I would argue that the core injury was the manufacture, not sale, of the good. The sale is only a secondary injury. Perhaps that should be clarified to say "principle injury". You could also clarify it to indicate that if injury is in multiple locations, the right to sue in the location of injury is void unless it happens to also be a significant nexus of one party or the other.
Regarding corporations versus individuals, corporations have always been held to different standards in many areas of the law. For example, corporations cannot vote. They cannot hold office. And so on. CU v. FEC was a train wreck, and even some of the judges that voted that way have pretty much concluded that it was a mistake. I wouldn't cite that as precedent just yet. It will probably be revisited soon enough, and with very different results.
You're right, though. Corporations, should also be able to sue in their home or their workplace. Oh, wait. They don't have either of those.:-) Similarly, referring to nexus for an individual tends to be something of a non sequitur. The term doesn't have much meaning in that context. Thus, the distinction is clearly one that is not intended to limit, but rather to clarify what "nexus" means with regards to an individual, where that term is much less clearly defined than in corporate cases. I'm pretty sure that such clarification would withstand constitutional scrutiny.
And yes, there are disagreements about nexus when it comes to things like affiliate networks, but I'd say that term is at least 80% defined, which is a lot more clear than the rules for choice of venue seem to be.
I would argue that independent invention without exposure to the other's work should simply invalidate the patent right off the bat. If two people are filing a patent on the same invention, unless they were working together at some point in the past or one of them stole research from the other in some way, that means the patent covers something that is obvious to a practitioner in the field, and is not patentable in the first place.
We need a lot more patents thrown out for failing the obviousness test. Like about 98% of all patents filed. If we had stricter application of the obviousness test at the patent office instead of in the courtroom, patents wouldn't need reforming. That one single change in policy would almost completely eliminate patent trolls.
Nah. "An individual must sue in a location that is either that individual's home, place of business, or the location where the alleged injury took place. A corporation must sue in a location where that corporation has a significant nexus." I think that ought to do it.
That's why they should instead create a few microcells (or a few thousand picocells) that cover the prison grounds, then log everything that passes through those cells just like they do with calls from the phone on the wall.
This has the advantage of significantly reducing the ability of inmates to use them for harm while not reducing their ability to use them for good (keeping in touch with family, etc.). Also, it's legal and doesn't put the staff at risk.
No, a Ponzi scheme, according to Wikipedia, is "a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors."
By that definition, the stock market for non-dividend-paying stocks is effectively a Ponzi scheme. If the company gets in dire straits, your stock becomes worthless, the company reorganizes, and you realize that you're not really holding a portion of the company. You're holding a piece of paper whose value is exactly what investors are willing to pay for it. Ponzi scheme. Just saying.
There are certain well defined limits to free speech. In general, the government can place very narrow limits on time, place, and manner of speech when it is necessary to achieve a compelling goal, but only to the minimum degree necessary to achieve that goal, and only if those limits are non-prejudicial and do not produce an undue burden on speech in general.
For example, the government can refuse to allow a porn shop next to an elementary school, but cannot refuse to allow the porn shop to exist anywhere in the city. The government can tell protesters that they are not allowed to protest in a certain area because of safety concerns, but cannot prevent the protest entirely. The government can allow you to protest outside a funeral, but can refuse to allow you to burn crosses. And so on.
To the extent that rules fall within the above narrow exception, you can potentially get punished by the government. Generally speaking, however, free speech means that the government cannot punish you. That doesn't mean that there aren't consequences, of course. I'm free to call my neighbor a stupid jackass, but that doesn't mean I won't wake up tomorrow and find my tires slashed. I can call my boss an idiot, but that doesn't mean I'll have a job tomorrow. And so on. However, as a rule, the government can't arrest me or fine me for doing either of those things.
As for censoring employees' Facebook pages, were it a private employer, such censorship would probably be allowed. With a public employer, it's not so clear-cut because the government is not supposed to be punishing people for exercising their free speech rights. On the other hand, they could argue that employees venting through such channels results in the public getting a dangerously incomplete view of what's happening inside the government, which could cause serious problems for the government's ability to operate, in which case they might be able to argue that this is a reasonable TPM restriction. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.
Here's what I don't get: does Brazil not have radar? I mean, he's not likely to produce a huge radar echo or anything, but they should have been able to spot him.
Or, for that matter, triangulate the satellite phone call.
Or, heaven forbid, the emergency operator goes to the website of the GPS manufacturer and downloads a copy of the manual, then gives him instructions....
Which brings me to the question: did they even try to save this guy? Yeah, there may be a Darwin award here, but if this story is true, there was plenty of incompetence to go around, and 99% of it wasn't on the part of the priest.
It's not a detection problem. The URL is being detected correctly, and it's a properly formed URL, so no, I haven't seen anything that legitimately needs to be blacklisted.
When a man page contains a URL, that URL is expected to be a valid URL, not a redirect. Thus, every man page that contains http://www.example.com/ should be considered buggy, and those pages should be changed to use a different, valid URL. From my perspective, it's as simple as that.
And that was my whole point. This change completely breaks the use of the domain in documentation as an example, making it no longer serve its intended purpose..
Sure, a static HTML page isn't an app, but I'd say Google is. Slashdot is. YouTube is.
No, none of those are web apps. A web app is a self-contained piece of code that runs on your local machine and queries the web with XMLHttpRequest() to obtain additional data. All of the sites you mentioned, with the exception of Google when live searching is enabled, are traditional CGI-based web sites in which your browser loads a new page to fetch new content. That's the exact opposite of a web app.
Your wall on Facebook is an example of a web app. (The entire site, however, is not.)
No, but you'll be hard pressed to find a good example that starts with 'http://' (other than the string "http://" by itself) that is not a working URL. In case you've never worked with a proper URL detector, good ones don't normally have detectable false positive rates. At least in OS manual pages, the only false positives I've seen in the past year or so have been due to things like commas or periods at the ends of the URLs. However, a URL detector for HTML generation can query these variant URLs during content generation and look for a 200 response, making those edge cases a nonissue.
Other than that, every broken link I've seen has either been A. content that used to be there and has gone away or B. a URL with a typographical error in it. I have never once even seen a detection problem that required blacklisting a specific URL.
More to the point, this rather defeats the purpose of using example.com in documentation from my perspective. If every single example is going to result in broken link errors from link checkers, we can't use that domain in the documentation, period. And that's unfortunate.
Hi, I'm General Tutan Khamun. As commander of the Royal Camel Battalion, I was in charge of paying the families of military dead in the Arab Republic of Egypt. However because of ongoing chaos in the country, numerous records have lost, and many dead have no recorded heir. Therefore, the payouts to families are large.
We need a person outside Egypt to serve as an intermediary to help transfer funds to heirs in the United States. In exchange for your help, we will pay you the some of TEN MILLION $10,000,000 U.S. DOLLARS dollars for helping us transfer these funds.
Please send me your contact information and I will call you back.
(Note: All misspellings, missing words, etc. are deliberate except for those that weren't.)
Bullshit. It's an individual's job to better himself, it's not owed to him to teach him it's required of him to learn. If he doesn't bother to learn, if he wants to waste any money he might win, he's not "doomed". He's lazy and uneducated.
But the opportunities to learn are not there. You're saying that these people are lazy because they haven't learned how to manage their money, but in most parts of the country the only classes that teach you how to manage your money require you to not be poor in order to take them. It's a classic chicken and egg problem.
Your perspective is completely backwards and dangerously wrong and leads to obviously wrong conclusions like government control of all wealth because the uneducated person obviously can't be trusted to manage their own money.
Only if you're an idiot who deliberately takes everything twenty steps too far. Your perspective is completely backwards and dangerously wrong. It leads to obviously wrong conclusions like that the poor contribute nothing useful to society and would be more useful as food. I cite as precedent "Soylent Green", and "A Modest Proposal". See how easy it is to come up with ludicrous examples of how something could be taken too far?
The problem is that for any *good* translation of man pages to HTML, you'll need to autodetect links in the text. Same goes for pretty printers that start with any text-based format. In the modern Internet, there is simply no place for URLs that aren't links.
So what you're saying is that everyone should have to add a special case workaround for one single broken website. Uh uh. Not gonna happen.
The problem comes when that documentation comes in the form of a web page. I'm expecting to have serious problems because of this change.
In particular, anyone maintaining HTML versions of OS manual pages can no longer usefully run automated link checkers on them because every man page that mentions "http://www.example.com" anywhere in it is going to contain "broken" links because of the redirect.
No, because it is similarly not the parents' fault that they were not taught money management as children; it was their parents' fault, which in turn was their parents' fault, and so on up the line. Ultimately, the real fault lies so far back in history that it really doesn't matter whose fault it is.
Also, a fair part of the blame rests on companies that extend insane amounts of credit. If you cannot possibly pay it back with a decade of wage garnishment and living hand to mouth, it is more credit than you can afford. The fact that you can afford a minimum payment that covers the interest is uninteresting and irrelevant.
Credit agencies should be reporting how much debt each person has, and what their total credit is. If that number is out of whack with their income, credit card companies and loan companies should not extend credit at any price. It shouldn't be about charging more money to cover your risk. It should be about doing what is best for the customer, which sometimes means saying no.
Now to be clear, I'm not saying that thirty year mortgages should be banned; there are somewhat valid uses for them---mainly to spread payments out over a longer time so that you can live more comfortably. However, if you can't afford the ten, you should not be allowed to take out the thirty, either.
In short, there's more than enough blame to go around. As such, we as a society have an obligation to help---not by programs like welfare, but by programs that teach people how to manage their money. It is a skill that can be learned like any other, but only if we as a society are willing to teach it.
I am sure that the fact that it is still possible for a person to grow up poor and with determination and hard work become rich is something that you either do not believe in or something that you do not believe happens.
It happens occasionally, but it is exceptionally rare. What actually happens, in practice, is that someone born into the middle class becomes upper middle class by moving to an area with a higher cost of living, then working for a while, and finally retiring somewhere with a lower cost of living. Work in California. Retire in Tennessee.
The number of children born below the poverty line (the definition of poor) who work hard and "become rich" is essentially zero, with the exception of lottery winners, and even those folks are rarely rich for very long.
The reason for this is twofold. First, the poor have to spend nearly all of their income just to get by. This leaves no realistic opportunity for the sorts of "I started a company and made it big" stories because there's not enough capital or access to capital to make that happen.
Second, because the poor live hand to mouth, they generally do not understand how to manage finances, so in the rare occasions when they come into a large sum of money (lottery, inheritance, etc.), they tend to blow through it very quickly instead of saving it and living on the interest. They also fail to keep enough money aside to pay their taxes, and end up losing their shirts. This same mindset leads to racking up colossal debt, which only exacerbates the problem.
Those two factors can be overcome, but only through proper education. Unfortunately, our education systems do not teach money management (except perhaps in an MBA program or something), and thus the only opportunity for kids to learn it is from their parents. When the parents don't know how to manage their money, the kids don't learn it. As a result, the vast majority of the working poor (along with the vast majority of their descendants) are basically doomed to a life of barely breaking even.
Even scholarships merely promote them from working poor to working middle class, but the tendency to burn through all their income usually follows them, and although they are in some sense better off, there's not much room for further advancement beyond that point except in subsequent generations through marrying someone with a better grip on money management.
It's like a treadmill. The poor keep walking on it because they started out going just fast enough to keep up. The middle class often start out going faster than the treadmill, walk off the front, and keep walking.
Short of outside interference (e.g. a better education system, marrying someone in a higher social class, etc.), there is no real opportunity to break this cycle. Thus, no matter how hard the poor work, they almost never get ahead, and even when they do, there are limits to how far ahead they are likely to get.
Ultimately, the only way to fix this is for schools to instill financial responsibility in children from a young age. However, this isn't in the best interests of the folks at the top, who require a steady flow of willing consumers in order to maintain their artificial inequality. As such, this isn't likely to every happen unless we get a truly progressive government (which we don't have now and haven't had in my lifetime).
RANT: I hate this new Slashdot Interface. Why the F*ck can't we include HTML tags in our replies anymore? I used italics and bold a lot to include quotes and provide emphasis. Slashdot has now stolen that from us!!!! I'm pissed.
HTML tags work fine for me. Try logging in.
No, wait, the <i> tag isn't working. The <em> tag works fine, though, and is functionally equivalent.
Bulleted lists are broken.
As are numbered lists.
You know, you're right. Somehow I have a feeling this wasn't tested very thoroughly before they rolled it out. The tags are right, but the CSS is hosed.
The potential payoff in saved lives just doesn't seem worth it.
Particularly when that payoff in saved lives A. hasn't materialized, and B. results in a commensurate loss of lives due to elevated cancer risk resulting from the use of full body X-ray scanners.
As for the depth perception impact, I have only a vague recollection of having read something on the subject. I may be seriously misremembering the details.
...people with just one eye will observe the growth effect but not the convergence effect, and they have no depth perception.
That is factually incorrect. The Wikipedia article on depth perception lists clues used in depth perception, and the vast majority of them are monocular, not binocular.
The two most important things are convergence and the physical sensation of focus. People with one eye (or with one eye closed) looking around at a scene can tell the difference between close and distant objects quite easily up to a certain distance, and less so the farther out you get. It is this aspect of 3D movies that causes problems. They are projected on a screen at a fixed distance, and as such, one of those depth clues (and arguably the more important one at the distances we're talking about) is missing entirely. You can get get away with using distance to create a perceived difference in size when you're using a camera because you can't physically feel the difference between a camera focusing at twenty feet and focusing at thirty. With a physical room and the human eye, you'll only get away with that illusion for a few seconds before your brain figures out something is wrong.
Secondarily, the microscopic motions of your eye are enough to create a limited amount of motion parallax even with just one eye looking at unmoving objects. The natural motion of your head contributes to this. And so on. That, too, is missing from 3D projection.
Finally, the human eye does not perceive things as a perfectly flat image in the first place. The rods in your eyes are much more sensitive than the cones, which means that they tend to pick up scattered light, whereas the cones basically only detect direct light. This means that a single human eye can perceive a difference in focal distance in a way that cameras cannot. This difference results in subtle fringing around real-world objects of differing depth that can provide further depth clues.
So is 3D useless? No. Is it likely to fool someone into thinking it is real? Also no. There are too many visual clues that simply cannot be simulated through projection on a flat screen.
Slashdot Mirror
I would argue that the core injury was the manufacture, not sale, of the good. The sale is only a secondary injury. Perhaps that should be clarified to say "principle injury". You could also clarify it to indicate that if injury is in multiple locations, the right to sue in the location of injury is void unless it happens to also be a significant nexus of one party or the other.
Regarding corporations versus individuals, corporations have always been held to different standards in many areas of the law. For example, corporations cannot vote. They cannot hold office. And so on. CU v. FEC was a train wreck, and even some of the judges that voted that way have pretty much concluded that it was a mistake. I wouldn't cite that as precedent just yet. It will probably be revisited soon enough, and with very different results.
You're right, though. Corporations, should also be able to sue in their home or their workplace. Oh, wait. They don't have either of those. :-) Similarly, referring to nexus for an individual tends to be something of a non sequitur. The term doesn't have much meaning in that context. Thus, the distinction is clearly one that is not intended to limit, but rather to clarify what "nexus" means with regards to an individual, where that term is much less clearly defined than in corporate cases. I'm pretty sure that such clarification would withstand constitutional scrutiny.
And yes, there are disagreements about nexus when it comes to things like affiliate networks, but I'd say that term is at least 80% defined, which is a lot more clear than the rules for choice of venue seem to be.
I would argue that independent invention without exposure to the other's work should simply invalidate the patent right off the bat. If two people are filing a patent on the same invention, unless they were working together at some point in the past or one of them stole research from the other in some way, that means the patent covers something that is obvious to a practitioner in the field, and is not patentable in the first place.
We need a lot more patents thrown out for failing the obviousness test. Like about 98% of all patents filed. If we had stricter application of the obviousness test at the patent office instead of in the courtroom, patents wouldn't need reforming. That one single change in policy would almost completely eliminate patent trolls.
Nah. "An individual must sue in a location that is either that individual's home, place of business, or the location where the alleged injury took place. A corporation must sue in a location where that corporation has a significant nexus." I think that ought to do it.
That's why they should instead create a few microcells (or a few thousand picocells) that cover the prison grounds, then log everything that passes through those cells just like they do with calls from the phone on the wall.
This has the advantage of significantly reducing the ability of inmates to use them for harm while not reducing their ability to use them for good (keeping in touch with family, etc.). Also, it's legal and doesn't put the staff at risk.
No, a Ponzi scheme, according to Wikipedia, is "a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors."
By that definition, the stock market for non-dividend-paying stocks is effectively a Ponzi scheme. If the company gets in dire straits, your stock becomes worthless, the company reorganizes, and you realize that you're not really holding a portion of the company. You're holding a piece of paper whose value is exactly what investors are willing to pay for it. Ponzi scheme. Just saying.
There are certain well defined limits to free speech. In general, the government can place very narrow limits on time, place, and manner of speech when it is necessary to achieve a compelling goal, but only to the minimum degree necessary to achieve that goal, and only if those limits are non-prejudicial and do not produce an undue burden on speech in general.
For example, the government can refuse to allow a porn shop next to an elementary school, but cannot refuse to allow the porn shop to exist anywhere in the city. The government can tell protesters that they are not allowed to protest in a certain area because of safety concerns, but cannot prevent the protest entirely. The government can allow you to protest outside a funeral, but can refuse to allow you to burn crosses. And so on.
To the extent that rules fall within the above narrow exception, you can potentially get punished by the government. Generally speaking, however, free speech means that the government cannot punish you. That doesn't mean that there aren't consequences, of course. I'm free to call my neighbor a stupid jackass, but that doesn't mean I won't wake up tomorrow and find my tires slashed. I can call my boss an idiot, but that doesn't mean I'll have a job tomorrow. And so on. However, as a rule, the government can't arrest me or fine me for doing either of those things.
As for censoring employees' Facebook pages, were it a private employer, such censorship would probably be allowed. With a public employer, it's not so clear-cut because the government is not supposed to be punishing people for exercising their free speech rights. On the other hand, they could argue that employees venting through such channels results in the public getting a dangerously incomplete view of what's happening inside the government, which could cause serious problems for the government's ability to operate, in which case they might be able to argue that this is a reasonable TPM restriction. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.
Here's what I don't get: does Brazil not have radar? I mean, he's not likely to produce a huge radar echo or anything, but they should have been able to spot him.
Or, for that matter, triangulate the satellite phone call.
Or, heaven forbid, the emergency operator goes to the website of the GPS manufacturer and downloads a copy of the manual, then gives him instructions....
Which brings me to the question: did they even try to save this guy? Yeah, there may be a Darwin award here, but if this story is true, there was plenty of incompetence to go around, and 99% of it wasn't on the part of the priest.
It's not a detection problem. The URL is being detected correctly, and it's a properly formed URL, so no, I haven't seen anything that legitimately needs to be blacklisted.
When a man page contains a URL, that URL is expected to be a valid URL, not a redirect. Thus, every man page that contains http://www.example.com/ should be considered buggy, and those pages should be changed to use a different, valid URL. From my perspective, it's as simple as that.
And that was my whole point. This change completely breaks the use of the domain in documentation as an example, making it no longer serve its intended purpose..
Out of curiosity, what breaks? Any interesting error spew?
No, none of those are web apps. A web app is a self-contained piece of code that runs on your local machine and queries the web with XMLHttpRequest() to obtain additional data. All of the sites you mentioned, with the exception of Google when live searching is enabled, are traditional CGI-based web sites in which your browser loads a new page to fetch new content. That's the exact opposite of a web app.
Your wall on Facebook is an example of a web app. (The entire site, however, is not.)
Most people don't carry them around in their pockets all day, either.
Did you leave out an "A" in the middle of that?
No, but you'll be hard pressed to find a good example that starts with 'http://' (other than the string "http://" by itself) that is not a working URL. In case you've never worked with a proper URL detector, good ones don't normally have detectable false positive rates. At least in OS manual pages, the only false positives I've seen in the past year or so have been due to things like commas or periods at the ends of the URLs. However, a URL detector for HTML generation can query these variant URLs during content generation and look for a 200 response, making those edge cases a nonissue.
Other than that, every broken link I've seen has either been A. content that used to be there and has gone away or B. a URL with a typographical error in it. I have never once even seen a detection problem that required blacklisting a specific URL.
More to the point, this rather defeats the purpose of using example.com in documentation from my perspective. If every single example is going to result in broken link errors from link checkers, we can't use that domain in the documentation, period. And that's unfortunate.
No, no, it's:
Hi, I'm General Tutan Khamun. As commander of the Royal Camel Battalion, I was in charge of paying the families of military dead in the Arab Republic of Egypt. However because of ongoing chaos in the country, numerous records have lost, and many dead have no recorded heir. Therefore, the payouts to families are large.
We need a person outside Egypt to serve as an intermediary to help transfer funds to heirs in the United States. In exchange for your help, we will pay you the some of TEN MILLION $10,000,000 U.S. DOLLARS dollars for helping us transfer these funds.
Please send me your contact information and I will call you back.
(Note: All misspellings, missing words, etc. are deliberate except for those that weren't.)
But the opportunities to learn are not there. You're saying that these people are lazy because they haven't learned how to manage their money, but in most parts of the country the only classes that teach you how to manage your money require you to not be poor in order to take them. It's a classic chicken and egg problem.
Only if you're an idiot who deliberately takes everything twenty steps too far. Your perspective is completely backwards and dangerously wrong. It leads to obviously wrong conclusions like that the poor contribute nothing useful to society and would be more useful as food. I cite as precedent "Soylent Green", and "A Modest Proposal". See how easy it is to come up with ludicrous examples of how something could be taken too far?
The problem is that for any *good* translation of man pages to HTML, you'll need to autodetect links in the text. Same goes for pretty printers that start with any text-based format. In the modern Internet, there is simply no place for URLs that aren't links.
So what you're saying is that everyone should have to add a special case workaround for one single broken website. Uh uh. Not gonna happen.
The problem comes when that documentation comes in the form of a web page. I'm expecting to have serious problems because of this change.
In particular, anyone maintaining HTML versions of OS manual pages can no longer usefully run automated link checkers on them because every man page that mentions "http://www.example.com" anywhere in it is going to contain "broken" links because of the redirect.
Not cool.
No, because it is similarly not the parents' fault that they were not taught money management as children; it was their parents' fault, which in turn was their parents' fault, and so on up the line. Ultimately, the real fault lies so far back in history that it really doesn't matter whose fault it is.
Also, a fair part of the blame rests on companies that extend insane amounts of credit. If you cannot possibly pay it back with a decade of wage garnishment and living hand to mouth, it is more credit than you can afford. The fact that you can afford a minimum payment that covers the interest is uninteresting and irrelevant.
Credit agencies should be reporting how much debt each person has, and what their total credit is. If that number is out of whack with their income, credit card companies and loan companies should not extend credit at any price. It shouldn't be about charging more money to cover your risk. It should be about doing what is best for the customer, which sometimes means saying no.
Now to be clear, I'm not saying that thirty year mortgages should be banned; there are somewhat valid uses for them---mainly to spread payments out over a longer time so that you can live more comfortably. However, if you can't afford the ten, you should not be allowed to take out the thirty, either.
In short, there's more than enough blame to go around. As such, we as a society have an obligation to help---not by programs like welfare, but by programs that teach people how to manage their money. It is a skill that can be learned like any other, but only if we as a society are willing to teach it.
It happens occasionally, but it is exceptionally rare. What actually happens, in practice, is that someone born into the middle class becomes upper middle class by moving to an area with a higher cost of living, then working for a while, and finally retiring somewhere with a lower cost of living. Work in California. Retire in Tennessee.
The number of children born below the poverty line (the definition of poor) who work hard and "become rich" is essentially zero, with the exception of lottery winners, and even those folks are rarely rich for very long.
The reason for this is twofold. First, the poor have to spend nearly all of their income just to get by. This leaves no realistic opportunity for the sorts of "I started a company and made it big" stories because there's not enough capital or access to capital to make that happen.
Second, because the poor live hand to mouth, they generally do not understand how to manage finances, so in the rare occasions when they come into a large sum of money (lottery, inheritance, etc.), they tend to blow through it very quickly instead of saving it and living on the interest. They also fail to keep enough money aside to pay their taxes, and end up losing their shirts. This same mindset leads to racking up colossal debt, which only exacerbates the problem.
Those two factors can be overcome, but only through proper education. Unfortunately, our education systems do not teach money management (except perhaps in an MBA program or something), and thus the only opportunity for kids to learn it is from their parents. When the parents don't know how to manage their money, the kids don't learn it. As a result, the vast majority of the working poor (along with the vast majority of their descendants) are basically doomed to a life of barely breaking even.
Even scholarships merely promote them from working poor to working middle class, but the tendency to burn through all their income usually follows them, and although they are in some sense better off, there's not much room for further advancement beyond that point except in subsequent generations through marrying someone with a better grip on money management.
It's like a treadmill. The poor keep walking on it because they started out going just fast enough to keep up. The middle class often start out going faster than the treadmill, walk off the front, and keep walking.
Short of outside interference (e.g. a better education system, marrying someone in a higher social class, etc.), there is no real opportunity to break this cycle. Thus, no matter how hard the poor work, they almost never get ahead, and even when they do, there are limits to how far ahead they are likely to get.
Ultimately, the only way to fix this is for schools to instill financial responsibility in children from a young age. However, this isn't in the best interests of the folks at the top, who require a steady flow of willing consumers in order to maintain their artificial inequality. As such, this isn't likely to every happen unless we get a truly progressive government (which we don't have now and haven't had in my lifetime).
HTML tags work fine for me. Try logging in.
No, wait, the <i> tag isn't working. The <em> tag works fine, though, and is functionally equivalent.
You know, you're right. Somehow I have a feeling this wasn't tested very thoroughly before they rolled it out. The tags are right, but the CSS is hosed.
Particularly when that payoff in saved lives A. hasn't materialized, and B. results in a commensurate loss of lives due to elevated cancer risk resulting from the use of full body X-ray scanners.
That's yet another good reason to only eat chicken at fast food restaurants (as though the health reasons aren't enough).
Rods definitely do play a role in daylight vision, at least in terms of color . I could probably cite a few dozen sources on that point, as "rod intrusion" is fairly well understood (I think). For example: Implications of Rod Sensitivity to Interior Lighting Practice provides, among other things, an interesting survey of literature in the field.
As for the depth perception impact, I have only a vague recollection of having read something on the subject. I may be seriously misremembering the details.
Sorry, I seem to be stuttering today.
That is factually incorrect. The Wikipedia article on depth perception lists clues used in depth perception, and the vast majority of them are monocular, not binocular.
The two most important things are convergence and the physical sensation of focus. People with one eye (or with one eye closed) looking around at a scene can tell the difference between close and distant objects quite easily up to a certain distance, and less so the farther out you get. It is this aspect of 3D movies that causes problems. They are projected on a screen at a fixed distance, and as such, one of those depth clues (and arguably the more important one at the distances we're talking about) is missing entirely. You can get get away with using distance to create a perceived difference in size when you're using a camera because you can't physically feel the difference between a camera focusing at twenty feet and focusing at thirty. With a physical room and the human eye, you'll only get away with that illusion for a few seconds before your brain figures out something is wrong.
Secondarily, the microscopic motions of your eye are enough to create a limited amount of motion parallax even with just one eye looking at unmoving objects. The natural motion of your head contributes to this. And so on. That, too, is missing from 3D projection.
Finally, the human eye does not perceive things as a perfectly flat image in the first place. The rods in your eyes are much more sensitive than the cones, which means that they tend to pick up scattered light, whereas the cones basically only detect direct light. This means that a single human eye can perceive a difference in focal distance in a way that cameras cannot. This difference results in subtle fringing around real-world objects of differing depth that can provide further depth clues.
So is 3D useless? No. Is it likely to fool someone into thinking it is real? Also no. There are too many visual clues that simply cannot be simulated through projection on a flat screen.