People tend be conservative in their beliefs. Until now there was always oil, therefore there will always be oil. It is difficult to grasp an abstract concept (Peak Oil, for example) and translate it to your own real lifestyle in the real world, when everybody agrees it's going to happen but can't imagine it's actually going to happen to *THEM* if they live long enough.
The only recourse is really to teach people what EROEI means, and that open-pit-mining shale, crushing the rock and boiling the petroleum out of it may be very possible but not necessarily a useful idea.
I recommend The Oil Drum.
Could you be more specific (not all of us use MS Windows or XFCE4 on a regular basis): are all the shortcuts wrong because they're inconsistent within KDE, or are they wrong because they're different from usage in other GUIs? I mean, bye "regular applications" do you mean "regular KDE applications" or "regular VM/CMS applications";-) ?
Maybe it's an idea to put it in the "computer" tab of the application launcher, between "system settings" and "run command".
Also, it would be nice if the keybinding was displayed next to it, i.e.
"show running programs control-escape"
"run command alt-F2"
I mean, how is a beginning user going to ever find alt-F2 ??
OK, then put the distinction line between materials used for construction (e.g. silver, gallium) and materials that are consumed in energy production (coal, uranium). Of course you'll also run out of construction materials eventually because repair and recycling can't be 100% perfect (third law of thermodynamics), but it'll take *much* longer than most consumables.
You're using the argument that without software patents, those "inventions" would not be publically disclosed (after all, that's the trade-off, right?)
So why is it that the source code of those "inventions" is not attached to the patent as proof of public disclosure? There's no technical reason whatsoever to not do this.
What's the economic value of 500,000 messages that contains only the plain text "&GREETTEXT& hello Cynthia. we've got the best deals anywhere. time is money friend"?
It poisons the Bayesian anti-spam filters, so that the real spam can get through more easily, and false positives (losing your real e-mail) becomes more likely, making you more likely to turn those anti-spam filters off.
There's a strong bias in good spam filters; accidentally receiving some extra spam messages is perceived as much less harmful than accidentally destroying your legitimate e-mails.
A variety of groups have shown their interest in getting more information on the substance of
the negotiations and have requested that the draft text be disclosed. However, it is accepted
practice during trade negotiations among sovereign states to not share negotiating texts with
the public at large, particularly at earlier stages of the negotiation. This allows delegations to
exchange views in confidence facilitating the negotiation and compromise that are necessary
in order to reach agreement on complex issues. At this point in time, ACTA delegations are
still discussing various proposals for the different elements that may ultimately be included in
the agreement. A comprehensive set of proposals for the text of the agreement does not yet
exist.
...
ACTA is not intended to interfere with a signatory's ability to respect its citizens' fundamental
rights and civil liberties, and will be consistent with the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and will respect the Declaration
on TRIPS and Public Health.
Great. We must hold our governments to this intent.
Section 4: Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement in the Digital Environment
This section of the agreement is intended to address some of the special challenges that
new technologies pose for enforcement of intellectual property rights, such as the possible
role and responsibilities of internet service providers in deterring copyright and related rights
piracy over the Internet. No draft proposal has been tabled yet, as discussions are still
focused on gathering information on the different national legal regimes to develop a
common understanding on how to deal best with these issues.
I don't like that "possible role and responsibilities of internet service providers" idea. They pass along bits from A to B. Nowadays in Europe you can get a court order to divulge recent traffic information, it seems. As other people have put it, should telephone operators be sued for their "possible role and responsibilities in deterring (threats and slander) over the (telephone)"?
The whole "Summary of Key Elements Under Discussion" document seems to focus on "better international enforcement of intellectual property rights". There is no place where the rights of the actual citizens of the countries are mentioned.
At the moment, without further information, I'd guess ACTA builds on the TRIPS agreement (countries must do what the USA tells them to do / harmonize their intellectual properties laws together) rather than on the South-American Operacion Condor approach to countries giving each other "technical assistance in improved enforcement":-).
But it's probably good to be vigilant.
Here is some supplemental info straight from one of the horses' mouths:
Anti-counterfeiting
It's a bit heavy on the misleading term "intellectual property".
If the Internet went down, Pringles would make a killing selling their crisps cans to be used as amplifiers for municipal WiFi such as in the Wireless Leiden project.
(Disclaimer: I've never used a wireless network in my life so YMMV, but I went to a lecture about Wireless Leiden once)
AFAIK, the current European copyright duration is "70 years post mortem auctoris". It's preposterous.
For example: J.K. Rowling is a European woman in the 21st century so let's suppose (and hope) she lives to put 90 candles on her birthday cake. That means that with current legislation, barring further ex-post-facto law changes, that Harry Potter is her publisher's monopoly right until anno domini 2125, or 116 years from now.
Publishing companies don't have eternal life either, so what are the odds that Bloomsbury Publishing (est. 1986) will still exist 116 years from now? And if it doesn't, *NOBODY* has the legal right to publish the adventures of the lightning-scarred pubescent until 2125. Not even Google:-)
I think that copyright should be the maximum of (the author's life , x years after production) where the mathematical optimum for x was something like 14 years? but even if it's 40 years that seems more reasonable.
X should be > 0 to prevent the following scenario: record company A "owns" wildly famous rock star B. competing record company C gets B killed, and can start production of B's records immediately as well as A, since B's dead and his music is now public domain.
However I consider the chance slim that someone kills Harry Mulisch to get "Wenken voor de Jongste Dag" (1967) into the public domain a few years sooner (sorry mr. Mulisch).
So they haven't tried an female-only crew yet, then. Preferably vegans (what are you going to eat for a year? cows? frozen hamburgers?). Preferably short. Preferably black (better UV resistance at the destination; don't know if it also helps against cosmic radiation though..) Add the male compartment of the crew in the form of a Dewar barrel with frozen sperm in case they want to build a colony.
I for one welcome our Martian vegan lesbian Pigmy colonist overladies!
<flamebait>Mars might even be a more welcoming habitat than Congo/Rwanda</flamebait>
Another (hippie??) lesson could be summarised as "designing a self-sufficient human-sustaining environment is HARD. So don't destroy the only currently working specimen we know."
So, I concur with GP, that an experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
Yeah, Windows now has drm. That has a lot more to do with media companies demanding it in order to allow their product to work in Windows than M$ inventing it and forcing the masses to its will.
I disagree. If the media companies demanded DRM and Microsoft, the maker of the OS on more than 90% PC's, told them to spin on it, do you seriously believe they would forbid 90% of computer users to play DVD's on their PC's? Region coding would be a thing of the past already.
For a while...
Get the Facts: LSE and Microsoft
Unfortunately, I can't find the proud LSE case study on Microsoft's Get the Facts webpage anymore:-(
Strange;-)
That's sad.
I'd have hoped that initiatives such as ODF workshop in the Netherlands and OfficeShots.org would contribute to better interoperability.
Can you give us any idea whether things are at least improving lately.
We have to lie. We must lie. It is imperative. Why? The truth can't sell. There it is in a nutshell. Truth about pharmaceuticals, processed foods, pollution, politics, power, religion,... ALL of cannot stand intense scrutiny.
That's sick.
In the sense that, it's not a stable and healthy basis for a civilisation.
I'll throw a Godwin for this:
What you say reminds me of the factoid that many Americans now believe that the war in Iraq has anything to do with the war in Afghanistan. This was fomented e.g. by showing news flashes from both wars in an alternating pattern.People then quickly form the association that because there's a temporal relationship (i.e. they watch footage from the war in Afghanistan and then Hans Blix in Iraq, every day: Iraq - Afghanistan - Iraq - Afghanistan - etc.) then there must also be a causal link.
What is "sick", in the sense of "unhealthy", is that in 20-50 years, it's going to be difficult for Americans to get a proper perspective of events in our time, because what the historians write will be dissimilar from what the people remember from the stories of their grandparents.
A bit like the outrage in Turkey now, about the demands of the EU that they get to grips with their peoples role in the Armenian genocide of 1915. The Turks of our generation say: "what Armenian genocide? There was no Armenian genocide in our history books".
Visualisation of the 3-D structure of medium-sized molecules, for example. See picture on this advertisement. That was 20 years ago, on an SGI Iris. The workstation was slow but fast enough to watch your basepairs of DNA in 3-D with OpenGL. I can't recall the specs of the Iris. Later we also used a faster SGI Indy which (I just looked up on wikipedia) had something like 32 Mb memory and ran on a MIPS R4400 CPU at (guessing wildly here) 200 MHz.
Slashdot Mirror
People tend be conservative in their beliefs. Until now there was always oil, therefore there will always be oil. It is difficult to grasp an abstract concept (Peak Oil, for example) and translate it to your own real lifestyle in the real world, when everybody agrees it's going to happen but can't imagine it's actually going to happen to *THEM* if they live long enough.
The only recourse is really to teach people what EROEI means, and that open-pit-mining shale, crushing the rock and boiling the petroleum out of it may be very possible but not necessarily a useful idea.
I recommend The Oil Drum.
Wouldn't it be fun if Mandelson ALSO changes allegiance to the Tories?
Here's another debt clock, this one's been ticking for years already: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Tony Blair made the UK join the US, therefore its laws apply, naturally.
I got my information from an allegorical depiction in a videoclip by George Michael, so it is trustworthy.
Could you be more specific (not all of us use MS Windows or XFCE4 on a regular basis): are all the shortcuts wrong because they're inconsistent within KDE, or are they wrong because they're different from usage in other GUIs? I mean, bye "regular applications" do you mean "regular KDE applications" or "regular VM/CMS applications" ;-) ?
Maybe it's an idea to put it in the "computer" tab of the application launcher, between "system settings" and "run command". Also, it would be nice if the keybinding was displayed next to it, i.e. "show running programs control-escape" "run command alt-F2" I mean, how is a beginning user going to ever find alt-F2 ??
Nice. didn't know it existed. Makes it easier to kill pulseaudio when it misbehaves :-)
OK, then put the distinction line between materials used for construction (e.g. silver, gallium) and materials that are consumed in energy production (coal, uranium). Of course you'll also run out of construction materials eventually because repair and recycling can't be 100% perfect (third law of thermodynamics), but it'll take *much* longer than most consumables.
On second thought.. No don't d---NO CARRIER
You're using the argument that without software patents, those "inventions" would not be publically disclosed (after all, that's the trade-off, right?) So why is it that the source code of those "inventions" is not attached to the patent as proof of public disclosure? There's no technical reason whatsoever to not do this.
What's the economic value of 500,000 messages that contains only the plain text "&GREETTEXT& hello Cynthia. we've got the best deals anywhere. time is money friend"?
It poisons the Bayesian anti-spam filters, so that the real spam can get through more easily, and false positives (losing your real e-mail) becomes more likely, making you more likely to turn those anti-spam filters off.
There's a strong bias in good spam filters; accidentally receiving some extra spam messages is perceived as much less harmful than accidentally destroying your legitimate e-mails.
I understand the balance of power will be shifting back in favor of the Parliament when the Lisbon treaty goes into effect.
In that case, it will be interesting to see what the fisheries ministers all get to sign before 1 December :-)
...
Great. We must hold our governments to this intent.
I don't like that "possible role and responsibilities of internet service providers" idea. They pass along bits from A to B. Nowadays in Europe you can get a court order to divulge recent traffic information, it seems. As other people have put it, should telephone operators be sued for their "possible role and responsibilities in deterring (threats and slander) over the (telephone)"?
:-).
The whole "Summary of Key Elements Under Discussion" document seems to focus on "better international enforcement of intellectual property rights". There is no place where the rights of the actual citizens of the countries are mentioned.
At the moment, without further information, I'd guess ACTA builds on the TRIPS agreement (countries must do what the USA tells them to do / harmonize their intellectual properties laws together) rather than on the South-American Operacion Condor approach to countries giving each other "technical assistance in improved enforcement"
But it's probably good to be vigilant.
Here is some supplemental info straight from one of the horses' mouths:
Anti-counterfeiting
It's a bit heavy on the misleading term "intellectual property".
That's called the "Panspermia" hypothesis.
If the Internet went down, Pringles would make a killing selling their crisps cans to be used as amplifiers for municipal WiFi such as in the Wireless Leiden project.
(Disclaimer: I've never used a wireless network in my life so YMMV, but I went to a lecture about Wireless Leiden once)
Mother Nature abhors YOU.
AFAIK, the current European copyright duration is "70 years post mortem auctoris". It's preposterous. :-)
For example: J.K. Rowling is a European woman in the 21st century so let's suppose (and hope) she lives to put 90 candles on her birthday cake. That means that with current legislation, barring further ex-post-facto law changes, that Harry Potter is her publisher's monopoly right until anno domini 2125, or 116 years from now.
Publishing companies don't have eternal life either, so what are the odds that Bloomsbury Publishing (est. 1986) will still exist 116 years from now? And if it doesn't, *NOBODY* has the legal right to publish the adventures of the lightning-scarred pubescent until 2125. Not even Google
I think that copyright should be the maximum of (the author's life , x years after production) where the mathematical optimum for x was something like 14 years? but even if it's 40 years that seems more reasonable.
X should be > 0 to prevent the following scenario: record company A "owns" wildly famous rock star B. competing record company C gets B killed, and can start production of B's records immediately as well as A, since B's dead and his music is now public domain.
However I consider the chance slim that someone kills Harry Mulisch to get "Wenken voor de Jongste Dag" (1967) into the public domain a few years sooner (sorry mr. Mulisch).
So they haven't tried an female-only crew yet, then. Preferably vegans (what are you going to eat for a year? cows? frozen hamburgers?). Preferably short. Preferably black (better UV resistance at the destination; don't know if it also helps against cosmic radiation though..) Add the male compartment of the crew in the form of a Dewar barrel with frozen sperm in case they want to build a colony.
I for one welcome our Martian vegan lesbian Pigmy colonist overladies!
<flamebait>Mars might even be a more welcoming habitat than Congo/Rwanda</flamebait>
Another (hippie??) lesson could be summarised as "designing a self-sufficient human-sustaining environment is HARD. So don't destroy the only currently working specimen we know."
So, I concur with GP, that an experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
I disagree. If the media companies demanded DRM and Microsoft, the maker of the OS on more than 90% PC's, told them to spin on it, do you seriously believe they would forbid 90% of computer users to play DVD's on their PC's? Region coding would be a thing of the past already.
For a while... :-(
;-)
Get the Facts: LSE and Microsoft
Unfortunately, I can't find the proud LSE case study on Microsoft's Get the Facts webpage anymore
Strange
That's sad.
I'd have hoped that initiatives such as ODF workshop in the Netherlands and OfficeShots.org would contribute to better interoperability.
Can you give us any idea whether things are at least improving lately.
That's sick.
In the sense that, it's not a stable and healthy basis for a civilisation.
I'll throw a Godwin for this:
What you say reminds me of the factoid that many Americans now believe that the war in Iraq has anything to do with the war in Afghanistan. This was fomented e.g. by showing news flashes from both wars in an alternating pattern.People then quickly form the association that because there's a temporal relationship (i.e. they watch footage from the war in Afghanistan and then Hans Blix in Iraq, every day: Iraq - Afghanistan - Iraq - Afghanistan - etc.) then there must also be a causal link.
What is "sick", in the sense of "unhealthy", is that in 20-50 years, it's going to be difficult for Americans to get a proper perspective of events in our time, because what the historians write will be dissimilar from what the people remember from the stories of their grandparents.
A bit like the outrage in Turkey now, about the demands of the EU that they get to grips with their peoples role in the Armenian genocide of 1915. The Turks of our generation say: "what Armenian genocide? There was no Armenian genocide in our history books".
Visualisation of the 3-D structure of medium-sized molecules, for example. See picture on this advertisement. That was 20 years ago, on an SGI Iris. The workstation was slow but fast enough to watch your basepairs of DNA in 3-D with OpenGL. I can't recall the specs of the Iris. Later we also used a faster SGI Indy which (I just looked up on wikipedia) had something like 32 Mb memory and ran on a MIPS R4400 CPU at (guessing wildly here) 200 MHz.