Wow. I appreciate the fact that you didn't take my flamebait. I do, however, completely and utterly disagree with nearly everything you said in this entire thread. Nothing wrong with that - just not something that fits within forum discussions.:)
Ah - someone else who has read that book. Personally, I found that it explained a whole lot of really strange behavior. I recommend it to everyone who wants to know why Bush, Cheney and Rummy did what they did. It also explains why they need to asap, before they do more damage - because they will screw up more before they leave.
If anyone is wondering: Cheney's One Percent Doctrine states that if certain high impact events (like a dirty bomb attack on NYC) have even a 1% chance of happening, they need to be treated as having a 100% chance of happening. Funny no one in Bush's cabinet noticed that that means that nothing can be properly dealt with, because a lot of things have a 1% chance of happening.
You do realize that Soldier of Fortune is a mag aimed at people who dream of being Soldiers of Fortune, but have never touched a rifle, and are most likely inept worker drones with violent dreams? Quoting Soldier of Fortune to talk military strategy is like quoting Weekly World News to discuss the finer details of Israelo-Palestinian peace talks.
Quite frankly, if anyone's living in Hollywood dream world, it's you. I'd suggest enlisting in the Army to figure out how stuff really works. I'm guessing there'll be a rude awakening.
Ummm - have you read some of the White House transcripts from during the missile crisis? Do you have any idea exactly how close we were to nuclear war? In retrospect, I'd say we were about 15 seconds away from nuclear war, rather than 2 minutes.
I'll give that the American presidents were nicely restrained in their use of nukes. So were the Russians. But we had a very, very close call. There were more very, very close calls - some based on real data, some based on faulty data. MAD is not a stable system for providing stability, it is russian roulette. Most sane people opt out of it. A few play it. With predictable consequences.
Remember - all it takes is one person to start a near-global nuclear war. How often do you want to roll the dice for it?
Mutually Assured Destruction works if both people in control of the Big Red Button are semi-sane, understand the consequences of pushing that button and are interested in self-preservation, or at least the preservation of a good chunk of their people.
However, I can say without a doubt that there are plenty of people who do not have any of these characteristics, including Americans. MAD is far too unstable a concept to be institutionalized. I'd much rather have no nukes than be the only one to have them. It simply won't stay in the latter state for very long.
Human interactions, goals and thought patterns are not measured by equations or instruments. Yes, this makes it hard to say what's going to happen when feeble bags of mostly water are involved. Doesn't mean though that you can't or shouldn't try, or that some people aren't very, very good at it. If you're upset that the clock reads 7 minutes instead of 8 or 6, you're missing the point.
Irrelevant. What's fair is that he gets paid what was in the contract. Doesn't matter whether that's 250 million, 10 bucks or a billion. If he thinks that dodgy accounting practices are responsible for reducing his cut, he has every right to challenge the accounting.
Number 1: Copyright is a law with a specific purpose. Once that purpose is no longer met, that law becomes more of an obstacle than a useful tool.
Number 2: Rights are subject to discussion. Some are easier to agree on than others. Murder is pretty straightforward in how it harms people and society. Cussing less so. Copyrights fall somewhere between those poles. It is not as black and white as you make it to be.
Number 3: People who create do not create in a vacuum. They take from others, just fail to acknowledge it, whether it is because they simply don't realize it (something about the collective unconscious) or because they don't want to (plagiarism). Copyright laws remove chunks of ideas from the public domain where they are free to be exchanged and modified, and fence them off for individual exploitation. This in spite of the fact that no one creates anything completely on their own, or that use of an idea or creative work does not preclude others from using it (which is the case with physical goods).
As a result, please do continue arguing about copyright law and DRM. More is always better than less. However, you really ought to familiarize yourself with the distinction between the physical and the abstract world, goals of laws, and the impact of copyright on human advancement. It'll make it easier to come to a good solution.
2 quick points: sociological studies have found that income inequality drives crime a lot more than purchasing power, and the current discussion centers around CEOs who obviously failed, yet still get 20million dollar severance packages. There's the rub.
Here's even better proof that PS3 is not selling out anymore: PS3 Ebay listings
A lot of systems are selling below market. Those that are above market price either have no bids, or have tricks like $500 (+$200 shipping) associated with them. There are some that have legit above market price bids, but nothing like what the Wii is fetching.
Ebay is supply and demand in action - and the demand for the PS3 is just not there anymore. End of story.
What this argument boils down to is "I don't want computers to get smarter because I don't like some of the applications."
Err, no. I have no idea where you got this idea from. What I actually don't like is weak attempts at improving the intelligence of computers. Furthermore, I like even less weak attempts at improving the intelligence of computers whose direct and inevitable consequence is the corruption of an incredibly useful resource, which in turn will lead to the corruption of the AI - the initial goal of the project.
I don't have a problem with AI edit wars. I have a problem with edit wars whose sole purpose is to destroy useful information. And that's where this is approach is going to lead to.
Damn - that first sentence of yours took the words right out of my mouth. Unfortunately, I don't agree one iota with the rest of your post. But I'll just deal with the first point....
I sure as hell hope that this approach fails miserably, because I can guarantee you that the next development will be the bot-based modification of all articles in the Wikipedia. There might be some development after that of captcha interstitials before posting or modifying anything, combined with some attempt at developing a more permanent community around posters. Personally, I'd like to see some moderation and meta-moderation system similar to what Slashdot uses, along with a decay that requires posters to be ranked higher and higher to modify articles as they get older and older. I think that'll will contribute a great bit towards making Wikipedia more stable and more useful, even if it comes at the expense of its lightning-quick response time.
Do you know how to read? Go educate yourself. I even provided the link for you. Come back when you have something useful to contribute. Like, what's the difference between satellite measurements and buoy measurements of ocean surface temperatures, and what's the cause of them? It's a good start. You'll even find out that statistically significant is not what you think it means.
I think you confused correlation and causation. The UCS was created to deal with problems such as Climate Change. It depends on climate fears for its existence as much as a Home Owners Association depends on lawns being no more than 3/4 of an inch high for its existence.
Anyway - the fact that Exxon is spending money to get their point across is no more abnormal than UCS pointing out what Exxon is doing as part of THEIR actions to get UCS's point of view across.
Absolutely.
Regarding the effect of solar forcing, check out the wikipedia article. It's got good links to studies that have shown that solar forcing only accounts for about 25% of the recorded increase in global temperatures.
I was hoping I wouldn't have to see another article about whose experts are more biased than others. Now I get to watch whole flames erupt over completely pointless issues.
Can we not get back to the fundamental problem of figuring out what path Global Warming is going to take, it's impact and how we are should deal with it? All this crap is just wasted air.
They have. Slowdown of the North Atlantic Current, increases in global average temperatures, melting of glaciers, raising of ocean levels (and no, they were not expected to be in the multiple yard levels) have all been inline with the median models.
-1, Incoherent. You're first blaming non-profits for only plowing 26% of their budget into research, but then laud Pfizer, which probably only uses 15% (if I take the average number across all of Pharma) of its budget for research?
Sheesh, there's plenty of reasons why non-profits aren't as awesome as they're sometimes made out to be, but at least focus your blame properly. Everyone has to eat, including non-profits. Don't label them sinners just because they aren't saints.
I really don't care about how many gamer points I have. But what I have found is that gamer points are a great way to figure out if someone really likes a game. Someone has unlocked only 10 points on an XBox Live game? Avoid. Someone unlocked all 200? I should take a look at it. Same thing with full games: someone unlocked 800 points in The Outfit? I'll take a close look at the game.
It's essentially a way to see what my friends are playing, and how much they've been playing it. Works as a great way to figure out what I should I buy.
You're comparing products not being cross-compatible (OS X, Halo, Ford) with standards (Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD). I am okay with a Ford Dealer not selling me a Nissan (although I've seen plenty of Subaru dealers wanting to sell me a Kia) or not playing Halo on Playstation. I am not okay, however, with a company trying to hijack a standard and use it as a license (literally) to fleece people.
If Sony wants to create a standard, they ought to play nice. If they want a proprietary technology, they can feel free to fleece.
The only people I remember talking about Iraq having WMDs were Bush and Blair. The US intelligence services, once you actually got a hold of the actual briefings, were very circumspect in their analysis. Everything was full of maybe's, there is a possibility, it could be, etc. There never, ever was an intelligence brief that showed a smoking gun.
As for foreign services talking about WMDs, do you have a quote? All I remember from every international news source (quoting both elected and intelligence officials) is that they thought the WMD charge was bogus.
Bush deserves full blame for the Iraq war, based on his lying (no other explanation really comes close to explaining his flip-flopping) and the complete absence of an actual reason to invade another country (that he was a bad guy had been known since the days that Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam in the eighties).
Finally, nobody's talking about invading North Korea. Which is kinda the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed - the vagaries of having to base your opinion of someone on a couple of paragraphs he writes on a specific topic. I like your last quote. :)
Wow. I appreciate the fact that you didn't take my flamebait. I do, however, completely and utterly disagree with nearly everything you said in this entire thread. Nothing wrong with that - just not something that fits within forum discussions. :)
Ah - someone else who has read that book. Personally, I found that it explained a whole lot of really strange behavior. I recommend it to everyone who wants to know why Bush, Cheney and Rummy did what they did. It also explains why they need to asap, before they do more damage - because they will screw up more before they leave.
If anyone is wondering: Cheney's One Percent Doctrine states that if certain high impact events (like a dirty bomb attack on NYC) have even a 1% chance of happening, they need to be treated as having a 100% chance of happening. Funny no one in Bush's cabinet noticed that that means that nothing can be properly dealt with, because a lot of things have a 1% chance of happening.
You do realize that Soldier of Fortune is a mag aimed at people who dream of being Soldiers of Fortune, but have never touched a rifle, and are most likely inept worker drones with violent dreams? Quoting Soldier of Fortune to talk military strategy is like quoting Weekly World News to discuss the finer details of Israelo-Palestinian peace talks.
Quite frankly, if anyone's living in Hollywood dream world, it's you. I'd suggest enlisting in the Army to figure out how stuff really works. I'm guessing there'll be a rude awakening.
Ummm - have you read some of the White House transcripts from during the missile crisis? Do you have any idea exactly how close we were to nuclear war? In retrospect, I'd say we were about 15 seconds away from nuclear war, rather than 2 minutes.
I'll give that the American presidents were nicely restrained in their use of nukes. So were the Russians. But we had a very, very close call. There were more very, very close calls - some based on real data, some based on faulty data. MAD is not a stable system for providing stability, it is russian roulette. Most sane people opt out of it. A few play it. With predictable consequences.
Remember - all it takes is one person to start a near-global nuclear war. How often do you want to roll the dice for it?
Mmhh.... let me rephrase that for clarity.
However, I can say without a doubt that there are plenty of people who do not have any of these characteristics, including many Americans.
There, better.
Yes, Kennedy and Khrushchev did very well not to go down the hardline path. But we won't get lucky every time.
Mutually Assured Destruction works if both people in control of the Big Red Button are semi-sane, understand the consequences of pushing that button and are interested in self-preservation, or at least the preservation of a good chunk of their people.
However, I can say without a doubt that there are plenty of people who do not have any of these characteristics, including Americans. MAD is far too unstable a concept to be institutionalized. I'd much rather have no nukes than be the only one to have them. It simply won't stay in the latter state for very long.
Human interactions, goals and thought patterns are not measured by equations or instruments. Yes, this makes it hard to say what's going to happen when feeble bags of mostly water are involved. Doesn't mean though that you can't or shouldn't try, or that some people aren't very, very good at it. If you're upset that the clock reads 7 minutes instead of 8 or 6, you're missing the point.
Irrelevant. What's fair is that he gets paid what was in the contract. Doesn't matter whether that's 250 million, 10 bucks or a billion. If he thinks that dodgy accounting practices are responsible for reducing his cut, he has every right to challenge the accounting.
Number 1: Copyright is a law with a specific purpose. Once that purpose is no longer met, that law becomes more of an obstacle than a useful tool.
Number 2: Rights are subject to discussion. Some are easier to agree on than others. Murder is pretty straightforward in how it harms people and society. Cussing less so. Copyrights fall somewhere between those poles. It is not as black and white as you make it to be.
Number 3: People who create do not create in a vacuum. They take from others, just fail to acknowledge it, whether it is because they simply don't realize it (something about the collective unconscious) or because they don't want to (plagiarism). Copyright laws remove chunks of ideas from the public domain where they are free to be exchanged and modified, and fence them off for individual exploitation. This in spite of the fact that no one creates anything completely on their own, or that use of an idea or creative work does not preclude others from using it (which is the case with physical goods).
As a result, please do continue arguing about copyright law and DRM. More is always better than less. However, you really ought to familiarize yourself with the distinction between the physical and the abstract world, goals of laws, and the impact of copyright on human advancement. It'll make it easier to come to a good solution.
2 quick points: sociological studies have found that income inequality drives crime a lot more than purchasing power, and the current discussion centers around CEOs who obviously failed, yet still get 20million dollar severance packages. There's the rub.
Ebay is supply and demand in action - and the demand for the PS3 is just not there anymore. End of story.
Err, no. I have no idea where you got this idea from. What I actually don't like is weak attempts at improving the intelligence of computers. Furthermore, I like even less weak attempts at improving the intelligence of computers whose direct and inevitable consequence is the corruption of an incredibly useful resource, which in turn will lead to the corruption of the AI - the initial goal of the project.
I don't have a problem with AI edit wars. I have a problem with edit wars whose sole purpose is to destroy useful information. And that's where this is approach is going to lead to.
Damn - that first sentence of yours took the words right out of my mouth. Unfortunately, I don't agree one iota with the rest of your post. But I'll just deal with the first point....
I sure as hell hope that this approach fails miserably, because I can guarantee you that the next development will be the bot-based modification of all articles in the Wikipedia. There might be some development after that of captcha interstitials before posting or modifying anything, combined with some attempt at developing a more permanent community around posters. Personally, I'd like to see some moderation and meta-moderation system similar to what Slashdot uses, along with a decay that requires posters to be ranked higher and higher to modify articles as they get older and older. I think that'll will contribute a great bit towards making Wikipedia more stable and more useful, even if it comes at the expense of its lightning-quick response time.
Do you know how to read? Go educate yourself. I even provided the link for you. Come back when you have something useful to contribute. Like, what's the difference between satellite measurements and buoy measurements of ocean surface temperatures, and what's the cause of them? It's a good start. You'll even find out that statistically significant is not what you think it means.
I think you confused correlation and causation. The UCS was created to deal with problems such as Climate Change. It depends on climate fears for its existence as much as a Home Owners Association depends on lawns being no more than 3/4 of an inch high for its existence.
Absolutely.
Regarding the effect of solar forcing, check out the wikipedia article. It's got good links to studies that have shown that solar forcing only accounts for about 25% of the recorded increase in global temperatures.
I should have known this was a troll. Do you even know what the IPCC is, and how those reports were created?
The current observations are largely inline with the median projections of the IPCC. See http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/online.htm/ for the full shebang.
I was hoping I wouldn't have to see another article about whose experts are more biased than others. Now I get to watch whole flames erupt over completely pointless issues.
Can we not get back to the fundamental problem of figuring out what path Global Warming is going to take, it's impact and how we are should deal with it? All this crap is just wasted air.
They have. Slowdown of the North Atlantic Current, increases in global average temperatures, melting of glaciers, raising of ocean levels (and no, they were not expected to be in the multiple yard levels) have all been inline with the median models.
-1, Incoherent. You're first blaming non-profits for only plowing 26% of their budget into research, but then laud Pfizer, which probably only uses 15% (if I take the average number across all of Pharma) of its budget for research?
Sheesh, there's plenty of reasons why non-profits aren't as awesome as they're sometimes made out to be, but at least focus your blame properly. Everyone has to eat, including non-profits. Don't label them sinners just because they aren't saints.
I really don't care about how many gamer points I have. But what I have found is that gamer points are a great way to figure out if someone really likes a game. Someone has unlocked only 10 points on an XBox Live game? Avoid. Someone unlocked all 200? I should take a look at it. Same thing with full games: someone unlocked 800 points in The Outfit? I'll take a close look at the game.
It's essentially a way to see what my friends are playing, and how much they've been playing it. Works as a great way to figure out what I should I buy.
You're comparing products not being cross-compatible (OS X, Halo, Ford) with standards (Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD). I am okay with a Ford Dealer not selling me a Nissan (although I've seen plenty of Subaru dealers wanting to sell me a Kia) or not playing Halo on Playstation. I am not okay, however, with a company trying to hijack a standard and use it as a license (literally) to fleece people.
If Sony wants to create a standard, they ought to play nice. If they want a proprietary technology, they can feel free to fleece.
The only people I remember talking about Iraq having WMDs were Bush and Blair. The US intelligence services, once you actually got a hold of the actual briefings, were very circumspect in their analysis. Everything was full of maybe's, there is a possibility, it could be, etc. There never, ever was an intelligence brief that showed a smoking gun.
As for foreign services talking about WMDs, do you have a quote? All I remember from every international news source (quoting both elected and intelligence officials) is that they thought the WMD charge was bogus.
Bush deserves full blame for the Iraq war, based on his lying (no other explanation really comes close to explaining his flip-flopping) and the complete absence of an actual reason to invade another country (that he was a bad guy had been known since the days that Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam in the eighties).
Finally, nobody's talking about invading North Korea. Which is kinda the point.