Now, you can make arguments about how barbaric Japanese culture is after the war, yadda yadda, but I have a simple theory for this: if you're a European activist group, it's easy to extend your activism efforts to another country that is right next to you where it's easy to contact sympathizers and where you probably know someone who speaks the right language. It's hard to do so when the country is on the other side of the world and speaks a completely unrelated language.
In other words, you are implying each country in Europe just independently decided by themselves to not have capital punishment, so that you can imply it's a lot of decisions versus just one on the side of the US, and that's not true. It's more like one decision by European lobbyists versus the US.
If someone gets put in jail and turns out to be innocent, do you suggest that all responsible get put in jail for kidnapping and false imprisonment? If someone gets convicted of a crime, this is reported in the newspapers, and they are found innocent, do you want to put all responsible in jail for committing slander and libel? If they're fined for a crime, should we put the judge in jail for theft (stealing the amount of the fine)?
If someone spends 30 years in prison under a life sentence, dies, and is found innocent afterwards (or is just never found innocent at all), there is absolutely nothing we can do to help.
Of course, there's a chance of them being found innocent before they die, but a chance, by definition, isn't going to apply to everyone. There will still be some innocent people who die in prison and for whom we can do nothing. There will be fewer of them, but they will still exist, and if you're bothered by the fact that they exist at all, the chance shouldn't matter unless the chance is certainty.
It depends on how the game is designed. A game that doesn't have checkpoints can still have situations that can't be passed without using trial and error. Demon Souls has several bosses like that. It even has one situation where you need to kill a character who doesn't attack you and sits vaguely near the boss room, before the boss will die. Congratulations on figuring that out first time around except by luck. It's also quite possible to survive to a boss and then find you don't have the equipment needed to defeat it reasonably, so you have no option but to die. That is not rewarding cautious gameplay, that's screwing the player over no matter how cautious he is.
Demon Souls also has two endings, but you're probably not going to see both of them without going to Youtube, because they depend on one decision made at the very end of the game, but since you can't save and reload your game there's no way to try again with the other decision.
A lot of games are set up so that if you want to complete everything in this sense, you have to use a guide. RPGs are particularly bad at this. "Follow this sequence of 10 arbitrary steps on arbitrary maps to get this hidden character". "Defeat this bonus boss, which is pretty much impossible without finding the exact piece of equipment, which is found as a 1 in 200 drop from an enemy on the opposite side of the map".
Follow the links, which go to a PDF of the case. The judge refers to court cases suggesting otherwise. For instance, "Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 68 (1986) (in sexual harassment case, totality of circumstances including plaintiffâ(TM)s own conduct is potentially relevant)."
Also, it helps to run a store in a low income neighborhood, where fewer people have fast internet connections. Likewise, places occupied by older people are a help, because they're less likely to have or know how to use Internet.
I'm not even joking--look at where the surviving Blockbusters are located. Unfortunately this advice isn't going to be much use if your store already exists.
A passive-aggressive form of troublemaking is still troublemaking. Just because he didn't utter the words "I have a bomb" doesn't mean that he didn't deliberately wear a device that he knows resembles a bomb with the intention of causing trouble.
And there's a difference between the TSA people confiscating a cupcake, and the TSA people calling in the bomb squad for something that looks like a bomb. Stopping bombs is what they're supposed to do.
A well-trained real threat who keeps his cool and follows every precaution to not get noticed won't behave like a prankster.
An actual real threat may very well behave like a prankster. Not everyone is perfect; besides, people certainly act in dumb ways when under stress, and bombing a plane is a high stress occupation.
Remember the first World Trade Center truck bomber? "A real threat wouldn't return to get back the deposit on the truck he used for bombing." Of course, he did.
If he wanted to be a troublemaker, intentionally made a fake bomb, and got caught, "art project" is pretty much the only thing he could say that would explain why he has a fake bomb without confessing to a crime. So I'm very skeptical that it's actually an art project. Rather, he tried to troll the TSA, and he got caught; I'm surprised that he didn't add that he was just doing a social experiment.
And in the unlikely event that he was actually doing it as an art project, it's really not unreasonable to expect the TSA to treat art projects that look like bombs as bombs. Really, switches, wires, and fuses? How many fuses are on your watch?
I'm pretty sure that the massive casualties suffered in World War II would have been less of the Nazis and Japanese had just been permitted to take over.
In that case, it's a tax. BBC apologists are claiming that it's not a tax because if you don't watch TV you don't need to pay it. But that's the wrong criterion. It's not a tax if not watching the BBC means you don't have to pay it. If you have to pay it even if you don't watch the BBC, it's a tax, even if you can still avoid it by avoiding the whole medium.
What if the BBC said that playing video games requires the purchase of a video game license? And then used the money to create their own Angry Beeb game? Would you agree that people who play other games are being taxed to pay for Angry Beeb, or would you say that it's not a tax because you can avoid it by not playing video games at all?
What does receiving broadcasts have to do with anything?
Suppose they published a newspaper, and charged everyone who reads any newspaper, even not their own. Would you say it's okay because they don't charge you if you don't read newspapers?
If the BBC released Angry Birds BBC, would you be okay with them charging money for that, even if you just want to play World of Warcraft? ("They don't pester you, as long as you don't use the computer to play video games.")
"You can avoid paying for X if you don't use X" is not a tax as long as both X's are the same. But in this case both X's are not the same. you can't fudge the granularity and make one X be something much broader than the other.
The license fee is not linked to watching BBC. If you only use the TV to watch BBC competitors you still have to pay the BBC. That's what makes it a tax in practice, rather than a fee for a service. Only taxes can do that.
Aside from the problems people already mentioned, if you look in their FAQ, one correction they didn't even mention is correcting it for total Obama support. Obviously if a place has twice as many Obama opponents it's also going to have twice as many racist Obama opponents. But that doesn't prove that it has "more racist Obama opponents" in the sense we normally think of. If you want that you need ratios.
And 395 is a very small number. They mention that it's not a sample, but it's all the geocoded racist tweets they found, but since it is such a small number, they failed to account for the possibility that there just isn't a lot of racism in the first place, and even if they did look for ratios, "very small percentage compared to another very small percentage" isn't interesting.
And they mention they didn't bother checking all the hateful comments about Romney (they did check for anti-white comments, but they didn't check for comments reflecting other stereotypes). Their excuse is basically "we were trying to find out about racism, which that's not". The trouble with that reasoning is that while anti-Romney tweets are not germane to what they literally claim to be looking for, they are germane to the subtext of what they're looking for, which is that racism is a big problem--if there are a lot of anti-Romney tweets, that can show that the number of anti-Obama tweets is not really such a big deal. "Blacks called names almost as much as Mormons" makes a bad headline, after all.
Allowing student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy is a good first step. The end result will be that the possibility of bankruptcy will mean that loans will be less available for useless degrees and more available for useful ones.
Unions work best when the workers are more or less interchangeable. In development, individual productivity differs widely; there's a far greater difference between a barely competent developer and a great developer than between a barely competent steelworker and a great steelworker. Skill sets and the market value for those skill sets also differ widely--there's no steelworker equivalent to "COBOL developer vs. Java developer". Unions getting into this would make a complete mess.
Not to mention that development is a changing industry and unions might not be able to keep up just because any large organization gets bureaucratic. Unions may very well have standard pay rates based on how popular languages were 10 years ago.
Also, unions are best at bargaining when there are large numbers of workers employed by a company. Often a company may employ a single digit number of developers. 100 people threatening to strike at once because they are made to work 80 hour weeks are a lot harder to replace than 4.
The idea that it is possible to only license something to be viewed by a certain number of people depends on copyright law. Copyright law comes from governments. Yeah, Microsoft is the one implementing it, but they wouldn't even try to restrict how many people can view the content if it wasn't possible to license the content that way.
One of the ways to do biased studies is to be selective about which ones you release. Just release the favorable ones and suppress the unfavorable ones; that allows you to be biased while using nonpartisan studies. You may point out that the Republicans wanted this study suppressed, but look at it the other way: how did this study get out in the first place?
Wikipedia explains that not all of the reports produced by CRS are released to the public, and some only get out because they are leaked. Having a report that makes good anti-Republican headlines released less than two months before the election should immediately raise suspicions of how it was chosen to be released, and how many reports unfavorable to Democrats were not chosen.
Is this a breakthrough? No. 29% is nice, but it's not like they found a whole new revolutionary way of doing it.
Is there some controversy, like someone claimed in the past that they could never get more than 10% better and Intel broke through the barrier? No (or if it is, Slashdot doesn't seem to have heard of it).
Does having them get this much better make them useful for applications they weren't useful before, or make them affordable to a whole new range of customers? Not really.
Is it at least a nice round number like "SSDs are now 100 times faster than when they were invented"? No.
This is either an ad, or a fan who's so rabid that he basically makes his own ads. What next, if they went up to 35%, 40%, and 45% would we see three more articles? Would shrinking to 18mm produce yet another article, and going down to 72 cents yet another? I mean, 40% is at least as newsworthy as 29% (which is to say, not at all), right?
Your new version won't fall under Betteridge's Law unless it actually appeared as a headline. And as a rule, it won't, for exactly the same reasons as to why we have Betteridge's Law in the first place. It would only appear if everyone agreed that Silicon Valley has no morals and the reporter wanted to suggest that it does, but is incapable of proving it. This scenario is more than unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan has the death penalty.
Now, you can make arguments about how barbaric Japanese culture is after the war, yadda yadda, but I have a simple theory for this: if you're a European activist group, it's easy to extend your activism efforts to another country that is right next to you where it's easy to contact sympathizers and where you probably know someone who speaks the right language. It's hard to do so when the country is on the other side of the world and speaks a completely unrelated language.
In other words, you are implying each country in Europe just independently decided by themselves to not have capital punishment, so that you can imply it's a lot of decisions versus just one on the side of the US, and that's not true. It's more like one decision by European lobbyists versus the US.
If someone gets put in jail and turns out to be innocent, do you suggest that all responsible get put in jail for kidnapping and false imprisonment? If someone gets convicted of a crime, this is reported in the newspapers, and they are found innocent, do you want to put all responsible in jail for committing slander and libel? If they're fined for a crime, should we put the judge in jail for theft (stealing the amount of the fine)?
If someone spends 30 years in prison under a life sentence, dies, and is found innocent afterwards (or is just never found innocent at all), there is absolutely nothing we can do to help.
Of course, there's a chance of them being found innocent before they die, but a chance, by definition, isn't going to apply to everyone. There will still be some innocent people who die in prison and for whom we can do nothing. There will be fewer of them, but they will still exist, and if you're bothered by the fact that they exist at all, the chance shouldn't matter unless the chance is certainty.
It depends on how the game is designed. A game that doesn't have checkpoints can still have situations that can't be passed without using trial and error. Demon Souls has several bosses like that. It even has one situation where you need to kill a character who doesn't attack you and sits vaguely near the boss room, before the boss will die. Congratulations on figuring that out first time around except by luck. It's also quite possible to survive to a boss and then find you don't have the equipment needed to defeat it reasonably, so you have no option but to die. That is not rewarding cautious gameplay, that's screwing the player over no matter how cautious he is.
Demon Souls also has two endings, but you're probably not going to see both of them without going to Youtube, because they depend on one decision made at the very end of the game, but since you can't save and reload your game there's no way to try again with the other decision.
A lot of games are set up so that if you want to complete everything in this sense, you have to use a guide. RPGs are particularly bad at this. "Follow this sequence of 10 arbitrary steps on arbitrary maps to get this hidden character". "Defeat this bonus boss, which is pretty much impossible without finding the exact piece of equipment, which is found as a 1 in 200 drop from an enemy on the opposite side of the map".
Follow the links, which go to a PDF of the case. The judge refers to court cases suggesting otherwise. For instance, "Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 68 (1986) (in sexual harassment case, totality
of circumstances including plaintiffâ(TM)s own conduct is potentially relevant)."
If you report it to the owner they have this habit of either threatening to sue you unless you keep it quiet.
Also, it helps to run a store in a low income neighborhood, where fewer people have fast internet connections. Likewise, places occupied by older people are a help, because they're less likely to have or know how to use Internet.
I'm not even joking--look at where the surviving Blockbusters are located. Unfortunately this advice isn't going to be much use if your store already exists.
Pretty much the only things that are any use on the Homebrew Channel are emulators, gameshark-esque hacking devices, and media players.
A passive-aggressive form of troublemaking is still troublemaking. Just because he didn't utter the words "I have a bomb" doesn't mean that he didn't deliberately wear a device that he knows resembles a bomb with the intention of causing trouble.
And there's a difference between the TSA people confiscating a cupcake, and the TSA people calling in the bomb squad for something that looks like a bomb. Stopping bombs is what they're supposed to do.
A well-trained real threat who keeps his cool and follows every precaution to not get noticed won't behave like a prankster.
An actual real threat may very well behave like a prankster. Not everyone is perfect; besides, people certainly act in dumb ways when under stress, and bombing a plane is a high stress occupation.
Remember the first World Trade Center truck bomber? "A real threat wouldn't return to get back the deposit on the truck he used for bombing." Of course, he did.
If he wanted to be a troublemaker, intentionally made a fake bomb, and got caught, "art project" is pretty much the only thing he could say that would explain why he has a fake bomb without confessing to a crime. So I'm very skeptical that it's actually an art project. Rather, he tried to troll the TSA, and he got caught; I'm surprised that he didn't add that he was just doing a social experiment.
And in the unlikely event that he was actually doing it as an art project, it's really not unreasonable to expect the TSA to treat art projects that look like bombs as bombs. Really, switches, wires, and fuses? How many fuses are on your watch?
I'm pretty sure that the massive casualties suffered in World War II would have been less of the Nazis and Japanese had just been permitted to take over.
If the BBC also authorized video games, would it then not be a tax to charge people for playing video games?
In that case, it's a tax. BBC apologists are claiming that it's not a tax because if you don't watch TV you don't need to pay it. But that's the wrong criterion. It's not a tax if not watching the BBC means you don't have to pay it. If you have to pay it even if you don't watch the BBC, it's a tax, even if you can still avoid it by avoiding the whole medium.
What if the BBC said that playing video games requires the purchase of a video game license? And then used the money to create their own Angry Beeb game? Would you agree that people who play other games are being taxed to pay for Angry Beeb, or would you say that it's not a tax because you can avoid it by not playing video games at all?
What does receiving broadcasts have to do with anything?
Suppose they published a newspaper, and charged everyone who reads any newspaper, even not their own. Would you say it's okay because they don't charge you if you don't read newspapers?
If the BBC released Angry Birds BBC, would you be okay with them charging money for that, even if you just want to play World of Warcraft? ("They don't pester you, as long as you don't use the computer to play video games.")
"You can avoid paying for X if you don't use X" is not a tax as long as both X's are the same. But in this case both X's are not the same. you can't fudge the granularity and make one X be something much broader than the other.
The license fee is not linked to watching BBC. If you only use the TV to watch BBC competitors you still have to pay the BBC. That's what makes it a tax in practice, rather than a fee for a service. Only taxes can do that.
Aside from the problems people already mentioned, if you look in their FAQ, one correction they didn't even mention is correcting it for total Obama support. Obviously if a place has twice as many Obama opponents it's also going to have twice as many racist Obama opponents. But that doesn't prove that it has "more racist Obama opponents" in the sense we normally think of. If you want that you need ratios.
And 395 is a very small number. They mention that it's not a sample, but it's all the geocoded racist tweets they found, but since it is such a small number, they failed to account for the possibility that there just isn't a lot of racism in the first place, and even if they did look for ratios, "very small percentage compared to another very small percentage" isn't interesting.
And they mention they didn't bother checking all the hateful comments about Romney (they did check for anti-white comments, but they didn't check for comments reflecting other stereotypes). Their excuse is basically "we were trying to find out about racism, which that's not". The trouble with that reasoning is that while anti-Romney tweets are not germane to what they literally claim to be looking for, they are germane to the subtext of what they're looking for, which is that racism is a big problem--if there are a lot of anti-Romney tweets, that can show that the number of anti-Obama tweets is not really such a big deal. "Blacks called names almost as much as Mormons" makes a bad headline, after all.
Allowing student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy is a good first step. The end result will be that the possibility of bankruptcy will mean that loans will be less available for useless degrees and more available for useful ones.
Unions work best when the workers are more or less interchangeable. In development, individual productivity differs widely; there's a far greater difference between a barely competent developer and a great developer than between a barely competent steelworker and a great steelworker. Skill sets and the market value for those skill sets also differ widely--there's no steelworker equivalent to "COBOL developer vs. Java developer". Unions getting into this would make a complete mess.
Not to mention that development is a changing industry and unions might not be able to keep up just because any large organization gets bureaucratic. Unions may very well have standard pay rates based on how popular languages were 10 years ago.
Also, unions are best at bargaining when there are large numbers of workers employed by a company. Often a company may employ a single digit number of developers. 100 people threatening to strike at once because they are made to work 80 hour weeks are a lot harder to replace than 4.
The idea that it is possible to only license something to be viewed by a certain number of people depends on copyright law. Copyright law comes from governments. Yeah, Microsoft is the one implementing it, but they wouldn't even try to restrict how many people can view the content if it wasn't possible to license the content that way.
One of the ways to do biased studies is to be selective about which ones you release. Just release the favorable ones and suppress the unfavorable ones; that allows you to be biased while using nonpartisan studies. You may point out that the Republicans wanted this study suppressed, but look at it the other way: how did this study get out in the first place?
Wikipedia explains that not all of the reports produced by CRS are released to the public, and some only get out because they are leaked. Having a report that makes good anti-Republican headlines released less than two months before the election should immediately raise suspicions of how it was chosen to be released, and how many reports unfavorable to Democrats were not chosen.
Translation: it's okay to lie, since this is for the greater good.
Is this a breakthrough? No. 29% is nice, but it's not like they found a whole new revolutionary way of doing it.
Is there some controversy, like someone claimed in the past that they could never get more than 10% better and Intel broke through the barrier? No (or if it is, Slashdot doesn't seem to have heard of it).
Does having them get this much better make them useful for applications they weren't useful before, or make them affordable to a whole new range of customers? Not really.
Is it at least a nice round number like "SSDs are now 100 times faster than when they were invented"? No.
This is either an ad, or a fan who's so rabid that he basically makes his own ads. What next, if they went up to 35%, 40%, and 45% would we see three more articles? Would shrinking to 18mm produce yet another article, and going down to 72 cents yet another? I mean, 40% is at least as newsworthy as 29% (which is to say, not at all), right?
Your new version won't fall under Betteridge's Law unless it actually appeared as a headline. And as a rule, it won't, for exactly the same reasons as to why we have Betteridge's Law in the first place. It would only appear if everyone agreed that Silicon Valley has no morals and the reporter wanted to suggest that it does, but is incapable of proving it. This scenario is more than unlikely.