Very true. Thanks for pointing that out. Photon mapping makes a lot of other simplifying assumptions, though, so my larger point remains valid: photon mapping is an algorithm for photorealistic image synthesis, not physical simulation.
The photon map algorithm is great for rendering realistic-looking images, but it is definitely not appropriate for a genuine, hard-core simulation like this guy wants to do. The photon map algorithm is based on physics, certainly, but it makes a lot of simplifications in order to make the rendering efficient. For one, it completely ignores diffraction and interference, treating photons as discrete particles travelling in straight lines. If you really want a physically accurate numerical simulation of the way light behaves in a given physical setting, you need to resort to these much more brute-force techniques.
By the way, I'm going out on a limb here, but I have a feeling that someone who's been published in SIGGRAPH (THE graphics conference) is aware of the state of rendering algorithms in general, and of the existence of photon mapping in particular. Just a guess.
In point of fact, Conquest does not use LRU. Conquest uses a very simple rule- files larger than a threshold are stored on disk, and files smaller than a threshold are stored in RAM. The threshold is currently a compiled-in constant (1 MB), but plans are for it eventually to be dynamic.
The advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the many layers of indirection needed to implement LRU-type caching, which is one reason Conquest consistently outperforms FS's based on LRU cacheing.
1. The fact that we always run deficits doesn't
mean that we shouldn't worry about them. Those
deficits do have consequences. Those 'special
sources' you mention are, as you point out
in #3, completely imaginary. The reality is that
in the federal budget, the money going out has
to equal the money going in because the government
cannot save money, nor can it create money.
Consequently, any expenditures beyond what is
covered by tax revenue must be financed by selling
bonds to the private sector.
The problem with selling bonds is twofold:
first of all, those bonds must be serviced yearly,
like any loan, which means these bonds show up in
the budget as additional expenses. As the
debt burden grows, the interest and principal
expenses grow. As these expenses grow, they
crowd out other spending. Eventually, the
government may be forced to take out new loans
just to pay back old ones, thereby crossing a
fiscal point-of-no-return towards economic
disaster which can only be averted by crippling
budget cuts.
Second, those bonds are sold on the open market.
Simple supply and demand shows that as the demand
for money (the real commodity being traded) is
driven up by government borrowing, the price of
funds (the interest rate) goes up. This makes it
harder for businesses and individuals to get
loans, which has a contractionary effect on the
national economy. Put simply, government borrowing
drives down the economic groth rate, and excessive
borrowing could even trigger a recession.
In short, the deficit issue is very real indeed.
By the way, the budget surplus of the past few
years was just as real as our current deficit-
between 1996 and 2000, net debt dropped by close
to half a trillion dollars, which led to
corresponding decreases in interest expenses.
3. The social security crisis is equally
real, although you are correct that almost nobody
in the media presents it accurately. As you note,
the 'trust fund' is an accounting fiction- there's
no pile of money sitting in some treasury building
waiting to be tapped into. This just makes the
crisis that much more imminent. For the moment,
social security is in surplus- social security tax
revenue exceeds social security payouts, so the
difference can be diverted to other expenses.
Within the decade, and by some estimates within
5 years, this will cease to be the case, and
social security outlays will begin to exceed
revenues. When that happens, the money will need
to either come out of existing government
programs, or out of new taxes.
The big problem is that social security is an
entitlement- if you qualify for social security,
the government is legally obligated to pay you,
so the government can't budget it- it can't, for
example, cut social security by 10%. All it can
do is change the qualifications for social
security benefits and hope the resulting expenses
go down by the appropriate amount.
The basic problem, as you point out, is that
thanks to the AARP, meaningful cuts in benefits
are simply not in the offing, and so the result
in the long run will either be enormous cuts in
other programs (unlikely), or drastic tax increases.
You may be pretty relaxed about that fact, but
I'm not, and you shouldn't be either: the kind
of tax increases we're talking about here are
enough to trigger a severe recession.
So the looming social security crisis is
very real, and very genuinely worrying.
Your basic point stands- Congress will not
reject this bill because it literally can't afford
it, although it might reject it because there are
more political points to be won by looking thrifty
than by looking pro-science. That doesn't mean
that we, the people who ultimately foot the bill,
should not be worried about the budgetary impact
of a proposal like this.
On the other hand, the need for regulation (self or otherwise) is far less pressing in the case of video games. Parents have no way to keep their kids out of R-rated movies short of keeping the kid on a leash. Computers, on the other hand, are almost always located at home, and so it's not that hard for a responsible parent to enforce any computer gaming rules that she sees fit, without the benefit of such legislation, just by supervising the child.
Hogwash. Violent and sexual movies are not
subject to any legal regulation, with the
exception of outright pornography. It is a common misconception that it is against the law for a minor to attend an R-rated movie without an adult accompaniment. This is not the case. The MPAA rating system is an entirely voluntary system of self regulation by the movie industry- the government has nothing to do with it. Thus, this legislation would lump violent video games in the same category as explicit pornography, and would treat it more seriously than even the most violent movie.
On the other hand, I tend to agree with you that, so long as this legislation exists only to empower parents, and not to supplant them with government regulation, I don't really see a serious problem.
I stand corrected. The ICNIRP's credentials
appear to be impeccable. My point is that the
posted article cannot be taken at face value
because it says nothing about that organization's
credentials, or reasons for setting those standards.
Microwaves and RF waves are not the same thing-
microwaves are higher-frequency than RF waves,
and consequently are higher-energy. Cell phones
broadcast at the high end of the RF spectrum, but
still below the microwave range. Moreover, their
signals are extremely weak. Yes, there is plenty
of evidence that microwaves, and even RF waves,
have physiological effects- they warm you up.
When you absorb any sort of radiation, that energy
enters your body, mostly as heat. However, you
will notice that you cannot stay warm by making
cell phone calls, no matter how many phones you
use- the power level of a cell phone antenna is
far too small to have a measurable effect on your
body temperature. Thus, if that immeasurably small
increase in temperature can give you cancer,
we're already dead, because you heat up your head
a lot more every time you stand in direct sunlight.
Non-existant? This
is the best overview I've been able to find of the
extensive research that has been done in this area.
Note that nearly all of the results were negative,
and most of the positive results were refuted
by later studies. I have only been able to find
a reference to one study of cell-phone radiation
and it was apparently undertaken by the cell-phone
industry, so I won't insult your intelligence
by citing it. However, it is suggestive that
studies of even much more powerful RF signals have
yielded no evidence of a health hazard.
Your suggestion that it is usually better to
guard against unproven risks is preposterous-
we should guard against risks in proportion to
the amount of evidence for the risk, and in
inverse proportion to the costs of guarding
against it. The
problem is that the levels of RF radiation that
the alarmists say are cancer-causing are so low
that this would effectively mean banning
broadcasting, which seems an awfully high price
to pay to avoid a risk with little to no evidence
that it even exists.
Your description of the mechanism by which
radiation causes cancer, and of the quantum
nature of radiation are both entirely correct.
The only problem is that RF radiation is non-ionizing.
In other words, an individual photon in the
radio frequency band does not have enough energy
to induce a chemical change in any molecule. Consequently,
as you note, even enormously strong RF waves
cannot cause chemical changes, because they just
consist of more (low-energy) photons. Thus,
the traditional cancer-causing mechanism for
radiation does not apply to RF. The only known
physiological effect of RF radiation is thermal-
if you absorb an RF photon, your body heats up
by that amount. However, you will notice that
you don't need to take off a sweatshirt to use a
cell phone- the thermal effects of that amount
of RF radiation are miniscule to nonexistant, so
that's no good as a mechanism either.
Why does everybody still take this stuff seriously?
Read the article- all this study does is establish
that you get exposed to more RF radiation in a
crowded train car than you do in other places.
The scary part only comes in when it brings up
these "international guidelines" which such exposure
may exceed. Who established these guidelines,
and how? The article does not say anything beyond
the name of the organization, but I note that
its name makes it sound like an independent, non-governmental
organization- so this could be effectively
anybody smart enough to give themselves a clever-sounding name
The idea that RF transmissions will kill you
or cause cancer has a long and ugly history of
bad science concealed by calculated emotional
appeals. It was basically started by a guy
whose wife (who used a cell phone a lot) died
of brain cancer, from which he concluded that
cell phones cause cancer. Most of the "science"
that has been done on this issue is basically the
same idiotic reasoning dressed up in white lab
coats. It is highly likely that the organization
setting this 'standard' is in fact one of the
lobbying groups associated with the anti-cell-phone
movement.
Consider- radio waves are extremely low-energy-
far below the threshold necessary to break
molecular bonds, which is how genuine cancer-causing
radiation works. Thus, if RF waves do cause cancer,
the mechanism by which they do this is A. different
than for other sorts of radiation, and B. totally
unknown.
Plus, as has been pointed out a million times,
a 'jammer' is a device which drowns out a signal
by emitting a much more powerful signal of its
own, not by magically making the other signal
go away. If RF waves give you cancer, the jammer
will give you cancer faster.
Read the articles- the only changes he's even
considering making are to shorten some shots and
sequences that only existed to give time for the
Harrison Ford voice-over (which has been deservedly
gone since the director's cut). Doing a new
digital transfer and a new sound mix really doesn't
count as a new edition- it's par for the course
for new releases of older movies.
If you want to see movies with too many pointless
versions, look at the Star Wars films- not only
is the DVD edition of episode I different from
the theatrical release, but Lucas has confirmed
that he will be modifying and adding to the
original trilogy again before they, in
turn, are released on DVD.
Hate to break it to you, but Moulin Rouge
didn't even get nominated for costume design,
at least according to the lists I've seen. A
grevious oversight, yes, but there it is.
Doesn't work that way, thankfully. Their patents can still be held illegitimate. Only the fraud charge was overturned, and fraud is a much more serious issue (and much harder to prove) than simple filing of an invalid patent. Fraud requires knowledge that the patent was false, as well as intent to obtain money thereby, as well as goodness knows how many other additional legal hurdles, whereas patent invalidity simply requires that the court determines that the patents were granted erroneously, with no question of intent or motive.
As an analogy to the courtroom scenario you describe, suppose I am in posession of some stolen property. They can't prove I stole it. Do I therefore get to keep it? No. Regardless of whether I actually comitted a crime in obtaining it, it still doesn't legitimately belong to me, and must be returned to the owner.
Suits over behavior which has stopped are rare and difficult to pursue- "Yeah, your honor, he stopped doing it, but I want to sue him anyway." This sort of thing is most likely to happen if you're suing for monetary damages, but I get the impression that no monetary harm was done, so this would be difficult. The fact that as yet there is no legal precedent for GPL cases would make such a suit doubly shaky- the first test case really ought to be on a clear-cut and unbending violator, not someone who has already (effectively) admitted defeat.
Technically, this is not true- 'spaceflight-related' is too broad. How about the crew of Apollo 1, incinerated in a launchpad fire a few days before launch? You are correct in that the Space Shuttle has had only seven casualties, and more broadly, that only seven Americans have died during the course of a mission, but there are several more deaths associated with the space program.
For your comparison with Russia to be meaningful, you'd have to give numbers regarding how many space missions the Russians have flown. Also, since Russia has no spacecraft of the Space Shuttle's caliber (in terms of crew capacity), it probably makes more sense to compare single fatality-causing incidents, rather than fatalities, and by that measure, America and Russia are neck-and-neck, with one each.
I'm not saying they're four-letter words, and my argument has nothing to do with political correctness. You have every right to say them. Moreover, I agree with the point you're making- the Democrats and the Republicans are in many ways failing to deliver the political choice a free society needs. All I'm saying is that those words are not likely to get their speaker taken very seriously. I'm sure, if your apply your apparently formiddable intellectual powers to it, you may be able to come up with a less juvenile way of "speaking the truth" about our political parties, without sacrificing the integrity of your position.
By the way, as far as my being well-trained by CNN, I can't stand TV news, and haven't watched CNN since the Gulf War. How's that for training?
I disagree. Name-calling never serves a purpose- it conveys no new information (if you get the joke of the name, you already know the point that's being made by it), it degrades the level of the discussion, and it makes the speaker sound like a 4-year-old who isn't getting what he wants. There are always better ways of underlining your point. For example, instead of saying "demopublicans and republicrats", the interviewer could have said "our increasingly indistinguishable political parties" or some such.
On the whole, it's a very interesting article, but I kept cringing at the the interviewer. It's not so much the fact that he's clearly biased that bothers me, it's the way the bias degrades the quality of the interview
Of course, there's one of my personal pet peeves, "Micro$oft." I suppose I can understand the desire to call names in private discourse, chatrooms, or wherever, but let's not mince words- it's still name-calling, plain and simple. It's what we did in preschool when we couldn't think of anything else to say, and yet because we're talking about the Great Satan, it's somehow supposed to be reasonable, even witty. Guess what? You still sound like a 4-year-old, and trying to incorporate "Micro$oft" into a serious, intelligent discussion (much less a journalistic interview) is about as effective as saying "Bill Gates is a poo-poo head." Ditto for "Demopublicans" and "Republicrats."
And then we have Mr. Young (quite rightly) arguing that we should consider the merits of openness as it applies to a particular situation, rather than blindly applying Open Source as the cure for all ills. In other words, he is arguing in favor of intelligent thought, as opposed to knee-jerking, and our esteemed interviewer unbelievably goes out of his way to disagree, citing the South African AIDS issue. Is this man seriously claiming that some issues are so morally objectionable that we must abandon discretion, stop thinking, and just blindly shout "Open Source"? Either he's doing frighteningly little thinking himself, or he's just not listening to his interviewee. Neither possibility reflects very well on the quality of this interview.
On the other hand, kudos to Mr. Young for an intelligent, coherent, and eminently reasonable interview.
Oh, please... This makes no sense. Another reply to your post explains a much more believable reason for the F-117 shoot-down. Besides, the embassy-bombing conspiracy theory is just ludicrous. That bombing was a huge PR loss for the US, and a huge win for China (except for the unfortunate folks in the building at the time). You're saying that the US publicly humiliated itself, violated diplomatic immunity, and committed an act of war against the world's only hostile nuclear power-- all to obtain an empty vengeance for an event which took place years ago and cost no American lives? Keep in mind that nobody (including the Chinese) can ever know that it was anything but an accident, which is why I call the vengeance empty.
Are you sure you posted this to the right article? I don't buy any of these arguments, and some of them just don't make sense.
Are you saying that in a battle between a collection of large, faceless corporations and a small group of scientists at top-flight research institutions, the corporations have the respectability edge? Said scientists are "scruffy malcontents"? Come on. Academic speech is one of the most clear-cut instances of first-amendment-protected speech there is. The SDMI et. al. have a huge task ahead of them just avoiding looking like the goon squad- interfering with academic publication isn't a very pretty picture. Besides, who's this "we" you're talking about? The plaintiffs aren't hackers- they're academics. In the eyes of most judges, there's a world of difference.
The fight isn't really over technical issues at all- it's over whether or not some scientists can publish a paper. The technical details of the paper are pretty much irrelevant. Besides, cases of this nature are seldom handled by a jury, and judges tend to make a good-faith effort to understand the technical issues they are confronted with.
This argument is too ridiculous to be rebutted. Felten et. al. will loose the case because it would be a horrible miscarriage of justice? You make it sound like Hon. Justice Snidely Whiplash has been appointed to the case. A few ugly cases do not make a legal system which thrives on miscarriage.
Erm, the government (U.S., state, or local) is a party in every criminal case in the country, yet somehow accused crmiminals are occasionally found innocent. The U.S. Government has been on the losing end of any number of major court cases, including many more important than this one (yes, there is such a thing). Besides, the U.S. government is not a defendant- the attorney general is, and he is a defendant only in a rather formal sense- nobody's accusing him of a crime. They need to include Ashcroft as a defendant in order for the case to have the scope necessary to get an order preventing possible future prosecutions of USENIX and others. In short, they need to get the government involved, even though the case is not a DMCA prosecution, in order for the case to have the necessary scope.
Re:Selling but not demanding payment
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
RedHat just reached break-even, and its revenues are continuing to grow. Get your facts straight.
Re:Selling but not demanding payment
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
First of all, I agree with you- corporations are a necessary and important part of modern society, and a key driving force for technological development. However, they are not the only ones.
Specifically, you slipped up on your examples, badly. The WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee as an academic information-sharing tool, while he was at CERN, an entirely non-corporate particle physics research lab. As for "all the cool technologies" that we see today, the computer sort of springs to mind (ENIAC and its predecessors were the product of government and university, not corporate, research). I'll grant you the second point.
Like you, I detest the neo-communist drivel which occasionally springs up in the Slashdot forums, but you're setting up a straw man. I seriously doubt that more than a small minority of Slashdotters would seriously contend that the world would be a better place without corporations. I can't speak for the FSF, but there's nothing explicitly anticorporate in their agenda (though they do explicitly oppose the software industry status quo), and the section of the GPL which launched this thread was placed there specifically to allow the making of money, hardly a resounding blow for the end of capitalist society.
As for the "how does one make money" question, I've already addressed that elsewhere, and I will pause only to note that RedHat is making money, so it is clearly possible.
Re:Selling but not demanding payment
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
You're right, it's not "free speech." It's free software. I fail to see how it's worse than a standard closed-source license, though- the rights granted by the GPL are a strict superset of the rights granted by a normal closed-source source license.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. Thanks for pointing that out. Photon mapping makes a lot of other simplifying assumptions, though, so my larger point remains valid: photon mapping is an algorithm for photorealistic image synthesis, not physical simulation.
By the way, I'm going out on a limb here, but I have a feeling that someone who's been published in SIGGRAPH (THE graphics conference) is aware of the state of rendering algorithms in general, and of the existence of photon mapping in particular. Just a guess.
I think I was at the same talk as the poster.
In point of fact, Conquest does not use LRU. Conquest uses a very simple rule- files larger than a threshold are stored on disk, and files smaller than a threshold are stored in RAM. The threshold is currently a compiled-in constant (1 MB), but plans are for it eventually to be dynamic.
The advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the many layers of indirection needed to implement LRU-type caching, which is one reason Conquest consistently outperforms FS's based on LRU cacheing.
1. The fact that we always run deficits doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about them. Those deficits do have consequences. Those 'special sources' you mention are, as you point out in #3, completely imaginary. The reality is that in the federal budget, the money going out has to equal the money going in because the government cannot save money, nor can it create money. Consequently, any expenditures beyond what is covered by tax revenue must be financed by selling bonds to the private sector.
The problem with selling bonds is twofold: first of all, those bonds must be serviced yearly, like any loan, which means these bonds show up in the budget as additional expenses. As the debt burden grows, the interest and principal expenses grow. As these expenses grow, they crowd out other spending. Eventually, the government may be forced to take out new loans just to pay back old ones, thereby crossing a fiscal point-of-no-return towards economic disaster which can only be averted by crippling budget cuts.
Second, those bonds are sold on the open market. Simple supply and demand shows that as the demand for money (the real commodity being traded) is driven up by government borrowing, the price of funds (the interest rate) goes up. This makes it harder for businesses and individuals to get loans, which has a contractionary effect on the national economy. Put simply, government borrowing drives down the economic groth rate, and excessive borrowing could even trigger a recession.
In short, the deficit issue is very real indeed.
By the way, the budget surplus of the past few years was just as real as our current deficit- between 1996 and 2000, net debt dropped by close to half a trillion dollars, which led to corresponding decreases in interest expenses.
3. The social security crisis is equally real, although you are correct that almost nobody in the media presents it accurately. As you note, the 'trust fund' is an accounting fiction- there's no pile of money sitting in some treasury building waiting to be tapped into. This just makes the crisis that much more imminent. For the moment, social security is in surplus- social security tax revenue exceeds social security payouts, so the difference can be diverted to other expenses.
Within the decade, and by some estimates within 5 years, this will cease to be the case, and social security outlays will begin to exceed revenues. When that happens, the money will need to either come out of existing government programs, or out of new taxes.
The big problem is that social security is an entitlement- if you qualify for social security, the government is legally obligated to pay you, so the government can't budget it- it can't, for example, cut social security by 10%. All it can do is change the qualifications for social security benefits and hope the resulting expenses go down by the appropriate amount.
The basic problem, as you point out, is that thanks to the AARP, meaningful cuts in benefits are simply not in the offing, and so the result in the long run will either be enormous cuts in other programs (unlikely), or drastic tax increases. You may be pretty relaxed about that fact, but I'm not, and you shouldn't be either: the kind of tax increases we're talking about here are enough to trigger a severe recession.
So the looming social security crisis is very real, and very genuinely worrying.
Your basic point stands- Congress will not reject this bill because it literally can't afford it, although it might reject it because there are more political points to be won by looking thrifty than by looking pro-science. That doesn't mean that we, the people who ultimately foot the bill, should not be worried about the budgetary impact of a proposal like this.
On the other hand, the need for regulation (self or otherwise) is far less pressing in the case of video games. Parents have no way to keep their kids out of R-rated movies short of keeping the kid on a leash. Computers, on the other hand, are almost always located at home, and so it's not that hard for a responsible parent to enforce any computer gaming rules that she sees fit, without the benefit of such legislation, just by supervising the child.
Hogwash. Violent and sexual movies are not subject to any legal regulation, with the exception of outright pornography. It is a common misconception that it is against the law for a minor to attend an R-rated movie without an adult accompaniment. This is not the case. The MPAA rating system is an entirely voluntary system of self regulation by the movie industry- the government has nothing to do with it. Thus, this legislation would lump violent video games in the same category as explicit pornography, and would treat it more seriously than even the most violent movie.
On the other hand, I tend to agree with you that, so long as this legislation exists only to empower parents, and not to supplant them with government regulation, I don't really see a serious problem.
I stand corrected. The ICNIRP's credentials appear to be impeccable. My point is that the posted article cannot be taken at face value because it says nothing about that organization's credentials, or reasons for setting those standards.
Microwaves and RF waves are not the same thing- microwaves are higher-frequency than RF waves, and consequently are higher-energy. Cell phones broadcast at the high end of the RF spectrum, but still below the microwave range. Moreover, their signals are extremely weak. Yes, there is plenty of evidence that microwaves, and even RF waves, have physiological effects- they warm you up. When you absorb any sort of radiation, that energy enters your body, mostly as heat. However, you will notice that you cannot stay warm by making cell phone calls, no matter how many phones you use- the power level of a cell phone antenna is far too small to have a measurable effect on your body temperature. Thus, if that immeasurably small increase in temperature can give you cancer, we're already dead, because you heat up your head a lot more every time you stand in direct sunlight.
Non-existant? This is the best overview I've been able to find of the extensive research that has been done in this area. Note that nearly all of the results were negative, and most of the positive results were refuted by later studies. I have only been able to find a reference to one study of cell-phone radiation and it was apparently undertaken by the cell-phone industry, so I won't insult your intelligence by citing it. However, it is suggestive that studies of even much more powerful RF signals have yielded no evidence of a health hazard.
Your suggestion that it is usually better to guard against unproven risks is preposterous- we should guard against risks in proportion to the amount of evidence for the risk, and in inverse proportion to the costs of guarding against it. The problem is that the levels of RF radiation that the alarmists say are cancer-causing are so low that this would effectively mean banning broadcasting, which seems an awfully high price to pay to avoid a risk with little to no evidence that it even exists.
Your description of the mechanism by which radiation causes cancer, and of the quantum nature of radiation are both entirely correct. The only problem is that RF radiation is non-ionizing. In other words, an individual photon in the radio frequency band does not have enough energy to induce a chemical change in any molecule. Consequently, as you note, even enormously strong RF waves cannot cause chemical changes, because they just consist of more (low-energy) photons. Thus, the traditional cancer-causing mechanism for radiation does not apply to RF. The only known physiological effect of RF radiation is thermal- if you absorb an RF photon, your body heats up by that amount. However, you will notice that you don't need to take off a sweatshirt to use a cell phone- the thermal effects of that amount of RF radiation are miniscule to nonexistant, so that's no good as a mechanism either.
Why does everybody still take this stuff seriously? Read the article- all this study does is establish that you get exposed to more RF radiation in a crowded train car than you do in other places. The scary part only comes in when it brings up these "international guidelines" which such exposure may exceed. Who established these guidelines, and how? The article does not say anything beyond the name of the organization, but I note that its name makes it sound like an independent, non-governmental organization- so this could be effectively anybody smart enough to give themselves a clever-sounding name
The idea that RF transmissions will kill you or cause cancer has a long and ugly history of bad science concealed by calculated emotional appeals. It was basically started by a guy whose wife (who used a cell phone a lot) died of brain cancer, from which he concluded that cell phones cause cancer. Most of the "science" that has been done on this issue is basically the same idiotic reasoning dressed up in white lab coats. It is highly likely that the organization setting this 'standard' is in fact one of the lobbying groups associated with the anti-cell-phone movement.
Consider- radio waves are extremely low-energy- far below the threshold necessary to break molecular bonds, which is how genuine cancer-causing radiation works. Thus, if RF waves do cause cancer, the mechanism by which they do this is A. different than for other sorts of radiation, and B. totally unknown.
Plus, as has been pointed out a million times, a 'jammer' is a device which drowns out a signal by emitting a much more powerful signal of its own, not by magically making the other signal go away. If RF waves give you cancer, the jammer will give you cancer faster.
Read the articles- the only changes he's even considering making are to shorten some shots and sequences that only existed to give time for the Harrison Ford voice-over (which has been deservedly gone since the director's cut). Doing a new digital transfer and a new sound mix really doesn't count as a new edition- it's par for the course for new releases of older movies.
If you want to see movies with too many pointless versions, look at the Star Wars films- not only is the DVD edition of episode I different from the theatrical release, but Lucas has confirmed that he will be modifying and adding to the original trilogy again before they, in turn, are released on DVD.
Yeah, my mistake. Apparently a couple different
news sites got their lists from the same (wrong)
source.
Hate to break it to you, but Moulin Rouge didn't even get nominated for costume design, at least according to the lists I've seen. A grevious oversight, yes, but there it is.
Doesn't work that way, thankfully. Their patents can still be held illegitimate. Only the fraud charge was overturned, and fraud is a much more serious issue (and much harder to prove) than simple filing of an invalid patent. Fraud requires knowledge that the patent was false, as well as intent to obtain money thereby, as well as goodness knows how many other additional legal hurdles, whereas patent invalidity simply requires that the court determines that the patents were granted erroneously, with no question of intent or motive.
As an analogy to the courtroom scenario you describe, suppose I am in posession of some stolen property. They can't prove I stole it. Do I therefore get to keep it? No. Regardless of whether I actually comitted a crime in obtaining it, it still doesn't legitimately belong to me, and must be returned to the owner.
Suits over behavior which has stopped are rare and difficult to pursue- "Yeah, your honor, he stopped doing it, but I want to sue him anyway." This sort of thing is most likely to happen if you're suing for monetary damages, but I get the impression that no monetary harm was done, so this would be difficult. The fact that as yet there is no legal precedent for GPL cases would make such a suit doubly shaky- the first test case really ought to be on a clear-cut and unbending violator, not someone who has already (effectively) admitted defeat.
Technically, this is not true- 'spaceflight-related' is too broad. How about the crew of Apollo 1, incinerated in a launchpad fire a few days before launch? You are correct in that the Space Shuttle has had only seven casualties, and more broadly, that only seven Americans have died during the course of a mission, but there are several more deaths associated with the space program.
For your comparison with Russia to be meaningful, you'd have to give numbers regarding how many space missions the Russians have flown. Also, since Russia has no spacecraft of the Space Shuttle's caliber (in terms of crew capacity), it probably makes more sense to compare single fatality-causing incidents, rather than fatalities, and by that measure, America and Russia are neck-and-neck, with one each.
I'm not saying they're four-letter words, and my argument has nothing to do with political correctness. You have every right to say them. Moreover, I agree with the point you're making- the Democrats and the Republicans are in many ways failing to deliver the political choice a free society needs. All I'm saying is that those words are not likely to get their speaker taken very seriously. I'm sure, if your apply your apparently formiddable intellectual powers to it, you may be able to come up with a less juvenile way of "speaking the truth" about our political parties, without sacrificing the integrity of your position.
By the way, as far as my being well-trained by CNN, I can't stand TV news, and haven't watched CNN since the Gulf War. How's that for training?
I disagree. Name-calling never serves a purpose- it conveys no new information (if you get the joke of the name, you already know the point that's being made by it), it degrades the level of the discussion, and it makes the speaker sound like a 4-year-old who isn't getting what he wants. There are always better ways of underlining your point. For example, instead of saying "demopublicans and republicrats", the interviewer could have said "our increasingly indistinguishable political parties" or some such.
On the whole, it's a very interesting article, but I kept cringing at the the interviewer. It's not so much the fact that he's clearly biased that bothers me, it's the way the bias degrades the quality of the interview
Of course, there's one of my personal pet peeves, "Micro$oft." I suppose I can understand the desire to call names in private discourse, chatrooms, or wherever, but let's not mince words- it's still name-calling, plain and simple. It's what we did in preschool when we couldn't think of anything else to say, and yet because we're talking about the Great Satan, it's somehow supposed to be reasonable, even witty. Guess what? You still sound like a 4-year-old, and trying to incorporate "Micro$oft" into a serious, intelligent discussion (much less a journalistic interview) is about as effective as saying "Bill Gates is a poo-poo head." Ditto for "Demopublicans" and "Republicrats."
And then we have Mr. Young (quite rightly) arguing that we should consider the merits of openness as it applies to a particular situation, rather than blindly applying Open Source as the cure for all ills. In other words, he is arguing in favor of intelligent thought, as opposed to knee-jerking, and our esteemed interviewer unbelievably goes out of his way to disagree, citing the South African AIDS issue. Is this man seriously claiming that some issues are so morally objectionable that we must abandon discretion, stop thinking, and just blindly shout "Open Source"? Either he's doing frighteningly little thinking himself, or he's just not listening to his interviewee. Neither possibility reflects very well on the quality of this interview.
On the other hand, kudos to Mr. Young for an intelligent, coherent, and eminently reasonable interview.
I meant hostile to the U.S., obviously.
Oh, please... This makes no sense. Another reply to your post explains a much more believable reason for the F-117 shoot-down. Besides, the embassy-bombing conspiracy theory is just ludicrous. That bombing was a huge PR loss for the US, and a huge win for China (except for the unfortunate folks in the building at the time). You're saying that the US publicly humiliated itself, violated diplomatic immunity, and committed an act of war against the world's only hostile nuclear power-- all to obtain an empty vengeance for an event which took place years ago and cost no American lives? Keep in mind that nobody (including the Chinese) can ever know that it was anything but an accident, which is why I call the vengeance empty.
Of course the embassy bombing was an accident!
Are you sure you posted this to the right article? I don't buy any of these arguments, and some of them just don't make sense.
RedHat just reached break-even, and its revenues are continuing to grow. Get your facts straight.
First of all, I agree with you- corporations are a necessary and important part of modern society, and a key driving force for technological development. However, they are not the only ones.
Specifically, you slipped up on your examples, badly. The WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee as an academic information-sharing tool, while he was at CERN, an entirely non-corporate particle physics research lab. As for "all the cool technologies" that we see today, the computer sort of springs to mind (ENIAC and its predecessors were the product of government and university, not corporate, research). I'll grant you the second point.
Like you, I detest the neo-communist drivel which occasionally springs up in the Slashdot forums, but you're setting up a straw man. I seriously doubt that more than a small minority of Slashdotters would seriously contend that the world would be a better place without corporations. I can't speak for the FSF, but there's nothing explicitly anticorporate in their agenda (though they do explicitly oppose the software industry status quo), and the section of the GPL which launched this thread was placed there specifically to allow the making of money, hardly a resounding blow for the end of capitalist society.
As for the "how does one make money" question, I've already addressed that elsewhere, and I will pause only to note that RedHat is making money, so it is clearly possible.
You're right, it's not "free speech." It's free software. I fail to see how it's worse than a standard closed-source license, though- the rights granted by the GPL are a strict superset of the rights granted by a normal closed-source source license.