Even if you take out all the shill 5 star reviews, you still have a shit load of 1 star reviews by people who are pissed off for stupid reasons like not reading the product description or some other random reason. Look at the reviews for Fallout 4 on Amazon and filter down to the 1 star reviews. Most people are pissed off that the disk doesn't have the full game, just an installer for Steam and then you are expected to download the game from there. If you read the description and the answered questions it makes that pretty clear...
I wouldn't round all transactions, just ones paid in cash. Round all cash transactions UP to the nearest quarter to discourage people from using cash. Use the remainder to pay down the national debt.
The doomsday scenario is not that you have one provider, but if that provider had the power to increase electricity rates to encourage the use of natural gas while the same provider is doing fracking. It sounds like the government regulates their charged rates and something tells me they wouldn't allow the increase of electricity rates because PG&E wants to sell more gas.
I can't believe I'm feeding the troll, but dammit I'm a libertarian. As crazy as this might seem to you, libertarians do support government action when it is necessary to ensure a free market. You cannot have a free market when a cartel of companies control the media and the access. The problem is not that Comcast, Time Warner, and others want to control the distribution of their own work, they want to discourage the distribution of competing works. This is fundamentally no different than UAW workers vandalizing non-union made cars in parking lots because they own all the parking lots.
This is the biggest case of Black or White fallacy ever. There are a few degrees of government intervention in markets. It's not just monopolies and communism.
*Prices valid for 1 year after which time you will have to call and threaten to cancel to pay any reasonable or competitive rate *Offer valid only if you let us snoop on your browsing habits and share this information with other companies so they can try to sell you crap *Rate includes 50% discount with automatic checking account electronic payments that we will screw up frequently which will be hard for you to contest since we already have the money *Signal may be degraded and connections randomly dropped if you call customer service for any reason to encourage you not to call for any reason *Technicians may sabotage competing connections for you and your neighbors if they have to come to your location to do installation *Does not include rental equipment fees that are mandatory and not available to buy on the open market *Does not include "HD" service which is poorly defined
We need this last mile provision as well as preventing companies who create and sell media be the ones to control the access to said media. Imagine if your home gas and electricity was through the same company and that company also happened to be a natural gas producer. Would it be fair for them to artificially inflate the cost of electricity to encourage the consumption of their other subsidiary's product?
Make it like natural gas or electricity. The supplier of the data and the provider of the service through the lines should be separate. The supplier of the lines can charge a connection and service fee, but not control at all what types or how much data passes through their pipe as long as it fits. Let the data providers compete over business while the lines themselves are charged for maintenance and upgrades.
The US actually does explicitly export government sanctioned killers and rapists to the rest of the world. Or are the military troops we send out entirely pure and none of them have been known to commit crimes upon innocent civilians?
I referenced not including bulk cargo which would include oil tankers. I didn't include passenger liners which are very few in number compared with cargo ships as well. Buoys would have to be an incredibly tiny amount of displacement... All buoys on earth is probably less than a single tanker. Drilling rigs displace only the legs below the surface as they are typically rigidly mounted to the sea-floor.
As for your erosion, volcanoes (no apostrophe for plurals by the way), continental thrust, and other natural sources, I briefly mentioned neglecting them as there is no real way to quantify that easily. Increase in sea level due to changes of the sea floor itself would be a full academic paper on its own.
But man-made displacement? I was merely trying to point out that there are orders of magnitude difference between ship displacement and sea level rise. I wouldn't be surprised if all ships of all types, buoys, and any other man made structural displacement represents less than 1mm of sea level rise.
Underwater volcanoes would be hard to quantify, but seriously ship tonnage? Literally a drop in the ocean. I'm a "denier" by most standards and even I know that 2.5" of sea level rise would probably be more than all cargo ever produced by mankind.
Assuming 2.5" of sea level rise (we'll call it 65mm) and a 360 million square kilometer surface area of oceans on earth, that's 2.34x10^13 cubic meters of water which would mass approximately 2.34x10^16 kg (conservative since salt water is more dense than pure water). Shipping units are a weird "TEU." According to wikipedia, the maximum mass for a TEU is 30,480 kilograms (TEUs are volume measurements). So for cargo ships, the amount of shipping containers needing to be on the ocean AT THE SAME TIME to displace that 2.5" is conservatively 7.68x10^11 TEU. The estimate for worldwide shipping in all of 2009 (not all at the same time) is a mere 465,597,537 TEU.
Of course I didn't include bulk cargo ships, but unless we are shipping a few million times as much mass by bulk shipping, it still isn't factoring in.
From your source: "Finally, some of the highest estimates include a portion of defense spending (more info on defense subsidies to oil here and here). It should be noted that while the estimate of $53 billion in fossil fuel subsidies annually does include some of the cost of U.S. military “defense” of the Persian Gulf region..."
"Subsidies" when referring to oil companies and fossil fuels in general include anything and everything under the sun that might be related to energy production, transportation, or usage in the slightest. Those huge numbers are highly misleading. As far as "tax breaks" which most people are against, it should be noted that most of them are tax breaks available to construction and mining in general and just happen to apply to fossil fuel companies that do construction and resource extraction.
If you want to say oil companies shouldn't be eligible for those because "AGW" then why not eliminate tax loopholes for employees of fossil fuel companies? Aren't those "subsidizing" fossil fuel production too?
Copyright needs a major overhaul. I think 20 years sounds like a good maximum limit. I would think 10 years with a 10 year renewal ought to be plenty in the modern world. In no case should copyright last longer than a lifetime, or really a "productive lifetime." (say retirement age of 65 minus starting working age of approximately 15) Basically if you have an idea inspired by existing copyrighted material, you should have an opportunity to create and sell your creative modification at some point during your working years. As it is now, I am 29 and Star Wars came out long before I was born, yet I will die before any of the Star Wars universe will go into the public domain. If I had a great idea for a story based in the Star Wars universe, I will never truly be able to control or publish that idea as my own.
That doesn't encourage creative works, that discourages it... Which is exactly what current media empires want. They don't want to encourage new works, they want to limit them because they don't want more creative works competing against their cash cow of reboots, sequels, prequels, and complete lack of any originality.
It's never a zero sum game when the government can legally print all the money it wants. If it were a zero sum game, we'd eventually have to balance a budget and pay down debt... But we don't.
Pfft, this coming from a 22 digit UID? I am such a young'un with a mere 20 digits! If I had bothered registering earlier I might even have a coveted sub 10 digit UID...
Yep, this is how all the telcoms work. Keep jacking up the "base" rates and offer "discounts" for things they cannot legally require. Automated billing? Discount! TV service you don't want? Discount! Privacy? Discount!
I don't know why they don't make the rates $1 billion/mo with a 99.99% discount to get 1mbps service with a 1GB cap only with automatic checking account withdrawl and selling all your data to 3rd parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you take out all the shill 5 star reviews, you still have a shit load of 1 star reviews by people who are pissed off for stupid reasons like not reading the product description or some other random reason. Look at the reviews for Fallout 4 on Amazon and filter down to the 1 star reviews. Most people are pissed off that the disk doesn't have the full game, just an installer for Steam and then you are expected to download the game from there. If you read the description and the answered questions it makes that pretty clear...
I wonder if you could put a turbo in the exhaust and use it to cram 2 atoms in the engine to get some more power out of it...
I wouldn't round all transactions, just ones paid in cash. Round all cash transactions UP to the nearest quarter to discourage people from using cash. Use the remainder to pay down the national debt.
The doomsday scenario is not that you have one provider, but if that provider had the power to increase electricity rates to encourage the use of natural gas while the same provider is doing fracking. It sounds like the government regulates their charged rates and something tells me they wouldn't allow the increase of electricity rates because PG&E wants to sell more gas.
I can't believe I'm feeding the troll, but dammit I'm a libertarian. As crazy as this might seem to you, libertarians do support government action when it is necessary to ensure a free market. You cannot have a free market when a cartel of companies control the media and the access. The problem is not that Comcast, Time Warner, and others want to control the distribution of their own work, they want to discourage the distribution of competing works. This is fundamentally no different than UAW workers vandalizing non-union made cars in parking lots because they own all the parking lots.
This is the biggest case of Black or White fallacy ever. There are a few degrees of government intervention in markets. It's not just monopolies and communism.
*Prices valid for 1 year after which time you will have to call and threaten to cancel to pay any reasonable or competitive rate
*Offer valid only if you let us snoop on your browsing habits and share this information with other companies so they can try to sell you crap
*Rate includes 50% discount with automatic checking account electronic payments that we will screw up frequently which will be hard for you to contest since we already have the money
*Signal may be degraded and connections randomly dropped if you call customer service for any reason to encourage you not to call for any reason
*Technicians may sabotage competing connections for you and your neighbors if they have to come to your location to do installation
*Does not include rental equipment fees that are mandatory and not available to buy on the open market
*Does not include "HD" service which is poorly defined
We need this last mile provision as well as preventing companies who create and sell media be the ones to control the access to said media. Imagine if your home gas and electricity was through the same company and that company also happened to be a natural gas producer. Would it be fair for them to artificially inflate the cost of electricity to encourage the consumption of their other subsidiary's product?
Make it like natural gas or electricity. The supplier of the data and the provider of the service through the lines should be separate. The supplier of the lines can charge a connection and service fee, but not control at all what types or how much data passes through their pipe as long as it fits. Let the data providers compete over business while the lines themselves are charged for maintenance and upgrades.
Yet...
There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch. -Nigel Powers
I didn't know you had to renounce your citizenship for run for office...
The US actually does explicitly export government sanctioned killers and rapists to the rest of the world. Or are the military troops we send out entirely pure and none of them have been known to commit crimes upon innocent civilians?
If Amazon has any sense whatsoever, this petition will be as effective as the Whitehouse.gov ones too.
Allow me to summarize their findings. Poor people are more likely to be obese and obese people have a shorter life expectancy*.
*Except in dense urban areas where walking and public transit are more common than driving and parking.
I referenced not including bulk cargo which would include oil tankers. I didn't include passenger liners which are very few in number compared with cargo ships as well. Buoys would have to be an incredibly tiny amount of displacement... All buoys on earth is probably less than a single tanker. Drilling rigs displace only the legs below the surface as they are typically rigidly mounted to the sea-floor.
As for your erosion, volcanoes (no apostrophe for plurals by the way), continental thrust, and other natural sources, I briefly mentioned neglecting them as there is no real way to quantify that easily. Increase in sea level due to changes of the sea floor itself would be a full academic paper on its own.
But man-made displacement? I was merely trying to point out that there are orders of magnitude difference between ship displacement and sea level rise. I wouldn't be surprised if all ships of all types, buoys, and any other man made structural displacement represents less than 1mm of sea level rise.
Underwater volcanoes would be hard to quantify, but seriously ship tonnage? Literally a drop in the ocean. I'm a "denier" by most standards and even I know that 2.5" of sea level rise would probably be more than all cargo ever produced by mankind.
Assuming 2.5" of sea level rise (we'll call it 65mm) and a 360 million square kilometer surface area of oceans on earth, that's 2.34x10^13 cubic meters of water which would mass approximately 2.34x10^16 kg (conservative since salt water is more dense than pure water). Shipping units are a weird "TEU." According to wikipedia, the maximum mass for a TEU is 30,480 kilograms (TEUs are volume measurements). So for cargo ships, the amount of shipping containers needing to be on the ocean AT THE SAME TIME to displace that 2.5" is conservatively 7.68x10^11 TEU. The estimate for worldwide shipping in all of 2009 (not all at the same time) is a mere 465,597,537 TEU.
Of course I didn't include bulk cargo ships, but unless we are shipping a few million times as much mass by bulk shipping, it still isn't factoring in.
Well in some cases, the government is actively shutting down privately funded transportation projects... Like the Keystone XL or Palmetto pipelines.
From your source: "Finally, some of the highest estimates include a portion of defense spending (more info on defense subsidies to oil here and here). It should be noted that while the estimate of $53 billion in fossil fuel subsidies annually does include some of the cost of U.S. military “defense” of the Persian Gulf region..."
"Subsidies" when referring to oil companies and fossil fuels in general include anything and everything under the sun that might be related to energy production, transportation, or usage in the slightest. Those huge numbers are highly misleading. As far as "tax breaks" which most people are against, it should be noted that most of them are tax breaks available to construction and mining in general and just happen to apply to fossil fuel companies that do construction and resource extraction.
If you want to say oil companies shouldn't be eligible for those because "AGW" then why not eliminate tax loopholes for employees of fossil fuel companies? Aren't those "subsidizing" fossil fuel production too?
Copyright needs a major overhaul. I think 20 years sounds like a good maximum limit. I would think 10 years with a 10 year renewal ought to be plenty in the modern world. In no case should copyright last longer than a lifetime, or really a "productive lifetime." (say retirement age of 65 minus starting working age of approximately 15) Basically if you have an idea inspired by existing copyrighted material, you should have an opportunity to create and sell your creative modification at some point during your working years. As it is now, I am 29 and Star Wars came out long before I was born, yet I will die before any of the Star Wars universe will go into the public domain. If I had a great idea for a story based in the Star Wars universe, I will never truly be able to control or publish that idea as my own.
That doesn't encourage creative works, that discourages it... Which is exactly what current media empires want. They don't want to encourage new works, they want to limit them because they don't want more creative works competing against their cash cow of reboots, sequels, prequels, and complete lack of any originality.
Obviously because a woman is protected by any men she knows that are travelling with her right?
Note: This is sarcasm because a woman is far more likely to be assaulted by someone she knows than she is by a stranger.
It's never a zero sum game when the government can legally print all the money it wants. If it were a zero sum game, we'd eventually have to balance a budget and pay down debt... But we don't.
I was wondering when we'd have the obligatory UID fight where it would end in gasps when someone reveals a sub 10 digit...
Pfft, this coming from a 22 digit UID? I am such a young'un with a mere 20 digits! If I had bothered registering earlier I might even have a coveted sub 10 digit UID...
I am actually rather enjoying the scores and UIDs in binary though. I think we should make it permanent.
Yep, this is how all the telcoms work. Keep jacking up the "base" rates and offer "discounts" for things they cannot legally require. Automated billing? Discount! TV service you don't want? Discount! Privacy? Discount!
I don't know why they don't make the rates $1 billion/mo with a 99.99% discount to get 1mbps service with a 1GB cap only with automatic checking account withdrawl and selling all your data to 3rd parties.
*If you choose to opt out, installation will cost $500 and mandatory equipment rental fees will double.