And running out of goods because people are hoarding them so that there isn't any left at *ANY* price hurts everybody.... and takes a longer time to recover from than if the price is raised high enough to keep supplies in place at a time when the natural compulsion is going to be to hoard anyways, long enough for it to be replenished.
Really, if it was so cheap to have essential goods or services available during a time of emergency why doesn't the state try doing it themselves, ans providing such goods throughout any such disaster at regular costs.
Oh, that's right... they can't. Because IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE.
No.... had they not been doing so, more people would have bought much more than they actually needed (which is a completely normal thing for people to do when they expect some sort of emergency-like situation), and the supply would run out, being completely unavailable to everybody until replacements arrived.... at *ANY* price.
Except by charging $15 dollars more, they are discouraging people from purchasing any more than they actually need... which maximizes the chance that the supply would actually last until the disaster conditions have ended.
If the state really has a problem with price gouging, then perhaps what they should do is be prepared to sell such essential goods to people at reasonable prices themselves. If they actually can't afford to do that, then why should they expect retailers to be able to?
That a dwindling supply might as well be empty because not everyone can afford it is preferable to a supply that has been tapped out entirely and is not available at all. Excessive prices create an immediate incentive for any new resources to have priority in being diverted to areas experiencing shortage... and as supplies return to normal levels, the prices will drop. If prices were kept lower than what is necessary to maintain a dwindling supplies before more comes in, you'd have an even worse situation, as some might be inclined to buy more than they may actually need, and those who might buy afterwards, but before replacement stock comes in, would be unable to buy any. At any price.
The simplest way to actually prevent price gouging is to just bring in more of the product that people are being gouged on, and sell it at a lower price. If you can't actually accomplish that because of some unprecedented disaster conditions having occurred, then why is it unreasonable for retailers to do so?
Which can also easily be defeated by not altering the volume level for commercials (it's my understanding that this is soon going to be illegal for networks to do anyways).
There's absolutely no theoretical reason you could not make commercials indistinguishable from the programming to anything other than a living human being.
1) Detecting a switch from stereo to mono is bypassed by broadcasting commercials in the same audio format as the program.
2)This can result in false positives by having black frames between scenes in the programming.
3)What if they didn't utilize any cue tones?
There's no theoretical reason that a commercial could not be made completely indistinguishable from the broadcasted program by an automated appliance without developing an AI that is about as intelligent as a human being.
All they need to do is figure out how Autohop works, and then redesign their advertisements so that they defeat feature. Some are based on volume detection... all the network would need to do to defeat that is have the commercials at the same volume level as the programming (which would have the upshot from the network's point of view that the commercials would be less annoying, and people might be less reluctant to sit through them).
Also, they would be smart to make commercials of various durations.... some 15 seconds, some 20, some 35, and so on, so that a simple time-based skip won't accurately skip any given commercial either.
It won't stop people from manually fastforwarding through commercials, but I see no reason that it could not prevent a tv recording appliance from recognizing where the commercials are so that they can be automatically skipped.
People have already tried pointing out the issues you've raised and I've raised and more to the Conservatives before this bill was passed. It appears that their belief is that any compromise on such fronts would amount to more of an additional enabler for piracy than it would amount to fair or reasonable usage of the work.
The added value comes from the additional legal protections that the locks get.
If legal protection did not offer any additional value to a work, then to give just one obvious example, most people who make free content would put it into public domain instead of bothering to utilize copyright at all.
To be fair, I have to say that those fair dealing exemptions are a good thing to be added to the law.
The core problem is that those exemptions can be revoked entirely at the discretion of the content maker who can simply decide to utilize a digital lock.
This is an inherent self-contradiction. If fair dealing was allegedly a reasonable exemption to copyright infringement, then why should a choice that the consumer has no part in making (the decision to utilize a digital lock) change that? Even at best it's irrellevant, and it's a damn-near certainty that most Canadians aren't going to care about this at all when they are engaging in practices that still may qualify as fair dealing, and allegedly could have been completely exempt from copyright infringement, but are suddenly illegal just because of a lock's presence. Consumers may have a choice to not buy such locked content, but by offering legal protection for digital locks, the government has created an added value incentive for publishers to utilize them, and this so-called "choice" that consumer have is restricted by the actual availability of unlocked and alternative content, which in the face of the added value that locks might have for publishers, is only going to get smaller in the future.
People do not obey laws that do not agree with... at least not in the long run, and it is as certain as anything that Canadians will break this restriction at their own convenience, privately or otherwise.
The so-called "right" to privacy, I think, boils down to practicing whatever type of treatment that one would prefer the people around them practice.
It's quite reasonable to desire some privacy in some matters, even if one has done nothing wrong, and I see privacy as being more a matter of treating those around us with plain old human respect and decency.
It doesn't make an inalienable right though.... more of a social privilege that we ought to grant eachother because we desire the same privilege for ourselves.
And do that end, I think that the only real problem comes in when one thinks that another has less entitlement to privacy than they, themselves, would like to have.
I seem to recall reading a superman comic a number of years ago where one of the premises of the story involved the earth entering the time-space cone that contained Krypton's explosion, so it was finally "visible" (I use the term loosely) from Earth.
Speaking as a Canadian here, who has actually worked for Elections Canada in the past three times now, let me clarify just how paper ballots work just fine up here:
Until your scanning machine gets out of alignment
Won't happen. Ballots are counted by hand.
...the people you hired to do hand counts get bribed
As the ballot counts are done in pairs, and even then are subject to being witnessed by the candidates or their representatives, you'd have to bribe one heck of a lot of people... up to and possibly even including the candidates themselves. Ballots with any writing or other identifying marks on them other than the voter's selection, which must be marked as described by the illustrated posters near each voting station, which might distinguish them from other ballots are considered "spoiled" and are not counted.
... or someone loses the ballots on the way to be counted
This is also can't happen, since the ballots are counted right there, almost immediately after the polls close.
The only real danger is if there is some sort of natural disaster which threatens one of the polling stations. I'm not sure what the recourse of EC would be in such a case... possibly a revote for people in that area.
This. Especially the last sentence. Using a mobile processor where it isn't necessary (and in particular, can be outperformed by non-mobile solutions) is such as enormous leap backwards that should not ever be worth considering.
I only suggested that such laws themselves do not show evidence of corruption, since they clearly exist to protect people and not exploit them, not that they are evidence that corruption does not exist.
What about laws that guarantee a certain minimum wage (and, in effect, avoiding slavery conditions)
What about laws prohibiting such activities like theft, rape, or murder?
I could probably come up with a few dozen more if I sat down and thought about it for a few minutes, and I'm not going to deny the existence of many laws which may be indicative of some type of corruption, but it's pretty obvious that there are no small number of laws that exist to protect people and not exploit them. That you can't think of any offhand is not a reflection of the notion that the number must be small.
Suggesting that there are other stores when talking about iOS apps is not entirely unlike suggesting that there are other operating systems you can use besides Windows on a PC.
Yeah, it's true.... that doesn't mean that that it's always going to be worth anyone's time to focus on that market for any given application.
I really like Google maps, and I own an iPhone, but if Google chose to do that, it wouldn't inspire me to buy Android. I would see such a choice by Google to be extremely petty.
Not that Apple rejecting Google likely wouldn't also be petty, but if Google is smart about this, they'd be wiser to let Apple take fall for being so. if Google tries to play by the same rules as anybody else and Apple just doesn't let them in, then only one of two things must happen:
Either Apple must also discontinue all the other map applications on the same grounds as they reject Google's. This will be almost certain to be the cause of numerous lawsuits... both against apple and against developers of such applications, and will result in a lot of bad PR for Apple; or else Apple will decide to treat Google differently, excluding it while allowing the other mapping applications, which would in no uncertain terms publicly paint Apple as the bad guy in all of this, which will still result in a lot of bad PR for Apple.
If Apple does let Google develop an iOS app, then everybody wins.
Wouldn't they then be in the position of being somewhat obligated to, for similar reasons, also discontinue (at least for iOS6 and later) any of the other mapping and navigations programs that are available on the app store?
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And running out of goods because people are hoarding them so that there isn't any left at *ANY* price hurts everybody.... and takes a longer time to recover from than if the price is raised high enough to keep supplies in place at a time when the natural compulsion is going to be to hoard anyways, long enough for it to be replenished.
Really, if it was so cheap to have essential goods or services available during a time of emergency why doesn't the state try doing it themselves, ans providing such goods throughout any such disaster at regular costs.
Oh, that's right... they can't. Because IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE.
The defense rests.
No.... had they not been doing so, more people would have bought much more than they actually needed (which is a completely normal thing for people to do when they expect some sort of emergency-like situation), and the supply would run out, being completely unavailable to everybody until replacements arrived.... at *ANY* price.
Except by charging $15 dollars more, they are discouraging people from purchasing any more than they actually need... which maximizes the chance that the supply would actually last until the disaster conditions have ended.
If the state really has a problem with price gouging, then perhaps what they should do is be prepared to sell such essential goods to people at reasonable prices themselves. If they actually can't afford to do that, then why should they expect retailers to be able to?
That a dwindling supply might as well be empty because not everyone can afford it is preferable to a supply that has been tapped out entirely and is not available at all. Excessive prices create an immediate incentive for any new resources to have priority in being diverted to areas experiencing shortage... and as supplies return to normal levels, the prices will drop. If prices were kept lower than what is necessary to maintain a dwindling supplies before more comes in, you'd have an even worse situation, as some might be inclined to buy more than they may actually need, and those who might buy afterwards, but before replacement stock comes in, would be unable to buy any. At any price.
The simplest way to actually prevent price gouging is to just bring in more of the product that people are being gouged on, and sell it at a lower price. If you can't actually accomplish that because of some unprecedented disaster conditions having occurred, then why is it unreasonable for retailers to do so?
There's absolutely no theoretical reason you could not make commercials indistinguishable from the programming to anything other than a living human being.
1) Detecting a switch from stereo to mono is bypassed by broadcasting commercials in the same audio format as the program.
2)This can result in false positives by having black frames between scenes in the programming.
3)What if they didn't utilize any cue tones?
There's no theoretical reason that a commercial could not be made completely indistinguishable from the broadcasted program by an automated appliance without developing an AI that is about as intelligent as a human being.
All they need to do is figure out how Autohop works, and then redesign their advertisements so that they defeat feature. Some are based on volume detection... all the network would need to do to defeat that is have the commercials at the same volume level as the programming (which would have the upshot from the network's point of view that the commercials would be less annoying, and people might be less reluctant to sit through them).
Also, they would be smart to make commercials of various durations.... some 15 seconds, some 20, some 35, and so on, so that a simple time-based skip won't accurately skip any given commercial either.
It won't stop people from manually fastforwarding through commercials, but I see no reason that it could not prevent a tv recording appliance from recognizing where the commercials are so that they can be automatically skipped.
It's substantial, but it's not 40%.
... then sell the same stuff that people are being gouged on at a lower price.
People have already tried pointing out the issues you've raised and I've raised and more to the Conservatives before this bill was passed. It appears that their belief is that any compromise on such fronts would amount to more of an additional enabler for piracy than it would amount to fair or reasonable usage of the work.
The added value comes from the additional legal protections that the locks get.
If legal protection did not offer any additional value to a work, then to give just one obvious example, most people who make free content would put it into public domain instead of bothering to utilize copyright at all.
To be fair, I have to say that those fair dealing exemptions are a good thing to be added to the law.
The core problem is that those exemptions can be revoked entirely at the discretion of the content maker who can simply decide to utilize a digital lock.
This is an inherent self-contradiction. If fair dealing was allegedly a reasonable exemption to copyright infringement, then why should a choice that the consumer has no part in making (the decision to utilize a digital lock) change that? Even at best it's irrellevant, and it's a damn-near certainty that most Canadians aren't going to care about this at all when they are engaging in practices that still may qualify as fair dealing, and allegedly could have been completely exempt from copyright infringement, but are suddenly illegal just because of a lock's presence. Consumers may have a choice to not buy such locked content, but by offering legal protection for digital locks, the government has created an added value incentive for publishers to utilize them, and this so-called "choice" that consumer have is restricted by the actual availability of unlocked and alternative content, which in the face of the added value that locks might have for publishers, is only going to get smaller in the future.
People do not obey laws that do not agree with... at least not in the long run, and it is as certain as anything that Canadians will break this restriction at their own convenience, privately or otherwise.
The so-called "right" to privacy, I think, boils down to practicing whatever type of treatment that one would prefer the people around them practice.
It's quite reasonable to desire some privacy in some matters, even if one has done nothing wrong, and I see privacy as being more a matter of treating those around us with plain old human respect and decency.
It doesn't make an inalienable right though.... more of a social privilege that we ought to grant eachother because we desire the same privilege for ourselves.
And do that end, I think that the only real problem comes in when one thinks that another has less entitlement to privacy than they, themselves, would like to have.
which, ironically, makes the machines unaccountable to anybody... and if an error occurs, there is a greater chance of it remaining undetected.
If that's the whole point, then kudos to the American election system.
I seem to recall reading a superman comic a number of years ago where one of the premises of the story involved the earth entering the time-space cone that contained Krypton's explosion, so it was finally "visible" (I use the term loosely) from Earth.
As I recall, Braniac was the villain.
Those who count the votes might decide everything, but they are still accountable to anyone who might be witness to them doing said counting.
Won't happen. Ballots are counted by hand.
As the ballot counts are done in pairs, and even then are subject to being witnessed by the candidates or their representatives, you'd have to bribe one heck of a lot of people... up to and possibly even including the candidates themselves. Ballots with any writing or other identifying marks on them other than the voter's selection, which must be marked as described by the illustrated posters near each voting station, which might distinguish them from other ballots are considered "spoiled" and are not counted.
This is also can't happen, since the ballots are counted right there, almost immediately after the polls close.
The only real danger is if there is some sort of natural disaster which threatens one of the polling stations. I'm not sure what the recourse of EC would be in such a case... possibly a revote for people in that area.
This. Especially the last sentence. Using a mobile processor where it isn't necessary (and in particular, can be outperformed by non-mobile solutions) is such as enormous leap backwards that should not ever be worth considering.
I only suggested that such laws themselves do not show evidence of corruption, since they clearly exist to protect people and not exploit them, not that they are evidence that corruption does not exist.
What about laws that guarantee a certain minimum wage (and, in effect, avoiding slavery conditions)
What about laws prohibiting such activities like theft, rape, or murder?
I could probably come up with a few dozen more if I sat down and thought about it for a few minutes, and I'm not going to deny the existence of many laws which may be indicative of some type of corruption, but it's pretty obvious that there are no small number of laws that exist to protect people and not exploit them. That you can't think of any offhand is not a reflection of the notion that the number must be small.
Suggesting that there are other stores when talking about iOS apps is not entirely unlike suggesting that there are other operating systems you can use besides Windows on a PC.
Yeah, it's true.... that doesn't mean that that it's always going to be worth anyone's time to focus on that market for any given application.
I really like Google maps, and I own an iPhone, but if Google chose to do that, it wouldn't inspire me to buy Android. I would see such a choice by Google to be extremely petty.
Not that Apple rejecting Google likely wouldn't also be petty, but if Google is smart about this, they'd be wiser to let Apple take fall for being so. if Google tries to play by the same rules as anybody else and Apple just doesn't let them in, then only one of two things must happen:
Either Apple must also discontinue all the other map applications on the same grounds as they reject Google's. This will be almost certain to be the cause of numerous lawsuits... both against apple and against developers of such applications, and will result in a lot of bad PR for Apple; or else Apple will decide to treat Google differently, excluding it while allowing the other mapping applications, which would in no uncertain terms publicly paint Apple as the bad guy in all of this, which will still result in a lot of bad PR for Apple.
If Apple does let Google develop an iOS app, then everybody wins.
Wouldn't they then be in the position of being somewhat obligated to, for similar reasons, also discontinue (at least for iOS6 and later) any of the other mapping and navigations programs that are available on the app store?
How do you downgrade back to iOS5, exactly? I mean, post-beta.