But then I'm from Scotland, the homeland of the phone's inventor
If you mean, Alexander Graham Bell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell, then you (like many others) still dont realise he may have profitted from (possibily one of the earliest) abuses of the patenting system.
From the Wikipedia article -
"However, it has been recognized (such as by the U.S. Congress in 2002) that Antonio Meucci was the first to invent the telephone in 1871. Bell invented his own telephone in 1875 after discovering that a receiver could also be a transmitter. Some claim he went to the patent office and bribed the officials there to destroy the records of Meucci's inventor-of-the-telephone status (Meucci was too poor to secure a patent). In any case Bell then secured his own patent in 1876, just hours before Elisha Gray visited the patent office for his own work on the telephone. Meucci was understandably furious, and took Bell to court. However, he was too poor to hire a legal team, and in declining health, he died before the end of the court case."
The telephone was originally built on a foundation of patent madness (the richest man, not the first, was the inventor), so why should the internet be any different?
The headline implies that these are the first organisms to survive in an ecosystem without the effects of sunlight. But there are other ecosystems devoid of (direct) sunlight influence, in the bottom of the oceans ecosystems are supported by the heat and nutrients of volcanic vents and more recently life has been found deep in caves streams so sulphur rich they would be fatal to all other lifeforms.
AFAIK this is the third such non-solar dependant ecosystem.
Every virus, every big news story about infected PCs, experts are interviewed and give the same advice for the public "run an up to date firewall, spyware and anti-virus program. Dont click on links or attachments in unsolicited emails regardless of how juicy the offerings". A few months later another big virus hits the news, the same advice is trotted out. I can only assume that the advice is being ignored, or not understood. We have lost the battle, because if this advice was followed, it wouldn't eliminate the problem, but I reckon it would be very much reduced.
We would get far less junk mail if people didn't keep responding for their free prize, reduce the benefits of production, (the 'demand' for spam/junk mail) reduce the incentive to produce.
assuming present energy prices - rarely paid for themselves
As with my parent argument, how much more expensive do energy prices have to get to be before that rarely turns into an always?
They might pay for themselves if electrical power gets more expensive
'When' not 'if', electricity is mostly generated from finite resources and as we can see building renuable sources is not trivial, that and increasing demand for energy.
As fuel and therefore electricity get more expensive so the demand of creating one's own electricity increase, the solar panels, wind farms, etc. may themselves become more expensive. Google may well be balancing the cost of building solar panels now, with the cost of solar panels in the future and the projected rises in cost of electricity - as young company we have no idea just how good their foresight is.
You beat me to it, Autism could explain why more kids were watching TV than engaging with others as well as vice versa and also there could be a third factor that causes both..
Just an idea but could the number of good doctors (ie more likely to diagnose Autism) and cable TV take up be caused by the affluence of the community as opposed to each other?
Also the media jumping at causes of Autism can be very dangerous, here in the UK only a few years ago people began to stop using the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) innoculation jab, for their kids, on the basis that there might be a possibility of an increased chance of the child developing autism. This may sound reasonable, but the governments concerns about this were right, many people moved to separate injections and either didn't do them all (leaving children uninnoculated against a major disease) or not at all (leaving children uninnoculated against all three major diseases). Parents did this on the basic of a media storm created by one scientific paper (and bad handling of said storm by Tony Blair).
I really hate it when the media jump on one scientific paper as if it is fact, before it has a chance of getting shot down or established as the prevalent theory. I bet this one makes the papers go nuts.
You do realize how short sighted that economic view is, dont you?
How expensive does oil/coal etc have to get before this saves money? In the short term this may cost money, but it does after all provide a renewable and free resource. It is just like double glazed windows, for the first few years the total cost is greater, but you are always saving money and after some years the saving has outweighed the cost of replacing the windows. This break even comes much sooner when you factor in the always increasing cost of finite energy.
I don't think that the patriot missile was a cover-up for anything else spectacular
I seem to remember that in Desert Storm, 'news' of Patriot missiles downing Scuds was used to keep Israel from wading-in, but the Patroits didn't actually knock down any Scuds during that operation, it was all a successful hoax. Perhaps not spectacular.
And that's counting just those who sent the crash reports.
Why would you install a beta version of an operating system and not send in crash reports? Perhaps it was because 1 in every 10 couldn't get it to install/boot/work
The basic argument is that an action is unethical if it causes suffering, and that many classes of animals can suffer (although generally not as much as humans). Therefore, it's unethical to cause the suffering of animals.
I entirely agree, but an animal that is on my dinner plate, and forms my wallet, is not (I hope) an animal that suffered. My original point was not that animals should be beaten for fun or anything like that, I strongly believe in animals having some rights. My point was that many people who that get upset at the idea that an animal has died to feed and clothe people, get upset for very naive reasons.
As I said, slavery and slaughter are different things, I dont personally see the parallel. I was trying to explain why.
It's only "right" if you think it is. But you're practicing Speciesism. Be aware that that's what you are doing and question whether or not it's justified under the circumstances of the situation you're focusing on.
Practicing 'speciesism'? I give one, albeit bad, reason for why people may think it is ok for dogs to be enslaved and I am Speciesist? Up until now I did not know such a phenomenon existed, I think you 'created' it. Perhaps I am not a great philosopher. Indulge me, in your opinion, Why is it right that dogs are enslaved?
So after a few generations of slaves we end up with a new `species` - that's ok because they'd not have existed in the wild?
Did I say it was OK? And no we wouldn't end up with a new species unless humans engineered it so, either by selective breeding or by genetic engineering.
Animal rights . . . is about giving them the right to a life without unnecessary suffering.
I didn't say anything about animal rights and anyway your definition supports the principle that killing an animal for meat does not violate it's rights (if slaughtered humainly). Which is kind of the point I was making in the grandparent. Should animal rights be different to human rights? now who is being Speciesist?
That's a very good point. I dont intend to disagree, however I dont think it is quite the same, the point here is about killing an animal for food NOT forced labour. But to clarify, slaves were not 'created', a slave in America or free man in Africa the human would have existed anyway (perhaps not that exact one DNAwise). American slaves were I believe Homo Sapiens even after a few generations they were still so. We use dogs as slaves so why is that right? Probably because they are a different species, a different order even. A species that would not exist if we hadn't bred them to, for sheparding, fighting, companionship etc. over dozens of millenia. And after that amount of selective breeding you end up with a animal that is suited to the job and enjoys it.
Human slaves were intelligent enough to know that they were no different from their enslavers and they knew what freedom was, they were simply prevented from having it - unfair and unnecessary cruelty. I dont know if Scraps has any idea of the abstract concept of freedom and he doesn't seem to mind pulling a sleigh (perhaps even enjoys it) - not cruel IMHO.
I am exactly the same (although usually Sainsburys as we dont have a Tesco near), I shop on a Sunday. Like I did say, supermarkets destroyed them, but it may well have been in the consumers interests. For bakers (perhaps unlike butchers) they were beaten by the supermarkets deliberately underpricing (9p loaves for instance) for bread below the cost of production, in order to get people to shop there. Bakers of course couldn't sell bread for less than the price it costs to make it plus a profit. So many bakers went out of business. Fortunately the healthy eating culture is bringing them back to make filled baguettes, which is destroying the fish and chips stores. In this case the free market seems to be working. And anyway, the butcher in a supermarket is now the local butcher.
However British farmers may have more reason to resent the supermarkets, as the purchasing power supermarkets wield isn't in either the consumers benefits or those of farmers.
Just out of curiosity (off topic I know) - Do they really think that cattle would exist unharmed roaming the plains if we hadn't 'created' them over thousands of years of selective breeding? Do they really think that stone age man wore fur clothes because they were too cruel to grow cotton?
I dont mind selective diets, but I am often amazed at many peoples reasons for doing so, so many people are so naive and uninformed as to the reasons livestock even exist.
The old joke "If eating meat is cruel then why are animals made of meat?" is more insightful than some people realise.
Re:10 hours is a lot, really.
on
Yakuza Review
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Dunno, but if these guys are a Wal-Mart UK equivelant
I believe the UK Walmart is ASDA http://www.asda.co.uk/, owned by Walmart and Tesco's biggest rival. But ethically all UK supermarkets are not to be trusted too closely, their combined buying power has allowed them to destroy british farmers, independant butchers, local bakers etc. However it could be aruged that they have done this in the benefit of the consumer, and going up against Microsoft certainly would be in the benefit of us consumers. The more people in the UK having something other than Windows, forces organisations such as the BBC to produce for platforms other than WindowsMedia, IE and Windows. Lets just hope it isn't just Tesco that does this.
Remember Hollywood is built on the production of fictional stories.
Check the end of the 'study' I bet there is a "This paper is fictional, any similarity to persons or events alive or dead is purely coincedental" disclaimer.
Backing up is a bit of a red herring with the BBC as they only really want their content available for a short while (a matter of around a week). If that was the argument against DRM (&WMP11) then I dont think it would make them reconsider for a second. My argument against too much M$ intrusion is that it prevents finding a solution that can run on all platforms. The BBC does have an obligation to make itself as accessible as possible for the licence payer.
47 seconds to boot up was the best? Our SATAs, our dual cores, our GB of DDR2, our PCI-E and it still takes almost a minute to boot up Windows. No wonder I dont want to upgrade, progress isn't making things any faster.
Well all the experts who predicted 'a bloodbath of crime' before the crime rate dropped in the mid 90s, sought many reasons why the crime rate dropped so no one would point out they were wrong. But from reading 'Freakonomics' it would seem that the three reasons the authors could actually support with statistical evidence were abortion, stronger jail sentencing and more police officers, many other reasons given simply have no numbers to back them up. What is also interesting is that it gave evdence to show that what one's parents did to/for their child had no impact on the childs life. What did have an effect was who the parents were (how successful they were) and the child's peers.
Never before has something so human and primitive as dating been reducible to such discrete values.
Actually I just finished reading 'Freakonomics'http://www.freakonomics.com/ its been out for a year and did just such an analysis on Internet Dating. It really is a good read.
The problem is not the number of processors but actually making use of them, so you *can* have enough cores. There is no point having an 80 core system if ony two of the cores are being used. What Tom Yager is saying is that AMD & Intel makers shouldn't just fall into a race to see how many cores they can fit on a chip but actually getting architecture and software that ensures that adding new cores does actually give a performance advantage.
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From the Wikipedia article -
The telephone was originally built on a foundation of patent madness (the richest man, not the first, was the inventor), so why should the internet be any different?
Yeah, my bad, I dont know why I missed it the first time.
The headline implies that these are the first organisms to survive in an ecosystem without the effects of sunlight. But there are other ecosystems devoid of (direct) sunlight influence, in the bottom of the oceans ecosystems are supported by the heat and nutrients of volcanic vents and more recently life has been found deep in caves streams so sulphur rich they would be fatal to all other lifeforms.
AFAIK this is the third such non-solar dependant ecosystem.
Every virus, every big news story about infected PCs, experts are interviewed and give the same advice for the public "run an up to date firewall, spyware and anti-virus program. Dont click on links or attachments in unsolicited emails regardless of how juicy the offerings". A few months later another big virus hits the news, the same advice is trotted out.
I can only assume that the advice is being ignored, or not understood. We have lost the battle, because if this advice was followed, it wouldn't eliminate the problem, but I reckon it would be very much reduced.
We would get far less junk mail if people didn't keep responding for their free prize, reduce the benefits of production, (the 'demand' for spam/junk mail) reduce the incentive to produce.
'When' not 'if', electricity is mostly generated from finite resources and as we can see building renuable sources is not trivial, that and increasing demand for energy.
As fuel and therefore electricity get more expensive so the demand of creating one's own electricity increase, the solar panels, wind farms, etc. may themselves become more expensive. Google may well be balancing the cost of building solar panels now, with the cost of solar panels in the future and the projected rises in cost of electricity - as young company we have no idea just how good their foresight is.
You beat me to it, Autism could explain why more kids were watching TV than engaging with others as well as vice versa and also there could be a third factor that causes both. .
Just an idea but could the number of good doctors (ie more likely to diagnose Autism) and cable TV take up be caused by the affluence of the community as opposed to each other?
Also the media jumping at causes of Autism can be very dangerous, here in the UK only a few years ago people began to stop using the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) innoculation jab, for their kids, on the basis that there might be a possibility of an increased chance of the child developing autism.
This may sound reasonable, but the governments concerns about this were right, many people moved to separate injections and either didn't do them all (leaving children uninnoculated against a major disease) or not at all (leaving children uninnoculated against all three major diseases). Parents did this on the basic of a media storm created by one scientific paper (and bad handling of said storm by Tony Blair).
I really hate it when the media jump on one scientific paper as if it is fact, before it has a chance of getting shot down or established as the prevalent theory. I bet this one makes the papers go nuts.
You do realize how short sighted that economic view is, dont you?
How expensive does oil/coal etc have to get before this saves money? In the short term this may cost money, but it does after all provide a renewable and free resource.
It is just like double glazed windows, for the first few years the total cost is greater, but you are always saving money and after some years the saving has outweighed the cost of replacing the windows. This break even comes much sooner when you factor in the always increasing cost of finite energy.
Perhaps it was because 1 in every 10 couldn't get it to install/boot/work
My original point was not that animals should be beaten for fun or anything like that, I strongly believe in animals having some rights. My point was that many people who that get upset at the idea that an animal has died to feed and clothe people, get upset for very naive reasons.
Practicing 'speciesism'? I give one, albeit bad, reason for why people may think it is ok for dogs to be enslaved and I am Speciesist? Up until now I did not know such a phenomenon existed, I think you 'created' it.
Perhaps I am not a great philosopher. Indulge me, in your opinion, Why is it right that dogs are enslaved?
Did I say it was OK?
And no we wouldn't end up with a new species unless humans engineered it so, either by selective breeding or by genetic engineering.
I didn't say anything about animal rights and anyway your definition supports the principle that killing an animal for meat does not violate it's rights (if slaughtered humainly). Which is kind of the point I was making in the grandparent. Should animal rights be different to human rights? now who is being Speciesist?
That's a very good point.
I dont intend to disagree, however I dont think it is quite the same, the point here is about killing an animal for food NOT forced labour.
But to clarify, slaves were not 'created', a slave in America or free man in Africa the human would have existed anyway (perhaps not that exact one DNAwise). American slaves were I believe Homo Sapiens even after a few generations they were still so. We use dogs as slaves so why is that right? Probably because they are a different species, a different order even. A species that would not exist if we hadn't bred them to, for sheparding, fighting, companionship etc. over dozens of millenia. And after that amount of selective breeding you end up with a animal that is suited to the job and enjoys it.
Human slaves were intelligent enough to know that they were no different from their enslavers and they knew what freedom was, they were simply prevented from having it - unfair and unnecessary cruelty. I dont know if Scraps has any idea of the abstract concept of freedom and he doesn't seem to mind pulling a sleigh (perhaps even enjoys it) - not cruel IMHO.
I am exactly the same (although usually Sainsburys as we dont have a Tesco near), I shop on a Sunday.
Like I did say, supermarkets destroyed them, but it may well have been in the consumers interests.
For bakers (perhaps unlike butchers) they were beaten by the supermarkets deliberately underpricing (9p loaves for instance) for bread below the cost of production, in order to get people to shop there. Bakers of course couldn't sell bread for less than the price it costs to make it plus a profit. So many bakers went out of business. Fortunately the healthy eating culture is bringing them back to make filled baguettes, which is destroying the fish and chips stores. In this case the free market seems to be working.
And anyway, the butcher in a supermarket is now the local butcher.
However British farmers may have more reason to resent the supermarkets, as the purchasing power supermarkets wield isn't in either the consumers benefits or those of farmers.
Just out of curiosity (off topic I know) - Do they really think that cattle would exist unharmed roaming the plains if we hadn't 'created' them over thousands of years of selective breeding? Do they really think that stone age man wore fur clothes because they were too cruel to grow cotton?
I dont mind selective diets, but I am often amazed at many peoples reasons for doing so, so many people are so naive and uninformed as to the reasons livestock even exist.
The old joke "If eating meat is cruel then why are animals made of meat?" is more insightful than some people realise.
I would be amazed if anyone could get through Stalingrad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalingrad_(book) or Godel,Escher,Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_B ach (that old favourite) in under 10 hours.
Oh and yes, I would consider both, essential reading.
But ethically all UK supermarkets are not to be trusted too closely, their combined buying power has allowed them to destroy british farmers, independant butchers, local bakers etc.
However it could be aruged that they have done this in the benefit of the consumer, and going up against Microsoft certainly would be in the benefit of us consumers. The more people in the UK having something other than Windows, forces organisations such as the BBC to produce for platforms other than WindowsMedia, IE and Windows.
Lets just hope it isn't just Tesco that does this.
Remember Hollywood is built on the production of fictional stories.
Check the end of the 'study' I bet there is a "This paper is fictional, any similarity to persons or events alive or dead is purely coincedental" disclaimer.
Backing up is a bit of a red herring with the BBC as they only really want their content available for a short while (a matter of around a week). If that was the argument against DRM (&WMP11) then I dont think it would make them reconsider for a second.
My argument against too much M$ intrusion is that it prevents finding a solution that can run on all platforms. The BBC does have an obligation to make itself as accessible as possible for the licence payer.
47 seconds to boot up was the best?
Our SATAs, our dual cores, our GB of DDR2, our PCI-E and it still takes almost a minute to boot up Windows.
No wonder I dont want to upgrade, progress isn't making things any faster.
Good point, couldn't they also attach these to paraplegics and help them walk? I would have thought that this would be a more important application.
Well all the experts who predicted 'a bloodbath of crime' before the crime rate dropped in the mid 90s, sought many reasons why the crime rate dropped so no one would point out they were wrong. But from reading 'Freakonomics' it would seem that the three reasons the authors could actually support with statistical evidence were abortion, stronger jail sentencing and more police officers, many other reasons given simply have no numbers to back them up.
What is also interesting is that it gave evdence to show that what one's parents did to/for their child had no impact on the childs life. What did have an effect was who the parents were (how successful they were) and the child's peers.
And yes they did say abortion. An excerpt from the chapter is here- http://www.freakonomics.com/ch4.php
The problem is not the number of processors but actually making use of them, so you *can* have enough cores. There is no point having an 80 core system if ony two of the cores are being used.
What Tom Yager is saying is that AMD & Intel makers shouldn't just fall into a race to see how many cores they can fit on a chip but actually getting architecture and software that ensures that adding new cores does actually give a performance advantage.