There's a law review article I read somewhere arguing that unless federal courts narrow the scope of that law, it will eventually be found void for vagueness. It is very poorly written.
So, it may upset you, but the foundation of the legal system is more or less until a judge rules on it, and until there is a legal precedent
Bullshit. The entire point of having a legal system based on written law is so that people know what the law is without having to just try things and then see if the executive arrests them. There are places in the law that are rough and where you really don't know what a judge will do -- "new areas of the law" -- but, in most cases, you do know what a judge will do, because of statute and precedent in similar cases. This certainty is what gives the law its value.
The GPL is a fairly simple document. It's pretty clear what it means, so we really don't need a judge to tell us. This court case might clear up a few corner cases about the consequences of infringement (forced relicensing or simple injunction + damages), but it is effectively impossible the entire document will be held null and void. There's enough precedent that it is possible to conditionally license a copyrighted work that the GPL's general validity is not in doubt.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Some people over on Apple.com forums are claiming that the hard disk that went into the iPod classic isn't being made anymore and that Apple therefore was essentially was forced to discontinue the product, because they couldn't find parts for it. Obviously they could try to find another supplier, make the hard drives themselves, etc., etc., but I guess the ROI wasn't there for them to bend over backwards to keep it going.
No it doesn't. If a trait provides a reproductive benefit, and it is monotonically marginally beneficial, then life will almost always find a way to evolve it.
You're basically asserting without evidence that there's an invisible hand of evolution. There's not. Some mutations happen much more frequently than others, and, if a trait can only be expressed with a sequence of very rare mutations, it might take a very, very long time (as in, "will never happen in a trillion trillion years") for evolution to be expected to get there. Others sort of just happen, and not for any real reason or anything, at least as far as we can tell. Evolution will only destroy a mutation if it's significantly maladaptive. If a trait is only marginally maladaptive where it's present (example: blue eyes, much more maladaptive in very sunny places than in the north), it might randomly be carried forward, at least for ~100,000 years or so.
I've got another just-so story:
Deer will also disproportionally abort female fetuses during harsh winters. Offspring born after hard times are likely to be stunted and inferior. Even if they are disadvantaged, a male offspring is still more likely to reproduce, because the male reproductive system is simpler and therefore less likely to be affected by fetal malnutrition. So carrying a disadvantaged daughter to term, when she is likely to be less fertile, is a waste of resources.
The implications for reasoning with just-so stories is left as an exercise for the reader.
You can search and browse torrents and it will look like it's working, but if you actually try to download anything, it'll ask for money.
Those are fakes.
Bullshit. VLSI code is almost always verified by finite models, and many processors are verified down to the level of mathematical axiom.
Bullshit on your bullshit, no it's not, and no they're not, not even close. Hardware companies have a fetish for formally verifying floating point stacks because, 20 years ago, the fickle and vacuous mainstream press people decided one particular piece of errata in one particular processor -- the Pentium FDIV bug from 1994 -- was important for some reason, even though every processor ever made and used has errata. AMD took advantage of Intel's bad publicity to formally verify their own FDIV instruction -- JUST the FDIV instruction, mind you -- and then doing formal verification with floating point stacks became something of a thing. There's nothing more going on than that.
Take a look here, in the section "Errata": http://download.intel.com/desi...
Doesn't look like the "proved" that VLSI very well to me, although they doubtless subjected it to a fuckton of simulation hours. Which is what they should be doing; theorem proving software or silicon is, usually, a ton of effort for little gain. Simulation hours cost much less than developer time. Our processors would likely be 486 level today if the designers had to prove everything correct. If that.
Provably correct software code exists in small amounts, and it's emergence is inevitable.
Said the formal verification researchers, for 30 years or so now.
Impressive. But they verified about 9000 lines of C code, and, by their own admission, it's a brittle verification (meaning if they change anything substantial they have to do a lot of work to re-prove it). The specifically say, in one instance, that it took one man-year to verify a change to 5% of the code base. That's ~500 lines of code.
A year. To change 500 lines of code. imo verifying software is still more a gimmick than anything. We've been writing reliable airline software without formally proving it for over 30 years. It takes a ton of effort, but so does formal verification.
But thanks for the link, that's an interesting pig they made fly.
Look at IR in the LLVM project which has allowed an explosion of languages that can enjoy most of the same compiler optimizations that the C family enjoy using this principle.
Umm
And provably correct code is still a pipe dream.
What you describe isn't hypocritical. Lab B is not rewarding Lab A for doing animal testing; its consumers are not supporting Lab A's research in any way. In fact, Lab B is undermining Lab A by competing with it, reducing the rewards Company A gets from its R&D department and reducing the incentives Company A has to continue financing Lab A.
That's not what "fruit of the poisonous tree" means.
Yours is the ethical argument against using Mengele's research, and it's even weaker here than it was there. In fact, it makes no sense at all here. The companies doing the research get no money from their cruelty-free competitors. The consumers of cruelty-free cosmetics are not incentivizing the animal-testing cosmetic companies to do additional research in any way. If anything, the price competition from cruelty-free cosmetics companies will make the companies that do experiments on animals have less R&D money to do additional experiments.
The argument works to the extent it does with Mengele because a Mengele researcher might be doing work for the good of humanity, in his own twisted way, rather than financial reward, and will do unethical experiments just for the sake of advancing the state of science. Unless you think there are altruistic scientists working on lipstick, your argument makes no sense at all.
So testing a hydrogen bomb is engineering, but testing cosmetics is science? First, you're wrong; second, you're splitting hairs trying to evade acknowledging the fact that what you said was absurd.
But whatever. Here's another example. Why don't we send probes to Venus? That would be science. We're not doing that science. We totally could. The USSR did. We don't, because it's not worth the cost, because Venus is a shit environment for our probes, so it would cost more to send them there. And don't say we're doing "better science instead", because we have enough money to send probes to Venus in addition to all the other science we're doing. We choose to make Hollywood movies, or build cars, or do other non-science stuff instead. Because doing the science isn't always the right answer.
This is the last time I will engage you on this point. Grow up, acknowledge what you said was stupid, or don't.
And finally, that doesn't we don't do the science in the way that causes the least damage.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
