I totally agree, let me quote myself:
'There are way more important things in life than, well, "things". '
ideas, theories, science, politics are all worthwhile (among many others), although it is presumptive of me to decide for anyone else what is important.
I will step out on the limb and say that, unless you are a museum curator, art dealer, or collector of rare, storied, artifacts, "things" are a bit less meaningful to devote your life to. having said that, has anyone seen my stapler? -sent from my cray-

I actually took the time to read the final fbi report This guy was mentally unstable well before the attacks, he was obsessed with some sorrority, with female co-workers, and was quite openly discussing his mental illness with co-workers. (why he was still in charge of antrax - astonishes me) The most interesting part is the new science that came out of the investigation (some kind of new dna sequencing method) either way, this guy was nuts before the fbi got involved (imho)

The first sign of trouble is when you said/thought, at least I am not as bad as X. oh goodness.
The second sign: an intervention by way of watching a tv show devoted to your disease.
Take it from a former hoarder: just throw everything away (donate, trash, etc). There are way
more important things in life than, well, "things". Once you start spending as much time, energy,
and care for the people in and around your life, I doubt you will ever hoard again.

-sent from my cray-

where is the outcry against "cowardly" IED's and homicide-bombers?

read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war . it will enlighten you.

also: there are civilians, and there are noncombatants... there is a difference.

unless you have been to war, you really know nothing about it.

cheers
J

clausevitz, jomini, study them. To even ask the question of explaining morality in war suggests you might have thought there should be morality in war. I am sorry you got that impression. A short essay on my thoughts and others:
War is an extension of politics - clausevitz. In the quest to get some power/people/entity to stop doing something (invading, destabilizing, living in some land you want) you must find a way (a policy) that convinces them (harasses them) such that continued pursuit of the policy you abhor (invading, destabilizing, living in some land you want) is NOT in their best interests. Since kings/presidents/governments tend to listen to their people _before_ they listen to some other king/president/government - your task as a war strategist: convince the king/president/government to stop the behavior you abhor (invading, destabilizing, living in some land you want) by causing chaos and fear amongst his population (the people who pay for the invading, destabilizing, living in some land you want activities). This could be peaceful (voice of america), cruel (trade emabargoes, sanctions), or violent (killing them / breaking their stuff until they see your way)

Jomeni advocated bombing the city centers (al queda have you been studying jomeni?) to cause chaos.
This method of warfare dominated US strategy during WW2 (nagasaki, hiroshima, fire bombings: germany, japan) and briefly during linebacker 2 of the vietnam war.
This is also the method of warfare of "terrorists" since beirut. Using largely ineffective, but spectactular effects to scare people. (cars/heart attacks/cancer kill way many more people than terrorists)

Recent glamorization of war (going back as far as the chivalry movement of the knights to cut down on the sheer barbarism of war) since WW2 has led to this thought of "civilians" - people who have nothing to do with war - and thus don't deserve to be targeted: it is merely a myth to calm the palettes of doves to convince them that war isn't really all that bad. Which of course is not true.

Once we stop the idea of "civilian" - I think people will realize that we all are responsible for the people we put in office, and it is our responsibility to stop them from expressing anything other than our intent when it comes to war. we are all in this fight, whether it be school teachers educating the next marines, or even the grocery store, our taxes fund the war machine and are a collective message to the rest of the world on our approval of the current war we are in.

in short: war was never meant to be moral - it is simply getting a country to do something they do not want to do, by means of strategic maneuvering (bombs, trade, money, isolation, invasion, eradication)

Why isn't JAVA (or some JAVA-like byte code embedded language) being used to address this- wasn't that the point of JAVA? I am not a CS guy, so maybe somebody can clue me in.

JP

The pending patents are for hardware, not software. They cannot apply to a box of software people purchase.

Okay, everyone seems to be very ignorant here, and the article isn't explaining this, so I guess I have to give a damn history lesson:

The US government requires that you put notification of patent use on things you sell. (Either your own patent, or something you've licensed from someone else.)

That is fine for issued patents, but what about pending patents? Remember, you can use something for up to a year before filing a patent on it, and you do have some amount of protection when patents are pending.

Ergo, you should have to put pending patent notifications, so people can look those up, too, and not waste their time building something that's going to be in violation of a patent in two months.

Well, the problem then arose. You see, actual patents are easy to look up. Patent lawyers could have copies of the entire set, you could go to a law courthouse in state capital, etc.

Pending patents, OTOH, are real bitch to find. Only the patent office has those. So some enterprising people who couldn't, or didn't bother, to get patents, just went around putting 'patent pending' on everything, resulting in other people unable to figure out what, exactly, was patented. Or they could keep resubmitted a rejected patent, and it remain 'pending'.

Hence, at some point, falsely claiming to have patents pending, or actually having one pending, but unrelated to what you put it on, was made criminal and you can be fined for it.

Those laws don't really make any sense anymore, but are still there.

Yet. There are three ways it can play out:

• Activision can prove in court that its product is patented, and the scope of the patents owned or licensed by Activision becomes clear to competitors.
• Activision can fail to prove that its product is patented, and the scope of the patents owned or licensed by Activision becomes clear to competitors.
• Activision can leave it ambiguous, and the anti-patent troll responds: "Grant $developer a license to your game's patents, or we'll seek class action status for every box that you've ever listed a patent on."

>>>But seriously where does this end? Will we see the death of Microsoft's .lit format in favor of Kindle's .azw?

Possibly but Microsoft will still win:
- EMBRACE (amazon's standard)
- EXTEND (azw with new features which will be MS proprietary & only readable from Windows)
- EXTINGUISH (because amazon kindles will no longer be able to read the new azw2 format that MS now controls, people will buy the Microsoft Zune Reader instead - Kindles will disappear)

If you don't know what I'm talking about just read wikipedia's article about Microsoft during the 1990s.

TFA isn't particularly enlightning, but the news is indeed slashdot worthy but raises many questions.

While not currently aimed at solar panel technology

Why not?

their research has uncovered a way to turn optical radiation into electrical current that could lead to self-powering molecular circuits

Battery-free gizmos? It doesn't say, but it seems like the photons wouldn't have to be optical wavelengths. However, how much current does this tech produce? "we could conceivably manufacture a 1A, 1V sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long"

WOW, that's a lot of power from a tinty surface. 1 amp at one volt is one watt; a device using this tech the size of a phone battery could run an air conditioner if there were any way to keep the thing from melting.

At the end of TFA it links the study.

Well, I'd put it this way. The Nazis, intellectually speaking, weren't anything.

Tyrannies of that type use ideology, but aren't about ideology. Trying to take their "ideologies" seriously as ideologies only leads to confusion, because they weren't interested in consistency, much less truth. They used language purely for its utility.

Take their idea of "Jewish science". You can't take that notion seriously, because it's all a fantasy they cooked up to target people they were afraid of. So they just lump them in together. It's telling that Himmler wanted to label Heisenberg as a "White Jew". "Jew" doesn't mean "person of historically Jewish descent" or "person who adheres to the Jewish law". It's just the verbal equivalent of a punch in the face.

The same goes for Hitler's views about atheists. Atheists tend to be free thinkers, and therefore likely to oppose the regime. So you take two despised groups and you manufacture a bigger "threat" by glomming them together.

Scapegoating is so critical to tyranny that where there aren't ready made hatreds, the tyrant invents groups to be hated. Stalin invented the "kulik", or rich peasant, as the scapegoat for his failed agricultural policies. They kuliks weren't rich by any means, but if your family were starving and your neighbor's had food, that gave you a satisfying, concrete target for your rage right within reach.

As far as the "Christianity" is concerned, it's about as meaningful as their notion of "Jew". If they'd been living in a predominantly Buddhist society, they'd be filling their propaganda with Buddhist trappings. If they'd been living in a Jewish society, then they'd avail themselves of Jewish symbols and scapegoat Christians and Muslims.

You can connect what the tyrant wants to what he says in this way: The tyrant wants power. To obtain and hold onto it, he needs a compliant people. To make the people compliant, he arouses fear, anger and hatred in them. To arouse those emotions he uses words, not to tell people anything, but to goad them.

Hatred and fear are for the politician like the nose ring a farmer puts on a bull. It allows him to safely lead a big, dumb dangerous animal where he wants it to go. This works for both right wing tyrants and left wing tyrants like Stalin. Remember that next time you are tempted to latch on to some popular political hatred.

And our infrastructure for such transportation methods that you suggest? Piddling in comparison to the oil infrastructure. It takes time for such transportation methods to ramp up to the level that oil is at. Time that we once had, but not anymore. How many electric powered shipping trucks do we have now? How many can we seriously expect to have in 5 years? Doesn't the fact that our oil consumption is still increasing even though our reserves are rapidly depleting suggest we are fucked? It would seem that the logical thing to do would be to use the oil however we wanted at first, then as we started to see limits to our supply we would start conserving and focus on developing alternative energy sources. Then, by the time oil reached permanent scarcity we would have phased out our dependence on it entirely.

its actually worse than that, the US could arbitrarily, in the event of a national emergency, turn OFF gps. And thus before 9/11, the EU wasn't worried about that scenario, after 9/11, they saw that we could and might turn off the GPS system if/when we needed to. -that could wreak havoc in a lot of places...

J