This is a bit late, but yes, I know what you mean about medical stuff being overdone...but the question we have to ask ourselves is, how much is that really going to cost us?
You're right in that there will be 'test creep' if there's nothing limiting it. Doctors have no incentive to do less testing, and even completely pure and honest motives would cause testing to creep up.
But then I ask: How much will all this medical testing actually cost? Not what the price is, which is clearly outrageous, but is there something inherently expensive about an EKG that we somehow need to limit it?
I actually possess an EKG machine, one that sends a decodable signal over the phone line to a doctor, because I have a pacemaker and have to regularly call in to test it. It does not appear to be a very complicated machine, and the operation of it is not particularly complicated. I've had plenty of hospital EKGs, and the entire procedure is a easy enough you could do it with an hour of training, the machine is cheap enough, and the electricity use is nominal.
Would we, as society, really be harmed if people were getting three times as much EKGs as they needed? Trying to save money on EKGs sounds like trying to save money on AC use by making doors on government buildings narrower.
I have a feeling that a lot of the expense is either actual scarcity, because the insurance industry has totally screwed up supply and demand, or pretend scarcity where 'medical' stuff is just expensive because it's 'medical'.
If we actually started providing health care in this country, a hell of a lot of the expense would go away.
Now, there are actual expensive tests, like DNA tests for genetic problems currently are. As time goes by those tests will drop in price, although new expensive tests will probably show up. (And some of that is patents, which should be totally banned. You can patent genes you make, but you shouldn't be able to patent the fact that a naturally occurring gene indicates a higher chance of disease X.)
I think medical ethics boards could probably handle expensive tests, creating standards and granting exceptions of when expensive tests are indicated. (Which would be a hell of a lot better than the current situation, where insurance companies create standards for all tests, and never grant exceptions.)
Yeah, I know they do it for some stuff. The big appliances, mostly. I would have mentioned that, but I forgot the name of the thing. We agree, they should do it for every single thing that plugs into a wall outlet.
And the Energyguide layout is just damn stupid. Huge yellow label, tiny tiny price. It's designed by morons.
The actual price should be much larger, and it should actually include more damn information instead of spending 80% of the damn label explaining things like 'Compare the Energy Use of this Refrigerator with Others before You Buy' and 'Refrigerators using more energy cost more to operate', like we're all mentally handicapped or something. The label literally has four pieces of information on it, in tiny type, and only two of them are about the actual model you're looking at.
Average cost, big letters. Average cost in general of that sort of item, medium letters. (I admit I forgot that to start with.) Average watts used, little letters. Hours of use and hours of idle used to calculate average, cost per hour, etc, little letters. Idiotic commentary about how to function in society, not included at all. (If You Purchase Items That Are Cheaper, You Will Have More Money Left Over. Money Can Be Exchanged for Goods and Services. Do Not Ingest Washing Machine.)
And, more to the point, it needs to be on every single thing that plugs into a wall outlet.
Oh, and while we're at it, it not only needs to be on the box, it needs to be on the item itself. (All electrical devices already have a little area with print on it, so it would just need to be put there.)
Also, washers and dryers should probably put the average cost and gallons of hot water used on them, but that's a whole nother label. (The Energyguide label idiotically adds that in, which means they have to have different ones for natural gas and electric heating, and it's just all around stupid.)
I'm actually of the opinion we'd be better off if we just put kWh instead of the cost, because frankly energy prices vary too much. We could require stores to post signs based on how much electricity costs locally, like 'For every 1 kWh you use, you will pay 11 cents. Each 900 kWh added to your house will add ten dollars to your electric bill each year.' or something like that, and assume people can reason 'So if this AC unit is 1400 kWh, that's, like, 15 dollars or so a year'. (Math in average people's head will still be better than math based on a nationwise area.)
And so many good ideas are just ignored for no apparent reason.
For example, I've long suggested that the government should establish baseline 'usage amount' for each type of electronic device.
For example, three hours of TV each day, one hour of cordless phone speaking, and an hour of being off the charger without speaking, five minutes of microwaving something, three minutes of a fridge being open in a 70 degree room, etc.
And then require manufactures to print, on the front of the box, in a standard colored and shaped blurb, exactly how much kilowatts that use. How much daily power 'average use' requires. Just like we already do for food labeling.
The premise is that you compare these to other makes and models of the same type of product, not each other, so it doesn't really matter how accurate the usage amount is. You watch twice as much TV, it uses roughly twice as much power.(Although not exactly, as the 'average' also include the power used while suspended. If you care enough, you can read the fine print on the label breaking it down instead of the big number.)
And every device that operates from wall power (including just charging from it, like cell phones) would have one of these. Same shape and color, varying size depending on the size of the box, saying exactly how many watts it uses a day if you use it the average amount.
No one has even been able to come up with any sort of reason this would be a bad idea, or even slightly add to the cost of stuff. Seriously, they sell kill-o-watt devices that can figure it out, and manufacturers already figure most of this out for Energy Star and Good Housekeeping seal of approval...they just don't put it on the box.
Despite this being an obvious way to promote the purchase of low energy using devices using the fricking free market and almost no government coercion at all, are any of these 'environmental' groups promoting it? Nope. Probably because it actually uses the free market instead of government coercion. Likewise, all the 'let the market decide' right-wing fake environmentalists don't appear to be willing to step in and actually inform the market so it can decide.
The real question is why we're spending all this time and effort on teaching people about recycling, and absolutely no time and effort teaching people to separate out paint, batteries, smoke detectors, etc. Or why we won't bother to run trucks to collect those things every month or so, but will run recycling trucks every week.
Why? Because it's not about helping the environment, it's about the fact that communities find it cheaper to recycle. Some stuff, like aluminum cans, actually makes money for them, and the rest, at least, is disposed of for free, instead of paying for landfill space. But all the toxic stuff is tiny, so there's no incentive to pull it out.
Of course, the reason landfill space is so fucking expensive is because people don't want them anywhere near them, because of all the toxic crap we continue to put in them. If we just put kitchen garbage, and all the stuff we recycle, in them, no one would give a flying fuck if a landfill was near them. (As long as it was out of nasal range...by 'near' I mean 'in the same county'.)
But they don't want the damn mercury from fluorescent lights leaking into their drinking water, so will fight more landfills...and not do a damn thing about getting people to not throw away fucking fluorescent lights in the first place.
We don't even have a insignia to indicate 'Do not throw away in trash', like we have to indicate 'recyclable'. (That triangle arrow thing.)
Instead of 'recycling' for the last few decades, we should have, instead, had people separate out their 'landfillable' trash from other trash.
Seriously, the whole thing is just incredibly stupid. I'd rather have a landfill full of paper and aluminum cans than batteries, but let's spend all our time and money on 'recycling' because it's incredibly cool or something, and have people continue to throw batteries in the trash.
If you could move your operations to another country, please explain why you would not have done so previously.
*crickets*
I thought so.
It's amazing how many people object to having companies pay taxes, or, in this case, pay their own damn externalities of pollution, by saying 'But they'll just move to another country'.
Well, YES.
The solution isn't to sit there and give companies everything they want so that they'll stay...in the end, US citizens still have a higher standard of living, so have to be paid more, so companies that can will move anyway, unless we start having the government subsides salaries or something. (If you don't pay 15% of my employee's salaries, I'm moving to Mexico and paying my workers 10% less!)
That is why we need fucking tariffs so we can actually stop companies from leaving, and recover the costs from companies that do. You want to sell to one of the biggest first world markets in the world, you'll either make the stuff you're selling here, or we'll make you pay import taxes before you can sell here. Period.(1)
That is operating from a position of power, a position where the government dictates terms, instead of running around handing out tax cuts hand over fist and doing whatever companies want so they'll stay here.
1) This shouldn't be confused with 'protectionism', which is where we run around trying to save American companies from actual first world competitors. If Japan and Germany can make cheaper cars that everyone likes better, tough shit, GM.
We should only implement tariffs against companies who are in countries where they don't follow some sort of minimum standards of regulation. Reasonable minimum wage laws, no child labor, not shooting protesters and union organizers, no dumping pollution into drinking water, etc.
As a bonus, once companies in those countries stop having free access to our markets because of those things, they'll start lobbying to fix those laws instead of lobbying against those laws in the first place.
Sometimes people try just a little bit too hard. CFL are, indeed, useful in 90% of the cases, but that does not mean they should be used 100% of the time.
Like you pointed out, they suck for outside in cold temperatures, especially on automated systems. Likewise, in places where the color is actually fairly important, like a bathroom mirror used to apply makeup, incandescents are better. And reading lamps that you sit and read under for hours probably should still be incandescent. Over my grandmother's dining table, I put in two CFL and left one incandescent to fix the color of the food, which indeed was noticeably blue with all CFLs.
Right now, I've got a stack of CFLs, and I'm replacing lightbulbs as they burn out. Sometimes something I want to keep incandescent will burn out, and I'll replace something else and put that bulb in what burned out, but the option to purchase new incadescents must exist. (I have absolutely no objection to requiring manufacturers to decrease energy usage, though, as long as it's done slowly enough that the price does not increase a lot. Like cars should have been required to do for the last few decades, but mysteriously weren't.)
The people who insist that CFLs must be used 100% of the time are starting to piss off people like me and you who thinks they're only appropriate 90% of the time. I swear, sometimes the environmental movement is hurt more by people on its side than people on the other side.
Household lighting usage is such a tiny fraction of the total energy usage in this country anyway...if people want to bitch and whine about how much power we use, perhaps they could bitch and whine about industrial manufacturers who waste much more electricity than we ever do. And most of the electricity we waste is because of poorly-designed products, sold to us without any indication of how much electricity they waste.
All web browsers have ways to run external code in the browser.
IE has the ability for web pages to run a very large variety of repeatedly buggy signed controls that come with Windows, and add their own controls.
Firefox does not have this. Strictly speaking, web pages could hand you an plugin you have to install to use their page...but they don't. And Firefox doesn't come with some giant library of signed plugins that any javascript can fire up and attack to exploit holes.
It's not so much that ActiveX is broken. Honestly, IE's ActiveX interface is a good deal less annoying than Firefox's plugin interface.
It's that IE comes with a crapload of buggy ActiveX controls that are repeatedly found to have security holes in them, and any damn Javascript can use them. Whereas Firefox doesn't come with any plugins.
In fact, given how undefined 'math' is, what that question may actually be asking is 'Do you ever run up against math problems that annoy you?'.
So if someone's a cashier, and can subtract from 100 and give change easily, they probably consider themselves good at math, which a cashier that cannot do that might consider themselves bad at math.
If that is all the math they run across, that is the 'math' they will talk about.
Whereasan engineer has an entirely different conception of 'math', because they run across different problems.
And someone who doesn't do any math normally but likes to do brainteasers might run against math problems they can't answer all the time, and hence consider themselves 'bad'.
The question is completely meaningless. Both because people have different ideas of 'math', and because incompetent people cannot recognize they are incompetent.
They should have arbitrarily picked a problem, like solving x^2+x-12=0, and see who got it right. Or even had three or four problems of increasing complexity and given people a 'math rating'.
But, of course, people don't want to be tested on a survey.
Make people feel that even though it's money out of their pocket, it's being plowed back into rewarding those people and making more albums, more movies. Of course they'd have to try to conceal all the profit they take out of it, but then they'd at least stand a chance.
That's the real joke. The reason they don't try that, is that they do suck so much money out that any human face they put on it either has to be a) a big name star who they pay well, but everyone knows is rich, so no one cares if they have a job or b) someone that gets paid crap.
Yeah, they could run an ad saying: 'Here is James Smith, a key grip (Disclaimer, I have no idea what a 'key grip' does.) who worked on Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, who, thanks to widespread pirating, had such low ratings (insert graph showing how estimated pirating hurt ratings) that the ad purchases didn't cover production costs (insert another graph), so it was canceled, and he has now lost his job. (insert shot of his family) Pirating costs real people jobs, don't do it.'...
...until someone looks up what percentage of the profits he was making and learns he was making 1/100,000th an episode vs. how much the studio will make...and it would have been half that if not for his union. And people will say 'So, if it's that important, why didn't you just pay your president, who doesn't appear to do any work on the show at all, 5% less and cover all their salaries?'
Heroin is, indeed, a very addictive drug. Not just 'mentally' addictive, but your body very rapidly becomes dependent on it and you will die if cut off from it rapidly. (Not 'may die'...'will die'.)
That said, when steadily supplied at invariant quantities, it is entirely, 100%, safe to take your entire life.
When morphine was first introduced and used during the US civil war, a lot of soldiers got addicted to it. It was basically the only battlefield medicine. If you got injured, or even ill from disease, which was a good percentage of people, and didn't die, which was almost no one who was sick, you'd end up addicted to morphine.(Heroin turns into morphine when ingested.) And you'd stay addicted to it your entire life.
And that's not counting the patent medications and laudanum and paregoric which hooked a bunch of civilians.
Estimates of 200,000 addicts are probably too high, but quite a large number of people got addicted in the last half of the 1800s, and never really got unaddicted.
And this was in days where quality control was a lot looser, and yet most people managed to have absolutely no medical problems whatsoever from their morphine addiction.
In modern day, there's absolutely no reason to believe that someone could not stay addicted to morphine or heroin their entire life with no medical complications at all.
It's worth noting that using someone's car without permission is actually legal as long as you do not deprive them of it or harm it in any way.
However, burning their gas or using their electricity is, indeed, harming it, even if you replace those things. It is 'theft by conversion' to burn someone's gasoline, regardless of if you replace it, just like it's illegal to embezzle money and then immediately pay it back.
Granted, they'll usually charge you with car theft if they catch you, on the assumption you were actually stealing the car. Moving something is fairly clear evidence you were depriving people of it. But if you were to actually return it before anyone noticed, or just run it in place, perhaps for the AC, they could not charge you with auto theft, just using gas and power.
And other laws make it illegal to enter or start someone's car without permission, as the assumption is you will steal it or something in it, but those laws are akin to breaking and entering laws, where simply being and doing something make it very likely you're about to commit a larger crime, and hence they themselves are illegal. It is not 'theft' itself.
But you can use their car as, for example, a table if you want. You can legally walk up to random people's parked cars, throw a tablecloth on them, pull up some chairs, and eat dinner off them. You can climb in the back of people's pickups and walk around there. All legal.
They'll get upset, and can sue you if you accidentally cause damage to their car (Which is not the same as driving it, which deliberately burns their gas, and hence is theft.), but barring any damage, it's entirely legal.
And, and we have the concept of 'stealing my girlfriend', too, but that doesn't mean that's legally plausible either. (Despite the fact that does deprive you of something.)
And stealing someone's thunder does deprive them of said thunder. That's the point. Same with stealing 'my idea', which usually means either depriving me of the 'credit for my idea' or the 'profit from my idea'.
Just because something is a figure of speech doesn't mean it's actually a rational, but, more important, those three concepts all, indeed, are the concept that you rightfully had something (Although, legally speaking, they were not things you 'owned'.)
By which we can conclude that people often use metaphors that invest property rights in things they don't legally have property rights in, and thus being deprived of those things is 'theft'.
It doesn't provide any examples of people using 'theft' as a metaphor for things they aren't deprived of.
Exactly. What's exceptionally crazy are the things that both sides dismiss people for, like being educated. So...it's a bias both way?
Nope. They don't want educated people because they're harder to sway with emotion, so both sides throw them out, because court cases nowadays are as much about emotion as fact. This is totally absurd.
There should be only two ground for removing people involuntary from a jury pool. The first is that they are an acquaintance of someone in the trial, obviously.
The second is if they, or a close friend or relative, who were a victim or perpetrator or accused perpetrator of the same crime, within an amount of time decided by the harshness of the sentence of said crime.
I.e, if they were accused of murder, they probably should not serve on a murder trial for ten years or whatever. Not because we don't trust them, I mean they were found innocent, but because they might not be objective about that crime. Same thing, from the other direction, of victims of that specific crime. (Well, not murder victims, but you know what I mean.)
And the judge should decide this.
And everyone else, everyone who is qualified to vote, should be allowed to serve on the jury.
And, incidentally, this would allow jury pools to be decided in advance, which would also mean that we'd have a lot less people sitting around waiting to be on a jury, which would take up less time in total, so less people would attempt to dodge jury duty. We could even have people come in the middle of the day. We could easily let people out and have them schedule days they were available.
You're partially right, but wrong about the age. 16 is usually is the top.
In my state, Georgia, the age of consent is 16. People who are over 16 can have sex with anyone else who's over 16. A 116 year old can have sex with a 16 year old.
It's people who are under 16 who can have sex with people if within three years. (IIRC it's three years.) Actually, strictly speaking, it's a misdemeanor, so it is illegal, but that's mostly so cops can grab you in public and call your parent, and stop kids from renting hotel rooms. (And it explicitly does not count as a 'sex crime'.)
Also, that exception only goes down to 13 or so, but that's because at that point they don't charge anyone with anything. If two ten year olds are 'having sex', um...it's not the legal system who need to fix that.
So, yes, there's a 'window', but it's below the age of consent, which is, indeed, usually 16. (I believe there's only one state where it's 18, and a few 15 and 17, and one 14!)
As an aside, in Georgia, this sliding window exception stupidly didn't apply to oral sex, which resulted in a rather spectacular court case and uproar a while back. I forgot the name of the guy, but a 17 year old boy let a 15 year old girl give him a blowjob at a party, and somewhat accidentally got charged with felony statutory rape. (The police burst in on the party during it, and the parties involved, thinking they'd be better off if it was just oral sex, admitted to it in their statements to the police, who didn't even realize the law said that.) That law has been changed, and I think he was pardoned by the governor.
However, the 'nude picture' thing is 18, everywhere, resulting in the absurdity, in 49 of the 50 states, where people cannot possess pictures of people they are legally allowed to have sex with. (Both fully legally, or 'misdemeanor so we can hassle children doing it' legally.)
Oh, actually, that's true in all 50. Even in the sole state you can't have sex in until you're 18, which is, I think, Oregon, you can still get married younger with parental permission, which give an 'age of consent' exception everywhere that people can marry younger below it. But legally, you cannot take nude pictures of your spouse.
And the GP has an epic fail anyway, as there's absolutely no different in the possible 'harm' caused to a 16 and a 18 with fake nude photos of them, but he's framing it in terms of child porn, which presumably means it would be legal to take a picture of someone the second they turn 18 and post those photos everywhere.
It's a really stupid argument to make. We can argue that photos can slander people, because they certainly can. That doesn't have anything to do with 'porn' at all.
The law is just blatantly stupid because they left of the phrase 'depiction of' and hence doesn't apply to anything at all except possibly kidnapping. Read the actual law:
It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in:
So it's illegal to carry around a napsack with a minor in it engaged in simulated sexual activity, or something. If I were this guy, I'd demand that someone demonstrate he, at any point in time, 'possessed' a minor, which he obviously would have to do to possess anything that contained a minor.
This issue is really what everyone is arguing about, because depending on how you mentally insert 'depiction of' depends on how you read this law.
It really is amazing how stupid legislature can be when writing their own laws. (As opposed to getting lobbyists to do it for them.)
No shit. This entire thing is as likely to demonstrate the opposite...it's entirely possible that people who can't tell how good they are at math are the ones who think it doesn't violate the law.
It's interesting to note that law is sheer nonsense. You cannot possess material that includes minors...you cannot 'possess' people. They mean depictions of minors, but they completely left that out.
Likewise, nude women are not automatically engaging in sexual activity, and I've failed to hear any evidence that said women were engaged in such, as opposed to just posing.
If they were, however, than I would have to say it violates the law as it's assumed to actually be. You can't argue that 'the images engaging in sexual activity' are 'not the minor'. That's the whole point of that second clause, to cover that situation. Actual depictions of sex are covered by the first. (And, yes, intent of the law is important.)
I also think said law is unconstitutional. It's outrageous that someone can be charged with manipulating pixels on their own computer.
So perhaps what it's really saying is that people who were good at math read an implicit 'and that law is constitutional' in the question.
You want exactly what I want, except I don't really care about a touch screen. And SD support would be nice so that we're not limited by internal memory. In fact, feel free to only store things on SD. (I personally could do without USB connectivity at all, only SD, but I can see why USB would be included.)
And contrary to what the other responder wants, neither you nor I care if it can do other things. It can come with Tetris or whatever, and it would be nice if added software could be ran on it.
We just don't want to pay for wifi and 3G connectivity, and DRM support, and audio output, and enough CPU to decode all that junk, in a fucking book.
Hell, I, strictly speaking, don't even need a PDF reader. Make the damn things only display monochrome PNGs, in order by directory, saving the last location per directory and letting me pick the directory, and give me a stupid piece of software to write out text and PDF like that. (Which requires about the same level of complexity as those 'electronic picture frames'.)
'Linux is not ready for the desktop' only in the sense that not all applications work on it. (Wine is certainly not ready for the desktop, and may never be.)
It is certainly more than ready for any business environment, and more than ready for techno-illiterate home environment where people won't be installing software.
It's not ready for environments where people might say 'Hey, why can't I download this new instant messenger client everyone is using?'. I.e., where people knew enough to install software, but not enough to understand Linux.
See, that's exactly what I thought they should be doing...mandate that browsers support the lowest-common denominator patent-less codec, and then have a very specific way of listing audio, video, and mux codecs so the browser could find them. (Gotta remember MUX, people always forget that 'how audio and video are contained together and interleaved' is a 'format' that must be supported. That's always a fairly easy format to support compared to video or audio, but it must be supported nevertheless.)
Also, as I pointed out above, the reason that PNG support took so long is MS not releasing a new version of IE for five years. It is unlikely they would have done so had HTML 4.5 come out during that time requiring correct PNG support. (Their PNG support wasn't bad for the time it was written, Mozilla had crappy PNG support at the time too. It was that they, at that moment, literally halted any sort of development at all and shut down the IE6 development team. People were able to make PNG transparency work in IE using fricking Javascript!)
That said, I'd have no problem if the w3c actually said 'You must support at least JPEG, GIF, and PNG', but that's a bit moot at this point.
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This is a bit late, but yes, I know what you mean about medical stuff being overdone...but the question we have to ask ourselves is, how much is that really going to cost us?
You're right in that there will be 'test creep' if there's nothing limiting it. Doctors have no incentive to do less testing, and even completely pure and honest motives would cause testing to creep up.
But then I ask: How much will all this medical testing actually cost? Not what the price is, which is clearly outrageous, but is there something inherently expensive about an EKG that we somehow need to limit it?
I actually possess an EKG machine, one that sends a decodable signal over the phone line to a doctor, because I have a pacemaker and have to regularly call in to test it. It does not appear to be a very complicated machine, and the operation of it is not particularly complicated. I've had plenty of hospital EKGs, and the entire procedure is a easy enough you could do it with an hour of training, the machine is cheap enough, and the electricity use is nominal.
Would we, as society, really be harmed if people were getting three times as much EKGs as they needed? Trying to save money on EKGs sounds like trying to save money on AC use by making doors on government buildings narrower.
I have a feeling that a lot of the expense is either actual scarcity, because the insurance industry has totally screwed up supply and demand, or pretend scarcity where 'medical' stuff is just expensive because it's 'medical'.
If we actually started providing health care in this country, a hell of a lot of the expense would go away.
Now, there are actual expensive tests, like DNA tests for genetic problems currently are. As time goes by those tests will drop in price, although new expensive tests will probably show up. (And some of that is patents, which should be totally banned. You can patent genes you make, but you shouldn't be able to patent the fact that a naturally occurring gene indicates a higher chance of disease X.)
I think medical ethics boards could probably handle expensive tests, creating standards and granting exceptions of when expensive tests are indicated. (Which would be a hell of a lot better than the current situation, where insurance companies create standards for all tests, and never grant exceptions.)
Yeah, I know they do it for some stuff. The big appliances, mostly. I would have mentioned that, but I forgot the name of the thing. We agree, they should do it for every single thing that plugs into a wall outlet.
And the Energyguide layout is just damn stupid. Huge yellow label, tiny tiny price. It's designed by morons.
The actual price should be much larger, and it should actually include more damn information instead of spending 80% of the damn label explaining things like 'Compare the Energy Use of this Refrigerator with Others before You Buy' and 'Refrigerators using more energy cost more to operate', like we're all mentally handicapped or something. The label literally has four pieces of information on it, in tiny type, and only two of them are about the actual model you're looking at.
Average cost, big letters. Average cost in general of that sort of item, medium letters. (I admit I forgot that to start with.) Average watts used, little letters. Hours of use and hours of idle used to calculate average, cost per hour, etc, little letters. Idiotic commentary about how to function in society, not included at all. (If You Purchase Items That Are Cheaper, You Will Have More Money Left Over. Money Can Be Exchanged for Goods and Services. Do Not Ingest Washing Machine.)
And, more to the point, it needs to be on every single thing that plugs into a wall outlet.
Oh, and while we're at it, it not only needs to be on the box, it needs to be on the item itself. (All electrical devices already have a little area with print on it, so it would just need to be put there.)
Also, washers and dryers should probably put the average cost and gallons of hot water used on them, but that's a whole nother label. (The Energyguide label idiotically adds that in, which means they have to have different ones for natural gas and electric heating, and it's just all around stupid.)
I'm actually of the opinion we'd be better off if we just put kWh instead of the cost, because frankly energy prices vary too much. We could require stores to post signs based on how much electricity costs locally, like 'For every 1 kWh you use, you will pay 11 cents. Each 900 kWh added to your house will add ten dollars to your electric bill each year.' or something like that, and assume people can reason 'So if this AC unit is 1400 kWh, that's, like, 15 dollars or so a year'. (Math in average people's head will still be better than math based on a nationwise area.)
Yup.
And so many good ideas are just ignored for no apparent reason.
For example, I've long suggested that the government should establish baseline 'usage amount' for each type of electronic device.
For example, three hours of TV each day, one hour of cordless phone speaking, and an hour of being off the charger without speaking, five minutes of microwaving something, three minutes of a fridge being open in a 70 degree room, etc.
And then require manufactures to print, on the front of the box, in a standard colored and shaped blurb, exactly how much kilowatts that use. How much daily power 'average use' requires. Just like we already do for food labeling.
The premise is that you compare these to other makes and models of the same type of product, not each other, so it doesn't really matter how accurate the usage amount is. You watch twice as much TV, it uses roughly twice as much power.(Although not exactly, as the 'average' also include the power used while suspended. If you care enough, you can read the fine print on the label breaking it down instead of the big number.)
And every device that operates from wall power (including just charging from it, like cell phones) would have one of these. Same shape and color, varying size depending on the size of the box, saying exactly how many watts it uses a day if you use it the average amount.
No one has even been able to come up with any sort of reason this would be a bad idea, or even slightly add to the cost of stuff. Seriously, they sell kill-o-watt devices that can figure it out, and manufacturers already figure most of this out for Energy Star and Good Housekeeping seal of approval...they just don't put it on the box.
Despite this being an obvious way to promote the purchase of low energy using devices using the fricking free market and almost no government coercion at all, are any of these 'environmental' groups promoting it? Nope. Probably because it actually uses the free market instead of government coercion. Likewise, all the 'let the market decide' right-wing fake environmentalists don't appear to be willing to step in and actually inform the market so it can decide.
The real question is why we're spending all this time and effort on teaching people about recycling, and absolutely no time and effort teaching people to separate out paint, batteries, smoke detectors, etc. Or why we won't bother to run trucks to collect those things every month or so, but will run recycling trucks every week.
Why? Because it's not about helping the environment, it's about the fact that communities find it cheaper to recycle. Some stuff, like aluminum cans, actually makes money for them, and the rest, at least, is disposed of for free, instead of paying for landfill space. But all the toxic stuff is tiny, so there's no incentive to pull it out.
Of course, the reason landfill space is so fucking expensive is because people don't want them anywhere near them, because of all the toxic crap we continue to put in them. If we just put kitchen garbage, and all the stuff we recycle, in them, no one would give a flying fuck if a landfill was near them. (As long as it was out of nasal range...by 'near' I mean 'in the same county'.)
But they don't want the damn mercury from fluorescent lights leaking into their drinking water, so will fight more landfills...and not do a damn thing about getting people to not throw away fucking fluorescent lights in the first place.
We don't even have a insignia to indicate 'Do not throw away in trash', like we have to indicate 'recyclable'. (That triangle arrow thing.)
The Roman god Mercury makes it, doesn't he?
Instead of 'recycling' for the last few decades, we should have, instead, had people separate out their 'landfillable' trash from other trash.
Seriously, the whole thing is just incredibly stupid. I'd rather have a landfill full of paper and aluminum cans than batteries, but let's spend all our time and money on 'recycling' because it's incredibly cool or something, and have people continue to throw batteries in the trash.
If you could move your operations to another country, please explain why you would not have done so previously.
*crickets*
I thought so.
It's amazing how many people object to having companies pay taxes, or, in this case, pay their own damn externalities of pollution, by saying 'But they'll just move to another country'.
Well, YES.
The solution isn't to sit there and give companies everything they want so that they'll stay...in the end, US citizens still have a higher standard of living, so have to be paid more, so companies that can will move anyway, unless we start having the government subsides salaries or something. (If you don't pay 15% of my employee's salaries, I'm moving to Mexico and paying my workers 10% less!)
That is why we need fucking tariffs so we can actually stop companies from leaving, and recover the costs from companies that do. You want to sell to one of the biggest first world markets in the world, you'll either make the stuff you're selling here, or we'll make you pay import taxes before you can sell here. Period.(1)
That is operating from a position of power, a position where the government dictates terms, instead of running around handing out tax cuts hand over fist and doing whatever companies want so they'll stay here.
1) This shouldn't be confused with 'protectionism', which is where we run around trying to save American companies from actual first world competitors. If Japan and Germany can make cheaper cars that everyone likes better, tough shit, GM.
We should only implement tariffs against companies who are in countries where they don't follow some sort of minimum standards of regulation. Reasonable minimum wage laws, no child labor, not shooting protesters and union organizers, no dumping pollution into drinking water, etc.
As a bonus, once companies in those countries stop having free access to our markets because of those things, they'll start lobbying to fix those laws instead of lobbying against those laws in the first place.
I agree.
Sometimes people try just a little bit too hard. CFL are, indeed, useful in 90% of the cases, but that does not mean they should be used 100% of the time.
Like you pointed out, they suck for outside in cold temperatures, especially on automated systems. Likewise, in places where the color is actually fairly important, like a bathroom mirror used to apply makeup, incandescents are better. And reading lamps that you sit and read under for hours probably should still be incandescent. Over my grandmother's dining table, I put in two CFL and left one incandescent to fix the color of the food, which indeed was noticeably blue with all CFLs.
Right now, I've got a stack of CFLs, and I'm replacing lightbulbs as they burn out. Sometimes something I want to keep incandescent will burn out, and I'll replace something else and put that bulb in what burned out, but the option to purchase new incadescents must exist. (I have absolutely no objection to requiring manufacturers to decrease energy usage, though, as long as it's done slowly enough that the price does not increase a lot. Like cars should have been required to do for the last few decades, but mysteriously weren't.)
The people who insist that CFLs must be used 100% of the time are starting to piss off people like me and you who thinks they're only appropriate 90% of the time. I swear, sometimes the environmental movement is hurt more by people on its side than people on the other side.
Household lighting usage is such a tiny fraction of the total energy usage in this country anyway...if people want to bitch and whine about how much power we use, perhaps they could bitch and whine about industrial manufacturers who waste much more electricity than we ever do. And most of the electricity we waste is because of poorly-designed products, sold to us without any indication of how much electricity they waste.
Indeed, this guy is an idiot.
All web browsers have ways to run external code in the browser.
IE has the ability for web pages to run a very large variety of repeatedly buggy signed controls that come with Windows, and add their own controls.
Firefox does not have this. Strictly speaking, web pages could hand you an plugin you have to install to use their page...but they don't. And Firefox doesn't come with some giant library of signed plugins that any javascript can fire up and attack to exploit holes.
It's not so much that ActiveX is broken. Honestly, IE's ActiveX interface is a good deal less annoying than Firefox's plugin interface.
It's that IE comes with a crapload of buggy ActiveX controls that are repeatedly found to have security holes in them, and any damn Javascript can use them. Whereas Firefox doesn't come with any plugins.
Good point.
In fact, given how undefined 'math' is, what that question may actually be asking is 'Do you ever run up against math problems that annoy you?'.
So if someone's a cashier, and can subtract from 100 and give change easily, they probably consider themselves good at math, which a cashier that cannot do that might consider themselves bad at math.
If that is all the math they run across, that is the 'math' they will talk about.
Whereasan engineer has an entirely different conception of 'math', because they run across different problems.
And someone who doesn't do any math normally but likes to do brainteasers might run against math problems they can't answer all the time, and hence consider themselves 'bad'.
The question is completely meaningless. Both because people have different ideas of 'math', and because incompetent people cannot recognize they are incompetent.
They should have arbitrarily picked a problem, like solving x^2+x-12=0, and see who got it right. Or even had three or four problems of increasing complexity and given people a 'math rating'.
But, of course, people don't want to be tested on a survey.
I think people who refer to copyright infringement as 'piracy' are rapists. Rapists of language.
Make people feel that even though it's money out of their pocket, it's being plowed back into rewarding those people and making more albums, more movies. Of course they'd have to try to conceal all the profit they take out of it, but then they'd at least stand a chance.
That's the real joke. The reason they don't try that, is that they do suck so much money out that any human face they put on it either has to be a) a big name star who they pay well, but everyone knows is rich, so no one cares if they have a job or b) someone that gets paid crap.
Yeah, they could run an ad saying: 'Here is James Smith, a key grip (Disclaimer, I have no idea what a 'key grip' does.) who worked on Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, who, thanks to widespread pirating, had such low ratings (insert graph showing how estimated pirating hurt ratings) that the ad purchases didn't cover production costs (insert another graph), so it was canceled, and he has now lost his job. (insert shot of his family) Pirating costs real people jobs, don't do it.'...
Oddly enough, counterfeiting money is probably the closest analogy to copyright infringement under the law.
How on earth does 'addictive' mean 'dangerous'?
Heroin is, indeed, a very addictive drug. Not just 'mentally' addictive, but your body very rapidly becomes dependent on it and you will die if cut off from it rapidly. (Not 'may die'...'will die'.)
That said, when steadily supplied at invariant quantities, it is entirely, 100%, safe to take your entire life.
When morphine was first introduced and used during the US civil war, a lot of soldiers got addicted to it. It was basically the only battlefield medicine. If you got injured, or even ill from disease, which was a good percentage of people, and didn't die, which was almost no one who was sick, you'd end up addicted to morphine.(Heroin turns into morphine when ingested.) And you'd stay addicted to it your entire life.
And that's not counting the patent medications and laudanum and paregoric which hooked a bunch of civilians.
Estimates of 200,000 addicts are probably too high, but quite a large number of people got addicted in the last half of the 1800s, and never really got unaddicted.
And this was in days where quality control was a lot looser, and yet most people managed to have absolutely no medical problems whatsoever from their morphine addiction.
In modern day, there's absolutely no reason to believe that someone could not stay addicted to morphine or heroin their entire life with no medical complications at all.
It's worth noting that using someone's car without permission is actually legal as long as you do not deprive them of it or harm it in any way.
However, burning their gas or using their electricity is, indeed, harming it, even if you replace those things. It is 'theft by conversion' to burn someone's gasoline, regardless of if you replace it, just like it's illegal to embezzle money and then immediately pay it back.
Granted, they'll usually charge you with car theft if they catch you, on the assumption you were actually stealing the car. Moving something is fairly clear evidence you were depriving people of it. But if you were to actually return it before anyone noticed, or just run it in place, perhaps for the AC, they could not charge you with auto theft, just using gas and power.
And other laws make it illegal to enter or start someone's car without permission, as the assumption is you will steal it or something in it, but those laws are akin to breaking and entering laws, where simply being and doing something make it very likely you're about to commit a larger crime, and hence they themselves are illegal. It is not 'theft' itself.
But you can use their car as, for example, a table if you want. You can legally walk up to random people's parked cars, throw a tablecloth on them, pull up some chairs, and eat dinner off them. You can climb in the back of people's pickups and walk around there. All legal.
They'll get upset, and can sue you if you accidentally cause damage to their car (Which is not the same as driving it, which deliberately burns their gas, and hence is theft.), but barring any damage, it's entirely legal.
And, and we have the concept of 'stealing my girlfriend', too, but that doesn't mean that's legally plausible either. (Despite the fact that does deprive you of something.)
And stealing someone's thunder does deprive them of said thunder. That's the point. Same with stealing 'my idea', which usually means either depriving me of the 'credit for my idea' or the 'profit from my idea'.
Just because something is a figure of speech doesn't mean it's actually a rational, but, more important, those three concepts all, indeed, are the concept that you rightfully had something (Although, legally speaking, they were not things you 'owned'.)
By which we can conclude that people often use metaphors that invest property rights in things they don't legally have property rights in, and thus being deprived of those things is 'theft'.
It doesn't provide any examples of people using 'theft' as a metaphor for things they aren't deprived of.
Exactly. What's exceptionally crazy are the things that both sides dismiss people for, like being educated. So...it's a bias both way?
Nope. They don't want educated people because they're harder to sway with emotion, so both sides throw them out, because court cases nowadays are as much about emotion as fact. This is totally absurd.
There should be only two ground for removing people involuntary from a jury pool. The first is that they are an acquaintance of someone in the trial, obviously.
The second is if they, or a close friend or relative, who were a victim or perpetrator or accused perpetrator of the same crime, within an amount of time decided by the harshness of the sentence of said crime.
I.e, if they were accused of murder, they probably should not serve on a murder trial for ten years or whatever. Not because we don't trust them, I mean they were found innocent, but because they might not be objective about that crime. Same thing, from the other direction, of victims of that specific crime. (Well, not murder victims, but you know what I mean.)
And the judge should decide this.
And everyone else, everyone who is qualified to vote, should be allowed to serve on the jury.
And, incidentally, this would allow jury pools to be decided in advance, which would also mean that we'd have a lot less people sitting around waiting to be on a jury, which would take up less time in total, so less people would attempt to dodge jury duty. We could even have people come in the middle of the day. We could easily let people out and have them schedule days they were available.
You're partially right, but wrong about the age. 16 is usually is the top.
In my state, Georgia, the age of consent is 16. People who are over 16 can have sex with anyone else who's over 16. A 116 year old can have sex with a 16 year old.
It's people who are under 16 who can have sex with people if within three years. (IIRC it's three years.) Actually, strictly speaking, it's a misdemeanor, so it is illegal, but that's mostly so cops can grab you in public and call your parent, and stop kids from renting hotel rooms. (And it explicitly does not count as a 'sex crime'.)
Also, that exception only goes down to 13 or so, but that's because at that point they don't charge anyone with anything. If two ten year olds are 'having sex', um...it's not the legal system who need to fix that.
So, yes, there's a 'window', but it's below the age of consent, which is, indeed, usually 16. (I believe there's only one state where it's 18, and a few 15 and 17, and one 14!)
As an aside, in Georgia, this sliding window exception stupidly didn't apply to oral sex, which resulted in a rather spectacular court case and uproar a while back. I forgot the name of the guy, but a 17 year old boy let a 15 year old girl give him a blowjob at a party, and somewhat accidentally got charged with felony statutory rape. (The police burst in on the party during it, and the parties involved, thinking they'd be better off if it was just oral sex, admitted to it in their statements to the police, who didn't even realize the law said that.) That law has been changed, and I think he was pardoned by the governor.
However, the 'nude picture' thing is 18, everywhere, resulting in the absurdity, in 49 of the 50 states, where people cannot possess pictures of people they are legally allowed to have sex with. (Both fully legally, or 'misdemeanor so we can hassle children doing it' legally.)
Oh, actually, that's true in all 50. Even in the sole state you can't have sex in until you're 18, which is, I think, Oregon, you can still get married younger with parental permission, which give an 'age of consent' exception everywhere that people can marry younger below it. But legally, you cannot take nude pictures of your spouse.
And the GP has an epic fail anyway, as there's absolutely no different in the possible 'harm' caused to a 16 and a 18 with fake nude photos of them, but he's framing it in terms of child porn, which presumably means it would be legal to take a picture of someone the second they turn 18 and post those photos everywhere.
It's a really stupid argument to make. We can argue that photos can slander people, because they certainly can. That doesn't have anything to do with 'porn' at all.
The law is just blatantly stupid because they left of the phrase 'depiction of' and hence doesn't apply to anything at all except possibly kidnapping. Read the actual law:
It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in:
So it's illegal to carry around a napsack with a minor in it engaged in simulated sexual activity, or something. If I were this guy, I'd demand that someone demonstrate he, at any point in time, 'possessed' a minor, which he obviously would have to do to possess anything that contained a minor.
This issue is really what everyone is arguing about, because depending on how you mentally insert 'depiction of' depends on how you read this law.
It really is amazing how stupid legislature can be when writing their own laws. (As opposed to getting lobbyists to do it for them.)
No shit. This entire thing is as likely to demonstrate the opposite...it's entirely possible that people who can't tell how good they are at math are the ones who think it doesn't violate the law.
It's interesting to note that law is sheer nonsense. You cannot possess material that includes minors...you cannot 'possess' people. They mean depictions of minors, but they completely left that out.
Likewise, nude women are not automatically engaging in sexual activity, and I've failed to hear any evidence that said women were engaged in such, as opposed to just posing.
If they were, however, than I would have to say it violates the law as it's assumed to actually be. You can't argue that 'the images engaging in sexual activity' are 'not the minor'. That's the whole point of that second clause, to cover that situation. Actual depictions of sex are covered by the first. (And, yes, intent of the law is important.)
I also think said law is unconstitutional. It's outrageous that someone can be charged with manipulating pixels on their own computer.
So perhaps what it's really saying is that people who were good at math read an implicit 'and that law is constitutional' in the question.
You want exactly what I want, except I don't really care about a touch screen. And SD support would be nice so that we're not limited by internal memory. In fact, feel free to only store things on SD. (I personally could do without USB connectivity at all, only SD, but I can see why USB would be included.)
And contrary to what the other responder wants, neither you nor I care if it can do other things. It can come with Tetris or whatever, and it would be nice if added software could be ran on it.
We just don't want to pay for wifi and 3G connectivity, and DRM support, and audio output, and enough CPU to decode all that junk, in a fucking book.
Hell, I, strictly speaking, don't even need a PDF reader. Make the damn things only display monochrome PNGs, in order by directory, saving the last location per directory and letting me pick the directory, and give me a stupid piece of software to write out text and PDF like that. (Which requires about the same level of complexity as those 'electronic picture frames'.)
Who the hell cares about IO speed for an ebook reader? You man startup time or something?
I am, however, confused about the idea of 'internal and external' USB.
No kidding.
'Linux is not ready for the desktop' only in the sense that not all applications work on it. (Wine is certainly not ready for the desktop, and may never be.)
It is certainly more than ready for any business environment, and more than ready for techno-illiterate home environment where people won't be installing software.
It's not ready for environments where people might say 'Hey, why can't I download this new instant messenger client everyone is using?'. I.e., where people knew enough to install software, but not enough to understand Linux.
Ah, seriously?
See, that's exactly what I thought they should be doing...mandate that browsers support the lowest-common denominator patent-less codec, and then have a very specific way of listing audio, video, and mux codecs so the browser could find them. (Gotta remember MUX, people always forget that 'how audio and video are contained together and interleaved' is a 'format' that must be supported. That's always a fairly easy format to support compared to video or audio, but it must be supported nevertheless.)
Also, as I pointed out above, the reason that PNG support took so long is MS not releasing a new version of IE for five years. It is unlikely they would have done so had HTML 4.5 come out during that time requiring correct PNG support. (Their PNG support wasn't bad for the time it was written, Mozilla had crappy PNG support at the time too. It was that they, at that moment, literally halted any sort of development at all and shut down the IE6 development team. People were able to make PNG transparency work in IE using fricking Javascript!)
That said, I'd have no problem if the w3c actually said 'You must support at least JPEG, GIF, and PNG', but that's a bit moot at this point.