You will pretty much never find a "real" vi on a Linux machine since the original vi was proprietary. Linux systems invariably ship one of the free clones - usually vim or elvis. Elvis is closer to vi than vim, but vim has awesome and modern features on the same time-tested fundamental design. It's my editor of choice.
Actual vi is mostly found on commercial unixes and there aren't very many of those left. Even there it's not universal, if memory serves even AIX was shipping VIM when last I worked with it (which was a few years ago so I could be remembering wrong).
Which, for the record, is the way it's spelled on keyboards... makes sense when spelling out a keyboard-command to use the same labels as is commonly found on said keyboards. Nobody writes "Press Alternate and F1" we say "Alt-F1" because the keys are labelled "Alt".
I finally relented and, for the first time in a decade, got a windows install again for games when SkyrimSE came out. Unfortunately it is entirely impossible to get it working in wine (unlike the original game) if you got it through steam since steam is 32-bit only and SKSE is 64-bit only and wine cannot run 32 and 64 bit apps in the same emulator.
But I refused to pollute my actual hard drive with it. I installed it onto a portable hard-drive, and added an NTFS partition where my windows steam lives (since I really don't want my games to be loading assets at USB speeds). But that's it, a single portable win10 - first time in 10 years I have any windows at all, and it's used *only* for gaming - it has nothing else installed, and never contains any personal information. Hell even when I buy games from steam I reboot into linux and do it from there, then reboot back into windows to do the install. I choose Linux native games whenever possible (Brutal Legend is awesome btw), and wine as second choice - installing to the portable windows is a distant third. Frankly I wouldn't even have bothered doing it for SKSE if it wasn't for the fact that I got it for free.
There is no such problem. If your program uses GTK or QT then every desktop distro will run it with the possible exception of a few ultra-tiny desktops but those are built for a specific niche and it only affects you if you are specifically marketing to that extremely tiny niche. Which one of GTK or QT to use ? That's up to you - but QT is probably the clear winner because it offers native windows support, and even android support, as well, which is nice if you want to make the program portable, and has some more advanced features.
And frankly it's not hard to run things that use less common varieties. PlayOnLinux uses WX which is now quite obscure enough that almost no distro ships with it, yet it easy as pie to install PoL on every major distro. The only time I've ever had difficulty was on a CLFS build - but you don't do any LFS-like system and expect it to be easy.
You shouldn't be targetting a specific DE with a user-app unless you are an open-source developer working on an app targetted for that DE. For general-use apps -target GTK or QT, this is certainly what commercial app devs should do.
Those aren't the same backs I know. Guess they had a redesign since the days I was doing this trick. I kind of lost interest in card games after high school.
A google image search shows that the back design have changed several times over the years. I was talking about this one:
Quite frankly if this was supposed to be games of chance it should be illegal to have programmed slot machines at all. They should be purely mechanical devices with the result determined by random (at the level of unpredictable at least) physics - more like dice or roulette. The odds of a jackpot happening on the first coin ever placed in it should be exactly the same as the odds the day AFTER it has earned more than the jackpot. The mere fact that only a few combos win anything and the rest is money to the house is already more than enough advantage in their favour.
That claim makes sense for state lotteries. It makes no sense whatsoever for privately owned casinos. Private companies are not supposed to be able to tax you and if, indeed, this is a tax as you claim - that alone is proof that it is evil.
Whether it should be illegal is another question entirely. At the very least though - it ought to be well regulated. It's a known (severely) dangerous business, government *does* in fact therefore have a compelling interest in regulating it.
This same trick works with the common "bicycle" brand cards most home players use. Look at the wheel in the center of the back pattern. There are three wings attached- and two are on the same side - so if you take a deck with all cards sorted same-way up, and flip one over, you can tell it apart later.
We used to do a simple "is this your card" trick in school using exactly that approach, sort the cards upfront so all the wheels are two-wings-up, let the person draw a card, then ask them to put it back - look which way up it is, and ensure you hold the deck out the other way up.
Then just sort through until you find the card with one-wing-up.
I admit it never occurred to me to try this at a casino though...
Well it is a pretty big claim yes, but it's a claim backed up by solid economics. The exact quote from Jared Daimond's citations: "Can entirely account for Africa's negative GDP rates".
The other problems you mention are, at the very least, severely aggravated by the poverty effects of Malaria. I live in Africa, and I've travelled the continent extensively - not just visiting countries but actually living with residents for extended periods, seeing things up close and experiencing other parts of the continent as the locals do. On more than one occasion I've spent more days outside my home country in a year than in it.
Keep in mind the cost is not just in lives lost, or even lives lost + healthcare to treat the ill. A child gets Malaria - one of the parents has to stay home to take care of them, there's huge ancillary productivity losses involved. You mentioned more. And it goes further - a continent full of frequent illness is a continent where education levels suffer - ill kids can't go to school, kids with ill parents are more likely to drop out to support them. The list just balloons. You saw it from the perspective of an outsider, as a native with a western education - that statement sounds entirely feasible to me.
Malaria is by no means the only disease problem in Africa, TB remains one of the biggest killers here - and it is aggravated by HIV (it's extremely hard to treat TB in an AIDS patient). The latter is still a major concern but not as much as it once were/is often imagined. Antiretrovirals have significantly reduced the issues of HIV (absent TB at least), and infection rates have been on a consistent decline for over a decade - it's by no means the pandemic it was when I was growing up anymore. This has been a bit of a mixed blessing. As HIV declined in the wealthy parts of the world, and became manageable in Africa - a process that was done entirely thanks to large financial investment - the money is drying up. It's no longer a sexy cause to donate to. Which of course threatens a resurgence. And of course - HIV makes people much more susceptible to Malaria.
There is an odd factor to consider - the malaria pandemic as it looks today is almost entirely the fault of colonisation. This seems like a stretch but there is solid reasoning behind it. African culture never really encourage large cities - even the biggest ones built pre-colonization (think of the Zimbabwe ruins for example) were relatively tiny by European standards - even for a thousand years earlier. And they had another odd aspects: they were never built near water. This is almost unique in human history. Nowhere else in the world did large settlements *not* naturally happen close to sources of fresh water. But Africans built their towns high up on mountains - and carried water long distances from rivers, and kept the towns small. There was, in fact, a good reason for it. Keeping towns small meant outbreaks did not turn into epidemics - because the next settlement was far away and outside of trade visits every few months had little contact. And being far from the water kept the risk of outbreaks small to begin with. Building higher also reduced the risk of infection - mosquitos don't like the thin air on mountaintops. Africa didn't build cities because cities were plague ridden on this continent. Colonisation saw the continent being upended by Europeans, who built European style cities next to the major rivers - and malaria went from a sad, but occasional, tragedy to a full blown pandemic. Africans had little choice but to migrate to these cities and still have little choice but to live in them - it's where the work is.
You are right that low-tech solutions are generally the best, educated Africans use them as par for the course. Indeed we avoid prophylactics for a different reason: they suppress symptoms and are not entirely effective so it's better NOT to use them, because if you don't then you guarantee if you do get it you'll show symptoms fast and get treated quickly. This is only true if you *li
>I think the issues are a little more complex than this. No copyrights on a recipe: sort of right. You cannot copyright a simple list of ingredients or basic instructions explaining how to put them together. Cookbooks, on the other hand, which include cute or clever language, photos of meals and so on are certainly copyrightable.
Yes, you can copyright a cookbook - but not the recipes inside. I can copy down any recipe in a cookbook and give it to a friend without violating a law, the recipes are not copyrightable.
>I believe you may be able to get a patent on a recipe.
Nope. Under the Berne convention certain classes of goods known as "necessities for life" cannot, in any signatory country, qualify for any of the laws that the Berne convention covers (Trademarks, Copyright, Patents). Clothing and Food (which includes recipes) both fall under this exception. That's why fashion designs cannot get IP protection. You can trademark your logo, but not the design.
That's exactly what DID happen when the EU banned Neonics a year or two ago. Bayer has been on a massive add-campaign ever since to try to get the ban lifted by claiming their pesticides are totally harmless to bees, bees actually like the stuff - they thrive when you spray them with it and think of all the job losses if we our massive multinational company has one less product to sell (which somehow didn't stop them from refusing to sell lethal injection meds to the US) etc. etc. etc.
Eventually they managed to raise enough dust to get the EU Safety Authority to set up a review committee to reconsider the decision. At time of writing the committee's results are not yet in... but I somehow have this idea that a lot of the committee members have been living large of late...
>Sure it's a bit better now, but not by much. ZA has a fvckton of coal, it will be burning it for some time.
Don't be so sure of this. Coal comes in different varieties and a coal plant must be designed for a specific variety. And we have a problem here in ZA. Until around 2010 the coal we used in our plants had little export value, while the coal Europe used was exactly the coal we didn't need. So Eskom could get very low rates on the coal they needed - because the mines could make lovely profits selling the rest to Europe.
Since 2010 the European market has been shrinking fast, it's not a viable export market anymore. China on the other hand is growing rapidly and is now our major coal export market. Only problem: China's plants use the same coal variety we do. So suddenly the mines are very unhappy about selling coal at R5 a tonne to Eskom when they SAME coal can get R50 a tonne from China. Part of why Eskom helped the Guptas to buy that coal mine is because the mine was about to go bankrupt. The owners are in a long-term cheap coal supply with Eskom and had decided they would rather close that mine and focus on the others (from where they could export the coal to China) than keep operating the one they had to sell so cheaply it was making a loss.
Helping the Guptas buy it was partly motivated by the risk that if the mine closes Eskom would face a critical shortage. That nobody was willing to buy it without kickbacks and help tells you a lot.
Either way, none of this is relevant to American coal-miners, we've never imported coal from them and we never will - since their coal won't work in our power plants and, like you said, we have plenty of coal anyway.
It's definitely in ZA's best interest to move away from coal - not least because the economics around mining and burning have changed and it's now a lot harder to do it economically. The answer isn't the ridiculous nuclear plan either.
The problem with nuclear is that it is extremely expensive and takes a long time to get online. A minimum of a decade - and nuclear plants are notorious for going extremely over budget and over time - look how late Kusile and Medupi already are, there's no practical way a nuclear project will produce a single KW/H of power in South Africa in under 30 years. We can't afford to wait that long.
Our answer must be solar - we can bring the same power as the nuclear project online with solar in 2 years for 10% of the capital costs. And the cost of the power is far cheaper as well. Even with storage factored in it remains the cheapest power source of all, and we are particularly suited to it what with being such a high sunshine country. The best studies right now pegs the total cost per kw/h of coal at about R120, nuclear is at about R1.05. Wind is around 85c - solar is 55c. Less than half the cost of coal.
And 13 democrats helped them do it (not least Cory Booker- now there's a Dino if ever I saw one).
Please punish those democrats in the midterms - give their seats to actual progressives. It's EXPECTED that republicans will fuck the little guy to enrich corporations, when democrats go along with it - that's a seriously flagrant betrayal of the people who voted them into office.
When people say something is "logically true" so they don't need evidence- they are almost always defending a position that, when you look at the evidence, turns out to be utterly false.
So for example it is "logically true" that gun control won't stop mass shootings because "anybody crazy enough to go on a shooting spree won't let gun control laws stop him getting an illegal gun" - it seems even more true if you consider that no gun-control country has managed to completely eradicate trafficking in illegal guns. There's just one problem - the logic doesn't match reality. The US has had more mass shootings in the past 20 years than the next 30 countries combined... BY MORE THAN TWO TIMES. The next thirty countries combined had 22 mass shootings alltogether, the US had 48 in the same time. Now why would this happen ? Why is the logic wrong ? Because it fails to consider the facts. Fact is, mass shooters are almost never career criminals. They have no contacts in the criminal underworld - and buying illegal guns is not easy. The guys selling them won't just sell them to anybody who shows up at the dockyard -the risk of it being an undercover cop is too high. You need people in the underworld who knows you and will vouch for you. You need to know where to go, who to talk to, what not to say... it's just not that simple.
It's "logical" that reducing government spending must also reduce government debt. Except that every time in history a government has reduced spending their debt went UP - there's literally no example of the "logical" prediction happening - not ever. When you consider ALL the facts - it starts to make sense. Every expense is somebody's income, this just just as true of government spending. Government cuts spending, that cuts income from citizens, and from the people they would have bought from. Most government revenue comes from taxes on income - so you cut a huge chain of income, that means cutting your own revenue by a massive amount. It's been mathematically proven that the revenue loss from austerity MUST always be greater than the savings, it's impossible for it it not to be. So in reality, austerity turns out to be about as effective a way of bringing down debt as burning your paycheck to save on your heating bill.
Lots of things are logical - but don't hold up to scrutiny because the evidence prove that the logic is, in fact, wrong because it didn't include all the relevant factors.
Your logic falls in the same category. The headlines are filled, daily, with massive scandals by big name brands- they happen constantly. So why is your logic wrong ? Because, it turns out, the risk of getting caught doing something horrible is relatively low, and usually you can get away with it for several years before you get caught. So why not do it? Any harm to the brand will be years away, after you made billions in profits, more than enough to cover whatever may be lost in future due to brand-harm, and anyway that will be some other CEO's problem to deal with, you'll have walked out with your golden parachute long before the crows come home to roost. Where DOES It happen ? When the bad things are done by somebody else, and the knowledge of it happening is already leaked. The tylenol poisoning case was such an example. Tylenol didn't poison their own medicine, they had every incentive to do a massive recall to prevent harm to the brand - because they were not profiting from the bad thing that caused the harm and it was ALREADY DISCOVERED. But this rare - the vast majority of horrible things done in the world are done by corporations to their own customers and the second most common variety are done by corporations to their own workers. The only reason that's the order is because corporations usually have more customers than workers - it has nothing to do with the severity of the horrible things.
It's worth noting that, prior to the FDA's establishment, more than 80% of all "medicine" sold in the US were so-called "patent medicine". These drugs, contrary to popular myth, didn't all do nothing - most of them were filled with deadly and addictive substances (usually opium) which the buyers had no idea they were buying. They were marketed for things so completely unrelated that it's physically impossible one drug could treat them all - but they sure made you high.
In short - it was a disaster that killed far more people than it ever cured. In the post-FDA world, this problem has shifted exclusively to those things which the FDA cannot regulate due to congressionmen selling out suplements and homeopathy. A recent study found that 1 in 3 supplements contained no shred whatsoever of the plant they are supposed to have been derived from. Suplements kill people on a daily basis due to dangerous ingredients and a lack of proper warnings about correct usage - seeing as they aren't regulated and nobody is making sure they know what correct usage actually means.
Where regulation does not exist, neither does medicine.
So does the cooking industry. You can't get patents or copyrights on a recipe. You can trademark a brand but you can't stop anybody else from making the exact same product.
Hence my use of the word "basically". Those mortality rates are concerning, but compared to Africa - they are insignificant. It's the single largest source of death on the continent - and many economists have argued that without the economic burden of Malaria this continent would be wealthy. It wipes out most of the continents GDP every year.
He chose Mike Pence as running mate. A bigot who once made it a criminal offense for gays to apply for marriage licenses. He was not okay with just denying them: he jailed them. And Trump put him a heartbeat from the presidency.
And you may have missed the point - it should have been obvious from the fact that I CHOSE to make every assumption maximally in their favour. The point is not to calculate the exact number, the point is a simple Fermi-estimation of the severity of the harm imposed compared to that of the GM ignition scandal. The point is not how many were harmed - if that was my goal, I would have done serious research to get accurate numbers for the things I just guessed in their favour - it's merely to illustrate in order of magnitudes how much worse it was. If the margin of error it's anywhere within 2 orders of magnitude then the calculation is close enough for it's intended purpose.
Simply put, as with any Fermi-estimation, the goal is not to determine what the number is, just to know if it's a big number or not.
And making every assumption in their favour more than erases extrapolation deviations - and also more than erases whatever difference the diesel/petrol percentage may be.
Then by your reasoning there is 1) No reason to have air quality laws at all 2) No justification for holding companies to account that violate them.
Since there are "direct" deaths - they bear no responsibility ?
Sorry, but I don't buy that reasoning for two reasons: 1) It's been an established point of law that indirectly, but knowingly, causing a death can bear culpability for over 2000 years. 2) It's batshit crazy.
The comparison was in how much harm was done - as that is the just way to determine damages. Whether the harm was direct or indirect is utterly unimportant.
Now your talk about 'extrapolation' comes down to questioning the maths - there's just one problem, I KNOW the maths are wrong, after all there are quite a few numbers we don't have definitive answers for. On every one of those I took the generous approach of assuming the smallest possible values. Using REALISTIC likely values would quadruple or even quintiple the damages. So sure, the maths aren't great - but I did them to maximally benefit Volkswagen - nobody can say I used the unknowns to their detriment, I made assumptions ONLY in their favour.
Oh how the world has changed... back in the early 2000's when casemodding was the great geekfad - and we all had drawer-handles screwed to the top of our desktops for easy carrying, one guy who showed up at our local lan-parties (remember those) had actually built a case where one entire side WAS a flat-screen (which was still new technology at the time). So he could carry the PC and the screen as one unit. Just plonk it down, and game on the left side of the box.
While very ingenious - I gave it a go and decided against trying to replicate it. The angle was horrible, and there was no way to lift the screen to a comfortable viewing height.
Now we're doing multi-monitor built-in to laptops...
So assuming that what you mean by 'correct' usage applies - that would be what ? About 800 AT&T employees all lining up to take a dump on him one at a time ? Nasty...
Thank goodness he used the it correctly then. As per the dictionary.com: 4. in effect; in substance; very nearly; virtually: I literally died when she walked out on stage in that costume.
Here is Webster's (you know for your Americans): 2: : in effect : virtually
There are two things you should learn from this discussion. Firstly - the common usage of "literally" as a an exclamation preceding hyperbole is, in fact, entirely correct English according to every dictionary. The second is this: American English has half as many meanings for the word "literally" as British English do - which means there are two MORE fully correct usages of "literally" you probably wouldn't even recognise if one bit you on the ass - and since/. has an international readership it's quite likely you may encounter them on these forums at times so you really ought to learn them.
The only thing worse than grammar nazi's are grammar nazis who can't even get the grammar right.
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You will pretty much never find a "real" vi on a Linux machine since the original vi was proprietary. Linux systems invariably ship one of the free clones - usually vim or elvis.
Elvis is closer to vi than vim, but vim has awesome and modern features on the same time-tested fundamental design. It's my editor of choice.
Actual vi is mostly found on commercial unixes and there aren't very many of those left. Even there it's not universal, if memory serves even AIX was shipping VIM when last I worked with it (which was a few years ago so I could be remembering wrong).
Which, for the record, is the way it's spelled on keyboards... makes sense when spelling out a keyboard-command to use the same labels as is commonly found on said keyboards.
Nobody writes "Press Alternate and F1" we say "Alt-F1" because the keys are labelled "Alt".
I finally relented and, for the first time in a decade, got a windows install again for games when SkyrimSE came out. Unfortunately it is entirely impossible to get it working in wine (unlike the original game) if you got it through steam since steam is 32-bit only and SKSE is 64-bit only and wine cannot run 32 and 64 bit apps in the same emulator.
But I refused to pollute my actual hard drive with it. I installed it onto a portable hard-drive, and added an NTFS partition where my windows steam lives (since I really don't want my games to be loading assets at USB speeds). But that's it, a single portable win10 - first time in 10 years I have any windows at all, and it's used *only* for gaming - it has nothing else installed, and never contains any personal information. Hell even when I buy games from steam I reboot into linux and do it from there, then reboot back into windows to do the install. I choose Linux native games whenever possible (Brutal Legend is awesome btw), and wine as second choice - installing to the portable windows is a distant third.
Frankly I wouldn't even have bothered doing it for SKSE if it wasn't for the fact that I got it for free.
There is no such problem. If your program uses GTK or QT then every desktop distro will run it with the possible exception of a few ultra-tiny desktops but those are built for a specific niche and it only affects you if you are specifically marketing to that extremely tiny niche. Which one of GTK or QT to use ? That's up to you - but QT is probably the clear winner because it offers native windows support, and even android support, as well, which is nice if you want to make the program portable, and has some more advanced features.
And frankly it's not hard to run things that use less common varieties. PlayOnLinux uses WX which is now quite obscure enough that almost no distro ships with it, yet it easy as pie to install PoL on every major distro. The only time I've ever had difficulty was on a CLFS build - but you don't do any LFS-like system and expect it to be easy.
You shouldn't be targetting a specific DE with a user-app unless you are an open-source developer working on an app targetted for that DE. For general-use apps -target GTK or QT, this is certainly what commercial app devs should do.
If Microsoft wanted to do something actually useful in that regard the, instead of WSL, we'd see them contributing major patches to WINE.
Those aren't the same backs I know. Guess they had a redesign since the days I was doing this trick. I kind of lost interest in card games after high school.
A google image search shows that the back design have changed several times over the years. I was talking about this one:
http://www.jimknapp.com/Cards/...
Look at the wings on the central wheel. Notably the wing on the left which points at one of the edges.
Quite frankly if this was supposed to be games of chance it should be illegal to have programmed slot machines at all. They should be purely mechanical devices with the result determined by random (at the level of unpredictable at least) physics - more like dice or roulette.
The odds of a jackpot happening on the first coin ever placed in it should be exactly the same as the odds the day AFTER it has earned more than the jackpot. The mere fact that only a few combos win anything and the rest is money to the house is already more than enough advantage in their favour.
> It's a tax on those with poor reasoning skills.
That claim makes sense for state lotteries. It makes no sense whatsoever for privately owned casinos. Private companies are not supposed to be able to tax you and if, indeed, this is a tax as you claim - that alone is proof that it is evil.
Whether it should be illegal is another question entirely. At the very least though - it ought to be well regulated. It's a known (severely) dangerous business, government *does* in fact therefore have a compelling interest in regulating it.
This same trick works with the common "bicycle" brand cards most home players use. Look at the wheel in the center of the back pattern. There are three wings attached- and two are on the same side - so if you take a deck with all cards sorted same-way up, and flip one over, you can tell it apart later.
We used to do a simple "is this your card" trick in school using exactly that approach, sort the cards upfront so all the wheels are two-wings-up, let the person draw a card, then ask them to put it back - look which way up it is, and ensure you hold the deck out the other way up.
Then just sort through until you find the card with one-wing-up.
I admit it never occurred to me to try this at a casino though...
Well it is a pretty big claim yes, but it's a claim backed up by solid economics. The exact quote from Jared Daimond's citations: "Can entirely account for Africa's negative GDP rates".
The other problems you mention are, at the very least, severely aggravated by the poverty effects of Malaria. I live in Africa, and I've travelled the continent extensively - not just visiting countries but actually living with residents for extended periods, seeing things up close and experiencing other parts of the continent as the locals do. On more than one occasion I've spent more days outside my home country in a year than in it.
Keep in mind the cost is not just in lives lost, or even lives lost + healthcare to treat the ill. A child gets Malaria - one of the parents has to stay home to take care of them, there's huge ancillary productivity losses involved. You mentioned more. And it goes further - a continent full of frequent illness is a continent where education levels suffer - ill kids can't go to school, kids with ill parents are more likely to drop out to support them. The list just balloons.
You saw it from the perspective of an outsider, as a native with a western education - that statement sounds entirely feasible to me.
Malaria is by no means the only disease problem in Africa, TB remains one of the biggest killers here - and it is aggravated by HIV (it's extremely hard to treat TB in an AIDS patient). The latter is still a major concern but not as much as it once were/is often imagined. Antiretrovirals have significantly reduced the issues of HIV (absent TB at least), and infection rates have been on a consistent decline for over a decade - it's by no means the pandemic it was when I was growing up anymore.
This has been a bit of a mixed blessing. As HIV declined in the wealthy parts of the world, and became manageable in Africa - a process that was done entirely thanks to large financial investment - the money is drying up. It's no longer a sexy cause to donate to. Which of course threatens a resurgence.
And of course - HIV makes people much more susceptible to Malaria.
There is an odd factor to consider - the malaria pandemic as it looks today is almost entirely the fault of colonisation. This seems like a stretch but there is solid reasoning behind it. African culture never really encourage large cities - even the biggest ones built pre-colonization (think of the Zimbabwe ruins for example) were relatively tiny by European standards - even for a thousand years earlier. And they had another odd aspects: they were never built near water. This is almost unique in human history. Nowhere else in the world did large settlements *not* naturally happen close to sources of fresh water. But Africans built their towns high up on mountains - and carried water long distances from rivers, and kept the towns small.
There was, in fact, a good reason for it. Keeping towns small meant outbreaks did not turn into epidemics - because the next settlement was far away and outside of trade visits every few months had little contact. And being far from the water kept the risk of outbreaks small to begin with. Building higher also reduced the risk of infection - mosquitos don't like the thin air on mountaintops. Africa didn't build cities because cities were plague ridden on this continent.
Colonisation saw the continent being upended by Europeans, who built European style cities next to the major rivers - and malaria went from a sad, but occasional, tragedy to a full blown pandemic. Africans had little choice but to migrate to these cities and still have little choice but to live in them - it's where the work is.
You are right that low-tech solutions are generally the best, educated Africans use them as par for the course. Indeed we avoid prophylactics for a different reason: they suppress symptoms and are not entirely effective so it's better NOT to use them, because if you don't then you guarantee if you do get it you'll show symptoms fast and get treated quickly. This is only true if you *li
>I think the issues are a little more complex than this. No copyrights on a recipe: sort of right. You cannot copyright a simple list of ingredients or basic instructions explaining how to put them together. Cookbooks, on the other hand, which include cute or clever language, photos of meals and so on are certainly copyrightable.
Yes, you can copyright a cookbook - but not the recipes inside. I can copy down any recipe in a cookbook and give it to a friend without violating a law, the recipes are not copyrightable.
>I believe you may be able to get a patent on a recipe.
Nope. Under the Berne convention certain classes of goods known as "necessities for life" cannot, in any signatory country, qualify for any of the laws that the Berne convention covers (Trademarks, Copyright, Patents). Clothing and Food (which includes recipes) both fall under this exception. That's why fashion designs cannot get IP protection. You can trademark your logo, but not the design.
That's exactly what DID happen when the EU banned Neonics a year or two ago. Bayer has been on a massive add-campaign ever since to try to get the ban lifted by claiming their pesticides are totally harmless to bees, bees actually like the stuff - they thrive when you spray them with it and think of all the job losses if we our massive multinational company has one less product to sell (which somehow didn't stop them from refusing to sell lethal injection meds to the US) etc. etc. etc.
Eventually they managed to raise enough dust to get the EU Safety Authority to set up a review committee to reconsider the decision. At time of writing the committee's results are not yet in... but I somehow have this idea that a lot of the committee members have been living large of late...
>Sure it's a bit better now, but not by much. ZA has a fvckton of coal, it will be burning it for some time.
Don't be so sure of this. Coal comes in different varieties and a coal plant must be designed for a specific variety. And we have a problem here in ZA. Until around 2010 the coal we used in our plants had little export value, while the coal Europe used was exactly the coal we didn't need. So Eskom could get very low rates on the coal they needed - because the mines could make lovely profits selling the rest to Europe.
Since 2010 the European market has been shrinking fast, it's not a viable export market anymore. China on the other hand is growing rapidly and is now our major coal export market. Only problem: China's plants use the same coal variety we do. So suddenly the mines are very unhappy about selling coal at R5 a tonne to Eskom when they SAME coal can get R50 a tonne from China.
Part of why Eskom helped the Guptas to buy that coal mine is because the mine was about to go bankrupt. The owners are in a long-term cheap coal supply with Eskom and had decided they would rather close that mine and focus on the others (from where they could export the coal to China) than keep operating the one they had to sell so cheaply it was making a loss.
Helping the Guptas buy it was partly motivated by the risk that if the mine closes Eskom would face a critical shortage. That nobody was willing to buy it without kickbacks and help tells you a lot.
Either way, none of this is relevant to American coal-miners, we've never imported coal from them and we never will - since their coal won't work in our power plants and, like you said, we have plenty of coal anyway.
It's definitely in ZA's best interest to move away from coal - not least because the economics around mining and burning have changed and it's now a lot harder to do it economically. The answer isn't the ridiculous nuclear plan either.
The problem with nuclear is that it is extremely expensive and takes a long time to get online. A minimum of a decade - and nuclear plants are notorious for going extremely over budget and over time - look how late Kusile and Medupi already are, there's no practical way a nuclear project will produce a single KW/H of power in South Africa in under 30 years. We can't afford to wait that long.
Our answer must be solar - we can bring the same power as the nuclear project online with solar in 2 years for 10% of the capital costs. And the cost of the power is far cheaper as well. Even with storage factored in it remains the cheapest power source of all, and we are particularly suited to it what with being such a high sunshine country.
The best studies right now pegs the total cost per kw/h of coal at about R120, nuclear is at about R1.05. Wind is around 85c - solar is 55c.
Less than half the cost of coal.
And 13 democrats helped them do it (not least Cory Booker- now there's a Dino if ever I saw one).
Please punish those democrats in the midterms - give their seats to actual progressives. It's EXPECTED that republicans will fuck the little guy to enrich corporations, when democrats go along with it - that's a seriously flagrant betrayal of the people who voted them into office.
You have a fecal factory ?
And they say American manufacturing is dead. Then again, America has always been, and remains, the world's number one manufacturer of bullshit.
When people say something is "logically true" so they don't need evidence- they are almost always defending a position that, when you look at the evidence, turns out to be utterly false.
So for example it is "logically true" that gun control won't stop mass shootings because "anybody crazy enough to go on a shooting spree won't let gun control laws stop him getting an illegal gun" - it seems even more true if you consider that no gun-control country has managed to completely eradicate trafficking in illegal guns. There's just one problem - the logic doesn't match reality. The US has had more mass shootings in the past 20 years than the next 30 countries combined... BY MORE THAN TWO TIMES. The next thirty countries combined had 22 mass shootings alltogether, the US had 48 in the same time. Now why would this happen ? Why is the logic wrong ? Because it fails to consider the facts. Fact is, mass shooters are almost never career criminals. They have no contacts in the criminal underworld - and buying illegal guns is not easy. The guys selling them won't just sell them to anybody who shows up at the dockyard -the risk of it being an undercover cop is too high. You need people in the underworld who knows you and will vouch for you. You need to know where to go, who to talk to, what not to say... it's just not that simple.
It's "logical" that reducing government spending must also reduce government debt. Except that every time in history a government has reduced spending their debt went UP - there's literally no example of the "logical" prediction happening - not ever. When you consider ALL the facts - it starts to make sense. Every expense is somebody's income, this just just as true of government spending. Government cuts spending, that cuts income from citizens, and from the people they would have bought from. Most government revenue comes from taxes on income - so you cut a huge chain of income, that means cutting your own revenue by a massive amount. It's been mathematically proven that the revenue loss from austerity MUST always be greater than the savings, it's impossible for it it not to be. So in reality, austerity turns out to be about as effective a way of bringing down debt as burning your paycheck to save on your heating bill.
Lots of things are logical - but don't hold up to scrutiny because the evidence prove that the logic is, in fact, wrong because it didn't include all the relevant factors.
Your logic falls in the same category. The headlines are filled, daily, with massive scandals by big name brands- they happen constantly. So why is your logic wrong ? Because, it turns out, the risk of getting caught doing something horrible is relatively low, and usually you can get away with it for several years before you get caught. So why not do it? Any harm to the brand will be years away, after you made billions in profits, more than enough to cover whatever may be lost in future due to brand-harm, and anyway that will be some other CEO's problem to deal with, you'll have walked out with your golden parachute long before the crows come home to roost.
Where DOES It happen ? When the bad things are done by somebody else, and the knowledge of it happening is already leaked. The tylenol poisoning case was such an example. Tylenol didn't poison their own medicine, they had every incentive to do a massive recall to prevent harm to the brand - because they were not profiting from the bad thing that caused the harm and it was ALREADY DISCOVERED. But this rare - the vast majority of horrible things done in the world are done by corporations to their own customers and the second most common variety are done by corporations to their own workers. The only reason that's the order is because corporations usually have more customers than workers - it has nothing to do with the severity of the horrible things.
It's worth noting that, prior to the FDA's establishment, more than 80% of all "medicine" sold in the US were so-called "patent medicine". These drugs, contrary to popular myth, didn't all do nothing - most of them were filled with deadly and addictive substances (usually opium) which the buyers had no idea they were buying. They were marketed for things so completely unrelated that it's physically impossible one drug could treat them all - but they sure made you high.
In short - it was a disaster that killed far more people than it ever cured. In the post-FDA world, this problem has shifted exclusively to those things which the FDA cannot regulate due to congressionmen selling out suplements and homeopathy. A recent study found that 1 in 3 supplements contained no shred whatsoever of the plant they are supposed to have been derived from. Suplements kill people on a daily basis due to dangerous ingredients and a lack of proper warnings about correct usage - seeing as they aren't regulated and nobody is making sure they know what correct usage actually means.
Where regulation does not exist, neither does medicine.
So does the cooking industry. You can't get patents or copyrights on a recipe. You can trademark a brand but you can't stop anybody else from making the exact same product.
Hence my use of the word "basically". Those mortality rates are concerning, but compared to Africa - they are insignificant. It's the single largest source of death on the continent - and many economists have argued that without the economic burden of Malaria this continent would be wealthy. It wipes out most of the continents GDP every year.
He chose Mike Pence as running mate. A bigot who once made it a criminal offense for gays to apply for marriage licenses. He was not okay with just denying them: he jailed them.
And Trump put him a heartbeat from the presidency.
And you may have missed the point - it should have been obvious from the fact that I CHOSE to make every assumption maximally in their favour. The point is not to calculate the exact number, the point is a simple Fermi-estimation of the severity of the harm imposed compared to that of the GM ignition scandal. The point is not how many were harmed - if that was my goal, I would have done serious research to get accurate numbers for the things I just guessed in their favour - it's merely to illustrate in order of magnitudes how much worse it was. If the margin of error it's anywhere within 2 orders of magnitude then the calculation is close enough for it's intended purpose.
Simply put, as with any Fermi-estimation, the goal is not to determine what the number is, just to know if it's a big number or not.
And making every assumption in their favour more than erases extrapolation deviations - and also more than erases whatever difference the diesel/petrol percentage may be.
Then by your reasoning there is
1) No reason to have air quality laws at all
2) No justification for holding companies to account that violate them.
Since there are "direct" deaths - they bear no responsibility ?
Sorry, but I don't buy that reasoning for two reasons:
1) It's been an established point of law that indirectly, but knowingly, causing a death can bear culpability for over 2000 years.
2) It's batshit crazy.
The comparison was in how much harm was done - as that is the just way to determine damages. Whether the harm was direct or indirect is utterly unimportant.
Now your talk about 'extrapolation' comes down to questioning the maths - there's just one problem, I KNOW the maths are wrong, after all there are quite a few numbers we don't have definitive answers for. On every one of those I took the generous approach of assuming the smallest possible values. Using REALISTIC likely values would quadruple or even quintiple the damages. So sure, the maths aren't great - but I did them to maximally benefit Volkswagen - nobody can say I used the unknowns to their detriment, I made assumptions ONLY in their favour.
Oh how the world has changed... back in the early 2000's when casemodding was the great geekfad - and we all had drawer-handles screwed to the top of our desktops for easy carrying, one guy who showed up at our local lan-parties (remember those) had actually built a case where one entire side WAS a flat-screen (which was still new technology at the time). So he could carry the PC and the screen as one unit. Just plonk it down, and game on the left side of the box.
While very ingenious - I gave it a go and decided against trying to replicate it. The angle was horrible, and there was no way to lift the screen to a comfortable viewing height.
Now we're doing multi-monitor built-in to laptops...
So assuming that what you mean by 'correct' usage applies - that would be what ? About 800 AT&T employees all lining up to take a dump on him one at a time ? Nasty...
Thank goodness he used the it correctly then. As per the dictionary.com:
4. in effect; in substance; very nearly; virtually:
I literally died when she walked out on stage in that costume.
Here is Webster's (you know for your Americans):
2: : in effect : virtually
There are two things you should learn from this discussion. /. has an international readership it's quite likely you may encounter them on these forums at times so you really ought to learn them.
Firstly - the common usage of "literally" as a an exclamation preceding hyperbole is, in fact, entirely correct English according to every dictionary. The second is this: American English has half as many meanings for the word "literally" as British English do - which means there are two MORE fully correct usages of "literally" you probably wouldn't even recognise if one bit you on the ass - and since
The only thing worse than grammar nazi's are grammar nazis who can't even get the grammar right.