The weight of the space shuttle is approximately four times as much as the 500-ton asteroid, and unfortunately we've recently seen what happens when it enters Earth's atmosphere (at the right angle to let it hit the ground). Pieces are scattered, and there's little damage to things on the ground.
At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, consider Mir, which weighed about 150 tons. Its orbit was intended to break it up (though burning it entirely wasn't the goal), and it did so, with only a few fragments surviving to hit the ocean.
Causing actual damage with an asteroid seems to require far more mass (or at least significantly better aerodynamics than a space station). Even orbiting the moon, the Earth is very far away, and cities are very small. A failsafe rocket to deliver a slight nudge is enough to steer the rock into a much nicer entry orbit.
For a while, my old high school promoted one of their janitors to system admin. I never worked with him, though, so I don't know how well he could code.
Ah, the wonderfully pessimistic assumption that what can happen will.
I like your attitude. I don't agree with it, but I like that it exists. The culture of the United States is paranoid and outrage-prone enough that if the government does actually turn oppressive, with opponents disappearing and certain thoughts outlawed, there will be enough activists to notice and care. In many cases this has happened with post 9/11 detainees, where local activists are fighting to have their friends returned. The government often ignores their requests, but they aren't being silenced.
In 1984, the government spied on its citizens, but that's not really the worst part of the story. That's the first few pages. The real villain is the oppressive political party, where even though its people (and some leaders) want change, they're silent out of fear. That bleak oppression is not in America's foreseeable future. The culture (including even the most staunch censors) still values free speech too much.
That's assuming that big companies actually are headed by evil businessmen, rather than actual human beings with their own sense of ethics and morality, supporting whatever they think is right.
Follow the money to determine which candidate is supported by people with money. Nothing more.
My preferred solution: fix income tax to cover all income, including capital gains.
Ron Paul's solution: the government screwed up income tax, so let's get rid of it.
Crafting a fair tax policy in a global, internet connected world is a difficult thing (but we certainly could do better).
I think that's why Ron Paul's gotten so much support: he offers easy solutions to difficult problems, completely ignoring the shortcomings and unintended consequences. Honestly, I don't see other candidates, even the extremists, being that idealistic about their platforms. They'll at least acknowledge that their plans have downsides.
My apologies for the long post, but Ron Paul pisses me off. From his own website:
Ron Paul supports the elimination of the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
First line of his tax platform, and we've established that he wants to get rid of the income tax, which is currently the most direct way to put the burden of social support on those who benefit most: the wealthy. If you're of the opinion that everyone should support society equally, whether or not they can afford it, then I guess removing income tax makes sense. That's not my opinion.
To provide funding for the federal government, Ron Paul supports excise taxes...
Excise tax is often connected to "sin tax" for good reason. The government gets to put a tax on anything it wants. The paranoid folks worry about the influence of government on our right to purchase particular things, but what actually concerns me more is the likelihood that a "fair" excise tax is applied to practically everything, so all prices rise by some amount, increasing the total cost of living. If wages also increase, then it's just inflation, and nothing changes (except we're in a worse position in the global economy). If wages don't increase, then the taxes affect the lowest-income population the most, while the middle and upper classes are unaffected.
...non-protectionist tariffs...
I don't think I've ever heard of any tariff that's not protectionist. Raising the price of an import necessarily makes outsourced manufacturing more expensive. Unfortunately, this isn't the 1800's, where America was capable of being (more or less) self-reliant. Americans want their electronics from Asia, and modern companies know this. The higher prices from the tariffs will be passed on to the consumers, which again will mostly hurt the lowest-income population. I don't think that's right.
massive cuts in spending
He defines what will be cut elsewhere. Notably, he intends to close the Department of Energy (because who needs energy research anyway, when you have big energy companies working on fossil fuels?), Housing and Urban Development (which currently manages federal programs for low-income people to buy homes), and the Department of Education (because the states do such a greatjobalready). Less specifically, some other goals are "returning responsibility for security to private property owners" which I interpret to mean cutting federal support for emergency services, and "stopping foreign aid", of which the #1 recipient is Afghanistan. Sure... once we've screwed over a country for 10 years, let's cut off support to rebuild, so we can cut back 1% of the federal budget. He also boasts about his promise to take a personal salary of only $39,000, which is a savings of almost 0.00001% from the federal budget. Then there's his spending freezes, on Medicaid, SCHIP, food stamps, family support, and child nutrition programs.
“I want to abolish the income tax, but I don’t want to replace it with anything. About 45 percent of all federal revenue comes from the personal income tax....
He wants to cut out 45% of income, but his vaunted $1 trillion in cuts only total about 33% of expenses. Without replacing the missing 12% of the budget, he's going to have a hard time meeting his promise to have a balanced budget in two years.
If you insist on sticking a label on me, I'll go with "moderate" or "centralist". There are some liberal policies I like, and some conservative policies I like. Sometimes there are heinous acts done to our environment, and heinous acts done in the name of our environment. I have no particularly loyal affiliation.
From a platform of eliminating income tax in favor of reliance on consumption taxes, cutting public service projects, and basing economic plans on intentional ignorance, Ron Paul's just about the perfect candidate for a stereotypical evil wealthy businessman. His approach to leadership is that the Founding Fathers had everything all figured out 250 years ago, and all those major changes like the Industrial Revolution are just bothersome little things that shouldn't concern us.
And then if several other cars' engines from the same supplier also blew up, would you still complain that it's purely Lotus' problem? Would you make a big deal about it being a problem with Lotus, and, if you're a journalism outfit like Slashdot, only follow up on stories involving Lotus' exploding engines?
I'm just pointing out that Slashdot often has an anti-corporate bias, and it applies most heavily to companies that make technology accessible to the public at large. Consider the number of posts that boil down to "I could do that with an Arduino and an afternoon" in articles about computerized appliances.
Because this is Slashdot. Apple is that evil bad nasty walled-garden company that makes products those filthy commoners like, and has grown huge doing it. Those GPU suppliers also make the nice hardware we use, though, so we don't complain about them nearly as much.
I don't like the "but we must do SOMEthing" philosophy. Most problems are caused by solutions.
I'll agree with your disagreement. Government solutions usually need more solutions.
Story time! I have an in-law who works for a certain energy company that had a pipeline leak within the past few years (it's not BP, and I honestly don't remember the name). He's a manager for a department of about a hundred people whose primary job is to produce reports to accommodate whatever silly requests the government agents want. Among the requests I've heard about:
Daily updates on the age of a pipeline
Metallurgical review of a piece of pipe, confirmed by four independent metallurgists
A list of all airplanes who would be crossing the area during repairs
Justification for every piece of equipment (including things like radios and portable toilets) at the repair site
Marital statuses of all construction workers
As it was explained to me, the vast majority of those agents were contractors, who make requests simply to look like they're doing something, which then entitles them to a piece of the government's clean-up money. The energy company faces enormous fines for not complying with every request, no matter how ridiculous the request or how indirect the connection to the incident may be. The end result is that the government money goes to producing useless reports, the company's repair efforts get less funding, and my in-law has a job.
Reminds me of the TV show seaQuest... for almost a whole season, they had interesting episodes based around real weirdness in the oceans.
What fascinates me even more is the emergent behavior observable in simple systems, such as growing crystals, diffusing liquids, convection currents... all of those delightfully complex results from simple principles. There's beauty in the result, and simplicity in the process.
Are they seriously hoping someone will buy two different versions to get everything they need?
Yup. One license included by the OEM on the cheap machines the small business orders, then another license (and fee) for the version with the features the business actually needs.
Also, what's with the X86/X64 offerings?
My understanding is that the x64 version also runs the Windows-On-Windows system, which provides the backwards-compatibility for 32-bit software. That means a different registry structure, different drivers, different libraries... A separate installation seems to be the easy way.
And here I thought the main question was the question that was asked, "Is it his responsibility to know that it is illegal?"
I'm not trying to claim copyright is morally right or wrong, or justify any piracy or business model. I know it's comforting to rally with the hivemind against copyright, but that's not the topic here.
The latter, along with being expected to learn about weapon laws before shooting a gun, driving rules before operating a car, and controlled substance laws before selling "medications".
Ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Whether the particular law's a good one or not is a different issue, outside the scope of my original comment.
Nope. It's John Wiley & Sons, a publishing company. No country is suing anybody.
If he went to Thailand. Bought the books there. Brought it back to USA.
Anything illegal yet?
I don't routinely import things, so I'm not 100% sure, but it does matter why he brought the book back. He'd have to have properly declared it and paid any applicable tariffs, but there's nothing inherently illegal about importing.
Once he is done with his class, he sold the book.
Now all of a sudden that is illegal?!
Possibly. Nothing in TFA implies that the books were used for class, or even related to his studies. It says only that he resold the books, and that he was a grad student. If he imported the books with the primary intent to resell them, that's illegal. If he imported them primarily for his own studies, then it's likely legal. Since the legality depends entirely on his intent when he imported the books, it's pretty normal (though not necessarily right) to see a controversial judgement here, and that's exactly why it's going to the Supreme Court.
Of course I see the difference, but I also see the similarities. Both are illegal under US laws, and both are the kinds of things someone could say "Hey, I could do that" and set up a business doing. Both are also perfectly legal in other jurisdictions.
You were doing so well, then said "rookie noobs". You have no knowledge of their qualifications other than "they don't agree with The Almighty APK", so you're launching ad hominem insults, which meets my criteria for not speaking with you again. Farewell, troll. Enjoy your irrelevance.
Is it his responsibility to know that it is illegal? And more to the point, by which basis are they illegal?
Yes, it is. When you change jurisdictions, it is your responsibility to learn the laws and customs of where you're going. The "I'm a ca-ra-zy foreigner!" excuse only gets you so far. Anytime you do anything new, especially something like starting what's effectively a get-rich-quick import business, you should see what laws could affect you.
Unrelatedly, I have a steak knife in my kitchen, and a sewing kit in my living room. I'll take care of that appendectomy you need for only $500... Think what you'll save over the hospital bills!
Slashdot Mirror
The weight of the space shuttle is approximately four times as much as the 500-ton asteroid, and unfortunately we've recently seen what happens when it enters Earth's atmosphere (at the right angle to let it hit the ground). Pieces are scattered, and there's little damage to things on the ground.
At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, consider Mir, which weighed about 150 tons. Its orbit was intended to break it up (though burning it entirely wasn't the goal), and it did so, with only a few fragments surviving to hit the ocean.
Causing actual damage with an asteroid seems to require far more mass (or at least significantly better aerodynamics than a space station). Even orbiting the moon, the Earth is very far away, and cities are very small. A failsafe rocket to deliver a slight nudge is enough to steer the rock into a much nicer entry orbit.
Disclaimer: I'm not a rocket scientist.
For a while, my old high school promoted one of their janitors to system admin. I never worked with him, though, so I don't know how well he could code.
Ah, the wonderfully pessimistic assumption that what can happen will.
I like your attitude. I don't agree with it, but I like that it exists. The culture of the United States is paranoid and outrage-prone enough that if the government does actually turn oppressive, with opponents disappearing and certain thoughts outlawed, there will be enough activists to notice and care. In many cases this has happened with post 9/11 detainees, where local activists are fighting to have their friends returned. The government often ignores their requests, but they aren't being silenced.
In 1984, the government spied on its citizens, but that's not really the worst part of the story. That's the first few pages. The real villain is the oppressive political party, where even though its people (and some leaders) want change, they're silent out of fear. That bleak oppression is not in America's foreseeable future. The culture (including even the most staunch censors) still values free speech too much.
So you're saying we will all go together when we go?
What poisons are those?
That's assuming that big companies actually are headed by evil businessmen, rather than actual human beings with their own sense of ethics and morality, supporting whatever they think is right.
Follow the money to determine which candidate is supported by people with money. Nothing more.
Fair point. I'll clarify:
From the liberal side, I like:
From the conservative side, I like:
From the environmentalist side, I like:
Apparently, the issues I care about do come more from the liberal side, but that might just be that I'm thinking of more liberal issues today.
My preferred solution: fix income tax to cover all income, including capital gains.
Ron Paul's solution: the government screwed up income tax, so let's get rid of it.
Crafting a fair tax policy in a global, internet connected world is a difficult thing (but we certainly could do better).
I think that's why Ron Paul's gotten so much support: he offers easy solutions to difficult problems, completely ignoring the shortcomings and unintended consequences. Honestly, I don't see other candidates, even the extremists, being that idealistic about their platforms. They'll at least acknowledge that their plans have downsides.
My apologies for the long post, but Ron Paul pisses me off. From his own website:
Ron Paul supports the elimination of the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
First line of his tax platform, and we've established that he wants to get rid of the income tax, which is currently the most direct way to put the burden of social support on those who benefit most: the wealthy. If you're of the opinion that everyone should support society equally, whether or not they can afford it, then I guess removing income tax makes sense. That's not my opinion.
To provide funding for the federal government, Ron Paul supports excise taxes...
Excise tax is often connected to "sin tax" for good reason. The government gets to put a tax on anything it wants. The paranoid folks worry about the influence of government on our right to purchase particular things, but what actually concerns me more is the likelihood that a "fair" excise tax is applied to practically everything, so all prices rise by some amount, increasing the total cost of living. If wages also increase, then it's just inflation, and nothing changes (except we're in a worse position in the global economy). If wages don't increase, then the taxes affect the lowest-income population the most, while the middle and upper classes are unaffected.
...non-protectionist tariffs...
I don't think I've ever heard of any tariff that's not protectionist. Raising the price of an import necessarily makes outsourced manufacturing more expensive. Unfortunately, this isn't the 1800's, where America was capable of being (more or less) self-reliant. Americans want their electronics from Asia, and modern companies know this. The higher prices from the tariffs will be passed on to the consumers, which again will mostly hurt the lowest-income population. I don't think that's right.
massive cuts in spending
He defines what will be cut elsewhere. Notably, he intends to close the Department of Energy (because who needs energy research anyway, when you have big energy companies working on fossil fuels?), Housing and Urban Development (which currently manages federal programs for low-income people to buy homes), and the Department of Education (because the states do such a great job already). Less specifically, some other goals are "returning responsibility for security to private property owners" which I interpret to mean cutting federal support for emergency services, and "stopping foreign aid", of which the #1 recipient is Afghanistan. Sure... once we've screwed over a country for 10 years, let's cut off support to rebuild, so we can cut back 1% of the federal budget. He also boasts about his promise to take a personal salary of only $39,000, which is a savings of almost 0.00001% from the federal budget. Then there's his spending freezes, on Medicaid, SCHIP, food stamps, family support, and child nutrition programs.
“I want to abolish the income tax, but I don’t want to replace it with anything. About 45 percent of all federal revenue comes from the personal income tax. ...
He wants to cut out 45% of income, but his vaunted $1 trillion in cuts only total about 33% of expenses. Without replacing the missing 12% of the budget, he's going to have a hard time meeting his promise to have a balanced budget in two years.
Is sociacommunenvirocorporatist an option?
If you insist on sticking a label on me, I'll go with "moderate" or "centralist". There are some liberal policies I like, and some conservative policies I like. Sometimes there are heinous acts done to our environment, and heinous acts done in the name of our environment. I have no particularly loyal affiliation.
I do hope that's sarcasm...
From a platform of eliminating income tax in favor of reliance on consumption taxes, cutting public service projects, and basing economic plans on intentional ignorance, Ron Paul's just about the perfect candidate for a stereotypical evil wealthy businessman. His approach to leadership is that the Founding Fathers had everything all figured out 250 years ago, and all those major changes like the Industrial Revolution are just bothersome little things that shouldn't concern us.
And then if several other cars' engines from the same supplier also blew up, would you still complain that it's purely Lotus' problem? Would you make a big deal about it being a problem with Lotus, and, if you're a journalism outfit like Slashdot, only follow up on stories involving Lotus' exploding engines?
I'm just pointing out that Slashdot often has an anti-corporate bias, and it applies most heavily to companies that make technology accessible to the public at large. Consider the number of posts that boil down to "I could do that with an Arduino and an afternoon" in articles about computerized appliances.
Because this is Slashdot. Apple is that evil bad nasty walled-garden company that makes products those filthy commoners like, and has grown huge doing it. Those GPU suppliers also make the nice hardware we use, though, so we don't complain about them nearly as much.
Wait... a copy party? So they did copy that floppy? Oh dear...
I don't like the "but we must do SOMEthing" philosophy. Most problems are caused by solutions.
I'll agree with your disagreement. Government solutions usually need more solutions.
Story time! I have an in-law who works for a certain energy company that had a pipeline leak within the past few years (it's not BP, and I honestly don't remember the name). He's a manager for a department of about a hundred people whose primary job is to produce reports to accommodate whatever silly requests the government agents want. Among the requests I've heard about:
As it was explained to me, the vast majority of those agents were contractors, who make requests simply to look like they're doing something, which then entitles them to a piece of the government's clean-up money. The energy company faces enormous fines for not complying with every request, no matter how ridiculous the request or how indirect the connection to the incident may be. The end result is that the government money goes to producing useless reports, the company's repair efforts get less funding, and my in-law has a job.
Reminds me of the TV show seaQuest... for almost a whole season, they had interesting episodes based around real weirdness in the oceans.
What fascinates me even more is the emergent behavior observable in simple systems, such as growing crystals, diffusing liquids, convection currents... all of those delightfully complex results from simple principles. There's beauty in the result, and simplicity in the process.
Are they seriously hoping someone will buy two different versions to get everything they need?
Yup. One license included by the OEM on the cheap machines the small business orders, then another license (and fee) for the version with the features the business actually needs.
Also, what's with the X86/X64 offerings?
My understanding is that the x64 version also runs the Windows-On-Windows system, which provides the backwards-compatibility for 32-bit software. That means a different registry structure, different drivers, different libraries... A separate installation seems to be the easy way.
Rogue waves: Demonstrating yet again that reality is a fascinatingly weird place.
And here I thought the main question was the question that was asked, "Is it his responsibility to know that it is illegal?"
I'm not trying to claim copyright is morally right or wrong, or justify any piracy or business model. I know it's comforting to rally with the hivemind against copyright, but that's not the topic here.
The latter, along with being expected to learn about weapon laws before shooting a gun, driving rules before operating a car, and controlled substance laws before selling "medications".
Ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Whether the particular law's a good one or not is a different issue, outside the scope of my original comment.
It's not the foreign country that is suing is it?
Nope. It's John Wiley & Sons, a publishing company. No country is suing anybody.
If he went to Thailand. Bought the books there. Brought it back to USA.
Anything illegal yet?
I don't routinely import things, so I'm not 100% sure, but it does matter why he brought the book back. He'd have to have properly declared it and paid any applicable tariffs, but there's nothing inherently illegal about importing.
Once he is done with his class, he sold the book.
Now all of a sudden that is illegal?!
Possibly. Nothing in TFA implies that the books were used for class, or even related to his studies. It says only that he resold the books, and that he was a grad student. If he imported the books with the primary intent to resell them, that's illegal. If he imported them primarily for his own studies, then it's likely legal. Since the legality depends entirely on his intent when he imported the books, it's pretty normal (though not necessarily right) to see a controversial judgement here, and that's exactly why it's going to the Supreme Court.
Of course I see the difference, but I also see the similarities. Both are illegal under US laws, and both are the kinds of things someone could say "Hey, I could do that" and set up a business doing. Both are also perfectly legal in other jurisdictions.
You were doing so well, then said "rookie noobs". You have no knowledge of their qualifications other than "they don't agree with The Almighty APK", so you're launching ad hominem insults, which meets my criteria for not speaking with you again. Farewell, troll. Enjoy your irrelevance.
Is it his responsibility to know that it is illegal? And more to the point, by which basis are they illegal?
Yes, it is. When you change jurisdictions, it is your responsibility to learn the laws and customs of where you're going. The "I'm a ca-ra-zy foreigner!" excuse only gets you so far. Anytime you do anything new, especially something like starting what's effectively a get-rich-quick import business, you should see what laws could affect you.
Unrelatedly, I have a steak knife in my kitchen, and a sewing kit in my living room. I'll take care of that appendectomy you need for only $500... Think what you'll save over the hospital bills!
My understanding is that fiber is still far faster and cheaper than anything space-based, and the maintenance costs are of course far lower, as well.