I don't have a link at the moment, but I believe there have been observed instances of homosexual primate behavior for social purposes, not overcrowding.
Frankly I tend to listen to PBS/NPR often because they are biased to the left
Eh? I'd call them biased less-right than other news sources, with occasional interviews with outright "liberals", but they're so scared that they'll piss off somebody in Congress or the FCC & get shutdown, I'd hardly call them "true left".
Republicans don't want pork barrel spending. They don't want federal highway funding. The don't want federal funding for education. They don't want federal funding for health care. The don't want federal funding for social security.
There is a simple solution to that, I promise. If she doesn't want the consequences then she shouldn't be taking the risk.
Yeah, because no teenager raised in a good, strong God-fearing home ever had sex or became pregnant without the permission of her parents. And those that did got thrown out of the house in an awe-inspiring act of "compassionate conservatism".
So the president has taken your attitude and acted in what he sees as the best interest of his country, the economy and the environment of that country.
Nah, he acts only in what he perceives to be the short-term best interests of people like himself. Everyone else can go screw themselves.
Obviousness is a legal concept which must be proven. It is setup this way for a reason. So how do I know that this was obvious back in 1996?
Yeah, and that's one of the big problems with the current implementation of the patent system. The patent system is _supposed_ to exist to encourage the rapid dissemination & usage of clever ideas through the society. With that goal in mind, there had better be a pretty damn high standard of NON-OBVIOUSNESS before you allow someone to stop everyone else from coming up with a similar idea.
If a whole bunch of people come up with the same idea in response to the same problem - aside from demonstrating how obvious the solution was - then granting somebody a monopoly on that idea will only hinder its spread through society. A society should only use intellectual-property monopolies to encourage those ideas which are HARD to develop, but easy to copy.
I don't understand why people make such a big deal out of it.
That's because you don't run an ISP, or you haven't had your net connection terminated because a spammer got a zombie process onto your machine & started sending out spam.
There are estimates that at least 40% of all email being sent through the Internet is either spam or attempted spam. Think of how much wasted bandwidth that represents, and how much it costs to maintain the equipment! Are the spammers paying for all of that bandwidth usage? No, they're stealing it (in the straightforward it's-not-available-for-anyone-else sense of the word).
The person votes for someone else, and comes out with a receipt to prove it. Then what? They beat them up?
There are quite a few historical cases in the U.S. where this kind of thing has happened (see history of Chicago's political "machines", plus organized crime). Also other scenarios where employers try and force their employees to vote a particular way, and fire the employees if they don't.
In a system where the choices can affect the members of society in subtle but life-threatening ways, it is best to try and design a system to protect against as many possible cases of abuse as possible.
I believe that the rationale is: "If they don't have respect for the laws of society, then society doesn't have to give them any rights."
Personally, I feel this is bad public policy reasoning from a system-design perspective - allowing "criminals" to vote (even if serving time!) provides a negative-feedback mechanism on the law-creation part of society.
My basic reasoning is this: if the legal system is made up of good, common sense laws which most of the society members agree with, then there won't be very many criminals, and it won't really matter which way they vote.
On the other hand, if the legislators are going nuts & trying to criminalize everything they can think of (because they've lost connection with society, they're pandering to special interests, or because they're deliberately trying to make it so that law enforcement can use "selective" enforcement to control the public), then the "criminal" voting block will grow sufficiently to affect the outcome of elections.
Either way, it works to the best of the overall society.
Unfortunately, the usual reaction I get when describing my reasoning: "Well, it sounds logical, but damn criminals shouldn't be allowed to vote!" *Sigh*
The bottom line is that the only way out of this mess is public financing of candidates (e.g., as in arizona, maine (iirc?) and soon berkeley), and btw, republicans still get elected with clean money campaigns, just not as often.:)
Given the general respect for politicians in the public (somewhere around the level of town pooper-scoopers), I doubt highly you will convince the typical American taxpayer to give politicians free money. I, on the other hand, would _love_ to see an absolute campaign transparency law - let people donate all they want, but anyone from the public gets to follow the money trail - and anyone who tries to _hide_ the money trail gets thrown into jail.
Also, candidates for public office get a publicly-available dossier started on them WHICH THEY DO NOT CONTROL THE CONTENTS OF - where their lives, history, political views, actions, voting records, speeches, promises, etc. get described in detail, and updated as new information is uncovered (with indications of the source/reliability of the information). Controversial issues get investigators thrown at it until all the evidence that can be uncovered gets uncovered (and people attempting coverups get thrown into jail).
Even after they get into public office, I'd want that information source kept updated so that I can keep track of what they are doing compared to what they promised they were going to do. And _after_ they left public office, I'd want to make sure that they didn't take advantage of some kind of thing they setup while they were in office.
I'm trying to think of a recent get-out-the-vote effort that didn't have a partisan agenda, and I'm stumped.
Even the ones that _say_ they're non-partisan seem to have hidden agendas - witness the "Voter Outreach of America" program (in Nevada, now in Oregon), who is running from accusations that they accept registrations for everyone, but submit only Republican voter registrations & tear up Democratic ones.
It is important to note that there is no indication that "reusable" = cheaper, which was the primary reason for the Space Shuttle experiment. The space shuttle was a test to see if we could put stuff and people in orbit more cheaply and safely than before by using a reusable design. Almost 30 years later, the results of that experiment are being ignored: we can't.
Hardly. The reusable/cheap argument was really given only lip service, and the Space Shuttle turned out to be more of a jobs & pork program for NASA than an attempt at achieving a truly well-engineered solution.
There's plenty of documentation on how top-down the Shuttle design process was, ending up with a design where every little change required massive reanalysis on how that change affected every other part of the Shuttle. Any half-assed industrial engineer would be able to tell you how inefficient & error-prone that kind of design process is going to be. (This doesn't mean that the final design will necessarily be bad, only that it will be very expensive to change.)
NASA _should_ have approached the problem with a mindset geared toward creating & maintaining a fleet of shuttles (probably using a similar approach to designing airplanes for commercial use), but they blew quite a bit of money & public trust trying to maintain an engineering nightmare flying.
In other words, the issue of whether or not something reusable can make for a cheaper space program than the throwaway approach has _not_ been tested.
also, yes firefox still effs up slashdot rendering...usually a simple reload solves it...
You can also toggle the font sizes - Ctrl+ then Ctrl- on the keypad for my Linux/Solaris boxes (haven't tried it on the Windows box) to get the rendering right. Slightly more efficient than a reload, I think.
I see where you're going with this but surely there must be an opportunity for businesses to make an honest crust from this (Linux, OSS whatever) whithout jumping on the junket waggon
It's called providing a service - vendors/consultants/employees get paid to add to or change the software to satisfy the business needs of the customer. Once they have been paid to provide this service, however, they _don't_ get paid over and over every time their customer uses the software. In other words, they get paid for doing work, and if they want to keep getting paid, they do MORE work (unlike the situation for selling IP).
While this clause is rarely used Bill Gates once said he'd terminate all MS Windows licenses if the US Govt broke them apart. While a quick retraction followed, the point was he could legally do this.
I have a feeling that this was a baseless threat - if he tried to pull off something like that, the resultant outcry would have caused Congress to pass an exception to the copyright laws, just for Microsoft software. Somehow I don't think that's the effect Gates would've had in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a link at the moment, but I believe there have been observed instances of homosexual primate behavior for social purposes, not overcrowding.
Eh? I'd call them biased less-right than other news sources, with occasional interviews with outright "liberals", but they're so scared that they'll piss off somebody in Congress or the FCC & get shutdown, I'd hardly call them "true left".
Ummm...which Republicans are you talking about?
Yeah, because no teenager raised in a good, strong God-fearing home ever had sex or became pregnant without the permission of her parents. And those that did got thrown out of the house in an awe-inspiring act of "compassionate conservatism".
Kerry's actions don't affect the U.S. & the world like Bush's has & does.
Nah, he acts only in what he perceives to be the short-term best interests of people like himself. Everyone else can go screw themselves.
Bush & Co. like to say a lot of stuff they don't really mean.
Yeah, and that's one of the big problems with the current implementation of the patent system. The patent system is _supposed_ to exist to encourage the rapid dissemination & usage of clever ideas through the society. With that goal in mind, there had better be a pretty damn high standard of NON-OBVIOUSNESS before you allow someone to stop everyone else from coming up with a similar idea.
If a whole bunch of people come up with the same idea in response to the same problem - aside from demonstrating how obvious the solution was - then granting somebody a monopoly on that idea will only hinder its spread through society. A society should only use intellectual-property monopolies to encourage those ideas which are HARD to develop, but easy to copy.
Really? So do you consider yourself a liberal?
That's because you don't run an ISP, or you haven't had your net connection terminated because a spammer got a zombie process onto your machine & started sending out spam.
There are estimates that at least 40% of all email being sent through the Internet is either spam or attempted spam. Think of how much wasted bandwidth that represents, and how much it costs to maintain the equipment! Are the spammers paying for all of that bandwidth usage? No, they're stealing it (in the straightforward it's-not-available-for-anyone-else sense of the word).
I'm impressed when I hear a politician taking responsibility for their OWN actions, much less the nation's.
Gah...just imagine the graphics card specs you'd need to simulate all those pieces of paper!
There are quite a few historical cases in the U.S. where this kind of thing has happened (see history of Chicago's political "machines", plus organized crime). Also other scenarios where employers try and force their employees to vote a particular way, and fire the employees if they don't.
In a system where the choices can affect the members of society in subtle but life-threatening ways, it is best to try and design a system to protect against as many possible cases of abuse as possible.
I believe that the rationale is: "If they don't have respect for the laws of society, then society doesn't have to give them any rights."
Personally, I feel this is bad public policy reasoning from a system-design perspective - allowing "criminals" to vote (even if serving time!) provides a negative-feedback mechanism on the law-creation part of society.
My basic reasoning is this: if the legal system is made up of good, common sense laws which most of the society members agree with, then there won't be very many criminals, and it won't really matter which way they vote.
On the other hand, if the legislators are going nuts & trying to criminalize everything they can think of (because they've lost connection with society, they're pandering to special interests, or because they're deliberately trying to make it so that law enforcement can use "selective" enforcement to control the public), then the "criminal" voting block will grow sufficiently to affect the outcome of elections.
Either way, it works to the best of the overall society.
Unfortunately, the usual reaction I get when describing my reasoning: "Well, it sounds logical, but damn criminals shouldn't be allowed to vote!" *Sigh*
Given the general respect for politicians in the public (somewhere around the level of town pooper-scoopers), I doubt highly you will convince the typical American taxpayer to give politicians free money. I, on the other hand, would _love_ to see an absolute campaign transparency law - let people donate all they want, but anyone from the public gets to follow the money trail - and anyone who tries to _hide_ the money trail gets thrown into jail.
Also, candidates for public office get a publicly-available dossier started on them WHICH THEY DO NOT CONTROL THE CONTENTS OF - where their lives, history, political views, actions, voting records, speeches, promises, etc. get described in detail, and updated as new information is uncovered (with indications of the source/reliability of the information). Controversial issues get investigators thrown at it until all the evidence that can be uncovered gets uncovered (and people attempting coverups get thrown into jail).
Even after they get into public office, I'd want that information source kept updated so that I can keep track of what they are doing compared to what they promised they were going to do. And _after_ they left public office, I'd want to make sure that they didn't take advantage of some kind of thing they setup while they were in office.
I'm trying to think of a recent get-out-the-vote effort that didn't have a partisan agenda, and I'm stumped.
Even the ones that _say_ they're non-partisan seem to have hidden agendas - witness the "Voter Outreach of America" program (in Nevada, now in Oregon), who is running from accusations that they accept registrations for everyone, but submit only Republican voter registrations & tear up Democratic ones.
Hardly. The reusable/cheap argument was really given only lip service, and the Space Shuttle turned out to be more of a jobs & pork program for NASA than an attempt at achieving a truly well-engineered solution.
There's plenty of documentation on how top-down the Shuttle design process was, ending up with a design where every little change required massive reanalysis on how that change affected every other part of the Shuttle. Any half-assed industrial engineer would be able to tell you how inefficient & error-prone that kind of design process is going to be. (This doesn't mean that the final design will necessarily be bad, only that it will be very expensive to change.)
NASA _should_ have approached the problem with a mindset geared toward creating & maintaining a fleet of shuttles (probably using a similar approach to designing airplanes for commercial use), but they blew quite a bit of money & public trust trying to maintain an engineering nightmare flying.
In other words, the issue of whether or not something reusable can make for a cheaper space program than the throwaway approach has _not_ been tested.
The way you made your statement made it sound like you didn't think there was a way to make money off non-proprietary software.
You can also toggle the font sizes - Ctrl+ then Ctrl- on the keypad for my Linux/Solaris boxes (haven't tried it on the Windows box) to get the rendering right. Slightly more efficient than a reload, I think.
It's called providing a service - vendors/consultants/employees get paid to add to or change the software to satisfy the business needs of the customer. Once they have been paid to provide this service, however, they _don't_ get paid over and over every time their customer uses the software. In other words, they get paid for doing work, and if they want to keep getting paid, they do MORE work (unlike the situation for selling IP).
I have a feeling that this was a baseless threat - if he tried to pull off something like that, the resultant outcry would have caused Congress to pass an exception to the copyright laws, just for Microsoft software. Somehow I don't think that's the effect Gates would've had in mind.
Mmmm...Ramen. Lots of Top Ramen. Potatoes were good too.
I'm assuming you'd let the engineers out of the office when the fire alarm was going off, otherwise you'd probably be looking at quite a jail term.
I think I'd take about a week of eating hemp, seaweed & algae before I demonstrate how hemp can be used to create a rope to strangle myself with.
Sounds like mind-bogglingly good exercise.