Most staple foods in the US are mechanically harvested.
The ones that can't be (notoriously, strawberries), are specialty crops.
Illegal immigration does not bring the price per bushel of wheat down in any noticable maner. What is allready obscenely cheap to produce compared to manually picked crops, when you count only total laborers involved. (A single farmer plows, irrigates, sows, fertilizes, and sprays insecticide on a huge plot of land. Several people show up to harvest, only because it takes several drivers to haul the crop off, and because many hands make lighter work, and more fields can be harvested PER DAY. Compare to strawberries, which take DAYS to harvest one field.
You don't get "cheap food" from illegal labor. You get cheap luxuries from illegal labor.
There will also be microscopic particle buildup inside the air bearing itself, because it isn't a sealed unit.
The surfaces of the heatsink and the CPU are not perfectly smooth, which means tiny eddy currents will form on the surfaces, and trap these particles. This means the heatsink will still require periodic cleaning and inspection in any environment besides an electrostatic cleanroom.
A thousandth of an inch is very huge compared to dust particles.
Early *True* IBM PC-ATs had a really big toggle switch on the side. This is because the very first PC-ATs used an identical form factor to the PC-XT class system chasis, and was pretty much the same, other than the inclusion of an RTC, and a 286. (and able to see significantly more RAM.)
The original AT did not have any buttons that I am aware of on the chasis, other than technically the keylock switch... Later iterations, if I recall correctly... (it has been quite some time since my hands have been in one of THOSE things...) had a yellow turbo button, and a red reset button, but that was much later.
A patent is a limited right, granted to get the information published for the public to read and implement later.
It is intended to help prevent industrial secrets, and improve the state of the art. That is the purpose for a patent.
Apple's violent brandishing of the powers afforded to it via the patent process to stifle innovation, and to suppress the advancement of the state of the art is directly counter-intuitive to the reason they were granted the patent in the first place.
Apple could have chosen to license the patent for a steep fee, or to charge a royalty for the use of their patent, but instead seek to use it as a barrier to entry for other and competing products.
This is not the fault of the USPTO. It is squarely the fault of Apple Inc.
I agree with the judge. Apple should get a reasonable, and non-predatory royalty for any alledgedly used patents, not an injunction barring anybody else from making phones that aren't tincans on wires.
But that would be contrary to the memory of dr evi..I mean, Steve Jobs, who famously said he would [expletive] destroy android.
Apple doesn't want a royalty. They want dominance. I hope the judge hands them their balls on a plate instead.
Most of those are known as "abusive debt practices", and are illegal.
Don't misunderstand me here:
There are *plenty* of abusive creditors, and plenty of abusive collections agencies.
Sitting on a received check, or worse, cashing it and not crediting a balance, both have federal level restitutions and penalties, along with a whole lot of other abusive things.
The information on consumer protection is freely available. In addition to federal consumer protection, you may also be able to seek state level remedies for additional practices that your individual state deems unconscionable.
My home state especially is very aggressive in terms of the statutes and laws put down, that make the federal penalties look like chump change.
I appreciate collections agencies as a necessary thing for modern society. I do not however, give them carte blanc. They have rules and laws they have to abide by, and if they don't follow them, they are criminals, and need to be punished.
The specifics of what is and is not considered an abusive business practice differs from state to state. Check the internet, then check the legal section of your local library. If you believe you are being illegally abused during collections, contact a lawyer, and see to it.
Many of the larger collections agencies rely on people not knowing their rights and protections under the law, and illegally bully their debtors, because the illegal practices are easy, and effective, and the debtor doesn't know that they can devour the collections people like a diabetic in a candy store. (For instance, my home state has penalties of 10,000$ PER INFRACTION, Itemized, on some common offenses!)
Good collections agencies do things on the up and up, but becoming jaded and cynical causes them to become vindictive and fall into abusive practices. They then become bad collections agencies. That is why those laws exist. If you have problems with abusive collectors, learn what your rights and protections are, and seek legal remedy.
Don't complain to me about nasty collections calls.
Get off your butt, educate yourself, and take decisive lega action on your own behalf.
It doesn't matter what the circumstances are, really. If you take out a huge debt, then default, and then refuse to pay, you are a deadbeat client.
A collections agency deals exclusively with such clients. Some are honest people who have had a serious problem happen, such as a death in the family, a serious illness, or injury. Most of the people I know who work in collections are more than happy to work out an equitable payment plan for such people, if they can prove their condition.
The problem, is that there are also "Dedicated deadbeats" out there. They game the system for all it is worth, rack up debts of unbelievable amounts, then move, change their names, liquidate their on-credit purchases for cash, and settle somewhere else, leaving other people to hold the bag of their shit. These people invent sob stories all the time, hoping to weasle out of their obligations. Dealing with these people makes collections people innately distrustful and cynical.
I actually interned at a collection agency for awhile. I got to see just what percentages of the debtors were real, diehard deadbeats. we are talking people with a paper file that weighs 10 pounds, with 50 aliases.
These people far outnumber the honest debtors. Most honest people will try to bend over backwards to pay a bill before it reaches a collection agency. The people collection agencies deal with are the people that absolutely refuse to pay, despite being notified for months on end, as a usual practice.
Collection agencies are like trash collectors. They are not a glamorous vocation, and like trash collectors, being one puts you at risk. Trash collectors get unregistered medical waste from things like insulin syrenges in the trash that could stick them. They get exposed to all kinds of toxic chemical shit. Bill collectors have to work with people that would rather kill the bill collector than pay the bill.
As much as you seem to hate the bill collectors, they provide a valuable and essential service to modern society. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and often times, the bill collectors are all that stands between a glut of people gaming the system, and ruining it for everyone else.
Do you like running water? Electricity? Those services are not free to provide, and paying the people to provide them is how you get them. Most bills processed at the company I interned at were utility bills. With people wanting free utilities, by getting them in other people's names, under false names, and abusing the system in so many ways i cant even describe them all.
Contrary to what you might believe, a collections agency *CAN* pull your credit history, and see that while you owe a huge ass debt, you also spent 1000$ on a new laptop at newegg. As such, when you give a sob story about being laid off, they arent going to believe you. That 1000$ could have paid your 500$ debt, and left some over. Why didnt you make an effort to pay your debt?
Again, for the people who really *ARE* impoverished, their histories will clearly show that. You would be surprised how a properly informed agency can actually benefit such a debtor.
But of course, you hate collections people, because they make people pay what they legally owe.
actually, I know people who used to run a collections agency. (now retired)
Most agencies that are worth a shit will work with clients to get a suitable arrangement going.
The problem is that many people refuse to make any effort at such an arrangement, or demand an arrangement that is unworkable for the collection agency. (The agency at most gets around 30% of the value of the bill. this means that your 100$ bill to little ceasar's is only worth 30$ to the bill collector. This is why they refuse to accept 5$ a month as a payment plan for it.)
They are not the scum of the earth.
The scum of the earth, are the people who take out a debt they have no intention of ever paying back. Bill collectors are a last resort for all parties involved. They wouldnt exist without deadbeats.
I don't think perfect identification, be it biometric, technological, or other, is in any way a good thing.
There are perfectly valid reasons for needing or wanting aliases, which are not associated with being a criminal.
Take for instance, employees of a collections agency. These are people who perform a distasteful, but still required service. Nobody really likes being called by a bill collector, nor do they like having to use one to get deadbeat clients to pay up. Deadbeats especially, despise bill collectors, and some are even belligerent enough to be a real physical threat to collection employees. This is why many collections agencies provide work aliases for call center staff, etc. If a foolproof means of identifying people is developed, these employees are at risk.
Then you have the quintessential witness protection program. These are people that have witnessed a violent or serious crime, and are now embroiled through no fault of their own in some serious shit. If Big Tony can perfectly identify them through his ring of heavies using foolproof tech, this program becomes effectively worthless.
and last, but certainly far from least, you have the serious problems with the Feds, and their "Papers Please!" abuses. History does a fine job of explaining, in graphic, nightmare inducing detail, exactly why perfectly being identifiable by government officials is bad bad juju.
People making startups, and companies offering products:
I understand that there is a very strong demand for this kind of technology. Please also understand exactly *why* there is a demand for this kind of technology, and what it opens the door to. Is landing a fat contract and making bank worth endangering people's lives, and being directly complicit in abuses of power that very well inevitably kill people really worth it?
I personally dont think it is.
This kind of technology, in the broad and general sense, is not a good thing. Please stop developing it.
Space suits are a textile product, the same as a bullet proof vest, or a tommy hillfiger T-shirt.
Currently, they are expensive and rightfully so:
The number of paying customers is small. The number of units sold is small. The batch sizes for materials are small. The number of places that make them is small. The number of people that design and build/test them is small.
However, space suits, like any other commodity that could theoretically benefit from mass manufacture, stand to benefit greatly from the network effects of said mass manufacture.
Should commercial spaceflight take off as a new billion dollar industry, the situation with space suits changes.
The number of paying customers increases. May eventually become large. The number of units sold increases, and may become large. To meet the increased demand, the batch sizes for material grows. The increased demand, coupled with high initial prices means ripe territory for commercial competitors, which drives the prices down. The increased number of commercial competitors means an increase in the available choices of offering, which means that the numbers of people designing suits goes up.
Taken together, the price of suits will drop significantly, assuming artificial market pressures, like protectionism, market collusion, or innecessary (for the function of the product) regulations are not enacted.
From the perspective of somebody that might want to be a space colonist some day, the prospect of multiple sellers competing for my purchase dollar with quality offerings is very attractive, not the least of which being the lower personal cost of purchase; it also means a lower ticket price, since costs of operating the space transport are reduced, and increased options for specific types of suit fr specific tasks. If I am going to take a job building a commercial spce station doing evas bucking rivets, I want a durable, work-friendly suit. Not a fragile emergency support suit. Multiple suppliers with multiple products means I can find a better offering for my personal needs.
As such, I strongly desire a market flooded with specialty, commercially made suits.
While that would certainly be expedient, I can't see that ever happening outside of an untouchable govt program.
Further complicating the issue for the bible bumbers, is that embyonic cells can be harvested without blast destruction. It is commonly used to test blast health prior to implantation in IVF.
Regulations mandating nondestructive harvest only would solve both problems neatly.
But they cling so deperately to "embryonic == murder!" That they can't see anything else, and see hobgoblins and the devil behind ever proceedure and paper.
I was considering more the following, given the mental image:
AC unzips the space suit, and whips out his johnson.
Pressurized air from the space suit is forcibly blown out of the opening in the suit, whiping and swirling around said penis, and falling off in pressure as it does so. This is similar to venting compressed gas, such as a compressed air duster. It rapidly chills any surface that the venting gas cloud comes into contact with. Thermal exchange is with this "higher" pressure gas leaving the suit.
Further, he let's the urine fly.
The urine flows...quite forcibly due to the increased internal body pressure compared to the end of the hydraulic system...and rapidly transitions from high to low pressure without a pressurizing container. While it *is* inside the penis, the urethra is a straight, mostly unobstructed shot into the near vacuum of the martian polar atmosphere. This drop in pressure, direct contact with the airflow flash frozen penis, and gas spallation of dissolved gasses in the urine stream volatizing under the change in pressure (just gets foamy, but the phase change still changes effective temp) causes the urine temp to drop sharply.
If not freezing inside the urethra, it definately would be shortly after leaving.
Also, his bladder would empty profoundly and suddenly.
Personally, I wouldn't try it, but if you like exposing your penis to pressures so low that the blood inside it boils, while also subjecting it to temperatures so low as to cause the urine to flash freeze before it can leave the urethra, be my guest.
Not exactly what I would call "fun" myself, but I guess everyone has their kink.
Oh, they don't come to MY house anymore. A few friendly visits where I hand them pate of christianity, cut up, dissected, cross referenced, and fully researched, which shows their beliefs to be silly and totally incompatible with what is actually in that nasty little book, and they just stopped coming.:D
I must be on some kind of black list now, since I have moved since then, and *still* don't get any visits!
Destroying their little lives was such a delicious past time too! (Using the bible, in full, researched context to do it too, made it even more delightful, since they had absolutely no defense against it.)
Unfortunately for us both... I can't ever seem to forget anything that I read.
I read that particular fairytale, probably for the same reasons you did, (wtf is everyone always so angry about?!) And now its plot is permanently lodged in my assembled body of literary knowledge, right alongside all the greek mythology, the copy of the lord of the rings I read, and a dozen more science fiction books, and treatises on comparative religion.
As for usefulness... you would be surprised how useful that particular fairytale can be, when dealing with such annoyances as jehova's witnesses, and scary southern baptists.
Apparently god's powers are sufficiently hampered by iron vehicles that his divinely empowered armies can't defeat enemies equiped with them. (Seriously, google "chariots of iron" for epic lulz.) As such, apparently you can run over every messenger god sends at you with a lincoln town car and be perfectly safe from his wrath inside.
Since it is abudnandly clear you have not read this particular fairytale that you are harping about, here's a reader's digest version of events.
God creates the universe. God creates heaven, and the angels. (Includes lucifer.) God creates the earth. God creates man, and holds man in special esteem. (Unlike angels, humans were created to resemble god.) Lucifer is jealous, and angry about humans. Seeks to destroy them. Luficer cons eve into disobeying god. Humans are cast down. God punishes lucifer to crawl eternally in dust, and be trampled by human feet, and be forever hated....
Many generations in genesis later...
The "watchers", angels tasked with observing and reporting on the earth and human affairs, observe human women, and get horny. A shitton of them come down to earth, and swear a pact with each other to be fully complicit in their proposed crime. They then alter themselves, take human wives, and have children. The details of this escapade are the thesis of the first book of enoc, an apochryphal book. Genesis gets the reader's digest version one liner of "and the sons of god took of themselves wives, and there were giants in the land, heros and men of old."
These creatures have human appetites, are collossally huge, and don't age. They multiply, and threaten the human race with extinction.
Notice: no fire. No brimstone.
To correct the problem, god sends the flood.
The fallen watchers are banished to their prison in the darkest void, and the spirits of their mongrel children become the fell demons that torment men, since there was nowhere set aside for them to go. (They wander incorporeally on the earth, and settle in desolate places.)
But if you are going to bring up the fairytale, at least do a proper job of summarizing that part of the plot.
The nephalim (children produced by the fallen watchers who took human wives) had no place for their spiritual essenses to to upon death. They were founded on the perfect divine, from their paternal lineage as divine beings, but had been clothed in temporary flesh from their mothers'. No place existed for them to go.
They were banished to wander the earth as unclean spirits. Eg, "demons."
The fallen angels (the watchers) that sired them had to "pervert themselves" to even be able to sire children (spiritual beings have no gender), and had sworn oaths to the effect that they were all equally complicit in their fall, and share of blame.
As such, all of the fallen watchers, and a third of the other angels of heaven who sided with them, were banished from heaven. The bible (canon) does not explicitly state where they were banished to.
The apochryphal book or enoc does, however, give a description of the prison where these fallen watchers are held. Here's a hint: it bears absolutely no resemblence to dogmatic "fire and brimstone" hell as per current dogmatic practices.
Actually, the judeo christian bible is quite clear about what happens to unriteous people when they die. (Saying "sinners" implies a false dichotomy. All people are sinners by biblical standards.)
The old testament uses the term "grave" in most english translations. The original hebrew word was "sheol", which actually means "null", "nonexistence", "void", "emptiness", etc. Lit. The state of no longer being.
The current version of popular "hell", is a purely dogmatic construct with only the most minimal of biblical support, (namely the noteworthy reference in revelation to a lake of fire.) Its primary point of origin can be historically traced to the "christianization" of norther europe, where the indigionous religious belif held that those that died a "non glorious" death, such as by old age, sickness, accident, etc, were sent to a cold and harsh afterlife managed by the epynomous "hel", a frost giantess. the realm itself was also of the same name.
To better bring these forced converts into harmony with church doctrines, the role of hell changed, but the idea that undesirables go there did not.
The obvious utility of imposing an eternal punishment of unbelievable suffering and torment for disobeying religious teachings and dogma is self-evident, and is precisely why the dogma still endures long after its original parent religion's demise.
As for "if there is a heaven, there must be a hell", this is fundamentally untrue. The judeo-christian faith, as written, (not as commonly practiced, more's the pity) has no such concept, and simply has god destroying the unriteous outright, cleanly, utterly, and humanely. They die, and that's that.
Let's say for a moment, that I am a biological engineer. I specialize in creating designer microbes and plantlife.
I create a new plant. It is very pretty.
I decide, after I get rave reviews from the people seeing my new, unique plant, that other people would like to purchase seeds and seedlings of my new plant, because it is so very pretty.
I decide to make those seeds and seedlings available.
The seeds and seedlings I have then sold, do what seeds and seedlings do: they mature into adult plants, and make more seeds that are not my property anymore. While I designed the lifeform, and am ultimately responsible for creating it in the first place, my job in the lifecycle of that new organism is finished. The plants do not require me to make seeds, and frankly, don't give a shit about my wishes.
The plants were sold. If another person who bought the plants wants to try selective breeding pressures on the plants to make new varieties of my new species, that use should be allowed under the premise of the first sale doctrine. The new varieties they produce are under their exclusive control, up until they sell them to somebody else. At that time, the role of custodian once again changes hands.
What right do I, the initial biologist, have to tell other people what they can and cannot do with their own things?
Ideas are exactly the same.
I create a new idea. It is useful, and desireable, so I share that idea for a fee. Others accept the idea, and that new idea in turn cross polinates inside their heads to spawn yet more ideas I could not have concieved of myself. What right do I have to limit other people's creative evolution of my idea?
Every single thing you have around you, and every scrap of knowledge, philosophy, culture, art, and science that you treasure and value has similar evolutionary origins. No more than sigmund freud's estate has a right to demand royalties on all derivatives of psychotherapy, should any author, artist, scientist, engineer, architect, or laborer have over the evolution of their ideas and works as reinterpreted or used as an influence for works of their own engenderment or labor.
The power that the original artist has, and the only one which is intrinsic and inalienable, is the right to not publish.
Once released into the community, ideas stop being the exclusive treasure of their creators, and no longer require their creators.
Their creators are wrong to expect to, or try to, control them in any way.
Making art and making new ideas is a lot like making children. The grow up. They own themselves. You don't get to tap their bank accounts, and put garnishments on their wages, just because you sired them, or gave birth to them. You don't get to dictate who they marry, or have sex with. You don't get to dictate what carreers they will take. You have no claim to their work, property, or progeny.
These are common sense.
Yet, that is exactly what "intellectual property" does with art and ideas.
I really hope you mean that as a joke. I really, really do.
Firstly, the mayan calander thing has been quashed so intensly it isn't even really worth reacting to.
Secondly, for aliens to even see something as fucking tiny as the voyager spacecraft, they would have to already be here. Even then they might not find it. Compare: voyager spacecraft VS Sol, our sun. You can fit many millions of earths inside our sun. You can fit billions of voyager spaceprobes in a single earth. The sun is tiny compared to the heliosheath it creates against the interstellar medium. Aliens with a telescope would not be able to see the voyager spacecraft. You can't even see it from earth! You can only find it with reaaaaaly sensitive radio telescopes.
No. Aliens won't be visiting earth any time soon unless they are already here. If they were already here, the probe leaving the heliosheath wouldn't mean a damned thing.
No. This is news, because for the first time ever, we have an instrument heading into the interstellar medium, sending us actual data. Up until now, it has all been deduction and theory. Now we are getting data. That is worth celebrating.
No, that's catalogueing and preserving a research sample.
Production of a bioweapon is like what the USSR did with anthrax. Take ordinary soil microbes, and pressure them in lab conditions to take on characteristics that make them horrifically virulent and lethal to humans, produce them in bulk in a heated culture tank, carefully dry it so that it forms into spores, then load that into air-burst conventional warheads for military deployment.
People don't learn the proper lesson from damocles. Instead of discovering that being in power is inexoribly linked to the threat of being cast down, and that the chair is so cursed, and should only be sat in as a necessity, they instead clamor for it, and seek to cut the sword hanging over their heads down by force, and remove those intrinsic threats by violence.
When you take a position of power, and realize that the general public can and will do you harm if you are a tyrant (the public is one manifestation of the sword above damocles, held aloft by but a single hair), you realize that the public is then your enemy, and must be eliminated.
The fear caused by getting into that chair, and the fear of being forced out of it by violence drives people and governments to fits of unparalleled paranoia, violence, and twisted crimes of passion.
The creation and deployment of biological weapons is inevitable, now that we know how to make and use them.
This will always be true as long as there is a big chair to sit in.
There will always be such a chair, as long as mankind makes cities and nations.
It is a crime that the simple civics lesson of this simple story is only given a passing footnote, if at all these days.
To kill anyone who would make and use these weapons, is to kill all ambitious world leaders.
What makes you think that the powers that be are the representatives/senators/MPs/whatevers?
Multinational interests have powers that flow fluidly accross multiple political jurisdictions. They are the ones that want the dildo in your hole.
They won't stop until they are either told sraight up that they can't, or until they succeed in getting one rammed in there.
Despite what they might say, multinational corporations are not people. They are not human. They don't tire of devising ever more terrifying dicks to aim at you. They never get tired of trying, because they know that as long as they keep at it, they will eventually succeed.
If you think accepting a tiny dildo as a compromise is a sensible solution to the problem, I have only one thing to say:
Slashdot Mirror
Most staple foods in the US are mechanically harvested.
The ones that can't be (notoriously, strawberries), are specialty crops.
Illegal immigration does not bring the price per bushel of wheat down in any noticable maner. What is allready obscenely cheap to produce compared to manually picked crops, when you count only total laborers involved. (A single farmer plows, irrigates, sows, fertilizes, and sprays insecticide on a huge plot of land. Several people show up to harvest, only because it takes several drivers to haul the crop off, and because many hands make lighter work, and more fields can be harvested PER DAY. Compare to strawberries, which take DAYS to harvest one field.
You don't get "cheap food" from illegal labor. You get cheap luxuries from illegal labor.
There will also be microscopic particle buildup inside the air bearing itself, because it isn't a sealed unit.
The surfaces of the heatsink and the CPU are not perfectly smooth, which means tiny eddy currents will form on the surfaces, and trap these particles. This means the heatsink will still require periodic cleaning and inspection in any environment besides an electrostatic cleanroom.
A thousandth of an inch is very huge compared to dust particles.
Early *True* IBM PC-ATs had a really big toggle switch on the side. This is because the very first PC-ATs used an identical form factor to the PC-XT class system chasis, and was pretty much the same, other than the inclusion of an RTC, and a 286. (and able to see significantly more RAM.)
Here's an image to prove it.
The original AT did not have any buttons that I am aware of on the chasis, other than technically the keylock switch... Later iterations, if I recall correctly... (it has been quite some time since my hands have been in one of THOSE things...) had a yellow turbo button, and a red reset button, but that was much later.
Here is a back of the original PC-AT (IBM 5170) to prove the lack of buttons.
No, its properly with Apple.
A patent is a limited right, granted to get the information published for the public to read and implement later.
It is intended to help prevent industrial secrets, and improve the state of the art. That is the purpose for a patent.
Apple's violent brandishing of the powers afforded to it via the patent process to stifle innovation, and to suppress the advancement of the state of the art is directly counter-intuitive to the reason they were granted the patent in the first place.
Apple could have chosen to license the patent for a steep fee, or to charge a royalty for the use of their patent, but instead seek to use it as a barrier to entry for other and competing products.
This is not the fault of the USPTO. It is squarely the fault of Apple Inc.
I agree with the judge. Apple should get a reasonable, and non-predatory royalty for any alledgedly used patents, not an injunction barring anybody else from making phones that aren't tincans on wires.
But that would be contrary to the memory of dr evi..I mean, Steve Jobs, who famously said he would [expletive] destroy android.
Apple doesn't want a royalty. They want dominance. I hope the judge hands them their balls on a plate instead.
Most of those are known as "abusive debt practices", and are illegal.
Don't misunderstand me here:
There are *plenty* of abusive creditors, and plenty of abusive collections agencies.
Sitting on a received check, or worse, cashing it and not crediting a balance, both have federal level restitutions and penalties, along with a whole lot of other abusive things.
The information on consumer protection is freely available. In addition to federal consumer protection, you may also be able to seek state level remedies for additional practices that your individual state deems unconscionable.
My home state especially is very aggressive in terms of the statutes and laws put down, that make the federal penalties look like chump change.
I appreciate collections agencies as a necessary thing for modern society. I do not however, give them carte blanc. They have rules and laws they have to abide by, and if they don't follow them, they are criminals, and need to be punished.
The specifics of what is and is not considered an abusive business practice differs from state to state. Check the internet, then check the legal section of your local library. If you believe you are being illegally abused during collections, contact a lawyer, and see to it.
Many of the larger collections agencies rely on people not knowing their rights and protections under the law, and illegally bully their debtors, because the illegal practices are easy, and effective, and the debtor doesn't know that they can devour the collections people like a diabetic in a candy store. (For instance, my home state has penalties of 10,000$ PER INFRACTION, Itemized, on some common offenses!)
Good collections agencies do things on the up and up, but becoming jaded and cynical causes them to become vindictive and fall into abusive practices. They then become bad collections agencies. That is why those laws exist. If you have problems with abusive collectors, learn what your rights and protections are, and seek legal remedy.
Don't complain to me about nasty collections calls.
Get off your butt, educate yourself, and take decisive lega action on your own behalf.
It doesn't matter what the circumstances are, really. If you take out a huge debt, then default, and then refuse to pay, you are a deadbeat client.
A collections agency deals exclusively with such clients. Some are honest people who have had a serious problem happen, such as a death in the family, a serious illness, or injury. Most of the people I know who work in collections are more than happy to work out an equitable payment plan for such people, if they can prove their condition.
The problem, is that there are also "Dedicated deadbeats" out there. They game the system for all it is worth, rack up debts of unbelievable amounts, then move, change their names, liquidate their on-credit purchases for cash, and settle somewhere else, leaving other people to hold the bag of their shit. These people invent sob stories all the time, hoping to weasle out of their obligations. Dealing with these people makes collections people innately distrustful and cynical.
I actually interned at a collection agency for awhile. I got to see just what percentages of the debtors were real, diehard deadbeats. we are talking people with a paper file that weighs 10 pounds, with 50 aliases.
These people far outnumber the honest debtors. Most honest people will try to bend over backwards to pay a bill before it reaches a collection agency. The people collection agencies deal with are the people that absolutely refuse to pay, despite being notified for months on end, as a usual practice.
Collection agencies are like trash collectors. They are not a glamorous vocation, and like trash collectors, being one puts you at risk. Trash collectors get unregistered medical waste from things like insulin syrenges in the trash that could stick them. They get exposed to all kinds of toxic chemical shit. Bill collectors have to work with people that would rather kill the bill collector than pay the bill.
As much as you seem to hate the bill collectors, they provide a valuable and essential service to modern society. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and often times, the bill collectors are all that stands between a glut of people gaming the system, and ruining it for everyone else.
Do you like running water? Electricity? Those services are not free to provide, and paying the people to provide them is how you get them. Most bills processed at the company I interned at were utility bills. With people wanting free utilities, by getting them in other people's names, under false names, and abusing the system in so many ways i cant even describe them all.
Contrary to what you might believe, a collections agency *CAN* pull your credit history, and see that while you owe a huge ass debt, you also spent 1000$ on a new laptop at newegg. As such, when you give a sob story about being laid off, they arent going to believe you. That 1000$ could have paid your 500$ debt, and left some over. Why didnt you make an effort to pay your debt?
Again, for the people who really *ARE* impoverished, their histories will clearly show that. You would be surprised how a properly informed agency can actually benefit such a debtor.
But of course, you hate collections people, because they make people pay what they legally owe.
but thanks for the derail anyway.
actually, I know people who used to run a collections agency. (now retired)
Most agencies that are worth a shit will work with clients to get a suitable arrangement going.
The problem is that many people refuse to make any effort at such an arrangement, or demand an arrangement that is unworkable for the collection agency. (The agency at most gets around 30% of the value of the bill. this means that your 100$ bill to little ceasar's is only worth 30$ to the bill collector. This is why they refuse to accept 5$ a month as a payment plan for it.)
They are not the scum of the earth.
The scum of the earth, are the people who take out a debt they have no intention of ever paying back. Bill collectors are a last resort for all parties involved. They wouldnt exist without deadbeats.
I don't think perfect identification, be it biometric, technological, or other, is in any way a good thing.
There are perfectly valid reasons for needing or wanting aliases, which are not associated with being a criminal.
Take for instance, employees of a collections agency. These are people who perform a distasteful, but still required service. Nobody really likes being called by a bill collector, nor do they like having to use one to get deadbeat clients to pay up. Deadbeats especially, despise bill collectors, and some are even belligerent enough to be a real physical threat to collection employees. This is why many collections agencies provide work aliases for call center staff, etc. If a foolproof means of identifying people is developed, these employees are at risk.
Then you have the quintessential witness protection program. These are people that have witnessed a violent or serious crime, and are now embroiled through no fault of their own in some serious shit. If Big Tony can perfectly identify them through his ring of heavies using foolproof tech, this program becomes effectively worthless.
and last, but certainly far from least, you have the serious problems with the Feds, and their "Papers Please!" abuses. History does a fine job of explaining, in graphic, nightmare inducing detail, exactly why perfectly being identifiable by government officials is bad bad juju.
People making startups, and companies offering products:
I understand that there is a very strong demand for this kind of technology. Please also understand exactly *why* there is a demand for this kind of technology, and what it opens the door to. Is landing a fat contract and making bank worth endangering people's lives, and being directly complicit in abuses of power that very well inevitably kill people really worth it?
I personally dont think it is.
This kind of technology, in the broad and general sense, is not a good thing. Please stop developing it.
Space suits are a textile product, the same as a bullet proof vest, or a tommy hillfiger T-shirt.
Currently, they are expensive and rightfully so:
The number of paying customers is small.
The number of units sold is small.
The batch sizes for materials are small.
The number of places that make them is small.
The number of people that design and build/test them is small.
However, space suits, like any other commodity that could theoretically benefit from mass manufacture, stand to benefit greatly from the network effects of said mass manufacture.
Should commercial spaceflight take off as a new billion dollar industry, the situation with space suits changes.
The number of paying customers increases. May eventually become large.
The number of units sold increases, and may become large.
To meet the increased demand, the batch sizes for material grows.
The increased demand, coupled with high initial prices means ripe territory for commercial competitors, which drives the prices down.
The increased number of commercial competitors means an increase in the available choices of offering, which means that the numbers of people designing suits goes up.
Taken together, the price of suits will drop significantly, assuming artificial market pressures, like protectionism, market collusion, or innecessary (for the function of the product) regulations are not enacted.
From the perspective of somebody that might want to be a space colonist some day, the prospect of multiple sellers competing for my purchase dollar with quality offerings is very attractive, not the least of which being the lower personal cost of purchase; it also means a lower ticket price, since costs of operating the space transport are reduced, and increased options for specific types of suit fr specific tasks. If I am going to take a job building a commercial spce station doing evas bucking rivets, I want a durable, work-friendly suit. Not a fragile emergency support suit. Multiple suppliers with multiple products means I can find a better offering for my personal needs.
As such, I strongly desire a market flooded with specialty, commercially made suits.
This is not true.
There were several notorious victorian murderers who specialized in killing prostitutes to provide corpses for universities and med schools.
Nasty business.
These days though, enough people leave their bodies to science thanks to a rise in secularism.
While that would certainly be expedient, I can't see that ever happening outside of an untouchable govt program.
Further complicating the issue for the bible bumbers, is that embyonic cells can be harvested without blast destruction. It is commonly used to test blast health prior to implantation in IVF.
Regulations mandating nondestructive harvest only would solve both problems neatly.
But they cling so deperately to "embryonic == murder!" That they can't see anything else, and see hobgoblins and the devil behind ever proceedure and paper.
I was considering more the following, given the mental image:
AC unzips the space suit, and whips out his johnson.
Pressurized air from the space suit is forcibly blown out of the opening in the suit, whiping and swirling around said penis, and falling off in pressure as it does so. This is similar to venting compressed gas, such as a compressed air duster. It rapidly chills any surface that the venting gas cloud comes into contact with. Thermal exchange is with this "higher" pressure gas leaving the suit.
Further, he let's the urine fly.
The urine flows...quite forcibly due to the increased internal body pressure compared to the end of the hydraulic system...and rapidly transitions from high to low pressure without a pressurizing container. While it *is* inside the penis, the urethra is a straight, mostly unobstructed shot into the near vacuum of the martian polar atmosphere. This drop in pressure, direct contact with the airflow flash frozen penis, and gas spallation of dissolved gasses in the urine stream volatizing under the change in pressure (just gets foamy, but the phase change still changes effective temp) causes the urine temp to drop sharply.
If not freezing inside the urethra, it definately would be shortly after leaving.
Also, his bladder would empty profoundly and suddenly.
Personally, I wouldn't try it, but if you like exposing your penis to pressures so low that the blood inside it boils, while also subjecting it to temperatures so low as to cause the urine to flash freeze before it can leave the urethra, be my guest.
Not exactly what I would call "fun" myself, but I guess everyone has their kink.
Oh, they don't come to MY house anymore. A few friendly visits where I hand them pate of christianity, cut up, dissected, cross referenced, and fully researched, which shows their beliefs to be silly and totally incompatible with what is actually in that nasty little book, and they just stopped coming. :D
I must be on some kind of black list now, since I have moved since then, and *still* don't get any visits!
Destroying their little lives was such a delicious past time too! (Using the bible, in full, researched context to do it too, made it even more delightful, since they had absolutely no defense against it.)
Unfortunately for us both... I can't ever seem to forget anything that I read.
I read that particular fairytale, probably for the same reasons you did, (wtf is everyone always so angry about?!) And now its plot is permanently lodged in my assembled body of literary knowledge, right alongside all the greek mythology, the copy of the lord of the rings I read, and a dozen more science fiction books, and treatises on comparative religion.
As for usefulness... you would be surprised how useful that particular fairytale can be, when dealing with such annoyances as jehova's witnesses, and scary southern baptists.
Apparently god's powers are sufficiently hampered by iron vehicles that his divinely empowered armies can't defeat enemies equiped with them. (Seriously, google "chariots of iron" for epic lulz.) As such, apparently you can run over every messenger god sends at you with a lincoln town car and be perfectly safe from his wrath inside.
Such amazingly fun things in there!
Since it is abudnandly clear you have not read this particular fairytale that you are harping about, here's a reader's digest version of events.
God creates the universe. ...
God creates heaven, and the angels. (Includes lucifer.)
God creates the earth.
God creates man, and holds man in special esteem. (Unlike angels, humans were created to resemble god.)
Lucifer is jealous, and angry about humans. Seeks to destroy them.
Luficer cons eve into disobeying god.
Humans are cast down.
God punishes lucifer to crawl eternally in dust, and be trampled by human feet, and be forever hated.
Many generations in genesis later ...
The "watchers", angels tasked with observing and reporting on the earth and human affairs, observe human women, and get horny. A shitton of them come down to earth, and swear a pact with each other to be fully complicit in their proposed crime. They then alter themselves, take human wives, and have children. The details of this escapade are the thesis of the first book of enoc, an apochryphal book. Genesis gets the reader's digest version one liner of "and the sons of god took of themselves wives, and there were giants in the land, heros and men of old."
These creatures have human appetites, are collossally huge, and don't age. They multiply, and threaten the human race with extinction.
Notice: no fire. No brimstone.
To correct the problem, god sends the flood.
The fallen watchers are banished to their prison in the darkest void, and the spirits of their mongrel children become the fell demons that torment men, since there was nowhere set aside for them to go. (They wander incorporeally on the earth, and settle in desolate places.)
Indeed.
But if you are going to bring up the fairytale, at least do a proper job of summarizing that part of the plot.
The nephalim (children produced by the fallen watchers who took human wives) had no place for their spiritual essenses to to upon death. They were founded on the perfect divine, from their paternal lineage as divine beings, but had been clothed in temporary flesh from their mothers'. No place existed for them to go.
They were banished to wander the earth as unclean spirits. Eg, "demons."
The fallen angels (the watchers) that sired them had to "pervert themselves" to even be able to sire children (spiritual beings have no gender), and had sworn oaths to the effect that they were all equally complicit in their fall, and share of blame.
As such, all of the fallen watchers, and a third of the other angels of heaven who sided with them, were banished from heaven. The bible (canon) does not explicitly state where they were banished to.
The apochryphal book or enoc does, however, give a description of the prison where these fallen watchers are held. Here's a hint: it bears absolutely no resemblence to dogmatic "fire and brimstone" hell as per current dogmatic practices.
(Puts on buzz killington outfit)
Actually, the judeo christian bible is quite clear about what happens to unriteous people when they die. (Saying "sinners" implies a false dichotomy. All people are sinners by biblical standards.)
The old testament uses the term "grave" in most english translations. The original hebrew word was "sheol", which actually means "null", "nonexistence", "void", "emptiness", etc. Lit. The state of no longer being.
The current version of popular "hell", is a purely dogmatic construct with only the most minimal of biblical support, (namely the noteworthy reference in revelation to a lake of fire.) Its primary point of origin can be historically traced to the "christianization" of norther europe, where the indigionous religious belif held that those that died a "non glorious" death, such as by old age, sickness, accident, etc, were sent to a cold and harsh afterlife managed by the epynomous "hel", a frost giantess. the realm itself was also of the same name.
To better bring these forced converts into harmony with church doctrines, the role of hell changed, but the idea that undesirables go there did not.
The obvious utility of imposing an eternal punishment of unbelievable suffering and torment for disobeying religious teachings and dogma is self-evident, and is precisely why the dogma still endures long after its original parent religion's demise.
As for "if there is a heaven, there must be a hell", this is fundamentally untrue. The judeo-christian faith, as written, (not as commonly practiced, more's the pity) has no such concept, and simply has god destroying the unriteous outright, cleanly, utterly, and humanely. They die, and that's that.
Here is the problem with intellectual property:
Let's say for a moment, that I am a biological engineer. I specialize in creating designer microbes and plantlife.
I create a new plant. It is very pretty.
I decide, after I get rave reviews from the people seeing my new, unique plant, that other people would like to purchase seeds and seedlings of my new plant, because it is so very pretty.
I decide to make those seeds and seedlings available.
The seeds and seedlings I have then sold, do what seeds and seedlings do: they mature into adult plants, and make more seeds that are not my property anymore. While I designed the lifeform, and am ultimately responsible for creating it in the first place, my job in the lifecycle of that new organism is finished. The plants do not require me to make seeds, and frankly, don't give a shit about my wishes.
The plants were sold. If another person who bought the plants wants to try selective breeding pressures on the plants to make new varieties of my new species, that use should be allowed under the premise of the first sale doctrine. The new varieties they produce are under their exclusive control, up until they sell them to somebody else. At that time, the role of custodian once again changes hands.
What right do I, the initial biologist, have to tell other people what they can and cannot do with their own things?
Ideas are exactly the same.
I create a new idea. It is useful, and desireable, so I share that idea for a fee. Others accept the idea, and that new idea in turn cross polinates inside their heads to spawn yet more ideas I could not have concieved of myself. What right do I have to limit other people's creative evolution of my idea?
Every single thing you have around you, and every scrap of knowledge, philosophy, culture, art, and science that you treasure and value has similar evolutionary origins. No more than sigmund freud's estate has a right to demand royalties on all derivatives of psychotherapy, should any author, artist, scientist, engineer, architect, or laborer have over the evolution of their ideas and works as reinterpreted or used as an influence for works of their own engenderment or labor.
The power that the original artist has, and the only one which is intrinsic and inalienable, is the right to not publish.
Once released into the community, ideas stop being the exclusive treasure of their creators, and no longer require their creators.
Their creators are wrong to expect to, or try to, control them in any way.
Making art and making new ideas is a lot like making children. The grow up. They own themselves. You don't get to tap their bank accounts, and put garnishments on their wages, just because you sired them, or gave birth to them. You don't get to dictate who they marry, or have sex with. You don't get to dictate what carreers they will take. You have no claim to their work, property, or progeny.
These are common sense.
Yet, that is exactly what "intellectual property" does with art and ideas.
I really hope you mean that as a joke. I really, really do.
Firstly, the mayan calander thing has been quashed so intensly it isn't even really worth reacting to.
Secondly, for aliens to even see something as fucking tiny as the voyager spacecraft, they would have to already be here. Even then they might not find it. Compare: voyager spacecraft VS Sol, our sun. You can fit many millions of earths inside our sun. You can fit billions of voyager spaceprobes in a single earth. The sun is tiny compared to the heliosheath it creates against the interstellar medium. Aliens with a telescope would not be able to see the voyager spacecraft. You can't even see it from earth! You can only find it with reaaaaaly sensitive radio telescopes.
No. Aliens won't be visiting earth any time soon unless they are already here. If they were already here, the probe leaving the heliosheath wouldn't mean a damned thing.
No. This is news, because for the first time ever, we have an instrument heading into the interstellar medium, sending us actual data. Up until now, it has all been deduction and theory. Now we are getting data. That is worth celebrating.
Leave the aliens alone.
No, that's catalogueing and preserving a research sample.
Production of a bioweapon is like what the USSR did with anthrax. Take ordinary soil microbes, and pressure them in lab conditions to take on characteristics that make them horrifically virulent and lethal to humans, produce them in bulk in a heated culture tank, carefully dry it so that it forms into spores, then load that into air-burst conventional warheads for military deployment.
This problem will never go away.
People don't learn the proper lesson from damocles. Instead of discovering that being in power is inexoribly linked to the threat of being cast down, and that the chair is so cursed, and should only be sat in as a necessity, they instead clamor for it, and seek to cut the sword hanging over their heads down by force, and remove those intrinsic threats by violence.
When you take a position of power, and realize that the general public can and will do you harm if you are a tyrant (the public is one manifestation of the sword above damocles, held aloft by but a single hair), you realize that the public is then your enemy, and must be eliminated.
The fear caused by getting into that chair, and the fear of being forced out of it by violence drives people and governments to fits of unparalleled paranoia, violence, and twisted crimes of passion.
The creation and deployment of biological weapons is inevitable, now that we know how to make and use them.
This will always be true as long as there is a big chair to sit in.
There will always be such a chair, as long as mankind makes cities and nations.
It is a crime that the simple civics lesson of this simple story is only given a passing footnote, if at all these days.
To kill anyone who would make and use these weapons, is to kill all ambitious world leaders.
No silly! Read it again!
The porn addled teenagers only gangbang CHILDREN!
You have to dress like a prepubescent cubscout if you want to get any action!
What makes you think that the powers that be are the representatives/senators/MPs/whatevers?
Multinational interests have powers that flow fluidly accross multiple political jurisdictions. They are the ones that want the dildo in your hole.
They won't stop until they are either told sraight up that they can't, or until they succeed in getting one rammed in there.
Despite what they might say, multinational corporations are not people. They are not human. They don't tire of devising ever more terrifying dicks to aim at you. They never get tired of trying, because they know that as long as they keep at it, they will eventually succeed.
If you think accepting a tiny dildo as a compromise is a sensible solution to the problem, I have only one thing to say:
Enjoy.