Do not make the assumption that all religious people buy into the creationist agenda.
Then those "rational" religious folks should be a LOT more vocal about denouncing the fanatics who claim to represent them, and should vote against putting those fanatics into positions of power. It makes it awfully easy to assume that they DO buy into such idiocy.
Well, I will point out that the various theories of Creation in the last few hundred years has been far more stable than any scientific theory put forward.
That's just because such "theories" either ignore any inconvenient facts, or revise the "theory of Creation" so that it is impossible to disprove (and then pretend that's what the "theory" said all along). Eventually, they can say (like you did) that their theory has been stable longer than the physically-testable theories, and is therefore somehow "better".
Also, I can't seem to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster as I have yet to find any historical or archeological evidence to support the revelation.
You obviously haven't read much about the Church of the FSM. Part of their Articles of Faith is that the FSM continually adjusts reality so that you can neither prove nor disprove its existence - much like the fanatics who insist that the Bible is the literal truth say that their "ever-truthful" God created the world thousands of years ago, complete with all the physical evidence that makes us think it is billions of years old.
with which you can design your code nicely before you even fire up your IDE.
Your advice is one step above useless. Either you're some kind of programming prodigy who can create a nigh-perfect design on paper, or you haven't done any kind of significant programming.
Pencil & paper is good for designing a project's architecture, visualizing some control/data structures, or writing down brainstorming notes, but once coding begins, any details written on the paper rapidly become worthless. It's pretty much impossible to design "nice" code for any project of significant size the first time around - code becomes nice/refined/elegant after many, many cycles of iteration.
Just about software development process I've ever observed or been a part of for over 20 years of programming has involved a great deal of iteration. (A highly-detailed specification process just pushes the iteration back to the specification process).
The big problem Bayh-Dole attempts to address is that a pharmaceutical company is unlikely invest tens of millions of dollars on clinical trials to verify the safety and efficacy of a newly-invented drug if the company does not have exclusive patent rights.
Ah yes, the big problem of big companies not willing to adopt a new product unless they can make obscene profits without doing any work. I'm so glad that Congress saw fit to solve this problem at the public's expense.
If Congress _really_ wanted to do the public some good, they would've provided massive amounts of seed money so that those academic researchers could take their new discoveries & competitively kick big pharma in the nuts (metaphorically of course). Once big pharma got over the shock of actually having to compete for their profits, they'd find motivation for developing new drugs - like not going out of business. Of course, they might have to accept some slimmer profit margins.
I have really little sympathy for any industry where the main players are making huge profits. Anyone who understands Economics 101 supply & demand knows that huge profits means that there isn't enough competition in that market.
I'd be interested in knowing what society came up with that set of rules, but I don't think I would consider it a fully-articulated legal system. It doesn't describe who has what power, and what limits exists (if any) on their power.
It sounds like the kind of system that an absolute ruler would come up with when they wanted to be able to rule by whim without having to justify their actions according to a code of law.
I don't think you can call a system of law "simple & easy-to-understand" if it requires intimate knowledge of who is making the decisions in order to predict what the outcome of various scenarios might be.
Heh - I always thought that combining a balanced-budget amendment with an amendment requiring that the government provide free legal services to _everyone_ (the cost of which would have to be taken into account when writing laws) would probably result in the simplest, easy-to-understand legal system in history, since the government wouldn't be able to afford to keep existing otherwise.
Of course, I also think that criminals should be allowed to vote, since that provides a valuable form of negative feedback against legislators who try and disenfranchise classes of the population by criminalizing them.
Ah, so _that's_ where the mythical Iraqi massive stockpile of WMDs got moved to. I can safely assume that your information on this matter is better than Bush's was about Iraq.
I believe that complexity will tend to increase in an evolving system.
Dunno 'bout that - in an energy-starved environment, it is probably more likely that organisms might evolve to become SIMPLER, since fewer concurrent biological processes would probably require less energy & maintenance to survive. Just depends on what kind of environmental niche you're trying to survive in.
As far as we know, all life is carbon based, and requires both water and heat in order to exist
Rewording that slightly, all life that we know of is carbon based & requires both water & heat in order to exist. The key phrase being "that we know of". Let us know when you have exhaustively tested every single possible physically-realisable configuration of atoms in the universe to prove that a non-carbon-based lifeform can't be created..
Well, until someone who is better skilled & armed decides to take your property.
Freedom from unwarranted incursion into my property secures it.
Now you want government to protect your property for you? Weren't you taking care of that by bearing your own arms?
Freedom from entangling ourselves into the business of other countries secures us from the threat of terrorism.
While I don't think going around antagonizing major chunks of the international population is going to improve our safety, I don't think you can ignore them either. Sooner or later, somebody is going to want what you've got, and you've got to be engaged enough with the rest of the world to know that they're coming, and be able to plan something to do protect yourself.
Freedom from taxation secures my financial future.
Unless your current financial resources are zero, or you experience a major catastrophe which wipes out all your reserves, in which case the social net would would've been paid for by taxation is not around to give you a chance at having a future, financial or otherwise.
The U.S. federal government _IS_ out of control, but only whacked-out nutjobs would want to live in the type of society you're describing.
Making mobile tanks to safely store high-pressure hydrogen gas in sufficient quantities to equal the energy-density of current hydrocarbon-based fuels is a non-trivial engineering challenge.
In addition, since hydrogen gas has such a small molecule, unless it's chemically bonded to something, it tends to leak through just about every kind of substance that can be used to contain it.
If you come up with a safe, cheap way of storing hydrogen at the energy-densities of existing fuels, then you have found the Holy Grail of energy distribution.
I'm not quite sure what your position is - are you arguing for or against software-as-a-product?
No, see, I completely understand why a software company would want that model to succeed. I similarly understand why the media industry wants DRM.
Of course, those industries would want ways to make money by creating something once, then getting paid for it over and over. If the market weren't encumbered by IP laws, then they'd realize that business model was unworkable & try something else (like the service route for software development). Not sure about the media industry - I suspect they'd have to go back to supporting live performances, which might not be a bad thing culturally & socially speaking.
If you assume everyone acts greedily, there isn't a single person who wouldn't want special laws to let them make more money than they would otherwise be able to earn by simply providing goods or services.
Software has no such inherent limitation. If your company thrives on having people pay for software fixes, then face it - your software sucks.
You're not using your imagination. Even software has to evolve to adapt to changes in circumstance. You might be able to write a perfect, bulletproof program that satisfies every current customer need - but the customer WILL have new requirements, the platforms that the software needs to run on WILL change, the customer might have new projects (and would prefer to contract with you again if you did a good job the first time), etc. And although you sneer at "imperfect" programs, they WILL be created - and people will want them fixed. This, too, is a service professional's job.
Just like any other service professional, if you do a decent job, you WILL be able to get work. You don't need IP laws to make a living doing software development. And the more important the ability to process information is to our economy, the more work there will be.
So instead of buying software that works as you expect right out of the box, you get some raw materials for free, and then you have to spend time and money paying someone to make it work for you? Is that how it works?
No, for a typical business owner it would be more likely that they'd find something that already does pretty much what they want (if possible) and have it tweaked (by inhouse employees or contracting out) to exactly match their business requirements. That'd be a lot easier & cheaper if they didn't have to worry about violating IP laws. And the ability to customize their computing environment to exactly match their business requirements would probably be perceived as a competitive advantage.
That's an oft-cited model. It's also baffling to me.
That's because you can't get the idea of software-as-product out of your head. If you want a solid business model that doesn't depend on copyright law, then you make a living by charging for SERVICES.
Does a plumber charge you every time you use something they fixed? No, you tell them what the problem is, they fix it, charge you for the work & then go off to the next job. If they want to keep earning money, they have to keep fixing things.
Why should programmers be treated any differently? Somebody wants software created or modified, software developer does the work, gets paid, goes on to do the next job. There's no reason other than greed for someone to expect to keep getting paid over and over for one act of creation.
even the slowest person could have gotten out of town on foot.
Yeah, I can just imagine that 90-year-old with emphysema dragging his oxygen tank behind him for 80 miles - well, until the oxygen runs out anyway.
You must be one of those "compassionate conservatives" I've heard about - the way you don't let facts get in the way of a buttheaded theory makes it pretty obvious.
Software businesses can survive just fine by providing services. They just won't be able to make a profit by selling software the same way as a real product. That's one of the main motivations for the GPL.
It is not yet possible to regularly sleep less than the 7-8 hours for a day for several years without screwing up your:
Have you read about a polyphasic sleeping schedule? Apparently, you can force your body to adapt to sleeping for 1/2 hour every 4 hours (just long enough to get the required amount of REM sleep per day). As long as you're not physically stressing yourself, you can keep this schedule indefinitely & still be mentally alert.
I haven't tried it myself, however - just read about it. Apparently the transition period is hell.
Really? Government-financed research is at least in the public domain, and any entrepreneur who can see an opportunity is welcome to take the results of that research & run as far & as fast as they can go.
By contrast, and especially with the current state of our "intellectual property" laws, anything developed by a private interest will be doled out at whatever rate will maximize profit - and any attempts at competition will be ruthlessly stamped out.
Do you really think leaving basic research up to private concerns yields the most benefit for society?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, I wonder how hard it would be to get running on a console?
Then those "rational" religious folks should be a LOT more vocal about denouncing the fanatics who claim to represent them, and should vote against putting those fanatics into positions of power. It makes it awfully easy to assume that they DO buy into such idiocy.
That's just because such "theories" either ignore any inconvenient facts, or revise the "theory of Creation" so that it is impossible to disprove (and then pretend that's what the "theory" said all along). Eventually, they can say (like you did) that their theory has been stable longer than the physically-testable theories, and is therefore somehow "better".
You obviously haven't read much about the Church of the FSM. Part of their Articles of Faith is that the FSM continually adjusts reality so that you can neither prove nor disprove its existence - much like the fanatics who insist that the Bible is the literal truth say that their "ever-truthful" God created the world thousands of years ago, complete with all the physical evidence that makes us think it is billions of years old.
Your advice is one step above useless. Either you're some kind of programming prodigy who can create a nigh-perfect design on paper, or you haven't done any kind of significant programming.
Pencil & paper is good for designing a project's architecture, visualizing some control/data structures, or writing down brainstorming notes, but once coding begins, any details written on the paper rapidly become worthless. It's pretty much impossible to design "nice" code for any project of significant size the first time around - code becomes nice/refined/elegant after many, many cycles of iteration.
Just about software development process I've ever observed or been a part of for over 20 years of programming has involved a great deal of iteration. (A highly-detailed specification process just pushes the iteration back to the specification process).
Ah yes, the big problem of big companies not willing to adopt a new product unless they can make obscene profits without doing any work. I'm so glad that Congress saw fit to solve this problem at the public's expense.
If Congress _really_ wanted to do the public some good, they would've provided massive amounts of seed money so that those academic researchers could take their new discoveries & competitively kick big pharma in the nuts (metaphorically of course). Once big pharma got over the shock of actually having to compete for their profits, they'd find motivation for developing new drugs - like not going out of business. Of course, they might have to accept some slimmer profit margins.
I have really little sympathy for any industry where the main players are making huge profits. Anyone who understands Economics 101 supply & demand knows that huge profits means that there isn't enough competition in that market.
I'd be interested in knowing what society came up with that set of rules, but I don't think I would consider it a fully-articulated legal system. It doesn't describe who has what power, and what limits exists (if any) on their power.
It sounds like the kind of system that an absolute ruler would come up with when they wanted to be able to rule by whim without having to justify their actions according to a code of law.
I don't think you can call a system of law "simple & easy-to-understand" if it requires intimate knowledge of who is making the decisions in order to predict what the outcome of various scenarios might be.
Heh - I always thought that combining a balanced-budget amendment with an amendment requiring that the government provide free legal services to _everyone_ (the cost of which would have to be taken into account when writing laws) would probably result in the simplest, easy-to-understand legal system in history, since the government wouldn't be able to afford to keep existing otherwise.
Of course, I also think that criminals should be allowed to vote, since that provides a valuable form of negative feedback against legislators who try and disenfranchise classes of the population by criminalizing them.
Ah, so _that's_ where the mythical Iraqi massive stockpile of WMDs got moved to. I can safely assume that your information on this matter is better than Bush's was about Iraq.
They've been very competent at what was important to them: looting the U.S. Treasury.
Dunno 'bout that - in an energy-starved environment, it is probably more likely that organisms might evolve to become SIMPLER, since fewer concurrent biological processes would probably require less energy & maintenance to survive. Just depends on what kind of environmental niche you're trying to survive in.
Rewording that slightly, all life that we know of is carbon based & requires both water & heat in order to exist. The key phrase being "that we know of". Let us know when you have exhaustively tested every single possible physically-realisable configuration of atoms in the universe to prove that a non-carbon-based lifeform can't be created..
Well, until someone who is better skilled & armed decides to take your property.
Now you want government to protect your property for you? Weren't you taking care of that by bearing your own arms?
While I don't think going around antagonizing major chunks of the international population is going to improve our safety, I don't think you can ignore them either. Sooner or later, somebody is going to want what you've got, and you've got to be engaged enough with the rest of the world to know that they're coming, and be able to plan something to do protect yourself.
Unless your current financial resources are zero, or you experience a major catastrophe which wipes out all your reserves, in which case the social net would would've been paid for by taxation is not around to give you a chance at having a future, financial or otherwise.
The U.S. federal government _IS_ out of control, but only whacked-out nutjobs would want to live in the type of society you're describing.
Making mobile tanks to safely store high-pressure hydrogen gas in sufficient quantities to equal the energy-density of current hydrocarbon-based fuels is a non-trivial engineering challenge.
In addition, since hydrogen gas has such a small molecule, unless it's chemically bonded to something, it tends to leak through just about every kind of substance that can be used to contain it.
If you come up with a safe, cheap way of storing hydrogen at the energy-densities of existing fuels, then you have found the Holy Grail of energy distribution.
I'm not quite sure what your position is - are you arguing for or against software-as-a-product?
Of course, those industries would want ways to make money by creating something once, then getting paid for it over and over. If the market weren't encumbered by IP laws, then they'd realize that business model was unworkable & try something else (like the service route for software development). Not sure about the media industry - I suspect they'd have to go back to supporting live performances, which might not be a bad thing culturally & socially speaking.If you assume everyone acts greedily, there isn't a single person who wouldn't want special laws to let them make more money than they would otherwise be able to earn by simply providing goods or services.
You're not using your imagination. Even software has to evolve to adapt to changes in circumstance. You might be able to write a perfect, bulletproof program that satisfies every current customer need - but the customer WILL have new requirements, the platforms that the software needs to run on WILL change, the customer might have new projects (and would prefer to contract with you again if you did a good job the first time), etc. And although you sneer at "imperfect" programs, they WILL be created - and people will want them fixed. This, too, is a service professional's job.
Just like any other service professional, if you do a decent job, you WILL be able to get work. You don't need IP laws to make a living doing software development. And the more important the ability to process information is to our economy, the more work there will be.
No, for a typical business owner it would be more likely that they'd find something that already does pretty much what they want (if possible) and have it tweaked (by inhouse employees or contracting out) to exactly match their business requirements. That'd be a lot easier & cheaper if they didn't have to worry about violating IP laws. And the ability to customize their computing environment to exactly match their business requirements would probably be perceived as a competitive advantage.
That's because you can't get the idea of software-as-product out of your head. If you want a solid business model that doesn't depend on copyright law, then you make a living by charging for SERVICES.
Does a plumber charge you every time you use something they fixed? No, you tell them what the problem is, they fix it, charge you for the work & then go off to the next job. If they want to keep earning money, they have to keep fixing things.
Why should programmers be treated any differently? Somebody wants software created or modified, software developer does the work, gets paid, goes on to do the next job. There's no reason other than greed for someone to expect to keep getting paid over and over for one act of creation.
Yeah, I can just imagine that 90-year-old with emphysema dragging his oxygen tank behind him for 80 miles - well, until the oxygen runs out anyway.
You must be one of those "compassionate conservatives" I've heard about - the way you don't let facts get in the way of a buttheaded theory makes it pretty obvious.
Software businesses can survive just fine by providing services. They just won't be able to make a profit by selling software the same way as a real product. That's one of the main motivations for the GPL.
Hey, it's a war. People get killed.
Sorry, any more information than that is on a need-to-know basis, and you don't need to know.
Not only that, they give you free sex in sex ed!
Boy, sex ed has become so progressive nowadays...
Whatever the "left" can do to hurt the troops' morale is nothing compared to how the Bush Administration's incompetence can hurt their morale.
Haven't seen any official studies on it - just anecdotal descriptions of some people who have done it for a year or so without much complaint.
Have you read about a polyphasic sleeping schedule? Apparently, you can force your body to adapt to sleeping for 1/2 hour every 4 hours (just long enough to get the required amount of REM sleep per day). As long as you're not physically stressing yourself, you can keep this schedule indefinitely & still be mentally alert.
I haven't tried it myself, however - just read about it. Apparently the transition period is hell.
No...the signs would be too small.
Really? Government-financed research is at least in the public domain, and any entrepreneur who can see an opportunity is welcome to take the results of that research & run as far & as fast as they can go.
By contrast, and especially with the current state of our "intellectual property" laws, anything developed by a private interest will be doled out at whatever rate will maximize profit - and any attempts at competition will be ruthlessly stamped out.
Do you really think leaving basic research up to private concerns yields the most benefit for society?
Good luck then. If the neocons continue looting the federal government at their current rate, you'll soon have to pay through the nose for them.