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Given that most people in this country can't divide 100 by 8 in their heads, I mock the thought that anybody would take this story seriously.
At what age should kids be taught to read patent-claim language?
At what age should kids be taught to replace head gaskets?
At what age should kids be taught how to cull facts from political rhetoric, rather than just repeat what they hear on the radio?
I think it would be worth a cheer to see pre-teens get excited about writing little BASIC programs on their iPads, but in the real world, school teachers I know would be happy enough to be able to teach the majority of their grade-schoolers how to balance a checkbook, or how to understand a short piece of classical music.
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FWIW, the 1st Am. can become relevant if the government forces an entity to restrict speech, regardless of whether that speech is a term of a K. If I contract w/Facebook to give Facebook the right to publish and republish any text that I post, the 1st is implicated if the Federal govt. attempts to bar Facebook from enforcing that term. The 14th Am. extends this issue to state govt.'s. And then, there's also the contract clause of the Constitution, although freedom of speech generally trumps financial protections.
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Who says enabling technology is a good thing?
Not true. Variations of the first scenario are quite common. Your argument is circular. If you define "NPE" as an entity that engages exclusively in trolling abuses, then the only conclusion is that NPEs are abusers. It is certainly possible for a small inventor to create something new and valuable, but not have the resources to manufacture it. Here, the patent system allows the inventor to attempt to license the idea to a larger entity who is able to develop, market, manufacture, and distribute the resulting product. The fellow working in the office next to mine, e.g., is presently doing just that with a clever consumer product he recently patented. How is such a partnership an abuse of anything? And doesn't such a system promote innovation by encouraging an inventor to create a new technology despite the fact that she's just an average person with a dollar & a dream?
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Everybody has the right to masturbate, but if you can't answer that question with some crediblility, this discussion is a waste of time.
- the President of the United States is not an American citizen
- the President of the United States is secretly a Muslim (and simultaneously a member of a Caucasian-hating "black Christian church" that is conspiring with Kenyan citizens to overthrow the United States)
- there has been a global conspiracy over the last 25 years among every government, national science foundation, peer-reviewed journal, and credible scientist in three broad fields of science to perpetrate a hoax that human-produced greenhouse-gas emissions are warming the planet
- second-hand cigarette smoke has no harmful effect on humans
- the Affordable Care Act will strip $700 million (or whatever the number is up to now) of benefits from Social Security recipients and will establish "death panels" who decide whether gravely ill citizens will be given life-saving treatment
- and the classic "seat belts kill more people than they save because they trap victims inside a car during a crash, rather than letting them be safely ejected."
If you have a free hour, check out the beautiful documentary "Chasing Ice," in which shows the results of photographer James Balog's technically challenging "Extreme Ice" project, which took multi-year time-lapse videos of receding glaciers in remote areas of Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, & Montana. The big finale, a five-minute real-time clip of a Lower-Manhattan-sized chunk of ice plunging into the sea, is something you'll never forget.
Consequently, using biometric security mechanisms on a mobile device is not something I personally think is a good idea.
A more nuanced analysis would reveal that, if climate change is real, it will be a disaster for most of these national governments, many of whicfh are already a bit tentative in their finances. See, e.g., Australia. The cost to protect coastal urban areas will be astronomical, there will likely be large numbers of refugees (even in industrialized nations, but the problem will be far worse in the less-developed areas of Africa & South America), and the political issues alone will likely destabilize governments. Especially scary is that some of the countries likely to be hardest hit are nuclear powers, like Pakistan & India. So why in the world would nearly every national government -- including many that would resist agreeing with each other at gunpoint -- secretly conspire to perpetuate such a hoax.
Then again, some of the wackier denier types are the same people who believed with all their hearts that the President of the United States is not an American citizen. Or that he's both a secret Muslim and a believer in Reverend Wright's "radical black" sect of Christianity. Don't expect rational.
And, of course, maybe the membership deserves what it gets. Take a look, e.g., at all the self-important, clueless responses from Slashdotter Wikipedia Wile E. Coyotes. An idiotic statement like "A 24bit CD has a 144dB dynamic range and 1/33,554,432th of the signal will be noise" is wrong in so many ways. How many of them do you think even know how to pronounce 'Nyquist'"
As for the issue at hand, here's what I think is a reasonable analysis: Analog tape v. high-res digital files is a controversial topic on which reasonable minds may differ. Most truly knowledgeable people -- e.g., long-time contributors to "The Absolute Sound" -- listening through highest-quality gear (think Focal or Wilson) generally report that 15ips master tape played back on excellent-quality gear matches or exceeds the quality of any of their reference 24/192 digital recordings. Some of the newer tape decks and multi-hundred-buck tape reissues of classic rock albums (e.g., the limited rerelease of "Sgt. Pepper's" on tape) have apparently become sonic standards among the hardcore audiophile mags. Sweeping generalizations are, of course, by their nature conclusory, and there's no indication that Albini is anything other than a stopped clock, but I think that dismissing the possibility that analog tape may produce stunning sound quality is more often than not rooted in the arrogance of ignorance.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman