I guess my question would be not only why did the school administrators think that their authority over the child extended this far, but also why would they ever want it to go that far even if they thought it might? Whether it might be legal or not, it was just plain a stupid thing for them to do. It would've been just as easy for them to bring the girl into the office or wherever, and keep an eye on her while they called the parents and/or police, rather than taking such extreme measures over such a minor incident.
If they suspected a student of concealing something immediately dangerous, like a gun, then a search like this might be more understandable (nonwithstanding the fact that a gun would probably be rather hard to hide in your underwear). But to take such measures over suspicion of some pills (particularly something as lame as ibuprofen) was just lunacy. Especially when they had other better and easier options (call the parents).
Just coming up with an analogy off the top of my head, what if your child fell down the stairs at school and broke her arm? I'd expect the school to provide her with some first-aid, get her to a hospital maybe, call me and let me know about it, and then get out of the way. I certainly wouldn't expect or want them to go consult with the doctors at the hospital and decide for us what sort of treatment she needed. I don't need to leave work and rush over to the school every time my kid scrapes their knee, but I don't think the lines between what the school should handle on its own and what it should involve the parents for is that hard to discern. And if there's any doubt, the school should always try to involve the parents, if for no other reason than to protect itself from litigation-happy folk in the future.
That's the general hardware upgrade cycle problem that we see everywhere, given the current speed at which technology moves. No matter when you buy, you know that a couple years later you could've gotten way more for your money. Eventually you've gotta just take the plunge. Today I could buy an 52" LCD television for a few hundred bucks less than I spent on a comparable quality 46" set eighteen months ago. Such is life.
The people taking the plunge now are helping to drive the demand and fund the improvement to make the better technologies that we'll see in the future. If everyone stopped buying them today, it would just slow the progress that you're counting on.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think the vast majority of religious people really believe that they're basically doomed to hell unless they jump through a bazillion hoops and get everything just right. It's certainly possible to interpret parts of the bible that way, (and there are certainly some people who for some reason decide to interpret it that way), but I don't think that that's how most people actually live their lives.
It's more along the lines of those parts of the bible are there to remind us that all people are capable of bad acts, and that it's hard but necessary work to make sure that we're always making the effort to do what's right, and thoughtful about what truly is right, and not just what seems right at the time.
And there's the flip side, which says that no matter how bad you screw up, if you accept that you've done wrong and are truly sorry, then God will forgive you. That's not a scary thought to someone who believes in it, that's a comfort.
I don't think that most people actually operate under the belief that the only way to get God to forgive you is to go into a confession box and talk to a priest or whatever. The ability to do that is more of a service that churches provide because often times talking to another person is an important part of helping an individual come to terms with their mistake. Most people go about their lives believing that as long as they try to be a good person and are truly sorry for their mistakes, then God will consider that more important than some checklist of religious rituals that they may or may not have gone through.
Ignorant of the fact that there are many many different types of religions and religious people. Ignorant of the fact that there are many different types of atheists (even ones that fear death). Ignorant of the fact that stereotyping a very large and very broad category of people(religious)is a not at all informative or useful.
The bat was on the far side of the external tank from the orbiter, about a third of the way up from the bottom. There wasn't really any way that it could strike the orbiter during launch, or that any foam that it might pull off would fall and strike the orbiter. The weight of the bat compared to the weight of the shuttle loaded with fuel is negligible, you'd need a pretty big envelope for your back-of-the-envelope calculations to have enough decimal places to show any effect from it. It was not an unsafe call to essentially ignore the bat. It didn't pose any risk.
As for the idea of contaminating something like Mars and having it end up overrun with earth bacteria, I guess it's impossible to prove that it couldn't happen, but I don't it's very likely. Mars is more like the earth than anywhere else in the solar system, but it's still very different. You might be able to find a few organisms here that could potentially survive on Mars, but it's doubtful that any would thrive, particularly to the point of overrunning the planet.
There's two significant problems with just about any sort of physical collection of space junk. One is the relative velocities of all the crap in orbit. This stuff is moving really fast, so whatever mechanism you're using to catch it is going to have to absorb a lot of energy without being destroyed. There are some techniques that have been developed to protect spacecraft and even collect fast moving pieces (aerogels, a series of thin metal plates to dissipate impact energy), but those types of shielding are generally destroyed as they function, and don't seem particularly feasible to scale up. An alternative way to mitigate the velocity issue with physical collection would be to have your space roomba match trajectory/velocity with its current target so that the relative velocity is much lower, but this would require the space roomba to be constantly changing its own orbit for each piece of junk, and the fuel requirements would quickly become impractical.
The second big problem is that space is very big, and there's a whole lot of earth orbit out there. This links back to the fuel requirement problems. There's a practical size limit to how big of a space roomba we could put into orbit, so it would have to do a lot of maneuvering to make its orbit cross the orbits of enough space junk to make it all worthwhile.
In a lot of ways, the concept of a big space "vacuum" is a lot simpler than lasers brooms or whatever. But once you get into the details, it quickly becomes unworkable.
No kidding. The way this is explained makes it sound like if I pulled a stack of iTMS cards off the rack at walmart or whatever and walked out with them in my pocket, they'd all be valid and would work. I have a hard time believing that to be the case. There are hundreds of stores (both online and physical) that sell gift cards at other stores, I have a hard time believing that it doesn't generally work more like you describe, and I also have a hard time believing that Apple would have done it differently.
Unless maybe the people generating the card numbers has found a way to falsely activate them? Although if that were the case, I'd imagine that'd be a much easier fix.
*shrug* I'm not willing to die for my religion. I'm not willing to kill for my religion either. But hey, thanks for judging me based on the actions of a handful of nutjobs (with vastly different beliefs than mine) who did a terrible thing.
People hurt other people over all sorts of random stuff. Maybe we should outlaw love, people get killed over that all the damn time.
What does that mean that "you will not entertain any such nonsense"? If I'm having a discussion about my beliefs with someone, will you insert yourself into the conversation and try to convince me that I'm wrong? Will you yell insults from across the room? Will you run over to us and start yelling jibberish so that we can't continue our discussion? Or will you just put your headphones on and mind your own business?
Why shouldn't you be tolerant of the belief in Zeus. If someone wants to believe in Zeus, that's their business, and I don't see that as a reason to treat them differently from anyone else. Now if their belief in Zeus requires them to be an asshole to me, then I'll be an asshole back. But other than that, I couldn't care less.
I'll certainly agree that there are way too many people in this world who worry about the religious beliefs of people who don't want their concern. What I'm seeing as increasingly common (and which Dawkins is one of the most public examples of) are atheists who seem just as concerned and vocal about everyone's beliefs.
To be honest, I'm not particularly offended. I'm entirely indifferent towards your beliefs. Even if you want to go on broadcast TV and talk for hours about how everyone who has religious beliefs is a fool, I won't be particularly upset. The most disappointing part of all of this, to me at least, is that there are some very valid complaints about people with more extremist beliefs holding an undue amount of political influence, and using it to force aspects of their religion onto everyone. And the far too common response to this is that instead of attacking the blurring of that line between church and state, people like you choose to bash religion in general, call people names, and tell us that we're stupid.
All that does is alienate the moderate religious folk, many of which are just as uneasy about fundamental Christianity as you are. Like it or not, atheists are way out-numbered in this country, and if you want to avoid being marginalized, then insulting everyone else is not the smartest way to go about it. But you know, that's just my opinion, and I wear a cross around my neck so my opinion is worthless.
I've got better things to do then round up all the christian idiots and try to cram my beliefs down their throats. If someone comes to me with a genuine desire to study, analyze, and learn then I'll try to help them. Although my help would likely be to point them towards people who do that sort of thing for a living.
I'm hardly a bible-thumper. You dismissing me as such does little to advance your argument.
I'm not going to claim to know why God did or didn't do anything. I have a hard time seeing the value in taking any part of the bible as literal fact, so I'm not going to argue any specifics with you right now. Whether pushed along by divine inspiration or not, the bible was written by people, shared by people, and copied by people. People are often biased, confused, and sometimes even malicious. It's pretty darn hard to know why certain parts of the bible say what they say, or whether there's any truth or value in them at all.
I think it's fair to say that there are "truths" that don't boil down to just facts. Simple things like you should treat other people with respect, you shouldn't steal from people, you should try to help the less fortunate, etc. In many ways, large portions of the bible are similar to the sorts of stories that you read to kids, where there's a lesson that you hope they walk away with at the end. Rather than just saying THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD ACT, you're given an example of someone acting a particular way, and the result teaches you whether their choices/actions were good or not. In the new testament, Jesus often spoke in parables, which is basically the same thing. Rather than just plainly dictating a rule, a story was used to illustrate a point.
Unfortunately, the parables that Jesus told, as well as other stories in the bible were written to help people who lived at those times understand them. Because today we live in a much different world, most of us have a hard time relating to the stories, they describe a world that's very different than what we experience day to day now. That being the case, those parables take some extra effort in order to parse, and unfortunately many people are unwilling/unable to make that effort. That makes it that much easier for people who claim to understand the bible to impose their interpretation on others.
I consider myself very fortunate that my family had the resources to send me to a jesuit high school where the time was taken to go through the bulk of the bible in a very analytical and critical way. My experiences there turned the bible from a strangely written book that occasionally seemed to be crammed down my throat by various people into a very interesting and well written bunch of suggestions about how to live a better life. Once you stop looking at it for answers, and more for suggestions and direction, it becomes very useful.
I could write lots more about this, but I need to get back to work for now. Feel free to ask any follow up questions.
There are many religious people who value the bible yet don't consider it to be a literal encyclopedia of how the universe works. We are willing and able to reason enough to understand that it was written in a time and primarily for an audience with a significantly different understanding of the world from what science has provided for us today.
I've had many discussions with atheists where I am consistently asked to defend literal interpretations of the bible, when in fact I don't consider literal interpretations correct or useful.
There are many people out there who have decided to take much of the bible word for word as absolute truth, and I find that foolish. Please take care to not condemn all religious people just because some of them can't be bothered to think for themselves.
Please don't forget that it is a subset of "religious people" who are fighting to discredit science and impose their beliefs via government and laws. There are plenty of religious people who don't support those more extreme views. Belief in God and a respect and enthusiasm for science are not mutually exclusive. Maybe you should try to be more careful about making that distinction when using your vehement means.
I guess the question is, are you fighting against anyone who believes in God, or are you fighting against people who use their beliefs to justify controlling other people? If it's the latter, then myself and many other people who believe in God will support you. If it's the former, then you're turning us into enemies.
For me the best bits in RB is having some friends over to play, and going through all the fun songs that everybody knows. I think the Beatles have plenty of those.
I wouldn't expect to see games on average being any cheaper than retail versions any time soon, because as soon as a developer/publisher uses digital distribution to undercut the retail prices, then the retail stores will get upset and refuse to stock the product.
Like you mentioned, there's still plenty of value left in having a physical media copy of a game. For different people, that relative value might vary, but there's plenty of good reasons to prefer buying a game on a disc as opposed to downloading it. And as long as that's the case, it'll make sense for publishers to distribute retail versions of their games, and as long as they're doing retail, they can't really undercut those prices on their own online store.
Well if it's a CGI animation, then you're not really using gravity, you're just using fancy rendering. But ignoring that technicality, it's not really that much different than using a substance made out of molecules to build a scale model of a molecule. You're just using what's available to you in order to make a simplified model. There's not any easy and intuitive way to represent some aspects of physics in a manner that relates directly to the normal human experience of the universe. So you have to make a simpler model that starts to bridge the gap between how things appear to work at the scale of a human being and between the physics going on that are generally only visible at vastly larger or smaller scales.
So in the rubber sheet grid example, what's actually happening is that you're using gravity as generally experienced by humans (things roll downhill) to demonstrate some of the more fundamental aspects of that gravity (mass bends space).
There's still something to be said for rewarding people for their hard work. The fact that something can be copied for a negligible cost and without harming the original doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any value attached to it. If I pour my heart and sweat into producing something like that, and ask for something in return for sharing it with you, there is an ethical obligation to pay for it if you want it.
You haven't stolen my music/book/etc, but you have lessened my ability to support myself. Objectively, it's not as bad as stealing and depriving me of a physical possession, but the fact that it's not as bad as theft doesn't mean that it's a good thing.
I'm willing to bet that with the continuous increases in farming technology, the US produces more food today than it ever did in the past. It's just that consumption has gone way up (we're a nation of obese), and the demand for exotic and cheaply processed food has increased.
Any successor that tries to be the "next Steve Jobs" is destined to fail. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't have some of his talents and/or skills, but just swapping him out with someone who talks like him and hoping to keep that "majick" going is not going to work. There are lots of ways to run a successful company, even Apple.
A CEO that can keep Apple focused and efficient should do ok. The company has plenty of talented employees, decent products, and a very strong brand. As long as they continue to expand their product lineup slowly and carefully, their engineers and designers will come up with good stuff.
Part of that focus means a continued general neglect of the corporate marketplace. I don't know if I've read your rant about Apple as a toymaker, but I'd argue that Apple's lack of warranties and such are less about incompetence, and more about a conscious decision to avoid that market. It's a market of very thin margins, and as such, it only makes money for you if you capture a big chunk of it. We can make predictions and argue all day about whether or not the Mac could get that big chunk, but it looks like Apple has gone through that exercise before and decided that their effort is better spent expanding into the consumer music and phone business instead. And it seems to be working out well for them.
Right, so your theory is that because the government tried to help the banking industry not collapse, all the farmers in the country are going to stop growing food?
Depending on where you live, recording a conversation without letting the other party know that it's being recorded might be illegal. If you decide to follow the parent comment's advice, you should probably check into that, and if necessary let the other party know that the conversation is being recorded.
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Ah, but it could also have a surface skimmer that sucks up floating algae and turns it into biofuel. Booyah.
If there's some sort of sarcasm implied in your comment, then I don't get it. If you're making a serious comment, then you're making even less sense.
I guess my question would be not only why did the school administrators think that their authority over the child extended this far, but also why would they ever want it to go that far even if they thought it might? Whether it might be legal or not, it was just plain a stupid thing for them to do. It would've been just as easy for them to bring the girl into the office or wherever, and keep an eye on her while they called the parents and/or police, rather than taking such extreme measures over such a minor incident.
If they suspected a student of concealing something immediately dangerous, like a gun, then a search like this might be more understandable (nonwithstanding the fact that a gun would probably be rather hard to hide in your underwear). But to take such measures over suspicion of some pills (particularly something as lame as ibuprofen) was just lunacy. Especially when they had other better and easier options (call the parents).
Just coming up with an analogy off the top of my head, what if your child fell down the stairs at school and broke her arm? I'd expect the school to provide her with some first-aid, get her to a hospital maybe, call me and let me know about it, and then get out of the way. I certainly wouldn't expect or want them to go consult with the doctors at the hospital and decide for us what sort of treatment she needed. I don't need to leave work and rush over to the school every time my kid scrapes their knee, but I don't think the lines between what the school should handle on its own and what it should involve the parents for is that hard to discern. And if there's any doubt, the school should always try to involve the parents, if for no other reason than to protect itself from litigation-happy folk in the future.
That's the general hardware upgrade cycle problem that we see everywhere, given the current speed at which technology moves. No matter when you buy, you know that a couple years later you could've gotten way more for your money. Eventually you've gotta just take the plunge. Today I could buy an 52" LCD television for a few hundred bucks less than I spent on a comparable quality 46" set eighteen months ago. Such is life.
The people taking the plunge now are helping to drive the demand and fund the improvement to make the better technologies that we'll see in the future. If everyone stopped buying them today, it would just slow the progress that you're counting on.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think the vast majority of religious people really believe that they're basically doomed to hell unless they jump through a bazillion hoops and get everything just right. It's certainly possible to interpret parts of the bible that way, (and there are certainly some people who for some reason decide to interpret it that way), but I don't think that that's how most people actually live their lives.
It's more along the lines of those parts of the bible are there to remind us that all people are capable of bad acts, and that it's hard but necessary work to make sure that we're always making the effort to do what's right, and thoughtful about what truly is right, and not just what seems right at the time.
And there's the flip side, which says that no matter how bad you screw up, if you accept that you've done wrong and are truly sorry, then God will forgive you. That's not a scary thought to someone who believes in it, that's a comfort.
I don't think that most people actually operate under the belief that the only way to get God to forgive you is to go into a confession box and talk to a priest or whatever. The ability to do that is more of a service that churches provide because often times talking to another person is an important part of helping an individual come to terms with their mistake. Most people go about their lives believing that as long as they try to be a good person and are truly sorry for their mistakes, then God will consider that more important than some checklist of religious rituals that they may or may not have gone through.
Ignorant of the fact that there are many many different types of religions and religious people. Ignorant of the fact that there are many different types of atheists (even ones that fear death). Ignorant of the fact that stereotyping a very large and very broad category of people(religious)is a not at all informative or useful.
Interesting. I had not heard anything like that, but I will look for more information about it. Thanks.
The bat was on the far side of the external tank from the orbiter, about a third of the way up from the bottom. There wasn't really any way that it could strike the orbiter during launch, or that any foam that it might pull off would fall and strike the orbiter. The weight of the bat compared to the weight of the shuttle loaded with fuel is negligible, you'd need a pretty big envelope for your back-of-the-envelope calculations to have enough decimal places to show any effect from it. It was not an unsafe call to essentially ignore the bat. It didn't pose any risk.
As for the idea of contaminating something like Mars and having it end up overrun with earth bacteria, I guess it's impossible to prove that it couldn't happen, but I don't it's very likely. Mars is more like the earth than anywhere else in the solar system, but it's still very different. You might be able to find a few organisms here that could potentially survive on Mars, but it's doubtful that any would thrive, particularly to the point of overrunning the planet.
There's two significant problems with just about any sort of physical collection of space junk. One is the relative velocities of all the crap in orbit. This stuff is moving really fast, so whatever mechanism you're using to catch it is going to have to absorb a lot of energy without being destroyed. There are some techniques that have been developed to protect spacecraft and even collect fast moving pieces
(aerogels, a series of thin metal plates to dissipate impact energy), but those types of shielding are generally destroyed as they function, and don't seem particularly feasible to scale up. An alternative way to mitigate the velocity issue with physical collection would be to have your space roomba match trajectory/velocity with its current target so that the relative velocity is much lower, but this would require the space roomba to be constantly changing its own orbit for each piece of junk, and the fuel requirements would quickly become impractical.
The second big problem is that space is very big, and there's a whole lot of earth orbit out there. This links back to the fuel requirement problems. There's a practical size limit to how big of a space roomba we could put into orbit, so it would have to do a lot of maneuvering to make its orbit cross the orbits of enough space junk to make it all worthwhile.
In a lot of ways, the concept of a big space "vacuum" is a lot simpler than lasers brooms or whatever. But once you get into the details, it quickly becomes unworkable.
No kidding. The way this is explained makes it sound like if I pulled a stack of iTMS cards off the rack at walmart or whatever and walked out with them in my pocket, they'd all be valid and would work. I have a hard time believing that to be the case. There are hundreds of stores (both online and physical) that sell gift cards at other stores, I have a hard time believing that it doesn't generally work more like you describe, and I also have a hard time believing that Apple would have done it differently.
Unless maybe the people generating the card numbers has found a way to falsely activate them? Although if that were the case, I'd imagine that'd be a much easier fix.
*shrug* I'm not willing to die for my religion. I'm not willing to kill for my religion either. But hey, thanks for judging me based on the actions of a handful of nutjobs (with vastly different beliefs than mine) who did a terrible thing.
People hurt other people over all sorts of random stuff. Maybe we should outlaw love, people get killed over that all the damn time.
What does that mean that "you will not entertain any such nonsense"? If I'm having a discussion about my beliefs with someone, will you insert yourself into the conversation and try to convince me that I'm wrong? Will you yell insults from across the room? Will you run over to us and start yelling jibberish so that we can't continue our discussion? Or will you just put your headphones on and mind your own business?
Why shouldn't you be tolerant of the belief in Zeus. If someone wants to believe in Zeus, that's their business, and I don't see that as a reason to treat them differently from anyone else. Now if their belief in Zeus requires them to be an asshole to me, then I'll be an asshole back. But other than that, I couldn't care less.
I'll certainly agree that there are way too many people in this world who worry about the religious beliefs of people who don't want their concern. What I'm seeing as increasingly common (and which Dawkins is one of the most public examples of) are atheists who seem just as concerned and vocal about everyone's beliefs.
To be honest, I'm not particularly offended. I'm entirely indifferent towards your beliefs. Even if you want to go on broadcast TV and talk for hours about how everyone who has religious beliefs is a fool, I won't be particularly upset. The most disappointing part of all of this, to me at least, is that there are some very valid complaints about people with more extremist beliefs holding an undue amount of political influence, and using it to force aspects of their religion onto everyone. And the far too common response to this is that instead of attacking the blurring of that line between church and state, people like you choose to bash religion in general, call people names, and tell us that we're stupid.
All that does is alienate the moderate religious folk, many of which are just as uneasy about fundamental Christianity as you are. Like it or not, atheists are way out-numbered in this country, and if you want to avoid being marginalized, then insulting everyone else is not the smartest way to go about it. But you know, that's just my opinion, and I wear a cross around my neck so my opinion is worthless.
I've got better things to do then round up all the christian idiots and try to cram my beliefs down their throats. If someone comes to me with a genuine desire to study, analyze, and learn then I'll try to help them. Although my help would likely be to point them towards people who do that sort of thing for a living.
I'm hardly a bible-thumper. You dismissing me as such does little to advance your argument.
I'm not going to claim to know why God did or didn't do anything. I have a hard time seeing the value in taking any part of the bible as literal fact, so I'm not going to argue any specifics with you right now. Whether pushed along by divine inspiration or not, the bible was written by people, shared by people, and copied by people. People are often biased, confused, and sometimes even malicious. It's pretty darn hard to know why certain parts of the bible say what they say, or whether there's any truth or value in them at all.
I think it's fair to say that there are "truths" that don't boil down to just facts. Simple things like you should treat other people with respect, you shouldn't steal from people, you should try to help the less fortunate, etc. In many ways, large portions of the bible are similar to the sorts of stories that you read to kids, where there's a lesson that you hope they walk away with at the end. Rather than just saying THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD ACT, you're given an example of someone acting a particular way, and the result teaches you whether their choices/actions were good or not. In the new testament, Jesus often spoke in parables, which is basically the same thing. Rather than just plainly dictating a rule, a story was used to illustrate a point.
Unfortunately, the parables that Jesus told, as well as other stories in the bible were written to help people who lived at those times understand them. Because today we live in a much different world, most of us have a hard time relating to the stories, they describe a world that's very different than what we experience day to day now. That being the case, those parables take some extra effort in order to parse, and unfortunately many people are unwilling/unable to make that effort. That makes it that much easier for people who claim to understand the bible to impose their interpretation on others.
I consider myself very fortunate that my family had the resources to send me to a jesuit high school where the time was taken to go through the bulk of the bible in a very analytical and critical way. My experiences there turned the bible from a strangely written book that occasionally seemed to be crammed down my throat by various people into a very interesting and well written bunch of suggestions about how to live a better life. Once you stop looking at it for answers, and more for suggestions and direction, it becomes very useful.
I could write lots more about this, but I need to get back to work for now. Feel free to ask any follow up questions.
There are many religious people who value the bible yet don't consider it to be a literal encyclopedia of how the universe works. We are willing and able to reason enough to understand that it was written in a time and primarily for an audience with a significantly different understanding of the world from what science has provided for us today.
I've had many discussions with atheists where I am consistently asked to defend literal interpretations of the bible, when in fact I don't consider literal interpretations correct or useful.
There are many people out there who have decided to take much of the bible word for word as absolute truth, and I find that foolish. Please take care to not condemn all religious people just because some of them can't be bothered to think for themselves.
Please don't forget that it is a subset of "religious people" who are fighting to discredit science and impose their beliefs via government and laws. There are plenty of religious people who don't support those more extreme views. Belief in God and a respect and enthusiasm for science are not mutually exclusive. Maybe you should try to be more careful about making that distinction when using your vehement means.
I guess the question is, are you fighting against anyone who believes in God, or are you fighting against people who use their beliefs to justify controlling other people? If it's the latter, then myself and many other people who believe in God will support you. If it's the former, then you're turning us into enemies.
For me the best bits in RB is having some friends over to play, and going through all the fun songs that everybody knows. I think the Beatles have plenty of those.
I wouldn't expect to see games on average being any cheaper than retail versions any time soon, because as soon as a developer/publisher uses digital distribution to undercut the retail prices, then the retail stores will get upset and refuse to stock the product.
Like you mentioned, there's still plenty of value left in having a physical media copy of a game. For different people, that relative value might vary, but there's plenty of good reasons to prefer buying a game on a disc as opposed to downloading it. And as long as that's the case, it'll make sense for publishers to distribute retail versions of their games, and as long as they're doing retail, they can't really undercut those prices on their own online store.
Well if it's a CGI animation, then you're not really using gravity, you're just using fancy rendering. But ignoring that technicality, it's not really that much different than using a substance made out of molecules to build a scale model of a molecule. You're just using what's available to you in order to make a simplified model. There's not any easy and intuitive way to represent some aspects of physics in a manner that relates directly to the normal human experience of the universe. So you have to make a simpler model that starts to bridge the gap between how things appear to work at the scale of a human being and between the physics going on that are generally only visible at vastly larger or smaller scales.
So in the rubber sheet grid example, what's actually happening is that you're using gravity as generally experienced by humans (things roll downhill) to demonstrate some of the more fundamental aspects of that gravity (mass bends space).
There's still something to be said for rewarding people for their hard work. The fact that something can be copied for a negligible cost and without harming the original doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any value attached to it. If I pour my heart and sweat into producing something like that, and ask for something in return for sharing it with you, there is an ethical obligation to pay for it if you want it.
You haven't stolen my music/book/etc, but you have lessened my ability to support myself. Objectively, it's not as bad as stealing and depriving me of a physical possession, but the fact that it's not as bad as theft doesn't mean that it's a good thing.
According to this government website: ( http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/February08/DataFeature/ ) the US imports about 15% of its food by volume. That's a far cry from importing most of our food.
I'm willing to bet that with the continuous increases in farming technology, the US produces more food today than it ever did in the past. It's just that consumption has gone way up (we're a nation of obese), and the demand for exotic and cheaply processed food has increased.
Any successor that tries to be the "next Steve Jobs" is destined to fail. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't have some of his talents and/or skills, but just swapping him out with someone who talks like him and hoping to keep that "majick" going is not going to work. There are lots of ways to run a successful company, even Apple.
A CEO that can keep Apple focused and efficient should do ok. The company has plenty of talented employees, decent products, and a very strong brand. As long as they continue to expand their product lineup slowly and carefully, their engineers and designers will come up with good stuff.
Part of that focus means a continued general neglect of the corporate marketplace. I don't know if I've read your rant about Apple as a toymaker, but I'd argue that Apple's lack of warranties and such are less about incompetence, and more about a conscious decision to avoid that market. It's a market of very thin margins, and as such, it only makes money for you if you capture a big chunk of it. We can make predictions and argue all day about whether or not the Mac could get that big chunk, but it looks like Apple has gone through that exercise before and decided that their effort is better spent expanding into the consumer music and phone business instead. And it seems to be working out well for them.
Right, so your theory is that because the government tried to help the banking industry not collapse, all the farmers in the country are going to stop growing food?
Depending on where you live, recording a conversation without letting the other party know that it's being recorded might be illegal. If you decide to follow the parent comment's advice, you should probably check into that, and if necessary let the other party know that the conversation is being recorded.
I'd try to get it on paper somehow.