Does anyone try, for example, to archive tissue samples (and/or genomic sequence info?) of interesting species like the bluefin so we might have a chance of "resurrecting" them (at least approximately) after we advance enough in our knowledge of biology?
For such an economically valuable species as the bluefin, I would be surprised if someone wasn't doing this. Anyone have any info?
> The drugs were developed in hopes of getting some kind of return on investment.
You make the same assumption the the **AAs make: every infringement is a lost sale (at premium prices). This is obviously silly in some cases. One can imagine an expensive drug which is too expensive for the Indian government to provide to its citizens under its national health plan. Lets assume that this drug is necessary to treat a pandemic within India, so the Indian government decides that it would rather legislate a special exception to respecting the patent on the drug than letting millions of people die. In this case, without the exception, the drug company would not have gained any appreciable income from use of the drug in India, so the "infringement" costs the drug company nothing.
Unless, of course, the widespread use in India enables the detection of undesirable side-effects which weren't known previously.
> The pills will cost a lot less if R&D costs to recoup are only $200 million, instead of $2 billion.
That's a good point, but it doesn't go far enough. There should also be legislation which limits the liability of drug side-effects for companies which deal in good faith, but strips a drug company of its patent in the case where it has been found to be actively negligent with respect to testing the safety of the drug (i.e., in a case where the drug company wouldn't be able to sell the drug anyway, because of the risk of too much liability --- so the patent actually ends up doing nothing but totally blocking the use of the drug). If we had had such a law, for example, then generic Vioxx could have been continued to be used by patients who are much less at risk for its bad side-effects.
For example, a text book needs to look exactly the same to each student so that the teacher can refer to specific parts of the book (e.g. "read pages 14-17").
What you meant was that people will have to forgo talking about pages (which are display specific) and instead talk about some other kind of unit of information which needs to be invented to replace it. Actually, we have these semantic units already, they are called "chapters", "sections", and "paragraphs". If there is a real need for a unit which is of size between these, it can be invented (but I don't see why it would be necessary, there aren't so many paragraphs on a page that taking about paragraphs is very much more complicated than talking about pages).
The reader software would have to understand the new order of the day, of course.
And even if I had done it stupidly, you can't compare a stupid little thing done on faith (like buying lottery tickets) with something as terrible as religion. Not quite on the same level, you know?
Do you have a lot of experience with how other people relate to religion? In my experience, there are many, many people for whom religion is more or less "a stupid little thing done on faith". They celebrate holidays (because they enjoy the social aspects), perhaps go a few times a year to pray in a church or synagogue. They choose to celebrate personal life changes likes births, coming to maturity, and marriages within a religious framework without any deep belief in the religion. Do you revile these people just as much as religious fanatics who, I agree, in the most part damage society by lobbying for ridiculous restrictions on others?
I ask because the impression I received from your posts in these and other threads was that, yes, you revile them just like the fanatics. I received the impression that your ability to grade how bad or good religion might be on a continuous scale was limited, and you were stuck in a false dichotomy with respect to religion (or, even more strangely to me, non-religious theism). Perhaps you need to be a bit more specific in your criticism of religion/theism rather than a blanket "Religion is bad. Bad, bad, bad. Evil."?
It would probably increase your audience in the long run if you would better characterize the particular things which are bad about religion and justify your grouchiness better.
I find it relatively unbelievable that your behavior could be the result of indignation about abstract crimes against abstract entities. But whatever. If you don't want to talk/think about it, it's your privilege.
> What I truly wonder is, why do you need to believe so badly?.... > What happened in your life that made you so weak?
We all need to believe. We all believe lots of stuff which we have very little corroboratory evidence. All the time. For example, why did you bother to reply to my previous post after "foe"-ing me? Was it not, at least partially, due to a belief that doing so would have some benefit to you? Exactly how much evidence did you have to justify that belief?
> We are talking about god because someone proposed his existence.
You are talking about (the Abrahamic/other major religious) God. I am not. If you only have evidence that certain specific religious models of God do not exist, this doesn't interest me.
I asked that you provide specific, scientific evidence that an all-powerful God doesn't exist, not that there is no evidence for other people's beliefs, which is your only argument.
Personally, I believe, as you have heard before, that there is no possibility to produce evidence either for or against the existence of an all-powerful God which is above logic. How could you even reason about such an entity?
So, what I see is: 0 == 0. In such a tied situation, your vehement spouting of hate and revulsion against people who believe in God seems to me to indicate that you, rather than many of those you revile, could benefit more from psychological help.
> You are making a proposition for which you hold NO evidence. > What I said is that the evidence FOR a god is less than the > evidence AGAINST a god.
If you would actually pay attention to the arguments which others suggest, you would have seen that I made no proposition whatsoever, I merely asked you to produce this "evidence against a god".
You didn't, instead you just talked about how little evidence I have that an all-powerful God exists. Duh! I state unequivocably that yes, I have no evidence that an all-powerful God exists. That's not what I'm arguing about.
Now, what about producing that "evidence" that an all-powerful God does not exist? Explaining religion is not evidence with relation to God. I do not argue (or even believe) that the existence of religion is evidence for the existence of of God.
So, cough up. Where is your evidence? You provided exactly none in your reply. Please, show me the lab results, or whatever. LOL
There is no compelling evidence in favor of the existence of god, and lots of evidence against it.
OK, pleeze! Give me an example which contradicts the existence of an all-powerful God who is so powerful, even the rules of logic don't apply to him (so no, the "create the task he can't do" paradox is out).
>> only initially(emphasis mine) applies to ISPs with 400,000 customers or more.
Anyway, we all know that the more the fight against piracy revs up, the more pirates will find ways to circumvent the enforcement. And the worse and worse PR this will generate for the media companies.
We live in interesting times, as the Chinese might say.
Oh. And here I thought that there was a chance you'd continue: "and just watch free legal content, there's tons of it".
Maybe we should start a slogan campaign: "Media unavailable? Pirate it! Show you care!". (This is a hypothetical suggestion to show that some people might believe that copyright infringement is moral in certain circumstances, where they believe it actually benefits the rights holder).
The discovery evidence from Viacom vs. YouTube/Google proves you wrong. We can thank Viacom for showing just how possible it might be that "viral"/pirate content is actually being distributed by the rights holder.
That argument, merits aside, would only be applicable to downloading, not uploading. If I give you a free cookie, that doesn't mean you can tell other people to come into my store and take a free cookie.
Not necessarily. As I argued in another post, if I put my copyrighted information up on a public webpage, it's possible that the legal system would come to the conclusion that I am also inherently providing a license for people to view that information. And if I send email to someone, it is OK if he forwards it to a friend, even though I didn't give him explicit permission (as long as I didn't, of course, explicitly deny him permission). Similarly, I think it very possible that if a media company would originate a seeded torrent of their own material, the courts would find that they have provided an inherent license to disseminate the material via the BitTorrent protocol, which includes uploading.
Considering how we all hate spam, I'm sure you agree that anyone who forwards a chain letter by email to more than one other person should be tarred and feathered.
(Sorry it wasn't a car analogy --- cars are real property.)
The US court system has already ruled that unreasonably large judgments infringe on the right to due process. We're just now starting to see exactly how that's going to be interpreted in the new digital domain.
The fact that it's approximately 100% of the whole post doesn't come into play?
>.... it would be Fair Use
Perhaps. Most of us wouldn't be willing to go to court to test that (and court is the the only way to know for sure). This is why "Fair Use" is fairly useless to the Average Joe (who instead relies on "If I only do things which tens of thousands of others also do, I'd have to be really unlucky to get sued").
Browse the net much? Every time you visit a new web page you somehow magically first manage to view the license terms found at a totally different page?
That is, if there even is such a license (a lot of amateur pages don't include licenses).
I'm sure that even the US courts would agree that content posted on the net can be assumed to have a certain minimal-rights implicit license just by the fact it was posted where it was posted.
> I have trouble imagining anyone asserting with a straight face that a > reasonable person would believe the songs were off copyright attached.
The discovery evidence from Viacom vs. YouTube/Google proves you wrong. We can thank Viacom for showing just how possible it might be that "viral"/pirate content is actually being distributed by the rights holder.
Most of us aren't chummy with the **AAs so that we can know what the reality is. Sorry! Even those of us who still care (and I think that those who care just make sure that the artists they like get some of their money, regardless of the exact strictures of copyright law).
Looking at the results, I see that countries like Latvia, Moldova, Lithuania, and Bulgaria are starting to show results for upload/download bandwidth which compete with South Korea and Japan.
I predict a big boom in the proxy services based in those and similar countries when people start to think about end runs around more and more laws like "three strikes".
And understand, it doesn't require that everyone uses such a proxy to poke big holes in the **AAs attempts to prevent copyright infringement --- every teenager will know which of his friends knows someone who knows someone who can download safely. If necessary, special "social networking" services will spring up to fill this need (of finding the media infringement "pusher" --- hmm, in this case maybe it should be "puller").
I actually "inherited" this card from a relative who had bought it and found out he didn't need it.
This really has to show you how bad Linksys's customer relations were with me: I didn't even pay for the adapter myself and Linksys still managed to piss me off with their lying stories about their developers working on new drivers.
My post was not about GPL violations, it was just to spread the word about a personal collision with bad customer service at Linksys. Which really pissed me off. Which is why I post about it every now and then when the topic of Linksys comes up.
His main technique was to start his posts with "As one of the first...", "As someone with a lot of experience...", etc... In his last post he claimed to be the original founder of India (using this same technique).
So you might be right that the firmware of the Linksys device I bought was upgradable, but that's useless if you have no way to make custom firmware and the vendor doesn't issue bug fixes for its original firmware.
Thanks for the info, but I just realized that I asked the wrong question. I should have asked what percentage of the site's ad revenue is derived from US visitors. I have a strong feeling that it is much larger than the traffic percentages reflect.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone try, for example, to archive tissue samples (and/or genomic sequence info?) of interesting species like the bluefin so we might have a chance of "resurrecting" them (at least approximately) after we advance enough in our knowledge of biology?
For such an economically valuable species as the bluefin, I would be surprised if someone wasn't doing this. Anyone have any info?
> The drugs were developed in hopes of getting some kind of return on investment.
You make the same assumption the the **AAs make: every infringement is a lost sale (at premium prices). This is obviously silly in some cases. One can imagine an expensive drug which is too expensive for the Indian government to provide to its citizens under its national health plan. Lets assume that this drug is necessary to treat a pandemic within India, so the Indian government decides that it would rather legislate a special exception to respecting the patent on the drug than letting millions of people die. In this case, without the exception, the drug company would not have gained any appreciable income from use of the drug in India, so the "infringement" costs the drug company nothing.
Unless, of course, the widespread use in India enables the detection of undesirable side-effects which weren't known previously.
> The pills will cost a lot less if R&D costs to recoup are only $200 million, instead of $2 billion.
That's a good point, but it doesn't go far enough. There should also be legislation which limits the liability of drug side-effects for companies which deal in good faith, but strips a drug company of its patent in the case where it has been found to be actively negligent with respect to testing the safety of the drug (i.e., in a case where the drug company wouldn't be able to sell the drug anyway, because of the risk of too much liability --- so the patent actually ends up doing nothing but totally blocking the use of the drug). If we had had such a law, for example, then generic Vioxx could have been continued to be used by patients who are much less at risk for its bad side-effects.
For example, a text book needs to look exactly the same to each student so that the teacher can refer to specific parts of the book (e.g. "read pages 14-17").
What you meant was that people will have to forgo talking about pages (which are display specific) and instead talk about some other kind of unit of information which needs to be invented to replace it. Actually, we have these semantic units already, they are called "chapters", "sections", and "paragraphs". If there is a real need for a unit which is of size between these, it can be invented (but I don't see why it would be necessary, there aren't so many paragraphs on a page that taking about paragraphs is very much more complicated than talking about pages).
The reader software would have to understand the new order of the day, of course.
And even if I had done it stupidly, you can't compare a stupid little thing done on faith (like buying lottery tickets) with something as terrible as religion. Not quite on the same level, you know?
Do you have a lot of experience with how other people relate to religion? In my experience, there are many, many people for whom religion is more or less "a stupid little thing done on faith". They celebrate holidays (because they enjoy the social aspects), perhaps go a few times a year to pray in a church or synagogue. They choose to celebrate personal life changes likes births, coming to maturity, and marriages within a religious framework without any deep belief in the religion. Do you revile these people just as much as religious fanatics who, I agree, in the most part damage society by lobbying for ridiculous restrictions on others?
I ask because the impression I received from your posts in these and other threads was that, yes, you revile them just like the fanatics. I received the impression that your ability to grade how bad or good religion might be on a continuous scale was limited, and you were stuck in a false dichotomy with respect to religion (or, even more strangely to me, non-religious theism). Perhaps you need to be a bit more specific in your criticism of religion/theism rather than a blanket "Religion is bad. Bad, bad, bad. Evil."?
It would probably increase your audience in the long run if you would better characterize the particular things which are bad about religion and justify your grouchiness better.
> They've hurt all of humanity.
I find it relatively unbelievable that your behavior could be the result of indignation about abstract crimes against abstract entities. But whatever. If you don't want to talk/think about it, it's your privilege.
> What I truly wonder is, why do you need to believe so badly? ....
> What happened in your life that made you so weak?
We all need to believe. We all believe lots of stuff which we have very little corroboratory evidence. All the time. For example, why did you bother to reply to my previous post after "foe"-ing me? Was it not, at least partially, due to a belief that doing so would have some benefit to you? Exactly how much evidence did you have to justify that belief?
I would echo your post back at you, but somehow I don't see why I should revile you for your beliefs.
I'm curious. For what reason do you feel a need to revile others for their beliefs? Did religious zealots hurt you or someone close to you?
> We are talking about god because someone proposed his existence.
You are talking about (the Abrahamic/other major religious) God. I am not. If you only have evidence that certain specific religious models of God do not exist, this doesn't interest me.
I asked that you provide specific, scientific evidence that an all-powerful God doesn't exist, not that there is no evidence for other people's beliefs, which is your only argument.
Personally, I believe, as you have heard before, that there is no possibility to produce evidence either for or against the existence of an all-powerful God which is above logic. How could you even reason about such an entity?
So, what I see is: 0 == 0. In such a tied situation, your vehement spouting of hate and revulsion against people who believe in God seems to me to indicate that you, rather than many of those you revile, could benefit more from psychological help.
> You are making a proposition for which you hold NO evidence.
> What I said is that the evidence FOR a god is less than the
> evidence AGAINST a god.
If you would actually pay attention to the arguments which others suggest, you would have seen that I made no proposition whatsoever, I merely asked you to produce this "evidence against a god".
You didn't, instead you just talked about how little evidence I have that an all-powerful God exists. Duh! I state unequivocably that yes, I have no evidence that an all-powerful God exists. That's not what I'm arguing about.
Now, what about producing that "evidence" that an all-powerful God does not exist? Explaining religion is not evidence with relation to God. I do not argue (or even believe) that the existence of religion is evidence for the existence of of God.
So, cough up. Where is your evidence? You provided exactly none in your reply. Please, show me the lab results, or whatever. LOL
There is no compelling evidence in favor of the existence of god, and lots of evidence against it.
OK, pleeze! Give me an example which contradicts the existence of an all-powerful God who is so powerful, even the rules of logic don't apply to him (so no, the "create the task he can't do" paradox is out).
> which currently only has 399,998 customers
From the summary:
>> only initially(emphasis mine) applies to ISPs with 400,000 customers or more.
Anyway, we all know that the more the fight against piracy revs up, the more pirates will find ways to circumvent the enforcement. And the worse and worse PR this will generate for the media companies.
We live in interesting times, as the Chinese might say.
> I suggest you just stop caring about them.
I was with you 100% there.
> and just go full pirate! Arr!
Oh. And here I thought that there was a chance you'd continue: "and just watch free legal content, there's tons of it".
Maybe we should start a slogan campaign: "Media unavailable? Pirate it! Show you care!". (This is a hypothetical suggestion to show that some people might believe that copyright infringement is moral in certain circumstances, where they believe it actually benefits the rights holder).
That argument, merits aside, would only be applicable to downloading, not uploading. If I give you a free cookie, that doesn't mean you can tell other people to come into my store and take a free cookie.
Not necessarily. As I argued in another post, if I put my copyrighted information up on a public webpage, it's possible that the legal system would come to the conclusion that I am also inherently providing a license for people to view that information. And if I send email to someone, it is OK if he forwards it to a friend, even though I didn't give him explicit permission (as long as I didn't, of course, explicitly deny him permission). Similarly, I think it very possible that if a media company would originate a seeded torrent of their own material, the courts would find that they have provided an inherent license to disseminate the material via the BitTorrent protocol, which includes uploading.
Considering how we all hate spam, I'm sure you agree that anyone who forwards a chain letter by email to more than one other person should be tarred and feathered.
(Sorry it wasn't a car analogy --- cars are real property.)
The US court system has already ruled that unreasonably large judgments infringe on the right to due process. We're just now starting to see exactly how that's going to be interpreted in the new digital domain.
The fact that it's approximately 100% of the whole post doesn't come into play?
> .... it would be Fair Use
Perhaps. Most of us wouldn't be willing to go to court to test that (and court is the the only way to know for sure). This is why "Fair Use" is fairly useless to the Average Joe (who instead relies on "If I only do things which tens of thousands of others also do, I'd have to be really unlucky to get sued").
Browse the net much? Every time you visit a new web page you somehow magically first manage to view the license terms found at a totally different page?
That is, if there even is such a license (a lot of amateur pages don't include licenses).
I'm sure that even the US courts would agree that content posted on the net can be assumed to have a certain minimal-rights implicit license just by the fact it was posted where it was posted.
> I have trouble imagining anyone asserting with a straight face that a
> reasonable person would believe the songs were off copyright attached.
The discovery evidence from Viacom vs. YouTube/Google proves you wrong. We can thank Viacom for showing just how possible it might be that "viral"/pirate content is actually being distributed by the rights holder.
Most of us aren't chummy with the **AAs so that we can know what the reality is.
Sorry! Even those of us who still care (and I think that those who care just make sure that the artists they like get some of their money, regardless of the exact strictures of copyright law).
Yes, accelerating from Mach 4.5 to Mach 5 in 200 seconds is only about 0.1 G.
Probably the acceleration to Mach 4.5 using the rocket engine, however, was much higher.
Buy gold.
(Half in sarcasm, since if the world economy collapses totally, it would probably be better to have something like, say, food.)
Looking at the results, I see that countries like Latvia, Moldova, Lithuania, and Bulgaria are starting to show results for upload/download bandwidth which compete with South Korea and Japan.
I predict a big boom in the proxy services based in those and similar countries when people start to think about end runs around more and more laws like "three strikes".
And understand, it doesn't require that everyone uses such a proxy to poke big holes in the **AAs attempts to prevent copyright infringement --- every teenager will know which of his friends knows someone who knows someone who can download safely. If necessary, special "social networking" services will spring up to fill this need (of finding the media infringement "pusher" --- hmm, in this case maybe it should be "puller").
I actually "inherited" this card from a relative who had bought it and found out he didn't need it.
This really has to show you how bad Linksys's customer relations were with me: I didn't even pay for the adapter myself and Linksys still managed to piss me off with their lying stories about their developers working on new drivers.
My post was not about GPL violations, it was just to spread the word about a personal collision with bad customer service at Linksys. Which really pissed me off. Which is why I post about it every now and then when the topic of Linksys comes up.
> "as an iPhone developer"
Ah, nostalgia. This reminds me of one of the first Slashdot trolls I encountered when starting to moderate on Slashdot after becoming addicted.
His main technique was to start his posts with "As one of the first ...", "As someone with a lot of experience ...", etc... In his last post he claimed to be the original founder of India (using this same technique).
After getting the "our developers are working on it" runaround for months and months when Linksys didn't issue new drivers without the Broadcom vulnerability for my WPC54G v.4 adapter, rendering it totally useless, I decided to never, never, again buy Linksys equipment.
So you might be right that the firmware of the Linksys device I bought was upgradable, but that's useless if you have no way to make custom firmware and the vendor doesn't issue bug fixes for its original firmware.
Thanks for the info, but I just realized that I asked the wrong question. I should have asked what percentage of the site's ad revenue is derived from US visitors. I have a strong feeling that it is much larger than the traffic percentages reflect.
> In order to be a rational human being you must NOT believe in ANYTHING.
OK. I will take your advice. That means that I don't believe in that, either. Now what do I do?
Some free advice for you. Concentrate on concrete examples where it is obvious that deistic or pseudo-scientific beliefs are not beneficial.
Trying to argue the existence or non-existence of God via logic is pointless.