I agree with your ultimate point, but the following is a straw man:
If video games could so drastically affect behavior, where are all the Pac-Man addicts who should be running around eating everything in sight? Where are the vast numbers of Halo and UT who should be sniping at people off of rooftops?
The assertion that these anti-video game types are making is not that all video games have an across-the-board ability to force kids to emulate them. The claim they're making is this: Games that depict realistic-looking violence can cause kids to become more violent in general.
Who, precisely, would be the authority on what is the proper usage? English, like all non-prescriptive languages, exists only as the sum of how its speakers use it. The only meaning "the proper usage" can have is as a synonym for "a usage widely accepted enough that virtually no one will call it 'wrong.'"
The most common usage of the "grain of salt" idiom these days is as the grandparent described: the more unlikely the claim, the more salt you need to cover it up. Even if this isn't how it was originally used in Latin two thousand years ago, that doesn't mean it's somehow "wrong" or, more importantly, that we shouldn't use it that way now.
There also aren't many great ways to store energy from PV panels.
What about flywheels? I've seen a lot of research lately talking about using flywheels for flexibly bulk energy storage. Storage losses are fairly low, they're relatively nontoxic, cheap to produce, etc. Maybe I'm talking out my ass here, but I thought I'd bring it up and let the guy who works for "one of the largest renewable energy companies in North America" school me if necessary;)
If you really want to be connected, I suggest you turn off your cell phone before we take it out of your hand and smash it into the ground,
Yes, violence towards mildly irritating people is a great way to behave!
turn to someone in your general vicinity, and engage them in polite conversation. I have yet to hear anything resembling compelling evidence that leads me to believe that cell phones are, for 99% of the population, a superior method of communication.
Uh, a cellphone is a superior method of communication when the person you want to talk to isn't standing next to you. Do you think these people are going to talk about anything more consequential if there's someone standing next to them?
I think six months is far too short in order to accomplish the intended purpose of copyright (which is to encourage people to produce more copyrightable works by giving them a financial incentive).
Part of the problem is that you're focusing on big producers of copyrighted material, like movie studios or publishers. There are hundreds upon thousands of smaller groups and individuals who produce copyrightable materials, and it may take them months or years just to get their product into the awareness of the mass-market. A six-month copyright would weight things toward large corporations, because they'd be the only ones who could afford the six-month publicity blitz necessary to make money off the work.
It would also create problems for, for example, independent films. A lot of movies like that are made, then sit around for months while the producers try to find a distributor. They'll take the movie to Cannes or Sundance or another film festival and hope to get purchased. Then it might be another year or two before the movie actually appears in theaters. If there was a six-month duration on copyright, it would probably start when the movie was first publicly exhibited, which means that by the time it came out in mainstream theaters (a year after it appeared at Sundance), it's already out of copyright. Which means distributors wouldn't bother.
Six months is way too short to be practical for anyone. You may as well abandon copyright altogether.
If I had my way, I would fix it at 20 years flat, no renewals, from the date of first publication (i.e. when it's made available to the public). That's enough time for even the smallest copyright holder to make some kind of profit off the work, without allowing giant corporations to have perpetual control over things.
One suggestion I've heard, that I like, is that as long as a copyright is owned by the individual who originally created it, it lasts for the duration of his life or 20 years, whichever is longer (so that if you die soon after, it doesn't immediately enter the public domain, so that your heirs aren't screwed). But as soon as the copyright is transferred to anyone else, the expiration date of the copyright becomes 20 years after the date of first publication.
So if you write a book in 2005, the copyright expires in 2025 or when you die, whichever is later. But if you transfer the copyright to Disney in 2015, the copyright expires in 2025 no matter what. Even if Disney later transfers the copyright to another individual -- even you -- the expiration is now permanently 2025.
This allows individuals to retain control over their works, but prevents corporations from amassing huge libraries of copyrights and controlling significant portions of the collective culture for decades on end.
If I were doing serious research about something, I'd only use Wikipedia, Britannica, or any other encyclopedia as a starting point. Neither of them are going to contain exhaustive entries about what I'm looking for, and in any event, I'm not going to trust the small-group biases Britannica has any more than I'm going to trust the large-group biases that Wikipedia contributors have.
Both sources are starting points for real research. If you want to get a general overview of something, either encyclopedia is a fine place to start, but don't trust them on the details. Go find primary sources and examine them if you want to find accurate, in-depth info.
* Where "never" is defined as "virtually never," because you have to use your own judgment.
My personal behavior is to treat anything with a copyright date older than 28 years as in the public domain. (At least, for purposes of personal use; I'm not dumb enough to try and create derivatives of works that are still legally covered under copyright.) Why 28 years? Because that's what copyright law in the U.S. originally allowed for (14 years, plus ONE optional 14-year extension). 28 years, especially these days, is plenty of time for an author to be compensated for his work.
I guess that explains why, whenever I see a news story about a train crash in India, they always involve the death of hundreds upon hundreds of people...
Uh, no, it isn't. They're just sitting there. Even if the hardware is "on" in the general sense, transistors not being actively switched use up very, very little power.
If Gates hadn't abused the software market, Microsoft's monopoly position, numerous other companies, consumers, and the world in general, he wouldn't have had all that money to give away.
Given that he does have it, I'm glad he's giving so much of it to charity (although questions have been raised as to how equitably that charity money is being handled, but that's another story), but that doesn't in the least excuse his actions in acquiring that wealth.
If you steal $1,000 and then, when confronted about it, say (truthfully) that you gave it all to charity, you don't get off scot-free. You've still committed theft.
Re:Specialist Subject: the Bleeding Obvious
on
Napster Has Been Cracked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From MS's Secure Audio Path page, that you linked to:
Secure Audio Path provides a much higher degree of protection to audio content by making it virtually impossible for untrusted applications or audio drivers to access the unencrypted audio bits.
(emphasis mine)
I love that they admit that SAP doesn't make it actually impossible for untrusted applications to get access to the unencrypted audio. Just virtually impossible. And of course it only takes one dedicated person to figure out how to weasel through that tiny sliver of opportunity afforded by "virtually impossible," and SAP is blown wide open. Just like every other DRM scheme. Ever.
Of course, people like to trumpet Palladium and such things as the ultimate cure, without realizing that A) you still have access to the physical hardware, and B) does anyone really think Microsoft -- Microsoft -- is going to be able to implement such a complicated security scheme without making any mistakes that allow people to hack it?
I suppose the fact that IE has all sorts of nice direct access to the Windows code with god-knows-what tricks embedded to speed it up helps. Firefox is bound by what any non-MS program can do with the API.
As far as "cold starts," keep in mind that 90% of IE loads into memory when Windows boots up, whereas very little of (e.g.) Firefox is loaded into memory. Really just the Windows libraries that it uses are loaded; all its own stuff has to load on the spot, but IE's rendering engine and various other libraries are all automatically loaded when the OS starts. That gives IE a huge apparent speed boost as far as starting it up for the first time after you boot the computer.
I'm not going to praise what I think is a bad idea. I love the concept of nuclear power from an air-quality standpoint, but the incredibly dangerous and voluminous waste it produces is more than I can ignore.
I'm not sure how valid an argument it is to say that nuclear plants invariably produce "dangerous and voluminous waste." Dangerous, yes, I don't think anyone will argue that; but voluminous? Compared to the amount of waste that (e.g.) coal plants produce, nuclear plants produce a tiny amount of waste per megawatt. The waste is probably more "dangerous" per unit mass than coal waste, but the overall danger per megawatt is what's relevant.
Not only are the fuel rods dangerous, but all the parts involved in the heating of the water, etc, become dangerously irradiated and must be stored in similar conditions to the fuel rods.
There are a lot of nuclear plant designs that don't use fuel rods or water. Pebble bed reactors, for example, use tiny pebbles of uranium encased in extremely durable ceramics, and the heated fluid is *air*, not water. The air is typically passed through a heat exchanger to heat up water that then goes off and does useful work, non-radioactively.
PBRs are the type I'm most familiar with, but there are other designs (e.g. CANDU) that are similarly less dangerous, more stable, and less waste-creating than your standard ol' fashioned water-mediated fuel rod reactor.
While I'm sure it's theoretically possible to store this stuff safely, knowing the inherent laziness and stupidities of large corporations and governments, I have a hard time believing that it will actually be done right, and that's more risk than I'm willing to take.
Yes, but that's true of *any* kind of power plant. By that logic, we shouldn't have power plants at all.:)
Finally math books can spew out real world examples of geometry (mainly trig, subset of geometry anyways) that the students might use one day.
Yeah, because before GPS, nobody ever used math in the real world. Engineers? Scientists? People in any financial or business context? People doing their taxes? None of them used math?
Huh? I explicitly said that the outcome was not necessarily related to Bush's motivations. I'm under the impression that the bulk of the countries benefitting from access to Iraq's oil since the U.S. invasion are U.S. companies. My point was that regardless of Bush's motivation, the practical outcome is that U.S. oil companies are getting access to Iraq's oil, at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
The 185 Billion a year is going mostly to non Arab countries.
The U.S. is a non-Arab country... I don't understand what you mean.
My point was that you're attacking a strawman by pointing out that it costs the U.S. government more to get at this oil than they could profit from it. This is true, but this is not what the original poster (or anyone positing the "blood for oil" stance) is saying. They (not I) are saying that the invasion of Iraq has spent public funds with the end result of enriching private citizens. The more cynical of them claim that Bush specifically invaded Iraq so that his friends in the oil industry could get cheap access to Iraq's oil.
I'm not saying that's happened, I'm just telling you what the argument is. You were attacking a different argument as if it were the one I've just explained.
"even if nuclear power were a viable method that didn't cost much more than its risks are worth"
doesn't inherently include the contention that nuclear power is econmically unviable? But that's the very meaning of the statement! Saying "even if X were true" means that you think X isn't true!
Other absolute statements are sometimes appropriate, like "this disagreement is silly".
Yes, some absolutes are okay, and others are "disproportionate exaggerations to discredit opposition."
You most definitely claimed that nuclear power is not economically viable. This, not being true, qualifies as a "disproportionate exaggeration to discredit opposition." Hence the hypocrisy.
I mean, seriously. Here's an analogous conversation:
A: If you weren't such an asshole, I'd loan you ten bucks. B: Hey! You're saying I'm an asshole! A: No I'm not! Stop putting words in my mouth!
The pressure of religious ethics of the right wing Christians, along with this administration's spite towards science,
The administration is spending a lot of money on scientific research, specifically the trips to the moon and mars.
*TWEET* Conflation of terms! Five yard penalty!
Just because the Bush administration pushes one particular kind of science (manned spaceflight) does not mean they are in general friendly toward science, or that they are friendly toward the particular kind of genetic science at issue here.
Easy way to attack your analogy is to point out that the Titanic is useless in the middle of the desert. If you have to render something useless in order to render it unsinkable (or unable to melt down), then what good is it?
Don't worry, I agree with you in principle, I just think you might want to pick a better analogy.:)
His absolute was that anti-nuclear types protest "any movement down any path." Your absolute was (rephrased) "Nuclear power is not economically viable." I was pointing out the hypocrisy in belittling someone for using an absolute, and then using a contrary absolute two sentences later.
The point is that private U.S. corporations get the profits from that oil, but the public U.S. government is the one spending all the money. No one's claiming that the U.S. government is spending $280 billion to earn $185 billion; they're claiming that the people in power (Bush & Co.) are spending $280 billion of other peoples' (the U.S. populace's) money so that they and their friends can PERSONALLY pocket that $185 billion.
I'm not saying whether the argument is true (although the outcome does appear to be the same, regardless of what Bush's motivation is), but you don't seem to be aware of the actual argument being made. In other words, you're attacking a straw man. Stop it.
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Who, precisely, would be the authority on what is the proper usage? English, like all non-prescriptive languages, exists only as the sum of how its speakers use it. The only meaning "the proper usage" can have is as a synonym for "a usage widely accepted enough that virtually no one will call it 'wrong.'"
The most common usage of the "grain of salt" idiom these days is as the grandparent described: the more unlikely the claim, the more salt you need to cover it up. Even if this isn't how it was originally used in Latin two thousand years ago, that doesn't mean it's somehow "wrong" or, more importantly, that we shouldn't use it that way now.
I think six months is far too short in order to accomplish the intended purpose of copyright (which is to encourage people to produce more copyrightable works by giving them a financial incentive).
Part of the problem is that you're focusing on big producers of copyrighted material, like movie studios or publishers. There are hundreds upon thousands of smaller groups and individuals who produce copyrightable materials, and it may take them months or years just to get their product into the awareness of the mass-market. A six-month copyright would weight things toward large corporations, because they'd be the only ones who could afford the six-month publicity blitz necessary to make money off the work.
It would also create problems for, for example, independent films. A lot of movies like that are made, then sit around for months while the producers try to find a distributor. They'll take the movie to Cannes or Sundance or another film festival and hope to get purchased. Then it might be another year or two before the movie actually appears in theaters. If there was a six-month duration on copyright, it would probably start when the movie was first publicly exhibited, which means that by the time it came out in mainstream theaters (a year after it appeared at Sundance), it's already out of copyright. Which means distributors wouldn't bother.
Six months is way too short to be practical for anyone. You may as well abandon copyright altogether.
If I had my way, I would fix it at 20 years flat, no renewals, from the date of first publication (i.e. when it's made available to the public). That's enough time for even the smallest copyright holder to make some kind of profit off the work, without allowing giant corporations to have perpetual control over things.
One suggestion I've heard, that I like, is that as long as a copyright is owned by the individual who originally created it, it lasts for the duration of his life or 20 years, whichever is longer (so that if you die soon after, it doesn't immediately enter the public domain, so that your heirs aren't screwed). But as soon as the copyright is transferred to anyone else, the expiration date of the copyright becomes 20 years after the date of first publication.
So if you write a book in 2005, the copyright expires in 2025 or when you die, whichever is later. But if you transfer the copyright to Disney in 2015, the copyright expires in 2025 no matter what. Even if Disney later transfers the copyright to another individual -- even you -- the expiration is now permanently 2025.
This allows individuals to retain control over their works, but prevents corporations from amassing huge libraries of copyrights and controlling significant portions of the collective culture for decades on end.
If I were doing serious research about something, I'd only use Wikipedia, Britannica, or any other encyclopedia as a starting point. Neither of them are going to contain exhaustive entries about what I'm looking for, and in any event, I'm not going to trust the small-group biases Britannica has any more than I'm going to trust the large-group biases that Wikipedia contributors have.
Both sources are starting points for real research. If you want to get a general overview of something, either encyclopedia is a fine place to start, but don't trust them on the details. Go find primary sources and examine them if you want to find accurate, in-depth info.
* Where "never" is defined as "virtually never," because you have to use your own judgment.
My personal behavior is to treat anything with a copyright date older than 28 years as in the public domain. (At least, for purposes of personal use; I'm not dumb enough to try and create derivatives of works that are still legally covered under copyright.) Why 28 years? Because that's what copyright law in the U.S. originally allowed for (14 years, plus ONE optional 14-year extension). 28 years, especially these days, is plenty of time for an author to be compensated for his work.
I guess that explains why, whenever I see a news story about a train crash in India, they always involve the death of hundreds upon hundreds of people...
"Eminent" reminds me of a headline I saw in my college newspaper once:
Bombing of Iraq Eminent
This was in 1997 or 1998. Yay for vocabulary!
If Gates hadn't abused the software market, Microsoft's monopoly position, numerous other companies, consumers, and the world in general, he wouldn't have had all that money to give away.
Given that he does have it, I'm glad he's giving so much of it to charity (although questions have been raised as to how equitably that charity money is being handled, but that's another story), but that doesn't in the least excuse his actions in acquiring that wealth.
If you steal $1,000 and then, when confronted about it, say (truthfully) that you gave it all to charity, you don't get off scot-free. You've still committed theft.
I love that they admit that SAP doesn't make it actually impossible for untrusted applications to get access to the unencrypted audio. Just virtually impossible. And of course it only takes one dedicated person to figure out how to weasel through that tiny sliver of opportunity afforded by "virtually impossible," and SAP is blown wide open. Just like every other DRM scheme. Ever.
Of course, people like to trumpet Palladium and such things as the ultimate cure, without realizing that A) you still have access to the physical hardware, and B) does anyone really think Microsoft -- Microsoft -- is going to be able to implement such a complicated security scheme without making any mistakes that allow people to hack it?
...Incom Corp. has announced that it is getting out of the RFID market entirely and will instead start producing starfighters.
PBRs are the type I'm most familiar with, but there are other designs (e.g. CANDU) that are similarly less dangerous, more stable, and less waste-creating than your standard ol' fashioned water-mediated fuel rod reactor.
Yes, but that's true of *any* kind of power plant. By that logic, we shouldn't have power plants at all.Yeah, because before GPS, nobody ever used math in the real world. Engineers? Scientists? People in any financial or business context? People doing their taxes? None of them used math?
My point was that you're attacking a strawman by pointing out that it costs the U.S. government more to get at this oil than they could profit from it. This is true, but this is not what the original poster (or anyone positing the "blood for oil" stance) is saying. They (not I) are saying that the invasion of Iraq has spent public funds with the end result of enriching private citizens. The more cynical of them claim that Bush specifically invaded Iraq so that his friends in the oil industry could get cheap access to Iraq's oil.
I'm not saying that's happened, I'm just telling you what the argument is. You were attacking a different argument as if it were the one I've just explained.
You most definitely claimed that nuclear power is not economically viable. This, not being true, qualifies as a "disproportionate exaggeration to discredit opposition." Hence the hypocrisy.
I mean, seriously. Here's an analogous conversation:
A: If you weren't such an asshole, I'd loan you ten bucks.
B: Hey! You're saying I'm an asshole!
A: No I'm not! Stop putting words in my mouth!
The hell?
Just because the Bush administration pushes one particular kind of science (manned spaceflight) does not mean they are in general friendly toward science, or that they are friendly toward the particular kind of genetic science at issue here.
Easy way to attack your analogy is to point out that the Titanic is useless in the middle of the desert. If you have to render something useless in order to render it unsinkable (or unable to melt down), then what good is it?
:)
Don't worry, I agree with you in principle, I just think you might want to pick a better analogy.
You're looking at the wrong part of the sentence.
His absolute was that anti-nuclear types protest "any movement down any path." Your absolute was (rephrased) "Nuclear power is not economically viable." I was pointing out the hypocrisy in belittling someone for using an absolute, and then using a contrary absolute two sentences later.
The point is that private U.S. corporations get the profits from that oil, but the public U.S. government is the one spending all the money. No one's claiming that the U.S. government is spending $280 billion to earn $185 billion; they're claiming that the people in power (Bush & Co.) are spending $280 billion of other peoples' (the U.S. populace's) money so that they and their friends can PERSONALLY pocket that $185 billion.
I'm not saying whether the argument is true (although the outcome does appear to be the same, regardless of what Bush's motivation is), but you don't seem to be aware of the actual argument being made. In other words, you're attacking a straw man. Stop it.
Ah, shit. I put the quotation mark before the question mark. Now I'll be banned from the Punctuation Nazi Party. :(