In building and shaping the site I've always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We've always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community.
what you don't seem to get is that the rules of 'what is fittest' have not changed at all
Wrong! That is exactly what has changed. Look at cows. The farmer has an understandable aversion to being gored to death, so he wants placid cattle with shorter horns. So he bumps off & eats the bad tempered longhorns first, and breeds from the others. The resulting herd might not be fittest if they were in the wild, but that's irrelevant - they aren't in the wild now. They're fittest for the farmer's purpose.
my point is that technology has made it so that anyone can survive, however unfit they are.
Unfit by what criterion? Who is more fit in modern society, a crippled genius or a retarded olympian?
There's a world of difference. In a private company, the stock isn't publicly tradeable. This single fact is enough to strongly deter pump-and-dump and other forms of short-term thinking.
Actually, "patently obvious" and "patent" come from "letters patent"
No they don't. How can a word come from a phrase containing that word? That would be a recursive definition. It's like claiming that "black" comes from "black cat" or saying Australia is named after the people who live there.
which itself comes from Latin
So what? The "patentes" part still means open, as I said.
Start from the beginning. "A means of producing mechanical energy from a combustible fuel source" absolutely was patentable (not by 1850, though).
Rubbish. Can I patent a teleporter without making, or even knowing how to make one? Can I patent "A means of doing anything that would, you know, be really cool"?
The external combustion engine was patentable when created; the internal combustion engine was patentable, too.
Did I mention specific implementations? Yes I did, you even used one of them as a counter-example! Not the same as a vague concept/idea/wish at all. In future you could maybe try to understand what people are saying rather than automatically disagreeing with them to prove how clever you aren't.
I wonder if Google is planning to leverage MySQL in a proxy warfare type scenario vs. M$.
No way. Google are smart. Very smart. Some of their people have degrees I can't even spell. If that were their strategy, they'd have gone with Postgresql.
We'd be living the same as people did before the industrial revolution which would be a far shorter lifespan and much, much harder lives...burning coal and wood which genreate far more pollution/energy but that's a whole different topic...
More pollution per capita - but I suspect that (as you hinted) under that system there'd be a lot less people around...
It's not computers that steal your votes, it's people. And the same people can steal or miscount them when using the paper version.
This true, but they can steal the votes much more efficiently with a computer than they could using manual methods. Just a small amount of effort in the right place...
Have you ever read a patent? They all but say "using engineering" for most detailed and complex methods and go on to describe the results and/or consequences without disclosing the full answer to "how."
That shouldn't be allowed. The orignal meaning of the word patent is open (as in patently obvious).
That is because the engineering processes (including the mathematical algorithms that produced them [I'm talking even outside of software]) are protected trade secrets.
For the reasons I stated above, allowing a partially secret patent is a contradiction in terms and nonesensical.
We all love car analogies, so let's assume it's the year 1850. You should not be allowed to patent "a means of producing mechanical energy from gasoline. It's got metal bits in it, and that's all I'm saying." But you should be allowed to patent a specific implementation, e.g. the four stroke internal combustion engine. That would not prevent someone else inventing another means to the same end, e.g. a turbine.
I do know what the.nl suffix means, thanks all the same. Have you ever been accused of being patronising?
With announcing a fatwa, which was mostly a political action, not a religious one, the risk is some economic sanctions and a bit of diplomatic stress at most.
And not the death of the target?
Consider what would happen if Iran would use a nuclear bomb against Israel. It would be assurance for complete destruction of Iran by Israeli and perhaps American nukes
You're assuming they don't want to die. Perhaps you wouldn't launch a missile at Isreal for fear of retaliation. But as 9-11, London and Madrid show, death is not a deterrent for those who think they're going to an afterlife full of sweet cakes and little boys to molest.
You just proved my point exactly.
Stop hating people just because your television and government tells you to.
Double arrogance - first giving orders and second assuming anyone who has a different opinion to you is brainwashed. You couldn't be wrong, could you?
A basic graphical interface was possible long before it was actually implemented.
A graphical interface is a virtualisation or simulation of the control panel of a machine. Thus I would argue that a computer gui is just a logical continuation of an aircraft cockpit or the cab of a steam train.
Slashdot Mirror
You're postulating an additional entity - isn't that a violation of occam's razor?
Nightmare scenario ... they merge by some obscure genetic process (involving a spider bite or something like that) to form a backhoebo.
By feeding the sheets into this? I wonder what noise it makes? I'd guess more of a whirr than a whoosh...
The problem is probably Sgt Joe's 12 year old son, who regularly chats online with some cute girl called Rebecca3456 from Piddlidoydunk Idaho.
Just to prove that schoolgirls online aren't always FBI agents, in this case she's Abdul El Abullah bin Abdul, a dedicated member of Al-Qaeda.
Efficiency considerations aside, the first lawsuit over who that energy belongs to will kill the project stone dead.
I don't know about you, but in that case he beats me by at least 8 bridge chips and numerous versions thereof ...
Or it's square metres converted into hogsheads. Something like that.
Sparks just flew out of my badanalogometer. I'll get back to you when I've fixed it.
OMG elevNTone A77A|-| AK8aR PPPP's B @ IM, i5 t1m3 2 sl0rt0r t3h j000z + infuidLLza + cru54dorz rofl!!!!???!
Can't see them censoring that.
Dear Darl,
I hope to share a cell with you real soon.
Sincerely,
Bubba.
Because the solution's still searching for a problem. Coming up after the break, we ask an expert why Elvis is showing no signs of recovery.
There's a world of difference. In a private company, the stock isn't publicly tradeable. This single fact is enough to strongly deter pump-and-dump and other forms of short-term thinking.
We all love car analogies, so let's assume it's the year 1850. You should not be allowed to patent "a means of producing mechanical energy from gasoline. It's got metal bits in it, and that's all I'm saying." But you should be allowed to patent a specific implementation, e.g. the four stroke internal combustion engine. That would not prevent someone else inventing another means to the same end, e.g. a turbine.
You just proved my point exactly.Double arrogance - first giving orders and second assuming anyone who has a different opinion to you is brainwashed. You couldn't be wrong, could you?