Unless newspapers delivered via iPad are going to consist of something other than lightly-edited wire stories and insubstantial fluff reporting, they're not going to be a whole lot more appealing than the paper kind, and arguably less appealing, since lining the bottom of bird cages with iPads will be prohibitively expensive. And don't get me started on how much it would cost to pack boxes for a move.
And no you shouldn't have assumed man-made clocks were better based simply on the existence of frequency instability in pulsars.
Point taken, though by way of an excuse, my assumption was basically that in order to measure the instability of a pulsar, you'd have to have a chronometer that was more stable at the same or higher resolution. I shall now go research how the measurements were made in the first place with great enthusiasm and curiosity, so thanks for the correction!
The irregularity of pulsars has been known for decades now. Most of them are better than your watch, but I've got a textbook on pulsars that's twenty years old and mentions the drifts in their frequency in the first few pages.
I'm sure that there are lots of people who would like to run jobs on machines that normally process billions of dollars in transactions.
Of course, a certain percentage of them are going to be probing for security holes so they can steal financial data, but no worries -- the government will bail them out, right?
It's a great honor for Groklaw, but one wonders how many AC's there are, and whether Congress or future researchers would think that they are all one person.
I rather doubt many future researchers would think that "Anonymous Coward" is one person, though I can't speak for members of Congress. I can certainly imagine Ted Stevens talking about the tremendously prolific output of A. Coward flowing through a series of tubes....
My first thought was that pictures of people brandishing guns are so ubiquitous -- a large portion of the entertainment industry is devoted to exactly that -- that they're not necessarily a source of actual stress in most people. The researchers would have been better off using a loud, unexpected noise (dropping a heavy book on the floor behind the subject has been used in some experiments) or requiring the subjects to complete some arbitrary puzzle with a time limit if they wanted to generate stress in their subjects.
Personally, I'd have used a photo of a client demanding IE6 compatibility for their new web app.
This trick absolutely cannot be used in real life - it's useful only when the operating system runs exactly one process, a scenario that occurs only in research papers.
On the contrary, this opens up whole new possibilities for MS-DOS!
What I find interesting about the iPhone in particular is how good a job Apple has done supporting corporate/MS standards.
They pretty much have to if they want to get in that particular door.
What I mean when I say Apple isn't after the corporate market, at least in any broad way, is that Apple really doesn't have any products to offer in terms of the enterprise server and app market, and they seem to be quite content with not getting into that space. There are huge barriers to entry, actual anti-competitive practices by the incumbents aside, and the chances of success for a newcomer are relatively small by comparison.
Even if they just wanted to challenge the MS Office hegemony, it's not just Office itself they'd have to clone -- and I do mean clone, since neither companies nor most of their workers want to go through the time and expense of retraining, even if Apple came up with an "insanely great" spreadsheet, whatever that might mean -- they'd also have to clone or at least ensure compatibility with the largely undocumented interfaces of the entire MS (and IBM and Oracle) business software ecosystem.
And by no means do I mean to suggest that Apple isn't good enough or that MS/IBM/Oracle etc. are all that good; there's just a tremendous amount of inertia to overcome, to say nothing of the risky upfront expenditures, and since Apple seems to be raking in the money hand over fist in the consumer products arena right now, there's not a whole lot of incentive for them to divert their energy from a nice herd of cash cows to go tilting at windmills -- or Windows.
Entirely aside from the specific issue of deliberately and indiscriminately killing civilians, there's the larger issue that we are still conducting an unprovoked war of aggression. We don't have any legitimate targets in Iraq. Afghanistan is arguably a different situation (though whether it will do us any good is another question), but the only legitimate action we can undertake in Iraq is to get the hell out of their country.
Apple has basically avoided the corporate market, which is where most of Microsoft's money is made, however much ground they are gaining in the home market. Toes are being stepped on, to be sure, but I just don't see Microsoft and Apple as being on a collision course for the most part. Given the conservative nature of the corporate market, what's much more likely is that Apple will end up as the dominant home player, at least for a while, and Microsoft will follow IBM into being solely a corporate player.
The danger to Apple is that very large enterprises always ossify, and the market they are coming to dominate in the short term -- which is basically home entertainment electronics -- is vastly more competitive and unstable than the PC market has ever been (or likely ever will be). When much of your appeal is driven by current fashion trends, you're vulnerable in a way that a vendor of business software seldom faces.
Note that I'm not saying Apple is doomed or any similar nonsense. Apple is doing very well and probably will continue to do so for some time, and Microsoft will probably continue its slow decline. What I'm saying is that Microsoft and Apple are less and less in competition with each other. Apple will probably spend a lot more time in the future competing with companies like Sony and JVC and LG than it does with Microsoft, and they'll most likely do very well, at least as long as Jobs is at the helm. After Jobs, I'm rather less sanguine about Apple's future because people like Jobs (or, for that matter, Gates) tend not to groom their successors very well.
However, it is a very reasonable and successful way to prevent "ALL" nukes from detonating aka full out total nuclear strategic warfare WWIII.
Well, it's been successful so far. And I'm not sure that having two polities build enough weapons to destroy civilization several times over and trigger a mass extinction in the space of thirty minutes as part of a dispute over property distribution counts as reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
It probably is possible to build a company that does many widely disparate things well -- and certainly, there are a few successful examples -- but it is very, very hard. Most of the time, when a company wanders outside of its core competencies, the venture crashes and burns, and sometimes takes the company down with it. Microsoft (and yes, I am using the term core "competency" very loosely here) has managed to get a lock on PC operating systems and office software, but its ventures elsewhere have not been very successful: IE is the dominant browser, but the goal of using it to dominate the internet was a failure, and the Xbox, while reasonably popular, is not profitable for Microsoft. Google's ventures outside search and advertising have been ignorable so far. Even IBM's foray into personal computing, historically important though it was, is history. Combine such an expedition with a challenge to a competitor whose dominance borders on monopoly, and the odds definitely don't get any better.
Now Apple wants to enter a field in which they not only have no experience, but also lack experience in the entire underlying field of large-scale, massively parallel computing? And they think they're going to do this by buying an unknown and unproven startup?
Well, good luck with that. The odds of it going anywhere are not good, and if it pisses off enough iPhone owners, it might damage the core company as well. (I know, I know, if iPhones crapped every fifteen minutes like parrots, Apple enthusiasts would be the first to boast that Apple had crapping phones way ahead of everyone else, but Apple is no longer operating in a market where the majority of its customers are diehard fanboys.)
Seriously. The engineer is plainly making progress over his previous attempts, but he's got a long way to go. Humans are very good at reading subtle cues in other humans, like being able to tell when a friend is distracted by some unexpressed concern. That's what an android engineer is up against. This latest effort is immediately recognizable as a non-human when in motion, and something seems distinctly off about it in still pictures. And considering that even computer-rendered humans in movies -- which is arguably an easier problem -- are still less than 100% convincing in closeups, I'm not holding my breath for convincing androids any time soon.
It's a big lie that you'll ever use calculus for anything except for specialised degrees (and if you were to use it for anything you personally would want to do in your future, you would already be interested in it). It's also profoundly strange that calculus seems to be pinnacle of mathematical education if you're not going to go on to study something like mathematics itself or physics.
That's funny; I use calculus all the damn time, and I'm neither a professional mathematician or a physicist. I do, however, work a lot with statistics -- which is ultimately built on a foundation of calculus -- as a software engineer, and it has a definite impact on my personal bottom line, as my employers don't have to hire a statistician to work with me, so I command a higher salary than I would otherwise. Calculus has lots of practical uses, including scads of applications in business, if that's your cup of tea. Game programming also comes to mind, and of course, there are lots of openings for software engineers in the sciences. The real failing of math education, IMHO, is that the average mathematics teacher does a terrible job of informing students of the applications, most often because math teachers are interested in math for its own sake and don't know what the applications are.
Why aren't you required to achieve a certain level of chess expertise before you can complete a computer science degree? A lot of early computer science was concerned with chess playing, let us not forget!
Computer science is basically a branch of mathematics. If you're going to work in computer science, you absolutely must have a broad (and deep) mathematical education. If, however, you're just going to be a programmer writing billing software in Java, basic arithmetic and a smidgen of algebra will most likely be all you'll ever need to know. But there is a difference: you can be a computer scientist without programming being your primary job responsibility, and you can be a programmer without being a computer scientist.
It's pointless. It's pointless to cram for exams about subjects you don't care about in order to satisfy requirements you don't genuinely need.
Well, that much is true. Cramming is always pointless, insofar as you don't actually learn very much, to say nothing of learning it well enough to use it in the real world. That said, you often can't begin to understand the utility of a particular branch of knowledge until you actually know it. I see programmers reinventing the wheel all the time, usually badly, because they don't know that there's already an optimal or near-optimal solution for the problem they're working on.
In short, if you only pursue knowledge that you think you'll need, you'll always end up knowing less than you need to know, because your educational decisions are unavoidably uninformed.
My recommendation is, are you really interested in learning this stuff? If so, just spend hours and hours in your local university library in the math section browsing books you're interested in.
"Browsing" will not get you very far in any field. Unless you're prepared and motivated to systematically work through an area of study until you have achieved a full understanding of it and a solid grasp of how to apply it -- whether that's computer science or auto mechanics -- you will be a second-rate worker in the field. That's okay, if that's all you're interested in: there are plenty of openings for second-rate workers. But excellence and the rewards that come from it always involve very hard work.
I am a forensic investigator and it terrifies me that most people I meet in my field don't seem to care who goes to jail as long as somebody goes to jail.
That matches my experience. A disturbingly large number of people in law enforcement seem to think that their job is to bust people, as opposed to busting the guilty and protecting the innocent. Nor is it necessarily born out of malice, though there's that, too; most of the time, it's just tunnel-vision and sloppy thinking.
Capitalism and Democracy (direct or representative) go hand-in-hand, and it's very difficult to separate the two. How can you have true political freedom if you don't have economic freedom too?
20th century European fascism was largely capitalistic, as is the politically oppressive and communist-in-name-only mainland China, which latter hasn't gotten measurably freer since becoming capitalist. Much of present-day western Europe is considerably more democratic and politically freer than the United States, but much more socialistic. Since the fall of the Soviet bloc, almost all dictatorial states are also capitalist. The two demonstrably do not go hand in hand.
The real flaw in Lovelock's argument is that a large majority of the general population of the United States is in favor of stricter environmental regulation, even if it personally costs them more money, but because business has more influence over Congress than the voting public, environmental regulations end up being stalled by industrial lobbyists. If we want to address climate change, we need more democracy, not less.
Given that the USSR was the worst country in the world for the environment gives proof to the lie that capitalism is a global scourge.
I hate to add to this off-topic tangent, but twenty years of hearing exactly this fallacious argument is making me a little irritable.
The failure of communism speaks volumes about communism. It does not say a goddamn thing about capitalism one way or the other, any more than the failure of communism says anything about Tiger Woods' sex life, the number of craters on the far side of the moon, or the mating strategies of the duck-billed platypus.
Ironically, if capitalism is a scourge, then the fall of communism is what made it a global scourge.
(For the record, I think capitalism is quite successful in many areas, but it's by no means perfect and definitely has weaknesses that could be improved upon.)
Conversely, if you decline to settle, it doesn't make much sense for the MPAA to pursue the case, since odds are you don't have $100k, and if you insist on a jury trial, the odds are that you also don't have enough assets to seize to even cover the MPAA's legal expenses in the case.
On the other hand, if you do have enough assets to be worth the MPAA's time, maybe you should just buy the fucking movie.
People who are illegally downloading and distributing their works are not a part of their customer base. You have to *buy* something to be a customer.
In practice, there is considerable overlap between pirates and customers. Rare is the pirate who does not also buy content.
I would imagine that even rarer is the pirate who, having been dragged into court by the MPAA and found liable for an insane sum, will ever spend another dime on an MPAA product -- or even be able to.
What's even less plausible is that there will be very much sympathy for the MPAA among the general public when virtually all other civil cases are indefinitely deferred while fifty thousand piracy lawsuits drag the court system to a screeching halt. Injured on the job? Cheated by a contractor? Shafted by your bank? Well, in ten years or so, maybe a judge will be available to hear your case. In the meantime, someone needs to be brought to justice for making a free copy of The Lion King instead of paying a buck to Netflix to see it.
That's a valid question with respect to Novell, but asking how IBM can afford seven years of court costs is a bit like asking whether Sauron can stay up all night.
The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm -- not whether they were morally wrong in themselves.
Sounds like researchers found the seat of superstition, not morality. The volunteers judged actions on the basis of their actual consequences instead of religious mumbo jumbo. That's not just an interesting finding, it's progress. Maybe science has found a way to get the Pope to spend more time protecting children and less time forgiving child rapists.
And while I find the lack of action by school officials disturbing, I wonder if they would have made things worse by getting involved.
That's certainly a fear that keeps many victims of bullying from seeking help, and it's often well-founded, since school officials tend not to take any serious action nor watch for reprisals.
I'd argue that the solution here is definitely not parenting. A victim of bullying in school should not be placed in a position of having to compensate for the actions of the perpetrators any more than a crime victim out in the adult world should be. One might argue that the bullies' parents ought to be doing a better job, but realistically, they're probably bullies themselves, and their kids are acting out what they see at home.
Instead of having brain-dead zero-tolerance policies on drugs that expel perfectly good kids for having an aspirin, we ought to have zero-tolerance policies on bullying, especially (but not exclusively) when any physical violence is involved. If I punch a coworker, I'm likely to be arrested on assault charges, and I'm definitely out of a job, period, no second chances, no questions asked. If I assault a child -- at least in this state -- we're talking felony assault charges. Is it really asking too much for school bullies to be expelled from the public school system? And, for that matter, is it asking too much for the parents who raise these little thugs to be, at the very least, substantially fined and subject to intense scrutiny from child protective services in case the little thug in question is him- or herself the victim of child abuse and in need of help?
This shit goes on because it is not treated as the serious problem that it is. If it was met with an official response proportional to the gravity of the situation, most of it would cease to be a problem.
Until science offers a completely predictive model of behavior and thoughts, it would be premature to assume that a soul (in the classical definition) does or doesn't exist.
Fair enough. But even if the soul exists, free will remains nonsensical.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless newspapers delivered via iPad are going to consist of something other than lightly-edited wire stories and insubstantial fluff reporting, they're not going to be a whole lot more appealing than the paper kind, and arguably less appealing, since lining the bottom of bird cages with iPads will be prohibitively expensive. And don't get me started on how much it would cost to pack boxes for a move.
And no you shouldn't have assumed man-made clocks were better based simply on the existence of frequency instability in pulsars.
Point taken, though by way of an excuse, my assumption was basically that in order to measure the instability of a pulsar, you'd have to have a chronometer that was more stable at the same or higher resolution. I shall now go research how the measurements were made in the first place with great enthusiasm and curiosity, so thanks for the correction!
The irregularity of pulsars has been known for decades now. Most of them are better than your watch, but I've got a textbook on pulsars that's twenty years old and mentions the drifts in their frequency in the first few pages.
I'm sure that there are lots of people who would like to run jobs on machines that normally process billions of dollars in transactions.
Of course, a certain percentage of them are going to be probing for security holes so they can steal financial data, but no worries -- the government will bail them out, right?
It's a great honor for Groklaw, but one wonders how many AC's there are, and whether Congress or future researchers would think that they are all one person.
I rather doubt many future researchers would think that "Anonymous Coward" is one person, though I can't speak for members of Congress. I can certainly imagine Ted Stevens talking about the tremendously prolific output of A. Coward flowing through a series of tubes....
My first thought was that pictures of people brandishing guns are so ubiquitous -- a large portion of the entertainment industry is devoted to exactly that -- that they're not necessarily a source of actual stress in most people. The researchers would have been better off using a loud, unexpected noise (dropping a heavy book on the floor behind the subject has been used in some experiments) or requiring the subjects to complete some arbitrary puzzle with a time limit if they wanted to generate stress in their subjects.
Personally, I'd have used a photo of a client demanding IE6 compatibility for their new web app.
This trick absolutely cannot be used in real life - it's useful only when the operating system runs exactly one process, a scenario that occurs only in research papers.
On the contrary, this opens up whole new possibilities for MS-DOS!
What I find interesting about the iPhone in particular is how good a job Apple has done supporting corporate/MS standards.
They pretty much have to if they want to get in that particular door.
What I mean when I say Apple isn't after the corporate market, at least in any broad way, is that Apple really doesn't have any products to offer in terms of the enterprise server and app market, and they seem to be quite content with not getting into that space. There are huge barriers to entry, actual anti-competitive practices by the incumbents aside, and the chances of success for a newcomer are relatively small by comparison.
Even if they just wanted to challenge the MS Office hegemony, it's not just Office itself they'd have to clone -- and I do mean clone, since neither companies nor most of their workers want to go through the time and expense of retraining, even if Apple came up with an "insanely great" spreadsheet, whatever that might mean -- they'd also have to clone or at least ensure compatibility with the largely undocumented interfaces of the entire MS (and IBM and Oracle) business software ecosystem.
And by no means do I mean to suggest that Apple isn't good enough or that MS/IBM/Oracle etc. are all that good; there's just a tremendous amount of inertia to overcome, to say nothing of the risky upfront expenditures, and since Apple seems to be raking in the money hand over fist in the consumer products arena right now, there's not a whole lot of incentive for them to divert their energy from a nice herd of cash cows to go tilting at windmills -- or Windows.
And what's wrong with this?
Entirely aside from the specific issue of deliberately and indiscriminately killing civilians, there's the larger issue that we are still conducting an unprovoked war of aggression. We don't have any legitimate targets in Iraq. Afghanistan is arguably a different situation (though whether it will do us any good is another question), but the only legitimate action we can undertake in Iraq is to get the hell out of their country.
Apple has basically avoided the corporate market, which is where most of Microsoft's money is made, however much ground they are gaining in the home market. Toes are being stepped on, to be sure, but I just don't see Microsoft and Apple as being on a collision course for the most part. Given the conservative nature of the corporate market, what's much more likely is that Apple will end up as the dominant home player, at least for a while, and Microsoft will follow IBM into being solely a corporate player.
The danger to Apple is that very large enterprises always ossify, and the market they are coming to dominate in the short term -- which is basically home entertainment electronics -- is vastly more competitive and unstable than the PC market has ever been (or likely ever will be). When much of your appeal is driven by current fashion trends, you're vulnerable in a way that a vendor of business software seldom faces.
Note that I'm not saying Apple is doomed or any similar nonsense. Apple is doing very well and probably will continue to do so for some time, and Microsoft will probably continue its slow decline. What I'm saying is that Microsoft and Apple are less and less in competition with each other. Apple will probably spend a lot more time in the future competing with companies like Sony and JVC and LG than it does with Microsoft, and they'll most likely do very well, at least as long as Jobs is at the helm. After Jobs, I'm rather less sanguine about Apple's future because people like Jobs (or, for that matter, Gates) tend not to groom their successors very well.
However, it is a very reasonable and successful way to prevent "ALL" nukes from detonating aka full out total nuclear strategic warfare WWIII.
Well, it's been successful so far. And I'm not sure that having two polities build enough weapons to destroy civilization several times over and trigger a mass extinction in the space of thirty minutes as part of a dispute over property distribution counts as reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
It probably is possible to build a company that does many widely disparate things well -- and certainly, there are a few successful examples -- but it is very, very hard. Most of the time, when a company wanders outside of its core competencies, the venture crashes and burns, and sometimes takes the company down with it. Microsoft (and yes, I am using the term core "competency" very loosely here) has managed to get a lock on PC operating systems and office software, but its ventures elsewhere have not been very successful: IE is the dominant browser, but the goal of using it to dominate the internet was a failure, and the Xbox, while reasonably popular, is not profitable for Microsoft. Google's ventures outside search and advertising have been ignorable so far. Even IBM's foray into personal computing, historically important though it was, is history. Combine such an expedition with a challenge to a competitor whose dominance borders on monopoly, and the odds definitely don't get any better.
Now Apple wants to enter a field in which they not only have no experience, but also lack experience in the entire underlying field of large-scale, massively parallel computing? And they think they're going to do this by buying an unknown and unproven startup?
Well, good luck with that. The odds of it going anywhere are not good, and if it pisses off enough iPhone owners, it might damage the core company as well. (I know, I know, if iPhones crapped every fifteen minutes like parrots, Apple enthusiasts would be the first to boast that Apple had crapping phones way ahead of everyone else, but Apple is no longer operating in a market where the majority of its customers are diehard fanboys.)
Seriously. The engineer is plainly making progress over his previous attempts, but he's got a long way to go. Humans are very good at reading subtle cues in other humans, like being able to tell when a friend is distracted by some unexpressed concern. That's what an android engineer is up against. This latest effort is immediately recognizable as a non-human when in motion, and something seems distinctly off about it in still pictures. And considering that even computer-rendered humans in movies -- which is arguably an easier problem -- are still less than 100% convincing in closeups, I'm not holding my breath for convincing androids any time soon.
It's a big lie that you'll ever use calculus for anything except for specialised degrees (and if you were to use it for anything you personally would want to do in your future, you would already be interested in it). It's also profoundly strange that calculus seems to be pinnacle of mathematical education if you're not going to go on to study something like mathematics itself or physics.
That's funny; I use calculus all the damn time, and I'm neither a professional mathematician or a physicist. I do, however, work a lot with statistics -- which is ultimately built on a foundation of calculus -- as a software engineer, and it has a definite impact on my personal bottom line, as my employers don't have to hire a statistician to work with me, so I command a higher salary than I would otherwise. Calculus has lots of practical uses, including scads of applications in business, if that's your cup of tea. Game programming also comes to mind, and of course, there are lots of openings for software engineers in the sciences. The real failing of math education, IMHO, is that the average mathematics teacher does a terrible job of informing students of the applications, most often because math teachers are interested in math for its own sake and don't know what the applications are.
Why aren't you required to achieve a certain level of chess expertise before you can complete a computer science degree? A lot of early computer science was concerned with chess playing, let us not forget!
Computer science is basically a branch of mathematics. If you're going to work in computer science, you absolutely must have a broad (and deep) mathematical education. If, however, you're just going to be a programmer writing billing software in Java, basic arithmetic and a smidgen of algebra will most likely be all you'll ever need to know. But there is a difference: you can be a computer scientist without programming being your primary job responsibility, and you can be a programmer without being a computer scientist.
It's pointless. It's pointless to cram for exams about subjects you don't care about in order to satisfy requirements you don't genuinely need.
Well, that much is true. Cramming is always pointless, insofar as you don't actually learn very much, to say nothing of learning it well enough to use it in the real world. That said, you often can't begin to understand the utility of a particular branch of knowledge until you actually know it. I see programmers reinventing the wheel all the time, usually badly, because they don't know that there's already an optimal or near-optimal solution for the problem they're working on.
In short, if you only pursue knowledge that you think you'll need, you'll always end up knowing less than you need to know, because your educational decisions are unavoidably uninformed.
My recommendation is, are you really interested in learning this stuff? If so, just spend hours and hours in your local university library in the math section browsing books you're interested in.
"Browsing" will not get you very far in any field. Unless you're prepared and motivated to systematically work through an area of study until you have achieved a full understanding of it and a solid grasp of how to apply it -- whether that's computer science or auto mechanics -- you will be a second-rate worker in the field. That's okay, if that's all you're interested in: there are plenty of openings for second-rate workers. But excellence and the rewards that come from it always involve very hard work.
I am a forensic investigator and it terrifies me that most people I meet in my field don't seem to care who goes to jail as long as somebody goes to jail.
That matches my experience. A disturbingly large number of people in law enforcement seem to think that their job is to bust people, as opposed to busting the guilty and protecting the innocent. Nor is it necessarily born out of malice, though there's that, too; most of the time, it's just tunnel-vision and sloppy thinking.
I looked at the documentation of this "Church Programming language". Scheme and most other Lisp derivatives have been around longer and can do more.
Not only that, but more recent languages support actual syntax so that the user does not have to provide the parse tree himself.
Capitalism and Democracy (direct or representative) go hand-in-hand, and it's very difficult to separate the two. How can you have true political freedom if you don't have economic freedom too?
20th century European fascism was largely capitalistic, as is the politically oppressive and communist-in-name-only mainland China, which latter hasn't gotten measurably freer since becoming capitalist. Much of present-day western Europe is considerably more democratic and politically freer than the United States, but much more socialistic. Since the fall of the Soviet bloc, almost all dictatorial states are also capitalist. The two demonstrably do not go hand in hand.
The real flaw in Lovelock's argument is that a large majority of the general population of the United States is in favor of stricter environmental regulation, even if it personally costs them more money, but because business has more influence over Congress than the voting public, environmental regulations end up being stalled by industrial lobbyists. If we want to address climate change, we need more democracy, not less.
Given that the USSR was the worst country in the world for the environment gives proof to the lie that capitalism is a global scourge.
I hate to add to this off-topic tangent, but twenty years of hearing exactly this fallacious argument is making me a little irritable.
The failure of communism speaks volumes about communism. It does not say a goddamn thing about capitalism one way or the other, any more than the failure of communism says anything about Tiger Woods' sex life, the number of craters on the far side of the moon, or the mating strategies of the duck-billed platypus.
Ironically, if capitalism is a scourge, then the fall of communism is what made it a global scourge.
(For the record, I think capitalism is quite successful in many areas, but it's by no means perfect and definitely has weaknesses that could be improved upon.)
Conversely, if you decline to settle, it doesn't make much sense for the MPAA to pursue the case, since odds are you don't have $100k, and if you insist on a jury trial, the odds are that you also don't have enough assets to seize to even cover the MPAA's legal expenses in the case.
On the other hand, if you do have enough assets to be worth the MPAA's time, maybe you should just buy the fucking movie.
People who are illegally downloading and distributing their works are not a part of their customer base. You have to *buy* something to be a customer.
In practice, there is considerable overlap between pirates and customers. Rare is the pirate who does not also buy content.
I would imagine that even rarer is the pirate who, having been dragged into court by the MPAA and found liable for an insane sum, will ever spend another dime on an MPAA product -- or even be able to.
What's even less plausible is that there will be very much sympathy for the MPAA among the general public when virtually all other civil cases are indefinitely deferred while fifty thousand piracy lawsuits drag the court system to a screeching halt. Injured on the job? Cheated by a contractor? Shafted by your bank? Well, in ten years or so, maybe a judge will be available to hear your case. In the meantime, someone needs to be brought to justice for making a free copy of The Lion King instead of paying a buck to Netflix to see it.
That's a valid question with respect to Novell, but asking how IBM can afford seven years of court costs is a bit like asking whether Sauron can stay up all night.
The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm -- not whether they were morally wrong in themselves.
Sounds like researchers found the seat of superstition, not morality. The volunteers judged actions on the basis of their actual consequences instead of religious mumbo jumbo. That's not just an interesting finding, it's progress. Maybe science has found a way to get the Pope to spend more time protecting children and less time forgiving child rapists.
And while I find the lack of action by school officials disturbing, I wonder if they would have made things worse by getting involved.
That's certainly a fear that keeps many victims of bullying from seeking help, and it's often well-founded, since school officials tend not to take any serious action nor watch for reprisals.
I'd argue that the solution here is definitely not parenting. A victim of bullying in school should not be placed in a position of having to compensate for the actions of the perpetrators any more than a crime victim out in the adult world should be. One might argue that the bullies' parents ought to be doing a better job, but realistically, they're probably bullies themselves, and their kids are acting out what they see at home.
Instead of having brain-dead zero-tolerance policies on drugs that expel perfectly good kids for having an aspirin, we ought to have zero-tolerance policies on bullying, especially (but not exclusively) when any physical violence is involved. If I punch a coworker, I'm likely to be arrested on assault charges, and I'm definitely out of a job, period, no second chances, no questions asked. If I assault a child -- at least in this state -- we're talking felony assault charges. Is it really asking too much for school bullies to be expelled from the public school system? And, for that matter, is it asking too much for the parents who raise these little thugs to be, at the very least, substantially fined and subject to intense scrutiny from child protective services in case the little thug in question is him- or herself the victim of child abuse and in need of help?
This shit goes on because it is not treated as the serious problem that it is. If it was met with an official response proportional to the gravity of the situation, most of it would cease to be a problem.
Until science offers a completely predictive model of behavior and thoughts, it would be premature to assume that a soul (in the classical definition) does or doesn't exist.
Fair enough. But even if the soul exists, free will remains nonsensical.
How many fingers do you see, Winston?