"if you go through with the IR shielding your home/property, you will get your door kicked/rammed in with a swarm of cops"
Up here in the cold part of the continent we call that IR shielding "thermal insulation", and I was under the impression that in the hot part of the country it was useful in keeping the house cool during the summer. I doubt very much it would be considered probable cause.
"By all means continue research, continue studying, get the best models we can, but leave draconian governmental regulation until we are sure that we are not putting a huge unnecessary burden on our world economy. "
So, because you feel that we do not fully understand the whole feedback system, we should continue to do what everyone thinks is the worst possible thing to be doing, on the chance that some unknown restorative force will keep it all under control? I would think that working towards an economic system that rewards behaviours that have broad support as being beneficial or benign and that punishes behaviours that we think are destructive would be an obvious thing to do.
Easter island inhabitants chopped down the last trees - didn't they know there were not any more? We DO know the likely result of many of our present actions - what kinds of idiots are we going to seem to our distant ancestors?
On what do you base your statement that Pinatubo out performed all man-made emissions? Wikipedia doesn't mention this at all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo
These guys http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/education/gases/man.html state that man-made emissions of both sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide handily exceed volcanic ones by a factor of 150 for CO2 and around 6 for SO2. For some of the heavy metals and Hydrogen compounds, the volcanoes are more of an issue, but certainly not for the CO2 and SO2.
As for the 2005 report, I couldn't find it. And so what? If the general consensus amongst "real scientists" is not swayed by the report, perhaps its data and arguments were not persuasive? A single study on a complicated system such as climate, is only a single piece of evidence.
I once got a tuition bill for a negative amount (I had done some course swapping and ended up with one credit less than I had paid for, so they owed me something like $45), but rather than stating "hey, we owe you some money", the computer generated form said "pay this bill soon or bad things will befall you!". As I recall, it actually stated the amount owning as a negative number. I was tempted to write a cheque for a negative amount just to see what might happen.
I think it could be a potentially useful extension to the current chequing system - if you owe me some money, I could send you a bill along with a negative cheque, and when you "deposited" that cheque into you account, your account total would decrease, and when it finally "cleared" through my account, my account total would increase.
Of course none of this has anything to do with the topic at hand....
I think that at least some (possibly many, or most) publishing contracts revert the copyright to the author if/when the publisher takes it off the "books in print" list, or some limited time after that.
I'm not so sure that FB would retain the number of users it has if it charged anything - though it might be able to convert some of its users to paying customers for "premium" features. If nothing else, the troubles associated with billing would probably cause a significant fraction of the user base to evaporate - how many of their target audience don't have their own credit card?
Like every other social networking site I have seen in the past decade (six degrees was kind of fun a decade back - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com ) for any given group of people, the participation in the site dries up after a few months or at most years. My particular social group seems to have had a peak of FB usage about eight months ago - there are very few new people in this circle to "infect" and those already exposed seem to have little interest in expanding on their participation. I doubt any of my "friends" would pay for continued access. The phenomenon does seem to follow a similar time-line to infectious disease - see http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/12/1318237 for some similar data.
Those are some valid points - I would have thought a more balanced approach would be to legislate some sort of standards to which such devices must comply and maybe public scrutiny of the device and software. Preventing red-light-running seems like a laudable goal if it can be done fairly.
There are some reports of places with red-light-cameras having an increase in minor rear-end collisions due to people being more conservative with their entry into yellow lights, so that too needs to be balanced.
All good points. I was trying to make the case that if we have an effective way of avoiding the problems associated with a particular "defect" as seems to be the case with MD in dogs at least, then there is much less need to eliminate that gene from the population, and that there might be some benefit to keeping that gene around. With that said, if given the choice for my progeny, I would tend to favour those genetic combinations that do not cause any known problems, rather than hoping that one of them causes some hopeful benefit.
"There's not really an upside to MD, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, etc..."
One doesn't really know - perhaps some of these problems in less sever forms provide some advantage at some point in the organism's life - enough to offset their disadvantages - similar to Sickle cell anemia. I heard some discussion on a possible benefit for the fetus to implant on the uterine wall for one of them - a significant fraction of conceptions end up as unnoticed miscarriages I am led to believe. It is at least conceivable (no pun intended) that one of these problems could be linked to increased efficiency in some biological pathway totally unrelated to the problem - are MS people better at abstract math? do MD people have more efficient ATP production? We don't really know.
It is not clear however if an increased rate of a treatable disorder is such a bad thing - if everyone needs to wear eyeglasses to see (for example) that is not such a bad thing - particularly if those with the disorder are contributing to the group as a whole. Natural selection will ALWAYS have an effect, but all organisms change their environment in feedback loops - if MD is no longer a serious problem due to treatment, it does not spell our doom as a species.
Granted, the carriers of this gene might not be so well off when Mad Max comes to power, but until then we at least keep the widest possible genetic variation in the population so a few of us might be able to drink salt water when "the Mariner" takes over. Unfortunately I can't think of a good way of working in wolves or postmen to this post...
It would make a lot more sense for books to have a longer copyright term than movies, most of which seem to make the bulk of their profit in the first few years.
I think MOST of any of these types of creative works make their bulk in the first few years - face it, few make any "bulk" at all.
I do like the idea of some sort of exponential pricing model, where the first few (maybe five? maybe ten? it doesn't really matter) years of copyright are automatic and free and each year after that costs $2^n (or more accurately $1 x 2^n, where n is the year) to register, things very quickly come into the public domain, yet it is not prohibitively expensive to retain copyright for "younger" works, but at the 30 year mark, things start getting REALLY expensive (about a billion bucks).
Why should studios be able to snap up the hard work of others for pennies, then turn around and produce a blockbuster?
Because then the public gets to see more blockbusters?
More importantly, if 10 authors per year get "screwed over" and yet the public domain increases by a gizillian works per year, I for one think society is better off compared to 10 authors "winning big" each year and the public domain not having anything new put into it for 150 years. The point of copyright isn't to "protect the little guy", it is to encourage people to produce so we get lots of stuff - right now it is doing lots of encouraging, but we're not getting much stuff.
Patent = limited duration government-backed monopoly in exchange for eventually putting the details of how to do/make the thing in question into the public domain.
Copyright = protection of creative expression from exploitation by third parties in recognition of the efforts of the creator.
I think that copyright is also supposed to be an incentive to increase the public domain, rather than any sort of "recognition", at least that's how the US constitution describes it.
Another optimization would be to have pairs of next door neighbours stack their trash together at the common border of their property, thus providing for a single place for the truck to stop. You could even implement this yourself - pick a neighbour and put your trash at that corner of the property and get them to do the same.
Obviously this doesn't work well in some arrangements of properties.
Sure, but in this case we were not really talking about any of ABC but rather of general correspondence, particularly that related to work performance and employment conditions.
yeah, they might fire you! Seriously though, no company is going to go through the trouble of a lawsuit over copies of work related correspondence just to be nasty - those things cost money.
Reference please? A variety of companies may have policies of this nature to limit their legal exposure, but any LAW of this nature would be a clear violation of free speech guaranties in the US constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence
I haven't looked into it in depth, but a colleague once mentioned it as being the sort of thing a smaller institution could set up for the price of some water and transducers and it has some pretty nifty effects and is still largely not understood. Conceivably this could be the basis of a whole range of activities over a number of years as different groups could explore different aspects of it while designing and building equipment to measure the various aspects.
Slashdot Mirror
1988? My memory is foggy - did we go to war under GWBush in the late 1980s? I seem to recall some military action under his father in 1991, but I thought GWB was doing some other stuff like managing the Texas Rangers baseball franchise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_life_of_George_W._Bush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
Up here in the cold part of the continent we call that IR shielding "thermal insulation", and I was under the impression that in the hot part of the country it was useful in keeping the house cool during the summer. I doubt very much it would be considered probable cause.
So, because you feel that we do not fully understand the whole feedback system, we should continue to do what everyone thinks is the worst possible thing to be doing, on the chance that some unknown restorative force will keep it all under control? I would think that working towards an economic system that rewards behaviours that have broad support as being beneficial or benign and that punishes behaviours that we think are destructive would be an obvious thing to do.
Easter island inhabitants chopped down the last trees - didn't they know there were not any more? We DO know the likely result of many of our present actions - what kinds of idiots are we going to seem to our distant ancestors?
On what do you base your statement that Pinatubo out performed all man-made emissions? Wikipedia doesn't mention this at all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo These guys http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/education/gases/man.html state that man-made emissions of both sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide handily exceed volcanic ones by a factor of 150 for CO2 and around 6 for SO2. For some of the heavy metals and Hydrogen compounds, the volcanoes are more of an issue, but certainly not for the CO2 and SO2. As for the 2005 report, I couldn't find it. And so what? If the general consensus amongst "real scientists" is not swayed by the report, perhaps its data and arguments were not persuasive? A single study on a complicated system such as climate, is only a single piece of evidence.
I think it could be a potentially useful extension to the current chequing system - if you owe me some money, I could send you a bill along with a negative cheque, and when you "deposited" that cheque into you account, your account total would decrease, and when it finally "cleared" through my account, my account total would increase.
Of course none of this has anything to do with the topic at hand....
The Book Rights Registry would be useful for anyone planning on starting a similar service - authors need only opt out in one place.
Actually the purpose is "one-fold": to encourage creation of more work. The METHOD is by helping authors to profit from their work.
I think that at least some (possibly many, or most) publishing contracts revert the copyright to the author if/when the publisher takes it off the "books in print" list, or some limited time after that.
Humm, it looks like there are microphones available even for 1st generation iPods like http://touchmic.com/products-page/ipod-touch-microphones/ipod-touch-mics---1st-gen/
I'm not so sure that FB would retain the number of users it has if it charged anything - though it might be able to convert some of its users to paying customers for "premium" features. If nothing else, the troubles associated with billing would probably cause a significant fraction of the user base to evaporate - how many of their target audience don't have their own credit card?
Like every other social networking site I have seen in the past decade (six degrees was kind of fun a decade back - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com ) for any given group of people, the participation in the site dries up after a few months or at most years. My particular social group seems to have had a peak of FB usage about eight months ago - there are very few new people in this circle to "infect" and those already exposed seem to have little interest in expanding on their participation. I doubt any of my "friends" would pay for continued access. The phenomenon does seem to follow a similar time-line to infectious disease - see http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/12/1318237 for some similar data.
"then you didn't get the joke" - yep, that would be me. Wow, the world just gets richer and richer, eh?
There are some reports of places with red-light-cameras having an increase in minor rear-end collisions due to people being more conservative with their entry into yellow lights, so that too needs to be balanced.
Gatica here we come.
One doesn't really know - perhaps some of these problems in less sever forms provide some advantage at some point in the organism's life - enough to offset their disadvantages - similar to Sickle cell anemia. I heard some discussion on a possible benefit for the fetus to implant on the uterine wall for one of them - a significant fraction of conceptions end up as unnoticed miscarriages I am led to believe. It is at least conceivable (no pun intended) that one of these problems could be linked to increased efficiency in some biological pathway totally unrelated to the problem - are MS people better at abstract math? do MD people have more efficient ATP production? We don't really know.
Granted, the carriers of this gene might not be so well off when Mad Max comes to power, but until then we at least keep the widest possible genetic variation in the population so a few of us might be able to drink salt water when "the Mariner" takes over. Unfortunately I can't think of a good way of working in wolves or postmen to this post...
I think MOST of any of these types of creative works make their bulk in the first few years - face it, few make any "bulk" at all.
I do like the idea of some sort of exponential pricing model, where the first few (maybe five? maybe ten? it doesn't really matter) years of copyright are automatic and free and each year after that costs $2^n (or more accurately $1 x 2^n, where n is the year) to register, things very quickly come into the public domain, yet it is not prohibitively expensive to retain copyright for "younger" works, but at the 30 year mark, things start getting REALLY expensive (about a billion bucks).
Because then the public gets to see more blockbusters?
More importantly, if 10 authors per year get "screwed over" and yet the public domain increases by a gizillian works per year, I for one think society is better off compared to 10 authors "winning big" each year and the public domain not having anything new put into it for 150 years. The point of copyright isn't to "protect the little guy", it is to encourage people to produce so we get lots of stuff - right now it is doing lots of encouraging, but we're not getting much stuff.
I think that copyright is also supposed to be an incentive to increase the public domain, rather than any sort of "recognition", at least that's how the US constitution describes it.
Another optimization would be to have pairs of next door neighbours stack their trash together at the common border of their property, thus providing for a single place for the truck to stop. You could even implement this yourself - pick a neighbour and put your trash at that corner of the property and get them to do the same. Obviously this doesn't work well in some arrangements of properties.
Is that still the case? Since PDF is an open standard does it cost anything to produce and distribute PDF documents?
Sure, but in this case we were not really talking about any of ABC but rather of general correspondence, particularly that related to work performance and employment conditions.
Other than the US, who else in the "first world" doesn't?
yeah, they might fire you! Seriously though, no company is going to go through the trouble of a lawsuit over copies of work related correspondence just to be nasty - those things cost money.
Reference please? A variety of companies may have policies of this nature to limit their legal exposure, but any LAW of this nature would be a clear violation of free speech guaranties in the US constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence I haven't looked into it in depth, but a colleague once mentioned it as being the sort of thing a smaller institution could set up for the price of some water and transducers and it has some pretty nifty effects and is still largely not understood. Conceivably this could be the basis of a whole range of activities over a number of years as different groups could explore different aspects of it while designing and building equipment to measure the various aspects.