I would argue with the "new to using computers" bullet. If you're new to computing, exactly why would it be easier to learn Windows than Ubuntu? Both have their arcane peculiarities and unique paradigms you'd have to get accustomed to.
There are three reasons that jump out at me as an Ubuntu user since 2006.
Firstly, Ubuntu users are generally assumed to be computer-literate and to have deliberately chosen Ubuntu, which implies that they know the ins and outs of Linux distributions and technologies. This leads to help files that are unintelligible to anyone who doesn't know a thing about Linux - amarok is "a qt media player for KDE", for example, and if you want to install a new chess program you can choose between "X11" and "Gnome" versions. (what?) Similarly, help files and forums have people running shell commands and editing configuration files - that's just voodoo to a totally new computer user, and if nothing else ingraining a "just run whatever the forum tells you as administrator" mindset is not good. All of this is ok if the users are knowledgeable - but these ones aren't.
Secondly, people who don't know a lot about computers are the ones that really need shrinkwrap software to work for them. They're the ones who, not realising that there's a significant difference (a computer's a computer, right?) will be disappointed when nothing happens when they put the disc in.
Thirdly, if you've never used a computer before then you're going to have some problems. When you ring up tech support for the program you bought, or ask your friend or colleague for help, you don't want the answer to be "what's Ubuntu?". Everyone knows someone who is familiar with Windows, and most towns have an evening class to teach totally new users. Not many people who've never used a computer before know any Linux geeks.
I still don't quite follow you. What was it that was hidden? From the information I can find they followed the best-practice laid out in a peer-reviewed article in Nature; the reasons for the practice are out there for everyone to see, published in a leading scientific journal and backed up by a number of other peer-reviewed studies, such as Briffa (1998) and Cook (2004). Are you really suggesting that they hid this data by openly discussing it in the world's most highly-cited scientific journal?
Where scientific research has found that an instrument is reliable over a certain range and unreliable in another, is it dishonest to switch from one measure to another to cope with that? Is there actually an issue with the reliability of the data? I can't find any scientific literature that suggests that tree-rings are an inaccurate way to estimate temperature before 1960; the only studies I can find (such as Cook) suggest that it is accurate up to 1960. So even if there were any dishonesty - which I dispute, since I can't yet see how any of this could possibly be construed as hiding anything - would it even matter? If you fail to mention something that has no impact on the reliability of your conclusions is it significant?
[...]I think it [the "hide the decline" in the email] does refer to a decline in temperature.
Are you saying that the world is, in fact, getting cooler?
The entire climate science community has defended "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline" so that people wouldn't see how bad their evidence is, instead of criticizing the hiding of results that cast major doubt on their evidence. None of them have any credibility left, and will never get it back until they condemn instead of defend "Mike's Nature trick".
I'd never heard of "Mike's Nature trick", so I looked it up. Here's what Google turned up:
"Mike's Nature trick" refers to the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales. "Hide the decline" refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960, discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995.
"Mike's Nature trick" refers to a technique (aka "trick of the trade") used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.
The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature. More on the hockey stick divergence problem...
So this is a technique, accepted by scientists through peer-review, used to compensate for one form of data being unreliable in a particular arena. Can you explain why that's such a problem, because I don't see it?
One other thing: quoting only the "hide the decline" part of the email is rather disingenuous, since a lot of people will assume, without context, that it refers to a decline in temperature.
I think the biggest challenge in Aikido is finding a club that offers unrestricted sparring. Without that, you can never learn to actually defend yourself.
I briefly practised Aikido having trained in Sambo and Muay Thai. What shocked me (and caused me to leave every club I joined) was that everything was very slow and everyone always knew what was coming; as a result everyone thought that they were great because they didn't know how little they actually knew. This is in contrast to the other arts I have trained in, where (mostly) free sparring from the very first lesson means that you're acutely conscious of the limitations of what you know.
If you can find an Aikido club that shares premises with other martial artists and lets practitioners of different arts roll together then I can see Aikido being an effective discipline. Unfortunately this sort of practice, which isn't uncommon for judokas (who often spar with BJJ fighters or crosstrain for MMA), seems to be unheard of in Aikido, at least everywhere I've tried. It's similar to the problems in Karate and Taikwondo - if you don't allow any influence from outside the ecosystem then you can easily end up with an art that is useless when the rules of that ecosystem are removed. (That's not to say Karate or TKD are useless by nature, just that in their modern form they are normally taught by someone who has never learnt the weaknesses of the art. )
There's an important difference between genetic modification and selective breeding, though: selective breeding causes gradual change. Genetic modification is like doing selective breeding without the hundreds of years of gradual testing through eating and planting, and as such it carries much more chance of unintended consequences. That's why there needs to be regulation of GM food - in order to create the possibility of new, improved crops you're removing the natural oversight, and it needs to be replaced by something comparable.
I think you are missing the point. Your personal anecdotal evidence is meaningless when you are talking about the possessions of someone else completely. And yes, it's my liver, it's my eyes, it's my body parts whether I am dead or alive. If I'm dead, custody of my possessions go to my heirs, not the state or some fat bastard I couldn't stand when I was alive. Just like everything else, you need permission when the shit doesn't belong to you.
It's not my anecdote, it's yours. If it doesn't show anything, fine, it doesn't show anything. But it's not me that was using it to make a point - it was you.
I would have to ask you the same, why are you so gullible? I mean the full videos and transcripts are available online and Obama did say that they couldn't take the patient's spirit into consideration and there would be something set up to tell patients that this might not work, take the pain pill and die instead of the life saving treatment. Is that not correct? Because every full video and transcripts that are available online in which I can find says that.
Not, that is not correct, and anyone that tells you it is is either very foolish or trying to mislead you. Here's what Obama said regarding woman's question about spirit:
But, look, the first thing for all of us to understand is that we actually have some -- some choices to make about how we want to deal with our own end-of-life care. And that's one of the things I think that we can all promote, and this is not a big government program. This is something that each of us individually can do, is to draft and sign a living will so that we're very clear with our doctors about how we want to approach the end of life. I don't think that we can make judgments based on peoples' spirit. That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people. GIBSON: But the money may not have been there for her pacemaker or for your grandmother's hip replacement. OBAMA: Well, and -- and that's absolutely true. And end-of-life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we're going to have to make. I don't want bureaucracies making those decisions, but understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If they're not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they're being made by private insurers. We don't always make those decisions explicitly. We often make those decisions by just letting people run out of money or making the deductibles so high or the out-of-pocket expenses so onerous that they just can't afford the care. And all we're suggesting -- and we're not going to solve every difficult problem in terms of end-of-life care. A lot of that is going to have to be, we as a culture and as a society starting to make better decisions within our own families and for ourselves. But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not making anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller. And those kinds of decisions between doctors and patients, and making sure that our incentives are not preventing those good decision, and that -- that doctors and hospitals all are aligned for patient care, that's something we can achieve.
If you read that you will see that Obama is not introducing some cutoff point, and he's certainly not advocating any death panels. He's just being honest: there will be decisions that have to be made about what care can be provided, but those decisions are being made already. There isn't an
A consumption tax is regressive, since only people who have plenty of money have the choice about whether to spend or save. If you're living paycheck to paycheck then you would have to pay more tax on your purchases to make up for the rich who, no longer paying tax on their income choose to save or invest to avoid a consumption tax. A tax system that moves the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor seems difficult to justify both morally and economically (who gets more benefit from Government services? The young mother who takes the bus to work or the millionaire whose business empire is possible only because of Government-provided services?)
Wow, I can't believe you asked that. Most people don't (that is Do Not) have any objections (religious or otherwise) when I ask to barrow their car for a day. If they normally don't care "why the hell should the law assume they do". I mean I shouldn't automatically be in trouble because I didn't ask to use your car, and who knows, you may be just like everyone one else I have asked and said you didn't mind, or you may be a prick and say no, especially seeing how you don't know me.
I think you'll find that most people would object. Try going up to a random person and asking to borrow their car if you don't believe me...
Now it isn't just about religious objections. What about those people who think that if they are an organ donor that they won't save their life if they can harvest the organs? I mean it's not unheard of and the threat is even more real when you have death panels set up by the government to decide who is worthy of a life saving procedure or not. Especially when the president of the United States of America tells a person that her mom should have taken a pain pill instead of getting a life saving medical treatment that had extended her life by 5 years as of the time the question was asked.
Well, the people who are so gullible that they believe Limbaugh and the far-right corporate apologists when they create doctored videos, despite the fact that full videos and transcripts are available online, can just go and opt-out.
You might want to look up the actual transcript so you can see that where your conservative idols have told you that Obama advocates euthanasia, death panels and all manner of other scary ideas what he actually said was that the old lady should have received her pacemaker faster without so much corporate money spinning from the insurers.
This isn't the masses tyrannising people like in your analogy, it's a better set of defaults.
There are people who have strong feelings about organ donation - in both directions. These people will opt-in or out. There are also a majority of people who don't have strong feelings and don't mind the idea of donating organs but don't ever register. Changing the system to opt-out means that the default fits more peoples' wishes and also saves a large number of lives.
When weighed against the life-saving benefits, the fact that a small number of people will be mildly inconvenienced seems a little paltry, doesn't it? Especially when you consider that there were plenty of people being inconvenienced by having to opt in.
As I've pointed out below, I don't think they have any constitutional protection in this case. Since your signature suggests you're affiliated with the party can you shed any light on whether there's a specific reason that this constitutional protection would apply here?
If they aren't doing anything illegal then it doesn't matter where the server is. If they are planning to rely on parliamentary immunity then it implies that what they will be doing is illegal.
Unfortunately for them I don't see how this can work. The Swedish Constitution states that:
[...]If, in any other case, a member of the Riksdag is suspected of having committed a criminal act, the relevant rules of law concerning arrest, detention or remand are applied only if he admits guilt or was caught in the act, or the penalty for the offence is imprisonment for two years [or more, I assume; I don't speak Swedish so can't check the translation].
[Chapter 4, Article 8]
Under Swedish law copyright infringement carries a penalty of two years imprisonment, so I don't think they will have any criminal immunity.
The submitter seems to have confused immunity with prosecution and immunity from civil lawsuits; matters carried out as part of a political mandate are only immune from civil lawsuits (the criminal immunity, above, would appear to apply or not apply irrespective of whether the actions were part of a political mandate). What's more, this civil immunity can be waived by a 5/6 majority of those voting - I can't imagine this would be hard to arrange against an unpopular single candidate.
I'm not a Swedish lawyer (believe it or not!) but I hope they've checked with one because they seem to be relying on more protection than they actually have.
No, it's doing exactly the opposite of what was intended. To encourage publishing, copyright grants monopoly rights. Not to enrich the author, but to encourage publishing.
Here something was published, a new something (based on an old something) and copyright is being used to deprive the public of it. Copyright should never be used to reduce the amount of works available to the public.
Copyright law is just busted. If it said "right to profit" they'd let the guy publish and sue for his profits.
That said though, a large part of the C&D is very likely the trademark - which they do (legally) need to pursue.
Your comment is full of contradictions.
You say that copyright grants monopoly rights, then say that they shouldn't ever prevent publishing. How can you have a monopoly where everyone can enter the market? You say that copyright should encourage publishing but shouldn't enrich the author. How should publishing be encouraged without enriching the author?
You say that copyright grants monopoly rights and should encourage publishing. This copyright is the reason that Sony is still actively developing Lemmings games for multiple platforms. It is clearly encouraging publishing and granting a monopoly - the two things you say copyrights are meant to do - but you then say it's doing the opposite of what was intended.
Although to be honest, I wonder if this is Apple's secrecy coming to bite them in the ass. If you are uber careful about how many phones you have out in the field, you're a lot less likely to run into scenarios where your product fails in real world situations.
I think you're right that this issue was not discovered because of Apple's secrecy. If you remember, when they gave their staff phones to test they didn't want people to realise there was a new iPhone about - so they disguised them as iPhone 3s. The 3G didn't have the metal band, so the test models either didn't use one or - my guess - had it hidden under a fake iPhone 3 cover, meaning that this issue never came up.
Please forgive the language here, but THAT'S NOT THE FUCKING POINT
Why isn't it? This isn't an idle question, I honestly can't see any potential harm if Google continue to use this ability to remove only useless, malicious applications.
If the application doesn't do anything except leak private data, what is the difference between removing this application and upgrading the firmware to give the user more storage space, better battery life and more privacy?
If we abandon our ideological entrenchment for a moment, we should ask ourselves why it is that increased vendor control is not welcomed; the answer, surely, is that it often results in functionality being removed and the company reneging on the deal that was agreed. That isn't what's happened here; Google have removed an application that was installed by tricking the user and then constituted nothing but a security hole for them.
I think it's interesting to draw a parallel with Microsoft's reaction to the exploit in their Help & Support centre. Then they were castigated for not acting immediately to protect users, even though this would mean removing functionality from their copy of Windows. Here Google is acting to protect their users, with no loss of functionality and an increase in available system resources. What could be the matter with that?
These claims that people can see the flicker in low-energy lightbulbs, the pixels on the display and the noise of a power supply in the next town over seem to crop up fairly reliably on Slashdot. I normally just raise an eyebrow and wonder if it's possible, but this time I thought I'd check to see just how good your senses are compared to mine.
using a 32" 1080p LCD (with a native resolution 3x that) and sitting more than 6 feet away, I can still see the pixels
Ignoring the higher native resolution for the moment, a 32" 1080p LCD, assuming it's widescreen format and using Wikipedia's translation of 1080p to 1920*1080, will have pixels approximately 0.37mm square. From six feet away these pixels would have an angular separation of about 0.0056 degrees, or 0.35 arcminutes. According to the article, someone with 20/20 vision can resolve detail down to about 1 arcminute - making your eyesight about three times better than normal, or approximately 20/7 (1). Now, although, unfortunately, there isn't a Guinness world record for it, Wikipedia claims that the best measured eyesight is 20/8. Taking the most modest of your claims - since you said "more than 6 feet away" and that your LCD had a native resolution 3x 1080p - it would still appear that you have the best eyesight in the world
Regarding your incredible hearing, I don't have the expertise to comment on just how good that range is (can anyone comment on whether that range is exceptional?). I will ask, though, how you came to find out? I can't find anyone offering a hearing test that goes that high, so I doubt you got it done professionally, and most speakers won't emit sounds that high pitched.
If you really do encounter people with better hearing and vision daily as you say, I'd be interested to know where you live (some sort of superhero's lair, perhaps?)
(1) Other sources, for example Wikipedia, list 20/20 vision as giving a maximum visual accuity of 50 "cycles per degree", or 1.2 arcminutes, which would make you almost four times better than average.
Surely the big difference is that Amazon deleted a book that people intended to read. I don't see any potential harm in Google deleting applications that did nothing except trick users into downloading them and then send user data back to the application author.
If this is what Google intends to use the remote-delete function for then I see it as more akin to antivirus, and most people have no problem with their antivirus program deleting viruses. Those that do can choose not to use antivirus - in this case, not to use the Android Market.
arXiv is really a repository rather than a journal. If the submitter wants something to put on his/her CV, a traditional peer-reviewed journal is the way to go.
You talk about what "would" happen with socialized systems and the problems that "would" occur, almost as if the idea of public healthcare were some sort of daydream. But the results that I and other commenters mentioned above aren't the result of a few years of misguided experimentation. The NHS, for example, is about as old as the US employer-dominated health insurance system, so a claim that the lead that socialized systems currently enjoy is just because they are immature and will run into problems in the future needs a lot more to back it up than you have provided.
You also ignore the fact that free-market health care is not, itself, immune from the economic problems that you claim will make socialized healthcare unworkable. As you point out "there is not such thing as [a] free lunch" - but this applies to private enterprise as much as to government-run schemes. In times of economic difficulty individuals, as well as countries, have to cut back on their spending - and this can be much more dramatic since they do not have the creditworthiness that allows governments to use borrowing to mitigate the shock of the transition. I think it's telling that in the current economic crisis the NHS is having its funding cut by about 5%. This will certainly have some negative consequences, but healthcare will still be available to everyone who needs it. Meanwhile, over in the USA, where the system is much closer to your capitalist ideal, half of the population is either uninsured or underinsured, and the credit crisis has meant that with insurance have reduced their uptake of nonacute or preventative care by up to 29% (source). So it would appear that even in times of economic difficulty socialized health care is able to weather the storm better, and the individual approach lags even further behind.
How do you answer the point that many other developed countries have much more government involvement in healthcare, and yet pay less for better healthcare?
In France, for example, public healthcare is available to all, but they pay only only 3/5 as much as the US as a proportion of GDP and are considered to have the best healthcare system in the world by the WHO.
The British NHS, which at the time of the WHO's report cost only half as much as the French system in terms of GDP, was placed 18th; a fair few countries behind France, but still 19 places ahead of the US. To reiterate: the NHS, which is entirely Government funded, costs only just over a quarter of the US system and yet has better results.
Developed countries with socialized or partly socialized healthcare systems topped the list, while the US, coming far closer to your vision of non-Governmental healthcare, was beaten by powerhouses like Costa Rica, Columbia, Morocco, and the UAE.
Maybe but there's a difference between note taking and writing a dissertation. Using a computer/word processor to write a paper is much faster than using pen and paper. Once written, editing a digital file is simple whereas editing pen and paper requires the paper to be compleatly rewritten.
Of course - I was referring to the research I had done and not the dissertation itself. Finding a quotation in my paper isn't too bad; finding a quotation somewhere in my research means doing battle with a mass of notes from any number of different sources and different ideas.
>>>it's later when you want to organize your notes or re-use something you wrote down
I've never done that in my whole life. Well almost never. There are a few times I removed the sheets from the notebook and reoganized them, but most times I just keep them in chronological order. As for "reuse" that could be considered plagiarism, since most of my notes are direct quotes from the professor. It's often better to just rewrite.
If that's true then maybe it wouldn't be of any use to you, but I've just finished writing a dissertation for which I had several hundred pages of research and by the end I was wishing I had OCRed everything. Trying to find one specific quotation from somewhere in three ringbinders of notes and photocopies is exactly the sort of thing that's hard - and boring - for a human, but easy for a computer.
My point is that it's meaningless to claim that the response time has been improved by comparing two different responses; the hotfix was able to be produced quickly but was unnecessary until the Google engineer made the vulnerability public. The actual fix will still take a long time, what's changed is that Microsoft were forced to react to a threat that previously didn't exist - people exploiting this bug.
Slashdot Mirror
I would argue with the "new to using computers" bullet. If you're new to computing, exactly why would it be easier to learn Windows than Ubuntu? Both have their arcane peculiarities and unique paradigms you'd have to get accustomed to.
There are three reasons that jump out at me as an Ubuntu user since 2006.
Firstly, Ubuntu users are generally assumed to be computer-literate and to have deliberately chosen Ubuntu, which implies that they know the ins and outs of Linux distributions and technologies. This leads to help files that are unintelligible to anyone who doesn't know a thing about Linux - amarok is "a qt media player for KDE", for example, and if you want to install a new chess program you can choose between "X11" and "Gnome" versions. (what?) Similarly, help files and forums have people running shell commands and editing configuration files - that's just voodoo to a totally new computer user, and if nothing else ingraining a "just run whatever the forum tells you as administrator" mindset is not good. All of this is ok if the users are knowledgeable - but these ones aren't.
Secondly, people who don't know a lot about computers are the ones that really need shrinkwrap software to work for them. They're the ones who, not realising that there's a significant difference (a computer's a computer, right?) will be disappointed when nothing happens when they put the disc in.
Thirdly, if you've never used a computer before then you're going to have some problems. When you ring up tech support for the program you bought, or ask your friend or colleague for help, you don't want the answer to be "what's Ubuntu?". Everyone knows someone who is familiar with Windows, and most towns have an evening class to teach totally new users. Not many people who've never used a computer before know any Linux geeks.
I still don't quite follow you. What was it that was hidden? From the information I can find they followed the best-practice laid out in a peer-reviewed article in Nature; the reasons for the practice are out there for everyone to see, published in a leading scientific journal and backed up by a number of other peer-reviewed studies, such as Briffa (1998) and Cook (2004). Are you really suggesting that they hid this data by openly discussing it in the world's most highly-cited scientific journal?
Where scientific research has found that an instrument is reliable over a certain range and unreliable in another, is it dishonest to switch from one measure to another to cope with that? Is there actually an issue with the reliability of the data? I can't find any scientific literature that suggests that tree-rings are an inaccurate way to estimate temperature before 1960; the only studies I can find (such as Cook) suggest that it is accurate up to 1960. So even if there were any dishonesty - which I dispute, since I can't yet see how any of this could possibly be construed as hiding anything - would it even matter? If you fail to mention something that has no impact on the reliability of your conclusions is it significant?
[...]I think it [the "hide the decline" in the email] does refer to a decline in temperature.
Are you saying that the world is, in fact, getting cooler?
The entire climate science community has defended "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline" so that people wouldn't see how bad their evidence is, instead of criticizing the hiding of results that cast major doubt on their evidence. None of them have any credibility left, and will never get it back until they condemn instead of defend "Mike's Nature trick".
I'd never heard of "Mike's Nature trick", so I looked it up. Here's what Google turned up:
"Mike's Nature trick" refers to the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales. "Hide the decline" refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960, discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995.
"Mike's Nature trick" refers to a technique (aka "trick of the trade") used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.
The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature. More on the hockey stick divergence problem...
So this is a technique, accepted by scientists through peer-review, used to compensate for one form of data being unreliable in a particular arena. Can you explain why that's such a problem, because I don't see it?
One other thing: quoting only the "hide the decline" part of the email is rather disingenuous, since a lot of people will assume, without context, that it refers to a decline in temperature.
I think the biggest challenge in Aikido is finding a club that offers unrestricted sparring. Without that, you can never learn to actually defend yourself.
I briefly practised Aikido having trained in Sambo and Muay Thai. What shocked me (and caused me to leave every club I joined) was that everything was very slow and everyone always knew what was coming; as a result everyone thought that they were great because they didn't know how little they actually knew. This is in contrast to the other arts I have trained in, where (mostly) free sparring from the very first lesson means that you're acutely conscious of the limitations of what you know.
If you can find an Aikido club that shares premises with other martial artists and lets practitioners of different arts roll together then I can see Aikido being an effective discipline. Unfortunately this sort of practice, which isn't uncommon for judokas (who often spar with BJJ fighters or crosstrain for MMA), seems to be unheard of in Aikido, at least everywhere I've tried. It's similar to the problems in Karate and Taikwondo - if you don't allow any influence from outside the ecosystem then you can easily end up with an art that is useless when the rules of that ecosystem are removed. (That's not to say Karate or TKD are useless by nature, just that in their modern form they are normally taught by someone who has never learnt the weaknesses of the art. )
There's an important difference between genetic modification and selective breeding, though: selective breeding causes gradual change. Genetic modification is like doing selective breeding without the hundreds of years of gradual testing through eating and planting, and as such it carries much more chance of unintended consequences. That's why there needs to be regulation of GM food - in order to create the possibility of new, improved crops you're removing the natural oversight, and it needs to be replaced by something comparable.
I think you are missing the point. Your personal anecdotal evidence is meaningless when you are talking about the possessions of someone else completely. And yes, it's my liver, it's my eyes, it's my body parts whether I am dead or alive. If I'm dead, custody of my possessions go to my heirs, not the state or some fat bastard I couldn't stand when I was alive. Just like everything else, you need permission when the shit doesn't belong to you.
It's not my anecdote, it's yours. If it doesn't show anything, fine, it doesn't show anything. But it's not me that was using it to make a point - it was you.
I would have to ask you the same, why are you so gullible? I mean the full videos and transcripts are available online and Obama did say that they couldn't take the patient's spirit into consideration and there would be something set up to tell patients that this might not work, take the pain pill and die instead of the life saving treatment. Is that not correct? Because every full video and transcripts that are available online in which I can find says that.
Not, that is not correct, and anyone that tells you it is is either very foolish or trying to mislead you. Here's what Obama said regarding woman's question about spirit:
But, look, the first thing for all of us to understand is
that we actually have some -- some choices to make about how we want to
deal with our own end-of-life care.
And that's one of the things I think that we can all promote, and
this is not a big government program. This is something that each of us
individually can do, is to draft and sign a living will so that we're
very clear with our doctors about how we want to approach the end of life.
I don't think that we can make judgments based on peoples' spirit.
That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we
have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality
care for all people.
GIBSON: But the money may not have been there for her pacemaker or
for your grandmother's hip replacement.
OBAMA: Well, and -- and that's absolutely true. And end-of-life
care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we're going to
have to make.
I don't want bureaucracies making those decisions, but understand
that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If
they're not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they're being made
by private insurers.
We don't always make those decisions explicitly. We often make
those decisions by just letting people run out of money or making the
deductibles so high or the out-of-pocket expenses so onerous that they
just can't afford the care.
And all we're suggesting -- and we're not going to solve every
difficult problem in terms of end-of-life care. A lot of that is going
to have to be, we as a culture and as a society starting to make better
decisions within our own families and for ourselves.
But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that
exists in the system that's not making anybody's mom better, that is
loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence
shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let
doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn't
going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but
taking the painkiller.
And those kinds of decisions between doctors and patients, and
making sure that our incentives are not preventing those good decision,
and that -- that doctors and hospitals all are aligned for patient care,
that's something we can achieve.
If you read that you will see that Obama is not introducing some cutoff point, and he's certainly not advocating any death panels. He's just being honest: there will be decisions that have to be made about what care can be provided, but those decisions are being made already. There isn't an
A consumption tax is regressive, since only people who have plenty of money have the choice about whether to spend or save. If you're living paycheck to paycheck then you would have to pay more tax on your purchases to make up for the rich who, no longer paying tax on their income choose to save or invest to avoid a consumption tax. A tax system that moves the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor seems difficult to justify both morally and economically (who gets more benefit from Government services? The young mother who takes the bus to work or the millionaire whose business empire is possible only because of Government-provided services?)
Wow, I can't believe you asked that. Most people don't (that is Do Not) have any objections (religious or otherwise) when I ask to barrow their car for a day. If they normally don't care "why the hell should the law assume they do". I mean I shouldn't automatically be in trouble because I didn't ask to use your car, and who knows, you may be just like everyone one else I have asked and said you didn't mind, or you may be a prick and say no, especially seeing how you don't know me.
I think you'll find that most people would object. Try going up to a random person and asking to borrow their car if you don't believe me...
Now it isn't just about religious objections. What about those people who think that if they are an organ donor that they won't save their life if they can harvest the organs? I mean it's not unheard of and the threat is even more real when you have death panels set up by the government to decide who is worthy of a life saving procedure or not. Especially when the president of the United States of America tells a person that her mom should have taken a pain pill instead of getting a life saving medical treatment that had extended her life by 5 years as of the time the question was asked.
Well, the people who are so gullible that they believe Limbaugh and the far-right corporate apologists when they create doctored videos, despite the fact that full videos and transcripts are available online, can just go and opt-out.
You might want to look up the actual transcript so you can see that where your conservative idols have told you that Obama advocates euthanasia, death panels and all manner of other scary ideas what he actually said was that the old lady should have received her pacemaker faster without so much corporate money spinning from the insurers.
This isn't the masses tyrannising people like in your analogy, it's a better set of defaults.
There are people who have strong feelings about organ donation - in both directions. These people will opt-in or out. There are also a majority of people who don't have strong feelings and don't mind the idea of donating organs but don't ever register. Changing the system to opt-out means that the default fits more peoples' wishes and also saves a large number of lives.
When weighed against the life-saving benefits, the fact that a small number of people will be mildly inconvenienced seems a little paltry, doesn't it? Especially when you consider that there were plenty of people being inconvenienced by having to opt in.
Unfortunately (well, not really!) the protection only applies to criminal charges that carry a maximum of 2 years imprisonment.
As I've pointed out below, I don't think they have any constitutional protection in this case. Since your signature suggests you're affiliated with the party can you shed any light on whether there's a specific reason that this constitutional protection would apply here?
If they aren't doing anything illegal then it doesn't matter where the server is. If they are planning to rely on parliamentary immunity then it implies that what they will be doing is illegal.
Unfortunately for them I don't see how this can work. The Swedish Constitution states that:
[...]If, in any other case, a member of the Riksdag is suspected of having committed a criminal act, the relevant rules of law concerning arrest, detention or remand are applied only if he admits guilt or was caught in the act, or the penalty for the offence is imprisonment for two years [or more, I assume; I don't speak Swedish so can't check the translation].
[Chapter 4, Article 8]
Under Swedish law copyright infringement carries a penalty of two years imprisonment, so I don't think they will have any criminal immunity.
The submitter seems to have confused immunity with prosecution and immunity from civil lawsuits; matters carried out as part of a political mandate are only immune from civil lawsuits (the criminal immunity, above, would appear to apply or not apply irrespective of whether the actions were part of a political mandate). What's more, this civil immunity can be waived by a 5/6 majority of those voting - I can't imagine this would be hard to arrange against an unpopular single candidate.
I'm not a Swedish lawyer (believe it or not!) but I hope they've checked with one because they seem to be relying on more protection than they actually have.
No, it's doing exactly the opposite of what was intended. To encourage publishing, copyright grants monopoly rights. Not to enrich the author, but to encourage publishing.
Here something was published, a new something (based on an old something) and copyright is being used to deprive the public of it. Copyright should never be used to reduce the amount of works available to the public.
Copyright law is just busted. If it said "right to profit" they'd let the guy publish and sue for his profits.
That said though, a large part of the C&D is very likely the trademark - which they do (legally) need to pursue.
Your comment is full of contradictions.
You say that copyright grants monopoly rights, then say that they shouldn't ever prevent publishing. How can you have a monopoly where everyone can enter the market?
You say that copyright should encourage publishing but shouldn't enrich the author. How should publishing be encouraged without enriching the author?
You say that copyright grants monopoly rights and should encourage publishing. This copyright is the reason that Sony is still actively developing Lemmings games for multiple platforms. It is clearly encouraging publishing and granting a monopoly - the two things you say copyrights are meant to do - but you then say it's doing the opposite of what was intended.
Although to be honest, I wonder if this is Apple's secrecy coming to bite them in the ass. If you are uber careful about how many phones you have out in the field, you're a lot less likely to run into scenarios where your product fails in real world situations.
I think you're right that this issue was not discovered because of Apple's secrecy. If you remember, when they gave their staff phones to test they didn't want people to realise there was a new iPhone about - so they disguised them as iPhone 3s. The 3G didn't have the metal band, so the test models either didn't use one or - my guess - had it hidden under a fake iPhone 3 cover, meaning that this issue never came up.
Please forgive the language here, but THAT'S NOT THE FUCKING POINT
Why isn't it? This isn't an idle question, I honestly can't see any potential harm if Google continue to use this ability to remove only useless, malicious applications.
If the application doesn't do anything except leak private data, what is the difference between removing this application and upgrading the firmware to give the user more storage space, better battery life and more privacy?
If we abandon our ideological entrenchment for a moment, we should ask ourselves why it is that increased vendor control is not welcomed; the answer, surely, is that it often results in functionality being removed and the company reneging on the deal that was agreed. That isn't what's happened here; Google have removed an application that was installed by tricking the user and then constituted nothing but a security hole for them.
I think it's interesting to draw a parallel with Microsoft's reaction to the exploit in their Help & Support centre. Then they were castigated for not acting immediately to protect users, even though this would mean removing functionality from their copy of Windows. Here Google is acting to protect their users, with no loss of functionality and an increase in available system resources. What could be the matter with that?
These claims that people can see the flicker in low-energy lightbulbs, the pixels on the display and the noise of a power supply in the next town over seem to crop up fairly reliably on Slashdot. I normally just raise an eyebrow and wonder if it's possible, but this time I thought I'd check to see just how good your senses are compared to mine.
using a 32" 1080p LCD (with a native resolution 3x that) and sitting more than 6 feet away, I can still see the pixels
Ignoring the higher native resolution for the moment, a 32" 1080p LCD, assuming it's widescreen format and using Wikipedia's translation of 1080p to 1920*1080, will have pixels approximately 0.37mm square. From six feet away these pixels would have an angular separation of about 0.0056 degrees, or 0.35 arcminutes. According to the article, someone with 20/20 vision can resolve detail down to about 1 arcminute - making your eyesight about three times better than normal, or approximately 20/7 (1). Now, although, unfortunately, there isn't a Guinness world record for it, Wikipedia claims that the best measured eyesight is 20/8. Taking the most modest of your claims - since you said "more than 6 feet away" and that your LCD had a native resolution 3x 1080p - it would still appear that you have the best eyesight in the world
Regarding your incredible hearing, I don't have the expertise to comment on just how good that range is (can anyone comment on whether that range is exceptional?). I will ask, though, how you came to find out? I can't find anyone offering a hearing test that goes that high, so I doubt you got it done professionally, and most speakers won't emit sounds that high pitched.
If you really do encounter people with better hearing and vision daily as you say, I'd be interested to know where you live (some sort of superhero's lair, perhaps?)
(1) Other sources, for example Wikipedia, list 20/20 vision as giving a maximum visual accuity of 50 "cycles per degree", or 1.2 arcminutes, which would make you almost four times better than average.
Surely the big difference is that Amazon deleted a book that people intended to read. I don't see any potential harm in Google deleting applications that did nothing except trick users into downloading them and then send user data back to the application author.
If this is what Google intends to use the remote-delete function for then I see it as more akin to antivirus, and most people have no problem with their antivirus program deleting viruses. Those that do can choose not to use antivirus - in this case, not to use the Android Market.
arXiv is really a repository rather than a journal. If the submitter wants something to put on his/her CV, a traditional peer-reviewed journal is the way to go.
You talk about what "would" happen with socialized systems and the problems that "would" occur, almost as if the idea of public healthcare were some sort of daydream. But the results that I and other commenters mentioned above aren't the result of a few years of misguided experimentation. The NHS, for example, is about as old as the US employer-dominated health insurance system, so a claim that the lead that socialized systems currently enjoy is just because they are immature and will run into problems in the future needs a lot more to back it up than you have provided.
You also ignore the fact that free-market health care is not, itself, immune from the economic problems that you claim will make socialized healthcare unworkable. As you point out "there is not such thing as [a] free lunch" - but this applies to private enterprise as much as to government-run schemes. In times of economic difficulty individuals, as well as countries, have to cut back on their spending - and this can be much more dramatic since they do not have the creditworthiness that allows governments to use borrowing to mitigate the shock of the transition. I think it's telling that in the current economic crisis the NHS is having its funding cut by about 5%. This will certainly have some negative consequences, but healthcare will still be available to everyone who needs it. Meanwhile, over in the USA, where the system is much closer to your capitalist ideal, half of the population is either uninsured or underinsured, and the credit crisis has meant that with insurance have reduced their uptake of nonacute or preventative care by up to 29% (source). So it would appear that even in times of economic difficulty socialized health care is able to weather the storm better, and the individual approach lags even further behind.
How do you answer the point that many other developed countries have much more government involvement in healthcare, and yet pay less for better healthcare?
In France, for example, public healthcare is available to all, but they pay only only 3/5 as much as the US as a proportion of GDP and are considered to have the best healthcare system in the world by the WHO.
The British NHS, which at the time of the WHO's report cost only half as much as the French system in terms of GDP, was placed 18th; a fair few countries behind France, but still 19 places ahead of the US. To reiterate: the NHS, which is entirely Government funded, costs only just over a quarter of the US system and yet has better results.
Developed countries with socialized or partly socialized healthcare systems topped the list, while the US, coming far closer to your vision of non-Governmental healthcare, was beaten by powerhouses like Costa Rica, Columbia, Morocco, and the UAE.
Is unnecessary cosmetic treatment really the best yardstick to judge health care by?
Maybe but there's a difference between note taking and writing a dissertation. Using a computer/word processor to write a paper is much faster than using pen and paper. Once written, editing a digital file is simple whereas editing pen and paper requires the paper to be compleatly rewritten.
Of course - I was referring to the research I had done and not the dissertation itself. Finding a quotation in my paper isn't too bad; finding a quotation somewhere in my research means doing battle with a mass of notes from any number of different sources and different ideas.
>>>it's later when you want to organize your notes or re-use something you wrote down
I've never done that in my whole life. Well almost never. There are a few times I removed the sheets from the notebook and reoganized them, but most times I just keep them in chronological order. As for "reuse" that could be considered plagiarism, since most of my notes are direct quotes from the professor. It's often better to just rewrite.
If that's true then maybe it wouldn't be of any use to you, but I've just finished writing a dissertation for which I had several hundred pages of research and by the end I was wishing I had OCRed everything. Trying to find one specific quotation from somewhere in three ringbinders of notes and photocopies is exactly the sort of thing that's hard - and boring - for a human, but easy for a computer.
My point is that it's meaningless to claim that the response time has been improved by comparing two different responses; the hotfix was able to be produced quickly but was unnecessary until the Google engineer made the vulnerability public. The actual fix will still take a long time, what's changed is that Microsoft were forced to react to a threat that previously didn't exist - people exploiting this bug.