Most comments have focused on the question of whether or not a reasonable person could consider $60 an appropriate price to pay for a used laptop, and whether the device was functional at the time of sale. Indeed, even the defendants raised this point. However, I think this is not really getting at the heart of the matter.
While I don't know how the legal system actually handles such cases, I think that the proper outcome is that the plaintiff (the woman) should win her case against law enforcement (but not the recovery company), and be entitled to damages. Then I think the recovery company and law enforcement should win the case against the thief who stole the laptop. But I also think they should win an additional claim against the thief for reselling a device with monitoring software on it, thereby exposing the woman to this situation. If there isn't a statute to cover this, there should be. It should go a bit like this:
1. If you steal an electronic device and resell it, you are 100% liable for any invasion of privacy that results from that sale due to attempts to track and recover the device, regardless of whether or not you are aware of any recovery software on the device. 2. If you own a device and resell it, you are 100% liable for any invasion of privacy that results from that sale if you installed tracking/monitoring/recovery software. 3. If you own a device and resell it, you are NOT liable if someone else has installed monitoring software without your knowledge.
The reasoning as to why we would want to (partly) indemnify parties using the remote tracking software in the course of recovering a device, is because they need to gather as much identifying information as possible, and that includes private, personal information. The tracking company in this case acted appropriately given the circumstances, because while the plaintiff didn't know the laptop was stolen, the company had every reasonable suspicion that she was the thief. Relaying whatever evidence they could find--including nude images--is the logical consequence of that investigation. What would be unreasonable is if the tracking company published the images on the internet as a way to shame the thief--to my understanding, this did not occur. The problem in this case is that law enforcement behaved inappropriately by commenting on those images.
A little thought shows why this isn't a good idea.
Say this idea is implemented worldwide. You've lived in a particular place most of your life. You're accustomed to waking up at what is now called 3 pm. You eat breakfast at 3:30 pm, get to work by 4:30 pm, have lunch at 9 pm, and dinner by 4 am. All is well.
Now say you move to another city. Now your entire concept of when things are scheduled to happen, has to change. Furthermore, the magnitude of the change depends on the change in longitude--so whereas you were eating at 3:30 pm, 9 pm, and 4 am, now suddenly you find yourself eating at completely different hours of the day. Same goes for sleeping and waking. Each time you travel, it changes.
The point is that the hour of the day is strongly associated with specific activities. "Noon" in any part of the world tells us when most people are having lunch. It gives us a mental marker to synchronize our activities. To have to change that every time you move to a different time zone, rather than simply adjusting your watch, is backwards, and doesn't lessen the burden of having to keep track of something. It is easier to adjust our clocks than our internal concepts of when we do very basic and regular things--especially in this day and age, when we have phones capable of using GPS to automatically adjust the time zone.
Talk about missing the point, which is that Apple's vision of a tablet device--the iPad--has played a meaningful role in expanding the scope of how we interact with computing technologies. It wasn't Microsoft's Tablet PC running on Acer's hardware that did it, despite having predated the iPad.
The history of computing is punctuated with numerous moments of redefinition, and no, Apple was not responsible for all of them, or even a majority of them. But it is undeniable that the ease of use and flexibility of the iPad has facilitated the use of computing technology in new contexts. They have found their way into hospitals and airplane cockpits. You KNOW you did something right when your product can be enjoyed by just about anyone from 3 to 100+. Not that these things were not possible or foreseeable by others, but it wasn't until the iPad that widespread adoption of a tablet device actually occurred.
And that's what matters--not who made or envisioned the technology first, but who actually put it in people's hands, and got them to use it. That's what Mr. JT Wang doesn't understand (or is unwilling to acknowledge).
If it still works, there is still value to be extracted from the product that someone else, if not yourself, can utilize, and therefore it can fetch a higher price. This program is a recycling program for end-of-life waste, not a reselling program for used products. My point is that you wouldn't *want* to recycle a usable product, and that is appropriately reflected in the lower salvage value. You'd be better off finding a different channel through which to sell your used equipment.
The biggest issue I have with e-waste recycling is that it sometimes pollutes the environment of the countries that are processing the waste for their valuable components and simply dumping the rest. In effect, by "recycling," people are just shifting their garbage to other nations with cheap labor and less stringent environmental regulations. China does most (but not all) of this task. So, if people are going to recycle their old electronics, it has to be done properly. The problem for the consumer is that they generally don't have access to the information that would allow them to know which programs and services are legitimate.
It's my hope that Apple has teamed up with recyclers to give such initiatives credibility, allowing consumers to feel encouraged to send their e-waste for recycling. I hope that this program does things the right way--even if it costs more money--rather than merely serve as a convenient facade for more toxic dumping. Apple has been working hard to reduce the use of environmentally unfriendly materials in their products and substitute easily recyclable materials (like aluminum and glass) in their place, recognizing that you can't pollute what you don't use in the first place.
Many of us have seen how Greenpeace has been slamming Apple for not doing "enough" to address environmental sustainability. We know it's mostly political--by attacking the maker of the most popular consumer computing hardware in the world, Greenpeace gets the attention in the press they're seeking. And at the same time, Apple is forced to work even harder to go above and beyond what other companies merely promise they do. I bet Greenpeace will just find yet another way to spin this program in a negative light and continue to whine about how it's still not enough, just so they can get more headlines and donations.
Commercial aircraft are largely automated fly-by-wire systems. Every so often, there's a crash caused in part by sensor malfunction. Does the NTSB and FAA prohibit use of autopilot as a result?
Humans crash cars on the road and kill each other all the time. So that means we should outlaw human-controlled driving mechanisms, of course.
Some men are sexual predators and have abused children. That means we have to physically quarantine all men from all children, right?
If your standard for progress is perfection, then I've got some bad news for you.
The whole damn site is a privacy violation. I don't even use FB and I know that there are photos of me floating around on there, tagged by my so-called "friends." Short of being a hermit, I have no way to stop people from uploading data that identifies me to a site that makes money by exploiting that knowledge to sell shit.
You clearly don't understand the nature of credit and its importance in American economics.
The implication in your simplistic view of credit is that it is a mechanism by which one borrows what they cannot afford to pay in full immediately. This is only sometimes true. However, in many cases, credit is used as a method of protecting oneself from risk. Only fools and old grandmothers who stash money under their mattresses think that credit is intrinsically bad. If I pay for something with a card, my creditor provides additional protections in case what I bought is not as advertised, or if there is some other dispute with the merchant. If I paid cash, I have no such protection.
Building a positive credit history is also essential for other purposes, such as renting a property, or securing employment in some sectors. Whether you agree with the practice or not, there is an increasing trend toward using credit history as a measure of financial and social responsibility. Lack of such a history is not considered an advantage--quite the opposite. If you are one of the lucky few who can get through life without having to establish your reputation through such means, then that's great, but that doesn't give you the right to be condescending toward the vast, vast majority of individuals who work hard and manage their credit wisely.
Credit is like food. You can use it in moderation. Excessive use may be an indication of addiction. Trying to avoid it is an illness unto itself.
This is wrong. It actually not only hurts those who had their card data stolen, but it also hurts everyone who has a credit card, or who needs to secure a line of credit, because the cost to insure against losses due to fraud are eventually passed on to the borrower in the form of higher interest rates, higher fees, or more restrictive lending practices. That money isn't just eaten by the companies--you would be delusional to think that for one second.
The sentence is too light, not in terms of the jail term, but the fine. The only real meaningful form of punishment these days is not locking someone up physically, but financially. Turn him into an indentured servant, work him to the bone, and let him die penniless and in squalor. That would be justice.
Most of it was depressing, I agree. A few (and I really do mean, a *few*) responses were encouraging--Miss California's for example.
It's amusing how so many responses follow the same, superficial notion of "teach both sides! Knowledge is good! Let people make up their own minds!" That misses the whole point entirely. The question itself is poorly phrased. Evolution isn't something that requires belief, at least not in the sense of personal faith. It isn't something that you "should" or "should not" be taught. Evolution by natural selection MUST be taught, if you are to teach biology. To not do so would be like attempting to teach mathematics without discussing multiplication, or chemistry without talking about the periodic table, or American history without mentioning the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Thus, to ask the question "should evolution be taught in schools" is no different than asking "should biology be taught in schools," or more broadly, "should SCIENCE be taught in schools." You can't separate the two.
You can't really blame these contestants for being so hopelessly ignorant. They didn't get on that stage with their brainpower.
Since version 4, Firefox just stops functioning at random, with no warning. The menu bar becomes unresponsive, keyboard shortcuts and commands are not recognized, and tab switching is lost. You can still browse within the page you're on, but that's it. I went back to version 3, and realized that it was incredibly, incredibly slow.
Frustrated with no fix, I tried Google Chrome. So far, I am not impressed. It got caught in a loop when it tried importing my saved passwords from Firefox.
I may go back to Safari. I can't believe how obscenely hard it is to find a decent browser. So many choices, none of them any good.
I interpreted the grandparent post as meaning that there is a distinction to be drawn between what information we, in principle, should have access to, versus the actual state of what we do have access to. In other words, we do have an intrinsic right to know--it is simply that this right is not recognized by the government.
Not all "rights" are those that are defined and granted by law. The US Constitution attempts to be as broad as possible in codifying certain basic rights, but as we have seen throughout history, that doesn't mean every right we do have is actually allowed to be exercised in practice. That comes down to the subjective interpretations of nine fallible old people, many of whom are beholden to personal biases and political interests. And quite often, the way they rule does in fact deny people of their actual rights on a very fundamental level.
As nice as it may sound to have a state that is of the people, by the people, for the people...that is not what the US actually is, nor has it ever been. The government has always been of itself, by itself, and for itself, and the people are merely a source of money and labor for the powerful to exploit. It's a lie on the same level of communist propaganda. All government exists to rob power from the individual to concentrate it for the few.
No. You are conflating totalitarianism and fascism with atheism--a convenient and often-cited counterargument, but completely illogical. These regimes did not do what they did in the NAME of atheism, or BECAUSE of atheistic morals. The people who were responsible for these atrocities correctly distrusted religion because they understood the way organized religion and collective faith posed a threat to their ability to concentrate power and indoctrinate the people for their own purposes--in other words, they saw religion as competition, because religion uses the exact same tactics to control the weak and make them pliable.
In essence, your citation of these examples only further proves my point, which is that dogmatic thinking and building of a cult of personality around ANYONE, be it Jesus or Mohammed or Stalin, is strongly detrimental to humanity, and such glorification and idolization is antithetical to atheistic values.
As for your claim regarding the relative incidence of sexual abuse, there is yet another crucial difference you conveniently fail to note. It is not merely the fact that abuses were committed by the clergy. It is the fact that such abuse went on for DECADES, without any accountability, under the watch of local government, because the Church was SO POWERFUL that they were able to sweep it under the rug and shuffle these criminals from parish to parish. You clearly have failed to grasp the true magnitude of this. It isn't about saying "X number of children were raped by Y priests." This is about the incredible arrogance, hypocrisy, and corruption of an organization that exerts its significant financial and political resources to avoid being held accountable for the evils that they are willing to commit for the sake of their personal belief they are working "for the greater good."
BULL FUCKING SHIT. You want to know what is a REAL waste of taxpayer money? Having organized religion manipulate the government to pass legislation that favors their goals. Granting tax-exempt status for religious institutions. State funding for social services managed by religious institutions. Having to fight the legal impact of religious indoctrination in the courts, per evolution vs. creationism. The so-called "war on terror" would not exist if people weren't so goddamned busy blowing each other up over fairy tales.
And the coup de grace: The lives damaged and lost due to the decades-long history of CHILD RAPE that was condoned and hidden by the Catholic church.
Don't get all whiny about one guy costing taxpayers money because he wants to point out the hypocrisy and idiocy of pandering to religious nutjobs. Religion has cost humanity far more in terms of lost lives, productivity, education, and money, than it will ever be able to repay in the form of "goodwill" and "spiritual comfort."
No. This is known as plenoptic imaging, and the basic idea behind it is to use an array of microlenses positioned at the image plane, which causes the underlying group of pixels for a given microlens to "see" a different portion of the scene, much in the way that an insect's compound eyes work. Using some mathematics, you can then reconstruct the full scene over a range of focusing distances.
The problem with this approach, which many astute photographers pointed out when we read the original research paper on the topic (authored by the same guy running this company), is that it requires an imaging sensor with extremely high pixel density, yet the resulting images have relatively low resolution. This is because you are essentially splitting up the light coming through the main lens into many, many smaller images which tile the sensor. So you might need, say, a 500-megapixel sensor to capture a 5-megapixel plenoptic image.
Although Canon last year announced the development of a prototype 120-megapixel APS-H image sensor (with a pixel density rivaling that of recent digital compact point-and-shoot cameras, just on a wafer about 20x the area), it is clear that we are nowhere near the densities required to achieve satisfactory results with light field imaging. Furthermore, you cannot increase pixel density indefinitely, because the pixels obviously cannot be made smaller than the wavelength of the light it is intended to capture. And even if you could approach this theoretical limit, you would have significant obstacles to overcome, such as maintaining acceptable noise and dynamic range performance, as well as the processing power needed to record and store that much data. On top of that, there are optical constraints--the system would be limited to relatively slow f-numbers. It would not work for, say, f/2 or faster, due to the structure of the microlenses.
In summary, this is more or less some clever marketing and selective advertisement to increase the hype over the idea. In practice, any such camera would have extremely low resolution by today's standards. The prototype that the paper's author made had a resolution that was a fraction of that of a typical webcam; a production model is extremely unlikely to achieve better than 1-2 megapixel resolution.
Well, of course the US Senate has the law on its side. They wrote the law, arguably to serve their own interests, just like the Fed is a group of bankers that regulate the banking industry. It's not accountability if you are only accountable to yourself.
1. Different areas of the greater LA area show different driving habits. Some areas have a (well-deserved) reputation for aggressive drivers, such as the Westside, compared to more sparsely populated, remote suburbs. Higher traffic density seems to correlate with more reckless driving. 2. Some yellow lights are abnormally short for the size of the intersection, but not all. 3. Some drivers are willfully reckless/stupid. Just last night, I was in downtown LA for an event that included street closures as well as a heavy police presence. Due to the crowds, traffic was very bad. Despite the presence of police who would try to regulate the traffic flow when they were watching, drivers would allow themselves to get stuck in the intersection (driving ahead when the light was about to change, while seeing there was no room for them to exit). The police didn't cite them for blocking traffic. 4. I've seen a lot of broken red light cameras--they would flash when no violation occurred. This has actually happened to me personally; I'd go through a clear green light with the flow of traffic, and get flashed. No ticket was ever generated, but the kind of distraction and anxiety that this sort of thing produces is abusive and might actually cause some people to panic and hit the brakes. 5. The fines are insane--$475 or more in some cases. Thankfully I've never gotten one. I've seen the posted fine rise steadily in a few short years, and it seemed completely arbitrary. It also has little or no deterrent effect on the wealthiest Angelenos, who tool around Beverly Hills and Hollywood in their luxury vehicles and consider that kind of money to be chump change. It would be like telling you, "oh, you broke the law, now you have to pay a fine of $0.25." Meanwhile, they endanger everyone else around them. But if you are relatively poor, $475 could crush you. 6. The cameras are not everywhere. I've seen people reroute around them, causing changes in traffic patterns that may actually increase accidents because more cars are being directed to intersections that aren't able to handle the traffic flow, or have more pedestrians. Many drivers roll through four-way stops around here.
Reading the comments so far has been heartening. I am pleased to see that most commentators are intelligent and rational enough to spot the BS and realize that this wasn't a case of Apple copying someone else's idea. That narrative just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Apple hardly does everything right, but this was clearly a case of an obvious feature with an obvious logo design. The creator of the app wasn't the first to think of it. The only question I have is why Apple chose to wait as long as it did to implement this kind of functionality--at present, the most plausible answer is that they needed a good reason to offer it: the development of iCloud was probably what motivated it, but also, improvements in iOS sync efficiency and Wi-Fi network speeds since the introduction of the iPhone also seems to have played a role. From what I heard, the unofficial Wi-Fi sync app was/is slow.
First of all, "negatives" are a thing of the past insofar as 99% of wedding photography is concerned. It's all digital now. You want the unedited raw files? What would you want with them, clone out all the blemishes and do your own post processing because you're SO much better at it than the photographer you've paid to do it for you?
Let's put it this way: feel free to take your own damned wedding photos if you think the photographer's just there to snap some shots. Nobody's stopping you. You want complete copyright of the images? Then buy it. The price reflects the value of the work. Think it's too expensive? Buy your own cameras, lenses, strobes, modifiers, and learn how to take them for yourself. See how far you get.
In the US, no professional photographer is going to relinquish their copyright just to take photos of you unless you are a celebrity and/or are willing to pay a HUGE amount of money. The client doesn't need reproduction rights to the artwork; they just need copies of the artwork. The photographer needs the copyright because it is THEIR artistic vision that set up, directed, lit, took, and edited the shot. Not you. It may be a picture OF you, but it is still the photographer's aesthetic choices that makes it more than just something you took with your mobile phone. That copyright permits them to use the image for non-commercial purposes. This includes exhibition in a fine art gallery, as well as portfolio use.
Unless you have a specific need to control access to the images (e.g., you are a high-profile celebrity getting married and want the only copies in existence), paying for photo copyright is a waste of money. For a price, any good photographer will provide you their best high-resolution images. They'll give you versions you can post on Facebook if you want (*shudder*). Some will do their own prints, or give you permission to print them yourself. The point is, they'll gladly work with you to provide you with whatever usage requirements you have, but if you ask for the copyright without suitcases of cash in hand, you will be denied, because that is asking to TAKE SOMETHING AWAY FROM THEM.
Your thinking is a bit like the broken window fallacy. The scarcity of competition doesn't guarantee you a better salary. In fact, if there are fewer scientists, that decelerates the rate of human progress, making it more difficult to access financial and intellectual resources to facilitate your cause. If stupidity reigns over the rest of the world, who is going to be willing to fund your research? We quite literally witnessed this phenomenon in the Bush Administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
You're attempting to apply logic to individuals who have none. It's like trying to use adult reasoning on a toddler, to explain why he/she can't have all the candy they want. Someone who is trying to push creationism as scientific theory has already thrown all logic out the window; thus, it is utterly useless to try to convince them otherwise.
Why is the parent post (at the time of this writing) 50% funny, 30% underrated, and 20% troll? Should be 100% insightful, as it is completely factually accurate.
That's what I can't wrap my mind around (no pun intended). Even the most plush hotel towels are laundered and reused by guests, and the vast majority of hotel towels aren't really that high quality to begin with. Is the economy so bad that people are resorting (again, no pun intended) to taking used hotel towels instead of buying their own for a few bucks?
Despite the use of what must be copious amounts of chlorine and near-autoclave cleaning, just imagine what some people leave on those towels. You still want them?
Slashdot Mirror
Most comments have focused on the question of whether or not a reasonable person could consider $60 an appropriate price to pay for a used laptop, and whether the device was functional at the time of sale. Indeed, even the defendants raised this point. However, I think this is not really getting at the heart of the matter.
While I don't know how the legal system actually handles such cases, I think that the proper outcome is that the plaintiff (the woman) should win her case against law enforcement (but not the recovery company), and be entitled to damages. Then I think the recovery company and law enforcement should win the case against the thief who stole the laptop. But I also think they should win an additional claim against the thief for reselling a device with monitoring software on it, thereby exposing the woman to this situation. If there isn't a statute to cover this, there should be. It should go a bit like this:
1. If you steal an electronic device and resell it, you are 100% liable for any invasion of privacy that results from that sale due to attempts to track and recover the device, regardless of whether or not you are aware of any recovery software on the device.
2. If you own a device and resell it, you are 100% liable for any invasion of privacy that results from that sale if you installed tracking/monitoring/recovery software.
3. If you own a device and resell it, you are NOT liable if someone else has installed monitoring software without your knowledge.
The reasoning as to why we would want to (partly) indemnify parties using the remote tracking software in the course of recovering a device, is because they need to gather as much identifying information as possible, and that includes private, personal information. The tracking company in this case acted appropriately given the circumstances, because while the plaintiff didn't know the laptop was stolen, the company had every reasonable suspicion that she was the thief. Relaying whatever evidence they could find--including nude images--is the logical consequence of that investigation. What would be unreasonable is if the tracking company published the images on the internet as a way to shame the thief--to my understanding, this did not occur. The problem in this case is that law enforcement behaved inappropriately by commenting on those images.
A little thought shows why this isn't a good idea.
Say this idea is implemented worldwide. You've lived in a particular place most of your life. You're accustomed to waking up at what is now called 3 pm. You eat breakfast at 3:30 pm, get to work by 4:30 pm, have lunch at 9 pm, and dinner by 4 am. All is well.
Now say you move to another city. Now your entire concept of when things are scheduled to happen, has to change. Furthermore, the magnitude of the change depends on the change in longitude--so whereas you were eating at 3:30 pm, 9 pm, and 4 am, now suddenly you find yourself eating at completely different hours of the day. Same goes for sleeping and waking. Each time you travel, it changes.
The point is that the hour of the day is strongly associated with specific activities. "Noon" in any part of the world tells us when most people are having lunch. It gives us a mental marker to synchronize our activities. To have to change that every time you move to a different time zone, rather than simply adjusting your watch, is backwards, and doesn't lessen the burden of having to keep track of something. It is easier to adjust our clocks than our internal concepts of when we do very basic and regular things--especially in this day and age, when we have phones capable of using GPS to automatically adjust the time zone.
Talk about missing the point, which is that Apple's vision of a tablet device--the iPad--has played a meaningful role in expanding the scope of how we interact with computing technologies. It wasn't Microsoft's Tablet PC running on Acer's hardware that did it, despite having predated the iPad.
The history of computing is punctuated with numerous moments of redefinition, and no, Apple was not responsible for all of them, or even a majority of them. But it is undeniable that the ease of use and flexibility of the iPad has facilitated the use of computing technology in new contexts. They have found their way into hospitals and airplane cockpits. You KNOW you did something right when your product can be enjoyed by just about anyone from 3 to 100+. Not that these things were not possible or foreseeable by others, but it wasn't until the iPad that widespread adoption of a tablet device actually occurred.
And that's what matters--not who made or envisioned the technology first, but who actually put it in people's hands, and got them to use it. That's what Mr. JT Wang doesn't understand (or is unwilling to acknowledge).
If it still works, there is still value to be extracted from the product that someone else, if not yourself, can utilize, and therefore it can fetch a higher price. This program is a recycling program for end-of-life waste, not a reselling program for used products. My point is that you wouldn't *want* to recycle a usable product, and that is appropriately reflected in the lower salvage value. You'd be better off finding a different channel through which to sell your used equipment.
The biggest issue I have with e-waste recycling is that it sometimes pollutes the environment of the countries that are processing the waste for their valuable components and simply dumping the rest. In effect, by "recycling," people are just shifting their garbage to other nations with cheap labor and less stringent environmental regulations. China does most (but not all) of this task. So, if people are going to recycle their old electronics, it has to be done properly. The problem for the consumer is that they generally don't have access to the information that would allow them to know which programs and services are legitimate.
It's my hope that Apple has teamed up with recyclers to give such initiatives credibility, allowing consumers to feel encouraged to send their e-waste for recycling. I hope that this program does things the right way--even if it costs more money--rather than merely serve as a convenient facade for more toxic dumping. Apple has been working hard to reduce the use of environmentally unfriendly materials in their products and substitute easily recyclable materials (like aluminum and glass) in their place, recognizing that you can't pollute what you don't use in the first place.
Many of us have seen how Greenpeace has been slamming Apple for not doing "enough" to address environmental sustainability. We know it's mostly political--by attacking the maker of the most popular consumer computing hardware in the world, Greenpeace gets the attention in the press they're seeking. And at the same time, Apple is forced to work even harder to go above and beyond what other companies merely promise they do. I bet Greenpeace will just find yet another way to spin this program in a negative light and continue to whine about how it's still not enough, just so they can get more headlines and donations.
Commercial aircraft are largely automated fly-by-wire systems. Every so often, there's a crash caused in part by sensor malfunction. Does the NTSB and FAA prohibit use of autopilot as a result?
Humans crash cars on the road and kill each other all the time. So that means we should outlaw human-controlled driving mechanisms, of course.
Some men are sexual predators and have abused children. That means we have to physically quarantine all men from all children, right?
If your standard for progress is perfection, then I've got some bad news for you.
The whole damn site is a privacy violation. I don't even use FB and I know that there are photos of me floating around on there, tagged by my so-called "friends." Short of being a hermit, I have no way to stop people from uploading data that identifies me to a site that makes money by exploiting that knowledge to sell shit.
Couldn't have said this better myself. Pretty much sums it up in a nutshell.
You clearly don't understand the nature of credit and its importance in American economics.
The implication in your simplistic view of credit is that it is a mechanism by which one borrows what they cannot afford to pay in full immediately. This is only sometimes true. However, in many cases, credit is used as a method of protecting oneself from risk. Only fools and old grandmothers who stash money under their mattresses think that credit is intrinsically bad. If I pay for something with a card, my creditor provides additional protections in case what I bought is not as advertised, or if there is some other dispute with the merchant. If I paid cash, I have no such protection.
Building a positive credit history is also essential for other purposes, such as renting a property, or securing employment in some sectors. Whether you agree with the practice or not, there is an increasing trend toward using credit history as a measure of financial and social responsibility. Lack of such a history is not considered an advantage--quite the opposite. If you are one of the lucky few who can get through life without having to establish your reputation through such means, then that's great, but that doesn't give you the right to be condescending toward the vast, vast majority of individuals who work hard and manage their credit wisely.
Credit is like food. You can use it in moderation. Excessive use may be an indication of addiction. Trying to avoid it is an illness unto itself.
This is wrong. It actually not only hurts those who had their card data stolen, but it also hurts everyone who has a credit card, or who needs to secure a line of credit, because the cost to insure against losses due to fraud are eventually passed on to the borrower in the form of higher interest rates, higher fees, or more restrictive lending practices. That money isn't just eaten by the companies--you would be delusional to think that for one second.
The sentence is too light, not in terms of the jail term, but the fine. The only real meaningful form of punishment these days is not locking someone up physically, but financially. Turn him into an indentured servant, work him to the bone, and let him die penniless and in squalor. That would be justice.
Most of it was depressing, I agree. A few (and I really do mean, a *few*) responses were encouraging--Miss California's for example.
It's amusing how so many responses follow the same, superficial notion of "teach both sides! Knowledge is good! Let people make up their own minds!" That misses the whole point entirely. The question itself is poorly phrased. Evolution isn't something that requires belief, at least not in the sense of personal faith. It isn't something that you "should" or "should not" be taught. Evolution by natural selection MUST be taught, if you are to teach biology. To not do so would be like attempting to teach mathematics without discussing multiplication, or chemistry without talking about the periodic table, or American history without mentioning the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Thus, to ask the question "should evolution be taught in schools" is no different than asking "should biology be taught in schools," or more broadly, "should SCIENCE be taught in schools." You can't separate the two.
You can't really blame these contestants for being so hopelessly ignorant. They didn't get on that stage with their brainpower.
Since version 4, Firefox just stops functioning at random, with no warning. The menu bar becomes unresponsive, keyboard shortcuts and commands are not recognized, and tab switching is lost. You can still browse within the page you're on, but that's it. I went back to version 3, and realized that it was incredibly, incredibly slow.
Frustrated with no fix, I tried Google Chrome. So far, I am not impressed. It got caught in a loop when it tried importing my saved passwords from Firefox.
I may go back to Safari. I can't believe how obscenely hard it is to find a decent browser. So many choices, none of them any good.
I interpreted the grandparent post as meaning that there is a distinction to be drawn between what information we, in principle, should have access to, versus the actual state of what we do have access to. In other words, we do have an intrinsic right to know--it is simply that this right is not recognized by the government.
Not all "rights" are those that are defined and granted by law. The US Constitution attempts to be as broad as possible in codifying certain basic rights, but as we have seen throughout history, that doesn't mean every right we do have is actually allowed to be exercised in practice. That comes down to the subjective interpretations of nine fallible old people, many of whom are beholden to personal biases and political interests. And quite often, the way they rule does in fact deny people of their actual rights on a very fundamental level.
As nice as it may sound to have a state that is of the people, by the people, for the people...that is not what the US actually is, nor has it ever been. The government has always been of itself, by itself, and for itself, and the people are merely a source of money and labor for the powerful to exploit. It's a lie on the same level of communist propaganda. All government exists to rob power from the individual to concentrate it for the few.
No. You are conflating totalitarianism and fascism with atheism--a convenient and often-cited counterargument, but completely illogical. These regimes did not do what they did in the NAME of atheism, or BECAUSE of atheistic morals. The people who were responsible for these atrocities correctly distrusted religion because they understood the way organized religion and collective faith posed a threat to their ability to concentrate power and indoctrinate the people for their own purposes--in other words, they saw religion as competition, because religion uses the exact same tactics to control the weak and make them pliable.
In essence, your citation of these examples only further proves my point, which is that dogmatic thinking and building of a cult of personality around ANYONE, be it Jesus or Mohammed or Stalin, is strongly detrimental to humanity, and such glorification and idolization is antithetical to atheistic values.
As for your claim regarding the relative incidence of sexual abuse, there is yet another crucial difference you conveniently fail to note. It is not merely the fact that abuses were committed by the clergy. It is the fact that such abuse went on for DECADES, without any accountability, under the watch of local government, because the Church was SO POWERFUL that they were able to sweep it under the rug and shuffle these criminals from parish to parish. You clearly have failed to grasp the true magnitude of this. It isn't about saying "X number of children were raped by Y priests." This is about the incredible arrogance, hypocrisy, and corruption of an organization that exerts its significant financial and political resources to avoid being held accountable for the evils that they are willing to commit for the sake of their personal belief they are working "for the greater good."
BULL FUCKING SHIT. You want to know what is a REAL waste of taxpayer money? Having organized religion manipulate the government to pass legislation that favors their goals. Granting tax-exempt status for religious institutions. State funding for social services managed by religious institutions. Having to fight the legal impact of religious indoctrination in the courts, per evolution vs. creationism. The so-called "war on terror" would not exist if people weren't so goddamned busy blowing each other up over fairy tales.
And the coup de grace: The lives damaged and lost due to the decades-long history of CHILD RAPE that was condoned and hidden by the Catholic church.
Don't get all whiny about one guy costing taxpayers money because he wants to point out the hypocrisy and idiocy of pandering to religious nutjobs. Religion has cost humanity far more in terms of lost lives, productivity, education, and money, than it will ever be able to repay in the form of "goodwill" and "spiritual comfort."
No. This is known as plenoptic imaging, and the basic idea behind it is to use an array of microlenses positioned at the image plane, which causes the underlying group of pixels for a given microlens to "see" a different portion of the scene, much in the way that an insect's compound eyes work. Using some mathematics, you can then reconstruct the full scene over a range of focusing distances.
The problem with this approach, which many astute photographers pointed out when we read the original research paper on the topic (authored by the same guy running this company), is that it requires an imaging sensor with extremely high pixel density, yet the resulting images have relatively low resolution. This is because you are essentially splitting up the light coming through the main lens into many, many smaller images which tile the sensor. So you might need, say, a 500-megapixel sensor to capture a 5-megapixel plenoptic image.
Although Canon last year announced the development of a prototype 120-megapixel APS-H image sensor (with a pixel density rivaling that of recent digital compact point-and-shoot cameras, just on a wafer about 20x the area), it is clear that we are nowhere near the densities required to achieve satisfactory results with light field imaging. Furthermore, you cannot increase pixel density indefinitely, because the pixels obviously cannot be made smaller than the wavelength of the light it is intended to capture. And even if you could approach this theoretical limit, you would have significant obstacles to overcome, such as maintaining acceptable noise and dynamic range performance, as well as the processing power needed to record and store that much data. On top of that, there are optical constraints--the system would be limited to relatively slow f-numbers. It would not work for, say, f/2 or faster, due to the structure of the microlenses.
In summary, this is more or less some clever marketing and selective advertisement to increase the hype over the idea. In practice, any such camera would have extremely low resolution by today's standards. The prototype that the paper's author made had a resolution that was a fraction of that of a typical webcam; a production model is extremely unlikely to achieve better than 1-2 megapixel resolution.
Well, of course the US Senate has the law on its side. They wrote the law, arguably to serve their own interests, just like the Fed is a group of bankers that regulate the banking industry. It's not accountability if you are only accountable to yourself.
And I can state the following observations:
1. Different areas of the greater LA area show different driving habits. Some areas have a (well-deserved) reputation for aggressive drivers, such as the Westside, compared to more sparsely populated, remote suburbs. Higher traffic density seems to correlate with more reckless driving.
2. Some yellow lights are abnormally short for the size of the intersection, but not all.
3. Some drivers are willfully reckless/stupid. Just last night, I was in downtown LA for an event that included street closures as well as a heavy police presence. Due to the crowds, traffic was very bad. Despite the presence of police who would try to regulate the traffic flow when they were watching, drivers would allow themselves to get stuck in the intersection (driving ahead when the light was about to change, while seeing there was no room for them to exit). The police didn't cite them for blocking traffic.
4. I've seen a lot of broken red light cameras--they would flash when no violation occurred. This has actually happened to me personally; I'd go through a clear green light with the flow of traffic, and get flashed. No ticket was ever generated, but the kind of distraction and anxiety that this sort of thing produces is abusive and might actually cause some people to panic and hit the brakes.
5. The fines are insane--$475 or more in some cases. Thankfully I've never gotten one. I've seen the posted fine rise steadily in a few short years, and it seemed completely arbitrary. It also has little or no deterrent effect on the wealthiest Angelenos, who tool around Beverly Hills and Hollywood in their luxury vehicles and consider that kind of money to be chump change. It would be like telling you, "oh, you broke the law, now you have to pay a fine of $0.25." Meanwhile, they endanger everyone else around them. But if you are relatively poor, $475 could crush you.
6. The cameras are not everywhere. I've seen people reroute around them, causing changes in traffic patterns that may actually increase accidents because more cars are being directed to intersections that aren't able to handle the traffic flow, or have more pedestrians. Many drivers roll through four-way stops around here.
Reading the comments so far has been heartening. I am pleased to see that most commentators are intelligent and rational enough to spot the BS and realize that this wasn't a case of Apple copying someone else's idea. That narrative just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Apple hardly does everything right, but this was clearly a case of an obvious feature with an obvious logo design. The creator of the app wasn't the first to think of it. The only question I have is why Apple chose to wait as long as it did to implement this kind of functionality--at present, the most plausible answer is that they needed a good reason to offer it: the development of iCloud was probably what motivated it, but also, improvements in iOS sync efficiency and Wi-Fi network speeds since the introduction of the iPhone also seems to have played a role. From what I heard, the unofficial Wi-Fi sync app was/is slow.
First of all, "negatives" are a thing of the past insofar as 99% of wedding photography is concerned. It's all digital now. You want the unedited raw files? What would you want with them, clone out all the blemishes and do your own post processing because you're SO much better at it than the photographer you've paid to do it for you?
Let's put it this way: feel free to take your own damned wedding photos if you think the photographer's just there to snap some shots. Nobody's stopping you. You want complete copyright of the images? Then buy it. The price reflects the value of the work. Think it's too expensive? Buy your own cameras, lenses, strobes, modifiers, and learn how to take them for yourself. See how far you get.
In the US, no professional photographer is going to relinquish their copyright just to take photos of you unless you are a celebrity and/or are willing to pay a HUGE amount of money. The client doesn't need reproduction rights to the artwork; they just need copies of the artwork. The photographer needs the copyright because it is THEIR artistic vision that set up, directed, lit, took, and edited the shot. Not you. It may be a picture OF you, but it is still the photographer's aesthetic choices that makes it more than just something you took with your mobile phone. That copyright permits them to use the image for non-commercial purposes. This includes exhibition in a fine art gallery, as well as portfolio use.
Unless you have a specific need to control access to the images (e.g., you are a high-profile celebrity getting married and want the only copies in existence), paying for photo copyright is a waste of money. For a price, any good photographer will provide you their best high-resolution images. They'll give you versions you can post on Facebook if you want (*shudder*). Some will do their own prints, or give you permission to print them yourself. The point is, they'll gladly work with you to provide you with whatever usage requirements you have, but if you ask for the copyright without suitcases of cash in hand, you will be denied, because that is asking to TAKE SOMETHING AWAY FROM THEM.
Your thinking is a bit like the broken window fallacy. The scarcity of competition doesn't guarantee you a better salary. In fact, if there are fewer scientists, that decelerates the rate of human progress, making it more difficult to access financial and intellectual resources to facilitate your cause. If stupidity reigns over the rest of the world, who is going to be willing to fund your research? We quite literally witnessed this phenomenon in the Bush Administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
You're attempting to apply logic to individuals who have none. It's like trying to use adult reasoning on a toddler, to explain why he/she can't have all the candy they want. Someone who is trying to push creationism as scientific theory has already thrown all logic out the window; thus, it is utterly useless to try to convince them otherwise.
Why is the parent post (at the time of this writing) 50% funny, 30% underrated, and 20% troll? Should be 100% insightful, as it is completely factually accurate.
That's what I can't wrap my mind around (no pun intended). Even the most plush hotel towels are laundered and reused by guests, and the vast majority of hotel towels aren't really that high quality to begin with. Is the economy so bad that people are resorting (again, no pun intended) to taking used hotel towels instead of buying their own for a few bucks?
Despite the use of what must be copious amounts of chlorine and near-autoclave cleaning, just imagine what some people leave on those towels. You still want them?