How many people in Iran in the past posted comments and sent messages that were well within acceptable norms five years ago, and they have forgotten all about. No one ever even said anything to them about them.
But the security forces have had, since then, them on a list of 'troublemakers', and the very first thing they did now was set up surveillance on them.
You define the randomness of data by how compressible it is, duh. That's how everyone does it.
But, anyway, the Iranians would just block all ports but HTTP and SMTP, and put proxies on them so you can only use plaintext connections.
This wouldn't stop all encrypted stuff, you could still connect somewhere and POST encrypted uuencoded content via HTTP, but it would make it a good deal harder.
Javascript can actually do that encryption, so it's possible to make an utterly transparent-to-the-end-user forum that generates a per-session public key, and then sends and receives all data on that website encrypted to that key.
Of course, it's very susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. Although there are ways to make that more difficult...it could vary the encryption per-page, thus making the attacker actually run the Javascript on their machine, instead of writing a program to automatically decode.
Then, once the attacker is running the javascript themselves, the encryption key can start including things like the browser user agent and the IP of the browser, meaning the attacker would have to either rewrite the javascript before they could run it (Hard to do in anything near real time.), or they would have to get their own hacked javascript interpreter.
Either one of those feats is probably past Iran's technical abilities at this moment.
What the hell does selling short have to do with anything? Yes, some thing are risky, but that does not mean all investments are equally risky. Moreover, selling short does not manipulate the market.
But more importantly, the carbon credit market will not work as you are describing anyway. You seem to assume carbon credits are some actual thing you can corner.
As I explained, carbon credits are traded once, at the start of cycle, either or a year or a quarter, I forget.
People know how much they will use, and how much they have been given, and they will put any slack up for sell, or buy any they don't need.
The amount of people that will need to purchase them midcycle are negligible, and will be able to purchase them fairly cheaply from companies that reduced their production or just went out of business, or, of course that 5% that screwed up and didn't sell all the ones they could.
Its not a fucking day trading market. It's a once-a-year wheat market.
And, incidentally, that 5% isn't 'money wasted on nothing', you loon. Those are companies that had excessive credits and didn't manage to sell them in time. And if they actually went out and purchased too much, that's money transferred from an ineffectual company to one that isn't so ineffectual, so no harm there. In your universe, money just disappears if companies spend it unwisely in buying things from other companies, I guess.
Damn, you're rather dumb, aren't you. You don't understand how a carbon credit market would operate all, do you? You think it's the fucking stock market, or selling a tangible non-expiring good to consumers.
How the fuck would 'FUD' work? Companies know how much carbon credits they need, because they've been told the amount by various regulatory industries, and they've been buying that amount every year.
And they already bought any extra needed credit in the huge carbon market at the start of the year, or sold their extras, and couldn't care less about the delusional 'cornering' of the market you've done midseason.
Seriously, if you don't understand that companies know exactly how much carbon credits they need, each and every year, and buy it out of the damn huge pool to start with, and there is almost no actual 'trading' during the year, (Companies that expand some might need more, which will be provided by companies that go out of business and have their assets sold at auction.) there's really no hope in continuing this discussion.
And every day that a company owns a carbon credit and doesn't use it is a day they just purchased and threw away.
New York is charging sales tax to New York residents, which is entirely acceptable.
In fact, every state does this. If a business has a physical presence in the state, it has to collect the taxes and pay the taxes for the buyer, otherwise the buyer himself has to. (But no one does.)
What NC is trying to do, however, is apply sales tax when the buyer is not in the state. (Which, in turn, would require double sales tax if the buyer was somewhere like NY.)
They're doing this by claiming that the transaction with the affiliate somehow makes the entire thing happen in NC. Arguably, the payment to the affiliate, which is a tiny fraction of the purchase, could be taxable(1)...but that isn't what they're doing, they're trying to tax the entire purchase.
1) Although not via sales tax...that's a 'commission', and usually wouldn't fall under 'a sale', but rather under 'income'. People who work on commission do not pay 'sales tax' on what they get paid...the business collects sales tax on the entire amount, and they themselves pay income tax on what they get. (And people in NC collecting commissions from Amazon should already be paying income tax on it.)
As has been pointed out below, Walmart sells things online at walmart.com. Walmart has a physical presence in every state, and hence pays sales tax for online purchases for every single state.
The real funny joke is that all state sales taxes are always applicable. But they're on buyers. The courts have ruled that said states can't only force businesses to collect them for the buyer is if the business has a physical presence there, but that, frankly, is rather stupid. Regardless, the taxes are owed by someone.
I really think it would be entirely reasonable to drop the concept of physical presence and simply let all states require businesses selling to people in their state collect the taxes that the state is actually legally owned, but the buyer almost never actually pays.
It would be interesting for state governments to start cracking down on this, actually going around to their citizens and collecting the taxes from them, and fining for failing to pay them in the first place. We'd soon have people screaming to require out-of-state businesses to collect and pay the taxes for them.
That said, NC's behavior is idiotic. A fundamental rule of sales tax is it happens in one jurisdiction per purchase. It happens in the buyer's jurisdiction if the business has a physical presence, or nowhere if they don't.
NC, by trying to claim the transaction between it and the affiliate is a separate transaction also subject to sales tax, is trying to tax the actual transaction on top of that. A referral, however, is not a sale, it is a contractual transfer of money for a service. In theory, that transfer of money is taxable, but it sounds like NC is trying to tax the entire purchase, which is insane.
First of all, there is almost certainly no 'physical presence' in 99% of these cases. These are mostly guys who are putting links on their blogs to Amazon, not actual retail companies.
Secondly, a purchased server almost certainly does not count as such a presence. Under Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, you need a 'substantial nexus' to qualify, which probably means, at least, some sort of actual employees. In that case, the court decided that a computer to copy floppies for a mail-order software business didn't count as a 'substantial nexus', so it's unlikely that a server would.
It's unlikely that anywhere there were no actual company employees would count as one. The whole point is that the state can compel employees in that state to collect sales tax from the buyer for them. (As opposed to the buyers, who otherwise have to send it in manually...and never do) Without actual employees, it's hard to see exactly who can be compelled by said state in the first place.
Although this is almost entirely moot as businesses rarely actually purchase servers and have them installed somewhere that is not their property. They lease custom built machines in a manner that is like a purchase, but if you stop paying your hosting fees, the hosting company owns the machines, so they are not actually purchased.
I have no idea why you think that owned servers used to count as 'physical presence'.
What cities should do, and won't do as long as conservatives whine about it, is tax the companies using cities.
Instead, they have huge infrastructure costs, but the people using them don't live in the city, so no property tax from them. Hell, they aren't even buying gas in the city. They're paying no taxes to support the roads they use every day.
And the companies with the industry are selling everywhere, so cities can't really recoup using sales tax. Not without excessive ones, which mostly hurts their poorest residents...everyone else just shops elsewhere, especially people who live elsewhere.
Hell, half of the businesses aren't in the city at all, so property taxes on them don't even help...they're just using city roads to move stuff. People are driving through the city from the suburb they live in to the suburb they work in, which them ships the goods out using their roads and airports, producing no damn tax revenue at all, but costing the city huge amounts on money.
It's total insanity. Cities need to say 'No. You cannot use our stuff without paying some sort of actual fucking tax so we can run the damn city and build and maintain the stuff you're using!'.
And then, especially here in Georgia, assholic rich suburbs of Atlanta get pissed about how 'the poor inner cities' in their county are using all 'their' taxes and incorporate themselves so they can keep their taxes for themselves. Hey, morons, you wouldn't even exist if not for the city and the poor people in it, who do things like pave the roads you drive on.
Proving immortality is pretty difficult. I don't know how you'd even do that.
Catfish in captivity, however, have not been observed to die of old age. They just keep getting older and bigger.
They, of course, die of disease and cancer. They just do not show any sort of age-related slowdown or infirmaries.
In the wild, like I said, they tend to grow until they cannot actually catch enough food to support themselves.
And I don't quite know what your definition of 'organisms', but all single cell organisms are immortal by any definition of the word, or at least billions of years old.
Surely they should live extremely long lives by now, since they do not need to "make room" for new editions.
And where your analogy falls down there is that some fish are, as far as we can tell, immortal. Catfish, for example...what kills them is the fact they continue to grow, and eventually cannot function in their environment.
Whale sharks, meanwhile, apparently can live 100 years.
That said, aging has more to do with the rate of reproduction and of death than what 'niche' they're in. Elephants, for example, are pretty close to humans in reproduction and death rate, and they live for about 70 years. (Which is about how long humans live without medical care.)
...does anyone think it's stupidly bitchy to complain that Creative Commons came up with a 'public domain' tag?
Hey, Charles Eicher, that's because the Creative Common tag is a 'standard' for marking up ownership and licensing of documents. It's not an attempt to fucking claim ownership, it's a way to mark a document as public domain using an existing nomenclature that now has been expanded to include 'public domain'.
I can only imagine what you think about the Dewey decimal system, a system that has claimed ownership of all human knowledge. Or, at least, classified it using their nomenclature, which in your book is the same thing. (Luckily, they also own your book.)
And, um, Creative Commons isn't attempting to 'expand their licensing authority', as they have no licensing authority to start with. They wrote a bunch of template licenses for people to use. And came up with some way of marking content to use their licenses so that stuff can be found automatically. That's it. And now they've included public domain works as one of their 'licensing templates' you can mark things as under, although obviously it's not actually a license in that case.
I do love the way you blame flickr for not having public domain licensing as an option, only CC licensing, but then bitch and whine when CC adds a way to mark things 'public domain' using their tags, which would have actually solved the problem with flickr from the start if 'public domain' had been one of the choices.
Create asymmetry between US industry and global industry for future growth. Why should I build my factory in the USA and go through the regulations when it just became more profitable to build it overseas?
You shouldn't, which is why we desperately need to drive a stake through the heart of 'free trade'.
Free trade is what already killed the American car industry. Yes, the crappy cars and poor management didn't help, but what really killed it was competing with Japanese subsided cars. (Of course, the Europeans feel the same way about our car companies.)
As long as different governments have different impacts on their industries, and said industry can lobby their governments for different amounts of help, we need to be able to tax incoming products different, which means, at minimum, getting out of the WTO, which was always more about 'Letting American-owned companies sell cheap Chinese goods to Portugal' than actually helping American workers or consumers in any way.
I'm not saying we should revert to 'protectionism', we should not stop foreign companies from, in general, competing in the US, as long as they let us compete there. But the various treaties we have totally forbidding any sort of tariffs on incoming good, while at the same time allowing governments to subsidies and/or tax their own industries however they want, obviously results in abuse. Sometimes the competition is unfair. Hell, sometimes it is fair but it's an area so important to us we don't want to let others compete.
And coal should be more expensive than natural gas. Coal energy is literally the most damaging and dangerous energy we have.
The danger, luckily, is mostly contained to poor people, who don't count. We lose an average of more people to coal mining accidents a year than all people ever to nuclear accidents. And even more miners die of lung diseases. It releases more radioactivity than Three Mile Island, and let's not forget about all that lethal coal slurry that is building up in waste pools everywhere.
Granted, I'm not sure that a total and instant disruption to energy prices is a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that coal. is. very. bad.
I don't think it would be safe to let your non-existent farmers wander around inside your non-existent power plant. They probably need licenses or something.
So you're asserting that companies will make other companies pollute?
Via what, mind control?
Paying them to pollute so they'll then purchase credits from you, in an economic version of a perpetual motion machine?
Breaking in and meddling with their machinery? (Wouldn't it be more efficient to do this to my competitors, instead of unrelated people I'm hoping would buy my carbon credits, but might buy them from anyone? And certainly won't buy from me if they know I did it.)
If I'm selling carbon credits, it is indeed in my best interests if some other company pollutes, but I have absolutely no way to make that happen.
I mean, if I sell medical equipment, it's in my best interests if people break their legs, but I can hardly legally go out and break people's legs, and the fact that I, in theory, might do that is not a reason to forbid people from selling medical equipment.
By your logic no one should sell anything, ever. All markets are bad.
And your idea is particularly stupid. The idea that people would 'hang on' to carbon credit...that cost them money each year to renew from whatever company they got them from, and are making them no money at all, just because prices might go up before they expire, shows a rather fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work.
It's like worrying about a 'milk futures market' resulting in people unable to buy milk because companies hoard it hoping prices will go up. You can't really hoard things you need to keep purchasing, and that you have to throw away the old one if you were unable to use it. People are not going to buy carbon credits and sit on them.
Hell, they aren't even going to sit on their own credits...I suspect that something like 95% of the credits will get used, and the remaining 5% were planned to be used but were not, but it was too late to sell them.
Hoarding is an actual problem in the free market, but expiring stuff that vanishes and is instantly replaced each year with new product at the 'manufacturer' is exactly what isn't hoarded.
We do not sue people for physically injuring us. We arrest people for physically injuring us. It's called assault, asshole.
Granted current laws don't cover this, as there are expected levels of this. Sorta like if I water my lawn and the runoff leaves my property and wets your shoes, I have not assaulted you. But if I rip down the side off my above-ground pool and flood you with water and knock you down, I have.
Although, in this case, it's more like everyone is watering their lawn, and the street doesn't drain. At some point everyone's going to drown, but no one can actually be pointed out as the killer.
We're going to need some new laws, ones that state how much CO2 is expected, and how much crosses the line into actually harming others, which will now be illegal.
Heh. That could at least be a sane argument if we were talking about solid or liquid pollution. It's not a sane argument, but it could be.
But it clearly isn't here, considering we're talking about CO2.
But he's probably one of those libertarian fucktards who think it's immoral for the government to make any laws at all. Yeah, he'll claim that he only thinks it's immoral for the government to pass laws against things that do not harm others.
But we can see just how stupid and/or hypocritical he is when he argues against pollution laws, which by definition are attempting to stop people from harming others.
And, what's more, the two other possibiliy solution in libertarian do not work, a) the amount of harm is so diluted that it is not rational to fight this harm using lawsuits, it's like being stabbed to death with toothpicks, suing anyone there for damages is absurd, and yet you're still dead, and b) the people being harmed aren't necessarily the same people buying stuff from the company, so can't 'vote with their wallets', you poison one town's ground water and you can still sell to 99.999999% of the people in the US. The government actually has to make pollution illegal, even under libertarian logic.
But 'libertarian' and some uses of 'conservative' are really code for 'businesses should be able to do whatever they want, even if it actually does harm others'.
Well, to be fair, the people who didn't want the west fenced in actually did have a point. For the west to grow, it needed fences, but the existing people weren't actually harming others. We were nowhere at the point of tragedy of the commons, although, if we had not switched, we would have been there within a two or three decades. So we actually averted a problem early there, but the people who were part of the system and saw no actual problem existing had a sane complaint.
Unlike CO2 emissions, which we should have been started charging for way the hell back in the 70s.
But, there's a lot of stuff we should already have been doing, and weren't, so now we have to do them now. The entire system has collapsed due to their lack, and we find ourselves in the rather stupid position of having to fix a broken banking system, a broken environmental regulation system, and a broken health care system, all at the same time, all because a certain unnamed political party decided to fight against those things for decades until it all snapped.
I have yet to see ANYBODY recover a DoD wiped drive. You'd think that one of those data recovery firms would brag about it if they had actually been able to pull it off, yet nada. Give them a good DoD wipe and then they can be reused in computers for the poor.
Forget DoD wipes, it has never even been demonstrated it's possible to recover data from a single 00000000 wipe. No one has ever managed to read as much as a byte of data after it has been overwritten once with any value.
The whole thing is sheer paranoid lunacy. It has its origin when hard drives encoded data in a different way, and were a lot looser in where they wrote on the drive, so in theory parts of the signal could be left behind. But that was only hypothetical even back then, there was no way to separate the signals out, and hard drives are a lot denser and encode the signal differently now.
The only thing that makes a bit of sense is that hard drives can reassign clusters and leave data behind in bad ones, but you can get around that by using the right commands. It would be a hell of a lot more useful if the DoD would just invest in some external hard drive controller-type device to low-level format drives, and then when they're done turn on a huge magnet just to make sure.
Seriously, Bethesda has been doing FPS/RPGs with both Oblivion and Fallout 3, which use the same engine.
I don't have any idea how relevant that is to the Quake engine, but to pretend it's totally irrelevant is a bit silly.
Considering that the Bethesda engine is somewhat buggy, what with people falling through to the void and glitching through walls, what would be nice is if future Bethesda FPS/RPGs used the Quake engine for their graphics and rendering.
If I understand correctly, the Quake engine is already packaged for third parties to purchase and use, and other people have used it, so it shouldn't be incredibly hard. And it would let the Bethesda people concentrate on the RPG part.
OTOH, the Bethesda people have gotten Obsidian (Of KOTOR and NWN2 fame) to do Fallout 3: New Vegas, so apparently they don't want to do RPGs either!
Does anyone else find the game industry very confusing? We've got developers and publishers, but they're often the same company, but they'll do things like develop one game and have someone else publish it, and then publish another game that someone else develops, and then develop and publish a game...it's chaos.
And that's not counting all the 'sub' brands that companies like Atari and EA own. And the actual owners of the property the game is developed from.
Someone should make a 'mindmap' java program online showing all game companies, their relationship with other companies, and all games that have been worked on and by whom.
But right there is the key bit of the thing tripping things up that I was talking about: unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
Which, with the DS SDK, is true, as far as I know. Game consoles, in general, do not have 'OSes' and 'libraries' as part of them. Instead, all pre-defined functions are in the SDK, and whatever you use just get linked into your binary.
Because otherwise, they'd either have to include libraries in console firmware, which would mean it couldn't be updated safely without possibly breaking games, or they'd have to include a 'miniOS' on each CD with libraries, but then they'd waste space including functions that weren't used in whatever their version of DDLs are.
I'm sure there actually is some firmware, like 'Read this file off the CD' and whatnot. Obviously, the system has to be able to boot. But, like, the little 'Mii' interface, and 'Here's how you load a texture into the renderer.' and stuff like that, I suspect, is run off the CD.
Slashdot Mirror
And it works in the past, too.
How many people in Iran in the past posted comments and sent messages that were well within acceptable norms five years ago, and they have forgotten all about. No one ever even said anything to them about them.
But the security forces have had, since then, them on a list of 'troublemakers', and the very first thing they did now was set up surveillance on them.
You define the randomness of data by how compressible it is, duh. That's how everyone does it.
But, anyway, the Iranians would just block all ports but HTTP and SMTP, and put proxies on them so you can only use plaintext connections.
This wouldn't stop all encrypted stuff, you could still connect somewhere and POST encrypted uuencoded content via HTTP, but it would make it a good deal harder.
Javascript can actually do that encryption, so it's possible to make an utterly transparent-to-the-end-user forum that generates a per-session public key, and then sends and receives all data on that website encrypted to that key.
Of course, it's very susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. Although there are ways to make that more difficult...it could vary the encryption per-page, thus making the attacker actually run the Javascript on their machine, instead of writing a program to automatically decode.
Then, once the attacker is running the javascript themselves, the encryption key can start including things like the browser user agent and the IP of the browser, meaning the attacker would have to either rewrite the javascript before they could run it (Hard to do in anything near real time.), or they would have to get their own hacked javascript interpreter.
Either one of those feats is probably past Iran's technical abilities at this moment.
As long as they are being verbally and covertly threatened by the hyperpower that has just invaded the country next door.
Two countries next door, damnit. Two. We are still in Afghanistan, not matter how much we want to forget.
Technically, as we've bombed inside the border of Pakistan, it might be three.
What the hell does selling short have to do with anything? Yes, some thing are risky, but that does not mean all investments are equally risky. Moreover, selling short does not manipulate the market.
But more importantly, the carbon credit market will not work as you are describing anyway. You seem to assume carbon credits are some actual thing you can corner.
As I explained, carbon credits are traded once, at the start of cycle, either or a year or a quarter, I forget.
People know how much they will use, and how much they have been given, and they will put any slack up for sell, or buy any they don't need.
The amount of people that will need to purchase them midcycle are negligible, and will be able to purchase them fairly cheaply from companies that reduced their production or just went out of business, or, of course that 5% that screwed up and didn't sell all the ones they could.
Its not a fucking day trading market. It's a once-a-year wheat market.
And, incidentally, that 5% isn't 'money wasted on nothing', you loon. Those are companies that had excessive credits and didn't manage to sell them in time. And if they actually went out and purchased too much, that's money transferred from an ineffectual company to one that isn't so ineffectual, so no harm there. In your universe, money just disappears if companies spend it unwisely in buying things from other companies, I guess.
Damn, you're rather dumb, aren't you. You don't understand how a carbon credit market would operate all, do you? You think it's the fucking stock market, or selling a tangible non-expiring good to consumers.
How the fuck would 'FUD' work? Companies know how much carbon credits they need, because they've been told the amount by various regulatory industries, and they've been buying that amount every year.
And they already bought any extra needed credit in the huge carbon market at the start of the year, or sold their extras, and couldn't care less about the delusional 'cornering' of the market you've done midseason.
Seriously, if you don't understand that companies know exactly how much carbon credits they need, each and every year, and buy it out of the damn huge pool to start with, and there is almost no actual 'trading' during the year, (Companies that expand some might need more, which will be provided by companies that go out of business and have their assets sold at auction.) there's really no hope in continuing this discussion.
And every day that a company owns a carbon credit and doesn't use it is a day they just purchased and threw away.
New York is charging sales tax to New York residents, which is entirely acceptable.
In fact, every state does this. If a business has a physical presence in the state, it has to collect the taxes and pay the taxes for the buyer, otherwise the buyer himself has to. (But no one does.)
What NC is trying to do, however, is apply sales tax when the buyer is not in the state. (Which, in turn, would require double sales tax if the buyer was somewhere like NY.)
They're doing this by claiming that the transaction with the affiliate somehow makes the entire thing happen in NC. Arguably, the payment to the affiliate, which is a tiny fraction of the purchase, could be taxable(1)...but that isn't what they're doing, they're trying to tax the entire purchase.
1) Although not via sales tax...that's a 'commission', and usually wouldn't fall under 'a sale', but rather under 'income'. People who work on commission do not pay 'sales tax' on what they get paid...the business collects sales tax on the entire amount, and they themselves pay income tax on what they get. (And people in NC collecting commissions from Amazon should already be paying income tax on it.)
As has been pointed out below, Walmart sells things online at walmart.com. Walmart has a physical presence in every state, and hence pays sales tax for online purchases for every single state.
The real funny joke is that all state sales taxes are always applicable. But they're on buyers. The courts have ruled that said states can't only force businesses to collect them for the buyer is if the business has a physical presence there, but that, frankly, is rather stupid. Regardless, the taxes are owed by someone.
I really think it would be entirely reasonable to drop the concept of physical presence and simply let all states require businesses selling to people in their state collect the taxes that the state is actually legally owned, but the buyer almost never actually pays.
It would be interesting for state governments to start cracking down on this, actually going around to their citizens and collecting the taxes from them, and fining for failing to pay them in the first place. We'd soon have people screaming to require out-of-state businesses to collect and pay the taxes for them.
That said, NC's behavior is idiotic. A fundamental rule of sales tax is it happens in one jurisdiction per purchase. It happens in the buyer's jurisdiction if the business has a physical presence, or nowhere if they don't.
NC, by trying to claim the transaction between it and the affiliate is a separate transaction also subject to sales tax, is trying to tax the actual transaction on top of that. A referral, however, is not a sale, it is a contractual transfer of money for a service. In theory, that transfer of money is taxable, but it sounds like NC is trying to tax the entire purchase, which is insane.
I'm pretty sure NC did, in fact, pave the roads that Amazon is using to deliver books, unless Amazon has a giant catapult somewhere.
The treasury will be more than happy to accept the extra money you want to pay.
Um, no, actually, if you overpay your taxes, you will simply get the money sent back. (Actually, they might not accept a check for that much over.)
First of all, there is almost certainly no 'physical presence' in 99% of these cases. These are mostly guys who are putting links on their blogs to Amazon, not actual retail companies.
Secondly, a purchased server almost certainly does not count as such a presence. Under Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, you need a 'substantial nexus' to qualify, which probably means, at least, some sort of actual employees. In that case, the court decided that a computer to copy floppies for a mail-order software business didn't count as a 'substantial nexus', so it's unlikely that a server would.
It's unlikely that anywhere there were no actual company employees would count as one. The whole point is that the state can compel employees in that state to collect sales tax from the buyer for them. (As opposed to the buyers, who otherwise have to send it in manually...and never do) Without actual employees, it's hard to see exactly who can be compelled by said state in the first place.
Although this is almost entirely moot as businesses rarely actually purchase servers and have them installed somewhere that is not their property. They lease custom built machines in a manner that is like a purchase, but if you stop paying your hosting fees, the hosting company owns the machines, so they are not actually purchased.
I have no idea why you think that owned servers used to count as 'physical presence'.
What cities should do, and won't do as long as conservatives whine about it, is tax the companies using cities.
Instead, they have huge infrastructure costs, but the people using them don't live in the city, so no property tax from them. Hell, they aren't even buying gas in the city. They're paying no taxes to support the roads they use every day.
And the companies with the industry are selling everywhere, so cities can't really recoup using sales tax. Not without excessive ones, which mostly hurts their poorest residents...everyone else just shops elsewhere, especially people who live elsewhere.
Hell, half of the businesses aren't in the city at all, so property taxes on them don't even help...they're just using city roads to move stuff. People are driving through the city from the suburb they live in to the suburb they work in, which them ships the goods out using their roads and airports, producing no damn tax revenue at all, but costing the city huge amounts on money.
It's total insanity. Cities need to say 'No. You cannot use our stuff without paying some sort of actual fucking tax so we can run the damn city and build and maintain the stuff you're using!'.
And then, especially here in Georgia, assholic rich suburbs of Atlanta get pissed about how 'the poor inner cities' in their county are using all 'their' taxes and incorporate themselves so they can keep their taxes for themselves. Hey, morons, you wouldn't even exist if not for the city and the poor people in it, who do things like pave the roads you drive on.
Proving immortality is pretty difficult. I don't know how you'd even do that.
Catfish in captivity, however, have not been observed to die of old age. They just keep getting older and bigger.
They, of course, die of disease and cancer. They just do not show any sort of age-related slowdown or infirmaries.
In the wild, like I said, they tend to grow until they cannot actually catch enough food to support themselves.
And I don't quite know what your definition of 'organisms', but all single cell organisms are immortal by any definition of the word, or at least billions of years old.
Surely they should live extremely long lives by now, since they do not need to "make room" for new editions.
And where your analogy falls down there is that some fish are, as far as we can tell, immortal. Catfish, for example...what kills them is the fact they continue to grow, and eventually cannot function in their environment.
Whale sharks, meanwhile, apparently can live 100 years.
That said, aging has more to do with the rate of reproduction and of death than what 'niche' they're in. Elephants, for example, are pretty close to humans in reproduction and death rate, and they live for about 70 years. (Which is about how long humans live without medical care.)
...does anyone think it's stupidly bitchy to complain that Creative Commons came up with a 'public domain' tag?
Hey, Charles Eicher, that's because the Creative Common tag is a 'standard' for marking up ownership and licensing of documents. It's not an attempt to fucking claim ownership, it's a way to mark a document as public domain using an existing nomenclature that now has been expanded to include 'public domain'.
I can only imagine what you think about the Dewey decimal system, a system that has claimed ownership of all human knowledge. Or, at least, classified it using their nomenclature, which in your book is the same thing. (Luckily, they also own your book.)
And, um, Creative Commons isn't attempting to 'expand their licensing authority', as they have no licensing authority to start with. They wrote a bunch of template licenses for people to use. And came up with some way of marking content to use their licenses so that stuff can be found automatically. That's it. And now they've included public domain works as one of their 'licensing templates' you can mark things as under, although obviously it's not actually a license in that case.
I do love the way you blame flickr for not having public domain licensing as an option, only CC licensing, but then bitch and whine when CC adds a way to mark things 'public domain' using their tags, which would have actually solved the problem with flickr from the start if 'public domain' had been one of the choices.
Create asymmetry between US industry and global industry for future growth. Why should I build my factory in the USA and go through the regulations when it just became more profitable to build it overseas?
You shouldn't, which is why we desperately need to drive a stake through the heart of 'free trade'.
Free trade is what already killed the American car industry. Yes, the crappy cars and poor management didn't help, but what really killed it was competing with Japanese subsided cars. (Of course, the Europeans feel the same way about our car companies.)
As long as different governments have different impacts on their industries, and said industry can lobby their governments for different amounts of help, we need to be able to tax incoming products different, which means, at minimum, getting out of the WTO, which was always more about 'Letting American-owned companies sell cheap Chinese goods to Portugal' than actually helping American workers or consumers in any way.
I'm not saying we should revert to 'protectionism', we should not stop foreign companies from, in general, competing in the US, as long as they let us compete there. But the various treaties we have totally forbidding any sort of tariffs on incoming good, while at the same time allowing governments to subsidies and/or tax their own industries however they want, obviously results in abuse. Sometimes the competition is unfair. Hell, sometimes it is fair but it's an area so important to us we don't want to let others compete.
And coal should be more expensive than natural gas. Coal energy is literally the most damaging and dangerous energy we have.
The danger, luckily, is mostly contained to poor people, who don't count. We lose an average of more people to coal mining accidents a year than all people ever to nuclear accidents. And even more miners die of lung diseases. It releases more radioactivity than Three Mile Island, and let's not forget about all that lethal coal slurry that is building up in waste pools everywhere.
Granted, I'm not sure that a total and instant disruption to energy prices is a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that coal. is. very. bad.
I don't think it would be safe to let your non-existent farmers wander around inside your non-existent power plant. They probably need licenses or something.
So you're asserting that companies will make other companies pollute?
Via what, mind control?
Paying them to pollute so they'll then purchase credits from you, in an economic version of a perpetual motion machine?
Breaking in and meddling with their machinery? (Wouldn't it be more efficient to do this to my competitors, instead of unrelated people I'm hoping would buy my carbon credits, but might buy them from anyone? And certainly won't buy from me if they know I did it.)
If I'm selling carbon credits, it is indeed in my best interests if some other company pollutes, but I have absolutely no way to make that happen.
I mean, if I sell medical equipment, it's in my best interests if people break their legs, but I can hardly legally go out and break people's legs, and the fact that I, in theory, might do that is not a reason to forbid people from selling medical equipment.
By your logic no one should sell anything, ever. All markets are bad.
And your idea is particularly stupid. The idea that people would 'hang on' to carbon credit...that cost them money each year to renew from whatever company they got them from, and are making them no money at all, just because prices might go up before they expire, shows a rather fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work.
It's like worrying about a 'milk futures market' resulting in people unable to buy milk because companies hoard it hoping prices will go up. You can't really hoard things you need to keep purchasing, and that you have to throw away the old one if you were unable to use it. People are not going to buy carbon credits and sit on them.
Hell, they aren't even going to sit on their own credits...I suspect that something like 95% of the credits will get used, and the remaining 5% were planned to be used but were not, but it was too late to sell them.
Hoarding is an actual problem in the free market, but expiring stuff that vanishes and is instantly replaced each year with new product at the 'manufacturer' is exactly what isn't hoarded.
We do not sue people for physically injuring us. We arrest people for physically injuring us. It's called assault, asshole.
Granted current laws don't cover this, as there are expected levels of this. Sorta like if I water my lawn and the runoff leaves my property and wets your shoes, I have not assaulted you. But if I rip down the side off my above-ground pool and flood you with water and knock you down, I have.
Although, in this case, it's more like everyone is watering their lawn, and the street doesn't drain. At some point everyone's going to drown, but no one can actually be pointed out as the killer.
We're going to need some new laws, ones that state how much CO2 is expected, and how much crosses the line into actually harming others, which will now be illegal.
Oh, look. That went well.
Heh. That could at least be a sane argument if we were talking about solid or liquid pollution. It's not a sane argument, but it could be.
But it clearly isn't here, considering we're talking about CO2. But he's probably one of those libertarian fucktards who think it's immoral for the government to make any laws at all. Yeah, he'll claim that he only thinks it's immoral for the government to pass laws against things that do not harm others.
But we can see just how stupid and/or hypocritical he is when he argues against pollution laws, which by definition are attempting to stop people from harming others.
And, what's more, the two other possibiliy solution in libertarian do not work, a) the amount of harm is so diluted that it is not rational to fight this harm using lawsuits, it's like being stabbed to death with toothpicks, suing anyone there for damages is absurd, and yet you're still dead, and b) the people being harmed aren't necessarily the same people buying stuff from the company, so can't 'vote with their wallets', you poison one town's ground water and you can still sell to 99.999999% of the people in the US. The government actually has to make pollution illegal, even under libertarian logic.
But 'libertarian' and some uses of 'conservative' are really code for 'businesses should be able to do whatever they want, even if it actually does harm others'.
Well, to be fair, the people who didn't want the west fenced in actually did have a point. For the west to grow, it needed fences, but the existing people weren't actually harming others. We were nowhere at the point of tragedy of the commons, although, if we had not switched, we would have been there within a two or three decades. So we actually averted a problem early there, but the people who were part of the system and saw no actual problem existing had a sane complaint.
Unlike CO2 emissions, which we should have been started charging for way the hell back in the 70s.
But, there's a lot of stuff we should already have been doing, and weren't, so now we have to do them now. The entire system has collapsed due to their lack, and we find ourselves in the rather stupid position of having to fix a broken banking system, a broken environmental regulation system, and a broken health care system, all at the same time, all because a certain unnamed political party decided to fight against those things for decades until it all snapped.
I have yet to see ANYBODY recover a DoD wiped drive. You'd think that one of those data recovery firms would brag about it if they had actually been able to pull it off, yet nada. Give them a good DoD wipe and then they can be reused in computers for the poor.
Forget DoD wipes, it has never even been demonstrated it's possible to recover data from a single 00000000 wipe. No one has ever managed to read as much as a byte of data after it has been overwritten once with any value.
The whole thing is sheer paranoid lunacy. It has its origin when hard drives encoded data in a different way, and were a lot looser in where they wrote on the drive, so in theory parts of the signal could be left behind. But that was only hypothetical even back then, there was no way to separate the signals out, and hard drives are a lot denser and encode the signal differently now.
The only thing that makes a bit of sense is that hard drives can reassign clusters and leave data behind in bad ones, but you can get around that by using the right commands. It would be a hell of a lot more useful if the DoD would just invest in some external hard drive controller-type device to low-level format drives, and then when they're done turn on a huge magnet just to make sure.
And stop wasting all that hardware.
Yeah, me too. I hope that Bethesda starts using the Quake engine for their FPS/RPGs.
Seriously, Bethesda has been doing FPS/RPGs with both Oblivion and Fallout 3, which use the same engine.
I don't have any idea how relevant that is to the Quake engine, but to pretend it's totally irrelevant is a bit silly.
Considering that the Bethesda engine is somewhat buggy, what with people falling through to the void and glitching through walls, what would be nice is if future Bethesda FPS/RPGs used the Quake engine for their graphics and rendering.
If I understand correctly, the Quake engine is already packaged for third parties to purchase and use, and other people have used it, so it shouldn't be incredibly hard. And it would let the Bethesda people concentrate on the RPG part.
OTOH, the Bethesda people have gotten Obsidian (Of KOTOR and NWN2 fame) to do Fallout 3: New Vegas, so apparently they don't want to do RPGs either!
Does anyone else find the game industry very confusing? We've got developers and publishers, but they're often the same company, but they'll do things like develop one game and have someone else publish it, and then publish another game that someone else develops, and then develop and publish a game...it's chaos.
And that's not counting all the 'sub' brands that companies like Atari and EA own. And the actual owners of the property the game is developed from.
Someone should make a 'mindmap' java program online showing all game companies, their relationship with other companies, and all games that have been worked on and by whom.
Ah, okay.
But right there is the key bit of the thing tripping things up that I was talking about: unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
Which, with the DS SDK, is true, as far as I know. Game consoles, in general, do not have 'OSes' and 'libraries' as part of them. Instead, all pre-defined functions are in the SDK, and whatever you use just get linked into your binary.
Because otherwise, they'd either have to include libraries in console firmware, which would mean it couldn't be updated safely without possibly breaking games, or they'd have to include a 'miniOS' on each CD with libraries, but then they'd waste space including functions that weren't used in whatever their version of DDLs are.
I'm sure there actually is some firmware, like 'Read this file off the CD' and whatnot. Obviously, the system has to be able to boot. But, like, the little 'Mii' interface, and 'Here's how you load a texture into the renderer.' and stuff like that, I suspect, is run off the CD.