Perhaps they're one of those people who believes in providing customers software at a per-customer price that is far lower than the actual development costs?
That's called a free market - your product or service is worth only what people are willing to pay for it at the time of sale, no matter what _you_ think the product/service is worth. If you can't make a living that way, then your business model is broken.
Somebody who assumes that artificial scarcity enforced by legislation is a legitimate business model is just being greedy. There is no "right" to violate other people's personal property rights in order to support your broken business model (although a fair # of people apparently think they deserve such special treatment).
Or are you one of those people who believe they "deserve" to get extra money after providing the original service, even though you aren't doing any additional work?
I personally don't understand why people are upset by that.
I guess that makes clear that you feel that the substance is irrelevant as long as the perception is maintained.
What's the big deal that the music video acting and the singing were done by different people?
Maybe because they didn't actually tell people that was what they were doing, i.e., they were lying to their audience? Most people don't like being lied to, and they _will_ do what they can to punish such people.
When you watch a movie, are you upset to learn that a stunt double was used during certain action sequences? Do you feel that the audience is being lied to by making it look like it was really Bruce Willis who jumped from the top of the building?
Completely irrelevant, since most people don't expect the actors to perform those scenes themselves. In the rare case where the actor DOES have a reputation for performing such stunts (e.g., Jackie Chan), people would be very upset if he _claimed_ he had performed them, but it later turned out that a stunt double had done it.
Music, acting, and any other type of performance is entirely superficial. The play is the thing.
B.S. An important part of what makes a live performance special is an appreciation for the skill & training that the performer is demonstrating (and creativity, if the performer is improvising). Knowing that the performance is the equivalent of a recording significantly reduces the value of that performance, for both entertainment & symbolic purposes.
If it looks like a person playing taps and it sounds like a person playing taps then what conceivable problem is there with the fact that the person is not in fact playing taps?
Hey, if it looks like a person singing and performing, and it sounds like a person singing and performing, then what conceivable problem is there with the fact that the person is actually lip-synching? I mean, other than the fact that they're completely lying to their audience?
Well, I suppose if you're the kind of person who believes that perception is more important than substance, then I guess there is no problem. If you're the kind of the person who believes in doing something _right_, then you should find this kind of attitude downright dishonest.
Granted, I'm not the type of person who really gives a damn about a symbolic performance like bugling taps. But I will acknowledge that such symbolism is _very_ important to a lot of people, especially when they're burying a loved one who died in a non-peaceful way, and to pretend that a "fake" performance is as good as a real one is a really cynical insult.
This sort of circular logic is the reason I've stopped listening to the ID folks. I just smile, nod, and say "I have to go over there now."
That's too bad, avoiding them doesn't stop them from blasting their nonsense all over the local public perception.
At least for family & friends, if no one else, I do my best to try and show exactly how misinformed and outright deceptive the "arguments" from these kinds of idiots are (gets pretty heated since a few of my relatives are fundies "lite")-:
At the very least, they avoid talking about those subjects at family gatherings (at least in my presence:-)
I sincerely doubt that anything that can be modified by the President (e.g., Executive Orders) will place any sort of constraint on the behavior of this President.
Before the Republicans started bakig the Big Government pie, the Democrats had already perfected the recipe.
Uh huh - I think the Republicans are baking that pie "badly" - they seem to have forgotten a couple of ingredients, like not spending more money than the government is taking in, and trying to support programs that help the lower economic classes instead of the upper economic classes (who don't really need the help), and not using the government to enforce their own version of "morality". At least the Democrats pay lip service to that kind of thing (except for a different version of the morality thing).
To be fair, I think that a lot of it is the personal ideology of the Republican Leadership - but to be also fair, the Republican rank & file has been following them like sheep into an abattoir.
Given how poorly the Republican party's ideology has served the country, it would be the best for the country if anyone who has been following that ideology is removed from power for at least a few election cycles, and that we avoid replacing them with anyone who follows that ideology. (I include Democrats who follow that ideology as well.)
Whoever steps in to fill the vacuum might not be any better than the existing leadership, but they'll have to do pretty badly before they could be considered to be worse.
Yes, anything *can* be used as a weapon (which is why we need to recognize this regarding airport security and either design sensible regulations or require that everyone fly nude;-) )
On the other hand, in an enclosed space like an airplane, it would be hard for even the most accomplished martial artist to avoid being dogpiled by 20-30 desperate passengers. Sure, he/she could kill everyone who he/she could reach, but it's really hard to move (or even breath) once a couple tons of human meat is sitting on every part of your body.
(I'm having a bad flashback to being on the wrong side of a dogpile in a undergrad Rugby game gone awry...)
Yes. As uncharismatic as he comes across in the press, Kerry seems to be occasionally competent. He has at least demonstrated that he could satisfactorily perform his duties as a squad leader in actual combat, unlike our current "Commander".
Granted, it doesn't take much to outshine our current Chimp-in-Chief's competency levels, but you asked only whether we thought that we'd be better off with Kerry...
I still haven't figured out what Bush is competent at, except for signing bills to spend money that the government doesn't have.
Yeah, but the telomere limit provides a way to stop cells which have otherwise become cancerous (dividing out of control) but which haven't figured out a way to extend their own telomeres. Read somewhere that this might be happening all the time, but that such cells usually die before spreading too far because of the telomere limit.
If we figured out a way to extend the telomere limit, but blindly applied it to all of the cells in our body, then we might end up getting cancer all over the place from cells that would have otherwise died.
Anyway, that's the only reason I brought up telomerase.
The way we deal with this problem is that lots of junk DNA is stuck on to the ends of the DNA we got from our parents. This junk DNA is called telomeres. By adding this junk, the important stuff has a buffer on each end of unimportant stuff. We burn through that buffer during our lifetimes.
Yeah, I knew about the telomeres.
Also read the theories that say that having finite telomere lengths is one of the ways that the body kills cells which are on a dividing spree, ala proto-cancer - but the cancer cells which become dangerous are the ones which figured out how to make "telomerase", and effectively become immortal (albeit with rapidly increasing screwed-up DNA since they keep dividing so rapidly).
Cancer was the answer to my question about why these biologists weren't trying to figure out ways to flood our cells with lots of telomerase:-)
Well, you're thinking like an engineer, not a biologist.
Guilty as charged - occupational hazard I suppose:-)
Because of the details of how DNA is assembled and handled, one strand is more fragile than the other.
That's interesting, although it's the first I've heard of it (I'm somewhat of an information junkie - also an occupational hazard I guess). Do you have any "layman's" references you can point out about that difference (does wikipedia refer to it)?
Lastly, you'd have to weigh the penalty for hauling around a 3rd copy against the likelyhood of a mutation that requires it. And we've got a lot of DNA already. Each of your cells has around 6 feet of DNA crammed into it. It ends up being far more efficient to just let the organism die than to have a 3-copy backup system.
Yeah, that makes sense biologically speaking.
Since we're learning how to manage our own gene changes nowadays, I could imagine an interesting science-fiction-type scenario where we change our own gene-encoding scheme to be even more robust than it is (for life-extension, or for going into high-radiation areas like space, or if we pollute our own world too much with mutagenics, or fighting a dangerous retrovirus, etc).
I remember listening to some guy on NPR talking about the various differences between religions (he had studied as many as he could "scientifically").
One of the interesting comments that he made is that most of the "unorganized" pagan religions didn't really have the concept of "faith" - you either believed the stuff, or you didn't, or you believed variations or something else, but whatever interpretation you made of it was made completely by yourself in relation to how you experienced your life.
"Faith" is a concept that was almost exclusively introduced by "organized" religion, whenever you had some sort of elite/authority who wanted the general populace to follow a set of rules without having to police them all the time (especially since then you would have to police the police, etc).
By introducing Faith as a required part of any religion, people feel _guilty_ when they break your rules, and they get angry when they see other people breaking the rules (same reaction as when you see someone breaking the rules in a game). As a spiritual leader, you get the bonus of having people enforce rules on themselves, and on others, without you having to lift a finger.
Anyway, one of his main points was that every organized major religion in the world ended up adding "Faith" as one of their key tenets when each religion evolved to the point where they had some kind of elite who wanted to influence the followers of that religion.
Stop subsidizing the energy industries, and make sure they don't shift additional costs of energy production onto the public (by using cheaper technologies which cause more pollution).
Once people are exposed to the _real_ costs of energy, the law of supply-and-demand will rapidly find the correct equilibrium between various energy-production methods & conservation.
If you replaced all those wheels in an 18-wheeler with powerful electric motors, it seems like you'd be able to get a LOT of net torque (given that you can provide enough juice to all those motors of course).
Of course, the technical aspects of coordinating all of those motors, plus the maintenance required for any system which is more complex (diesel engines can be made pretty darn reliable), might make it not worth it.
On the plus side, such a rig would be pretty fault-tolerant (losing individual electrical motors would probably fail pretty gracefully), you wouldn't use much energy at all if your rig were lightly loaded, and you could probably use regenerative braking to help a lot.
He/she's not suggesting a perpetual motion machine.
Apparently adding some hydrogen to the air/fuel mixture really helps the efficiency of many internal combustion engines, even if you used some of the energy from your engine to get the hydrogen in the first place. Dunno if you can get the increases in efficiency that he/she was talking about.
There's various references to this effect scattered around the web, although it sounded a bit like snake oil to me, and I haven't experienced how effective it is for myself.
You're ignoring the only option which won't affect _something_: to use less energy, which is what those "hardcore" environmentalists probably really want...
...but that doesn't make as much money so it's not an attractive "solution" to anyone making money off the energy industry and since it usually requires people to change their consumption habits, it's not an attractive solution to the majority of us "lazy" people either.
Ah well, at some point "scarcity of resources" will catch up with us and we'll all start killing each other over what's left. Something to look forward to.
One of the advantages to having 2 strands of DNA: you've got a backup copy.
Having 2 copies of anything is _not_ a backup system, if you don't know which one is the "right" one (you need at least 3 for that). Fortunately, at least some of our genes have a certain amount of error-correcting encoding.
In his press release, Mr. Gonzales brought up the statistic that "one in five children has been solicited online".
78.34% of statistics put forth in press releases are pulled out of the presenters' posteriors, and are picked only to support the presenters' viewpoint. The other 30.32% are just wrong.:-) You can probably adjust both those numbers up when the presenters are politicians.
Unfortunately for you, your interpretation of the Commerce Clause, 9th & 10th Amendments don't matter: only the opinion of the SCOTUS matters, and in the case of the Commerce Clause they've pretty much stretched it to cover _anything_.
If Disney hadn't gotten their way and Mickey Mouse were in the public domain right now, it would shift the profits on Mickey from Disney, to 10,000 Chinese companies.
And how, exactly, is IP law going to protect our economy from China if China doesn't pay anything more than lip service to it? If anything, IP law prevents our companies from being able to compete.
Given the incredibly ignorant-sounding statement you made in your original post, it was hard to assume anything other than that you didn't know much about encryption. I was trying to write assuming that you didn't. Apologies if you were trying to say something other than what you wrote.
there are countries that make our politicians look like amateurs when it comes to corruption.
On an individual basis (i.e., many corrupt individual/small groups), perhaps, but when it gets down to large-scale institutional corruption, I think we're playing with the big boys.
Petty Third World corrupt government officials only _dream_ of being able to slosh billions of dollars around to whoever they want, without fear of discovery because you made it legal through "legislation".
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That's called a free market - your product or service is worth only what people are willing to pay for it at the time of sale, no matter what _you_ think the product/service is worth. If you can't make a living that way, then your business model is broken.
Somebody who assumes that artificial scarcity enforced by legislation is a legitimate business model is just being greedy. There is no "right" to violate other people's personal property rights in order to support your broken business model (although a fair # of people apparently think they deserve such special treatment).
So what's stopping you?
Or are you one of those people who believe they "deserve" to get extra money after providing the original service, even though you aren't doing any additional work?
I guess that makes clear that you feel that the substance is irrelevant as long as the perception is maintained.
Maybe because they didn't actually tell people that was what they were doing, i.e., they were lying to their audience? Most people don't like being lied to, and they _will_ do what they can to punish such people.
Completely irrelevant, since most people don't expect the actors to perform those scenes themselves. In the rare case where the actor DOES have a reputation for performing such stunts (e.g., Jackie Chan), people would be very upset if he _claimed_ he had performed them, but it later turned out that a stunt double had done it.
B.S. An important part of what makes a live performance special is an appreciation for the skill & training that the performer is demonstrating (and creativity, if the performer is improvising). Knowing that the performance is the equivalent of a recording significantly reduces the value of that performance, for both entertainment & symbolic purposes.
Hey, if it looks like a person singing and performing, and it sounds like a person singing and performing, then what conceivable problem is there with the fact that the person is actually lip-synching? I mean, other than the fact that they're completely lying to their audience?
Well, I suppose if you're the kind of person who believes that perception is more important than substance, then I guess there is no problem. If you're the kind of the person who believes in doing something _right_, then you should find this kind of attitude downright dishonest.
Granted, I'm not the type of person who really gives a damn about a symbolic performance like bugling taps. But I will acknowledge that such symbolism is _very_ important to a lot of people, especially when they're burying a loved one who died in a non-peaceful way, and to pretend that a "fake" performance is as good as a real one is a really cynical insult.
That's too bad, avoiding them doesn't stop them from blasting their nonsense all over the local public perception.
At least for family & friends, if no one else, I do my best to try and show exactly how misinformed and outright deceptive the "arguments" from these kinds of idiots are (gets pretty heated since a few of my relatives are fundies "lite")-:
At the very least, they avoid talking about those subjects at family gatherings (at least in my presence :-)
I sincerely doubt that anything that can be modified by the President (e.g., Executive Orders) will place any sort of constraint on the behavior of this President.
Uh huh - I think the Republicans are baking that pie "badly" - they seem to have forgotten a couple of ingredients, like not spending more money than the government is taking in, and trying to support programs that help the lower economic classes instead of the upper economic classes (who don't really need the help), and not using the government to enforce their own version of "morality". At least the Democrats pay lip service to that kind of thing (except for a different version of the morality thing).
To be fair, I think that a lot of it is the personal ideology of the Republican Leadership - but to be also fair, the Republican rank & file has been following them like sheep into an abattoir.
Given how poorly the Republican party's ideology has served the country, it would be the best for the country if anyone who has been following that ideology is removed from power for at least a few election cycles, and that we avoid replacing them with anyone who follows that ideology. (I include Democrats who follow that ideology as well.)
Whoever steps in to fill the vacuum might not be any better than the existing leadership, but they'll have to do pretty badly before they could be considered to be worse.
On the other hand, in an enclosed space like an airplane, it would be hard for even the most accomplished martial artist to avoid being dogpiled by 20-30 desperate passengers. Sure, he/she could kill everyone who he/she could reach, but it's really hard to move (or even breath) once a couple tons of human meat is sitting on every part of your body.
(I'm having a bad flashback to being on the wrong side of a dogpile in a undergrad Rugby game gone awry...)
Yes. As uncharismatic as he comes across in the press, Kerry seems to be occasionally competent. He has at least demonstrated that he could satisfactorily perform his duties as a squad leader in actual combat, unlike our current "Commander".
Granted, it doesn't take much to outshine our current Chimp-in-Chief's competency levels, but you asked only whether we thought that we'd be better off with Kerry...
I still haven't figured out what Bush is competent at, except for signing bills to spend money that the government doesn't have.
So if the female is upside down, then we'd be able to legally see the underside?
I imagine lots more slow-mo flips & somersaults...
Yeah, but the telomere limit provides a way to stop cells which have otherwise become cancerous (dividing out of control) but which haven't figured out a way to extend their own telomeres. Read somewhere that this might be happening all the time, but that such cells usually die before spreading too far because of the telomere limit.
If we figured out a way to extend the telomere limit, but blindly applied it to all of the cells in our body, then we might end up getting cancer all over the place from cells that would have otherwise died.
Anyway, that's the only reason I brought up telomerase.
Yeah, I knew about the telomeres.
Also read the theories that say that having finite telomere lengths is one of the ways that the body kills cells which are on a dividing spree, ala proto-cancer - but the cancer cells which become dangerous are the ones which figured out how to make "telomerase", and effectively become immortal (albeit with rapidly increasing screwed-up DNA since they keep dividing so rapidly).
Cancer was the answer to my question about why these biologists weren't trying to figure out ways to flood our cells with lots of telomerase :-)
Guilty as charged - occupational hazard I suppose :-)
That's interesting, although it's the first I've heard of it (I'm somewhat of an information junkie - also an occupational hazard I guess). Do you have any "layman's" references you can point out about that difference (does wikipedia refer to it)?
Yeah, that makes sense biologically speaking.
Since we're learning how to manage our own gene changes nowadays, I could imagine an interesting science-fiction-type scenario where we change our own gene-encoding scheme to be even more robust than it is (for life-extension, or for going into high-radiation areas like space, or if we pollute our own world too much with mutagenics, or fighting a dangerous retrovirus, etc).
I remember listening to some guy on NPR talking about the various differences between religions (he had studied as many as he could "scientifically").
One of the interesting comments that he made is that most of the "unorganized" pagan religions didn't really have the concept of "faith" - you either believed the stuff, or you didn't, or you believed variations or something else, but whatever interpretation you made of it was made completely by yourself in relation to how you experienced your life.
"Faith" is a concept that was almost exclusively introduced by "organized" religion, whenever you had some sort of elite/authority who wanted the general populace to follow a set of rules without having to police them all the time (especially since then you would have to police the police, etc).
By introducing Faith as a required part of any religion, people feel _guilty_ when they break your rules, and they get angry when they see other people breaking the rules (same reaction as when you see someone breaking the rules in a game). As a spiritual leader, you get the bonus of having people enforce rules on themselves, and on others, without you having to lift a finger.
Anyway, one of his main points was that every organized major religion in the world ended up adding "Faith" as one of their key tenets when each religion evolved to the point where they had some kind of elite who wanted to influence the followers of that religion.
Stop subsidizing the energy industries, and make sure they don't shift additional costs of energy production onto the public (by using cheaper technologies which cause more pollution).
Once people are exposed to the _real_ costs of energy, the law of supply-and-demand will rapidly find the correct equilibrium between various energy-production methods & conservation.
If you replaced all those wheels in an 18-wheeler with powerful electric motors, it seems like you'd be able to get a LOT of net torque (given that you can provide enough juice to all those motors of course).
Of course, the technical aspects of coordinating all of those motors, plus the maintenance required for any system which is more complex (diesel engines can be made pretty darn reliable), might make it not worth it.
On the plus side, such a rig would be pretty fault-tolerant (losing individual electrical motors would probably fail pretty gracefully), you wouldn't use much energy at all if your rig were lightly loaded, and you could probably use regenerative braking to help a lot.
He/she's not suggesting a perpetual motion machine.
Apparently adding some hydrogen to the air/fuel mixture really helps the efficiency of many internal combustion engines, even if you used some of the energy from your engine to get the hydrogen in the first place. Dunno if you can get the increases in efficiency that he/she was talking about.
There's various references to this effect scattered around the web, although it sounded a bit like snake oil to me, and I haven't experienced how effective it is for myself.
You're ignoring the only option which won't affect _something_: to use less energy, which is what those "hardcore" environmentalists probably really want...
...but that doesn't make as much money so it's not an attractive "solution" to anyone making money off the energy industry and since it usually requires people to change their consumption habits, it's not an attractive solution to the majority of us "lazy" people either.
Ah well, at some point "scarcity of resources" will catch up with us and we'll all start killing each other over what's left. Something to look forward to.
Having 2 copies of anything is _not_ a backup system, if you don't know which one is the "right" one (you need at least 3 for that). Fortunately, at least some of our genes have a certain amount of error-correcting encoding.
78.34% of statistics put forth in press releases are pulled out of the presenters' posteriors, and are picked only to support the presenters' viewpoint. The other 30.32% are just wrong. :-) You can probably adjust both those numbers up when the presenters are politicians.
Unfortunately for you, your interpretation of the Commerce Clause, 9th & 10th Amendments don't matter: only the opinion of the SCOTUS matters, and in the case of the Commerce Clause they've pretty much stretched it to cover _anything_.
And how, exactly, is IP law going to protect our economy from China if China doesn't pay anything more than lip service to it? If anything, IP law prevents our companies from being able to compete.
Given the incredibly ignorant-sounding statement you made in your original post, it was hard to assume anything other than that you didn't know much about encryption. I was trying to write assuming that you didn't. Apologies if you were trying to say something other than what you wrote.
On an individual basis (i.e., many corrupt individual/small groups), perhaps, but when it gets down to large-scale institutional corruption, I think we're playing with the big boys.
Petty Third World corrupt government officials only _dream_ of being able to slosh billions of dollars around to whoever they want, without fear of discovery because you made it legal through "legislation".
I thought grips _were_ often treated like slaves by the Hollywood establishment - do they want official recognition now?