I know that Bank of Boston only accepts 4 (I know because they didn't tell me, so I chose a 6 digit number, which the atm then wouldn't accept). Not sure if their ATMs can accept pins for non Bank of Boston customers with more than 4 digits.
It's important to note that the judge hasn't said that this definately is a contract, just that there's enough evidence to make this a reasonable case. So now they get to have the actual trial.
You may be right about some of that, but one thing you're definately wrong about is the ability of the government to fire people. Government employees always have the highest job security, and any attempt to fire someone becomes a bureaucratic nightmare.
Look at the school system, public school teachers get paid more than private school teachers, but are generally worse because they stay at their jobs forever no matter how much their teaching deteriorates.
Jules Verne was not the visionary many people make him out to be these days. Most of his books contained gross scientific inaccuracies (even based on the lessened understanding of science at the time), some intentional, some not. In _From the Earth To the Moon_, he deliberately thought up a technique that could not possibly work, and furthermore chose a site for the gun that he knew had underground water, which would flood the barrel, because much of the book was aimed at making fun of American arrogance. Submarines existed prior to _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_. In _The Mysterious Island_ one of the characters deduces that a hot spring must be 98.6 degrees, because it feels neither hot nor cold, so it must be the same as one's body temperature. Ever gotten in a 100 degree hot tub? Pretty damn hot.
That's an exceptionally short list, I could go on at great length about inaccuracies, but suffice to say it was not "hard sci-fi" by any means. So, seriously, the only thing Jules Verne foreshadowed was the rise of science fiction, not the science or inventions themselves.
Animals manage it just fine, and humans managed it before verbal communication, so I've got to figure it's fairly intuitive. I've been given to understand that when babies are born they see everything upside down, and it takes a few weeks before their brains learn to compensate, so maybe that's part of why they have trouble at first. That and the fact that they have no coordination yet either.
John Williams does do good work. However, it seemed to me that all the music in the trailer was taken directly from previous movies. Has he not yet recorded the music, or is he simply getting less original?
I'm glad I saw Final Fantasy... once. I'm a big fan of anime, and Final Fantasy, but the plot of the movie bit ass. Still, it was impressive to look at, and that was worth the price of admission for me.
Ever tried to get CSS to work in IE 4? No, of course not, because IE 4 is now totally obsolete. Netscape 4 would probably be obsolete too if Microsoft hadn't crushed them.
As it is, Mozilla is the successor to Netscape 4, and CSS, I understand, works just fine in the more recent builds.
Using your analogy, the way it works is this: you create a plan whereby, if you see your neighbor running across the lawn brandishing his shotgun with a crazy look in his eyes, you will get behind the couch and point your shotgun at the door. If he breaks down your door, you will then shoot him. You don't want him to bust into your house, you don't even really expect him to bust into your house, but just in case, you've got a plan to cover it.
These contingency plans have nothing to do with first strike. The avowed strategy for the US continues to be "no first strike with weapons of mass destruction." (Though of course, what is considered a weapon of mass destruction is occasionally subject to change.)
The reason we have contingency plans for nuking Russia is because Russia has the most nukes besides us, and is not entirely stable politically. We certainly don't expect that Putin's going to do anything that would activate those plans, but what if there were another coup? The point is that we want to work out these worst case scenarios NOW, so that if (god forbid) any of it ever comes to pass, we know what to do, and we're not just running around like chickens with our heads cut off.
Stalin responded with indifference because he already knew about the project, had spies in place, and had scientists actively working to copy the American designs. Truman, in his unbelievable ignorance, thought he could secure more favorable peace terms in dividing up Germany by sending Stalin veiled threats about a new superweapon. All he did in reality though was kickstart the cold war and let Stalin know that he was a bit behind in the rush to build the first nuclear weapons.
Also, they knew damn well how powerful the blast would be. What they didn't expect was the radioactive fallout. For decades after radioactive materials were still used for glow in the dark consumer objects (watch faces, for example).
Other than that though, I agree with your points. The nuclear attacks shocked an exceptionally stubborn and prideful country into surrendering, almost certainly reducing loss of life on both sides.
No, but I do face them when I talk. My mouth is still pointing in the direction that I am projecting sound. Do you stand at right angles to people when you talk to them?
He didn't say it doesn't work, he said it doesn't feel right, and I agree. I want what I'm talking into to be in front of my mouth, not over on the side of my face. Besides which, it seems that these small phones unconciously causes people to talk louder, to the point where many people on cell phones are almost shouting, to the great annoyance of all around them.
Actually, I read an arcticle recently about a species of insect that has had something of an evolutionary arms race between the males and the females. In the time that they've been studying this species, the male genitalia has become larger and capable of grasping the females, while the females have gotten faster and gained a partial ability to close off access to their reproductive organs.
I'm sorry, but if you can't see how incredibly arrogant you are being, there's not a whole lot else to say. You refuse to educate yourself for fear you'll "end up like me?" You obviously don't understand the first thing about what inflation even is, and your casual dismissal of the output of certain types of workers based on your own pereferences is downright sickening.
Christ, this is turning into an Intro to Economics course. Seriously, do yourself a favor and take such a course, it'll do you some good. The real price LEVEL is fixed (by definition), relative prices of good A and good B fluctuate against each other. Actually, one measure of inflation, the GDP deflator, has difficulty with relative price fluctuations, which is one reason that the CPI, despite its many failings, is used more frequently.
Okay, the 10 million reasons why your idea is overly simplistic, undoable and insane. First and foremost, all men are not created equal. If person A can make 4000 loaves of bread in an hour but person B can only make 2000 loaves, then what do you do? If you pay them the same, then person A will figure "fuck this, I'm not going to knock myself out making 4000 loaves, I'll just take it easy and make 2000 also. Hell, maybe I'll only make 50 loaves an hour, who cares?" This, obviously, is one of the main problems with communism. People are inherently lazy. Maybe not all people, but more than society can care for without some kind of competitive system. The USSR tried to get around this with quotas, but people still found ways around it. If the government said you had to produce 4000 shoes, then the factory would produce 4000 size 6 lefty sandles. So they'd say, "2000 pairs, different sizes, and different types." So the factory would produce 1999 pairs of size 6 sandles, and 1 pair of size 7 sneakers. And every time the requirements became more detailed, you had to have more and more people checking compliance, and the people working in the factories found more and more creative ways around the restrictions. Besides all that, would you really want to live in a world where if you don't make production quotas, you don't just lose your job, you're sent to Siberia?
Okay, point 2, how do you distribute labor and goods? A truck driver and a garbage man have the same set of skills, they both drive trucks. However, I think we can all agree that being a truck driver is a much better job. So, without some sort of oversight, everyone would choose the better jobs assuming equal pay. With fixed prices, this would create excess trucking capacity, while garbage would pile up on the streets. Then of course, once you produce your goods you have to get them to the people. You obviously don't appreciate the amount of effort that goes into keeping the shelves of stores fully stocked while having a minimum of products going bad. It takes lots of research and lots of (yes, that's right) middle managers to keep that running smoothly. I'm not sure if you are old enough to have any recollection/knowledge of the attempt the government made to control distribution of gasoline in the 70's, but suffice it to say that it was an absolute goddamn nightmare. They were probably only off by maybe a couple percentage points here or there, but the result was thousands of gallons of surplus or shortage in certain areas. People literally killed each other for cutting in gas station lines because the shortage got so bad. It's precisely because of that era that gas tanks to this day have anti-siphon devices on them.
Third, I've already hinted above at why middle managers are not the waste you seem to think they are (bankers fall into the same catagory of striving for efficiency in movement of resources), but what about all the rest of the jobs you would eliminate? Some people LIKE watching sports. Most of us like watching movies and listening to music. Ah, I see, you still want people to do these things, you just don't want to pay them for it, am I right? You expect someone like Mark McGuire to continue to spend (I'm making this number up) 15 hours a week in the gym lifting weights, plus another (again, made up number) 30 hours practicing baseball, just for the fun of it? You expect him to fly all over the country (how do you motivate people to spend the requisite amount of time in flight school if their paid the same as a manual laborer?), be seperated from his family for weeks at a time, and get booed by opposing fans just for the joy of the game? On top of that, you expect him to work, however much, say 10 hours, doing something "productive" so he can actually be allowed to eat? Ain't going to happen my friend. Sure, there are people that would be happy to play for free in a local park, but it's just not exciting to watch that when you know just how incredibly good a professional athlete can be.
Finally, I think your estimates on time are off. Sure, one person might be able to turn dough into loaves of bread at a rate close to 4000 an hour, but what about growing the wheat, grinding it into flour, and mixing it with the other ingredients (what all goes into bread? Yeast, eggs, sugar, and salt, I know, anything else?). Plus, of course, someone has to make all of those other ingredients too. Quite frankly, I think you'd be lucky to get even 10 loaves an hour, if you sum up the work time of everyone in the supply chain.
Okay, moving on to fusion power. I don't think fusion is impossible. Indeed, I hope I will see it in my lifetime. I just am saying that throwing an ungodly amount of money at the problem because of your conviction that it's just around the corner is a tremendous risk for society to take for not a whole heck of a lot of benefit. Electricity is pretty damn cheap as it is, I think my monthly power bills were in the range of $10 or $11 a month, and this was in California during the height of the "power emergency." I don't see how fusion is going to suddenly change the world as you seem to think. Okay, maybe fuel cells become a little more reasonable as a technology, but who does that hurt? The auto manufacturers are already working on putting fuel cells in their cars, they don't care. Any pressure from domestic oil companies would be offset by our desire to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Seriously, I just don't see the threat (or all that much of a benefit) here. Maybe if they were virtually free to manufacture, and could fit inside a minitower case, I could see that as being a great bonus for society, but more likely they'll be at least the size of a fission plant, and cost a bloody fortune.
Prices are going down in real terms (well, put more correctly, real income is rising, because by definition real prices are held fixed, that's how we determine inflation). If you believe otherwise, you need to read some economic data. Yes, there is inflation, but that's not the same thing. That's a simple devaluation of currency.
I argue that we simply don't know if fusion can be done in a fashion that is 1) cheap 2) safe 3) provides a great deal of excess energy 4) practical here on earth (recreating the sun would not be practical). Business would LOVE to get a piece of fusion if they thought it was practical. Maybe existing power companies would be concerned, but an upstart could get funding and go for it (Enron, despite all its assorted accounting frauds, went from nothing to enourmous in a very short period of time, so it IS entirely possible). Really, fusion power would be an ideal business to be in because building a fusion plant would have a high cost barrier to entry, especially if the company that invented it patented associated technologies. It is very rare that a company is actually able to surpress a technology they find threatening, and if they do, it's always through government intervention.
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I know that Bank of Boston only accepts 4 (I know because they didn't tell me, so I chose a 6 digit number, which the atm then wouldn't accept). Not sure if their ATMs can accept pins for non Bank of Boston customers with more than 4 digits.
Right, but the product in question is Lindows, not Microsoft Lindows. Also, it's not X Windows, it's the X Window System, or X.
It's important to note that the judge hasn't said that this definately is a contract, just that there's enough evidence to make this a reasonable case. So now they get to have the actual trial.
He means things like stop signs, yeild signs, pedestrian crossings, crap like that, not signs that give the names of streets.
Wouldn't that be "both," rather than "neither?"
Look at the school system, public school teachers get paid more than private school teachers, but are generally worse because they stay at their jobs forever no matter how much their teaching deteriorates.
That's an exceptionally short list, I could go on at great length about inaccuracies, but suffice to say it was not "hard sci-fi" by any means. So, seriously, the only thing Jules Verne foreshadowed was the rise of science fiction, not the science or inventions themselves.
Just my $0.02
Animals manage it just fine, and humans managed it before verbal communication, so I've got to figure it's fairly intuitive. I've been given to understand that when babies are born they see everything upside down, and it takes a few weeks before their brains learn to compensate, so maybe that's part of why they have trouble at first. That and the fact that they have no coordination yet either.
John Williams does do good work. However, it seemed to me that all the music in the trailer was taken directly from previous movies. Has he not yet recorded the music, or is he simply getting less original?
I'm glad I saw Final Fantasy... once. I'm a big fan of anime, and Final Fantasy, but the plot of the movie bit ass. Still, it was impressive to look at, and that was worth the price of admission for me.
Try Independence War. Maybe it doesn't have the nukes, but the universe does have newtonian physics.
As it is, Mozilla is the successor to Netscape 4, and CSS, I understand, works just fine in the more recent builds.
These contingency plans have nothing to do with first strike. The avowed strategy for the US continues to be "no first strike with weapons of mass destruction." (Though of course, what is considered a weapon of mass destruction is occasionally subject to change.)
Go ahead and tell me why this is wrong.
The reason we have contingency plans for nuking Russia is because Russia has the most nukes besides us, and is not entirely stable politically. We certainly don't expect that Putin's going to do anything that would activate those plans, but what if there were another coup? The point is that we want to work out these worst case scenarios NOW, so that if (god forbid) any of it ever comes to pass, we know what to do, and we're not just running around like chickens with our heads cut off.
Also, they knew damn well how powerful the blast would be. What they didn't expect was the radioactive fallout. For decades after radioactive materials were still used for glow in the dark consumer objects (watch faces, for example).
Other than that though, I agree with your points. The nuclear attacks shocked an exceptionally stubborn and prideful country into surrendering, almost certainly reducing loss of life on both sides.
No, but I do face them when I talk. My mouth is still pointing in the direction that I am projecting sound. Do you stand at right angles to people when you talk to them?
He didn't say it doesn't work, he said it doesn't feel right, and I agree. I want what I'm talking into to be in front of my mouth, not over on the side of my face. Besides which, it seems that these small phones unconciously causes people to talk louder, to the point where many people on cell phones are almost shouting, to the great annoyance of all around them.
"it" and "in" are ignored by google, so it's just "leave" and "me," not necessarily in any particular order.
I think they're more focused on the second definition... perpetual employment for themselves.
Anyway, I just thought that was pretty weird.
I think there's one species that's man made...
I'm sorry, but if you can't see how incredibly arrogant you are being, there's not a whole lot else to say. You refuse to educate yourself for fear you'll "end up like me?" You obviously don't understand the first thing about what inflation even is, and your casual dismissal of the output of certain types of workers based on your own pereferences is downright sickening.
Okay, the 10 million reasons why your idea is overly simplistic, undoable and insane. First and foremost, all men are not created equal. If person A can make 4000 loaves of bread in an hour but person B can only make 2000 loaves, then what do you do? If you pay them the same, then person A will figure "fuck this, I'm not going to knock myself out making 4000 loaves, I'll just take it easy and make 2000 also. Hell, maybe I'll only make 50 loaves an hour, who cares?" This, obviously, is one of the main problems with communism. People are inherently lazy. Maybe not all people, but more than society can care for without some kind of competitive system. The USSR tried to get around this with quotas, but people still found ways around it. If the government said you had to produce 4000 shoes, then the factory would produce 4000 size 6 lefty sandles. So they'd say, "2000 pairs, different sizes, and different types." So the factory would produce 1999 pairs of size 6 sandles, and 1 pair of size 7 sneakers. And every time the requirements became more detailed, you had to have more and more people checking compliance, and the people working in the factories found more and more creative ways around the restrictions. Besides all that, would you really want to live in a world where if you don't make production quotas, you don't just lose your job, you're sent to Siberia?
Okay, point 2, how do you distribute labor and goods? A truck driver and a garbage man have the same set of skills, they both drive trucks. However, I think we can all agree that being a truck driver is a much better job. So, without some sort of oversight, everyone would choose the better jobs assuming equal pay. With fixed prices, this would create excess trucking capacity, while garbage would pile up on the streets. Then of course, once you produce your goods you have to get them to the people. You obviously don't appreciate the amount of effort that goes into keeping the shelves of stores fully stocked while having a minimum of products going bad. It takes lots of research and lots of (yes, that's right) middle managers to keep that running smoothly. I'm not sure if you are old enough to have any recollection/knowledge of the attempt the government made to control distribution of gasoline in the 70's, but suffice it to say that it was an absolute goddamn nightmare. They were probably only off by maybe a couple percentage points here or there, but the result was thousands of gallons of surplus or shortage in certain areas. People literally killed each other for cutting in gas station lines because the shortage got so bad. It's precisely because of that era that gas tanks to this day have anti-siphon devices on them.
Third, I've already hinted above at why middle managers are not the waste you seem to think they are (bankers fall into the same catagory of striving for efficiency in movement of resources), but what about all the rest of the jobs you would eliminate? Some people LIKE watching sports. Most of us like watching movies and listening to music. Ah, I see, you still want people to do these things, you just don't want to pay them for it, am I right? You expect someone like Mark McGuire to continue to spend (I'm making this number up) 15 hours a week in the gym lifting weights, plus another (again, made up number) 30 hours practicing baseball, just for the fun of it? You expect him to fly all over the country (how do you motivate people to spend the requisite amount of time in flight school if their paid the same as a manual laborer?), be seperated from his family for weeks at a time, and get booed by opposing fans just for the joy of the game? On top of that, you expect him to work, however much, say 10 hours, doing something "productive" so he can actually be allowed to eat? Ain't going to happen my friend. Sure, there are people that would be happy to play for free in a local park, but it's just not exciting to watch that when you know just how incredibly good a professional athlete can be.
Finally, I think your estimates on time are off. Sure, one person might be able to turn dough into loaves of bread at a rate close to 4000 an hour, but what about growing the wheat, grinding it into flour, and mixing it with the other ingredients (what all goes into bread? Yeast, eggs, sugar, and salt, I know, anything else?). Plus, of course, someone has to make all of those other ingredients too. Quite frankly, I think you'd be lucky to get even 10 loaves an hour, if you sum up the work time of everyone in the supply chain.
Okay, moving on to fusion power. I don't think fusion is impossible. Indeed, I hope I will see it in my lifetime. I just am saying that throwing an ungodly amount of money at the problem because of your conviction that it's just around the corner is a tremendous risk for society to take for not a whole heck of a lot of benefit. Electricity is pretty damn cheap as it is, I think my monthly power bills were in the range of $10 or $11 a month, and this was in California during the height of the "power emergency." I don't see how fusion is going to suddenly change the world as you seem to think. Okay, maybe fuel cells become a little more reasonable as a technology, but who does that hurt? The auto manufacturers are already working on putting fuel cells in their cars, they don't care. Any pressure from domestic oil companies would be offset by our desire to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Seriously, I just don't see the threat (or all that much of a benefit) here. Maybe if they were virtually free to manufacture, and could fit inside a minitower case, I could see that as being a great bonus for society, but more likely they'll be at least the size of a fission plant, and cost a bloody fortune.
I argue that we simply don't know if fusion can be done in a fashion that is 1) cheap 2) safe 3) provides a great deal of excess energy 4) practical here on earth (recreating the sun would not be practical). Business would LOVE to get a piece of fusion if they thought it was practical. Maybe existing power companies would be concerned, but an upstart could get funding and go for it (Enron, despite all its assorted accounting frauds, went from nothing to enourmous in a very short period of time, so it IS entirely possible). Really, fusion power would be an ideal business to be in because building a fusion plant would have a high cost barrier to entry, especially if the company that invented it patented associated technologies. It is very rare that a company is actually able to surpress a technology they find threatening, and if they do, it's always through government intervention.