Because of engineering reasons mostly. We could define a kilogram to be X many photons that have the same wavelength as the hyper-fine hydrogen emission or whatever. But unless you've got a machine that can count out exactly that many photons and withstand the Hiroshima magnitude energies of those photons just long enough to either convert them into mass or weigh them against another mass, it won't work as a standard.
In theory there at lots of theoretical definitions of the kilogram that would work just fine. (E.g. according to general relativity G = 8*pi*T where T is the mass and G is the curvature (this is a simplification) so we could define the kilogram by the amount of spatial curvature it causes.) But in practice, most of the definitions are impractical because either we don't have the engineering technology to do the measurements or the measurements don't have enough precision in them (we need upwards of 9 digits of precision).
IIRC, temperatures are notoriously difficult to measure/reproduce/etc. with high precision. You could probably only get five or six digits of precision out of a temperature measurement which in turn limits your kilogram precision, but we probably want upwards of 9 digits of precision in our kilogram.
I don't think anyone in America believes they are paying less than their "willing to pay" price.
There is no choice. We *must* drive to work, etc.
As I indicated in my post, if they are still buying the product then by definition they are willing to pay. It's called an inelastic demand and market forces work just fine there. Maybe you forgot that from ECON 101.
I never said that Petroleum is a free market, but rather that the GGP has an incorrect understanding of "willing to pay" (which you seem to share). Petroleum is indeed a prototypical example of an oligopoly based market. However, the reasons it is not a free market have nothing to do with whether you buy gas (i.e. elasticity) and everything to do with from whom you buy gas (i.e. oligopoly). The GGP is blaming the wrong cause which is no help to anybody.
In a free market the economic profit should indeed tend toward 0% but the 7% you mention is accounting profit which doesn't include things like opportunity costs.
Also, "willing to pay" doesn't mean "the price you think is fair". It means "the price at which you stop buying". It would be better termed "willing to buy". But actually that doesn't matter since a true free market actually charges less than some people's "willing to pay" price and more than other people's "willing to pay" price because some people are willing to pay more than others even though the price the item is sold at is (usually) the same for everyone. (Exceptions include coupons, student discounts and a whole host of tricks known as price descrimination.)
ECON 101, possibly the most important course anyone who wants to have an informed political opinion could take.
IIUC & FFCM, copyright is based on derivation not information.
So, if you randomly and independantly came up with the same bits as the Star Wars DVD, then you wouldn't be infringing because there is no derivation even though the information is the same (though that situation is implausible enough that it would be hard to prove it). However, if you just kept randomly generating values and checked them until they "happened" to match the XOR of the original Start Wars DVD with the 47MHz radio static that happened on your birthday, they would have a copyright claim on the result since it is derivative.
IIUC = If I understand correctly
FFCM = Feel free to correct me
An overly generous or overly tight judge will inherently favor either risk taking or conservative players. Thus there will always be a bias.
Now the same could be said of umpires, but with umpires everyone understands the sorts of errors they introduce. The idea that the umpire could be wrong is freely discussed and lived with. As the article points out, systems like HawkEye usually foster the public perception that they are the absolute truth when in fact every physical measurement has a statistical error in it. The article suggests that at-home viewers should be presented with some graphic that emphasizes that fact. (How is left up to the graphic arts people.)
In fact presenting the error rate could make the system more accepted by viewers. If the system is presented as perfect and the viewer sees an "obviously" wrong call, the viewer will conclude the system is broken and doesn't work at all. On the other hand, if the system is presented as having a small error rate, that "obviously" wrong call may be chalked up to the error rate and not some inherent brokenness of the system.
These statistics could actually argue against gun control even if they could be taken at face value (which I don't think they can) because they are also saying that, even when they already own guns, random people (e.g. robbers) going around killing strangers is a very rare event.
That may sound like a silly argument (and it is), but but it is only as silly as the original take on these statistics. The 9/10 statistics address who owns the gun when someone is killed but say nothing about how often someone is killed by a gun or whether gun ownership decreases your likelyhood of being killed (since they don't count gun owners that live).
These and similar statistics often fall prey to some variant of the False positive paradox in which if you test positive for a moderately rare disease with a test that is 98% accurate, you don't have a 98% chance of having the disease. If the disease occurs in 1 out of 1000 people (which is only moderately rare) you actually only have only about a 5% chance of having the disease.
the earliest point that EVERYONE can agree a baby becomes a human person is birth
First, you should say "a baby is a person" rather than "becomes", because some believe that a baby "becomes" before birth.
Second, the earliest point that everyone agrees a baby is a person, would be sometime after birth. For the Romans a baby wasn't a person until it was formally accepted by the father and a deformed baby might be rejected. There are some languages that draw a strong line between people and things (similar too but stronger than "he/she" vs "it"), and until a baby learns to talk they are not considered a person. Maybe we consider those ideas primitive and brutish, but then again maybe our ideas are primitive compared to future generations.
Worms still need to get executed. Not all execution requires user interaction.
Of course a computer running (as TSR) the STONED virus will infect any disk placed in it. But that is not the question. The question is whether a diskette with the STONED virus on it can infect a clean machine without executing or booting from the diskette. This is impossible (see the part that says "only way to infect a computer with an MBR/Boot Sector infector is to attempt to boot from an infected floppy diskette", STONED is a MBR infector).
You're going to have to back that claim up with a citation because I don't buy it.
If there is a virus in the MBR (i.e. track 0), and you boot from the floppy then sure you'll get infected because (on a PC) booting executes portions of the MBR, but just putting the floppy in the computer will not infect it.
Even in the DOS days, there had to be something that triggered the execution of the virus. Until *something* triggers the execution of the virus' code, the virus is just a piece of data (abet hidden in some other EXE) and it can't infect anything.
You may be thinking of TSR viruses that would be running in the background, but those don't apply here. First when imaging a disk the host machine is usually off, so there is no place for a TSR to be. Second even if the virus got onto the disk where the image is stored, in order to spread further, some executable on that disk has to be launched. Which again is contrary to standard forensic best practices.
So, no. While a super-virus may taint anything it touches, it has to be given life (i.e. executed) before it can touch anything. Keep it on ice (i.e. as just another file or part of some EXE that is never executed) and it's not going anywhere.
Viruses have to be executed in order to spread. Any half way competent inspector will image the disk and keep the data as data, thus nothing gets executed. No execution, no spreading.
Now if they are stupid and copy the data by USB key, you could infect it with an auto-run virus that runs when the USB key is inserted. But then they are doing in it wrong.
There has to be valid probable cause before having to be subjected to such search and seizures
You are mistaken. At the border, they can search you without any cause at least for "routine" non-body searches. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this at least forty years ago (See Border Search Exception).
Across time and nations, customs agents get to search things that cross the border based on little more than a gut feeling. It might be able to be changed, but (according to SCOTUS) legally they already comply with the 4th, so complaining that the 4th is being violated isn't going to win the argument.
Disclaimer: Positions espoused in this post are to illuminate the political and legal realities and may not reflect the authors personal opinions.
Since the signing of the Constitution, border agents (not TSA) have always had the right to search persons crossing the border. They don't need probable cause or even suspicion. I'm not saying it is right, but this is the law.
Now if you want to change the law with respect to laptops, there are three key points. Ignore these and you won't win.
You must establish that border agents should only be searching for actual contraband and not intelligence gathering or filling any other law enforcement role. (This point should be easy compared to the remaining ones, but it still might be hard.)
You must establish that contraband couldn't be contained in the information on the laptop. (Hard to establish since it's not true as long as child porn is illegal.) In the alternate, establish that boarder agents shouldn't be responsible for finding information-based contraband. (Still a bit of a tough argument to make.)
If you fail on the previous point, you could try to establish that while border agents can search laptops without cause, they shouldn't be allowed to seize the laptops without cause.
This last point seems like it is the most likely to win, but it contains a hidden trap.
First they establish that seizure should be possible when information based contraband (e.g. child port) has definitely been found.
Then they draw an analogy between encrypted or password protected drives and the physical situation where someone tries to cross the border (let's say by car to avoid the TSA) with a steal safe. I'm not sure but I'd guess that if the person refuses to open the safe, then the border agents will either refuse entry, arrest the person or seize the safe. (For good reason, otherwise it would be a loophole big enough to drive a truck full of contraband through.)
Then they bring up the physical analogy to TruCrypt: someone crosses the border with a safe and shows the inside of the safe, but the agents think the safe has a hidden compartment. I'm not sure if currently they can seize in this case. It's probably a gray area (e.g. if the safe model is well known for having a hidden compartment, etc.).
End result? Seizing laptops where nothing is encrypted and there is no contraband might stop, but searching laptops isn't going away any time soon and seizing laptops "with cause" will continue. It's just a question of how broadly we define "cause".
Giordano Bruno was condemned because of his Theological beliefs. Galileo was just making scientifically unsound (and later proven false) claims.
Galileo was right that the Earth goes around the Sun, but he also wrongly insisted that it's orbit was circular (thus either introducing errors or necessitating the same epicycles that the geocentric model needed) and that tides were caused by the Earth's orbit and not the Moon. Further while his observations about the moons of Jupiter were insightful, he also mistook Saturn's rings for moons thus impugning the reliability of his Jupiter observations.
Galileo got a lot of things right, but he went about it in a very unscientific way (e.g. he wasn't critical enough of his own findings) that led to him also getting a lot of things wrong. Making mistakes is okay, but Galileo's wouldn't revise them when other academics pointed out their flaws. This eventually made enemies for him in the academic world which is eventually is what did him in.
Galileo did a number of great things. Just keep in mind that the version taught today is a censored one sided version of the story.
Drat, I had a nice long explanation of how it works out in higher dimensions when my browser crashed. I'm too tired to rewrite it so here's the short summary: in higher dimensional Euclidean spaces it still works out even if the space is non-uniformly distributed or fills a complex shape. However it probably doesn't generalize to the very non-Euclidean landscape of the political world. (Though I ran across some research papers on this very topic.)
Ok, so I see three theories what would explain this.
First, you might be looking at the wrong axis. There are many political issues and any one candidate may fall at many different places on those issues. Just because all the parties happen to align on certain issues (e.g. economy, etc.) they can often be quite disparate on other issues (e.g. death penalty, abortion, etc.). Saying that the Democrat's are right wing might be true on some issues (e.g. both Dems and Reps would say they reject socialism), on the issues that most politically aware Americans pay attention to maybe they are not.
Second, keep in mind that political parties do shift from time to time. At one time the Republican's were a liberal third party and Democrats got the religious vote. (I don't know maybe back then it was called the "religious left" instead of the "religious right".) If you think the Democrat's are moving right, then look for either the Republican's or a third party to move into the political niche that is being vacated.
Third, using game theory if we assume:
there are two parties and
all the issues collapse down to a one dimensional continuum and
the voters vote for the person who is closest to their position and
parties try to maximize the number of votes they get.
Then the equilibrium solution will put both parties in the dead center only a hairs breath apart so that they both get 50% of the vote. In some sense this is a good thing as the government will then always represent the median position of the entire nation. It may not be what you think of as center or moderate, but it will be the median.
(The above are theories, I share them so that others may improve, refute or refine them. Flames don't accomplish that.)
Could this effect the copyrighting of some software?
For example, if I write the simple version of "Hello World" or "Quick Sort", am I adding anything original? What if I implement a (e.g. programing language) specification with exacting accuracy? Or what if I get "creative" with the spec would that give me more copyright protection? If someone later removes the creative aspects can they copy my "creative" implementation of the spec and avoid my copyright?
Fortunately Bell's Theorem provides us with an experiment that can disprove the idea that it is just hidden variables.
Unfortunately, while actual testing of those experiments appears to confirm Bell's Theorem, there are a few loopholes and controversies about whether the experiments actually worked.
In some contexts this may still be plagiarism. Self plagiarism to be precise. In academic publications it is a big deal, though most wouldn't be too worried about student reports and Wikipedia entries.
Three things make the Thermal Footprint likely to be negligible. (I'm not sure I believe the following arguments, but I'll share them anyway.)
First, the Sun has a much larger thermal footprint on the earth than any of the heat we produce. (Though since the Sun is heating the earth from ~0K to ~300K, we only need to be 1% of the Sun's output to increase the temperature by 3 degrees.)
Second, the Earth is radiating heat into space. So the equilibrium temperature depends both on how quickly heat is added and how much thermal resistance there is to that heat being dissipated. The noise about CO2 ("carbon" footprint is a misnomer) is because it increases the resistance. While a Thermal Footprint increases the rate of energy input. But increasing the thermal resistance may be worse of the two because it gets multiplied by the energy that the Sun is producing and not just the puny energy that we are producing.
Finally, many energy sources come from the Sun directly or indirectly. So using them doesn't necessarily increase our Thermal Footprint.
The good news is that if we found out that Thermal Footprints don't hang around like CO2 does. Once we stop producing the heat, the Earth will very quickly cool down to where it was before.
Slashdot Mirror
Because of engineering reasons mostly. We could define a kilogram to be X many photons that have the same wavelength as the hyper-fine hydrogen emission or whatever. But unless you've got a machine that can count out exactly that many photons and withstand the Hiroshima magnitude energies of those photons just long enough to either convert them into mass or weigh them against another mass, it won't work as a standard.
In theory there at lots of theoretical definitions of the kilogram that would work just fine. (E.g. according to general relativity G = 8*pi*T where T is the mass and G is the curvature (this is a simplification) so we could define the kilogram by the amount of spatial curvature it causes.) But in practice, most of the definitions are impractical because either we don't have the engineering technology to do the measurements or the measurements don't have enough precision in them (we need upwards of 9 digits of precision).
But one is a ping-pong ball the other is a bowling ball so they are being blown up by different amounts.
IIRC, temperatures are notoriously difficult to measure/reproduce/etc. with high precision. You could probably only get five or six digits of precision out of a temperature measurement which in turn limits your kilogram precision, but we probably want upwards of 9 digits of precision in our kilogram.
I don't think anyone in America believes they are paying less than their "willing to pay" price.
There is no choice. We *must* drive to work, etc.
As I indicated in my post, if they are still buying the product then by definition they are willing to pay. It's called an inelastic demand and market forces work just fine there. Maybe you forgot that from ECON 101.
I never said that Petroleum is a free market, but rather that the GGP has an incorrect understanding of "willing to pay" (which you seem to share). Petroleum is indeed a prototypical example of an oligopoly based market. However, the reasons it is not a free market have nothing to do with whether you buy gas (i.e. elasticity) and everything to do with from whom you buy gas (i.e. oligopoly). The GGP is blaming the wrong cause which is no help to anybody.
In a free market the economic profit should indeed tend toward 0% but the 7% you mention is accounting profit which doesn't include things like opportunity costs.
Also, "willing to pay" doesn't mean "the price you think is fair". It means "the price at which you stop buying". It would be better termed "willing to buy". But actually that doesn't matter since a true free market actually charges less than some people's "willing to pay" price and more than other people's "willing to pay" price because some people are willing to pay more than others even though the price the item is sold at is (usually) the same for everyone. (Exceptions include coupons, student discounts and a whole host of tricks known as price descrimination.)
ECON 101, possibly the most important course anyone who wants to have an informed political opinion could take.
IIUC & FFCM, copyright is based on derivation not information.
So, if you randomly and independantly came up with the same bits as the Star Wars DVD, then you wouldn't be infringing because there is no derivation even though the information is the same (though that situation is implausible enough that it would be hard to prove it). However, if you just kept randomly generating values and checked them until they "happened" to match the XOR of the original Start Wars DVD with the 47MHz radio static that happened on your birthday, they would have a copyright claim on the result since it is derivative.
IIUC = If I understand correctly FFCM = Feel free to correct me
The random blocks don't infringe the copyright, but the key would likely be considered a derivative work and thus the key infringes the copyright.
An overly generous or overly tight judge will inherently favor either risk taking or conservative players. Thus there will always be a bias.
Now the same could be said of umpires, but with umpires everyone understands the sorts of errors they introduce. The idea that the umpire could be wrong is freely discussed and lived with. As the article points out, systems like HawkEye usually foster the public perception that they are the absolute truth when in fact every physical measurement has a statistical error in it. The article suggests that at-home viewers should be presented with some graphic that emphasizes that fact. (How is left up to the graphic arts people.)
In fact presenting the error rate could make the system more accepted by viewers. If the system is presented as perfect and the viewer sees an "obviously" wrong call, the viewer will conclude the system is broken and doesn't work at all. On the other hand, if the system is presented as having a small error rate, that "obviously" wrong call may be chalked up to the error rate and not some inherent brokenness of the system.
These statistics could actually argue against gun control even if they could be taken at face value (which I don't think they can) because they are also saying that, even when they already own guns, random people (e.g. robbers) going around killing strangers is a very rare event.
That may sound like a silly argument (and it is), but but it is only as silly as the original take on these statistics. The 9/10 statistics address who owns the gun when someone is killed but say nothing about how often someone is killed by a gun or whether gun ownership decreases your likelyhood of being killed (since they don't count gun owners that live).
These and similar statistics often fall prey to some variant of the False positive paradox in which if you test positive for a moderately rare disease with a test that is 98% accurate, you don't have a 98% chance of having the disease. If the disease occurs in 1 out of 1000 people (which is only moderately rare) you actually only have only about a 5% chance of having the disease.
That generally tends to happen when someone's life is on the line. Cf. Capitol Punishment.
First, you should say "a baby is a person" rather than "becomes", because some believe that a baby "becomes" before birth.
Second, the earliest point that everyone agrees a baby is a person, would be sometime after birth. For the Romans a baby wasn't a person until it was formally accepted by the father and a deformed baby might be rejected. There are some languages that draw a strong line between people and things (similar too but stronger than "he/she" vs "it"), and until a baby learns to talk they are not considered a person. Maybe we consider those ideas primitive and brutish, but then again maybe our ideas are primitive compared to future generations.
Worms still need to get executed. Not all execution requires user interaction.
Of course a computer running (as TSR) the STONED virus will infect any disk placed in it. But that is not the question. The question is whether a diskette with the STONED virus on it can infect a clean machine without executing or booting from the diskette. This is impossible (see the part that says "only way to infect a computer with an MBR/Boot Sector infector is to attempt to boot from an infected floppy diskette", STONED is a MBR infector).
You're going to have to back that claim up with a citation because I don't buy it.
If there is a virus in the MBR (i.e. track 0), and you boot from the floppy then sure you'll get infected because (on a PC) booting executes portions of the MBR, but just putting the floppy in the computer will not infect it.
I say again, no execution means no infection.
In the US, you don't have to be guilty in order to be searched.
Even in the DOS days, there had to be something that triggered the execution of the virus. Until *something* triggers the execution of the virus' code, the virus is just a piece of data (abet hidden in some other EXE) and it can't infect anything.
You may be thinking of TSR viruses that would be running in the background, but those don't apply here. First when imaging a disk the host machine is usually off, so there is no place for a TSR to be. Second even if the virus got onto the disk where the image is stored, in order to spread further, some executable on that disk has to be launched. Which again is contrary to standard forensic best practices.
So, no. While a super-virus may taint anything it touches, it has to be given life (i.e. executed) before it can touch anything. Keep it on ice (i.e. as just another file or part of some EXE that is never executed) and it's not going anywhere.
Viruses have to be executed in order to spread. Any half way competent inspector will image the disk and keep the data as data, thus nothing gets executed. No execution, no spreading.
Now if they are stupid and copy the data by USB key, you could infect it with an auto-run virus that runs when the USB key is inserted. But then they are doing in it wrong.
You are mistaken. At the border, they can search you without any cause at least for "routine" non-body searches. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this at least forty years ago (See Border Search Exception).
Across time and nations, customs agents get to search things that cross the border based on little more than a gut feeling. It might be able to be changed, but (according to SCOTUS) legally they already comply with the 4th, so complaining that the 4th is being violated isn't going to win the argument.
Disclaimer: Positions espoused in this post are to illuminate the political and legal realities and may not reflect the authors personal opinions.
Since the signing of the Constitution, border agents (not TSA) have always had the right to search persons crossing the border. They don't need probable cause or even suspicion. I'm not saying it is right, but this is the law.
Now if you want to change the law with respect to laptops, there are three key points. Ignore these and you won't win.
This last point seems like it is the most likely to win, but it contains a hidden trap.
End result? Seizing laptops where nothing is encrypted and there is no contraband might stop, but searching laptops isn't going away any time soon and seizing laptops "with cause" will continue. It's just a question of how broadly we define "cause".
Giordano Bruno was condemned because of his Theological beliefs. Galileo was just making scientifically unsound (and later proven false) claims.
Galileo was right that the Earth goes around the Sun, but he also wrongly insisted that it's orbit was circular (thus either introducing errors or necessitating the same epicycles that the geocentric model needed) and that tides were caused by the Earth's orbit and not the Moon. Further while his observations about the moons of Jupiter were insightful, he also mistook Saturn's rings for moons thus impugning the reliability of his Jupiter observations.
Galileo got a lot of things right, but he went about it in a very unscientific way (e.g. he wasn't critical enough of his own findings) that led to him also getting a lot of things wrong. Making mistakes is okay, but Galileo's wouldn't revise them when other academics pointed out their flaws. This eventually made enemies for him in the academic world which is eventually is what did him in.
Galileo did a number of great things. Just keep in mind that the version taught today is a censored one sided version of the story.
Drat, I had a nice long explanation of how it works out in higher dimensions when my browser crashed. I'm too tired to rewrite it so here's the short summary: in higher dimensional Euclidean spaces it still works out even if the space is non-uniformly distributed or fills a complex shape. However it probably doesn't generalize to the very non-Euclidean landscape of the political world. (Though I ran across some research papers on this very topic.)
Ok, so I see three theories what would explain this.
First, you might be looking at the wrong axis. There are many political issues and any one candidate may fall at many different places on those issues. Just because all the parties happen to align on certain issues (e.g. economy, etc.) they can often be quite disparate on other issues (e.g. death penalty, abortion, etc.). Saying that the Democrat's are right wing might be true on some issues (e.g. both Dems and Reps would say they reject socialism), on the issues that most politically aware Americans pay attention to maybe they are not.
Second, keep in mind that political parties do shift from time to time. At one time the Republican's were a liberal third party and Democrats got the religious vote. (I don't know maybe back then it was called the "religious left" instead of the "religious right".) If you think the Democrat's are moving right, then look for either the Republican's or a third party to move into the political niche that is being vacated.
Third, using game theory if we assume:
Then the equilibrium solution will put both parties in the dead center only a hairs breath apart so that they both get 50% of the vote. In some sense this is a good thing as the government will then always represent the median position of the entire nation. It may not be what you think of as center or moderate, but it will be the median.
(The above are theories, I share them so that others may improve, refute or refine them. Flames don't accomplish that.)
Could this effect the copyrighting of some software?
For example, if I write the simple version of "Hello World" or "Quick Sort", am I adding anything original? What if I implement a (e.g. programing language) specification with exacting accuracy? Or what if I get "creative" with the spec would that give me more copyright protection? If someone later removes the creative aspects can they copy my "creative" implementation of the spec and avoid my copyright?
Let the legal thought experiments begin.
Fortunately Bell's Theorem provides us with an experiment that can disprove the idea that it is just hidden variables.
Unfortunately, while actual testing of those experiments appears to confirm Bell's Theorem, there are a few loopholes and controversies about whether the experiments actually worked.
In some contexts this may still be plagiarism. Self plagiarism to be precise. In academic publications it is a big deal, though most wouldn't be too worried about student reports and Wikipedia entries.
Three things make the Thermal Footprint likely to be negligible. (I'm not sure I believe the following arguments, but I'll share them anyway.)
First, the Sun has a much larger thermal footprint on the earth than any of the heat we produce. (Though since the Sun is heating the earth from ~0K to ~300K, we only need to be 1% of the Sun's output to increase the temperature by 3 degrees.)
Second, the Earth is radiating heat into space. So the equilibrium temperature depends both on how quickly heat is added and how much thermal resistance there is to that heat being dissipated. The noise about CO2 ("carbon" footprint is a misnomer) is because it increases the resistance. While a Thermal Footprint increases the rate of energy input. But increasing the thermal resistance may be worse of the two because it gets multiplied by the energy that the Sun is producing and not just the puny energy that we are producing.
Finally, many energy sources come from the Sun directly or indirectly. So using them doesn't necessarily increase our Thermal Footprint.
The good news is that if we found out that Thermal Footprints don't hang around like CO2 does. Once we stop producing the heat, the Earth will very quickly cool down to where it was before.