because investor will need about three seconds to understand that Facebook will either operate at a loss in Europe, or leave the market to competitors, and Europe is a larger market than the US, both by population and money.
If governments weren't at this point in time wholly owned and operated by corporations, they very well could show teeth. But the politicians of today desperately want to belong to that global elite themselves after their term. That's why they are fishing for those speaking and consulting contracts that pay obscene rates that are basically legal bribes, and they wouldn't want to upset their potential future employers.
Too few people understood already that all of this behaviour by the large corporations is fully intentional.
The law moves slowly, the markets move fast. That is why breaking the law is short-term profitable, and short-term profits are all that matters if you are measured by quarterly results. Your chances of either working somewhere else already or having made it so big that you basically don't care by the time the punishment rolls around are pretty good.
The whole system is rigged to make law-breaking profitable. And there's no easy fix.
This culture of listening to people just because they're rich is deluded.
We have the scientific research that proves that rich people (in general) are rich not because they're super-humans, but because of a combination of talent, the right background and environment and sheer dumb luck. And that their talent in one region doesn't necessarily confer talent in other regions.
Bill Gates has been wrong about almost everything that's not related to making Microsoft an evil empire. He famously underestimated the Internet even in his book, which is choke full of more mistakes. His actions in Africa are lauded by some and called misguided by others, and pretty much everything else he's done outside MS has received mix results at best.
e-learning is something he's been trying to be a champion of for at least a decade, with no results to show for. Textbooks won't go away for one simple reason: They work.
When your nifty tech solution is as reliable as a paperback book, we can talk. When it can be lended, get any kind and colour of bookmarks, can get comments scribbled in the margins - in short, when you can duplicate the reliability and functionality with something digital instead of weak attempts at a somewhat imitation as we have now, then you can try to expand on it.
Or, invent something different and better. Cars don't duplicate horse-drawn carriage and yet they replaced them. Because they didn't try to be the same thing just better, they understood they are a different thing. Also, horse-drawn carriages still exist in some areas.
Textbooks aren't going away just because some tech-mogul wants to sell you something that will pump up his stocks.
Some pharmaceuticals so old that they're off patent still sell for multiple thousands of times the cost of materials
Seems you are missing a tremendous business opportunity there. Go and make the same product, selling it for only a single thousand times the cost of materials. You'll instantly dominate the market and become rich beyond belief.
Or maybe, just maybe, there's something wrong with your statement. Such as cost of materials not being the only factor. The cost of materials for a computer chip is close to zero - they're made from silicon, which can be extracted from silicon dioxide, a chemical compound better known by its colloquial name: sand. If cost of materials were the only factor, computer chips should be cheaper than potato chips.
"best" is a value judgement on anything that has multiple independent variables.
If you advertise with value judgements, indicate whose judgement. I don't have a problem at all with "best car (according to 2016 survey of Three-Wheel-Cars Magazine)" - that is a truthful statement if there was indeed a survey titled "best car" in said magazine. It also allows me to qualify the statement with my opinion of that magazine.
The "corporations are (like) people (before the law)" came from a corporation trying to evade paying for goods it had received, arguing that corporations don't have to pay because they don't have the financial responsibility that people have. The court said "Yes they do. Pay up."
Could've easily done that without giving them full people recognition. In fact, I would argue that corporations have higher financial responsibilities than people.
Free speech is for everyone, and limiting it by the sort of people involved is very dangerous.
I'm not trying to limit the sort of people involved.
I'm trying to make the obvious-to-anyone-with-a-brain point that corporations are not people. Supreme court or not. This is what is generally called a category mistake, and it's clear judges aren't exempt from making them.
"Profit-based legal entities" are essential to modern civilized human life, yet you seem to have an objection to them.
Not at all. On the contrary, I own one, as well as stocks in several others.
I just object to confusing them with human beings and thinking they are the same thing. They are not. For one, they don't die of old age, which is an essential difference in the matter of wealth accumulation. They can also be in many places at the same time, another limitation not shared with human beings. From these two things alone it should be obvious that these two things are not the same.
The quality of this exchange has been on a constant downward spiral. I'll bail before it hits the ground. You can consider yourself the winner if you need such.
Contrary to you, I'm not here to discuss my penis size, but was under the impression we are talking about Tesla instead. I'm not in a mood to discuss semantical details of Internet comments. If you want exact, academic phrases, quality-controlled and double-checked, you'll have to pay my usual daily rate. On/. my opinions are for free, but if you break them with nitpicking, you get to keep both parts.
There is nothing simple about that. What is the standard of "truth" here?
Which evidence do you have that your claim is true? What evidence exists that your claim is false?
Most cases will be obvious from there. The non-obvious cases can be sorted out in court, like everything else that's in dispute. We figured that principle out in Ancient Rome, so what's the problem?
I didn't state any hypothesis. I simply said that maybe Tesla was on to something. If you call that a hypothesis, your standards should make an IPO to beat the Boring Company out of business.
Usually true, though some ingredients might cause skin irritations or other side-effects and brand names are maybe slightly more likely to be careful in their selection.
You are right. Skin conditions at the outside (acne is about the pores getting clogged up) can of course be healed from the outside. I was speaking about "anti-aging" and "reduces wrinkles" types of cremes and should've made that more clear.
There are a LOT of "pharmaceutical" products that have even less efficacy than some supplements !
I doubt that because they have to prove that they are at least more efficient than placebo to get clearance.
But I'm sure you have dozens of studies that prove your point. Maybe list me just three? Don't have time to read more than that.
not disclosing the harsher side effects or low efficacy compared to placebos is no better than quackery.
That is true, which is why all medicine is tested against placebos. And why they have this boring papers inside that list all the side-effects, preconditions and other details that nobody ever reads (except some... ehem... nerds).
There is evidence from many studies that many advertisements:
Oh, absolutely. At least 80% of advertisement is either exaggeration or straight-out lies. That's exactly the point I'm making, so I figure we agree? If it were illegal to make claims in advertisement that you cannot back up, that would be a big step forward, right?
I pity you for the results of that process, but if you keep at it then one day you'll figure it out and this "thinking" thing may start to work out for you.
Tesla doesn't state "maybe there is something that does something". He's quite a bit more specific than that. Hence you can test it.
Falsifiability in the strictest sense - no. You can always claim that something was missed and if only one more change were made...
But in the practical sense, once you've tried everything within the description left by Tesla, maybe there is something else out there, but it's not what he described.
And yes, it may well be that we discover something different. When you have an old treasure map and there's no island where the map says, but there is an island a few miles to the East - it could be the same island (and the map is slightly off) or it could be an entirely different island and the map is completely wrong. But if it has the treasure mentioned, the chances just shifted dramatically (I'm sure you know about conditional probability). So if you discover the effect described by Tesla in reasonable proximity to his specifications, chances are considerable that you didn't by accident discover a completely unrelated effect.
There are entire industries (plural!) that exist by living just outside the border, like slum towns.
An ex-GF of mine studied this stuff and once said something very clear and straightforward: All those skin cremes are scams. To be actually effective, they would have to penetrate the outer layers of the skin. But if they did that, they would be classified as medicines and sold only in pharmacies. If you can buy it in a drug store, the only thing it actually does is make your topmost skin layer a bit wet.
I took that as a general concept for other stuff of the same type. You know, vitamins, supplements, pills and cremes and everything else that claims to have some effect on your body. If you can get it outside a pharmacy, it probably does nothing you couldn't do yourself with the equivalent of a damp towel.
You could just make it illegal to scam people, you know?
As in lying about the properties of your product, claiming things that you have no evidence are true, and advertising features or advantages your product does not actually have.
But you guys dug yourself a deep grave the day some idiots in robes decided that corporations are people and thus the first amendment applies to them and now they can spread whatever lies they want and say "free speech".
The simple rule "advertisement must be truthful" would kill all this bullshit instantly. But I guess free speech for profit-based legal entities is more important than not scamming people.
Your hypothesis is non-falsifiable. Just like most God theories.
Build a tower, try what Tesla described. Does it work? No? Tweak it around this way and that. Does it work or show any signs of anything maybe working? No? Ok, Tesla was wrong. Next theory please.
Making up something is not the same as formulating a hypothesis. There is actually a rigorous process to doing the later, including such things as testability and research into existing theories in the same area.
And keeping your eyes and mind open for the undiscovered is not the same as "oh, maybe god exists". Sure, maybe he does. Or maybe Atlantis is actually a space station in orbit around Pluto. Possibility and probability and plausibility are different concepts and you freely mix them all. Also, maybe he's a she? And why is your god true, but the other 5000 or so that humans believe or once believed in not? If you attribute equal probability to wireless energy transfer and the existence of god, you must be logically consistent and also apply equal probability to all the available gods.
If you use your brain, the sheer nonsense becomes quite apparent. And that's why I call it make-believe fantasy bullshit, because as soon as you don't stop thinking at the first intersection, it all falls apart.
Not the place for this argument, which you cannot possibly win. For every monk who contributed to early science, there were two actual scientists prosecuted. The net total is negative, even if you can find some positive contributions.
No, they should not exclusively use Free Software (sorry, "Open Source" guys, I never hopped on that bandwaggon) but they should have a strong preference for it.
Sadly, there are many areas where no Free Software of adequate quality exists. Areas that are vital for government work, and a government should not restrict itself. However, if an adequate Free Software exists, the government should strongly prefer it.
Security? Let's not forget two things: a) Free Software isn't bug-free, either, and especially tricky parts with security implications regularily don't get enough eyes on them. And b) we're talking about governments here. Unless you're the government of some tiny island, you can probably pressure big software vendors into giving you their source code for inspection. I mean, you seriously think the NSA (which is tasked with keeping the US government IT infrastructure secure) doesn't have access to the Windows, Office and whatever other source code they want? For large enough governments, every software is open source.
The natural world is full of wonders. There is more between the heavens and the earth than we can imagine in our wildest dream, and the unbelievable damage that religion and mysticism have done to the human race in distracting us away from those wonders into make-believe fantasy bullshit will one day be remembered as the highest crime against humanity.
Wherever we look, whenever we think that "science is over", someone makes a freak discovery and whole new worlds open up. So did Tesla know about something we don't? Maybe not in the sense of having a complete understanding of it, but he was an experimental guy, and may well have discovered something that even if he couldn't explain it he had an idea how and what to use it for.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually wanted to, you could very well do something.
The international arrest warrent exists, and it would dramatically reduce Zuckerbergs mobility. It would hit him where it really hurts, because you can't be part of the international elite if you can't travel internationally anymore.
And you can block Facebook in the EU without any Internet filters. Did you forget what their business is? In Zuckerbergs own words: "Senator, we run ads". If they can't sell ads in Europe anymore, that's their business in Europe gone. It would also drop their stock price through the floor because investor will need about three seconds to understand that Facebook will either operate at a loss in Europe, or leave the market to competitors, and Europe is a larger market than the US, both by population and money.
If governments weren't at this point in time wholly owned and operated by corporations, they very well could show teeth. But the politicians of today desperately want to belong to that global elite themselves after their term. That's why they are fishing for those speaking and consulting contracts that pay obscene rates that are basically legal bribes, and they wouldn't want to upset their potential future employers.
Too few people understood already that all of this behaviour by the large corporations is fully intentional.
The law moves slowly, the markets move fast. That is why breaking the law is short-term profitable, and short-term profits are all that matters if you are measured by quarterly results. Your chances of either working somewhere else already or having made it so big that you basically don't care by the time the punishment rolls around are pretty good.
The whole system is rigged to make law-breaking profitable. And there's no easy fix.
This culture of listening to people just because they're rich is deluded.
We have the scientific research that proves that rich people (in general) are rich not because they're super-humans, but because of a combination of talent, the right background and environment and sheer dumb luck. And that their talent in one region doesn't necessarily confer talent in other regions.
Bill Gates has been wrong about almost everything that's not related to making Microsoft an evil empire. He famously underestimated the Internet even in his book, which is choke full of more mistakes. His actions in Africa are lauded by some and called misguided by others, and pretty much everything else he's done outside MS has received mix results at best.
e-learning is something he's been trying to be a champion of for at least a decade, with no results to show for. Textbooks won't go away for one simple reason: They work.
When your nifty tech solution is as reliable as a paperback book, we can talk. When it can be lended, get any kind and colour of bookmarks, can get comments scribbled in the margins - in short, when you can duplicate the reliability and functionality with something digital instead of weak attempts at a somewhat imitation as we have now, then you can try to expand on it.
Or, invent something different and better. Cars don't duplicate horse-drawn carriage and yet they replaced them. Because they didn't try to be the same thing just better, they understood they are a different thing. Also, horse-drawn carriages still exist in some areas.
Textbooks aren't going away just because some tech-mogul wants to sell you something that will pump up his stocks.
Some pharmaceuticals so old that they're off patent still sell for multiple thousands of times the cost of materials
Seems you are missing a tremendous business opportunity there. Go and make the same product, selling it for only a single thousand times the cost of materials. You'll instantly dominate the market and become rich beyond belief.
Or maybe, just maybe, there's something wrong with your statement. Such as cost of materials not being the only factor. The cost of materials for a computer chip is close to zero - they're made from silicon, which can be extracted from silicon dioxide, a chemical compound better known by its colloquial name: sand. If cost of materials were the only factor, computer chips should be cheaper than potato chips.
"best" is a value judgement on anything that has multiple independent variables.
If you advertise with value judgements, indicate whose judgement. I don't have a problem at all with "best car (according to 2016 survey of Three-Wheel-Cars Magazine)" - that is a truthful statement if there was indeed a survey titled "best car" in said magazine. It also allows me to qualify the statement with my opinion of that magazine.
The "corporations are (like) people (before the law)" came from a corporation trying to evade paying for goods it had received, arguing that corporations don't have to pay because they don't have the financial responsibility that people have. The court said "Yes they do. Pay up."
Could've easily done that without giving them full people recognition. In fact, I would argue that corporations have higher financial responsibilities than people.
Free speech is for everyone, and limiting it by the sort of people involved is very dangerous.
I'm not trying to limit the sort of people involved.
I'm trying to make the obvious-to-anyone-with-a-brain point that corporations are not people. Supreme court or not. This is what is generally called a category mistake, and it's clear judges aren't exempt from making them.
"Profit-based legal entities" are essential to modern civilized human life, yet you seem to have an objection to them.
Not at all. On the contrary, I own one, as well as stocks in several others.
I just object to confusing them with human beings and thinking they are the same thing. They are not. For one, they don't die of old age, which is an essential difference in the matter of wealth accumulation. They can also be in many places at the same time, another limitation not shared with human beings. From these two things alone it should be obvious that these two things are not the same.
The quality of this exchange has been on a constant downward spiral. I'll bail before it hits the ground. You can consider yourself the winner if you need such.
Contrary to you, I'm not here to discuss my penis size, but was under the impression we are talking about Tesla instead. I'm not in a mood to discuss semantical details of Internet comments. If you want exact, academic phrases, quality-controlled and double-checked, you'll have to pay my usual daily rate. On /. my opinions are for free, but if you break them with nitpicking, you get to keep both parts.
No, they do not. That's only true for new drugs
I didn't know that. Thanks for the information.
There is nothing simple about that. What is the standard of "truth" here?
Which evidence do you have that your claim is true?
What evidence exists that your claim is false?
Most cases will be obvious from there. The non-obvious cases can be sorted out in court, like everything else that's in dispute. We figured that principle out in Ancient Rome, so what's the problem?
I didn't state any hypothesis. I simply said that maybe Tesla was on to something. If you call that a hypothesis, your standards should make an IPO to beat the Boring Company out of business.
Usually true, though some ingredients might cause skin irritations or other side-effects and brand names are maybe slightly more likely to be careful in their selection.
You are right. Skin conditions at the outside (acne is about the pores getting clogged up) can of course be healed from the outside. I was speaking about "anti-aging" and "reduces wrinkles" types of cremes and should've made that more clear.
There are a LOT of "pharmaceutical" products that have even less efficacy than some supplements !
I doubt that because they have to prove that they are at least more efficient than placebo to get clearance.
But I'm sure you have dozens of studies that prove your point. Maybe list me just three? Don't have time to read more than that.
not disclosing the harsher side effects or low efficacy compared to placebos is no better than quackery.
That is true, which is why all medicine is tested against placebos. And why they have this boring papers inside that list all the side-effects, preconditions and other details that nobody ever reads (except some... ehem... nerds).
There is evidence from many studies that many advertisements:
Oh, absolutely. At least 80% of advertisement is either exaggeration or straight-out lies. That's exactly the point I'm making, so I figure we agree? If it were illegal to make claims in advertisement that you cannot back up, that would be a big step forward, right?
I applaud you for thinking for yourself.
I pity you for the results of that process, but if you keep at it then one day you'll figure it out and this "thinking" thing may start to work out for you.
Tesla doesn't state "maybe there is something that does something". He's quite a bit more specific than that. Hence you can test it.
Falsifiability in the strictest sense - no. You can always claim that something was missed and if only one more change were made...
But in the practical sense, once you've tried everything within the description left by Tesla, maybe there is something else out there, but it's not what he described.
And yes, it may well be that we discover something different. When you have an old treasure map and there's no island where the map says, but there is an island a few miles to the East - it could be the same island (and the map is slightly off) or it could be an entirely different island and the map is completely wrong. But if it has the treasure mentioned, the chances just shifted dramatically (I'm sure you know about conditional probability). So if you discover the effect described by Tesla in reasonable proximity to his specifications, chances are considerable that you didn't by accident discover a completely unrelated effect.
There are entire industries (plural!) that exist by living just outside the border, like slum towns.
An ex-GF of mine studied this stuff and once said something very clear and straightforward: All those skin cremes are scams. To be actually effective, they would have to penetrate the outer layers of the skin. But if they did that, they would be classified as medicines and sold only in pharmacies. If you can buy it in a drug store, the only thing it actually does is make your topmost skin layer a bit wet.
I took that as a general concept for other stuff of the same type. You know, vitamins, supplements, pills and cremes and everything else that claims to have some effect on your body. If you can get it outside a pharmacy, it probably does nothing you couldn't do yourself with the equivalent of a damp towel.
You could just make it illegal to scam people, you know?
As in lying about the properties of your product, claiming things that you have no evidence are true, and advertising features or advantages your product does not actually have.
But you guys dug yourself a deep grave the day some idiots in robes decided that corporations are people and thus the first amendment applies to them and now they can spread whatever lies they want and say "free speech".
The simple rule "advertisement must be truthful" would kill all this bullshit instantly. But I guess free speech for profit-based legal entities is more important than not scamming people.
Your hypothesis is non-falsifiable. Just like most God theories.
Build a tower, try what Tesla described. Does it work? No? Tweak it around this way and that. Does it work or show any signs of anything maybe working? No? Ok, Tesla was wrong. Next theory please.
What's so hard about that?
Technically, at least one body knows - the dog. So it's actually (nobody - 1).
So much nonsense in so few words. :-)
Making up something is not the same as formulating a hypothesis. There is actually a rigorous process to doing the later, including such things as testability and research into existing theories in the same area.
And keeping your eyes and mind open for the undiscovered is not the same as "oh, maybe god exists". Sure, maybe he does. Or maybe Atlantis is actually a space station in orbit around Pluto. Possibility and probability and plausibility are different concepts and you freely mix them all. Also, maybe he's a she? And why is your god true, but the other 5000 or so that humans believe or once believed in not? If you attribute equal probability to wireless energy transfer and the existence of god, you must be logically consistent and also apply equal probability to all the available gods.
If you use your brain, the sheer nonsense becomes quite apparent. And that's why I call it make-believe fantasy bullshit, because as soon as you don't stop thinking at the first intersection, it all falls apart.
Not the place for this argument, which you cannot possibly win. For every monk who contributed to early science, there were two actual scientists prosecuted. The net total is negative, even if you can find some positive contributions.
I see that you don't understand probabilistic approaches. Maybe stick to Ouija boards.
No, they should not exclusively use Free Software (sorry, "Open Source" guys, I never hopped on that bandwaggon) but they should have a strong preference for it.
Sadly, there are many areas where no Free Software of adequate quality exists. Areas that are vital for government work, and a government should not restrict itself. However, if an adequate Free Software exists, the government should strongly prefer it.
Security? Let's not forget two things: a) Free Software isn't bug-free, either, and especially tricky parts with security implications regularily don't get enough eyes on them. And b) we're talking about governments here. Unless you're the government of some tiny island, you can probably pressure big software vendors into giving you their source code for inspection. I mean, you seriously think the NSA (which is tasked with keeping the US government IT infrastructure secure) doesn't have access to the Windows, Office and whatever other source code they want? For large enough governments, every software is open source.
Really? Just last year a cooperation effort discovered that water is actually two different liquids.
The natural world is full of wonders. There is more between the heavens and the earth than we can imagine in our wildest dream, and the unbelievable damage that religion and mysticism have done to the human race in distracting us away from those wonders into make-believe fantasy bullshit will one day be remembered as the highest crime against humanity.
Wherever we look, whenever we think that "science is over", someone makes a freak discovery and whole new worlds open up. So did Tesla know about something we don't? Maybe not in the sense of having a complete understanding of it, but he was an experimental guy, and may well have discovered something that even if he couldn't explain it he had an idea how and what to use it for.