How else was the officer supposed to gather information on the suspect?
He could have asked. I watched the video. The officer did not ask Hiibel's name. He started out by asking for his ID. Hiibel didn't have any ID on him. If the person who made the call in the first place knew Hiibel's name, and told the police his name, then the first thing the sheriff should have done was asked "Are you Dudley Hiibel?" He could have asked Hiibel's daughter if Hiibel had hit her, if she was okay, etc. But he started out by assuming that a crime had occurred, based only on an anonymous tip. Rather then trying to determine if a crime had occurred (which would have given him cause to ask for ID), he jumped to the asking for ID part.
Not only did the cop not see Hiibel driving the truck, but Hiibel hadn't even been driving the truck -- his daughter had. He wasn't driving at all, let alone driving without a license.
That's saying a bit too much... The term "cyberspace" was coined because of Gibson's popular book,
More accurately, Gibson himself coined the word "cyberspace" in Neuromancer. (I think. I know he coined the word, but I'm not positive that Neuromancer marked its first appearance.)
The words "steal" and "theft" do not, by common usage, include the action of copyright infringement. That's why we have the term "copyright infringement" -- to recognize the distinction between physical removal of an object (and subsequent denial of its use), and the unauthorized duplication of materials that someone holds a legal monopoly on. The words are not interchangeable.
What you're saying is that since copyright infringement is kinda like stealing, in that you're "taking" something that doesn't belong to you, and since copyright infringement is illegal and wrong, that therefore it is equivalent to theft. This is linguistically and logically absurd. Whether copyright infringement is illegal (it is) or immoral (debatable) is irrelevant when considering whether the terms "stealing" and "theft" can be accurately applied to the action of duplicating copyrighted works without permission. This is not a "bizarre obsession;" this is critical to the entire debate of the ways that information should be treated like property.
No doubt there are people (even on Slashdot) who try to claim that since infringement isn't exactly the same as stealing, it's therefore not immoral; but that doesn't mean it's true that if infringement is illegal and wrong, and stealing is illegal and wrong, that they're therefore equivalent.
I will also point out that the law makes a very significant distinction between copyright infringement and theft (larceny). So important a distinction that we have an entire Title (17) of the federal U.S. Code dedicated to it (as copyright is only the domain of the federal gov't), whereas larceny is almost entirely handled in state and local law. (Incidentally, I checked: the words "steal," "stealing," "theft," and "larceny" do not appear in Title 17.)
I will also point out that you're implying that every Slashdotter has the exact same hypocritical beliefs: saying that piracy is bad on the one hand (because we all, apparently, like John Carmack); and yet saying on the other hand that piracy is okay (because we're doing it to the evil MPAA/RIAA). We do not all say those things, and I'm willing to bet that the people who say one do not generally say the other, and vice versa. Unless you have some data to back up the assertion that "Slashdotters all pretend to be against software piracy...but music and movies are okay, because we pretend there aren't humans making these things..." (emphasis mine).
Well, I *could* just point out your syllogism by asking "how" all that oil got created? From the decomposition and compression over time of microorganisms, yes? As far as I know, those processes continue. Therefore you're factually wrong, it's NOT a finite resource, it's just very slowly-renewing. (And that presupposes a conventional view about the origin of oil, some believe that it has other origins from extremophile organisms.)
*rolls eyes* Yeah, we have a phrase for that kind of behavior. It's called "being a smartass." So I'm glad you're not doing that, then.:)
But I'll confine myself to pointing out that my long list simply serves to illustrate the constant mantra that "we're running out of oil!" has been said many, many times before, by people who are highly qualifed to say such things.
Then I guess it's a good thing I didn't repeat the mantra. I merely stated that the amount of oil is finite, and it would run out eventually (with the obvious implication that whatever oil is being produced these days is vastly insufficient to keep our society going with the same rate of oil consumption). You were the one who assumed I was doing so from a particular political standpoint.
If you do want to get political about it, there are at least a handful of decent reasons to switch away from an oil economy. Other methods of energy production are less location-bound, meaning that we don't have to bother dealing with politically unstable countries in order to make use of (e.g.) wind, solar, nuclear, biofuel, etc. Political and indirect economic costs are not usually taken into account when determining how much oil costs us.
E.g., maybe it costs me $2 a gallon for gasoline at the pump, so I think oil's cheap. Say I buy $20 of gas every two weeks, so I spend about $500 on gas per year. But if another $500 per year of my federal income taxes goes toward supporting political regimes in other countries that give us good prices on oil (or goes toward our invasion of countries that have oil, so that we can get cheaper access to it -- not that we've done that), then the actual cost is about $4 a gallon.
Other technologies pollute less than oil, which means we wreak less havoc on the environment, and make the world a nicer place to live. I know that I'd gladly pay five times as much for my car's fuel if it meant no more automotive smog (I live in Los Angeles). Et cetera.
Inevitably, tech advances make "reachable" resources balloon before the taps run dry.
There's nothing inevitable about it; it happens that historically, tech advances bring more resources within reach, but there is no law of physics which guarantees that this will always remain so. I don't know enough to do the math, but it's at least conceivable that certain oil resources would require a certain absolute minimum amount of energy to retrieve (e.g. the simple action of pumping the oil up would use more energy than the oil would provide when burned), and the amount of energy we'd get from them would be less than we would spend to do so. Oil resources from beyond a certain depth would fall into this category.
At any rate, counting on the tech curve to save the day isn't necessarily wise. The tech curve on aircraft speed began to stagnate in the 1960s. Passenger aircraft haven't gotten any faster at all in the last forty years. Yet someone could easily have made the same claim, that technological advances would "inevitably" make planes faster and faster.
and if we ever manage to achieve fusion power (still only 20 years away!...as they've been saying for 40 years LOL) we will have functionally limitless energy to reach deposits.
Maybe I misunderstand, but if we achieve self-sustaining fusion power, why would we need oil?
It will still keep trickling back as long as there is a carbon-based bio
So, tell me again how we're going to run out of oil?
Because despite all the statistics and other stuff you listed, there is still only a finite amount of oil in the planet. I never said we would run out soon, or even in our lifetimes. I merely said that it is inevitable that we will EVENTUALLY run out. But of course, you had to pretend I was claiming we'd run out soon.
Unless you're claiming that there is a literally infinite supply of oil in the planet, and therefore we will never run out of oil. Are you claiming that?
Right, because there's just no way that the bad things you mentioned could be the result of poor management. It absolutely must be an inherent flaw with the technology. Yeah, that's it!
A bit of googling (http://www.arctic-cat.com/generators/wattage.asp) turns up numbers showing that an iron takes about 1.2KW, or just over 1KW for a toaster. So almost enough for an average home, so long as I wander round the house turning off everything else before flattening my shirt or browning some wheat. That's handy.
Who said you'd try to power an average-sized home using one power cell that produces 1 kilowatt? An actual production unit would probably have the capacity to produce 2-3 kW, and you might have a couple of them in a house to allow for higher periods of power consumption. Don't pretend to be dense and reject the idea out of hand because freakin' CNN said something dumb.
Actually, all fuels take more energy to produce than they contain -- thanks to the same Second Law of Thermodynamics that Uncle Cecil seems to misunderstand at the end of the linked article. (Don't get me wrong, I like Cecil, but I think he made a little mistake.) Anything that produced more energy than was put into it would violate the Second Law.
You might respond to this by saying, "But it takes less energy to get oil out of the ground than that oil eventually produces when burned!" Well, not exactly. The energy that went into making that oil was expended millions of years ago, and it all started as solar energy that was converted into plant and animal matter by the appropriate biological processes. Not really any different than the ethanol produced by plants that are grown with solar energy.
It's just that those hundreds of millions of years produced a large reserve of oil, so that the energy expended in finding it, drilling it, refining it, and transporting it is less than the amount of energy we get out of it -- but the total amount of energy that's gone into getting the oil into a usable form *is* still greater than the amount that's produced when it burns.
The amount of oil available on our planet is finite. There's still plenty of debate about how much is left, but there's never been any indication that more oil is being produced inside the planet, at least not at a rate that's anywhere near what we use it at. Which means we are going to eventually need alternative fuels. (Assuming our rate of consumption doesn't decrease drastically.) That might be 10, 20, 50, 500 years in the future, but it *will* happen.
All that said, there's also no reason why we have to use fossil fuels to produce ethanol. It's just that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest energy source. That won't remain true forever: the cost of all renewable sources will only ever decrease, as technology improves.
- I accept that humans are fallible, and as long as software is produced by humans, or by anything humans create to produce software for them, the software will have bugs.
- I accept that there is no magic bullet to programming, no simple, easy way to create bug-free software.
- I will not add unrelated features to programs that do something else. A program should concentrate on one thing and one thing only. If I want a program to do something unrelated, I will write a different program.
- I will design the structure of the program, and freeze its feature set, before I begin coding. Once coding has begun, new features will not be added to the design. Only when the program is finished will I think about adding new features to the next version. Anyone who demands new features be added after coding has begun will be savagely beaten.
- A program is only finished when the time and effort it would take to squash the remaining obscure bugs exceeds the value of adding new features... by a factor of at least two.
- If I find that the design of my program creates significant problems down the line, I will not kludge something into place. I will redesign the program.
- I will document everything thoroughly, including the function and intent of all data structures.
- I will wish for a pony, as that will be about as useful as wishing that people would follow the above rules.:)
The 120 character sig length limit should not count HTML code not seen by users!
I'm replying about your sig, not your post, so this is offtopic, but anyway... the problem with this is that there needs to be SOME limit as to how much HTML you put into your sig, otherwise the trolls could just cram a couple megabytes into it and waste everyone's time and bandwidth.
It would probably be feasible to limit sigs to 120 visible chars and (say) 500 invisible chars, or something.
Slashdot is best when it is a level headed forum for reasoned arguement, not a once sided diatribe against all things capitalist.
It's also best when you don't assume that every single person who posts here has the same set of beliefs.
Of course, with some open source projects, if there is a bug or security flaw, not only does the problem not get fixed, there isn't anyone there to fix it!
There's always someone to fix it. Since the code is available, anyone with the time and inclination can find the bug and fix it. Compare this to closed-source projects, where the company can go out of business, and nobody will have access to the source. In this case, the bug can never be fixed.
There are a number of open source projects that are no longer being maintained, but are in fairly wide use. At least with Microsoft, there is someone there saying "yea, yea... I'll get to it!"
Of course, you have no idea whether or not their fix will actually correctly fix the bug, or whether it might cause other problems... because you have to take Microsoft's word for it that it actually does what it says. Having the code means you can look at it and see for yourself (or find someone you trust to do it for you -- obviously not everyone has the time or ability to pore through open source code, but there are a lot of people who do).
True, anyone has the ability to fix the problem, but most of the time the user is not necessarily a developer or admin. And if someone out there DOES fix the problem, there isn't neccessarily a central place to post the fix.
If the project is alive, then there is always a "central place to post the fix" -- the project's website. If the fix is good and valid, most project managers will accept its contribution. If the project is dead, then there's nothing stopping you from forking your own version of the project (or, with the original developers' blessing, taking control of the defunct project).
Compare this to proprietary programs, where if a company decides to discontinue a piece of software, there's nothing you can do about it.
Open source isn't perfect, but it addresses a lot of the problems that closed source has.
Well, a force that we could never observe, we could never test the existence of. Sure, you could postulate it, but it wouldn't help the theory at all -- you wouldn't be able to tell if your theory was right or not. You might as well say that tiny invisible demons are causing strange things to happen...
In my opinion, the ideal model for the distribution of creative content is this: A creator creates the content (a writer writes a book, filmmakers make a movie, a musician records a song), then releases the content for free.
The public knows that creators have to eat, and so they know that if they like the work that a particular creator puts out, they should donate to that creator in order to encourage him, her, or them to continue producing things they like. If the creator doesn't receive enough donations due to his work, he may choose not to continue doing it (in favor of "regular" jobs). So it's in each reader/viewer/listener's interest to donate to the creators they like, since if they don't, there's a chance that those creators will decide it's not feasible to continue creating, and will stop, thus depriving the audience of further good artistic creations.
Karmically, you'd donate after experiencing a work, for as much as you think the work was worth to you. If you read Doctorow's new book and hated it, you'd probably donate nothing, and never again read one of his books. If you thought he had potential but didn't like this particular book, or simply wanted to reward him for his effort, you might donate a buck or two. Like the book reasonably well? Maybe five bucks. Think it's the greatest thing ever? The sky's the limit.
That's fundamentally it. The core idea is that since publically-disseminated information (like books, songs, and movies) cannot be controlled once published, fighting against it is wasteful and pointless. This isn't a new idea, nor is it originally my idea (I'm not positive but it's essentially a form of busking). Copyright was a nifty idea back when it was relatively difficult to copy large quantities of information like a book, movie, or song, but technology has changed and controlling it the way we do is no longer feasible.
There are practical issues, like the fact that some percentage of people will take in all the content they can without ever compensating the creators. But even they will eventually come to understand that if they don't contribute, and if enough people are like them, the creators will stop making their content. But we don't need laws to enforce this: it'll happen on its own. (And of course, creators could choose to sell copies of their works, if they wanted, in convenient formats; and I'm willing to bet that most people would still prefer to go to a store and buy a convenient copy of a movie or book or album, rather than dealing with getting a digital copy for free.)
Yet another example of the left thinking only of their agenda...
Right, because we all know that the "right" never thinks only of their agenda, or does anything wrong, bad, misguided, or evil. Because politics is so simplistic, that we can just blame all the problems on our enemies! Our side never does anything wrong!
Idiot. I'm on what you would robotically call the "left" and I dislike radical environmentalists just as much as you do. Piss off.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only did the cop not see Hiibel driving the truck, but Hiibel hadn't even been driving the truck -- his daughter had. He wasn't driving at all, let alone driving without a license.
The words "steal" and "theft" do not, by common usage, include the action of copyright infringement. That's why we have the term "copyright infringement" -- to recognize the distinction between physical removal of an object (and subsequent denial of its use), and the unauthorized duplication of materials that someone holds a legal monopoly on. The words are not interchangeable.
What you're saying is that since copyright infringement is kinda like stealing, in that you're "taking" something that doesn't belong to you, and since copyright infringement is illegal and wrong, that therefore it is equivalent to theft. This is linguistically and logically absurd. Whether copyright infringement is illegal (it is) or immoral (debatable) is irrelevant when considering whether the terms "stealing" and "theft" can be accurately applied to the action of duplicating copyrighted works without permission. This is not a "bizarre obsession;" this is critical to the entire debate of the ways that information should be treated like property.
No doubt there are people (even on Slashdot) who try to claim that since infringement isn't exactly the same as stealing, it's therefore not immoral; but that doesn't mean it's true that if infringement is illegal and wrong, and stealing is illegal and wrong, that they're therefore equivalent.
I will also point out that the law makes a very significant distinction between copyright infringement and theft (larceny). So important a distinction that we have an entire Title (17) of the federal U.S. Code dedicated to it (as copyright is only the domain of the federal gov't), whereas larceny is almost entirely handled in state and local law. (Incidentally, I checked: the words "steal," "stealing," "theft," and "larceny" do not appear in Title 17.)
I will also point out that you're implying that every Slashdotter has the exact same hypocritical beliefs: saying that piracy is bad on the one hand (because we all, apparently, like John Carmack); and yet saying on the other hand that piracy is okay (because we're doing it to the evil MPAA/RIAA). We do not all say those things, and I'm willing to bet that the people who say one do not generally say the other, and vice versa. Unless you have some data to back up the assertion that "Slashdotters all pretend to be against software piracy...but music and movies are okay, because we pretend there aren't humans making these things..." (emphasis mine).
*rolls eyes* Yeah, we have a phrase for that kind of behavior. It's called "being a smartass." So I'm glad you're not doing that, then. :)
Then I guess it's a good thing I didn't repeat the mantra. I merely stated that the amount of oil is finite, and it would run out eventually (with the obvious implication that whatever oil is being produced these days is vastly insufficient to keep our society going with the same rate of oil consumption). You were the one who assumed I was doing so from a particular political standpoint.
If you do want to get political about it, there are at least a handful of decent reasons to switch away from an oil economy. Other methods of energy production are less location-bound, meaning that we don't have to bother dealing with politically unstable countries in order to make use of (e.g.) wind, solar, nuclear, biofuel, etc. Political and indirect economic costs are not usually taken into account when determining how much oil costs us.
E.g., maybe it costs me $2 a gallon for gasoline at the pump, so I think oil's cheap. Say I buy $20 of gas every two weeks, so I spend about $500 on gas per year. But if another $500 per year of my federal income taxes goes toward supporting political regimes in other countries that give us good prices on oil (or goes toward our invasion of countries that have oil, so that we can get cheaper access to it -- not that we've done that), then the actual cost is about $4 a gallon.
Other technologies pollute less than oil, which means we wreak less havoc on the environment, and make the world a nicer place to live. I know that I'd gladly pay five times as much for my car's fuel if it meant no more automotive smog (I live in Los Angeles). Et cetera.
There's nothing inevitable about it; it happens that historically, tech advances bring more resources within reach, but there is no law of physics which guarantees that this will always remain so. I don't know enough to do the math, but it's at least conceivable that certain oil resources would require a certain absolute minimum amount of energy to retrieve (e.g. the simple action of pumping the oil up would use more energy than the oil would provide when burned), and the amount of energy we'd get from them would be less than we would spend to do so. Oil resources from beyond a certain depth would fall into this category.
At any rate, counting on the tech curve to save the day isn't necessarily wise. The tech curve on aircraft speed began to stagnate in the 1960s. Passenger aircraft haven't gotten any faster at all in the last forty years. Yet someone could easily have made the same claim, that technological advances would "inevitably" make planes faster and faster.
Maybe I misunderstand, but if we achieve self-sustaining fusion power, why would we need oil?
Unless you're claiming that there is a literally infinite supply of oil in the planet, and therefore we will never run out of oil. Are you claiming that?
There's no rule about freezing the design, only a rule about freezing the feature set.
Actually, all fuels take more energy to produce than they contain -- thanks to the same Second Law of Thermodynamics that Uncle Cecil seems to misunderstand at the end of the linked article. (Don't get me wrong, I like Cecil, but I think he made a little mistake.) Anything that produced more energy than was put into it would violate the Second Law.
You might respond to this by saying, "But it takes less energy to get oil out of the ground than that oil eventually produces when burned!" Well, not exactly. The energy that went into making that oil was expended millions of years ago, and it all started as solar energy that was converted into plant and animal matter by the appropriate biological processes. Not really any different than the ethanol produced by plants that are grown with solar energy.
It's just that those hundreds of millions of years produced a large reserve of oil, so that the energy expended in finding it, drilling it, refining it, and transporting it is less than the amount of energy we get out of it -- but the total amount of energy that's gone into getting the oil into a usable form *is* still greater than the amount that's produced when it burns.
The amount of oil available on our planet is finite. There's still plenty of debate about how much is left, but there's never been any indication that more oil is being produced inside the planet, at least not at a rate that's anywhere near what we use it at. Which means we are going to eventually need alternative fuels. (Assuming our rate of consumption doesn't decrease drastically.) That might be 10, 20, 50, 500 years in the future, but it *will* happen.
All that said, there's also no reason why we have to use fossil fuels to produce ethanol. It's just that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest energy source. That won't remain true forever: the cost of all renewable sources will only ever decrease, as technology improves.
- I accept that humans are fallible, and as long as software is produced by humans, or by anything humans create to produce software for them, the software will have bugs.
:)
- I accept that there is no magic bullet to programming, no simple, easy way to create bug-free software.
- I will not add unrelated features to programs that do something else. A program should concentrate on one thing and one thing only. If I want a program to do something unrelated, I will write a different program.
- I will design the structure of the program, and freeze its feature set, before I begin coding. Once coding has begun, new features will not be added to the design. Only when the program is finished will I think about adding new features to the next version. Anyone who demands new features be added after coding has begun will be savagely beaten.
- A program is only finished when the time and effort it would take to squash the remaining obscure bugs exceeds the value of adding new features... by a factor of at least two.
- If I find that the design of my program creates significant problems down the line, I will not kludge something into place. I will redesign the program.
- I will document everything thoroughly, including the function and intent of all data structures.
- I will wish for a pony, as that will be about as useful as wishing that people would follow the above rules.
It would probably be feasible to limit sigs to 120 visible chars and (say) 500 invisible chars, or something.
Compare this to proprietary programs, where if a company decides to discontinue a piece of software, there's nothing you can do about it.
Open source isn't perfect, but it addresses a lot of the problems that closed source has.
Another version: The U.S. was founded by people so staid and uptight that England threw them out.
This guy looks like his head's being consumed by a giant fungus... and he doesn't mind.
Well, a force that we could never observe, we could never test the existence of. Sure, you could postulate it, but it wouldn't help the theory at all -- you wouldn't be able to tell if your theory was right or not. You might as well say that tiny invisible demons are causing strange things to happen...
In my opinion, the ideal model for the distribution of creative content is this: A creator creates the content (a writer writes a book, filmmakers make a movie, a musician records a song), then releases the content for free.
The public knows that creators have to eat, and so they know that if they like the work that a particular creator puts out, they should donate to that creator in order to encourage him, her, or them to continue producing things they like. If the creator doesn't receive enough donations due to his work, he may choose not to continue doing it (in favor of "regular" jobs). So it's in each reader/viewer/listener's interest to donate to the creators they like, since if they don't, there's a chance that those creators will decide it's not feasible to continue creating, and will stop, thus depriving the audience of further good artistic creations.
Karmically, you'd donate after experiencing a work, for as much as you think the work was worth to you. If you read Doctorow's new book and hated it, you'd probably donate nothing, and never again read one of his books. If you thought he had potential but didn't like this particular book, or simply wanted to reward him for his effort, you might donate a buck or two. Like the book reasonably well? Maybe five bucks. Think it's the greatest thing ever? The sky's the limit.
That's fundamentally it. The core idea is that since publically-disseminated information (like books, songs, and movies) cannot be controlled once published, fighting against it is wasteful and pointless. This isn't a new idea, nor is it originally my idea (I'm not positive but it's essentially a form of busking). Copyright was a nifty idea back when it was relatively difficult to copy large quantities of information like a book, movie, or song, but technology has changed and controlling it the way we do is no longer feasible.
There are practical issues, like the fact that some percentage of people will take in all the content they can without ever compensating the creators. But even they will eventually come to understand that if they don't contribute, and if enough people are like them, the creators will stop making their content. But we don't need laws to enforce this: it'll happen on its own. (And of course, creators could choose to sell copies of their works, if they wanted, in convenient formats; and I'm willing to bet that most people would still prefer to go to a store and buy a convenient copy of a movie or book or album, rather than dealing with getting a digital copy for free.)
Pfft. Real men jam the ethernet cable into their tongues and interpret the electrical signals by feel.
Matt Hooper was the name of Richard Dreyfuss's character in "Jaws." Might not be the poster's real name. :)
Idiot. I'm on what you would robotically call the "left" and I dislike radical environmentalists just as much as you do. Piss off.