I'm no chemophobe, I just want to not put any of these 12 harmful chemical groups on my skin or down my drain. Unfortunately they're in EVERY!! SINGLE!! mass produced skin lotion and shampoo.
(Had to upstage your exclamation point emphasis to show that even in the extreme it doesn't make words any more meaningful.)
BTW the most common artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame) are not only far from organic, they were discovered in labs by accident, not even trying to work on anything edible. See, if a sweetener is organic, it's not artificial then is it?
I believe the term "takes one to know one" has never been more fitting.
But it's true, Macs are now plentiful enough to attract the attention of malware purveyors, and the fact that the target market is so unsuspecting must be making them salivate. It's certainly in M$'s best interests to make this known, and they're doing the Mac fanboi's a favor by putting them on alert.
And before someone sharp-shoots me on the apostrophe, it's acceptable to use one when otherwise the plural forms a misleading word. "Fanbois" looks French...
They'd be a perfect offense on a civilian crowd. Why wait for real terrorists to strike when you can just facilitate them or even just stage it yourself.
"This just in, terrorists have taken command of two flat-top SAR missile platforms and are raining missiles all over London. MI5 has been granted emergency powers to arrest and detain indefinitely without charge" etc.
I am not a tax attorney, but doesn't the US also have the highest tax write-offs for lobbying, political contributions, and other means of influencing the government? As usual, the rules benefit corporations with the means and willingness to manipulate the system. There's high taxes to preclude benevolent corporations from prospering, oil restrictions that only the most corrupt corporations can circumvent, FDA restrictions so costly only the most corrupt pharmaceutical corporations can afford, and don't get me started on the SEC, military contractors, or the health system. They're all exactly how the most corrupt corporations want them.
So would you rather US corporations dodged taxes, or essentially spent them to subvert the system against its citizens?
Terms Of Service notifications are completely meaningless from corporate entities with absolutely no substantial liability for violating them. Go piss up a rope.
I suppose it depends on the design, but a smaller reactor can be built so that if it loses cooling it just shuts down (i.e. the reaction stops), not melts down. I remember reading about this a long time ago, about how we could have reactors in neighborhoods with no problems. Oh wait, here we go:
"Most [small reactors] are also designed for a high level of passive or inherent safety in the event of malfunction. A 2010 report by a special committee convened by the American Nuclear Society showed that many safety provisions necessary, or at least prudent, in large reactors are not necessary in the small designs forthcoming."
Yeah, let's downplay the need for safety measures. What could go wrong? Whatever you do, don't employ the truly fail-safe measures that CANDU reactors have proven effective since the 60's. I mean, where's the fun in that?
How does this solve the problem though? I've twice bought GPS units for my tour van and returned them at the end of the tour because they either had bad maps or didn't track accurately. If a DL scan was required to return them, I would refuse because it's absurd, and then never shop there again. Even if I allowed them to scan my DL just to get that one return, I still wouldn't shop there again, certainly not for the 90 day period. Either way, they lose business, their volume-purchasing discount drops, their overhead remains unchanged, so prices will go up, not down.
While I can appreciate that you don't want to be penalized for other people's abuse, this is nowhere near a cure. It is an extremely arrogant security theater clusterfuck resulting only in a collection of DL scans to be targeted by identity thieves. How can anyone seriously trust Best Buy for its security or trustworthiness of their staff with this. Another laugh meter broken.
It's even cheaper if you get a grease cleaning system using a Dieselcraft centrifuge. For roughly $1000 you can collect and clean waste vegetable oil for use in an unmodified diesel vehicle costing only pennies per tank in hydro and using absolutely no chemicals apart from cleaning the rig, which can be standard dish soap.
The down side is that small diesel cars are all imports, so you're paying a diesel tax and an import tax if you ever need engine repair ($150/hr and up). Volkswagen and Mercedes both use proprietary bolts for example. Since the grease is so cheap to process, you can just get a larger vehicle, but then you're processing more grease to run it and creating more pollution etc.
Hybrid diesel is the holy grail of fuel efficiency for cars, however the diesel engine, electric motor, and battery charging systems are each more expensive than a small gas engine that gets ~40mpg.
But what's missing from TFA is how hybrids are selling in Europe and elsewhere where gas is 3-4x as expensive as in the US. I can tell you they're on a steady rise in Canada, where there are substantial gov't incentives and gas is ~50% higher than the US.
BTW most Marshall and Fender guitar amps are now built in China, much like all other brands. All Traynor guitar amps are made in Canada. Same goes for Yorkville PA speakers.
Same thing happened in Canada, Peter Traynor was an amp repairman in Toronto who essentially copied the Fender Bassman design (much like Jim Marshall did) with just enough mods to keep from being sued, but while adding some innovations of durability. The Traynor Dyna-bass, later renamed the Bassmaster, was designed and tested so it could survive being thrown off the roof of the original 3-storey Long & McQuade music store building, and still work by just replacing the tubes.
While Marshall innovated on tone moreso than Fender did (IMO) the original Fender Bassman is the blueprint from which most amps that use EL34 tubes are designed. Most of them from the 60's and 70's can be modified to each other's specs just by changing low-level resistors and capacitors, the expensive components are functionally identical from different manufacturers. I own 1968 and 1970 Traynor Bassmasters, one is modified to Marshall "plexi" JCM1 specs, the other is modded as a Bassman. Neither a JCM1 nor a Bassman can undergo a 3-storey drop and be expected to operate with replaced tubes, but my Traynors can. Each is sonically and electronically identical to their respective partners.
Nowadays, Marshall is a household name for guitarists, as is Yorkville for sound techs. Yorkville is essentially a co-venture of Traynor and Long & McQuade, and carries Pete Traynor's influence of being indestructible while providing the sonic characteristics to get the job done time and time again on a budget. I was pleasantly surprised that the two festivals I attended in Tennessee and Florida recently were using Yorkville speakers, and that the techs knew how to make them sound good. They're more tough than they are sweet-sounding, but dial them in and nobody complains, and they'll never ever let you down.
Sorry for the Can-con segway, Jim Marshall's impact on the music industry will never go unnoticed, much less forgotten.
Let's elaborate on that: According to the Wiki, the earthquake forces exceeded design tolerances by.1g. Imagine 10% of the weight of the reactors slamming into them. That how much force was exerted upon them BEYOND the design limits. They measured.56g forces at the reactor sites, like 56% of their weight slamming into them. Prior to the tsunami the back-up diesel generators and water pumps were operational, which serve to prevent meltdowns after an emergency shutdown. All indications are that no meltdown would have occurred were it not for the tsunami. That's one tough plant.
Unfortunately it was followed by the 46' tsunami, which vastly exceeded the 19' seawall. Essentially the plant took the full force of a 25' tsunami, which rendered the diesel generators inoperable (they're located in the basement... duh!). The only type of plant that can be trusted to withstand that double-whammy without radiation leakage is a CANDU reactor, thanks to heavy water moderation. Yay Canada.
CANDU reactors are the safest. The cheap reactors like Fukushima and those used in the US require about 9 months of active cooling to be shut down safely. With CANDU reactors used in Canada, S Korea, and India (among others), when the flow of heavy water stops, the reactor shuts down on its own without any need for active cooling. They are more expensive to build and operate, but still plenty profitable. I think non-CANDU reactors should be banned. Without heavy water moderation you are really asking for trouble. It's like saving a few bucks to not have seatbelts (obligatory car analogy).
That's why 90% of us Canadians live near the US border, to watch. We're boring as hell ourselves, and there's nothing worth watching up north but the aurora borealis, and that channel almost never comes in well.
Read TFA, it's a $100 fee to apply for Precheck clearance. They check you out and grant clearance if you qualify, if not you lose the $100. They don't tell you what the qualifications are.
Here are the top two ways the RIAA continued to post profits despite rampant piracy:
1 - Massive staff layoffs, I've seen the _floors_ of empty cubicles and offices at Sony/BMG's New York offices, one building of many.
2 - Massive cuts in artist royalties, aka the 360 deal. Where labels used to only take a (large) percentage of retail album/single sales, they now take large percentage of everything from publishing to endorsements to merchandising to ringtones.
In short, everybody in the music industry is suffering except the RIAA executives. There is a finite amount of effective music promotions that can be done, and the RIAA owns them, all of them. There are only so many appearances on TV shows, awards shows, major tours, only so much radio listenership, etc etc. Making a good career of music requires access to that level of promotions to some degree. The more you promote piracy, the bigger a cut labels take to provide access, and the harder you make it for musicians, not the label executives.
So you keep on saying how RIAA profits prove piracy doesn't hurt anyone, and I'll keep playing gigs for the same rate musicians got in the 1970's. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The $/watt number refers to the cost of the PV chips. So it costs them $0.40 to create a chip that outputs 1 watt.
Keep in mind that's the cost of _production_ of the PV chips, not the price of assembled panels to the end user. Don't mean to be pessimistic, but $0.40 is not the number to be basing calculations upon.
Also I had an eye-opening chat with a utilities employee from Ontario Canada, where it's actually illegal to use your own solar power unless you go completely off the grid, otherwise you can only sell the power generated to the utility provider for your area. Sounds crazy, but folks quickly appreciate the situation because they're paying something like $0.55 per kWh for private solar/wind installations to pump juice into the grid. Sounds even more crazy, but it actually makes sense as it was explained to me.
Ontario has lots of electricity sources that have already paid for themselves and have lots of service life left, so much of the power comes at a pricetag of under $0.05 per kWh. However, as demand has exceeded the cheap supply, additional power generation gets extremely expensive fast. No matter what type of power generation is developed, it can't be located close to where the demand is, so the infrastructure required to patch it to where it needs to go plus upgrade all regional subsystems to handle the higher overall grid capacity is a massive expense in addition to the cost of the generators themselves.
For example, obviously the GTA (greater Toronto area) is a huge consumer of electricity, and there's a nuclear power plant in Pickering about 60mi away, not the closest to the GTA, but it does contribute to the GTA's supply. When the Pickering plant was built, they didn't run primary power cables directly to Toronto, they ran them to a new substation which joined it to the grid at the nearest feasible access point. Then all substations between it and downtown Toronto had to be upgraded to handle the potential current flow.
The beauty of solar/wind is that the power sources are within the same region as the end users, plus the hours of production coincide with the hours of demand. As long as solar/wind production escalates at the same rate as regional demand, the regional substations will never require upgrading, and the system scales itself, offsetting load off the grid exactly as demand peaks. The solar/wind power doesn't even need to be stepped up to high voltage / low current for long distance transmission. That's why they're paying over 5x the rate that they charge to provide the same thing. It would cost them even more to add conventional power to the grid.
If they don't have a monopoly and have to compete, yes. If they're like Geico and blow hundreds of millions on advertising claiming they can save you money compared to what you already have, then they give you a predatory rate and jack it up later. One has nothing to do with the other.
When I moved from Ontario to Vancouver in '98, ICBC insurance was prohibitively expensive. I had already paid the high-risk $1800/yr premiums in my teens and was down to $70/month, then ICBC expected me to pay the high-risk premiums again, pretty much ignoring my driver training and driving record. I was literally quoted the same rate as a new untrained driver my age when I inquired out of curiosity. I wasn't planning to own a car there anyway because the transit system rocks, but I can't say I'm a fan of government-run insurance. Melloche Monnex discounted me for my driver training, my university degree, and even waived the 2-year insurance lapse when I returned to Ontario. As a musician and sound engineer, my van is damaged about every 6 months from being parked in high-risk areas, and I've never had anything but a smooth claim process and I pay under $80/month for auto and home insurance, which covers my gear in the van, even when I'm touring in BC. Recovering two items stolen from my van on separate occasions seems to help. (Moral of the story - never steal from musicians, fan-led campaigns to recover stolen gear make RCMP manhunts look pathetic)
If downloading child pornography supports child pornographers how can downloading music destroy the music industry?
This is hands-down the most ignorant thing I've ever read.
BTW I'm a professional musician of 15 years and an audio engineer of 8 years. SOPA is bullshit, but the likelihood of you being introduced to musicians you enjoy is directly proportional to the assurance they have of their talent being rewarded. If they can't sell their music, nobody will invest in promoting them. If this is prevalent on an industry-wide basis, no musicians get promoted, all you get is the contrived fluffy garbage we hear today.
Believe me when I say that SOPA is not just the result of greedy labels, it is in part a response to pro-piracy bullshit like yours. The arts requires some protection against the flagrant piracy going on, and governments and the courts have always agreed with that and wanted to provide that reasonably. Any argument against that is pro-piracy, deal with it. The MAFIAA has the lobbying power to get laws written, and they will be written in direct proportion to the aggressiveness of short-sighted pro-piracy advocates like yourself, since they lend excellent argument for tougher copyright laws. They can either be like SOPA, or you can STFU and they won't be so intent on capitalizing on the situation.
I stand to benefit a lot from SOPA once money starts being invested in music again, and it won't bother me one bit. I'd rather copyright laws were more reasonable, but overkill is better than nothing. It's not my fault you clowns made the overkill possible and effectively dared them to do it. They're rich assholes with deep government connections, and you're openly advocating the failure of their business. How did you expect them to react?
If information is holy, how come Kopimi treat artists and programmers like shit? We're the ones making the information valuable at all. As creators of the holy information, it is we you should be worshiping, not the information itself.
As a Kopimi deity I hereby decree that you must STOP STEALING FROM US.
Depends on whether you think everything's ok to do without a warrant until the Supreme Court says it's not ok, or if you think nothing is ok to do without a warrant until the Supreme Court says it's ok. When it comes to emerging technology, I definitely think it should be approved by the Court before being used without a warrant.
Since the obligatory car metaphor is already taken by TFA, let's instead say a mind-reading device is developed and cops want to use it before adequate testing for health problems has been done. Warrant or no warrant?
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I'm no chemophobe, I just want to not put any of these 12 harmful chemical groups on my skin or down my drain. Unfortunately they're in EVERY!! SINGLE!! mass produced skin lotion and shampoo.
(Had to upstage your exclamation point emphasis to show that even in the extreme it doesn't make words any more meaningful.)
BTW the most common artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame) are not only far from organic, they were discovered in labs by accident, not even trying to work on anything edible. See, if a sweetener is organic, it's not artificial then is it?
I believe the term "takes one to know one" has never been more fitting.
But it's true, Macs are now plentiful enough to attract the attention of malware purveyors, and the fact that the target market is so unsuspecting must be making them salivate. It's certainly in M$'s best interests to make this known, and they're doing the Mac fanboi's a favor by putting them on alert.
And before someone sharp-shoots me on the apostrophe, it's acceptable to use one when otherwise the plural forms a misleading word. "Fanbois" looks French...
They'd be a perfect offense on a civilian crowd. Why wait for real terrorists to strike when you can just facilitate them or even just stage it yourself.
"This just in, terrorists have taken command of two flat-top SAR missile platforms and are raining missiles all over London. MI5 has been granted emergency powers to arrest and detain indefinitely without charge" etc.
I am not a tax attorney, but doesn't the US also have the highest tax write-offs for lobbying, political contributions, and other means of influencing the government? As usual, the rules benefit corporations with the means and willingness to manipulate the system. There's high taxes to preclude benevolent corporations from prospering, oil restrictions that only the most corrupt corporations can circumvent, FDA restrictions so costly only the most corrupt pharmaceutical corporations can afford, and don't get me started on the SEC, military contractors, or the health system. They're all exactly how the most corrupt corporations want them.
So would you rather US corporations dodged taxes, or essentially spent them to subvert the system against its citizens?
Here's my terms:
Terms Of Service notifications are completely meaningless from corporate entities with absolutely no substantial liability for violating them. Go piss up a rope.
So this is the new way of getting malware on our computers, corporate endorsement. Still see it for what it is.
I suppose it depends on the design, but a smaller reactor can be built so that if it loses cooling it just shuts down (i.e. the reaction stops), not melts down. I remember reading about this a long time ago, about how we could have reactors in neighborhoods with no problems. Oh wait, here we go: "Most [small reactors] are also designed for a high level of passive or inherent safety in the event of malfunction. A 2010 report by a special committee convened by the American Nuclear Society showed that many safety provisions necessary, or at least prudent, in large reactors are not necessary in the small designs forthcoming."
Yeah, let's downplay the need for safety measures. What could go wrong? Whatever you do, don't employ the truly fail-safe measures that CANDU reactors have proven effective since the 60's. I mean, where's the fun in that?
"Voyager and the Coming Great Hiatus In Deep Space"
Coming? The Great Hiatus has been upon us since May 23rd, 2001.
How does this solve the problem though? I've twice bought GPS units for my tour van and returned them at the end of the tour because they either had bad maps or didn't track accurately. If a DL scan was required to return them, I would refuse because it's absurd, and then never shop there again. Even if I allowed them to scan my DL just to get that one return, I still wouldn't shop there again, certainly not for the 90 day period. Either way, they lose business, their volume-purchasing discount drops, their overhead remains unchanged, so prices will go up, not down.
While I can appreciate that you don't want to be penalized for other people's abuse, this is nowhere near a cure. It is an extremely arrogant security theater clusterfuck resulting only in a collection of DL scans to be targeted by identity thieves. How can anyone seriously trust Best Buy for its security or trustworthiness of their staff with this. Another laugh meter broken.
It's even cheaper if you get a grease cleaning system using a Dieselcraft centrifuge. For roughly $1000 you can collect and clean waste vegetable oil for use in an unmodified diesel vehicle costing only pennies per tank in hydro and using absolutely no chemicals apart from cleaning the rig, which can be standard dish soap.
The down side is that small diesel cars are all imports, so you're paying a diesel tax and an import tax if you ever need engine repair ($150/hr and up). Volkswagen and Mercedes both use proprietary bolts for example. Since the grease is so cheap to process, you can just get a larger vehicle, but then you're processing more grease to run it and creating more pollution etc.
Hybrid diesel is the holy grail of fuel efficiency for cars, however the diesel engine, electric motor, and battery charging systems are each more expensive than a small gas engine that gets ~40mpg.
But what's missing from TFA is how hybrids are selling in Europe and elsewhere where gas is 3-4x as expensive as in the US. I can tell you they're on a steady rise in Canada, where there are substantial gov't incentives and gas is ~50% higher than the US.
BTW most Marshall and Fender guitar amps are now built in China, much like all other brands. All Traynor guitar amps are made in Canada. Same goes for Yorkville PA speakers.
Same thing happened in Canada, Peter Traynor was an amp repairman in Toronto who essentially copied the Fender Bassman design (much like Jim Marshall did) with just enough mods to keep from being sued, but while adding some innovations of durability. The Traynor Dyna-bass, later renamed the Bassmaster, was designed and tested so it could survive being thrown off the roof of the original 3-storey Long & McQuade music store building, and still work by just replacing the tubes.
While Marshall innovated on tone moreso than Fender did (IMO) the original Fender Bassman is the blueprint from which most amps that use EL34 tubes are designed. Most of them from the 60's and 70's can be modified to each other's specs just by changing low-level resistors and capacitors, the expensive components are functionally identical from different manufacturers. I own 1968 and 1970 Traynor Bassmasters, one is modified to Marshall "plexi" JCM1 specs, the other is modded as a Bassman. Neither a JCM1 nor a Bassman can undergo a 3-storey drop and be expected to operate with replaced tubes, but my Traynors can. Each is sonically and electronically identical to their respective partners.
Nowadays, Marshall is a household name for guitarists, as is Yorkville for sound techs. Yorkville is essentially a co-venture of Traynor and Long & McQuade, and carries Pete Traynor's influence of being indestructible while providing the sonic characteristics to get the job done time and time again on a budget. I was pleasantly surprised that the two festivals I attended in Tennessee and Florida recently were using Yorkville speakers, and that the techs knew how to make them sound good. They're more tough than they are sweet-sounding, but dial them in and nobody complains, and they'll never ever let you down.
Sorry for the Can-con segway, Jim Marshall's impact on the music industry will never go unnoticed, much less forgotten.
Let's elaborate on that: According to the Wiki, the earthquake forces exceeded design tolerances by .1g. Imagine 10% of the weight of the reactors slamming into them. That how much force was exerted upon them BEYOND the design limits. They measured .56g forces at the reactor sites, like 56% of their weight slamming into them. Prior to the tsunami the back-up diesel generators and water pumps were operational, which serve to prevent meltdowns after an emergency shutdown. All indications are that no meltdown would have occurred were it not for the tsunami. That's one tough plant.
Unfortunately it was followed by the 46' tsunami, which vastly exceeded the 19' seawall. Essentially the plant took the full force of a 25' tsunami, which rendered the diesel generators inoperable (they're located in the basement... duh!). The only type of plant that can be trusted to withstand that double-whammy without radiation leakage is a CANDU reactor, thanks to heavy water moderation. Yay Canada.
CANDU reactors are the safest. The cheap reactors like Fukushima and those used in the US require about 9 months of active cooling to be shut down safely. With CANDU reactors used in Canada, S Korea, and India (among others), when the flow of heavy water stops, the reactor shuts down on its own without any need for active cooling. They are more expensive to build and operate, but still plenty profitable. I think non-CANDU reactors should be banned. Without heavy water moderation you are really asking for trouble. It's like saving a few bucks to not have seatbelts (obligatory car analogy).
That's why 90% of us Canadians live near the US border, to watch. We're boring as hell ourselves, and there's nothing worth watching up north but the aurora borealis, and that channel almost never comes in well.
Read TFA, it's a $100 fee to apply for Precheck clearance. They check you out and grant clearance if you qualify, if not you lose the $100. They don't tell you what the qualifications are.
Sounds like "American freedom" to me...
Here are the top two ways the RIAA continued to post profits despite rampant piracy:
1 - Massive staff layoffs, I've seen the _floors_ of empty cubicles and offices at Sony/BMG's New York offices, one building of many.
2 - Massive cuts in artist royalties, aka the 360 deal. Where labels used to only take a (large) percentage of retail album/single sales, they now take large percentage of everything from publishing to endorsements to merchandising to ringtones.
In short, everybody in the music industry is suffering except the RIAA executives. There is a finite amount of effective music promotions that can be done, and the RIAA owns them, all of them. There are only so many appearances on TV shows, awards shows, major tours, only so much radio listenership, etc etc. Making a good career of music requires access to that level of promotions to some degree. The more you promote piracy, the bigger a cut labels take to provide access, and the harder you make it for musicians, not the label executives.
So you keep on saying how RIAA profits prove piracy doesn't hurt anyone, and I'll keep playing gigs for the same rate musicians got in the 1970's. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The $/watt number refers to the cost of the PV chips. So it costs them $0.40 to create a chip that outputs 1 watt.
Keep in mind that's the cost of _production_ of the PV chips, not the price of assembled panels to the end user. Don't mean to be pessimistic, but $0.40 is not the number to be basing calculations upon.
Also I had an eye-opening chat with a utilities employee from Ontario Canada, where it's actually illegal to use your own solar power unless you go completely off the grid, otherwise you can only sell the power generated to the utility provider for your area. Sounds crazy, but folks quickly appreciate the situation because they're paying something like $0.55 per kWh for private solar/wind installations to pump juice into the grid. Sounds even more crazy, but it actually makes sense as it was explained to me.
Ontario has lots of electricity sources that have already paid for themselves and have lots of service life left, so much of the power comes at a pricetag of under $0.05 per kWh. However, as demand has exceeded the cheap supply, additional power generation gets extremely expensive fast. No matter what type of power generation is developed, it can't be located close to where the demand is, so the infrastructure required to patch it to where it needs to go plus upgrade all regional subsystems to handle the higher overall grid capacity is a massive expense in addition to the cost of the generators themselves.
For example, obviously the GTA (greater Toronto area) is a huge consumer of electricity, and there's a nuclear power plant in Pickering about 60mi away, not the closest to the GTA, but it does contribute to the GTA's supply. When the Pickering plant was built, they didn't run primary power cables directly to Toronto, they ran them to a new substation which joined it to the grid at the nearest feasible access point. Then all substations between it and downtown Toronto had to be upgraded to handle the potential current flow.
The beauty of solar/wind is that the power sources are within the same region as the end users, plus the hours of production coincide with the hours of demand. As long as solar/wind production escalates at the same rate as regional demand, the regional substations will never require upgrading, and the system scales itself, offsetting load off the grid exactly as demand peaks. The solar/wind power doesn't even need to be stepped up to high voltage / low current for long distance transmission. That's why they're paying over 5x the rate that they charge to provide the same thing. It would cost them even more to add conventional power to the grid.
If they don't have a monopoly and have to compete, yes. If they're like Geico and blow hundreds of millions on advertising claiming they can save you money compared to what you already have, then they give you a predatory rate and jack it up later. One has nothing to do with the other.
When I moved from Ontario to Vancouver in '98, ICBC insurance was prohibitively expensive. I had already paid the high-risk $1800/yr premiums in my teens and was down to $70/month, then ICBC expected me to pay the high-risk premiums again, pretty much ignoring my driver training and driving record. I was literally quoted the same rate as a new untrained driver my age when I inquired out of curiosity. I wasn't planning to own a car there anyway because the transit system rocks, but I can't say I'm a fan of government-run insurance. Melloche Monnex discounted me for my driver training, my university degree, and even waived the 2-year insurance lapse when I returned to Ontario. As a musician and sound engineer, my van is damaged about every 6 months from being parked in high-risk areas, and I've never had anything but a smooth claim process and I pay under $80/month for auto and home insurance, which covers my gear in the van, even when I'm touring in BC. Recovering two items stolen from my van on separate occasions seems to help. (Moral of the story - never steal from musicians, fan-led campaigns to recover stolen gear make RCMP manhunts look pathetic)
If downloading child pornography supports child pornographers how can downloading music destroy the music industry?
This is hands-down the most ignorant thing I've ever read.
BTW I'm a professional musician of 15 years and an audio engineer of 8 years. SOPA is bullshit, but the likelihood of you being introduced to musicians you enjoy is directly proportional to the assurance they have of their talent being rewarded. If they can't sell their music, nobody will invest in promoting them. If this is prevalent on an industry-wide basis, no musicians get promoted, all you get is the contrived fluffy garbage we hear today.
Believe me when I say that SOPA is not just the result of greedy labels, it is in part a response to pro-piracy bullshit like yours. The arts requires some protection against the flagrant piracy going on, and governments and the courts have always agreed with that and wanted to provide that reasonably. Any argument against that is pro-piracy, deal with it. The MAFIAA has the lobbying power to get laws written, and they will be written in direct proportion to the aggressiveness of short-sighted pro-piracy advocates like yourself, since they lend excellent argument for tougher copyright laws. They can either be like SOPA, or you can STFU and they won't be so intent on capitalizing on the situation.
I stand to benefit a lot from SOPA once money starts being invested in music again, and it won't bother me one bit. I'd rather copyright laws were more reasonable, but overkill is better than nothing. It's not my fault you clowns made the overkill possible and effectively dared them to do it. They're rich assholes with deep government connections, and you're openly advocating the failure of their business. How did you expect them to react?
If information is holy, how come Kopimi treat artists and programmers like shit? We're the ones making the information valuable at all. As creators of the holy information, it is we you should be worshiping, not the information itself.
As a Kopimi deity I hereby decree that you must STOP STEALING FROM US.
Depends on whether you think everything's ok to do without a warrant until the Supreme Court says it's not ok, or if you think nothing is ok to do without a warrant until the Supreme Court says it's ok. When it comes to emerging technology, I definitely think it should be approved by the Court before being used without a warrant.
Since the obligatory car metaphor is already taken by TFA, let's instead say a mind-reading device is developed and cops want to use it before adequate testing for health problems has been done. Warrant or no warrant?
And there will always be touchy, defensive people of all ages who perceive criticism behind every simple observation.
LIES!!! Why do you have to be such a jerk?!