They completely refactored it. Instead of toolbars you've got so-called ribbons now. Try it if you're running Windows, find yourself some screenshots if you're not. The old UI is (partly) available thru 3rd-party plugins, so "no" would probably be the appropriate answer to your last question.
And that's where the big difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world lies. Not much suing going on in Europe about that kind of stuff.
About the way-too-long minimum notice: It's a great way to create a more stable situation overall and, given a mutual agreement, can be waived at any time. It may not be the best way to be able to cope with huge growths, but it sure makes for a more secure (as in "not having to worry about how to make money tomorrow") environment.
It's more or less common practice to save up a few weeks of vacation time for that kind of cases. Plus there's always the possibility of a mutual agreement upon any other timeframe (like four parasecs or so).
To go with your deterrence idea:
I'm sure you'd agree with me that a military kind of deterrence is supposed to be working against an oppossing nation with the potential to engage in a more or less uniformed and geneva-convention-style (that's the one, right?) conflict. Such an enemy would very surely need to be based somewhere, that somewhere usually being a country. (Terrorists are the exception here, but they aren't deterred by a huge army, now are they?)
Continuing, the probably biggest deterrent to an aggressor of that kind would very probably be the possibility of completely and exceptionlessy obliberate the enemy's base. The U.S. is stockpiling nukes, intelligent bombs and so on in the tens of thousands. Even if we exclude nukes and chemical/biological warfare from the equation, the U.S. quite surely has enough firepower to disinhabitate any country on this planet permanently in a matter of hours. What would they need *more* deterrents for? It's pretty common knowledge that any large-scale war (I'm talking "two similar enemies" here, invasions like Iraq and Afghanistand don't count) would destroy the world as we know it. Nobody is going to risk that.
If the enemy plane can shut down comms between UAV and controller, it can shut down comms between manned aircraft pilot and command centre as well. If UAVs actually get used in that kind of combat situations, they will (I'd imagine they might already) have a fallback similar to what a pilot could do.
If the enemy plane can disrupt the UAVs on-board electronics, it could do the same to a manned aircraft's electronics. Not much of a difference there, I reckon.
To show their appreciation for the work others did and they enjoy. It's kind of an invite-your-girlfriend-to-dinner situation (sorry bout the example, I know this is slashdot, just bear with me, okay?). You may do it 'cause you expect some kind of return (e.g. a new album), to express your appreciation, or just for the heck of it.
Drinking age? Why not stick to 18, like the rest of the world?
Marijuana? My suggestion: legalize, no driving while high, 18+ (like cigs & co).
Speed limits? No idea bout the situation in the U.S., but you're a democracy. Vote! (I don't think speeds can be limited differently for different cars of one "class", though.)
IMO the best solution to that kind of problems is a direct democratic decision by the jurisdiction's population (in that case the whole U.S.). Create a few sets of rules (e.g. a "green one" topping at 55 mph, one that's in line with your neighbour's limits and perhaps one without any limits (just on highways?)), create a few sets of punishments for breaking said rules (going over the limit costs ya lots of green, your license, nothing). Send said lists and some pros and cons (by the respective political groups, of course) to every voting person, let em vote it off.
I'm pretty sure in most cases medium fines with medium speed limits would be voted for. People want security, yet be able to travel quickly. They want others with disprespect for said security to be punished accordingly yet know they'll get caught too some day.
Pretty much the same for filesharing, if you ask me. A rather large part of the population not being able to relate to the problem at hand (as opposed to driving) may skew the decision, but I'm sure a consent could be found and wouldn't be so different from what Canada's doing now.
To be honest, I don't have any idea how much money is spent on woodstock museums or bridges to nowhere annually, but I figure it's in the two- or three-digit millions max. American warmongering, on the other hand, pretty clearly is in the two- to three-digit billion range, a few orders of magnitude higher.
Re:3 million dollars per year is a pittance
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Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
You probably won't care about the blue slime in their pool. (They stole the house, remember?:p)
Atoms you have observed (as such) over the course of forty years: 0
People whose lives have been saved because of X-Ray over the course of some years: 1000+
if we took the 600 billion (approx.) so far spent on space and instead spent it directly on research, how would it compare?
We would've probably gotten more. But there's another question:
If we took the trillions ($800bn spent on Afghanistan and Iraq alone, estimates range up to $2.4tn (some $8'000 per American citizen) for Afghanistan and Iraq in a ten-year window) spent on Bushes and instead spent it directly on research, how would it compare?
As opposed to the space programme, no great discoveries should and are expected. It's pretty hard to even find a reference point for comparison as the only direct effect of the U.S' government's warmongering seems to be anti-americanism throughout the world (including most intelligent americans ). It's four times as expensive in an I-don't-know-how-much shorter timeframe. Seriously, if you're concerned about what's being done with your tax money, rage against the military, not science funding.
While I don't want to doubt the intelligence of dolphins, I suspect there to be different "kinds" of it. If we were to detect technically generated radio signals, whomever is responsible for them has built some kind of technical infrastructure, just like mankind. Dolphins seem to be building villages just as much as most any other animal species -- not. I can't tell if this is because they're blocked from doing so by people's dominance on our planet or if there's just nothing in for them to try, the fact remains: they don't.
As soon as you'll show me a group of non-humans capable of building complex technical devices (sharpened stones and spears aren't) with which we cannot communicate on a basic level because of differences in our communication ways ("cause they're nukin' us" doesn't have to mean they can't talk to us), I'll agree with you.
Re:Meta to discussion: who is this "we" you speak
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Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
Making a moral judgment about how someone spends money is perfectly fine. We make moral judgments about government spending all the time.
Making moral judgements about government spending is perfectly fine. It's our money, it ought to be spent on things the majority of people agree upon being important enough to deserve said funding. Judging other people's spending habits, however, clearly is a no-no. It's their money, you didn't (usually) give it to them (robberies are a different piece of cake, but after being robbed you won't usually complain about the fact that said robber spent some of your money on SETI but rather about the fact that he robbed you), you don't deserve any control about how it's spent whatsoever (not including illegal ways of doing so).
Simultaneously downloading from 8 peers in a properly operating swarm of peers is still very fucking slow. (The "seedboxing" technique (kickstarting distribution of popular files by using one or some well-networked, high-performance box) does not work for this model of distribution; you'd have to stick to actual peers on (if you're lucky) 1 mbps or less of total upstream bandwidth.) Don't forget to factor in many people accessing their files hosted on one peer simulatenously. BitTorrent works really nicely for distribution of few large files to many clients. Given unchanged limitations in bandwidth and storage, it doesn't and won't scale well to store lots of information for the use of few clients. I'd love to hear about a real-world disproof of this, but it ain't gonna happen.
[...] by doing unto others' data what others do unto theirs.
Except it doesn't work that way. Redundancy requires more than one copy to be stored somewhere. In an extremely fluctuating situation like BittorrentFS, less than five copies would, imo, be insanity (not sparta). For some safety, think more like 8+. To get your "ratio", you'd need a 160 gig drive to store some 20 gigs of data. Then there'd be the whole bandwidth deal. Do you enjoy downloading something from 8 peers? Didn't think so either. Now imagine all your data being available so sluggishly. Long story short: It'd suck, try finding someone who'll sell AFS storage or go for WebDAV or something like that.
Consider e.g. switzerland's situation. Every male citizen is drafted and equipped with an assault rifle and (up until pretty recently, I think) ammunition (to be used only on military command). While any news related to the use of those rifles are quite rare, the huge majority seems to deal with domestic conflicts. Usually lethal for at least one, often all members of the family.
if we decriminalized narcotics and classified addicts as what they are
I'm all for that. IMO, the addict's not the criminal; his dealer is. There's just one problem: The line between legal and illegal needs to be drawn somewhere. Where would that be? Marijuana? LSD/Speed? Cocaine? Heroin? Some drugs may turn you into an addict on first contact - how would should those be treated? Legality of drugs is a tough fucking question and actually I'm happy not to have to answer it. (But if I had to, I'd probably go for "It's your body, do whatever the intercourse you want to it".)
a: The communications channel is encrypted. The data itself is decrypted at the recipient.
b: Why would BitTorrent users store your encrypted data on their systems for free and provide you with free bandwidth? Remember, in "normal" BT use, everybody gets something.
[...] in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.
I'm not an expert on this kind of stuff, but hasn't the MAFIAA furnished BitTorrent copyright holders and maybe even the interviewed ISP's customers the perfect occasion to take a nice bit of revenge? They realize it's encrypted, they realize they don't have a fucking clue about what's running through the pipes, yet they criminalize it? Free speech is great and all, but this seems like openly stating that thousands of users participate in illegal actions, without any proof.
Syncing with Outlook is, as you said, not too much of a biggie. Syncing with Exchange (skipping Outlook, i.e. push e-mail), however, isn't that simple apparently.
People die from guns; worth it for the freedom to own guns.
Unfortunately, the group of people who tend to die from guns don't correlate too much to the group of people who tend to own guns (okay, in "da hood" they may, but looking at domestic violence and such, they usually don't).
People die from drugs; worth it to have the freedom to control your own body.
This one's really, really hard to judge. On one hand, I totally agree one (of full age) should be able to take any drug he wants to, if said drug isn't known to directly cause sicknesses infecting other people. On the other hand, Think of the Children. They'll foot the bill for the years upon years of rehab and medical care a victim of drugs may have to go through. Think of 'em again, 'cause they may, just like anybody else, find themselves dead or crippled after a car crash with a drugged (and, of course, unhurt) moron.
Full ack on freedom vs. terrorism though. The T word's hugely overrated.
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They completely refactored it. Instead of toolbars you've got so-called ribbons now. Try it if you're running Windows, find yourself some screenshots if you're not. The old UI is (partly) available thru 3rd-party plugins, so "no" would probably be the appropriate answer to your last question.
About the way-too-long minimum notice: It's a great way to create a more stable situation overall and, given a mutual agreement, can be waived at any time. It may not be the best way to be able to cope with huge growths, but it sure makes for a more secure (as in "not having to worry about how to make money tomorrow") environment.
It's more or less common practice to save up a few weeks of vacation time for that kind of cases. Plus there's always the possibility of a mutual agreement upon any other timeframe (like four parasecs or so).
To go with your deterrence idea:
I'm sure you'd agree with me that a military kind of deterrence is supposed to be working against an oppossing nation with the potential to engage in a more or less uniformed and geneva-convention-style (that's the one, right?) conflict. Such an enemy would very surely need to be based somewhere, that somewhere usually being a country. (Terrorists are the exception here, but they aren't deterred by a huge army, now are they?)
Continuing, the probably biggest deterrent to an aggressor of that kind would very probably be the possibility of completely and exceptionlessy obliberate the enemy's base. The U.S. is stockpiling nukes, intelligent bombs and so on in the tens of thousands. Even if we exclude nukes and chemical/biological warfare from the equation, the U.S. quite surely has enough firepower to disinhabitate any country on this planet permanently in a matter of hours. What would they need *more* deterrents for? It's pretty common knowledge that any large-scale war (I'm talking "two similar enemies" here, invasions like Iraq and Afghanistand don't count) would destroy the world as we know it. Nobody is going to risk that.
If the enemy plane can shut down comms between UAV and controller, it can shut down comms between manned aircraft pilot and command centre as well. If UAVs actually get used in that kind of combat situations, they will (I'd imagine they might already) have a fallback similar to what a pilot could do.
If the enemy plane can disrupt the UAVs on-board electronics, it could do the same to a manned aircraft's electronics. Not much of a difference there, I reckon.
Remember, the U.S. of A. is not the only community on this planet.
Drinking age? Why not stick to 18, like the rest of the world?
Marijuana? My suggestion: legalize, no driving while high, 18+ (like cigs & co).
Speed limits? No idea bout the situation in the U.S., but you're a democracy. Vote! (I don't think speeds can be limited differently for different cars of one "class", though.)
IMO the best solution to that kind of problems is a direct democratic decision by the jurisdiction's population (in that case the whole U.S.). Create a few sets of rules (e.g. a "green one" topping at 55 mph, one that's in line with your neighbour's limits and perhaps one without any limits (just on highways?)), create a few sets of punishments for breaking said rules (going over the limit costs ya lots of green, your license, nothing). Send said lists and some pros and cons (by the respective political groups, of course) to every voting person, let em vote it off.
I'm pretty sure in most cases medium fines with medium speed limits would be voted for. People want security, yet be able to travel quickly. They want others with disprespect for said security to be punished accordingly yet know they'll get caught too some day.
Pretty much the same for filesharing, if you ask me. A rather large part of the population not being able to relate to the problem at hand (as opposed to driving) may skew the decision, but I'm sure a consent could be found and wouldn't be so different from what Canada's doing now.
Jesus could walk on water, so if Canadians are as Jesus-loving as some Americans, water counts too.
To be honest, I don't have any idea how much money is spent on woodstock museums or bridges to nowhere annually, but I figure it's in the two- or three-digit millions max. American warmongering, on the other hand, pretty clearly is in the two- to three-digit billion range, a few orders of magnitude higher.
You probably won't care about the blue slime in their pool. (They stole the house, remember? :p)
SETI, designer clothes, ring tones, dry cleaning, nail salons, drm music, starbucks coffee don't eat up taxpayer money.
Atoms you have observed (as such) over the course of forty years: 0
People whose lives have been saved because of X-Ray over the course of some years: 1000+
If we took the trillions ($800bn spent on Afghanistan and Iraq alone, estimates range up to $2.4tn (some $8'000 per American citizen) for Afghanistan and Iraq in a ten-year window) spent on Bushes and instead spent it directly on research, how would it compare?
As opposed to the space programme, no great discoveries should and are expected. It's pretty hard to even find a reference point for comparison as the only direct effect of the U.S' government's warmongering seems to be anti-americanism throughout the world (including most intelligent americans ). It's four times as expensive in an I-don't-know-how-much shorter timeframe. Seriously, if you're concerned about what's being done with your tax money, rage against the military, not science funding.
While I don't want to doubt the intelligence of dolphins, I suspect there to be different "kinds" of it. If we were to detect technically generated radio signals, whomever is responsible for them has built some kind of technical infrastructure, just like mankind. Dolphins seem to be building villages just as much as most any other animal species -- not. I can't tell if this is because they're blocked from doing so by people's dominance on our planet or if there's just nothing in for them to try, the fact remains: they don't.
As soon as you'll show me a group of non-humans capable of building complex technical devices (sharpened stones and spears aren't) with which we cannot communicate on a basic level because of differences in our communication ways ("cause they're nukin' us" doesn't have to mean they can't talk to us), I'll agree with you.
Simultaneously downloading from 8 peers in a properly operating swarm of peers is still very fucking slow. (The "seedboxing" technique (kickstarting distribution of popular files by using one or some well-networked, high-performance box) does not work for this model of distribution; you'd have to stick to actual peers on (if you're lucky) 1 mbps or less of total upstream bandwidth.) Don't forget to factor in many people accessing their files hosted on one peer simulatenously. BitTorrent works really nicely for distribution of few large files to many clients. Given unchanged limitations in bandwidth and storage, it doesn't and won't scale well to store lots of information for the use of few clients. I'd love to hear about a real-world disproof of this, but it ain't gonna happen.
I'm all for that. IMO, the addict's not the criminal; his dealer is. There's just one problem: The line between legal and illegal needs to be drawn somewhere. Where would that be? Marijuana? LSD/Speed? Cocaine? Heroin? Some drugs may turn you into an addict on first contact - how would should those be treated? Legality of drugs is a tough fucking question and actually I'm happy not to have to answer it. (But if I had to, I'd probably go for "It's your body, do whatever the intercourse you want to it".)
a: The communications channel is encrypted. The data itself is decrypted at the recipient.
b: Why would BitTorrent users store your encrypted data on their systems for free and provide you with free bandwidth? Remember, in "normal" BT use, everybody gets something.
Syncing with Outlook is, as you said, not too much of a biggie. Syncing with Exchange (skipping Outlook, i.e. push e-mail), however, isn't that simple apparently.
Full ack on freedom vs. terrorism though. The T word's hugely overrated.
You had me at people and lost me at "who stand in the middle of escalators!". Let's do this!