Well obviously Murdoch wants his web pages crawled, otherwise nobody will visit them.
Frankly, what he is demanding is non-sensical; he wants Google to index his news sites, but does NOT want Google to display headlines or partial text when returning results. How the hell is a searcher supposed to know that the link in question has any relevance at all to what they are looking for?
He also seems to have a pretty screwed up view of what fair use is. Fair use is not the exception to copyright, copyright is the exception to fair use. That's why copyright had to be enumerated in the first place. The fair use statutes are there to help clarify what copyright does -not- extend to, but it is intentionally left somewhat vague to make it difficult for copyright to over-step its bounds.
All of this comes from the stated goal of copyright in the copyright goal, which is to enhance the proliferation of creative arts for the betterment of society at large. It's goal is NOT to make content owners rich, that is simply the vehicle to increase the amount of creative art produced for public consumption.
So, when he says he believes fair use doctrine is on its way out, it shows that he has absolutely no understanding of what copyright is for, and that he is also one greedy som'bitch. If he is right in any way, it means our law has really been turned on its head.
Actually you are accelerating - so long as you are standing on the earth you are constantly accelerating.
Acceleration is a change in velocity, not speed. Velocity can change with a change in speed OR direction, or both obviously.
While standing on the ground, gravity applies a force that accelerates you toward the ground instead of allowing you to fly off into space like your velocity at any given moment in time should cause you to do.
In other words, even though gravity cannot accelerate you by increasing your speed (or decreasing, for that matter, that's still acceleration), it can and does still accelerate you by continually changing your direction.
Giving away your stuff isn't usually a good way to make money.
Non-sequitur.
This incorrectly implies that the only reason for innovation is to directly make money off them.
Ok, you just agreed that true innovation requires money, often large somes of money. Where does that money come from, if no profit is made off of the innovations? Donations do not work anywhere near as well as investments, and getting income indirectly is tricky and often impossible depending the potential uses for a given innovation.
It seems like it follows pretty well to me.
The parent never said money was the "only reason for innovation", but given that the primary means we as a society use to reward innovation is via monetary gain it is definitely the primary reason for innovation. Go back and have a look-see at all the great inventions (you know, the ones that really changed the way we do things) in history and you'll find that almost all of them were used for direct monetary gain. This motivation is so important we have global standards for limited monopolies on innovative things, be it copyright or patents.
Only if the inventor/developer's main goal is to sell the "innovation" for a profit. If the goal is reduced costs
Reduced costs = greater profit margin and/or a competitive advantage. Again, this relates directly to the primary reason innovations occur. Even "eureka" moments usually happen when an inventor is attempting to solve a different problem for profit. Generally the reason people give their innovations away is because they are not big enough to profit from directly, or the nature of the innovation makes it difficult to profit from directly, so they instead opt for indirect rewards. There is a very small percentage of people who give away their innovations for altruistic reasons.
I'm not sure you understand the difference between a rhetorical device (simile, metaphor, hyperbole, etc) and a fallacy (ad hominem, begging the question, straw man).
I super quick test in case you aren't sure: a rhetorical device, when used correctly and understood by the target audience, will always enhance the idea you are trying to convey, whereas a fallacy cannot be used correctly by definition, and when understood by the target audience will always undermine the idea you are trying to convey.
Fallacies are specific to arguments, rhetorical devices are not.
If you want a list of fallacies to study up on so you can tell the difference next time, try this site.
Oh and in case you weren't able to glean it from my text: yes, I do think you are a moron.
You are absolutely correct. It's an engineering challenge, not a conceptual one. Solving the engineering challenges may have been what made them decide against it in Vermont, however. That and the fact that, despite the benefits, I don't think most people would feel comfortable living inside a giant dome.
I'd certainly want to see it, but I don't think I'd like to live there.
They simulate Mars conditions all the time, and they defintely would test it on earth first to be sure it operated as expected. That does not mean they will be putting it over a city.
See, this certain crop isn't exactly "legal" in most states yet.
And even in those states where it IS legal, it isn't legal. You won't get busted by the city or state cops, but the feds will keep running their "War On Drugs" forever.
My state has some very confusing laws, like it's legal to own it, but it's illegal to buy or grow it. 0.o
Then again, most people making 100k or more a year are self-employed and willing to sacrifice a little comfort and take some extra risk in order to get ahead in the long run.
Hardly, most of the people I work with make a lot more than that, and none of them are even close to managerial level. They are, however, engineers. If you have a valuable skill to sell, you can make a good deal of money by selling it to the right people. You don't have to be an entrepreneur. Hell there are a few experienced helpdesk techs in our group who make nearly 100k, and I'm currently under-paid for my skills at around 50k (I'm working on that, contracts are a bitch sometimes).
The 100k mark is actually pretty low on the earnings scale, and yet the majority of people don't earn much less than that. This is fine, because the majority of people don't bother to get a profitable education, or put in the large amount of effort it takes to start a business, and so they live in mediocrity.
If anybody thinks there is no room for people who work hard and make themselves valuable, they should look at the stats for the amount of high-paid talent that comes into the US on work visas every year. The reason that happens is because the US is simply not producing enough talent to cover the needs of US businesses.
You've obviously never seen giant, radioactive jellyfish before. They easily transition from water to air and hover over the city, soaking up the juice from the power lines (they use it to help them hover) before floating down to Tokyo Tower for some tenticle-based destruction. Oh and pr0n. Wherever there are tenticles in Japan, there's tenticle pr0n.
It's been shown that simply cordoning off sections of the ocean where no one is allowed...
You realize you just described a fishery, right? A fishery is not some giant tank where fish are grown (ok, it CAN be, but that is by far the exception). The vast majority of fisheries aren't even fish farms, they are wild fisheries.
Fisheries are areas where fishing is actively regulated for the express purpose of producing a larger fish harvest. We have dozens, if not close to a hundred, fisheries here in Alaska, and as far as I know not a single fish farming operation, those all operate on the west-coast.
If you don't understand the difference, then there's no helping you.
If you can't explain the difference, then perhaps there is none.
Government run monopolies, at least in the US, are all terribly inefficient. One big, shining example is public education - it's horrible and expensive. What ranking among 1st world countries are we down to now, 50th? Worse? I'm not sure, the last figure I saw was 49th and that was years ago, and I know it hasn't gotten any better. We average close to $10,000 per year per student, and it's utter crap. There is so much beurocracy that the $10,000 is almost eaten up before you even get to the teacher's salary, leaving next to nothing for books and school programs. Compare that to the private school I went to, which recieved zero government funding, and cost less than $5,000 per student. SAT scores, as well as a number of local academic competitions, regularly average higher scores than their public school counterparts, and for the competitions the public schools get to pick from a much larger pool of students to compete with.
Frankly, ANY monopoly becomes terribly inefficient without some force equally powerful to keep it in check. In a non-monopoly situation, that force is competition. In a monopoly the force is the government. But what happens when the monopoly IS the government? There is no opposing force to keep it in check.
Canada and the UK's healthcare systems are both going bankrupt, Medicare is going bankrupt, and these are the examples we want to follow? I agree that healthcare is broken, that's obvious, but bankrupting our economy to fix it seems like a case of not being able to see the forest because there are too many trees in the way.
You're right on the money, but what happens when you get cancer and have to pony up $500k for cancer treatments?
That's the kind of thing health insurance should be for, the catastrophic events that there is no way the average joe would be able to pay for.
Frankly, -anybody- can save up a couple thousand dollars a year, even if you make next to nothing. $1000 is only $20 per week, $2,000 is only $40. That's less than what most people spend on McDonalds in a week (which is NOT cheap! You can get the same shitty food for far less if you make it yourself). If you save a few thousand a year, you can cover all the small procedures on your own. What's more, in only a few years you'll be capable of covering rather large health care bills up front. All it takes is the discipline that most American's (including myself) lack.
The only real danger to someone paying in cash is catastrophy, and that's what insurance should be for.
I needed a root canal. My dental insurance covered root canals! Nice. Except... when I called them to get the name of a local specialist that could perform the procedure they told me, "Oh, #4 tooth? We don't cover root canals on that tooth. Sorry." This is a direct quote.
You realize that, at least as far as I've heard/read, there is nothing in the bill that would prevent this practice.
They can't deny you for pre-existing conditions, but there is nothing that I know of that guarantees the extent of the coverage they provide.
Proper healthcare is vital to a strong workforce. A strong workforce results in stronger returns in taxes.
You know, logic with absolutely no basis in fact is not solid logic no matter how well you transition from point to point. If what you say were true, the US would not be the dominant economic force in the world. The combined economic might of Europe is still on less than that of the US (though we seem to be working hard to fix that), yet the EU countries generally have socialized health care. Saving tons of money on that huh?
Frankly, the bill doesn't address any of the issues that cause health care in the US to cost so much, and if anything premiums are going to have to rise, if not skyrocket. There is a reason insurance companies pull all the bullshit tactics they do, and it's because it saves them money (and therefor increases their revenues). Take away a few of those tactics without introducing new ways to limit the costs and prices will just go up.
Then deny the illegal aliens that to which they are not entitled.
Except that that's illegal. It has already been determined that illegal imigrants have the right to the same basic protections/benefits that citizens do, especially regarding medical care. You can see this now with emergency care - a US citizen cannot be denied emergency care for any reason, and because of that neither can an illegal immigrant. If all citizens have the right to publicly funded medical insurance then so do the illegal immigrants. The ONLY difference is the illegals can be kicked out, though often they are not. That's the big secret of the "public option" - they can explicitly deny illegal immigrants in the law, and it won't matter one bit. The SCOTUS has already determined that illegals have the same rights to basic care that a citizen does.
Getting off the topic a little, but what pisses me off about the whole illegal imigration issue, is the fact that we have millions of people trying to become US citizens the legal way, who want to live and work and grow here, and it's almost impossible for them to do it. Yet it seems at least once a decade whichever US President is in power at the time decides to grant amnesty to millions of illegals. What the hell is that? I have two coworkers, one from Great Britain and another from Ireland, who have both worked here for almost as long as I've been alive, yet it wasn't until last week that they were sworn in as citizens. Seriously, wtf? They'd have become citizens sooner if they had come in illegally and waited for the seemingly inevitable amnesty that comes along every few years. It's ridiculous.
They are still responsible for it though. If it bites anybody in the ass, it's going to bite Sony first. Sony themselves will have to do any further biting in the ass.
You seem to have only read the first sentance of that paragraph, because it goes on to give additional incentives besides money, and also admit that companies can potentially profit from new technologies in ways other than the monopoly that copyright provides. Then they state that governments have chosen to suppliment the natural incentives.
It is completely accurate.
A lot of the current extreme backlash against copyright stems from a misunderstanding of what copyright is, and what it is intended to do. The goal of copyright is not to allow content producers to profit from their product - that's simply the vehicle for achieving its goal. The goal of copyright is to produce as much new creative content (art, literature, music, etc) as possible for the overall benefit of the public, and it sounds like at least one person at the WIPO understands this.
You see, copyright is really an exception to an individual's right to use of any property they own for any purpose except directly harming another individual or their property. It is an exception to your natural rights, and as such it has limitations. This doctrine basically says there are some situations where copying all or part of a work for certain purposes like analysis, review, commentary, etc, are fair and the copyright monopoly does not affect those uses. Because fair use is determined by deciding what copyright does not apply to, rather than what fair use applies to, it tends to be fuzzy and subjective.
Now, the companies who profit the most off of copyrighted works couldn't give a rat's ass about producing new content for the enhancement of society as a whole, all they care about is how much their content can be consumed. Obviously if copyrights they own go away after 20-30 years, they can't keep milking that cash cow, so they push for extensions. As soon as they get one they push for more, and more. It doesn't help that half the time congressmen don't have a clue (or sometimes even want to have a clue) about things like copyright and what it is for. So we end up with cartoons that have been copyrighted for 100 years with no end in sight, books that won't come into the public domain until they are largely irrelivant, and music that is copyrighted virtually indefinitely.
Sane copyright is a good thing, however insane copyright really just encourages piracy. Piracy has gotten so prevalent that I'm not even sure copyright is having that much of a detrimental effect on society. The funny thing is, people are generally happy to pay for this stuff if it is priced reasonably. What does it cost a record label to cut the price of a digital download in half and sell three times as many copies? If you can't do that math, you suck at business.
Boiling water isn't a direct electrical source either, it's all about energy conversion. The easiest way to convert heat into electricity is to first convert it to kinetic energy. The easiest, cheapest, and safest way to convert heat energy to kinetic energy is to boil water and creat a pressure differential to drive a piston or turbine or what have you. It's very effective, and there isn't any compound likely to do the job better than H2O that isn't also prohibitively expensive.
Heat is the easiest form of raw energy to produce, and if boiling water is the easiest, cheapest, and safest way to convert heat energy into kinetic energy (which is then trivial to convert to electrical energy at very high conversion rates).
Heat engines are also still the most efficient form of energy conversion available to us. A typical modern steam turbine generator will convert close to 50% of the heat energy to electricity, and in some applications can convert as much as 90%. Combustion engines are typically in the 30% range, but getting higher, though they have a theoretical hard limit at 37%. Photvoltaic is coming along, but frankly it's still young and the readily available PV cells compare poorly to combustion and turbine engines. The theoretical limit for a single cell is about 40% efficiency (with light concentrators), but new techniques are working around that limit (they use multiple materials in the cell, effectively combining several cells in one) and the current record is around 43%.
The big problem PV has vs combustion or turbine engines is energy density - the fuel sources the later two methods use are significantly more energy dense than plain sunlight. Sunlight throws a lot of energy everywhere, but only a little in any particular spot. Concentrating it effectively has always been a problem.
During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms -- and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.
In other words, they have detected 17 gamma-ray flashes due to lightning, and some of them have the signature of antimatter (i.e. the electron-positron annihilation).
I'm not sure how that's not exactly what you're saying they didn't say. Just because they didn't say 511 KeV? If 511 KeV is the signature of electron-positron antimatter collitions, and they've found the signature of antimatter collisions in some (not all) of the storms, wouldn't that suggest they are seeing 511 KeV bursts?
Here's more:
During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could have been produced only by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons.
It seems pretty specific about what they are seeing, it is simply stated in a high-level language that the common interested-but-not-knowledgeable reader can understand.
This is essentially an online science news magazine, not a journal for published papers seeking peer review. They are only going to give you the gist of the information at a high-level, and from there if you have better knowledge of the subject you should have an automatic deeper insight into what they might be seeing.
It's not like it's some amature job either, the space telescope was built to find this sort of thing, so finding these signatures is not like some wack job pop-sci company pushing nonsense in a press conference to attract investors before folding in a few years.
In truth I was working from memory there, there are a few other things in there that are slightly off as well. Like the Whig party, that was the party that originally split off from the Democratic Republican party, and the reason they split literally was because the Democrats wanted to move closer to a pure democracy, while the Whigs wanted to remain a solid Republic. Eventually the Whig party fell apart, and the new Republican party formed from the fallout.
The Democratic party is the oldest and longest party in US History, but even it was not the first party, the Federalist party came before it, which actually formed during George Washington's first term.
BTW, I totally would have voted for the Bull Moose party, dagnabbit!
You know, if we nixed minimum wage and let the currently illegal Mexican immigrants in en-mass we'd solve all our outsourcing and cheap labor problems.
Of course, it would cause other problems, but then we'd essentially be a first and second world country combined, and would compete with China and India as well as Europe on all levels.
It would also probably come close to ending unemployment, though a lot of people currently making 6 bucks an hour would not be making so much for very long, and that would erode pay up the scale until you get up to skillsets that take considerable investment and command higher pay from the get-go.
Plus, if Ron Paul had won, HOLY SHIT would he have a mandate from the people! The Elephants and Donkeys in Congress, even though they out-numbered him 650-1, would be shaking in their boots at the thought of pissing off such a large portion of their constituency by opposing him.
It would be very, very hard to come up with the 2/3 majority to over ride the veto of a guy who was elected completely out of left field.
You have to realize that Congressmen, particularly in the House of Representatives, are generally wimps. The reason there is so much waste is because every congressman panders to their constituency by slipping in funding for their little home-town pet project, all so they can say "Look what I did for you! Vote me in again!". It doesn't matter what party, Republicans spend money like it's going out of style, while Democrats spend money like it's all the rage. Hell, I'd be willing to bet almost half of the 2,000 page monstrosity of a health care bill is useless waste that could be stripped out and would have no effect on health care at all. Bills like that get loaded down with shit amendments because they are pushed so hard, something is going to pass eventually.
So when you have a candidate that outrageously pulls 50% plus of the vote from both Democrats and Republicans, Congress would take notice, and the opposition would more than likely be for show only as they cowered in fear of the next election cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
Well obviously Murdoch wants his web pages crawled, otherwise nobody will visit them.
Frankly, what he is demanding is non-sensical; he wants Google to index his news sites, but does NOT want Google to display headlines or partial text when returning results. How the hell is a searcher supposed to know that the link in question has any relevance at all to what they are looking for?
He also seems to have a pretty screwed up view of what fair use is. Fair use is not the exception to copyright, copyright is the exception to fair use. That's why copyright had to be enumerated in the first place. The fair use statutes are there to help clarify what copyright does -not- extend to, but it is intentionally left somewhat vague to make it difficult for copyright to over-step its bounds.
All of this comes from the stated goal of copyright in the copyright goal, which is to enhance the proliferation of creative arts for the betterment of society at large. It's goal is NOT to make content owners rich, that is simply the vehicle to increase the amount of creative art produced for public consumption.
So, when he says he believes fair use doctrine is on its way out, it shows that he has absolutely no understanding of what copyright is for, and that he is also one greedy som'bitch. If he is right in any way, it means our law has really been turned on its head.
Don't worry, given time /. moderation usually fixes itself. Your post is now current +2 Insightful, or something like that.
Actually you are accelerating - so long as you are standing on the earth you are constantly accelerating.
Acceleration is a change in velocity, not speed. Velocity can change with a change in speed OR direction, or both obviously.
While standing on the ground, gravity applies a force that accelerates you toward the ground instead of allowing you to fly off into space like your velocity at any given moment in time should cause you to do.
In other words, even though gravity cannot accelerate you by increasing your speed (or decreasing, for that matter, that's still acceleration), it can and does still accelerate you by continually changing your direction.
Effort costs money.
True.
Giving away your stuff isn't usually a good way to make money.
Non-sequitur.
This incorrectly implies that the only reason for innovation is to directly make money off them.
Ok, you just agreed that true innovation requires money, often large somes of money. Where does that money come from, if no profit is made off of the innovations? Donations do not work anywhere near as well as investments, and getting income indirectly is tricky and often impossible depending the potential uses for a given innovation.
It seems like it follows pretty well to me.
The parent never said money was the "only reason for innovation", but given that the primary means we as a society use to reward innovation is via monetary gain it is definitely the primary reason for innovation. Go back and have a look-see at all the great inventions (you know, the ones that really changed the way we do things) in history and you'll find that almost all of them were used for direct monetary gain. This motivation is so important we have global standards for limited monopolies on innovative things, be it copyright or patents.
Only if the inventor/developer's main goal is to sell the "innovation" for a profit. If the goal is reduced costs
Reduced costs = greater profit margin and/or a competitive advantage. Again, this relates directly to the primary reason innovations occur. Even "eureka" moments usually happen when an inventor is attempting to solve a different problem for profit. Generally the reason people give their innovations away is because they are not big enough to profit from directly, or the nature of the innovation makes it difficult to profit from directly, so they instead opt for indirect rewards. There is a very small percentage of people who give away their innovations for altruistic reasons.
I'm not sure you understand the difference between a rhetorical device (simile, metaphor, hyperbole, etc) and a fallacy (ad hominem, begging the question, straw man).
I super quick test in case you aren't sure: a rhetorical device, when used correctly and understood by the target audience, will always enhance the idea you are trying to convey, whereas a fallacy cannot be used correctly by definition, and when understood by the target audience will always undermine the idea you are trying to convey.
Fallacies are specific to arguments, rhetorical devices are not.
If you want a list of fallacies to study up on so you can tell the difference next time, try this site.
Oh and in case you weren't able to glean it from my text: yes, I do think you are a moron.
...relative to the rest of England
Read much?
You are absolutely correct. It's an engineering challenge, not a conceptual one. Solving the engineering challenges may have been what made them decide against it in Vermont, however. That and the fact that, despite the benefits, I don't think most people would feel comfortable living inside a giant dome.
I'd certainly want to see it, but I don't think I'd like to live there.
They simulate Mars conditions all the time, and they defintely would test it on earth first to be sure it operated as expected. That does not mean they will be putting it over a city.
See, this certain crop isn't exactly "legal" in most states yet.
And even in those states where it IS legal, it isn't legal. You won't get busted by the city or state cops, but the feds will keep running their "War On Drugs" forever.
My state has some very confusing laws, like it's legal to own it, but it's illegal to buy or grow it. 0.o
Then again, most people making 100k or more a year are self-employed and willing to sacrifice a little comfort and take some extra risk in order to get ahead in the long run.
Hardly, most of the people I work with make a lot more than that, and none of them are even close to managerial level. They are, however, engineers. If you have a valuable skill to sell, you can make a good deal of money by selling it to the right people. You don't have to be an entrepreneur. Hell there are a few experienced helpdesk techs in our group who make nearly 100k, and I'm currently under-paid for my skills at around 50k (I'm working on that, contracts are a bitch sometimes).
The 100k mark is actually pretty low on the earnings scale, and yet the majority of people don't earn much less than that. This is fine, because the majority of people don't bother to get a profitable education, or put in the large amount of effort it takes to start a business, and so they live in mediocrity.
If anybody thinks there is no room for people who work hard and make themselves valuable, they should look at the stats for the amount of high-paid talent that comes into the US on work visas every year. The reason that happens is because the US is simply not producing enough talent to cover the needs of US businesses.
You've obviously never seen giant, radioactive jellyfish before. They easily transition from water to air and hover over the city, soaking up the juice from the power lines (they use it to help them hover) before floating down to Tokyo Tower for some tenticle-based destruction. Oh and pr0n. Wherever there are tenticles in Japan, there's tenticle pr0n.
It's been shown that simply cordoning off sections of the ocean where no one is allowed...
You realize you just described a fishery, right? A fishery is not some giant tank where fish are grown (ok, it CAN be, but that is by far the exception). The vast majority of fisheries aren't even fish farms, they are wild fisheries.
Fisheries are areas where fishing is actively regulated for the express purpose of producing a larger fish harvest. We have dozens, if not close to a hundred, fisheries here in Alaska, and as far as I know not a single fish farming operation, those all operate on the west-coast.
In other words, what you want is a fishery.
If you don't understand the difference, then there's no helping you.
If you can't explain the difference, then perhaps there is none.
Government run monopolies, at least in the US, are all terribly inefficient. One big, shining example is public education - it's horrible and expensive. What ranking among 1st world countries are we down to now, 50th? Worse? I'm not sure, the last figure I saw was 49th and that was years ago, and I know it hasn't gotten any better. We average close to $10,000 per year per student, and it's utter crap. There is so much beurocracy that the $10,000 is almost eaten up before you even get to the teacher's salary, leaving next to nothing for books and school programs. Compare that to the private school I went to, which recieved zero government funding, and cost less than $5,000 per student. SAT scores, as well as a number of local academic competitions, regularly average higher scores than their public school counterparts, and for the competitions the public schools get to pick from a much larger pool of students to compete with.
Frankly, ANY monopoly becomes terribly inefficient without some force equally powerful to keep it in check. In a non-monopoly situation, that force is competition. In a monopoly the force is the government. But what happens when the monopoly IS the government? There is no opposing force to keep it in check.
Canada and the UK's healthcare systems are both going bankrupt, Medicare is going bankrupt, and these are the examples we want to follow? I agree that healthcare is broken, that's obvious, but bankrupting our economy to fix it seems like a case of not being able to see the forest because there are too many trees in the way.
You're right on the money, but what happens when you get cancer and have to pony up $500k for cancer treatments?
That's the kind of thing health insurance should be for, the catastrophic events that there is no way the average joe would be able to pay for.
Frankly, -anybody- can save up a couple thousand dollars a year, even if you make next to nothing. $1000 is only $20 per week, $2,000 is only $40. That's less than what most people spend on McDonalds in a week (which is NOT cheap! You can get the same shitty food for far less if you make it yourself). If you save a few thousand a year, you can cover all the small procedures on your own. What's more, in only a few years you'll be capable of covering rather large health care bills up front. All it takes is the discipline that most American's (including myself) lack.
The only real danger to someone paying in cash is catastrophy, and that's what insurance should be for.
I needed a root canal. My dental insurance covered root canals! Nice. Except... when I called them to get the name of a local specialist that could perform the procedure they told me, "Oh, #4 tooth? We don't cover root canals on that tooth. Sorry." This is a direct quote.
You realize that, at least as far as I've heard/read, there is nothing in the bill that would prevent this practice.
They can't deny you for pre-existing conditions, but there is nothing that I know of that guarantees the extent of the coverage they provide.
Proper healthcare is vital to a strong workforce. A strong workforce results in stronger returns in taxes.
You know, logic with absolutely no basis in fact is not solid logic no matter how well you transition from point to point. If what you say were true, the US would not be the dominant economic force in the world. The combined economic might of Europe is still on less than that of the US (though we seem to be working hard to fix that), yet the EU countries generally have socialized health care. Saving tons of money on that huh?
Frankly, the bill doesn't address any of the issues that cause health care in the US to cost so much, and if anything premiums are going to have to rise, if not skyrocket. There is a reason insurance companies pull all the bullshit tactics they do, and it's because it saves them money (and therefor increases their revenues). Take away a few of those tactics without introducing new ways to limit the costs and prices will just go up.
Then deny the illegal aliens that to which they are not entitled.
Except that that's illegal. It has already been determined that illegal imigrants have the right to the same basic protections/benefits that citizens do, especially regarding medical care. You can see this now with emergency care - a US citizen cannot be denied emergency care for any reason, and because of that neither can an illegal immigrant. If all citizens have the right to publicly funded medical insurance then so do the illegal immigrants. The ONLY difference is the illegals can be kicked out, though often they are not. That's the big secret of the "public option" - they can explicitly deny illegal immigrants in the law, and it won't matter one bit. The SCOTUS has already determined that illegals have the same rights to basic care that a citizen does.
Getting off the topic a little, but what pisses me off about the whole illegal imigration issue, is the fact that we have millions of people trying to become US citizens the legal way, who want to live and work and grow here, and it's almost impossible for them to do it. Yet it seems at least once a decade whichever US President is in power at the time decides to grant amnesty to millions of illegals. What the hell is that? I have two coworkers, one from Great Britain and another from Ireland, who have both worked here for almost as long as I've been alive, yet it wasn't until last week that they were sworn in as citizens. Seriously, wtf? They'd have become citizens sooner if they had come in illegally and waited for the seemingly inevitable amnesty that comes along every few years. It's ridiculous.
They are still responsible for it though. If it bites anybody in the ass, it's going to bite Sony first. Sony themselves will have to do any further biting in the ass.
I prefer the more subtle approach: "It's not the dress..."
Of course, I currently don't have a girlfriend, so use at your own risk.
You seem to have only read the first sentance of that paragraph, because it goes on to give additional incentives besides money, and also admit that companies can potentially profit from new technologies in ways other than the monopoly that copyright provides. Then they state that governments have chosen to suppliment the natural incentives.
It is completely accurate.
A lot of the current extreme backlash against copyright stems from a misunderstanding of what copyright is, and what it is intended to do. The goal of copyright is not to allow content producers to profit from their product - that's simply the vehicle for achieving its goal. The goal of copyright is to produce as much new creative content (art, literature, music, etc) as possible for the overall benefit of the public, and it sounds like at least one person at the WIPO understands this.
You see, copyright is really an exception to an individual's right to use of any property they own for any purpose except directly harming another individual or their property. It is an exception to your natural rights, and as such it has limitations. This doctrine basically says there are some situations where copying all or part of a work for certain purposes like analysis, review, commentary, etc, are fair and the copyright monopoly does not affect those uses. Because fair use is determined by deciding what copyright does not apply to, rather than what fair use applies to, it tends to be fuzzy and subjective.
Now, the companies who profit the most off of copyrighted works couldn't give a rat's ass about producing new content for the enhancement of society as a whole, all they care about is how much their content can be consumed. Obviously if copyrights they own go away after 20-30 years, they can't keep milking that cash cow, so they push for extensions. As soon as they get one they push for more, and more. It doesn't help that half the time congressmen don't have a clue (or sometimes even want to have a clue) about things like copyright and what it is for. So we end up with cartoons that have been copyrighted for 100 years with no end in sight, books that won't come into the public domain until they are largely irrelivant, and music that is copyrighted virtually indefinitely.
Sane copyright is a good thing, however insane copyright really just encourages piracy. Piracy has gotten so prevalent that I'm not even sure copyright is having that much of a detrimental effect on society. The funny thing is, people are generally happy to pay for this stuff if it is priced reasonably. What does it cost a record label to cut the price of a digital download in half and sell three times as many copies? If you can't do that math, you suck at business.
Had a mis-statement, I meant turbine engines are the most efficient form of energy conversion available.
Also, ignore the fragment.
Boiling water isn't a direct electrical source either, it's all about energy conversion. The easiest way to convert heat into electricity is to first convert it to kinetic energy. The easiest, cheapest, and safest way to convert heat energy to kinetic energy is to boil water and creat a pressure differential to drive a piston or turbine or what have you. It's very effective, and there isn't any compound likely to do the job better than H2O that isn't also prohibitively expensive.
Heat is the easiest form of raw energy to produce, and if boiling water is the easiest, cheapest, and safest way to convert heat energy into kinetic energy (which is then trivial to convert to electrical energy at very high conversion rates).
Heat engines are also still the most efficient form of energy conversion available to us. A typical modern steam turbine generator will convert close to 50% of the heat energy to electricity, and in some applications can convert as much as 90%. Combustion engines are typically in the 30% range, but getting higher, though they have a theoretical hard limit at 37%. Photvoltaic is coming along, but frankly it's still young and the readily available PV cells compare poorly to combustion and turbine engines. The theoretical limit for a single cell is about 40% efficiency (with light concentrators), but new techniques are working around that limit (they use multiple materials in the cell, effectively combining several cells in one) and the current record is around 43%.
The big problem PV has vs combustion or turbine engines is energy density - the fuel sources the later two methods use are significantly more energy dense than plain sunlight. Sunlight throws a lot of energy everywhere, but only a little in any particular spot. Concentrating it effectively has always been a problem.
From the first paragraph of the article:
During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms -- and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.
In other words, they have detected 17 gamma-ray flashes due to lightning, and some of them have the signature of antimatter (i.e. the electron-positron annihilation).
I'm not sure how that's not exactly what you're saying they didn't say. Just because they didn't say 511 KeV? If 511 KeV is the signature of electron-positron antimatter collitions, and they've found the signature of antimatter collisions in some (not all) of the storms, wouldn't that suggest they are seeing 511 KeV bursts?
Here's more:
During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could have been produced only by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons.
It seems pretty specific about what they are seeing, it is simply stated in a high-level language that the common interested-but-not-knowledgeable reader can understand.
This is essentially an online science news magazine, not a journal for published papers seeking peer review. They are only going to give you the gist of the information at a high-level, and from there if you have better knowledge of the subject you should have an automatic deeper insight into what they might be seeing.
It's not like it's some amature job either, the space telescope was built to find this sort of thing, so finding these signatures is not like some wack job pop-sci company pushing nonsense in a press conference to attract investors before folding in a few years.
In truth I was working from memory there, there are a few other things in there that are slightly off as well. Like the Whig party, that was the party that originally split off from the Democratic Republican party, and the reason they split literally was because the Democrats wanted to move closer to a pure democracy, while the Whigs wanted to remain a solid Republic. Eventually the Whig party fell apart, and the new Republican party formed from the fallout.
The Democratic party is the oldest and longest party in US History, but even it was not the first party, the Federalist party came before it, which actually formed during George Washington's first term.
BTW, I totally would have voted for the Bull Moose party, dagnabbit!
You know, if we nixed minimum wage and let the currently illegal Mexican immigrants in en-mass we'd solve all our outsourcing and cheap labor problems.
Of course, it would cause other problems, but then we'd essentially be a first and second world country combined, and would compete with China and India as well as Europe on all levels.
It would also probably come close to ending unemployment, though a lot of people currently making 6 bucks an hour would not be making so much for very long, and that would erode pay up the scale until you get up to skillsets that take considerable investment and command higher pay from the get-go.
Plus, if Ron Paul had won, HOLY SHIT would he have a mandate from the people! The Elephants and Donkeys in Congress, even though they out-numbered him 650-1, would be shaking in their boots at the thought of pissing off such a large portion of their constituency by opposing him.
It would be very, very hard to come up with the 2/3 majority to over ride the veto of a guy who was elected completely out of left field.
You have to realize that Congressmen, particularly in the House of Representatives, are generally wimps. The reason there is so much waste is because every congressman panders to their constituency by slipping in funding for their little home-town pet project, all so they can say "Look what I did for you! Vote me in again!". It doesn't matter what party, Republicans spend money like it's going out of style, while Democrats spend money like it's all the rage. Hell, I'd be willing to bet almost half of the 2,000 page monstrosity of a health care bill is useless waste that could be stripped out and would have no effect on health care at all. Bills like that get loaded down with shit amendments because they are pushed so hard, something is going to pass eventually.
So when you have a candidate that outrageously pulls 50% plus of the vote from both Democrats and Republicans, Congress would take notice, and the opposition would more than likely be for show only as they cowered in fear of the next election cycle.