Yeah, nukes are defensive. There's only one thing you can do with them that you can't do with conventionals. Nuke a city. Credible deterrence. That's the point.
Nukes aren't needed by Iran. They have all the deterrence they need in how they can threaten to close the straight. So for Iran, nukes are a "nice to have, eventually" kinda thing. Not something you move heaven and earth to get tomorrow.
Let's try and remember too that, the spirit if not the letter of the non-proliferation treaty is, all the non-nuclear states agree to stay that way and the nuclear powers agree to eventually get rid of theirs.
Well, for the lifetime of the treaty so far, the position of the leaders of nuclear powers has been that "eventually" means "not in my lifetime". Can you blame Iran for wanting nukes?
I mean, if you're a non-nuclear signatory to the NPT, then when exactly is it reasonable for you to conclude that the nuclear powers are bullshitting you, and that they in fact never intend, and never intended, to get rid of their own nukes? When the President of the USA gets up and states that he has to concede that the USA will not get rid of nukes in his lifetime? And what do you do then?
I guess the honest thing to do is, officially pull out of the NPT, and then develop your own nukes, but hey, uh, this is statecraft here, not Ethics 101 final exam, and it's not like the other side has been honest with you in the past, right?
Which is why it's such a great example mentioning the flight that overflew their target.
We have aircraft that can take off, fly, and land by themselves. But they can't take off and land 747s 2 minutes apart with that sort of automated aircraft.
So, we have a tech (aircraft that "can't get lost") that can do this or solve that problem, but it isn't actually practical to deploy most of the time for various non-technical reasons, like economics for example.
Or, y'know, just not having pilots making $25K/year and so sleep deprived on standby shifts that they fall asleep mid flight would do it too. I know nobody's ever likely to prove it, but you talk to pilots who are willing to speak candidly about that case, who are familiar with the working conditions, they'll tell you the crew fell asleep.
(as a side note, pilots can be on "standby availability" for 8 or 12 hours, then 5 minutes before the end of their standby shift, get called to do an 8 hour flight. You'll fall asleep too.)
It's funny you mention that - my wife and I just moved into a neighborhood that is cheap, but slightly dodgy. Not so much dangerous, but a lot of break-ins and property crime.
When we were checking out our place, I was looking at the parking lot included. I looked across the alley and realized that I was looking at a 3-story building, maybe ten or twelve apartment balconies per floor, that was a retirement home.
At any hour of the day or night, there are at least one or two people on their balconies having a smoke. All of a sudden, I stopped worrying about break-ins.
Well, didn't the human race almost die off completely about 75,000 years ago due to a big volcano? There's a genetic bottleneck that they detected or something?
I'm not sure that Canada is going to benefit from increased frost-free days at higher latitudes if the glacier fed rivers that make farming viable everywhere west of the great lakes dry up or become seasonal rivers.
I mean, it's not like Southern Alberta for example, has a water surplus, right?
Hmmm... Anybody keeping track of the checklist of climate-change denier bingo here?
First, we get the "the earth isn't warming. And if it is, it isn't anything humans did. And if it is, it isn't a problem" progression.
Now the AC above me gives us the (so thoroughly debunked I'm not gonna bother searching for links) "in the 70s climate scientists told us the earth was going to cool so it's all a big hoax!" argument.
I have a theory that, the reason a lot of people get so upset about this issue because, when you're trying to have a logical, reasonable discussion with someone, and you realize, they aren't having a discussion at all, they're doing something between deliberate disinformation and a political speech, you realize that your opponent has been entirely deceptive and mendacious.
That tends to make people angry. Especially if the former in this example is a scientist or a researcher, and they're used to dealing in something like objectivity, and don't have much in the way of "political skills" or "media literacy", and you realize you just got ambushed by somebody with a hidden agenda.
" A warmer planet is a better planet for life, period."
Yes, for "life", in general, a warmer planet is "better". On a geological timescale.
Myself, I'm less concerned whether or not something is good for "life" or not, and whether or not it's good for "humans". And some consequences of warming are crop failures. A 2 degree mean global increase in temperature means that, in july and august, in the non-coastal areas of North America, a six degree rise in daytime temperature high.
So it takes very little to have massive, massive crop failures.
And that's if nothing happens to water supplies. OK, some areas, depending on your latitude, might end up with more rainfall. But there's a lot of people, and a lot of farming, in the regions where expanding Hadley cells means more deserts.
Sea level rise - personally, I think the effects of this on coastal cities has been much overblown. The dutch figured out how to build dikes a long time back. However, if you think about the big river deltas of the Yellow or the Yangzee, you have millions of people living within 1 meter of sea level. Oh, and, those millions are frequently farmers who feed billions. Anyway. How much of a sea level rise do you need to destroy an awful lot of rice paddies?
So yeah, in a sense, a warmer planet is "better for life". However, on the much-shorter-timescale of a human lifetime, it's going to be very unpleasant for a few lifetimes.
Oh, and, your argument about "telling a family in Africa that they have to watch their children die of malnourishment", um, that really only makes sense if your budget for combating climate change comes out of your foreign aid budget. Maybe that's how it works in the Free Republic of Ayn Rand-ia, but I don't know of any _real_ countries where it works like that.
"the subject believes that they work and the polygrapher CAN see changes that can indicate that the person under scrutiny is having an issue with something."
Yeah, or, the polygrapher could have some sort of bias, couldn't he? Couldn't the polygrapher mistakenly _believe_ that, but be wrong?
If the polygraph is NOT 100%, weapons-grade bullonium, then what about the National Academy of Sciences report on the polygraph? What about the Aldrich Ames case? More specifically, why hasn't the polygraph been subjected to the kind of scientific, rigorous, double-blind testing that most other knowledge claims would be subjected to in this day and age?
There was a public inquiry here in Canada back in the 80s. The report the judge who presided over it produced is instructive reading. The judge was consistently frustrated by his inability to get a straight answer out of polygraph "experts" when he'd ask questions like "OK, show me where on these results that deception is indicated."
One of the things that this inquiry found was that you could replace the polygraph with a purely theatrical device and you'd get about the same results.
"In the course of the production of my book, it is touched and receives positive benefit from (in no particular order): A writer, an agent, an editor, a copy editor, an art director, an artist, a book designer, a marketer, a publicist, a distributor and a bookseller. As an author, if I lose one of those people, the final product — a saleable book — suffers in one way or another."
Yeah, surprise, surprise, everybody thinks their own position, work, and revenue stream is essential.
The last 2 in that list of 11 positions are middlemen between the author and the consumer/reader. Pardon me if I (as a reader) don't see them as essential. The agent works for you, the author, and provides a service to you, the author, not me, the reader. If his services are valuable, it seems like it's up to you to pay for your own agent, actually.
As Cory Doctorow likes to point out, most of us find our favourite authors by word-of-mouth. So the assertion that the marketer, publicist, artist, and book designer are vital is um, unproven. Burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim. And, uh, as far as I can see, ugly-ass cover art and bad design are not necessarily an obstacle to a book's success, just ask Robert Jordan's heirs.
The assertion that everybody in the production chain is really really important reminds me of (I don't actually know if this is true or not, might be apocryphal) that thing about record execs in the 90s saying how MP3s weren't a threat, because, c'mon, who wants to listen to music on a lossy format?
You know what the real problem with books is? They cost too much. In 2008 dollars, John Updike's "Rabbit, run" sold for something in the range of 5 or 6 bucks when it was released. Currently it's only available in trade paperback at $20-25 a pop. The biggest cause of this is that, when you buy a book, you're not just paying for that book, you're paying for all the books that the publisher puts out and didn't sell, and get sent back to the publisher and get pulped. Bookstores get to take books basically on consignment, and send back the ones that don't sell.
Now this unique arrangement is designed to get Barnes and Noble to take a chance on unknown authors so they don't stock nothing but Stephen King and J.K. Rawling or something. This is the elephant in the room for the publishing industry, and e-distribution could solve it. So don't tell me that your cover art designer is an essential part of the supply chain, thanks.
You're confused by the "small government" creed of conservatives?
What about the fact that people who call themselves Christians vote right-wing? Christianity is, in it's texts, a very very left-leaning religion. From "love of money is the root of all evil" to "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven" or "what you have done for the least of my brothers, you have done for me", the real thing to be confused about is why it is that Christians, at least in the USA, seem to think kicking people off welfare and blaming the victim is just what Jesus would've prescribed.
Didn't Jefferson say something about how an educated population is essential to democracy succeeding?
Of course, then 30-odd years later De Touqueville predicted that american democracy would succeed, unless elected representatives realized that they can bribe the American people with their own money...
You ever read any Greg Egan? He talks about how the postmodernists et. al. destroyed the civil rights movement, sorta tongue-in-cheek, presents it as a CIA plot. They managed to transform the civil rights movement from "Hey, you liberal democracies? You like to talk about great things like civil rights. Can we have some too?" to "your reality narrative is different but equally valid to my reality narrative".
When you think about it, it almost seems plausible...
It seems to me that a good predictor of how militant or aggressive any given union is, is how the employees have been treated by their employer in the past.
The best argument on this, especially when talking to the religious right, is biblical.
Matthew 25:34-40.
And Jesus said, For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
"And Jesus said to the righteous, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
Seriously, even for an atheist like me, that's a powerful argument.
The vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released someday.
Not to mention that the "cage experience" is probably exactly what you don't want for people with uncorrected violent tendencies.
Here's a fun fact in this debate - murderers have amongst the lowest recidivism rates. Think about it - you murder your husband/wife 'cause you caught them in bed with your best friend, or you kill your business partner over a dispute. What are the odds you'll be in that situation again?
Did you see the bit about how the (at the time) governor of Michigan decided to, after seeing some of the results of the innocence project, commute the sentences of EVERYONE sentenced to death to life instead?
I was watching a documentary about the innocence project, and I just remember thinking how satisfying it must be for that particular governor. It's like all the things everybody dreams of doing when they're working a job and gave their 2 weeks notice.
"Yeah, I'm not running again, so I'm gonna do what I want. What the fuck are you guys gonna do, _NOT_ vote for me?"
Don't get me wrong, I think, given the error rate for convictions, this was an entirely noble thing to do. But I just imagine a guy, who spent his whole career doing what he thinks will play well with the voters, saying "fuck y'all, I'm retiring, I'm gonna do what I want, and it's the right thing to do!"
Stephen J. Gould said something about how any evidence that suggests nurture over nature, could usually be used just as well to suggest a nature over nurture.
It turns out that nature vs nurture is a false dichotomy. For example, there have been genes identified in rats that are ONLY turned on by specific maternal behaviors.
So genes matter, but environment is at least as important. Without the environment that "turns on" a gene, nothing happens.
OK, I don't have any experience with _only_ cutting my caloric intake, but I _do_ know that in 3 months of running for an hour (say, 4 miles, I'm slow) at a time 3X+/week, it had virtually zero effect on my waistline/% body fat, but after doing that for about 3 or 4 months, I changed my diet, and the fat _melted_ off, or so it seemed.
My sister and her fiancee are both personal trainers/fitness instructors. Some observations they've shared with me:
1) 200 or 300 calories an hour, um, that's not really exercise, in the sense that you wanna define "exercise" in the context of weight loss. That's a rate of exercise that you'd recommend for someone who is very, very, overweight, the sort where you're worried that having them hit a heart rate > 120 might not be safe. This is not the majority of people 50 or 60 years old.
200-300 calories an hour, um, that's not even breaking a sweat for a lot of people. Call me old-fashioned, but I think if I'm not breaking a sweat, I don't really call it exercise.
2) The math on this shows nothing surprising. Estimate 2000 calories net gain/loss over a timeframe of weeks per pound of fat gained/lost.
So you wanna call burning 200 calories your "workout"? OK, no problem. But with no changes to diet, and assuming someone is eating basically their "revenue neutral", no loss, no gain, amount of calories per day, well, if you exercise 5X a week, you're going to lose a pound every 2 weeks.
So a really anemic, unsatisfying rate of weight loss is what you get if you do a teeny, tiny, bit of exercise that barely breaks a sweat and don't change your eating habits. Film at 11.
3) My sister has a client that I met, once, then didn't see for a year or 2. She had lost at least 100 lbs. So I asked my sister "aren't there some people that are still fat, even if they exercise and eat properly?" and she told me, not that she'd seen. She told me the number of clients she'd had who had decent eating habits in the 2000-3000 cal/day range, who exercise 3X/week (that is, vigorous, 500 cal/hour, think running intensity level) for an hour or more at a time, who started out overweight and stayed just as overweight was exactly zero. She hasn't even ever _heard of_ another fitness instructor who had someone like that.
4) One problem my sister identified in a lot of clients, especially people who are hitting the gym for the first time in their life in their 30s or later and never played any sports, is they don't want to do a level of exercise intensity that they find "uncomfortable". Anybody who's ever done anything even remotely athletic in their life will know the truth of "no pain, no gain", but there are some people who don't want to endure the "pain" part of that equation. Those people have a lot of trouble losing weight, and often feel that "it just never works for me", and only when they get one-on-one training with a fitness instructor (or go to the gym with a fit friend) that anybody has ever pointed out "you're doing it wrong".
And, ok, profoundly unscientific, but at least in my own personal experience, I'm amazed at how much exercise I can do, and how much I can improve my fitness level (by whatever measure you like) and have zero or next-to-zero effect on my waistline, and by how significant effects on my waist that I _do_ see, with what seems like a pretty small change in diet. Like, as in, switch from coke to coke zero, and changing morning "coffee plus donut" to "just coffee".
"That is clear, you're correct. What is unclear is whether there is a middle ground. It is entirely possible that even with penny DVD's people will still take it illegitimately. It doesn't take a huge imagination to see where that would wind up leading."
Yes, that's true. But I can get water from my tap at a price too small for me to conveniently measure, it's effectively free. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a profit selling bottled water.
OK, but the argument being made by people who talk about marginal production cost approaching zero aren't (ok, not all of them anyway) asking for stuff to be free - what I want is, the reduction in marginal cost of production to be reflected in the price I pay, for movies or tv or music.
Take movies, the worst offender IMO. Movie theater tickets have doubled in price in the last ooh, what? 15 years or so?
What people are suggesting is, if it costs 20 bucks to buy a DVD of "Terminator - Salvation" in a store, that a digital copy, with it's marginal cost of production, should be available for a fraction of that price.
The content owners want to do what every other corporation has done with new tech that brings down production costs - they want to realize all the benefits of new tech, but they want to keep the price structure of a pre-internet, bandwidth-scarce, world.
This is all really complicated, and difficult. We can have a lot of meaningful debate on where the price points should be. But a digital copy of something should be a fraction of the physical version, and that's something that every content owner is not only fighting, they're pretending the argument doesn't even exist.
I know you're joking, and this is off-topic, but your line of "depends on how hard you hit them" reminds me of something Bruce Schnier said about security policies - someone asked him, what's the best way to get users to follow our security policy?
He replied "Easy. Just fire someone, loudly and publicly, for violating security policy."
But as we all know, that virtually never happens, right? He pointed out that employees, when they violate security policies, are just rationally evaluating risks. There's the risk of "not getting their work done" vs "almost zero chance of negative consequences for breaking the rules".
So maybe it's not that "the most difficult thing to change is end-user behavior", more accurate thing to say would be "the most difficult thing to do is get users to change their behavior, in ways that make it harder to for them to get their work done, by asking them, when they don't understand why it's important."
Copyright is about legal technicalities and competing economic interests. There is nothing "moral" or "ethical" about the issue, full stop.
There is no "natural right" to a monopoly on reproduction of a creative work the way that there's a "natural" right to freedom of speech or something.
As Jefferson said, (sorry if I mangle the quote) "he who lights his taper at my candle enriches himself while taking nothing from me."
If you wanna talk about ethics around IP, the only questions that make sense to be framed as "ethical" are all on the side of the anti-copyright zealots. Things like "is it ethical for person A to restrict person B's freedom of speech" or "is it ethical to prohibit people from accessing life-saving drugs unless they give me money first?"
Those who wanna argue in favor of the status quo on copyright seem to be unable to come up with anything like a rational argument, so they've resorted to emotional appeals and attempts to make people feel guilty. But it's just not a moral or ethical issue, it's just a question of competing economic interests.
Let me highly recommend getting the big after-market battery on the G1.
A G1 only fits in the pocket of a suit jacket or something, which for me is maybe 10 days a year, so I'm carrying it in a belt-clip holder anyway. So who cares if the phone is thicker as a result?
Also, it actually makes typing on the keyboard much more comfortable.
The 1100 mAh battery is a real design flaw of the G1, but with the 2300 one I don't even worry about using wi-fi, keeping the brightness cranked, or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
"How important is _tooth retention_ to you, anyway..."
*hands pamphlet titled "you do the Meth!"*
Yeah, nukes are defensive. There's only one thing you can do with them that you can't do with conventionals. Nuke a city. Credible deterrence. That's the point.
Nukes aren't needed by Iran. They have all the deterrence they need in how they can threaten to close the straight. So for Iran, nukes are a "nice to have, eventually" kinda thing. Not something you move heaven and earth to get tomorrow.
Let's try and remember too that, the spirit if not the letter of the non-proliferation treaty is, all the non-nuclear states agree to stay that way and the nuclear powers agree to eventually get rid of theirs.
Well, for the lifetime of the treaty so far, the position of the leaders of nuclear powers has been that "eventually" means "not in my lifetime". Can you blame Iran for wanting nukes?
I mean, if you're a non-nuclear signatory to the NPT, then when exactly is it reasonable for you to conclude that the nuclear powers are bullshitting you, and that they in fact never intend, and never intended, to get rid of their own nukes? When the President of the USA gets up and states that he has to concede that the USA will not get rid of nukes in his lifetime? And what do you do then?
I guess the honest thing to do is, officially pull out of the NPT, and then develop your own nukes, but hey, uh, this is statecraft here, not Ethics 101 final exam, and it's not like the other side has been honest with you in the past, right?
Which is why it's such a great example mentioning the flight that overflew their target.
We have aircraft that can take off, fly, and land by themselves. But they can't take off and land 747s 2 minutes apart with that sort of automated aircraft.
So, we have a tech (aircraft that "can't get lost") that can do this or solve that problem, but it isn't actually practical to deploy most of the time for various non-technical reasons, like economics for example.
Or, y'know, just not having pilots making $25K/year and so sleep deprived on standby shifts that they fall asleep mid flight would do it too. I know nobody's ever likely to prove it, but you talk to pilots who are willing to speak candidly about that case, who are familiar with the working conditions, they'll tell you the crew fell asleep.
(as a side note, pilots can be on "standby availability" for 8 or 12 hours, then 5 minutes before the end of their standby shift, get called to do an 8 hour flight. You'll fall asleep too.)
It's funny you mention that - my wife and I just moved into a neighborhood that is cheap, but slightly dodgy. Not so much dangerous, but a lot of break-ins and property crime.
When we were checking out our place, I was looking at the parking lot included. I looked across the alley and realized that I was looking at a 3-story building, maybe ten or twelve apartment balconies per floor, that was a retirement home.
At any hour of the day or night, there are at least one or two people on their balconies having a smoke. All of a sudden, I stopped worrying about break-ins.
Well, didn't the human race almost die off completely about 75,000 years ago due to a big volcano? There's a genetic bottleneck that they detected or something?
You familiar with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event
96% of all marine species dead, 70% of land animals?
Take a look at "canfield oceans".
I'm not sure that Canada is going to benefit from increased frost-free days at higher latitudes if the glacier fed rivers that make farming viable everywhere west of the great lakes dry up or become seasonal rivers.
I mean, it's not like Southern Alberta for example, has a water surplus, right?
f
Hmmm... Anybody keeping track of the checklist of climate-change denier bingo here?
First, we get the "the earth isn't warming. And if it is, it isn't anything humans did. And if it is, it isn't a problem" progression.
Now the AC above me gives us the (so thoroughly debunked I'm not gonna bother searching for links) "in the 70s climate scientists told us the earth was going to cool so it's all a big hoax!" argument.
I have a theory that, the reason a lot of people get so upset about this issue because, when you're trying to have a logical, reasonable discussion with someone, and you realize, they aren't having a discussion at all, they're doing something between deliberate disinformation and a political speech, you realize that your opponent has been entirely deceptive and mendacious.
That tends to make people angry. Especially if the former in this example is a scientist or a researcher, and they're used to dealing in something like objectivity, and don't have much in the way of "political skills" or "media literacy", and you realize you just got ambushed by somebody with a hidden agenda.
" A warmer planet is a better planet for life, period."
Yes, for "life", in general, a warmer planet is "better". On a geological timescale.
Myself, I'm less concerned whether or not something is good for "life" or not, and whether or not it's good for "humans". And some consequences of warming are crop failures. A 2 degree mean global increase in temperature means that, in july and august, in the non-coastal areas of North America, a six degree rise in daytime temperature high.
So it takes very little to have massive, massive crop failures.
And that's if nothing happens to water supplies. OK, some areas, depending on your latitude, might end up with more rainfall. But there's a lot of people, and a lot of farming, in the regions where expanding Hadley cells means more deserts.
Sea level rise - personally, I think the effects of this on coastal cities has been much overblown. The dutch figured out how to build dikes a long time back. However, if you think about the big river deltas of the Yellow or the Yangzee, you have millions of people living within 1 meter of sea level. Oh, and, those millions are frequently farmers who feed billions. Anyway. How much of a sea level rise do you need to destroy an awful lot of rice paddies?
So yeah, in a sense, a warmer planet is "better for life". However, on the much-shorter-timescale of a human lifetime, it's going to be very unpleasant for a few lifetimes.
Oh, and, your argument about "telling a family in Africa that they have to watch their children die of malnourishment", um, that really only makes sense if your budget for combating climate change comes out of your foreign aid budget. Maybe that's how it works in the Free Republic of Ayn Rand-ia, but I don't know of any _real_ countries where it works like that.
"the subject believes that they work and the polygrapher CAN see changes that can indicate that the person under scrutiny is having an issue with something."
Yeah, or, the polygrapher could have some sort of bias, couldn't he? Couldn't the polygrapher mistakenly _believe_ that, but be wrong?
If the polygraph is NOT 100%, weapons-grade bullonium, then what about the National Academy of Sciences report on the polygraph? What about the Aldrich Ames case? More specifically, why hasn't the polygraph been subjected to the kind of scientific, rigorous, double-blind testing that most other knowledge claims would be subjected to in this day and age?
There was a public inquiry here in Canada back in the 80s. The report the judge who presided over it produced is instructive reading. The judge was consistently frustrated by his inability to get a straight answer out of polygraph "experts" when he'd ask questions like "OK, show me where on these results that deception is indicated."
One of the things that this inquiry found was that you could replace the polygraph with a purely theatrical device and you'd get about the same results.
"In the course of the production of my book, it is touched and receives positive benefit from (in no particular order): A writer, an agent, an editor, a copy editor, an art director, an artist, a book designer, a marketer, a publicist, a distributor and a bookseller. As an author, if I lose one of those people, the final product — a saleable book — suffers in one way or another."
Yeah, surprise, surprise, everybody thinks their own position, work, and revenue stream is essential.
The last 2 in that list of 11 positions are middlemen between the author and the consumer/reader. Pardon me if I (as a reader) don't see them as essential. The agent works for you, the author, and provides a service to you, the author, not me, the reader. If his services are valuable, it seems like it's up to you to pay for your own agent, actually.
As Cory Doctorow likes to point out, most of us find our favourite authors by word-of-mouth. So the assertion that the marketer, publicist, artist, and book designer are vital is um, unproven. Burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim. And, uh, as far as I can see, ugly-ass cover art and bad design are not necessarily an obstacle to a book's success, just ask Robert Jordan's heirs.
The assertion that everybody in the production chain is really really important reminds me of (I don't actually know if this is true or not, might be apocryphal) that thing about record execs in the 90s saying how MP3s weren't a threat, because, c'mon, who wants to listen to music on a lossy format?
You know what the real problem with books is? They cost too much. In 2008 dollars, John Updike's "Rabbit, run" sold for something in the range of 5 or 6 bucks when it was released. Currently it's only available in trade paperback at $20-25 a pop. The biggest cause of this is that, when you buy a book, you're not just paying for that book, you're paying for all the books that the publisher puts out and didn't sell, and get sent back to the publisher and get pulped. Bookstores get to take books basically on consignment, and send back the ones that don't sell.
Now this unique arrangement is designed to get Barnes and Noble to take a chance on unknown authors so they don't stock nothing but Stephen King and J.K. Rawling or something. This is the elephant in the room for the publishing industry, and e-distribution could solve it. So don't tell me that your cover art designer is an essential part of the supply chain, thanks.
You're confused by the "small government" creed of conservatives?
What about the fact that people who call themselves Christians vote right-wing? Christianity is, in it's texts, a very very left-leaning religion. From "love of money is the root of all evil" to "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven" or "what you have done for the least of my brothers, you have done for me", the real thing to be confused about is why it is that Christians, at least in the USA, seem to think kicking people off welfare and blaming the victim is just what Jesus would've prescribed.
Didn't Jefferson say something about how an educated population is essential to democracy succeeding?
Of course, then 30-odd years later De Touqueville predicted that american democracy would succeed, unless elected representatives realized that they can bribe the American people with their own money...
You ever read any Greg Egan? He talks about how the postmodernists et. al. destroyed the civil rights movement, sorta tongue-in-cheek, presents it as a CIA plot. They managed to transform the civil rights movement from "Hey, you liberal democracies? You like to talk about great things like civil rights. Can we have some too?" to "your reality narrative is different but equally valid to my reality narrative".
When you think about it, it almost seems plausible...
It seems to me that a good predictor of how militant or aggressive any given union is, is how the employees have been treated by their employer in the past.
Unions are like a mirror image of the employer.
The best argument on this, especially when talking to the religious right, is biblical.
Matthew 25:34-40.
And Jesus said, For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
"And Jesus said to the righteous, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
Seriously, even for an atheist like me, that's a powerful argument.
Here, here, to your point #3.
The vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released someday.
Not to mention that the "cage experience" is probably exactly what you don't want for people with uncorrected violent tendencies.
Here's a fun fact in this debate - murderers have amongst the lowest recidivism rates. Think about it - you murder your husband/wife 'cause you caught them in bed with your best friend, or you kill your business partner over a dispute. What are the odds you'll be in that situation again?
Did you see the bit about how the (at the time) governor of Michigan decided to, after seeing some of the results of the innocence project, commute the sentences of EVERYONE sentenced to death to life instead?
I was watching a documentary about the innocence project, and I just remember thinking how satisfying it must be for that particular governor. It's like all the things everybody dreams of doing when they're working a job and gave their 2 weeks notice.
"Yeah, I'm not running again, so I'm gonna do what I want. What the fuck are you guys gonna do, _NOT_ vote for me?"
Don't get me wrong, I think, given the error rate for convictions, this was an entirely noble thing to do. But I just imagine a guy, who spent his whole career doing what he thinks will play well with the voters, saying "fuck y'all, I'm retiring, I'm gonna do what I want, and it's the right thing to do!"
So. Very. Satisfying.
Stephen J. Gould said something about how any evidence that suggests nurture over nature, could usually be used just as well to suggest a nature over nurture.
It turns out that nature vs nurture is a false dichotomy. For example, there have been genes identified in rats that are ONLY turned on by specific maternal behaviors.
So genes matter, but environment is at least as important. Without the environment that "turns on" a gene, nothing happens.
OK, I don't have any experience with _only_ cutting my caloric intake, but I _do_ know that in 3 months of running for an hour (say, 4 miles, I'm slow) at a time 3X+/week, it had virtually zero effect on my waistline/% body fat, but after doing that for about 3 or 4 months, I changed my diet, and the fat _melted_ off, or so it seemed.
My sister and her fiancee are both personal trainers/fitness instructors. Some observations they've shared with me:
1) 200 or 300 calories an hour, um, that's not really exercise, in the sense that you wanna define "exercise" in the context of weight loss. That's a rate of exercise that you'd recommend for someone who is very, very, overweight, the sort where you're worried that having them hit a heart rate > 120 might not be safe. This is not the majority of people 50 or 60 years old.
200-300 calories an hour, um, that's not even breaking a sweat for a lot of people. Call me old-fashioned, but I think if I'm not breaking a sweat, I don't really call it exercise.
2) The math on this shows nothing surprising. Estimate 2000 calories net gain/loss over a timeframe of weeks per pound of fat gained/lost.
So you wanna call burning 200 calories your "workout"? OK, no problem. But with no changes to diet, and assuming someone is eating basically their "revenue neutral", no loss, no gain, amount of calories per day, well, if you exercise 5X a week, you're going to lose a pound every 2 weeks.
So a really anemic, unsatisfying rate of weight loss is what you get if you do a teeny, tiny, bit of exercise that barely breaks a sweat and don't change your eating habits. Film at 11.
3) My sister has a client that I met, once, then didn't see for a year or 2. She had lost at least 100 lbs. So I asked my sister "aren't there some people that are still fat, even if they exercise and eat properly?" and she told me, not that she'd seen. She told me the number of clients she'd had who had decent eating habits in the 2000-3000 cal/day range, who exercise 3X/week (that is, vigorous, 500 cal/hour, think running intensity level) for an hour or more at a time, who started out overweight and stayed just as overweight was exactly zero. She hasn't even ever _heard of_ another fitness instructor who had someone like that.
4) One problem my sister identified in a lot of clients, especially people who are hitting the gym for the first time in their life in their 30s or later and never played any sports, is they don't want to do a level of exercise intensity that they find "uncomfortable". Anybody who's ever done anything even remotely athletic in their life will know the truth of "no pain, no gain", but there are some people who don't want to endure the "pain" part of that equation. Those people have a lot of trouble losing weight, and often feel that "it just never works for me", and only when they get one-on-one training with a fitness instructor (or go to the gym with a fit friend) that anybody has ever pointed out "you're doing it wrong".
And, ok, profoundly unscientific, but at least in my own personal experience, I'm amazed at how much exercise I can do, and how much I can improve my fitness level (by whatever measure you like) and have zero or next-to-zero effect on my waistline, and by how significant effects on my waist that I _do_ see, with what seems like a pretty small change in diet. Like, as in, switch from coke to coke zero, and changing morning "coffee plus donut" to "just coffee".
Yes, that's true. But I can get water from my tap at a price too small for me to conveniently measure, it's effectively free. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a profit selling bottled water.
OK, but the argument being made by people who talk about marginal production cost approaching zero aren't (ok, not all of them anyway) asking for stuff to be free - what I want is, the reduction in marginal cost of production to be reflected in the price I pay, for movies or tv or music.
Take movies, the worst offender IMO. Movie theater tickets have doubled in price in the last ooh, what? 15 years or so?
What people are suggesting is, if it costs 20 bucks to buy a DVD of "Terminator - Salvation" in a store, that a digital copy, with it's marginal cost of production, should be available for a fraction of that price.
The content owners want to do what every other corporation has done with new tech that brings down production costs - they want to realize all the benefits of new tech, but they want to keep the price structure of a pre-internet, bandwidth-scarce, world.
This is all really complicated, and difficult. We can have a lot of meaningful debate on where the price points should be. But a digital copy of something should be a fraction of the physical version, and that's something that every content owner is not only fighting, they're pretending the argument doesn't even exist.
I know you're joking, and this is off-topic, but your line of "depends on how hard you hit them" reminds me of something Bruce Schnier said about security policies - someone asked him, what's the best way to get users to follow our security policy?
He replied "Easy. Just fire someone, loudly and publicly, for violating security policy."
But as we all know, that virtually never happens, right? He pointed out that employees, when they violate security policies, are just rationally evaluating risks. There's the risk of "not getting their work done" vs "almost zero chance of negative consequences for breaking the rules".
So maybe it's not that "the most difficult thing to change is end-user behavior", more accurate thing to say would be "the most difficult thing to do is get users to change their behavior, in ways that make it harder to for them to get their work done, by asking them, when they don't understand why it's important."
Copyright is about legal technicalities and competing economic interests. There is nothing "moral" or "ethical" about the issue, full stop.
There is no "natural right" to a monopoly on reproduction of a creative work the way that there's a "natural" right to freedom of speech or something.
As Jefferson said, (sorry if I mangle the quote) "he who lights his taper at my candle enriches himself while taking nothing from me."
If you wanna talk about ethics around IP, the only questions that make sense to be framed as "ethical" are all on the side of the anti-copyright zealots. Things like "is it ethical for person A to restrict person B's freedom of speech" or "is it ethical to prohibit people from accessing life-saving drugs unless they give me money first?"
Those who wanna argue in favor of the status quo on copyright seem to be unable to come up with anything like a rational argument, so they've resorted to emotional appeals and attempts to make people feel guilty. But it's just not a moral or ethical issue, it's just a question of competing economic interests.
Let me highly recommend getting the big after-market battery on the G1.
A G1 only fits in the pocket of a suit jacket or something, which for me is maybe 10 days a year, so I'm carrying it in a belt-clip holder anyway. So who cares if the phone is thicker as a result?
Also, it actually makes typing on the keyboard much more comfortable.
The 1100 mAh battery is a real design flaw of the G1, but with the 2300 one I don't even worry about using wi-fi, keeping the brightness cranked, or whatever.