Everybody who keeps comparing the EU to the USA and saying how cities in Europe are so much closer are only thinking about things like LA to SF
LA to SF: 344 miles.
Paris to Marseille: 486 miles.
The TGV Med does that in 3 hours. And yes, this includes stops along the way. It's actually faster than air travel, if you include the delays inherent to flying (check-in, security, moving between the airport and the city center, etc.).
Hell, that's why the French built the TGV in the first place: France is the largest country in western Europe, and significantly larger than any single American state. It's "small" when compared to the entire US, but it's still pretty damn big. So you need fast trains.
So really, the distance argument doesn't really hold, especially for places like California where state-wide population density is similar to France. The real reason why Americans don't have a decent inter-city rail system is that you simply can't do that without planning and initial funding from a central government authority, and as we all know that's anti-American.
I think artists need to go back at doing what classical orchestras have been doing for years in order to get money: give concerts.
You don't seem to understand that those who are good at writing music are not necessarily good at performing it. If you make performance the sole basis for revenue, you immediately lose the majority of interesting songwriters (random radio tripe "songwriters" are not affected, since they can be employed on a salaried basis by managers).
Do you know who wrote Elvis' songs? Do you know who wrote the music for "My Way"? Ever heard Lee Hazlewood (by any standards an awesome songwriter) sing? According to you, society would have been better off if all those people had been flipping burgers rather than devoting their time to writing songs. Sorry, but I don't buy it.
There is a bubble theory of evolution. It works along this same principle, Evolution occurs within species and we didn't branch for the apes rather grew alongside them.
And after hundreds of millions of years of separate evolution, our independently mutating genomes ended up being 96% identical.
I won't even try to put a probability estimate on that.
Is it really so hard for some people to accept the fact that they had four-legged ancestors?
On the surface your argument sounds solid, but you have not taken into account the devastation the 99% of flawed mutations has taken on the remaining population.
No, you have not taken into account the fact that mutations are a rare event, and that the majority of genetic mutations will have no effect at all. When they do have an effect, this effect is usually small. I'm not sure you realise just how much genetic variation there is out there in the wild. Also, I'm not sure you realise how much machinery there is in your body to prevent mutations from happening.
In other words, the "99% of flawed mutations" are only among those (rare) mutations which do have an effect. Meanwhile, "normal", not-significantly-mutated organisms keep breeding happily, perpetuating the "wild type".
What you are talking about (harmful mutations accumulating beyond control) is called "mutational meltdown", or "error catastrophe", depending on the context. It just doesn't happen in large natural populations today, precisely because 1) mutation rates are so low and 2) those mutations which are harmful are eventually eliminated.
Osteogenesis imperfecta ("brittle bones" disease) most certainly does affect reproduction and survival, especially in pre-modern times ! Again, I'm not sure you realise how even a small (but persistent) disadvantage in reproduction is dramatically amplified by the exponential nature of replication.
Thus how can can one random mutation produce (...) eye sight
I can't believe the example of the eye is still being used by creationists. Not only do we have plausible scenarios for gradual, step-by-step evolution of the eye, but we have actually found each of these "steps" in organisms living around us right now. Please have a look at this picture.
One mutation cannot produce the vertebrate eye (or a squid eye or insect eye for that matter). The patient accumulation of small, beneficial improvements (which are kept in the population, precisely because they are beneficial - as opposed to the thousands of non-beneficial small modifications which are quickly eliminated) can.
Executive summary: you are trying to criticise natural selection while not fully understanding it, please read more Dawkins.
At some point any primate, and eventually all animals, would develop to a point of where it would not only be self aware but intelligent.
You seem to assume that it is always better to be smarter, or that higher complexity is necessarily a decisive evolutionary advantage . Need I remind you that chimpanzees and other great apes are on the verge of extinction, while simpler, stupider baboons and (especially) macaques are thriving? At a larger scale, primates are vastly outnumbered by "split-hoof" mammals (artiodactyls: pigs, cows, etc.). Mammals in general are dwarved by insects, and animals are almost insignificant against plants in terms of total biomass. By the way, did you know that the majority of living (cellular) biomass is actually composed of bacteria, the simplest, least complex form of life around?
Evolution is about success, not about intelligence or complexity. Being more complex is no guarantee of long-term survival and dominance. Humans are very much the exception rather than the rule. Please read S. J. Gould's "Full House", or if you want something shorter just have a look at what R. Dawkins has to say on the subject.
I am also one of a small minority that believe that evolution and creationism can and do coexist.
You are a "small minority" only from a American fundamentalist perspective. In the outside world, most Christians (including Catholics) accept both without any difficulty. Rabid young-Earth creationism is very much an American phenomenon.
It's just another dude promoting artificial scarcity... One day, hopefully soon, this whole concept of scarcity of information will just vanish.
You, Sir, fail to make the fundamental distinction between CREATION of information and DISTRIBUTION of said information.
Creative information IS scarce. If you disagree, I challenge you to produce a novel / movie / song which has the potential to become widely popular and/or receive critical acclaim. By next Monday.
However, once this information has been created, its distribution and replication are NOT scarce, because distribution costs of anything that can be digitized are now close to zero. So we have a dilemma here. How do we ensure that the price of an item of information reflects the cost of its creation, rather than just those of its distribution?
"Intellectual property" is an artificial scarcity imposed on the replication of already-created information, which ensures that the price of information reflects the cost of its production, rather than the (zero) cost of its distribution and replication. In theory, with intellectual property rights, the value of creative work can be left to the free market. You like what I'm doing? Cough up. If people think the price is worth it, they buy it. If not, well, they don't. In the end, the price settles towards what people are willing to pay for this or that piece of work - that is, to its actual value. Economics 101.
Of course, in the real world, things are more complicated. Distibution cartels, oligopsony, etc. And now, BitTorrent.
DRM are a misguided attempt to preserve this system by enforcing the scarcity at the technical rather than legal level - with all the scary consequences well known to/. readers. But the "information wants to be free" crowd is just as annoying, because they fail to understand the rather obvious distinction between creation costs and distribution costs. "Oh, look, distributing content costs nothing, why should I pay for stuff? Oh noes the cartels are teh evil greed mafiaa DRM!!!!1!1"
And please, don't tell me that "people have aways produced great works even without IP". These works were paid for either by taxes or by sponsorship from very rich people. Is this the kind of model we want to revert back to?
I've tried to do that in the past, but I seem to end up with corrupt documents (especially PowerPoint for some reason).
Say what? If your network drive actually corrupts your data then your company has a much, much bigger problem on its hand than choosing between thin clients and workstations.
Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap
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The pro-piracy argument here is surely not that "all information should be free, everything you ever created should be available to everybody for no cost and they shouldn't have to pay you". That's insane.
However, one of the defining characteristics of life is that it uses energy. It metabolizes, grows, and reproduces. It eats something, somehow. It makes a waste product. So, if we look at a planet's chemical composition, we can make a good guess as to whether there is life there by looking at its chemistry. If there are living things there, they will be making reactive chemicals.
Uh ? There seems to be a non-sequitur here. Living organisms consume free energy, they do not create it (in a strict, global sense, nothing can). It is possible that they create reactive, non-equilibrium chemicals, in the process of harnessing another source of energy: plants, for example, create oxygen from CO2 by harnessing sunlight, and use the carbon as food and construction material. But there doesn't seem to be any logical necessity.
There seems to be no logical impossibility agaist lifeforms which would extract energy from the sunlight in such a way that no active, non-equilibrium gas is produced or released in the atmosphere.
Actually, finding life is very difficult because the necessary conditions for the formation of a single celled organism only exist with very low possibilities.
This may well be true, or not. Right now we don't know how life emerged (though we have quite a few hypotheses), so we can't say.
However, you might want to reflect on this: traces of photosynthetic life have been found in the oldest sediments we know of (see Hadean). Fully-formed fossils appear not much later than that. That puts a lower bound for the appearance of modern bacterial lifeforms at about 3.5Gy ago, and we know that bacteria were not the first form of life to emerge (they're just too complicated). Basically, it seems that life appeared on Earth pretty much as soon as it could. That's not quite what you would expect from a "very low possibility" event.
Keep in mind that we have never manufactured a single living cell with functional DNA in a lab even with conditions entirely under our human control. Pasteur's Law still holds today. If we can't use thousands of years of engineering, including at least 2 decades of advanced bio-medical technology, to manufacture a single funcional cell from non-organic material, do you really expect it to form arbitrarily in space all the time?
We have never manufactured a star either - despite the fact that we know how stars work. Yet there are billions of stars in the universe. Our inability to build something is no indication of how easy it is for Nature to build it.
Life is a very, very complicated business, involving the interplay of a large quantity of microscopic compounds. It is quite possible that the easiest way to create a living cell will not be to engineer one in a "top-down" manner, but rather to find a process through which life would originate "on its own".
Let's see, I get punished if I don't fly the very cheapest route on company travel, regardless of the cost to my personal life, and a retired exec gets FREE use of a WHOLE 747 for his PERSONAL use whenever he feels like it? And THAT is considered ethical conduct?
Would you like some cheese with that whine ?
The "retired exec" in question has increased the market value of the company by $400 BILLIONS. That's more than the GDP of Belgium. While I'm sure you contributed a lot to the company yourself, I somehow doubt it is even remotely comparable.
Jack Welch was basically a tech with a PhD, NOT a random MBA clone. He rose through the ranks, he didn't buy his way to the top. Now if you were from a really disadvantaged brackground it would be different, but I fail to see what opportunity Jack Welch had that you didn't.
The guy was damn smart. He made a lot of money for the company, so the company gave him a lot of money in return. That's not unethical. Don't like to work for overpaid execs ? Become an exec yourself, or start your own company.
To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
Interestingly, you failed to mention an obvious third way to make a profit: produce the exact same thing, without any of the associated costs which make innovation possible.
I think you want to look up "parasitism" in a dictionary.
for example, I make my website accessible to googlebot without restriction (including indexing, caching etc). In return, google is available to me.
That really blew my mind. Are you really suggesting that the value of your website (which you so generously "offer" to googlebot) is even remotely comparable to that of the services that Google provides ?
Well there's another "fundamental assumption" which you seem to have misunderstood: this assumption is that it actually costs money to set up the GooglePlex and accumulate the data that Google provides (or, in this case, to buy it from people who send goddamn satellites in orbit).
Now apparently some people, such as you, hold a deep conviction that putting up three pages of HTML gives them an inalienable right to access this data and use it as they please. Even when Google finds a way to let people access the data for free, with only very minor requirements (please use our own API, don't link directly to the data, thank you), people like you still regard this as an intolerable infringement of their God-given right to enjoy the fuit of other people's work (and investment). "Hey, I let you index my blog, so your data is mine !".
Now this poses a problem to us, the rest of the world: should we allow people like you to do as they please with anything that's accessible on the intraweb, or should we allow Google to enforce the terms of its contract with the original data providers ? On the one hand, we risk losing access to your website. On the other hand, we risk losing an enormous amount of data, provided to the entire world at no cost. Hmmm, tough call.
The unfortunate thing is that this combination of reciprocity, fair-use and courtesy is not enshrined in law, and we persist in the ludicrous notion of "intellectual property".
"Intellectual property" is an enshrinement of reciprocity in law. Its purpose is to protect said reciprocity (and the benefits it provides) from freeloaders such as, say, you.
Heat is the thermal energy content. It need not flow. An object that isn't at absolute zero contains "heat".
In everyday language, sure. But not in scientific language.
From the wiki article: "In physics, heat, symbolized by Q, is defined as energy in transit."
Heat is the amount of thermal energy that is flowing between two bodies at different temperatures. The "thermal energy content" (roughly) is temperature itself. GP was quite correct.
Hollywood is known for borderline illegal accounting practices, NO move has ever made a profit, so if you get net points on a film you are royally "fubared"
While it may well have been the case in this particular occurence, and while I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next/.er, it's worth pointing out that quite often hugely successful movies will indeed turn out a net loss for the studios, especially in the short term. That's why huge hits like Terminator 2 and Silence of the Lambs actually caused their studios to go bankrupt !
Without DRM, the copies cease to have value, but the skilled labor that goes into their creation still does, and could be sold even in the absence of DRM (or copyright).
Yup. To the highest bidder, that is, the local prince or bishop. Just like in the old days. Tough luck for us lowly Third Estate villains.
If an author cannot make a living by selling copies of his works, then the only remaining source of subsistence is sponsorhip by the rich and powerful, or some large institution such as the state or the church. At least that's the only other model which has actually worked, to some extent (during a period which, incidentally, has since come to be known as "the Dark Ages").
That was before we could make copies of anything on a large scale. The printing press allowed not only for massive diffusion of existing works, but also for a flourishing of new publications, because non-sponsored authors could now make a living by entering contracts whereby publishers paid them for the right to copy their work.
By the way, if copies "cease to have value", why do people still download them? Perhaps you meant "copies cease to be a source of subsistence for authors, regardless of their value", which is not exactly the same thing. You might want to ponder the implications.
Do they realize that they are implicitly suggesting that Europeans have bigger brains than Africans?
Where did they say that ? There's nothing like that in their declarations. It's not in the original paper either. All they say is that apparently, a certain allele of this gene 1) was introduced into our gene pool recently, even though it originated long ago and 2) was massively favoured by natural selection, to the point of being present in 70% of the modern population (though more so in Europe than in Africa).
However, for some reason, people spontaneously jump to the conclusion that it somehow favours "bigger brains" - as indicated by the ludicrous, sensationalistic headline of TFA. And of the/. headline. And your own comment.
Draw your own conclusions as to what it implies about the psyche of the average journalist/slashdotter...
On the other hand, when the UN report suggested that lambda was.5c/W, while Stephen and Boltzmann calculated the constant to be.3c/W is pretty damning. If something is calculated and used in other instances, and is a significant part of everyday physics, why does it suddenly cease to be applicable when talking about global phenomena?
How about "because the Earth is not in thermodynamic equilibrium ?"
This bit was precisely what put me off the article. Apparently Mr Monckton (a journalist) is convinced that no climate scientist ever heard about Boltzmann's constant, or any thermodynamics for that matter. And apparently there are people (like you) who are ready to believe that.
This/. discussion does a good job to debunk the rest of TFA, but considering the amount of gullibility in the general public (which you so obligedly illustrated) I guess that a strongly worded reply from the folks at the Royal Society (or some similar institution) is in order.
As far as tex goes, if you are still typsetting to PostScript and converting to pdf, you are missing a bunch of features. Pdftex can generate pdf directly, and includes bunch of nice features that the original tex engine lacks.
I so agree. Example: with pdftex / pdflatex, you can use.png picture files in your document directly, rather than the cumbersome, ill-supported eps format. Considering how portable pdf documents are (ever tried reading a.ps.gz on a standard Windows machine ?), I can't see why anybody would choose not to use it.
Proper regulations would have entailed the use of tariffs to level the playing field, by raising the price of products made by cheap (or slave) labour to a level equivalent to the cost of domestic labour.
Question: if it were so, why on Earth would any company set up shop in those poorer countries ? No infrastructures + little education = dreadful productivity. What you're suggesting is that those workers should be paid much more than they actually produce, which is just a polite way of saying you don't want them to receive foreign investment.
This way gives the incentive for the exporting countries to raise their wages, and the extra prosperity means that the "poor" countries will become rich enough to afford products made by "rich" countries, thus increasing their exports, and, most importantly, maintaining a healthy trade balance.
Which is exactly what has happened over the last fifty years. Seen many slums in Seoul lately ? As for "trade balance", the massive US trade deficits are an exception among rich countries. Incidentally, "trade deficit" means exactly one thing: people are willing to send you real products in exchange for green paper which they'll put in a vault.
In fact, the US economic situation could very well copy the phenomenon that basically destroyed the spanish economy 400 years ago,
How about actually reading articles before linking to them ? This article says that the reason for Spanish decline was mass inflation due to massive increase in available bullion (gold from South America). How much inflation have you seen in the US lately (even including the house price bubble) ?
Evolution does not work on individuals but rather on populations, and for the population, it is better to have individuals eventually die off to make room for the next generation of random mutations
Your comment seems to be a striking example of an all too common fallacy, namely the fallacy that evolution somehow "cares" about the general well-being of the population. This idea has been eradicated long ago, and "group selection" only survives in very limited circumstances. The reason is quite simple: explanation based on "sacrifice for the common good" are vulnerable to invasion by "cheating" mutants.
Imagine a population of altruistic individuals which somehow sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the group. Now imagine one "cheating" mutant which, while enjoying the effect of the others' sacrifice, would *not* sacrifice itself. Obviously this cheater will live longer, reproduce more, and therefore "cheating" genes will quickly propagate through the population, eliminating the altruistic, self-sacrificing behaviour. Special cases of group selection may counter this effect, but they are not widely applicable - and certainly not at the level of entire species.
The "correct" (in most cases) explanation for altruistic behaviour is kin selection. In kin selection, individuals can voluntarily reduce their own expected fitness for the benefit of others, if these others are close relatives (or have good chances of being close relatives). The amount of "risk" (reduction in expected reproductive success) that any individual A may take in helping another individual B is equal to the increase in reproductive success gained by B multiplied by the relatedness between A and B. The reason, again, is rather simple: by doing so, a gene will statistically increase its replication chances, because the loss of reproduction caused in A is more than compensated by the expected number of copies of this gene which will be propagated by B (and all other relatives "helped" by A's risk-taking).
Evolution doesn't work at the level of "populations", "individuals" or whatever (though it does have effect in all of these). At its most basic, evolution is just the very complex set of very subtle consequences which derive from a simple fact: some genes, due to many different reasons, replicate more than others. Period. If your explanation cannot be put in terms of "how did the gene for this behaviour replicate more than average", it is not an evolutionary explanation.
Since we're judging superiority as fitness or the ability for a certain pattern (the genome) to continue propagating, then the superior species would be that one most able to overcome a greater variety of possible roadblocks to it's survival.
Can you cite one single environment in which you could survive and reproduce while bacteria couldnt't ?
Hint: bacteria can survive and reproduce around super-hot thermal vents, in the crust of the Earth, and on the surface of Venus. We can't even survive in *water* more than three minutes.
And in that sense there is a sort of teleology to evolution: over time, as environments change back and forth and around to a variety of different extremes, the most flexible, adaptable, and generally well-rounded species will tend to outlive the rest.
Again, the only type of creatures I can think of to which such a description applies are bacteria and archaea.
But that doesn't mean you have to deny any sort of progression, or any sort of objective criteria for discerning superiority or fitness between species.
Unfortunately, according to your criterion, the "best" group is precisely the first one which ever appeared ! At the very least, it appeared three *billion* years before the first multicellular animals, to which it is so clearly "superior" (again, according to your own criteria). How's that for a "progression" ?
The concept of fitness is purely local, both in space and time. There may be an increase in organismal complexity over time, but this increase can be easily explained by a randomwalk phenomenon, without invoking "progress". It's time people get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody who keeps comparing the EU to the USA and saying how cities in Europe are so much closer are only thinking about things like LA to SF
LA to SF: 344 miles.
Paris to Marseille: 486 miles.
The TGV Med does that in 3 hours. And yes, this includes stops along the way. It's actually faster than air travel, if you include the delays inherent to flying (check-in, security, moving between the airport and the city center, etc.).
Hell, that's why the French built the TGV in the first place: France is the largest country in western Europe, and significantly larger than any single American state. It's "small" when compared to the entire US, but it's still pretty damn big. So you need fast trains.
So really, the distance argument doesn't really hold, especially for places like California where state-wide population density is similar to France. The real reason why Americans don't have a decent inter-city rail system is that you simply can't do that without planning and initial funding from a central government authority, and as we all know that's anti-American.
I think artists need to go back at doing what classical orchestras have been doing for years in order to get money: give concerts.
You don't seem to understand that those who are good at writing music are not necessarily good at performing it. If you make performance the sole basis for revenue, you immediately lose the majority of interesting songwriters (random radio tripe "songwriters" are not affected, since they can be employed on a salaried basis by managers).
Do you know who wrote Elvis' songs? Do you know who wrote the music for "My Way"? Ever heard Lee Hazlewood (by any standards an awesome songwriter) sing? According to you, society would have been better off if all those people had been flipping burgers rather than devoting their time to writing songs. Sorry, but I don't buy it.
There is a bubble theory of evolution. It works along this same principle, Evolution occurs within species and we didn't branch for the apes rather grew alongside them.
And after hundreds of millions of years of separate evolution, our independently mutating genomes ended up being 96% identical.
I won't even try to put a probability estimate on that.
Is it really so hard for some people to accept the fact that they had four-legged ancestors?
On the surface your argument sounds solid, but you have not taken into account the devastation the 99% of flawed mutations has taken on the remaining population.
No, you have not taken into account the fact that mutations are a rare event, and that the majority of genetic mutations will have no effect at all. When they do have an effect, this effect is usually small. I'm not sure you realise just how much genetic variation there is out there in the wild. Also, I'm not sure you realise how much machinery there is in your body to prevent mutations from happening.
In other words, the "99% of flawed mutations" are only among those (rare) mutations which do have an effect. Meanwhile, "normal", not-significantly-mutated organisms keep breeding happily, perpetuating the "wild type".
What you are talking about (harmful mutations accumulating beyond control) is called "mutational meltdown", or "error catastrophe", depending on the context. It just doesn't happen in large natural populations today, precisely because 1) mutation rates are so low and 2) those mutations which are harmful are eventually eliminated.
Osteogenesis imperfecta ("brittle bones" disease) most certainly does affect reproduction and survival, especially in pre-modern times ! Again, I'm not sure you realise how even a small (but persistent) disadvantage in reproduction is dramatically amplified by the exponential nature of replication.
Thus how can can one random mutation produce (...) eye sight
I can't believe the example of the eye is still being used by creationists. Not only do we have plausible scenarios for gradual, step-by-step evolution of the eye, but we have actually found each of these "steps" in organisms living around us right now. Please have a look at this picture.
One mutation cannot produce the vertebrate eye (or a squid eye or insect eye for that matter). The patient accumulation of small, beneficial improvements (which are kept in the population, precisely because they are beneficial - as opposed to the thousands of non-beneficial small modifications which are quickly eliminated) can.
Executive summary: you are trying to criticise natural selection while not fully understanding it, please read more Dawkins.
At some point any primate, and eventually all animals, would develop to a point of where it would not only be self aware but intelligent.
You seem to assume that it is always better to be smarter, or that higher complexity is necessarily a decisive evolutionary advantage . Need I remind you that chimpanzees and other great apes are on the verge of extinction, while simpler, stupider baboons and (especially) macaques are thriving? At a larger scale, primates are vastly outnumbered by "split-hoof" mammals (artiodactyls: pigs, cows, etc.). Mammals in general are dwarved by insects, and animals are almost insignificant against plants in terms of total biomass. By the way, did you know that the majority of living (cellular) biomass is actually composed of bacteria, the simplest, least complex form of life around?
Evolution is about success, not about intelligence or complexity. Being more complex is no guarantee of long-term survival and dominance. Humans are very much the exception rather than the rule. Please read S. J. Gould's "Full House", or if you want something shorter just have a look at what R. Dawkins has to say on the subject.
I am also one of a small minority that believe that evolution and creationism can and do coexist.
You are a "small minority" only from a American fundamentalist perspective. In the outside world, most Christians (including Catholics) accept both without any difficulty. Rabid young-Earth creationism is very much an American phenomenon.
It's just another dude promoting artificial scarcity ... One day, hopefully soon, this whole concept of scarcity of information will just vanish.
/. readers. But the "information wants to be free" crowd is just as annoying, because they fail to understand the rather obvious distinction between creation costs and distribution costs. "Oh, look, distributing content costs nothing, why should I pay for stuff? Oh noes the cartels are teh evil greed mafiaa DRM!!!!1!1"
You, Sir, fail to make the fundamental distinction between CREATION of information and DISTRIBUTION of said information.
Creative information IS scarce. If you disagree, I challenge you to produce a novel / movie / song which has the potential to become widely popular and/or receive critical acclaim. By next Monday.
However, once this information has been created, its distribution and replication are NOT scarce, because distribution costs of anything that can be digitized are now close to zero. So we have a dilemma here. How do we ensure that the price of an item of information reflects the cost of its creation, rather than just those of its distribution?
"Intellectual property" is an artificial scarcity imposed on the replication of already-created information, which ensures that the price of information reflects the cost of its production, rather than the (zero) cost of its distribution and replication. In theory, with intellectual property rights, the value of creative work can be left to the free market. You like what I'm doing? Cough up. If people think the price is worth it, they buy it. If not, well, they don't. In the end, the price settles towards what people are willing to pay for this or that piece of work - that is, to its actual value. Economics 101.
Of course, in the real world, things are more complicated. Distibution cartels, oligopsony, etc. And now, BitTorrent.
DRM are a misguided attempt to preserve this system by enforcing the scarcity at the technical rather than legal level - with all the scary consequences well known to
And please, don't tell me that "people have aways produced great works even without IP". These works were paid for either by taxes or by sponsorship from very rich people. Is this the kind of model we want to revert back to?
I've tried to do that in the past, but I seem to end up with corrupt documents (especially PowerPoint for some reason).
Say what? If your network drive actually corrupts your data then your company has a much, much bigger problem on its hand than choosing between thin clients and workstations.
The pro-piracy argument here is surely not that "all information should be free, everything you ever created should be available to everybody for no cost and they shouldn't have to pay you". That's insane.
You must be new here...
However, one of the defining characteristics of life is that it uses energy. It metabolizes, grows, and reproduces. It eats something, somehow. It makes a waste product. So, if we look at a planet's chemical composition, we can make a good guess as to whether there is life there by looking at its chemistry. If there are living things there, they will be making reactive chemicals.
Uh ? There seems to be a non-sequitur here. Living organisms consume free energy, they do not create it (in a strict, global sense, nothing can). It is possible that they create reactive, non-equilibrium chemicals, in the process of harnessing another source of energy: plants, for example, create oxygen from CO2 by harnessing sunlight, and use the carbon as food and construction material. But there doesn't seem to be any logical necessity.
There seems to be no logical impossibility agaist lifeforms which would extract energy from the sunlight in such a way that no active, non-equilibrium gas is produced or released in the atmosphere.
Actually, finding life is very difficult because the necessary conditions for the formation of a single celled organism only exist with very low possibilities.
This may well be true, or not. Right now we don't know how life emerged (though we have quite a few hypotheses), so we can't say.
However, you might want to reflect on this: traces of photosynthetic life have been found in the oldest sediments we know of (see Hadean). Fully-formed fossils appear not much later than that. That puts a lower bound for the appearance of modern bacterial lifeforms at about 3.5Gy ago, and we know that bacteria were not the first form of life to emerge (they're just too complicated). Basically, it seems that life appeared on Earth pretty much as soon as it could. That's not quite what you would expect from a "very low possibility" event.
Keep in mind that we have never manufactured a single living cell with functional DNA in a lab even with conditions entirely under our human control. Pasteur's Law still holds today. If we can't use thousands of years of engineering, including at least 2 decades of advanced bio-medical technology, to manufacture a single funcional cell from non-organic material, do you really expect it to form arbitrarily in space all the time?
We have never manufactured a star either - despite the fact that we know how stars work. Yet there are billions of stars in the universe. Our inability to build something is no indication of how easy it is for Nature to build it.
Life is a very, very complicated business, involving the interplay of a large quantity of microscopic compounds. It is quite possible that the easiest way to create a living cell will not be to engineer one in a "top-down" manner, but rather to find a process through which life would originate "on its own".
Let's see, I get punished if I don't fly the very cheapest route on company travel, regardless of the cost to my personal life, and a retired exec gets FREE use of a WHOLE 747 for his PERSONAL use whenever he feels like it? And THAT is considered ethical conduct?
Would you like some cheese with that whine ?
The "retired exec" in question has increased the market value of the company by $400 BILLIONS. That's more than the GDP of Belgium. While I'm sure you contributed a lot to the company yourself, I somehow doubt it is even remotely comparable.
Jack Welch was basically a tech with a PhD, NOT a random MBA clone. He rose through the ranks, he didn't buy his way to the top. Now if you were from a really disadvantaged brackground it would be different, but I fail to see what opportunity Jack Welch had that you didn't.
The guy was damn smart. He made a lot of money for the company, so the company gave him a lot of money in return. That's not unethical. Don't like to work for overpaid execs ? Become an exec yourself, or start your own company.
To make a profit you have to either sell something different or produce the same thing more efficiently. Both of these require innovation.
Interestingly, you failed to mention an obvious third way to make a profit: produce the exact same thing, without any of the associated costs which make innovation possible.
I think you want to look up "parasitism" in a dictionary.
for example, I make my website accessible to googlebot without restriction (including indexing, caching etc). In return, google is available to me.
That really blew my mind. Are you really suggesting that the value of your website (which you so generously "offer" to googlebot) is even remotely comparable to that of the services that Google provides ?
Well there's another "fundamental assumption" which you seem to have misunderstood: this assumption is that it actually costs money to set up the GooglePlex and accumulate the data that Google provides (or, in this case, to buy it from people who send goddamn satellites in orbit).
Now apparently some people, such as you, hold a deep conviction that putting up three pages of HTML gives them an inalienable right to access this data and use it as they please. Even when Google finds a way to let people access the data for free, with only very minor requirements (please use our own API, don't link directly to the data, thank you), people like you still regard this as an intolerable infringement of their God-given right to enjoy the fuit of other people's work (and investment). "Hey, I let you index my blog, so your data is mine !".
Now this poses a problem to us, the rest of the world: should we allow people like you to do as they please with anything that's accessible on the intraweb, or should we allow Google to enforce the terms of its contract with the original data providers ? On the one hand, we risk losing access to your website. On the other hand, we risk losing an enormous amount of data, provided to the entire world at no cost. Hmmm, tough call.
The unfortunate thing is that this combination of reciprocity, fair-use and courtesy is not enshrined in law, and we persist in the ludicrous notion of "intellectual property".
"Intellectual property" is an enshrinement of reciprocity in law. Its purpose is to protect said reciprocity (and the benefits it provides) from freeloaders such as, say, you.
You do realise that the most popular British dish is Chicken Tikka Masala, right ?
Heat is the thermal energy content. It need not flow. An object that isn't at absolute zero contains "heat".
In everyday language, sure. But not in scientific language.
From the wiki article: "In physics, heat, symbolized by Q, is defined as energy in transit."
Heat is the amount of thermal energy that is flowing between two bodies at different temperatures. The "thermal energy content" (roughly) is temperature itself. GP was quite correct.
Hollywood is known for borderline illegal accounting practices, NO move has ever made a profit, so if you get net points on a film you are royally "fubared"
/.er, it's worth pointing out that quite often hugely successful movies will indeed turn out a net loss for the studios, especially in the short term. That's why huge hits like Terminator 2 and Silence of the Lambs actually caused their studios to go bankrupt !
While it may well have been the case in this particular occurence, and while I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next
Woah, a little less of the f**king and maybe people will pay attention to the point you are making.
You're new on this planet, aren't you ?
Without DRM, the copies cease to have value, but the skilled labor that goes into their creation still does, and could be sold even in the absence of DRM (or copyright).
Yup. To the highest bidder, that is, the local prince or bishop. Just like in the old days. Tough luck for us lowly Third Estate villains.
If an author cannot make a living by selling copies of his works, then the only remaining source of subsistence is sponsorhip by the rich and powerful, or some large institution such as the state or the church. At least that's the only other model which has actually worked, to some extent (during a period which, incidentally, has since come to be known as "the Dark Ages").
That was before we could make copies of anything on a large scale. The printing press allowed not only for massive diffusion of existing works, but also for a flourishing of new publications, because non-sponsored authors could now make a living by entering contracts whereby publishers paid them for the right to copy their work.
By the way, if copies "cease to have value", why do people still download them? Perhaps you meant "copies cease to be a source of subsistence for authors, regardless of their value", which is not exactly the same thing. You might want to ponder the implications.
Stephen Colbert posts on Slashdot! Excuse me, I'll go and kill a bear to celebrate...
Do they realize that they are implicitly suggesting that Europeans have bigger brains than Africans?
/. headline. And your own comment.
Where did they say that ? There's nothing like that in their declarations. It's not in the original paper either. All they say is that apparently, a certain allele of this gene 1) was introduced into our gene pool recently, even though it originated long ago and 2) was massively favoured by natural selection, to the point of being present in 70% of the modern population (though more so in Europe than in Africa).
However, for some reason, people spontaneously jump to the conclusion that it somehow favours "bigger brains" - as indicated by the ludicrous, sensationalistic headline of TFA. And of the
Draw your own conclusions as to what it implies about the psyche of the average journalist/slashdotter...
On the other hand, when the UN report suggested that lambda was .5c/W, while Stephen and Boltzmann calculated the constant to be .3c/W is pretty damning. If something is calculated and used in other instances, and is a significant part of everyday physics, why does it suddenly cease to be applicable when talking about global phenomena?
/. discussion does a good job to debunk the rest of TFA, but considering the amount of gullibility in the general public (which you so obligedly illustrated) I guess that a strongly worded reply from the folks at the Royal Society (or some similar institution) is in order.
How about "because the Earth is not in thermodynamic equilibrium ?"
This bit was precisely what put me off the article. Apparently Mr Monckton (a journalist) is convinced that no climate scientist ever heard about Boltzmann's constant, or any thermodynamics for that matter. And apparently there are people (like you) who are ready to believe that.
This
As far as tex goes, if you are still typsetting to PostScript and converting to pdf, you are missing a bunch of features. Pdftex can generate pdf directly, and includes bunch of nice features that the original tex engine lacks.
.png picture files in your document directly, rather than the cumbersome, ill-supported eps format. Considering how portable pdf documents are (ever tried reading a .ps.gz on a standard Windows machine ?), I can't see why anybody would choose not to use it.
I so agree. Example: with pdftex / pdflatex, you can use
Proper regulations would have entailed the use of tariffs to level the playing field, by raising the price of products made by cheap (or slave) labour to a level equivalent to the cost of domestic labour.
Question: if it were so, why on Earth would any company set up shop in those poorer countries ? No infrastructures + little education = dreadful productivity. What you're suggesting is that those workers should be paid much more than they actually produce, which is just a polite way of saying you don't want them to receive foreign investment.
This way gives the incentive for the exporting countries to raise their wages, and the extra prosperity means that the "poor" countries will become rich enough to afford products made by "rich" countries, thus increasing their exports, and, most importantly, maintaining a healthy trade balance.
Which is exactly what has happened over the last fifty years. Seen many slums in Seoul lately ? As for "trade balance", the massive US trade deficits are an exception among rich countries. Incidentally, "trade deficit" means exactly one thing: people are willing to send you real products in exchange for green paper which they'll put in a vault.
In fact, the US economic situation could very well copy the phenomenon that basically destroyed the spanish economy 400 years ago,
How about actually reading articles before linking to them ? This article says that the reason for Spanish decline was mass inflation due to massive increase in available bullion (gold from South America). How much inflation have you seen in the US lately (even including the house price bubble) ?
Evolution does not work on individuals but rather on populations, and for the population, it is better to have individuals eventually die off to make room for the next generation of random mutations
Your comment seems to be a striking example of an all too common fallacy, namely the fallacy that evolution somehow "cares" about the general well-being of the population. This idea has been eradicated long ago, and "group selection" only survives in very limited circumstances. The reason is quite simple: explanation based on "sacrifice for the common good" are vulnerable to invasion by "cheating" mutants.
Imagine a population of altruistic individuals which somehow sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the group. Now imagine one "cheating" mutant which, while enjoying the effect of the others' sacrifice, would *not* sacrifice itself. Obviously this cheater will live longer, reproduce more, and therefore "cheating" genes will quickly propagate through the population, eliminating the altruistic, self-sacrificing behaviour. Special cases of group selection may counter this effect, but they are not widely applicable - and certainly not at the level of entire species.
The "correct" (in most cases) explanation for altruistic behaviour is kin selection. In kin selection, individuals can voluntarily reduce their own expected fitness for the benefit of others, if these others are close relatives (or have good chances of being close relatives). The amount of "risk" (reduction in expected reproductive success) that any individual A may take in helping another individual B is equal to the increase in reproductive success gained by B multiplied by the relatedness between A and B. The reason, again, is rather simple: by doing so, a gene will statistically increase its replication chances, because the loss of reproduction caused in A is more than compensated by the expected number of copies of this gene which will be propagated by B (and all other relatives "helped" by A's risk-taking).
Evolution doesn't work at the level of "populations", "individuals" or whatever (though it does have effect in all of these). At its most basic, evolution is just the very complex set of very subtle consequences which derive from a simple fact: some genes, due to many different reasons, replicate more than others. Period. If your explanation cannot be put in terms of "how did the gene for this behaviour replicate more than average", it is not an evolutionary explanation.
Since we're judging superiority as fitness or the ability for a certain pattern (the genome) to continue propagating, then the superior species would be that one most able to overcome a greater variety of possible roadblocks to it's survival.
Can you cite one single environment in which you could survive and reproduce while bacteria couldnt't ?
Hint: bacteria can survive and reproduce around super-hot thermal vents, in the crust of the Earth, and on the surface of Venus. We can't even survive in *water* more than three minutes.
And in that sense there is a sort of teleology to evolution: over time, as environments change back and forth and around to a variety of different extremes, the most flexible, adaptable, and generally well-rounded species will tend to outlive the rest.
Again, the only type of creatures I can think of to which such a description applies are bacteria and archaea.
But that doesn't mean you have to deny any sort of progression, or any sort of objective criteria for discerning superiority or fitness between species.
Unfortunately, according to your criterion, the "best" group is precisely the first one which ever appeared ! At the very least, it appeared three *billion* years before the first multicellular animals, to which it is so clearly "superior" (again, according to your own criteria). How's that for a "progression" ?
The concept of fitness is purely local, both in space and time. There may be an increase in organismal complexity over time, but this increase can be easily explained by a randomwalk phenomenon, without invoking "progress". It's time people get over it.