Firstly, there is no such thing as an 'unlimited buffet'. All you can eat buffets are always, at the very least, limited to the actual buffet. You can't get any food which they are not serving on the buffet, you can't get any drinks as part of the buffet, etc. And hence, they are not called 'unlimited', they are called 'all you can eat'. An all you can eat buffet is all purchasers can eat...of the buffet, not of other stuff.
And just like every other meal in the place, as part of how restaurants operates, you have to stop eating and leave when they close.
And, just like all meals served at restaurants they consider the meal done, and forget who you are, when you leave.
If there were places open 24 hours but kicking people out after a certain amount of time, you'd have a valid point, but no restaurant owner is stupid enough to make an all you can eat buffet open 24 hours without clearly explain in advance exactly how long your 'meal' can last, or homeless people would start living in there. So if there was a place open 24 hours, I'm sure they actually have a time limit stated or a better explanation than 'all you can eat'.
In fact, your point is a little strange, because every 'all you can eat' buffet I've ever seen, it says, underneath, 'limited to a single visit'. No, this isn't the same thing as asterisks, because cell phone companies do not _explain_ the actual limitations. They just offer 'unlimited' things and then think it's reasonable to randomly and secretly limit them after people have purchased them.
This would be akin to an all you can eat buffet saying 'Subject to certain limitations' on a sign and then trying to kick people out who keep choosing 'expensive' stuff. They do not do this, because restaurant owners are not part of a small group of abusive businesses that hold the entire market so can feel free to mislead customers.
You idiot, do you have any idea how many posts those accounts have?
In fact, at least one of them trolls, which is a rather stupid thing for a PR-firm run account to do. (InsightIn140Bytes ran around praising Kim Jong Il for a bit!)
And half of them are pro-Apple, half pro-Microsoft, half pro-Android, etc, which seems to be some fairly serious conflicts of interest for a single PR firm.
You do realize that your solution is completely and utterly unworkable, for three entirely separate reasons, right?
1) People do not have the resources to sue when they are harmed. This is obvious because there's nothing stopping them from suing now. Yes, power plants have special immunities, but there are plenty of polluters that are not, and in fact, often get sued...by the government. Not by private individuals.
In fact, suggesting that any solution to 'entities blatantly wandering around causing harm to others' is 'a lawsuit' is so fucktarded that it's nearly inconceivable, but that's libertarians for you. Hell, if we're not going to make laws about pollution, how about we just have them charged with assault, as that would actually be what people who of 'pump toxins into the air people are breathing' would be charged with.
Don't like that? Then we're back to specific laws.
2) We are talking cumulative effect. If twenty companies dump out 1/5th the safe limit of coal dust, how exactly does that work, liability-wise? Who do I blame my coal-caused lung disease on, and more important, how can I win in court? And how do I know who to sue? Is each bit of pollution tags with a creator?
3) Plenty of pollution causes no 'harm' that could be sued over, and yet it causes problems we want to avoid. I point to sulfur pollution, which causes acid rain. (Which we mostly got a hold of by limiting sulfur emissions.) Acid rain does not hurt people, and any property damage it causes in any specific instance is trivial. It just kills fish, and forests, and soil. So guess the government would sue...just like it does now.
But you want a system where polluters just get sued randomly based on who can allege what harm, and I want the existing world, a system of laws where actual pre-set fine exist and people have to follow the rules laid out in advance, where if they follow them they are fine, and if they don't they are fined.
We can either live in a world that says 'you can take ten galleons of water from the well each day' and if you cheat you get sued, or we live in a world where the government randomly sues people it claims took 'too much'. Removing laws that define 'What you can do to public commons' and then trying to work it out in a court (where the government would be the plaintiff anyway) is as I said, possibly the most fucktarded idea I've ever heard of. That doesn't make people more free, that makes the entire universe utterly arbitrary.
Horseshit. Cancer is a known and extensively documented phenomenon. That would simply prove those ten people had delusions of some nature
Incorrect beliefs are not 'delusions'.
Impossible or absurd beliefs (Like the belief you're Abraham Lincoln), or continual beliefs in things that have been disproved to a level that any rational person would change their belief (Like if they thought they had cancer, and doctors tested and said they did not.) are delusions.
Simply being wrong is not a delusion. Even if you're wrong about 'crazy' things. For example, thinking someone is following you every time you leave your house is not delusional. That could, in fact, be true. However, if you hire people and set up cameras and whatnot to check on that, find no trace of them, and conclude that they're just very very good at hiding, or they're manipulating the cameras and people, at a certain point that belief crosses over into delusional. Non-delusional people would change their belief, or at least assert the people spying on them stopped.
Likewise, hypochondriacs tend to skip from disease to disease as their older self-diagnosis become implausible. They believed something specific is wrong, but when presented with evidence otherwise, changed their belief. Thus they are not delusional. (Hypochondria is a real mental problem, but it's not 'delusions'.)
It's only a 'delusion' when the facts, as presented to the belief holder, say one thing, but the belief holder continues to come up with increasing implausible ways their belief might be true. Not only does someone have to be wrong, they have to know enough that a reasonable person would admit they are wrong, and yet insist otherwise.
Please note the 'Martha Mitchell effect', which is when a mental health professional misjudges when a belief is absurd or disproven, and note that there are some beliefs that are explicitly prohibited from being considered 'delusional', like beliefs that contain value judgements. I.e., if someone thinks that the President hates them, that cannot be considered delusional, no matter how much evidence there is the President does not know who they are. 'Hates' is an opinion. The belief that the president is conspiring against them, however, can be delusional.
As for water dousing and other pseudo-science, it is entirely possible to make the case that the case that such a belief should be delusional if we actually taught people correctly in schools...however, we do not, so it is not. I.e, our 'reasonable person' test is broken, as it is 'reasonable' to believe in complete nonsense.
Erm, first of all, you do notice that about two thirds of the posts here utterly misunderstand in a much worse way than you do? Aka, they're asserting that the school took away someone's food, and forced them to eat something, and then charged for it?
Asking 'If you saw a news story on the Huffington Post....would you immediately assume it was all lies because Huffington Post is a biased left-wing site?' makes you sound pretty silly when the original story basically was all lies, and it is that story that's still being echo-chambered around the internet.
Secondly, you still misunderstand the story, as the newspapers still haven't corrected it. Almost EVERY point you just listed is utterly wrong:
A kid went to lunch, and because she had been signed up by her parent for a special program to monitor and supplement her diet, and because she didn't have any obvious milk, she was told to get some, which was free. (It turns out she did have some dairy, but the 'inspection' is 'glancing down the table', not 'opening sandwiches')
That's it. That's the 'state intrusion'. That's all the government actually did. Does anyone have a problem with that?
Meanwhile, the state sent a letter home at the start of the year stating that if parents did not send their students to school without proper food, the school would provide it and might charge the parents. (As schools, in fact, often do, and anyone who has a problem with that can fuck off. The school is in loco parentis and must feed children, and they don't have the money to keep doing that for free. Although it's worth pointing out that 'charging the parents' is usually just there for threatening purposes, i.e., they call the parents in and say 'either send appropriate lunches or we will bill you for all the food we have to provide already'.)
Now, this didn't apply to parents who were signed up specifically for the program for free food supplements, as the state provides money for that, but the school failed to make that clear.
Meanwhile, the kid get in line and, misunderstanding, got an entire tray of food instead of just the milk, but it didn't matter, as the food was free. She then ate some of that instead of her meal, taking the bagged meal home. It's worth pointing out if she'd just done what was asked of her and taken just a milk, or even eaten the school meal and thrown her bag lunch away, no one would have even noticed anything happened.
So, basically, the problem was that a four-year-old couldn't follow teacher directions (Which obviously isn't her fault.), and the school sent out confusing letters to explained to parents 'If you do not provide food for your kid to eat, we'll do it and bill you. ' and didn't explain how that intersected with the 'Sign up here if you are unable to provide lunches and want us to help' program.
So that's two failures of communication from the school...which caused no actual harm here and perhaps all the morons out there could calm the fuck down and suggest the school work on explaining what is going on slightly better, instead of yammering about fascism and school lunch Nazis.
They didn't give the kid chicken nuggets at all, you utter dumbass. Here is the actual fucking story:
Teachers (not a 'state agent' unless you've decided to refer to all teachers in that way) occassionally see a kid without milk at lunch. As the school was in a program to try to provide healthier food, and knowing the kid was in that program, the kid tends to be directed to go get some milk.
No, despite the quote above, it has nothing to do with an inspector, unless they've been hanging out in the lunchroom every day. She's been given free stuff more than once. Nor, as various article implied, was her food inspected, and the cheese ignored. Instead, duh, her food wasn't inspected, so the cheese wasn't even noticed. 'Hey, look, it's a kid sitting without any milk.' says a teacher. 'Kid, go get some free milk.'
The kid, confused, at least once gets an entire lunch and doesn't eat her own, and then tells the parent about this, including giving them the receipt that all cash registers print off stating the cost of the meal. (Which is not, in fact, a 'bill'.) There is absolutely no indication that her existing food was in any way removed. (And, in fact, we know it wasn't, as she went home with it.)
The parent, remembering a previous letter that says that the school might start to charge for this sort of thing, and unable to afford the cost of the food they keep giving her kid (Although the school is not currently doing that, which is probably why the kid keeps being directed to get some milk without anyone thinking twice about it.), contacts the newspapers, worried the school is going to make her pay for the food.
Several news organizations misreport this story, and utter morons attach themselves to this story like white on white paint, apparently outraged that a school is providing free food and a parent is confused and worried she might have to pay for it. The horror that a school would provide things for free to poor children, or have some sort of authority over children in its care!
The government assigning an arbitrary amount of pollution credits for each person
See, and it's deliberate misunderstandings like that make no one take you seriously. At no point have I even vaguely suggested it be done in an arbitrary manner, and there's really no want to get that from anything I said or implied.
I said, very clearly, they should be evenly distributed. 'the rights to a X amount of pollution should start evenly distributed in the hands of every American'
Unless you're trying to imply the total is arbitrary, but I didn't say that either. That, just like how much mercury can be put safely in a river, should be decided by the government.
and having the main mechanism be a government pool to dump those credits to corporations for money is a Controlled Market.
Uh, no. The government selling stuff to the highest bidder is not, in fact, a 'controlled market'. That's how all free markets work, people sell stuff to the highest bidder. I have no idea in what delusional universe you think the government selling stuff to the highest bidder is not a free market.
The only reason you'd have a problem with it is that you have no respect for property rights. Namely, you think that corporations have the right to use and abuse public commons however they want, and the public has no right to set restrictions on how those commons are used. (Which the public, of course, would do by electing a government that decides exactly how much of the commons can be used, and then sells it in tiny pieces. Or lets people keep 'their piece'.)
You are a complete fool, and now you know which you are. It's really hilarious to watch libertarians argue about this, to see them baldly assert that the most libertarian solution possible is somehow not libertarian, simply because the Republicans don't like it.
Tell me, in your universe full of your rather shitty libertarians, how would that government control a limited public commons? Lottery tickets? Handing it to the rich? Handing it to the poor? If there was only one well in town, and it was publicly owned and gave out only a certain amount of water a month, how exactly would you decide who got the water? An interpretive dance concert? Fisticuffs?
Your whole premise is that Cap and Trade is an inherently Libertarian idea when in fact the market for carbon credits is 100% the creation of a government imposed regulation.
In that sense, all markets are 100% the creation of a government imposed regulation, because all property is 100% the creation of a government imposed regulation.
Saying 'We should invent property like that' requires some sort of explanation of why we should have car titles or have police to evict trespassers.
A certificate saying 'This person have the right to emit X tons of C02 in 2013' is no different than one saying 'This person has the right to control possession of a specific 1992 Pontiac Sunbird'.
And the government doesn't need to create a 'market' for that. Markets just magically come into existence when people have property they wish to buy, sell, or trade.
The philosophical problem with Cap and Trade is that it is an artificial creation of scarcity, and every such regulation is anathema to the libertarian mind (and I speak as a libertarian).
Um, I rather suspect you need to talk to Libertarians about intellectual property before you get all high and mighty about claiming they have a problem with 'artificial creation of scarcity'. You'll discover that most of them seem to have no problem with it.
However, more to the point, 'lack of pollution' is not artificial. People have always had the right to control people dumping stuff on their property. Or on the commons.
The only change is we've come to understand that the air and the climate are, in fact, property.
We need to figure out, as a society, how much damage we're willing to do to our commons (Just like we need to figure out how many cows we're going to let eat the grass of the village common, or whatever), and then fairly let people do that damage. (Which is, in modern society, done via the free market.)
This is, of course, complicated by the fact we're sharing these commons with the entire planet, and we don't want to restrict ourselves only to watch all the other villages eat the commons flat, but that is a fixable problem.
The practical problems are much greater - they begin with the fact that Cap and Trade is susceptible to "subsidy farming" by those who produce nothing, continue with the abuse of the system by arbitrageurs and other forms of rent seeker (Al Gore - I'm looking at you), and end with the fact that such provisions are not and are unlikely to ever be universal.
Uh, yes, which is why I proposed not handing the credits to companies, but instead handing them out to actual human beings, who could then do whatever they wanted with them. Or alternately the government could just let everyone bid on them, straight up highest bidder wins.
Looking back just shy of 2,000 years to when the Romans grew grapes in Yorkshire, I can see that the climate in the part of the world that I inhabit has been much warmer than today, with no dramatic ill effects on other parts of the world, so doubt that a couple of degrees rise from current temperatures would result in the disasters that the doomsayers would have us believe.
It's astonishing how your (lack of) scientific knowledge happens to align perfectly with your political position.
Here's a fun question for you, and unlike the other poster, it's not a hypothetical:
There are certain substances that are, in fact, toxic in large amounts, such as coal dust. This is not some 'possible' toxin, it's very well documented.
Coal plants, of course, wish to release these into the air, which is obviously cheaper than doing something about it, and even the expensive 'cleaning' system do not work 100%.
How do you propose we deal with that? Regulate an amount 'each plant' can give out? (What defines 'a plant'?) Regulate specific setups and cleaning equipment?
Now if you'll excuse me, my neighbor has a nice looking car I've wanted for a while, so I think I'll go take it. Although I might take his truck first, so I can pick up some of that wood laying around at Home Depot and build a house on the nice flat area a little bit down the road.
I'm so glad we live in a world where the government doesn't bother to keep track of stuff like 'who owns the right to control access to things', aka, private property. That would be so much work. All libertarians know the only legit job of the government is to...wait, what was it again?
Ah, fake libertarians. It's so much fun talking to you on Slashdot, with your addled brains and inability to actually come up with any consistent political philosophy, as you react in outrage to the idea that the government should divvy up a common good and let all citizens control their piece of it as they see fit, keeping it or reselling it on the free market. The HORROR! Such a thing must not be allowed!
That's some real nice 'Libertarianism' you've got going there. Keep up the good work of reacting in outrage to using the free market to distribute 'the commons' instead of letting the business community abuse it for free.
Well, yeah, the entire system is stupid. At this point, if someone wanted to start a panic and disrupt air travel, they'd set off a bomb in the security checkpoint line.
And let's not mention in inane idea that we can keep 'knifes' out of anywhere, at any time.
Uh, no. We can't even keep knives out of prisons.
Granted, we can't keep drugs out either, but that's because of bribery. With knives, though, no one bothers to bribe...the prisoners just make them. We can't keep 'knives' out of somewhere unless every single thing in that area is either too soft or too hard. I.e., a padded room of some sort. Assuming we're letting people fly with laptops and shoes and suitcases and cell phones and buy plastic-encased goods at airport shops...uh, no, we can't keep out 'knives'.
I was just pointing out that adding profiling to a stupid system would make it even stupider. Because 'profiling' actually means, in this context, 'announcing one group of people we're going to spend a lot of time on that can be used as a distraction, and another group we're not going to check as carefully'.
You'd think all this would be obvious, but there are some fairly stupid people out there. I suspect the only reason we didn't end up with profiling is that someone said 'Wait, we can't profile Muslims because Muslims don't magically have some distinguishing physical identification. And, oddly, not all of them appear to be Arab.'
While I'm not a libertarian, and in fact think most of them are fools lead by sociopaths, I must defend them here. There probably is a libertarian solution to all this. In fact, the right has promoted in the past:
Cap and trade.
Such a system is about as free as it comes, and works perfectly fine for regulating other scarce resources like the EM spectrum.
Although the rights to a X amount of pollution should start evenly distributed in the hands of every American, actual human beings. Which most would turn back over to the government to put in a pool for corporations to bid on, for lower taxes...but people could, instead, choose to just tell them to fuck off, they're keeping and not using the credits. Charities could even be set up to bid against companies and buy and not-use pollution credits.
That would be the free market solution, the libertarian solution. Assign every human being a specific amount of pollution they are allowed to cause, and they can freely sell it, or at least lease it. Or they can even buy more, or whatever. (Granted, the real implementation of this was not quite as good, because it started the credits in companies...but of all the proposals, it was the most libertarian, and could easily be changed once the system was set up.)
The problem is, of course, that 'libertarian' and 'the right' only coincide when 'libertarian' coincides with 'business interests'. When cap and trade was laxer than what the left was proposing, the right was all for it. When it's what the left is proposing, big business move the goalposts, and the right moves along with it. Libertarians end up standing around confused, duped by the right once again, as one of the most libertarian solutions possible suddenly becomes a liberal conspiracy, and the business community^W^WRepublicans have once again moved back to the idea of using 'regulations' that they can manipulate, instead of the government saying 'We don't care how you do it, you can only produce X amount of pollution, and if you want more, you have to buy that right from someone else'.
And there's no way, of course, that they'd just use a woman to carry stuff past the security checkpoint and hand it off to a man.
Or, of course, enter security at another airport altogether, fly to another airport, and hand the stuff off, inside the security checkpoint, there.
Terrorists don't even have to find people willing to commit suicide or even anywhere near them. All it requires is one person, anywhere in the entire world, that can act as carrier to get something inside the airport security system. (They can even do it multiple times as long there's someone staying inside the secure area to collect them, which gets nicely around any '3 oz' restrictions the TSA has invented..)
That, right there, shows why profiling is idiotic, and the people who suggest it aren't that smart either.
This is all pretending you are correct, which you are not, at least if the religion you are speaking of is Islam. Please google 'Shahidka' for a modern day group of Muslim female suicide bombers that are so common they needed a name. Or in Palestine, where it's happening more and more often. Or Sana'a Mehaidli or Thenmozhi Rajaratnam. If you are talking about al-Qaeda specifically, they used a woman as a suicide bomber in their 2005 Amman attack, Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi. (Which we only know because her bomb was broken.)
Actually, considering the common Iranian religious beliefs about women, if the government started even talking about taking naked pictures of them, there would be riots in the street.
I pirate all my TV shows. Why? Because I watch them at random times, and I watch them from years earlier. (And, no, I'm not buying a DVD of a series I watch once.)
And, no, I don't have enough consistent internet bandwidth to 'stream', nor do I wish watch them in a shitty web browser interface instead of on my actual TV with an actual remote control and media interface.
You want to make me stop pirating, media corporations? You want me to watch your TV shows with commercials in them?
How about you fucking provide them with commercials? Somewhere I can, you know, download them and watch them later in an interface of my choosing.
And, hell, I don't actually care about DRM. You want to DRM them so that I can only watch them a few times, go ahead. You want the file to phone home when it's played, go ahead, I don't actually care, and neither would the vast majority of people.
You want to stop online pirating of TV shows? Right now? Give people a program that lets them subscribe to TV shows, and download them with ads in advance of their airdate, and decrypts them at the correct time. And provides the same with older shows. And, hey, look, no more fucking TV piracy. (And you can even let people pay extra for a lack of ads, and for bonus content, like the DVD model.)
And, some people are going to point out they're building an model (Except only with purchasing ad-free ones) in iTunes... no.There you're paying to 'own' the copy, instead of just 'renting' it. If I'm buying an episode of Supernatural, it might, indeed, be worth a dollar. (That's basically the DVD price, after all, and you're buying one at a time so it costs more.) If I just want to watch the newest one without commercials, and I'm not planning on ever watching it again? Uh, no. Charge me what you would have gotten for the commercials in it. (Which is probably closer to ten cents.)
I once got 1st place in economics in the local academic decathlon. Surprised the hell out of me, as I thought I didn't know anything about that subject.
Yes, and we need less MDs at the start of medicine, also.
Of the people who visit a general practitioner, if they visited an RN first:
X% could probably been sent home without a doctor. (No, the cough you're worried about is not a problem yet, please go home, come back if it persists another week.)
X% could be tested and lab work sent in, the lab work sent to a doctor, be found okay, and never have to see a doctor, and use maybe 10 minutes of their time. (And, as you point out, there is no reason why such lab technicians should be doctors.)
X% could be tested and lab work sent in, problems found, and a doctor visit scheduled.
X% would have such obvious problems that they just get sent to a doctor.
I have no idea what the percentage
And, as you point out, a lot of 'doctor stuff' is simply 'trying things until something works', and I utterly fail to see why there can't be scripts for this. It's not like 'list of medications to try' are some sort of military secret.
The problem is, at this point, the problem of medicine isn't the structure at all. There's stuff that's fixable there, but the problem isn't anything to do with that, it's that we have built a system where society, in general, pay a flat rate to a corporation, and that corporation then has to pay for medical expenses we incur out of their profits...which is, obviously, an incentive to provide as little as possible.
It is, quite literally, the stupidest possible way to design a health care system. (Or, indeed, any sort of market.)
Why the hell would the bandwidth used to transmit the voice request over the network 'correlate to the complexity of the specific query and language we used to perform it.'?
It seems unreasonable that it would correlate entirely to how long you spoke. (And I guess, how compressibly you spoke, but presumably that's somewhat consistent.)
How much data returned also shouldn't correlate with that. That data is machine instructions to do a simple task, and thus really shouldn't be more than a single TCP/IP packet.
Yes, because that's how people do web searches on their phone in your universe...they sit there and type in a hyperlink. It's manual web searching, just type URLs until you hit what you're looking for!
However, in my universe, people do web searched by typing in a search box in their web browser, which returns a list of search results as a web page, and people click on something.
Now, it's entirely likely that Google mobile search results are less than 64KB. (Google's non-mobile page is about 500KB, but there's a lot of images, their actual HTML is closer to 30k.) But comparing it to a 'URL' is idiotic. No one is getting search results by using 1K of data. You can argue that it's maybe double the amount of data...but that becomes a bit moot considering half the time the page they just went to is 900KB+ of data, which is about the average.
And people are not using Siri to load URLs. They are using their bookmarks. In fact, Siri can't load URLs, either straight out or from Bookmarks. (You can do some complicated trick of putting URLs in contacts, and 'calling them' to launch them, but I suspect that most people do not.)
And, no, I don't have Siri either. And don't particularly see the point of it.
Dude, there are people on this very page who are asserting that the earth has not warmed. In fact, that's Watt's entire premise, and the claim about the 'climategate' emails. ('They're hiding the decline!' Aka, they're excluding the known-bogus modern tree ring data. We don't know what the hell tree rings are currently doing, but we know for a fact they stopped measuring temperature, so, yes, we leave them out for years where we actually measured the temperature ourselves.)
So, yes, there are, in fact, people denying that.
Once you get past that, it's hard to figure out what explanations there are for the increase besides more CO2. Thanks to carbon dating, it's pretty indisputable where the CO2 in the air is coming from. Any source of CO2 that wasn't from fossil fuels would have different carbon isotopes. So once you accept CO2, you basically have to accept 'human caused', unless nature is burning fossil fuels or massive ten thousand year-old forests or we broke into some sort of underground CO2 reservoir or something. (It's not utterly impossible for there to be some other source for 'old carbon in all the new CO2' besides fossil fuels, but no one can really come up with a good one.)
The sun was a bogus theory, and in fact bogus to start with. We can actually measure the output of the sun fairly well, and it appears to have almost no correlation with temperature at all. Sun gets brighter, temperature goes up. Sun gets dimmer, temperature continues to go up at the same speed.
No one has really come up with any reasonable idea beyond CO2, besides the fairly lame 'It might happen naturally'. However, when you have one theory that has an actual workable mechanism, and the other theory is 'It's any mechanism except that!'...yeah, we know which to use.
So, while it seems like some people have accepted that the climate is changing...those people quickly run out of other ways to deny AGW, and end up running back to 'But we don't know that it's actually changing, anyway!'.
Shakespeare isn't literature and should not be taught at as such. (Unless you mean his poetry, which is not actually that good as poetry, and is frankly only famous because he is.)
The scripts of Shakespeare are not literature. The scripts are instructions on how to make art, they are not art themselves.
I swear to God, one day I'm going to walk into a school board meeting and propose we teach students how offset printing works and to read the layout instructions of how to print a copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' instead of actually having people read that book. Or instead of viewing pictures of Rembrandt art, instead we simply show students how to mix the paints he used.
And instead of eating food, they can just watch pigs being slaughtered.
When they ask why, I'll point out that's how we've decided to teach plays, having them read the instructions (Which have inexplicably become 'literature') instead of viewing the finished product in the form of performance art.
You are not supposed to sit down and read the script of a play, period, unless you're fucking directing that play. There is no purpose in it. Scripts are no more art than a paintbrush is art, or a spotlight is art, or a typewriter is art. A script is a tool you use to make art.
It's the same in Georgia, too. Obviously not less snow (We already got so little snow that statistically 'none' would not be distinguishable from normal), but we used to have a fairly consistent temperature change, where the length of the seasons would vary, and sometimes run 'backwards', but they didn't just change overnight like they've been doing, where one say it's 60 and one day it's 30.
Likewise, we didn't used to have days, in the middle of a normal week, where it stayed below freezing. In fact, I'm hard pressed to even recall any 24 hour span when it stayed below freezing, and when they happened, they used to be in the middle of week-long temperature dips where other days it stayed below 40. But we just recently had a day it barely broken 20...in January instead of February. Then two days later, it was 55.
Likewise, last year it snowed at Christmas. And it snowed two weeks before that. It never snows here outside of official 'winter', or even earlier than February. And we don't get six inches of snow, period.
People laugh, and idiots will assert that random cold weather doesn't mean that 'global warming' is true...but frankly, everyone can see that something odd is going on, because the weather has become exceedingly odd. We repeatedly set record lows one week, and then the next week, it's all back to normal. And in the summer, the same thing happened...record highs, and then back to normal. (And even outside of 'summer'.)
I dunno, I was told a decade ago to expect temperature fluctuation as part of climate change, so maybe I'm just seeing what I was told to see. But it's not just me. Even people who have no idea what's going on talk about how weird the weather is.
The IPCC makes fucking predictions all the time. They predict the average temperature years in advance, you dumbass, and they've been consistently right for two decades as the temperature has risen. (Actually, more technically they have a mathematical model that predicts the temperature based on the amount of CO2 released, and other such things, and that is the falsifable part. Obviously, they can't predict the amount of CO2 future humans release, hence their need to constantly update their reports, and the reason they issue multiple predictions, each based on different amounts of CO2 that humans might release.)
You'd think before saying something like 'So neither the IPCC, nor NOAA, nor the Royal Meteorological society have made any clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.' you would actually fucking go to their websites and actually look at them.
Hell, in 2010, everyone was running around claiming that the 'lower temperatures' for 2009 disproved their predictions. You deniers sure have short memories. Of course, that stopped when 2009 was proven to be a strange fluke and the temperature went right back on track of the predictions.
And, no, a fluke doesn't disprove anything. The earth is hardly a controlled experiment, and a side running around yammering how the earth's temperature could be changing from all sorts of different things, not just CO2, doesn't get to point to a year where temperatures held steady as 'proof' of anything...if all that other stuff could be causing the change, then it certainly could have instead counteracted the change one year. You can't have it both ways.
In fact, the IPCC's predictions have been challenged in recent years, because it appears they have been wrong about a few key things, for example, how fast arctic ice melts. Sadly for your point, they were predicting it would melt slower, and now the sea level is rising faster than they predicted also. (And a lot of people aren't happy that their 'highest' baseline of CO2 prediction is almost always correct. If humans are going to put that much CO2 in the air, the IPCC needs to admit it and center their baselines around that point, instead of inventing multiple other baselines of less CO2 production.)
It's like you have no damn idea what the IPCC does, which is mainly produce reports that contain falsifiable scientific theories.
What DHT needs at this point is some sort of RSS feed-ish system.
There needs to be a way to make a magnet link to content that doesn't exist yet, or that can change later. Then the pirate bay could exist purely as a DHT-entity...your client torrents it in. (And the backend is hidden somewhere trusted.)
I can't imagine how this could possibly work, though, considering how DHT works. You'd have to has something besides the changing part, and then you've got hypothetical fakes out there.
...you know, DHT can be updated. Hash types can be added to it. What if PGP was added as a hash type, which returned files signed by that hash? And you could also specify a date and time? So pirate bay could be something like magnet:?xt=urn:pgp:FAC382FB055E031A340479EA9E767B67|filelist-%y%m%d%h
Where that first part is the pgp fingerprint, and the last part is filled in by your torrent client, so it would look for signed by them 'named' filelist-2011011614? So they just make a new one with a new name every hour. (How this name is specified, I do not know.)
Does that make sense? I know it sorta screws up the idea of 'hashes', as that is not, in fact, any sort of hash, and idiots could produce two identical torrents with the same 'hash'. But assuming the Pirate Bay isn't so stupid as to do that, I don't see why it couldn't work, assuming that people had torrent clients that understood pgp signatures.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, there is no such thing as an 'unlimited buffet'. All you can eat buffets are always, at the very least, limited to the actual buffet. You can't get any food which they are not serving on the buffet, you can't get any drinks as part of the buffet, etc. And hence, they are not called 'unlimited', they are called 'all you can eat'. An all you can eat buffet is all purchasers can eat...of the buffet, not of other stuff.
And just like every other meal in the place, as part of how restaurants operates, you have to stop eating and leave when they close.
And, just like all meals served at restaurants they consider the meal done, and forget who you are, when you leave.
If there were places open 24 hours but kicking people out after a certain amount of time, you'd have a valid point, but no restaurant owner is stupid enough to make an all you can eat buffet open 24 hours without clearly explain in advance exactly how long your 'meal' can last, or homeless people would start living in there. So if there was a place open 24 hours, I'm sure they actually have a time limit stated or a better explanation than 'all you can eat'.
In fact, your point is a little strange, because every 'all you can eat' buffet I've ever seen, it says, underneath, 'limited to a single visit'. No, this isn't the same thing as asterisks, because cell phone companies do not _explain_ the actual limitations. They just offer 'unlimited' things and then think it's reasonable to randomly and secretly limit them after people have purchased them.
This would be akin to an all you can eat buffet saying 'Subject to certain limitations' on a sign and then trying to kick people out who keep choosing 'expensive' stuff. They do not do this, because restaurant owners are not part of a small group of abusive businesses that hold the entire market so can feel free to mislead customers.
You idiot, do you have any idea how many posts those accounts have?
In fact, at least one of them trolls, which is a rather stupid thing for a PR-firm run account to do. (InsightIn140Bytes ran around praising Kim Jong Il for a bit!)
And half of them are pro-Apple, half pro-Microsoft, half pro-Android, etc, which seems to be some fairly serious conflicts of interest for a single PR firm.
Seriously, you're completely stupid.
Yes, only giant corporations and millionaires should be able to directly pay for campaigns.
You do realize that your solution is completely and utterly unworkable, for three entirely separate reasons, right?
1) People do not have the resources to sue when they are harmed. This is obvious because there's nothing stopping them from suing now. Yes, power plants have special immunities, but there are plenty of polluters that are not, and in fact, often get sued...by the government. Not by private individuals.
In fact, suggesting that any solution to 'entities blatantly wandering around causing harm to others' is 'a lawsuit' is so fucktarded that it's nearly inconceivable, but that's libertarians for you. Hell, if we're not going to make laws about pollution, how about we just have them charged with assault, as that would actually be what people who of 'pump toxins into the air people are breathing' would be charged with.
Don't like that? Then we're back to specific laws.
2) We are talking cumulative effect. If twenty companies dump out 1/5th the safe limit of coal dust, how exactly does that work, liability-wise? Who do I blame my coal-caused lung disease on, and more important, how can I win in court? And how do I know who to sue? Is each bit of pollution tags with a creator?
3) Plenty of pollution causes no 'harm' that could be sued over, and yet it causes problems we want to avoid. I point to sulfur pollution, which causes acid rain. (Which we mostly got a hold of by limiting sulfur emissions.) Acid rain does not hurt people, and any property damage it causes in any specific instance is trivial. It just kills fish, and forests, and soil. So guess the government would sue...just like it does now.
But you want a system where polluters just get sued randomly based on who can allege what harm, and I want the existing world, a system of laws where actual pre-set fine exist and people have to follow the rules laid out in advance, where if they follow them they are fine, and if they don't they are fined.
We can either live in a world that says 'you can take ten galleons of water from the well each day' and if you cheat you get sued, or we live in a world where the government randomly sues people it claims took 'too much'. Removing laws that define 'What you can do to public commons' and then trying to work it out in a court (where the government would be the plaintiff anyway) is as I said, possibly the most fucktarded idea I've ever heard of. That doesn't make people more free, that makes the entire universe utterly arbitrary.
Horseshit. Cancer is a known and extensively documented phenomenon. That would simply prove those ten people had delusions of some nature
Incorrect beliefs are not 'delusions'.
Impossible or absurd beliefs (Like the belief you're Abraham Lincoln), or continual beliefs in things that have been disproved to a level that any rational person would change their belief (Like if they thought they had cancer, and doctors tested and said they did not.) are delusions.
Simply being wrong is not a delusion. Even if you're wrong about 'crazy' things. For example, thinking someone is following you every time you leave your house is not delusional. That could, in fact, be true. However, if you hire people and set up cameras and whatnot to check on that, find no trace of them, and conclude that they're just very very good at hiding, or they're manipulating the cameras and people, at a certain point that belief crosses over into delusional. Non-delusional people would change their belief, or at least assert the people spying on them stopped.
Likewise, hypochondriacs tend to skip from disease to disease as their older self-diagnosis become implausible. They believed something specific is wrong, but when presented with evidence otherwise, changed their belief. Thus they are not delusional. (Hypochondria is a real mental problem, but it's not 'delusions'.)
It's only a 'delusion' when the facts, as presented to the belief holder, say one thing, but the belief holder continues to come up with increasing implausible ways their belief might be true. Not only does someone have to be wrong, they have to know enough that a reasonable person would admit they are wrong, and yet insist otherwise.
Please note the 'Martha Mitchell effect', which is when a mental health professional misjudges when a belief is absurd or disproven, and note that there are some beliefs that are explicitly prohibited from being considered 'delusional', like beliefs that contain value judgements. I.e., if someone thinks that the President hates them, that cannot be considered delusional, no matter how much evidence there is the President does not know who they are. 'Hates' is an opinion. The belief that the president is conspiring against them, however, can be delusional.
As for water dousing and other pseudo-science, it is entirely possible to make the case that the case that such a belief should be delusional if we actually taught people correctly in schools...however, we do not, so it is not. I.e, our 'reasonable person' test is broken, as it is 'reasonable' to believe in complete nonsense.
Erm, first of all, you do notice that about two thirds of the posts here utterly misunderstand in a much worse way than you do? Aka, they're asserting that the school took away someone's food, and forced them to eat something, and then charged for it?
Asking 'If you saw a news story on the Huffington Post....would you immediately assume it was all lies because Huffington Post is a biased left-wing site?' makes you sound pretty silly when the original story basically was all lies, and it is that story that's still being echo-chambered around the internet.
Secondly, you still misunderstand the story, as the newspapers still haven't corrected it. Almost EVERY point you just listed is utterly wrong:
A kid went to lunch, and because she had been signed up by her parent for a special program to monitor and supplement her diet, and because she didn't have any obvious milk, she was told to get some, which was free. (It turns out she did have some dairy, but the 'inspection' is 'glancing down the table', not 'opening sandwiches')
That's it. That's the 'state intrusion'. That's all the government actually did. Does anyone have a problem with that?
Meanwhile, the state sent a letter home at the start of the year stating that if parents did not send their students to school without proper food, the school would provide it and might charge the parents. (As schools, in fact, often do, and anyone who has a problem with that can fuck off. The school is in loco parentis and must feed children, and they don't have the money to keep doing that for free. Although it's worth pointing out that 'charging the parents' is usually just there for threatening purposes, i.e., they call the parents in and say 'either send appropriate lunches or we will bill you for all the food we have to provide already'.)
Now, this didn't apply to parents who were signed up specifically for the program for free food supplements, as the state provides money for that, but the school failed to make that clear.
Meanwhile, the kid get in line and, misunderstanding, got an entire tray of food instead of just the milk, but it didn't matter, as the food was free. She then ate some of that instead of her meal, taking the bagged meal home. It's worth pointing out if she'd just done what was asked of her and taken just a milk, or even eaten the school meal and thrown her bag lunch away, no one would have even noticed anything happened.
So, basically, the problem was that a four-year-old couldn't follow teacher directions (Which obviously isn't her fault.), and the school sent out confusing letters to explained to parents 'If you do not provide food for your kid to eat, we'll do it and bill you. ' and didn't explain how that intersected with the 'Sign up here if you are unable to provide lunches and want us to help' program.
So that's two failures of communication from the school...which caused no actual harm here and perhaps all the morons out there could calm the fuck down and suggest the school work on explaining what is going on slightly better, instead of yammering about fascism and school lunch Nazis.
They didn't give the kid chicken nuggets at all, you utter dumbass. Here is the actual fucking story:
Teachers (not a 'state agent' unless you've decided to refer to all teachers in that way) occassionally see a kid without milk at lunch. As the school was in a program to try to provide healthier food, and knowing the kid was in that program, the kid tends to be directed to go get some milk.
No, despite the quote above, it has nothing to do with an inspector, unless they've been hanging out in the lunchroom every day. She's been given free stuff more than once. Nor, as various article implied, was her food inspected, and the cheese ignored. Instead, duh, her food wasn't inspected, so the cheese wasn't even noticed. 'Hey, look, it's a kid sitting without any milk.' says a teacher. 'Kid, go get some free milk.'
The kid, confused, at least once gets an entire lunch and doesn't eat her own, and then tells the parent about this, including giving them the receipt that all cash registers print off stating the cost of the meal. (Which is not, in fact, a 'bill'.) There is absolutely no indication that her existing food was in any way removed. (And, in fact, we know it wasn't, as she went home with it.)
The parent, remembering a previous letter that says that the school might start to charge for this sort of thing, and unable to afford the cost of the food they keep giving her kid (Although the school is not currently doing that, which is probably why the kid keeps being directed to get some milk without anyone thinking twice about it.), contacts the newspapers, worried the school is going to make her pay for the food.
Several news organizations misreport this story, and utter morons attach themselves to this story like white on white paint, apparently outraged that a school is providing free food and a parent is confused and worried she might have to pay for it. The horror that a school would provide things for free to poor children, or have some sort of authority over children in its care!
The government assigning an arbitrary amount of pollution credits for each person
See, and it's deliberate misunderstandings like that make no one take you seriously. At no point have I even vaguely suggested it be done in an arbitrary manner, and there's really no want to get that from anything I said or implied.
I said, very clearly, they should be evenly distributed. 'the rights to a X amount of pollution should start evenly distributed in the hands of every American'
Unless you're trying to imply the total is arbitrary, but I didn't say that either. That, just like how much mercury can be put safely in a river, should be decided by the government.
and having the main mechanism be a government pool to dump those credits to corporations for money is a Controlled Market.
Uh, no. The government selling stuff to the highest bidder is not, in fact, a 'controlled market'. That's how all free markets work, people sell stuff to the highest bidder. I have no idea in what delusional universe you think the government selling stuff to the highest bidder is not a free market.
The only reason you'd have a problem with it is that you have no respect for property rights. Namely, you think that corporations have the right to use and abuse public commons however they want, and the public has no right to set restrictions on how those commons are used. (Which the public, of course, would do by electing a government that decides exactly how much of the commons can be used, and then sells it in tiny pieces. Or lets people keep 'their piece'.)
You are a complete fool, and now you know which you are. It's really hilarious to watch libertarians argue about this, to see them baldly assert that the most libertarian solution possible is somehow not libertarian, simply because the Republicans don't like it.
Tell me, in your universe full of your rather shitty libertarians, how would that government control a limited public commons? Lottery tickets? Handing it to the rich? Handing it to the poor? If there was only one well in town, and it was publicly owned and gave out only a certain amount of water a month, how exactly would you decide who got the water? An interpretive dance concert? Fisticuffs?
Your whole premise is that Cap and Trade is an inherently Libertarian idea when in fact the market for carbon credits is 100% the creation of a government imposed regulation.
In that sense, all markets are 100% the creation of a government imposed regulation, because all property is 100% the creation of a government imposed regulation.
Saying 'We should invent property like that' requires some sort of explanation of why we should have car titles or have police to evict trespassers.
A certificate saying 'This person have the right to emit X tons of C02 in 2013' is no different than one saying 'This person has the right to control possession of a specific 1992 Pontiac Sunbird'.
And the government doesn't need to create a 'market' for that. Markets just magically come into existence when people have property they wish to buy, sell, or trade.
The philosophical problem with Cap and Trade is that it is an artificial creation of scarcity, and every such regulation is anathema to the libertarian mind (and I speak as a libertarian).
Um, I rather suspect you need to talk to Libertarians about intellectual property before you get all high and mighty about claiming they have a problem with 'artificial creation of scarcity'. You'll discover that most of them seem to have no problem with it.
However, more to the point, 'lack of pollution' is not artificial. People have always had the right to control people dumping stuff on their property. Or on the commons.
The only change is we've come to understand that the air and the climate are, in fact, property.
We need to figure out, as a society, how much damage we're willing to do to our commons (Just like we need to figure out how many cows we're going to let eat the grass of the village common, or whatever), and then fairly let people do that damage. (Which is, in modern society, done via the free market.)
This is, of course, complicated by the fact we're sharing these commons with the entire planet, and we don't want to restrict ourselves only to watch all the other villages eat the commons flat, but that is a fixable problem.
The practical problems are much greater - they begin with the fact that Cap and Trade is susceptible to "subsidy farming" by those who produce nothing, continue with the abuse of the system by arbitrageurs and other forms of rent seeker (Al Gore - I'm looking at you), and end with the fact that such provisions are not and are unlikely to ever be universal.
Uh, yes, which is why I proposed not handing the credits to companies, but instead handing them out to actual human beings, who could then do whatever they wanted with them. Or alternately the government could just let everyone bid on them, straight up highest bidder wins.
Looking back just shy of 2,000 years to when the Romans grew grapes in Yorkshire, I can see that the climate in the part of the world that I inhabit has been much warmer than today, with no dramatic ill effects on other parts of the world, so doubt that a couple of degrees rise from current temperatures would result in the disasters that the doomsayers would have us believe.
It's astonishing how your (lack of) scientific knowledge happens to align perfectly with your political position.
Here's a fun question for you, and unlike the other poster, it's not a hypothetical:
There are certain substances that are, in fact, toxic in large amounts, such as coal dust. This is not some 'possible' toxin, it's very well documented.
Coal plants, of course, wish to release these into the air, which is obviously cheaper than doing something about it, and even the expensive 'cleaning' system do not work 100%.
How do you propose we deal with that? Regulate an amount 'each plant' can give out? (What defines 'a plant'?) Regulate specific setups and cleaning equipment?
Yes, I agree!
Now if you'll excuse me, my neighbor has a nice looking car I've wanted for a while, so I think I'll go take it. Although I might take his truck first, so I can pick up some of that wood laying around at Home Depot and build a house on the nice flat area a little bit down the road.
I'm so glad we live in a world where the government doesn't bother to keep track of stuff like 'who owns the right to control access to things', aka, private property. That would be so much work. All libertarians know the only legit job of the government is to...wait, what was it again?
Ah, fake libertarians. It's so much fun talking to you on Slashdot, with your addled brains and inability to actually come up with any consistent political philosophy, as you react in outrage to the idea that the government should divvy up a common good and let all citizens control their piece of it as they see fit, keeping it or reselling it on the free market. The HORROR! Such a thing must not be allowed!
That's some real nice 'Libertarianism' you've got going there. Keep up the good work of reacting in outrage to using the free market to distribute 'the commons' instead of letting the business community abuse it for free.
Like I said: Fools led by sociopaths.
Well, yeah, the entire system is stupid. At this point, if someone wanted to start a panic and disrupt air travel, they'd set off a bomb in the security checkpoint line.
And let's not mention in inane idea that we can keep 'knifes' out of anywhere, at any time.
Uh, no. We can't even keep knives out of prisons. Granted, we can't keep drugs out either, but that's because of bribery. With knives, though, no one bothers to bribe...the prisoners just make them. We can't keep 'knives' out of somewhere unless every single thing in that area is either too soft or too hard. I.e., a padded room of some sort. Assuming we're letting people fly with laptops and shoes and suitcases and cell phones and buy plastic-encased goods at airport shops...uh, no, we can't keep out 'knives'.
I was just pointing out that adding profiling to a stupid system would make it even stupider. Because 'profiling' actually means, in this context, 'announcing one group of people we're going to spend a lot of time on that can be used as a distraction, and another group we're not going to check as carefully'.
You'd think all this would be obvious, but there are some fairly stupid people out there. I suspect the only reason we didn't end up with profiling is that someone said 'Wait, we can't profile Muslims because Muslims don't magically have some distinguishing physical identification. And, oddly, not all of them appear to be Arab.'
While I'm not a libertarian, and in fact think most of them are fools lead by sociopaths, I must defend them here. There probably is a libertarian solution to all this. In fact, the right has promoted in the past:
Cap and trade.
Such a system is about as free as it comes, and works perfectly fine for regulating other scarce resources like the EM spectrum.
Although the rights to a X amount of pollution should start evenly distributed in the hands of every American, actual human beings. Which most would turn back over to the government to put in a pool for corporations to bid on, for lower taxes...but people could, instead, choose to just tell them to fuck off, they're keeping and not using the credits. Charities could even be set up to bid against companies and buy and not-use pollution credits.
That would be the free market solution, the libertarian solution. Assign every human being a specific amount of pollution they are allowed to cause, and they can freely sell it, or at least lease it. Or they can even buy more, or whatever. (Granted, the real implementation of this was not quite as good, because it started the credits in companies...but of all the proposals, it was the most libertarian, and could easily be changed once the system was set up.)
The problem is, of course, that 'libertarian' and 'the right' only coincide when 'libertarian' coincides with 'business interests'. When cap and trade was laxer than what the left was proposing, the right was all for it. When it's what the left is proposing, big business move the goalposts, and the right moves along with it. Libertarians end up standing around confused, duped by the right once again, as one of the most libertarian solutions possible suddenly becomes a liberal conspiracy, and the business community^W^WRepublicans have once again moved back to the idea of using 'regulations' that they can manipulate, instead of the government saying 'We don't care how you do it, you can only produce X amount of pollution, and if you want more, you have to buy that right from someone else'.
And there's no way, of course, that they'd just use a woman to carry stuff past the security checkpoint and hand it off to a man.
Or, of course, enter security at another airport altogether, fly to another airport, and hand the stuff off, inside the security checkpoint, there.
Terrorists don't even have to find people willing to commit suicide or even anywhere near them. All it requires is one person, anywhere in the entire world, that can act as carrier to get something inside the airport security system. (They can even do it multiple times as long there's someone staying inside the secure area to collect them, which gets nicely around any '3 oz' restrictions the TSA has invented..)
That, right there, shows why profiling is idiotic, and the people who suggest it aren't that smart either.
This is all pretending you are correct, which you are not, at least if the religion you are speaking of is Islam. Please google 'Shahidka' for a modern day group of Muslim female suicide bombers that are so common they needed a name. Or in Palestine, where it's happening more and more often. Or Sana'a Mehaidli or Thenmozhi Rajaratnam. If you are talking about al-Qaeda specifically, they used a woman as a suicide bomber in their 2005 Amman attack, Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi. (Which we only know because her bomb was broken.)
Actually, considering the common Iranian religious beliefs about women, if the government started even talking about taking naked pictures of them, there would be riots in the street.
This.
I pirate all my TV shows. Why? Because I watch them at random times, and I watch them from years earlier. (And, no, I'm not buying a DVD of a series I watch once.)
And, no, I don't have enough consistent internet bandwidth to 'stream', nor do I wish watch them in a shitty web browser interface instead of on my actual TV with an actual remote control and media interface.
You want to make me stop pirating, media corporations? You want me to watch your TV shows with commercials in them?
How about you fucking provide them with commercials? Somewhere I can, you know, download them and watch them later in an interface of my choosing.
And, hell, I don't actually care about DRM. You want to DRM them so that I can only watch them a few times, go ahead. You want the file to phone home when it's played, go ahead, I don't actually care, and neither would the vast majority of people.
You want to stop online pirating of TV shows? Right now? Give people a program that lets them subscribe to TV shows, and download them with ads in advance of their airdate, and decrypts them at the correct time. And provides the same with older shows. And, hey, look, no more fucking TV piracy. (And you can even let people pay extra for a lack of ads, and for bonus content, like the DVD model.)
And, some people are going to point out they're building an model (Except only with purchasing ad-free ones) in iTunes... no.There you're paying to 'own' the copy, instead of just 'renting' it. If I'm buying an episode of Supernatural, it might, indeed, be worth a dollar. (That's basically the DVD price, after all, and you're buying one at a time so it costs more.) If I just want to watch the newest one without commercials, and I'm not planning on ever watching it again? Uh, no. Charge me what you would have gotten for the commercials in it. (Which is probably closer to ten cents.)
I once got 1st place in economics in the local academic decathlon. Surprised the hell out of me, as I thought I didn't know anything about that subject.
Yes, and we need less MDs at the start of medicine, also.
Of the people who visit a general practitioner, if they visited an RN first:
X% could probably been sent home without a doctor. (No, the cough you're worried about is not a problem yet, please go home, come back if it persists another week.)
X% could be tested and lab work sent in, the lab work sent to a doctor, be found okay, and never have to see a doctor, and use maybe 10 minutes of their time. (And, as you point out, there is no reason why such lab technicians should be doctors.)
X% could be tested and lab work sent in, problems found, and a doctor visit scheduled.
X% would have such obvious problems that they just get sent to a doctor.
I have no idea what the percentage And, as you point out, a lot of 'doctor stuff' is simply 'trying things until something works', and I utterly fail to see why there can't be scripts for this. It's not like 'list of medications to try' are some sort of military secret.
The problem is, at this point, the problem of medicine isn't the structure at all. There's stuff that's fixable there, but the problem isn't anything to do with that, it's that we have built a system where society, in general, pay a flat rate to a corporation, and that corporation then has to pay for medical expenses we incur out of their profits...which is, obviously, an incentive to provide as little as possible.
It is, quite literally, the stupidest possible way to design a health care system. (Or, indeed, any sort of market.)
Why the hell would the bandwidth used to transmit the voice request over the network 'correlate to the complexity of the specific query and language we used to perform it.'?
It seems unreasonable that it would correlate entirely to how long you spoke. (And I guess, how compressibly you spoke, but presumably that's somewhat consistent.)
How much data returned also shouldn't correlate with that. That data is machine instructions to do a simple task, and thus really shouldn't be more than a single TCP/IP packet.
Yes, because that's how people do web searches on their phone in your universe...they sit there and type in a hyperlink. It's manual web searching, just type URLs until you hit what you're looking for!
However, in my universe, people do web searched by typing in a search box in their web browser, which returns a list of search results as a web page, and people click on something.
Now, it's entirely likely that Google mobile search results are less than 64KB. (Google's non-mobile page is about 500KB, but there's a lot of images, their actual HTML is closer to 30k.) But comparing it to a 'URL' is idiotic. No one is getting search results by using 1K of data. You can argue that it's maybe double the amount of data...but that becomes a bit moot considering half the time the page they just went to is 900KB+ of data, which is about the average.
And people are not using Siri to load URLs. They are using their bookmarks. In fact, Siri can't load URLs, either straight out or from Bookmarks. (You can do some complicated trick of putting URLs in contacts, and 'calling them' to launch them, but I suspect that most people do not.)
And, no, I don't have Siri either. And don't particularly see the point of it.
Dude, there are people on this very page who are asserting that the earth has not warmed. In fact, that's Watt's entire premise, and the claim about the 'climategate' emails. ('They're hiding the decline!' Aka, they're excluding the known-bogus modern tree ring data. We don't know what the hell tree rings are currently doing, but we know for a fact they stopped measuring temperature, so, yes, we leave them out for years where we actually measured the temperature ourselves.)
So, yes, there are, in fact, people denying that.
Once you get past that, it's hard to figure out what explanations there are for the increase besides more CO2. Thanks to carbon dating, it's pretty indisputable where the CO2 in the air is coming from. Any source of CO2 that wasn't from fossil fuels would have different carbon isotopes. So once you accept CO2, you basically have to accept 'human caused', unless nature is burning fossil fuels or massive ten thousand year-old forests or we broke into some sort of underground CO2 reservoir or something. (It's not utterly impossible for there to be some other source for 'old carbon in all the new CO2' besides fossil fuels, but no one can really come up with a good one.)
The sun was a bogus theory, and in fact bogus to start with. We can actually measure the output of the sun fairly well, and it appears to have almost no correlation with temperature at all. Sun gets brighter, temperature goes up. Sun gets dimmer, temperature continues to go up at the same speed.
No one has really come up with any reasonable idea beyond CO2, besides the fairly lame 'It might happen naturally'. However, when you have one theory that has an actual workable mechanism, and the other theory is 'It's any mechanism except that!'...yeah, we know which to use.
So, while it seems like some people have accepted that the climate is changing...those people quickly run out of other ways to deny AGW, and end up running back to 'But we don't know that it's actually changing, anyway!'.
Shakespeare isn't literature and should not be taught at as such. (Unless you mean his poetry, which is not actually that good as poetry, and is frankly only famous because he is.)
The scripts of Shakespeare are not literature. The scripts are instructions on how to make art, they are not art themselves.
I swear to God, one day I'm going to walk into a school board meeting and propose we teach students how offset printing works and to read the layout instructions of how to print a copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' instead of actually having people read that book. Or instead of viewing pictures of Rembrandt art, instead we simply show students how to mix the paints he used.
And instead of eating food, they can just watch pigs being slaughtered.
When they ask why, I'll point out that's how we've decided to teach plays, having them read the instructions (Which have inexplicably become 'literature') instead of viewing the finished product in the form of performance art.
You are not supposed to sit down and read the script of a play, period, unless you're fucking directing that play. There is no purpose in it. Scripts are no more art than a paintbrush is art, or a spotlight is art, or a typewriter is art. A script is a tool you use to make art.
It's the same in Georgia, too. Obviously not less snow (We already got so little snow that statistically 'none' would not be distinguishable from normal), but we used to have a fairly consistent temperature change, where the length of the seasons would vary, and sometimes run 'backwards', but they didn't just change overnight like they've been doing, where one say it's 60 and one day it's 30.
Likewise, we didn't used to have days, in the middle of a normal week, where it stayed below freezing. In fact, I'm hard pressed to even recall any 24 hour span when it stayed below freezing, and when they happened, they used to be in the middle of week-long temperature dips where other days it stayed below 40. But we just recently had a day it barely broken 20...in January instead of February. Then two days later, it was 55.
Likewise, last year it snowed at Christmas. And it snowed two weeks before that. It never snows here outside of official 'winter', or even earlier than February. And we don't get six inches of snow, period.
People laugh, and idiots will assert that random cold weather doesn't mean that 'global warming' is true...but frankly, everyone can see that something odd is going on, because the weather has become exceedingly odd. We repeatedly set record lows one week, and then the next week, it's all back to normal. And in the summer, the same thing happened...record highs, and then back to normal. (And even outside of 'summer'.)
I dunno, I was told a decade ago to expect temperature fluctuation as part of climate change, so maybe I'm just seeing what I was told to see. But it's not just me. Even people who have no idea what's going on talk about how weird the weather is.
The IPCC makes fucking predictions all the time. They predict the average temperature years in advance, you dumbass, and they've been consistently right for two decades as the temperature has risen. (Actually, more technically they have a mathematical model that predicts the temperature based on the amount of CO2 released, and other such things, and that is the falsifable part. Obviously, they can't predict the amount of CO2 future humans release, hence their need to constantly update their reports, and the reason they issue multiple predictions, each based on different amounts of CO2 that humans might release.)
You'd think before saying something like 'So neither the IPCC, nor NOAA, nor the Royal Meteorological society have made any clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.' you would actually fucking go to their websites and actually look at them.
Hell, in 2010, everyone was running around claiming that the 'lower temperatures' for 2009 disproved their predictions. You deniers sure have short memories. Of course, that stopped when 2009 was proven to be a strange fluke and the temperature went right back on track of the predictions.
And, no, a fluke doesn't disprove anything. The earth is hardly a controlled experiment, and a side running around yammering how the earth's temperature could be changing from all sorts of different things, not just CO2, doesn't get to point to a year where temperatures held steady as 'proof' of anything...if all that other stuff could be causing the change, then it certainly could have instead counteracted the change one year. You can't have it both ways.
In fact, the IPCC's predictions have been challenged in recent years, because it appears they have been wrong about a few key things, for example, how fast arctic ice melts. Sadly for your point, they were predicting it would melt slower, and now the sea level is rising faster than they predicted also. (And a lot of people aren't happy that their 'highest' baseline of CO2 prediction is almost always correct. If humans are going to put that much CO2 in the air, the IPCC needs to admit it and center their baselines around that point, instead of inventing multiple other baselines of less CO2 production.)
It's like you have no damn idea what the IPCC does, which is mainly produce reports that contain falsifiable scientific theories.
What DHT needs at this point is some sort of RSS feed-ish system.
There needs to be a way to make a magnet link to content that doesn't exist yet, or that can change later. Then the pirate bay could exist purely as a DHT-entity...your client torrents it in. (And the backend is hidden somewhere trusted.)
I can't imagine how this could possibly work, though, considering how DHT works. You'd have to has something besides the changing part, and then you've got hypothetical fakes out there.
Where that first part is the pgp fingerprint, and the last part is filled in by your torrent client, so it would look for signed by them 'named' filelist-2011011614? So they just make a new one with a new name every hour. (How this name is specified, I do not know.)
Does that make sense? I know it sorta screws up the idea of 'hashes', as that is not, in fact, any sort of hash, and idiots could produce two identical torrents with the same 'hash'. But assuming the Pirate Bay isn't so stupid as to do that, I don't see why it couldn't work, assuming that people had torrent clients that understood pgp signatures.