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News Briefs 26-02-08

Intellectual property is a load of rubbish, as most ideas are a load of rubbish. But when someone invents something potentially valuable…

  • Towers of Babble: 911 truthers are on to something but they dont know what.
  • Ruins of 5500 year old plaza found in Peru.
  • Two of Egypt’s pyramids were conceived as a single project.
  • Morgellons: emerging illness or filaments of the imagination?
  • Doomsday seed vault opens in Arctic.
  • Earth’s final sunset predicted. Must be what the seed vault is for.
  • The Enceladus engima.
  • Two oxygenation events in ancient oceans sparked spread of complex life.
  • Did Hitler draw Disney?
  • Secret documents of the Holy Inquisition revealed.
  • Intellectual property is a silly euphemism.
  • Pyramid architect’s final resting place?
  • Electronic voices from beyond the grave.
  • The expanding earth debate. part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Thanks Greg


Quote of the Day:

What was the best thing before sliced bread?

George Carlin

  1. Great News!
    [quote]Intellectual property is a load of rubbish[/quote]

    So I can move forward with development of my web bot to automatically copy the contents of TDG everyday to my new site: The Daily Flail?!!!?

    ————————————–
    My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

    1. intellectual property
      The problem is that governments and corporations are striving to mantain legal standards that were once designed with cattle and real estate in mind, and they still want to apply them to the realities of the XXIst century’s digital age. Obviously there has to be better ways.

      I’ve just read at a mexican newspaper that some very big music label is forcing its signed artists to accept the taking (from the label) of a percentage of their revenue that comes from ticket sales to live concerts and merchandise sales, which frankly I think IS a load of rubbish, because it is almost as if the label is saying that they OWN the physical persona of an artist.

      Then there are artists like Radiohead, who created a lot of heart attacks in the music industry with their scheme to offer their latest album on-line, and let the people pay whatever they wanted for it. What was interesting in that experiment was that, on average, people paid about US$4.00 for the downloaded album; of course this is Radiohead we’re talking about here, and that was a gamble that no upstarting band could pull off.

      —–
      It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
      It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

      Red Pill Junkie

      1. Can’t Talk Now
        I’m busy today, xeroxing the Harry Potter books.

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        My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

        1. He He! Funny you mention that…
          Funny you mention that, because back in the days when I went to college, it was the habit of many teachers to leave you some pages of some book to be read as an assignment for their class, and these teachers always left some Xeroxed copies of the assignment reading at one of the many copy centers distributed throughout the school.

          And of course, let’s not forget the joy of going to the library, and needing to get copies of a particular book that happened to be also the only copy available. It was great fun to be behind the girl who asked “copies from page 2 to 125, please” when your next class was about to start in 10 min!

          And all this happened without the teachers and the Library staff never realizing they were making us ‘accesories to copyright infringement’ 🙂

          Of course, I went to college in the 90s, before the digital age craze (I actually experienced the transition from the 5 1/2″ diskettes to the 3 1/4″ disks to the CDs, and from black monitors with green letters to Mozilla and the baby steps of Yahoo!)

          —–
          It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
          It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

          Red Pill Junkie

          1. Difference
            Yeah, but the difference is that I plan on selling my Harry Potter books to unsuspecting school children and parents for a tidy little profit. Hell, I’m doing them a service as my books will be far cheaper than those over-priced, hard cover monstrosities.

            However, I am changing the character’s name to Nerdy McMagic. Just so everyone understands that it really is my own effort going into the Xeroxing. Do you know how many freaking pages those books are? This is going to take while.

            ————————————–
            My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

          2. Good luck then 🙂
            And it is interesting to note that you acknowledge the differences between those two types of “infringements” (th guys who want to make a profit vs the guys who allege “fair use”). Unfortunately, current copyright laws make no such distinctions: they are all criminal to their eyes.

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

          3. Maybe in Mexico
            There is a “fair use” provision in U.S. Copyright law. No one would get in trouble for copying a few pages of a textbook.

            Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances. See FL 102, Fair Use, and Circular 21, Reproductions of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians.

            ————————————–
            My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

          4. Mmm… kind of vague isn’t it?
            So suppose a school kid needs to make a report on Harry Potter, and buys one of the Xerox copies you are preparing?

            And what exactly qualifies as ‘commentary’ and ‘criticism’ according to this statute?

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

          5. Hey, watch it!
            Don’t be tryin’ to mess with my new bidnez!

            ————————————–
            My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

          6. oh the old days
            When I went to the capitalist colleges, we didn’t have servants to do the copying for us. We had to do it ourselves. And when you want to copy a 5 page article, the girl in front of you who wants to copy “only 95 more pages” didn’t look so pretty any more.

            —-
            wherever you go, there you are

          7. Servants! LOL
            They certainly didn’t act as your servants, for they charged you with a pretty penny for every copy you asked. And they were always cranky.

            I suppose colleges in Mexico prefer to have their own copy centers instead of self-service machines, because they don’t trust their students that much. Same is true here for gas stations… besides, you need to employ people at something, even if it is a task so menial and easy a machine could do it more efficiently 🙂

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

      1. Rats…
        Think I should sue?

        ————————————–
        My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

    2. I am not against the notion
      I am not against the notion of intellectual property when there is a potentially valuable result to come from it. I have a few things I wont patent because they will be ripped off. I cant talk about them because they will be ripped off and I dont have the money to develop them. So, if I am right then the market place stands to lose out because i am not protected.

      But most ideas turn out to be rubbish and so they dont matter. But the idea that can become something everyone wants but they cannot make for themselves has a lot of value. If it took a lot of sacrifices to come up with the idea in the first place the individual that comes up with the idea should be rewarded.

      Many people take property as real, and intellectual property as imaginary. I think all property is imaginary because all rights are imaginary. Law is born of the imagination that things could be otherwise than they are, and so i see no problem with having as strong laws for intellectual property as for real estate etc.

      1. I read you 🙂
        [quote=Jameske]Many people take property as real, and intellectual property as imaginary. I think all property is imaginary because all rights are imaginary. Law is born of the imagination that things could be otherwise than they are, and so i see no problem with having as strong laws for intellectual property as for real estate etc.[/quote]

        Very good point, I’m just saying that MAYBE governments should start making laws that fit with the current digital enviroment of instant replicas that are exactly the same as the original, instead of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole as they have been doing in the last decade, and adapting laws that were intended for real estate and cattle 2 centuries ago.

        I accept the fact that a person should be rewarded for the originality of their ideas (I’m a desginer, for cying out loud!), but there are several aspects where we should be careful with this mentality. Take scientific research for instance.
        —–
        It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
        It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

        Red Pill Junkie

        1. Yeah, but…
          [quote]Take scientific research for instance.[/quote]

          Careful about that one too. There’s no faster way to kill a lot of scientific research than to take the incentive of financial success out of the equation.

          ————————————–
          My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

          1. you think so?
            Maybe that’s the way we incite research nowadays, but it wasn’t always the case. I don’t remember Pythagoras holding the copyright for that funny-looking triangle of his 🙂

            Yes, I know much of the current research needs big labs with big budgets, but maybe we should start wondering if the pressure of market forces do not infact hinder the advancement of science, with many people trying to re-invent the wheel on their own.

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

          2. Comparisons
            The folly of trying to compare the last 100 years to the circumstances of the ancient world not withstanding, I’m pretty sure the “profit motive” existed in Pythagoras’ time too.

            I’ll put my money on free market capitalism over pie-in-the-sky, feel-good, cradle-to-grave, big gubmint socialism.

            ————————————–
            My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

          3. ok, but the problem with that is…
            that if we let the commercial insterest that drive the scienific agenda unchecked, we might find that most of the money spent on research will end up financing solutions for hair loss, instead of looking for a cure to AIDS 🙁

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie


          4. When the issue potentially effects an entire society, like AIDS, there is a role for government. But it is still minimal. Most AIDS breakthroughs in the last ten years came from the marketplace, not because of, but despite governemnt involvment. The causes of high drug prices and medical treatments can all be traced to government interfernce that impeded the supply and price functions of a truly competitive free market.

            ————————————–
            My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

          5. …….
            Yeah, but the drive of the marketplace makes that in those 10 years, more money was spent looking for ways to get senior citizens rise to the occasion (if you catch my drift), figth male alopecia and depression, than looking for diseases that affect the 3rd World.

            Look how much money is spent to find ways to cure diabetes (a 1st world disease).

            Now look how much money is spent on finding ways to fight malaria.

            Obviously for big pharma corporations, that spend millions on research for new drugs, there’s more interest in finding medicines for diabetes, that will be have a significant market among people with income, than finding ways to solve the maladies of people who don’t have money to buy medicines in the first place. And let’s not forget also that the clinical trials of those diabetes and heart-disease drugs are being done in countries like India and Africa with human guinea pigs.

            And there’s also the danger of scientific studies being funded by private corporations, which questions the objectivity and unbias of those studies. And I’m not the only one who is concerned about this. In a recent interview done by the Discover magazine, former chairman of George W Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass, mentioned this same concern.

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

          6. drug compamny research
            Actually the big drug companies spend more money on advertizing than on research. And yes, you are hearing this from a guy whon mostly favours free markets.

            —-
            wherever you go, there you are

          7. A recipe for disaster:
            With sloppy research, improve the ads and the donations!

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

  2. Utne Reader artiucle on 911 truth
    Too many 911 truth skeptics are lazy. Many have not even given the subject a cursory examination as can be seen from some of the comments in the Utne article which casually assume that the many anomalies and coincidences surrounding the event automatically point to government complicity which of course doesn’t say much of anything about who the conspirators were since so much of “government” has been virtually privatized anyway. Simply start with the collection of data enumerated here: http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html
    Any good lawyer will tell you that there is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a new look at the event -with subpoenas, under oath testimony, and maybe amnesty for all whistleblowers. Simply including all the excluded testimony from the first commission’s business would probably illuminate many dark corners and bring to light many unsuspected actors. Zach Long

    1. My Theory
      I say the whole thing was filmed on a sound stage in Hollywood.

      ————————————–
      My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

  3. WTC Collapses
    The WTC buildings collapsed as they did for a very simple and previously described reason. They were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese man hired specifically because he designed buildings in earthquake prone Japan to collapse in just that fashion, preventing damage to other buildings nearby. They were thinking about the possibility of such a thing happening as early as 1966. WTC 7 collapsed for this reason too. It suffered structural damage, particularly to that which kept it intact in its vertical position, due to the nearby earthquake-like events of the towers collapsing, and collapsed itself exactly as it was designed to do.

    Yamasaki was interviewed the same day (or maybe the next, I forget) and explained this all on TV. While the conspiracy people accumulate and pray to their circumstantial evidences, they refuse to accept this direct, overt and very well documented evidence, something we tend to call a “fact”. Anyone doubting is free to look up the many other buildings designed by Yamasaki and determine whether they too were designed with this sort of collapse design in mind. It is, after all, his specialty.

    As for “puffs” occurring at lower floors while the upper ones were coming down, consider the effect of enormous kinetic energies being transmitted through the structure and its effect on air trapped inside the windows on lower floors. The shock waves transmitted through the structure caused hydraulic (more properly, pneumatic) shock waves, creating overpressures in those lower floors, blowing out the windows and contents of the floors, prior to those floors actually collapsing. Try an experiment: Place a stack of cinder blocks on a cardboard box. Smash the top one with a sledgehammer. The top one will shatter, and maybe the second. The others will remain intact. The box will collapse from the shock. Continued smashing with the hammer will smash the blocks in turn, equivalent to the upper floors landing on those immediately below, but the ones farther below, like the box, will have already suffered shock based damage without having yet collapsed.

    Consider also the effect of the pressure of the upper floors collapsing blowing debris and dust down the stairways and elevator shafts to the lower floors.

    There may be other incidents which remain unanswered. But these major ones indicate that some of the most salient questions raised had perfectly good and true, though almost entirely ignored, answers. I believe they indicate that others would also given the evidence (especially pre-impact design considerations), and such evidence being made as public as the conspiracy theories.

    I only wish Feynman were still alive to make things as crystal clear as almost nobody else could. There’d be no conspiracy theories. Or if there were, he’d have found them and explained the details in plain and simple language. All we have now is people with too little information filling in holes with imaginary information and ignoring factual information, in the absence of a true genius with the ability to find the deep truths and speak in such a way that nobody but the stubbornly self-ignorant could deny.

    No, I am not the brain specialist…..
    YES. Yes I AM the brain specialist.

    1. Too much logic. Too many facts.
      Prepare to be savaged. By the savages.

      😉

      ————————————–
      My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.

      1. I Am The Boogie-Scientist
        [quote=Anonymous]Prepare to be savaged. By the savages.

        😉

        ————————————–
        My apologies go out to all who were just offended by this hostile, confrontational and completely unreasonable post.[/quote]

        I am a scientist. I am accustom to fighting off the savage hordes with the double-edge sword of sharpened facts and logic. It doesn’t change their minds, but it does cause the uncommitted others listening to the discussion to consider more than one side of the argument, particularly since the side with real data makes more sense than the side that simply repeats questions, accusations and conjectures.

        I predict here and now that nobody will research the architect’s other work, including the buildings in Japan that collapsed in the same way, just as they were supposed to. The True Believers can’t stand documented reality that contradicts their “truths”.

        I have also researched such controversial subjects such as positive effects from tobacco*, and galvanic skin response and EEG signal indicating prior to decision and even stimulus presentation whether a person will correctly identify something. I am accustom to the same kind of hand-to-hand defense versus my supposed colleagues. Sadly, and especially in the tobacco research, it does not seem to get the other scientists to listen to opinions or data that they refuse to consider.

        I’d tend to conclude that non-scientists have more open minds. But the fact is scientists are far less likely to be willing to be seen considering a politically/scientifically unpopular opinion. Such is the effect of relying on grants given by others who themselves are afraid to be seen considering those things. Individually and in private scientists have more open minds and are not only willing to listen but tentatively agree and provide supporting evidence. But get them together in public, such as at a conference, particularly in the audience of a talk on one of these subjects, and they become downright rabid. Not necessarily in their minds, but definitely in their social behavior

        So bring them on. They’re swinging football bats, not realizing those aren’t real, and my helmet and shield are made of hardened data, which are. They’re not nearly as hard to handle as scientists with an agenda that they want others to publically witness, and I’ve handled those quite well.

        [* After getting shouted off stage in the middle of presentations, I finally got them to shut up about the tobacco research by starting out with “My ancestors have been here for over 500 years, and we’ve been trying to tell you all along that tobacco is a medicinal plant. Don’t say we didn’t tell you so. Here’s the proof.” I trumped their high horse of anti-tobacco political correctness with my higher horse of cultural history defense, a tactic they dare not fight against in public without looking racist. I unashamedly admit to thoroughly enjoying doing this, especially when I saw their faces fall when the realized they couldn’t mount the political correctness attack for others to see them doing.]

        In a similar vein, I noticed that on the day that both the article on “spaceships” blurrily telephotographed and posted on Rense, and the article on those who locate and track satellites (even ‘secret’ ones) using only binoculars appeared, nobody could explain why the large number of the latter failed to notice the things supposedly seen by the one and only source for the former. Too hard a question for those with vivid imaginations, I suspect.

        I hereby offer an apology to all those for whom such logic and data spoil their fun. Not to worry, there’s plenty more to consider that don’t have these spoilers attached. I too enjoy those thoroughly. It’s only those with real answers I can’t abide being presented as questions. A true skeptic should keep an open mind. That includes being open to hard data and supported explanations. True Believers of both sides do a disservice to finding truths.

        No, I am not the brain specialist…..
        YES. Yes I AM the brain specialist.

        1. First Principles
          Back in the dark ages when I went to University (slide rules!), my second year dynamics professor, Dr. Turnbull, would have skinned us alive if we couldn’t describe the basic failure sequence of the towers. That was in the heyday of Feynman and anyone not able to grasp these basics would have been driving a cab or selling carpets in short order.

          Xavier Onassis

      2. Uh oh
        Uh oh, what does that make me? I’m not convinced by 9/11 conspiracies, but I am convinced humans are contributing to global warming. Jokers to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.

  4. Morgellons
    There are 8 references to this problem on the National Library of Medicine’s database PubMed. Those from dermatologists refer to a disease. Those from psychiatrists refer to delusions. Only one, the very first, has the abstract given in the database and although it mentions delusion in the title, the content implies that it is not. It may include “neuropsychological symptoms”, but if you had colored fibers extruding from your skin, I’m betting you’d have some psychological disturbances, like fear and panic, also:

    Am J Clin Dermatol. 2006;7(1):1-5.

    The mystery of Morgellons disease: infection or delusion?

    Savely VR, Leitao MM, Stricker RB.

    South Austin Family Practice Clinic, Austin, Texas, USA.

    Morgellons disease is a mysterious skin disorder that was first described more than 300 years ago. The disease is characterized by fiber-like strands extruding from the skin in conjunction with various dermatologic and neuropsychiatric symptoms. In this respect, Morgellons disease resembles and may be confused with delusional parasitosis. The association with Lyme disease and the apparent response to antibacterial therapy suggest that Morgellons disease may be linked to an undefined infectious process. Further clinical and molecular research is needed to unlock the mystery of Morgellons disease.

    PMID: 16489838 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

    Although supposedly 300 years of history, there are no PubMed (therefore any medical literature) referring to it prior to 2006. However, the abstract implies a successful treatment.

    Although most have no abstract, and this one shows only the abstract, look them up in the library of a college or university that subscribes to the e-text versions available on PubMed, and you’ll get the full text. Very soon any research even partially funded (and much is) will be required to be made available in full text to everyone via PubMed.

    No, I am not the brain specialist…..
    YES. Yes I AM the brain specialist.

    1. Dear Lord!
      You mean to tell me anyone can get those e-text versions… for free??

      Damn college scientist, renegade hippies all! 😉

      —–
      It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
      It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

      Red Pill Junkie

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