No, they really don't, because the air in LA isn't as bad as most people think it is. I grew up in the LA area. I remember the smog alerts keeping us inside on warm, sunny days. Even by the 90s, the air was nothing like it was in the 1980s, which were improved over the 1970s. I now have a private pilot's license, and it's usually haze, not smog, that blocks the view from LA from 40 miles out, and even then it usually just obscures it a little; the buildings are still recognizable.
Then again, I'm complaining about a state where the South Coast Air Quality Management District is trying very hard to tell people they can't use their fireplaces in the winter.
The Nissan Xtrail is a small SUV compared to many that are out there, smaller even than the X-Terra.
In addition, several states have emissions laws that reduce the mileage of vehicles sold there. When the early-90s Geo Metro was getting around 50MPG in many other states, it was getting closer to 40MPG in California because the stricter emissions requirements robbed it of mileage. It was still around double what the average was at the time, but I never did quite understand why they would limit an efficient car like that.
This is exactly the kind of story that has been coming out of North Korea for decades. They may well be in imminent danger of collapse, but stories like these are no harbingers of such calamity. Besides, China has a vested interest in propping up North Korea, because they don't want millions of refugees crossing uncontrolled into China.
The number of people who are removed from the floor for being "too good" is very, very small. The justification for it is the possibility that the person is cheating, but that the casino hasn't figured out how. Lengthy winning streaks are good for the casino to a point, because they get other people enthusiastic that they might be able to pull off the same thing. Eventually, they become a bad thing because people are paying too much attention to it and not gambling, or the casino simply is losing too much money. It is technically possible that the gambler could go on a nine-hour winning streak, but it is at the same time very improbable.
Many of those who were kicked out were found later to have been likely cheaters, sometimes because the casino was able to figure out their scheme, often because they got busted at some later point at another casino. The odds of multiple long winning streaks being the result of cheating is much greater than the odds of actually achieving such streaks.
That was kind of my point. They have a lot of work to do, and their real schedule is not the one that is on the site in that it's fallen behind their estimates. I would think that one responsible for payloads would know that.
Several demonstration flights this year? Despite what the SpaceX site says, there was a news story last week wherein SpaceX had told NASA that there would be at least an eight-month gap between the first two COTS demo flights. The first, according to the story, is still apparently planned for sometime in July, but an eight-month gap suggests that the C2 flight won't be until at least March 2011. Another story yesterday mentions that if things went well today, they would be looking to skip one of the COTS demo flights, specifically one that would have the Dragon approach no closer than 10km from the station, and instead have the grapple mission be the second flight, and that was mentioned as being in the second quarter of 2011.
There have been suggestions that it could be as little as two years off, except that the emergency systems (particularly the ejection mechanism) might not make that mark. As can be seen by the recent delays for the Falcon 9 largely because the flight termination system was awaiting certification, seemingly minor things can lengthen things dramatically.
I think two years is incredibly optimistic, but I would love for SpaceX to prove me wrong.
Same here. I physically avoid the worst of them, turning to go through another door when possible to not have to hear them do that while they're typing on their Blackberry and saying it with no emotion.
Pointless small talk irritates me pretty severely. When people speak based on rote patterns, it demonstrates a lack of willingness to care about their immediate circumstances unless they somehow become unusual. I see it most often with a few friends who open every conversation with "How are you?" (or worse, in text or IM, "how ru"). I cringe before responding to them, though I try to head it off when I can by responding with something like, "What's on your mind?" if they start the conversation, or by trying to jump ahead to the point of the conversation if I'm starting it. I know that they use that question by rote because I could have had a conversation with them an hour prior and they will still ask. This can happen -- and has happened -- four times in one day. I have tried explaining this to them, but it never lasts more than a few days before they fall back into their old patterns.
I don't do this with people with whom I rarely speak, as the odds are that they don't know for certain how I am. Even those who can track me on Facebook don't get anything more than I'm willing to share in public, so they may be lacking the whole picture.
One of these days when someone asks me how I am, instead of returning the expected responses, I'm going to go Marvin on them and tell him about the pain all down my left side, and continue on from there. If he protests, I'm going to ask him why he asks the question if he doesn't care to know the actual answer.
Forests in the US have been increasing for almost the past 60 years. More wood is grown than harvested by a ratio of 3:1, and significant acreage has been returned to forests, in part because more responsible timber farms have been created over the decades. We may have at one time reached peak wood, but usage and growth patterns changed, and that is no longer the case.
Other nations may have problems with their forests, but the US is not one that does.
Copyright infringement is a civil issue unless the defendant is accused of actually making money from the infringement. Copying a CD for a friend, for example, is a civil infringement if you were not paid for it. Copying a CD and then selling it to someone on the street is a criminal violation because you're making money from it.
If you listen to it and realize that somehow, you both came up with substantially identical melody or lyrics and he came up with them first, then hopefully he's going to be cool and maybe just go with an agreement to receive royalties for future performances plus a reasonable cut of your past sales. You have to get an attorney involved if there's a serious disagreement in either the compensation requested by the other guy or whether there was an infringement at all.
Wait until someone tells you that you've infringed if you've truly never heard the song.
It's a tricky situation. If you can prove that you've almost certainly never heard the tune (your unpublished song in Boise compared to his unpublished song from Hagerstown), the judgment would probably be minimal and limited to compensatory damages. The chance that Harrison had not heard "She's So Fine" was very remote given its status on the charts, and as a professional musician with a wide listening base behind him (not to mention that the Beatles were known to be fans of the Motown style), he probably was seen as having had more responsibility for not treading on the work of others.
The other person has done research and could have a reasonable belief that he was in the right, depending on the level of research. You, OTOH, would be civilly and criminally liable under fraud and copyright statutes.
In the US, yes, you hold the copyright on both the work and the recording by default. As soon as each is created, the copyright is automatically yours, no registration required.
'Grossly excessive' punitive judgments were generally prohibited by the Supreme Court in Gore v. BMW as a violation of the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That seems to separate judgments from the Eighth Amendment.
I'm glad you pointed this out. I wasn't aware that KDevelop 4 had finally been released, and I'll have to go have a look at it. I was beginning to think that it, DNF, and OSSTMM3 were in competition for last release date.
That works for the geeks, but the casual user is going to get frustrated that he has to buy a new phone to get all of the things that his friends get merely by updating. HTC makes some excellent phones, but their business model is based on a significant portion of their users buying phones more rapidly than every two years.
While I have been wanting out of California for some time now, I am appreciative of some of the laws in place here that cover, for example, labor and agriculture (I'll only be talking about the latter in this post). Derided in much of the rest of the country as liberal (and sometimes borderline communist, for whatever that's worth), agriculture still does pretty well out here; for all the other products out there such as Wisconsin dairy, Idaho potatoes, Florida oranges, and Iowa corn, California is still the top-producing agricultural state in the nation, and that over an astonishingly wide range of products: citrus, strawberries, almonds, pistachios, apples, and grapes, to name a few.
Getting to the main point of the thread, there are also thriving beef, pork, lamb, and poultry industries despite some of the strictest animal welfare laws in the country. Voters recently passed an initiative, Proposition 2, that would "prohibit the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. The measure deals with three types of confinement: veal crates, battery cages, and sow gestation crates." (Quote from Wikipedia) Some farmers backed some ads against it, saying that they would lose out to competition from other states, but others came out and said they were already complying, and were doing just fine.
The labeling is another issue, I know, and I know that cageless and free-range don't mean that they're out in the open sunlight. Depending on the environment, they may be in stall-less barns or what amount to mesh tents; it's not an ideal life, but it's still better than what goes on in normal egg farms.
One final point: I realized long ago that I can't base most moral decisions solely on what disgusts me. I can watch most surgery, but brain surgery tends to send me from the room. That doesn't mean that if a neurosurgeon recommends it for a brain tumor, I will automatically turn it down. There has to be a careful evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages, and they have to be combined with any moral issues that may be present. Morality may be a deciding -- even overwhelming -- factor but it usually is not the only one worth considering.
I agree wholeheartedly. The idea that we import cattle from South America should be a sign that perhaps we should be eating somewhat less. I primarily eat poultry, though I do love a good burger or steak and I've been experimenting with ways of making Bacon Explosion even more likely to cause a heart attack.
I'm cognizant of the damage done to the environment, and much of it is regrettable. The waste from pork farms can be difficult to deal with, and it's done a great deal of damage to areas around the Appalachians. But with such problems often come ingenuity, and there have been some attempts to tackle the problem, admittedly with mixed success. It's part of the cost, though that doesn't mean that the cost cannot be reduced in that sense.
This exact argument can be applied to defend the hypothesis that other humans do not feel pain.
Only if you ignore the other similarities between us. I brought up those elements because it shows where there are similarities in the responses between plant and animal. A great many animals do clearly feel pain -- the more complex they are, the more likely a pain response is present. The more similar their reactions to ours, the more we can be sure that they experience pain. When the differences are significant, we have to define the terms. It may be something that is elusive, such as the dividing line between human intelligence and that of other apes. Tool use, language, and warfare have all fallen to the wayside as differentiators; a definition of pain may be similarly hard to pin down.
Do you buy your meat from sustainable, small-scale farms?
Not usually, though I do occasionally buy from small-scale specialty outlets when I'm looking for higher quality, and I buy my milk from Alta Dena Dairy because it tastes better and lasts longer. But general slaughterhouse practices as they are conducted today differ significantly from those of a few decades ago. There is bound to be some suffering, I know, but it is reduced significantly from what it was before. I will be among the first to buy vat-grown cloned meat products when they become available, both for the lower environmental impact and for the lack of suffering.
Whether a plant experiences pain and suffering depends on your definition of it. Plants do respond to detrimental contact with defensive reactions, which may include the release of ethylene gas (a signaling agent), generation and use of hormones and infection-blocking chemicals, and emission of paralyzing agents upon attack by certain insects. Animals usually run, cower, or lash out as defensive reactions to detrimental contact, though some also make use of signals (shrieks, yelps, cries, or roars), hormones (adrenaline), and even some paralyzing agents (snakes and scorpions, for example).
I am an omnivore. I am neither proud or ashamed of this; it is a simple fact that humans are omnivores, and their ancestors have been for at least the last few hundred thousand years, perhaps even several million years. We do eat more meat than we used to, and we should probably shift this back the other way some, but that doesn't mean that eating meat is itself unnatural. Should some people choose to eat according to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I am happy to leave them to their choice. I am just as happy when they leave me to my choice. I do like to think that the animals that are slaughtered for my food suffer as little as possible, but I am not so naive as to think that they do not feel any fear or suffering. It's part of the price paid for the convenience of eating meat.
That could be the case, and is probably simpler. Living in California, it's not uncommon to see a Chinese restaurant have a menu 90% identical to other nearby venues, but with one or two specialties as well that aren't as easy to find. Those specialties will often trigger people to pick them out for special occasions.
It's in the process of coming around, actually. China has been hit by problems of other countries providing unskilled labor for lower rates, resulting in an outsourcing of work. This has cost millions of jobs. On top of that, China is under constant pressure from other nations to allow its currency to float freely, something that it refuses to do, instead setting a narrow range of values within which it can float (0.5% above or below a parity rate set by the Bank of China). Right now, the official rate is around 6.80 to the US dollar, while many estimates suggest that it should be closer to 2 or 3 to the dollar.
However, doing so would do a great deal of damage to the Chinese economy, causing exports to plummet as costs rise dramatically. While this provides some stability now, in the long run it is probably damaging the world economy, and creating a false impression of strength of the Chinese economy.
I think the conclusion is that if they serve a rare delicacy, then people from the local R&D department will want to go there to eat, particularly on special occasions. The restaurant could be bugged to overhear details which could be used to replicate research, to find potential spies, or to look for blackmail material.
It's not a completely unreasonable idea, but after looking up the dish in question, it does seem like a big stretch.
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No, they really don't, because the air in LA isn't as bad as most people think it is. I grew up in the LA area. I remember the smog alerts keeping us inside on warm, sunny days. Even by the 90s, the air was nothing like it was in the 1980s, which were improved over the 1970s. I now have a private pilot's license, and it's usually haze, not smog, that blocks the view from LA from 40 miles out, and even then it usually just obscures it a little; the buildings are still recognizable.
Then again, I'm complaining about a state where the South Coast Air Quality Management District is trying very hard to tell people they can't use their fireplaces in the winter.
The Nissan Xtrail is a small SUV compared to many that are out there, smaller even than the X-Terra.
In addition, several states have emissions laws that reduce the mileage of vehicles sold there. When the early-90s Geo Metro was getting around 50MPG in many other states, it was getting closer to 40MPG in California because the stricter emissions requirements robbed it of mileage. It was still around double what the average was at the time, but I never did quite understand why they would limit an efficient car like that.
This is exactly the kind of story that has been coming out of North Korea for decades. They may well be in imminent danger of collapse, but stories like these are no harbingers of such calamity. Besides, China has a vested interest in propping up North Korea, because they don't want millions of refugees crossing uncontrolled into China.
The number of people who are removed from the floor for being "too good" is very, very small. The justification for it is the possibility that the person is cheating, but that the casino hasn't figured out how. Lengthy winning streaks are good for the casino to a point, because they get other people enthusiastic that they might be able to pull off the same thing. Eventually, they become a bad thing because people are paying too much attention to it and not gambling, or the casino simply is losing too much money. It is technically possible that the gambler could go on a nine-hour winning streak, but it is at the same time very improbable.
Many of those who were kicked out were found later to have been likely cheaters, sometimes because the casino was able to figure out their scheme, often because they got busted at some later point at another casino. The odds of multiple long winning streaks being the result of cheating is much greater than the odds of actually achieving such streaks.
That was kind of my point. They have a lot of work to do, and their real schedule is not the one that is on the site in that it's fallen behind their estimates. I would think that one responsible for payloads would know that.
Several demonstration flights this year? Despite what the SpaceX site says, there was a news story last week wherein SpaceX had told NASA that there would be at least an eight-month gap between the first two COTS demo flights. The first, according to the story, is still apparently planned for sometime in July, but an eight-month gap suggests that the C2 flight won't be until at least March 2011. Another story yesterday mentions that if things went well today, they would be looking to skip one of the COTS demo flights, specifically one that would have the Dragon approach no closer than 10km from the station, and instead have the grapple mission be the second flight, and that was mentioned as being in the second quarter of 2011.
There have been suggestions that it could be as little as two years off, except that the emergency systems (particularly the ejection mechanism) might not make that mark. As can be seen by the recent delays for the Falcon 9 largely because the flight termination system was awaiting certification, seemingly minor things can lengthen things dramatically.
I think two years is incredibly optimistic, but I would love for SpaceX to prove me wrong.
Same here. I physically avoid the worst of them, turning to go through another door when possible to not have to hear them do that while they're typing on their Blackberry and saying it with no emotion.
Pointless small talk irritates me pretty severely. When people speak based on rote patterns, it demonstrates a lack of willingness to care about their immediate circumstances unless they somehow become unusual. I see it most often with a few friends who open every conversation with "How are you?" (or worse, in text or IM, "how ru"). I cringe before responding to them, though I try to head it off when I can by responding with something like, "What's on your mind?" if they start the conversation, or by trying to jump ahead to the point of the conversation if I'm starting it. I know that they use that question by rote because I could have had a conversation with them an hour prior and they will still ask. This can happen -- and has happened -- four times in one day. I have tried explaining this to them, but it never lasts more than a few days before they fall back into their old patterns.
I don't do this with people with whom I rarely speak, as the odds are that they don't know for certain how I am. Even those who can track me on Facebook don't get anything more than I'm willing to share in public, so they may be lacking the whole picture.
One of these days when someone asks me how I am, instead of returning the expected responses, I'm going to go Marvin on them and tell him about the pain all down my left side, and continue on from there. If he protests, I'm going to ask him why he asks the question if he doesn't care to know the actual answer.
Forests in the US have been increasing for almost the past 60 years. More wood is grown than harvested by a ratio of 3:1, and significant acreage has been returned to forests, in part because more responsible timber farms have been created over the decades. We may have at one time reached peak wood, but usage and growth patterns changed, and that is no longer the case.
Other nations may have problems with their forests, but the US is not one that does.
Copyright infringement is a civil issue unless the defendant is accused of actually making money from the infringement. Copying a CD for a friend, for example, is a civil infringement if you were not paid for it. Copying a CD and then selling it to someone on the street is a criminal violation because you're making money from it.
If you listen to it and realize that somehow, you both came up with substantially identical melody or lyrics and he came up with them first, then hopefully he's going to be cool and maybe just go with an agreement to receive royalties for future performances plus a reasonable cut of your past sales. You have to get an attorney involved if there's a serious disagreement in either the compensation requested by the other guy or whether there was an infringement at all.
Wait until someone tells you that you've infringed if you've truly never heard the song.
It's a tricky situation. If you can prove that you've almost certainly never heard the tune (your unpublished song in Boise compared to his unpublished song from Hagerstown), the judgment would probably be minimal and limited to compensatory damages. The chance that Harrison had not heard "She's So Fine" was very remote given its status on the charts, and as a professional musician with a wide listening base behind him (not to mention that the Beatles were known to be fans of the Motown style), he probably was seen as having had more responsibility for not treading on the work of others.
The other person has done research and could have a reasonable belief that he was in the right, depending on the level of research. You, OTOH, would be civilly and criminally liable under fraud and copyright statutes.
In the US, yes, you hold the copyright on both the work and the recording by default. As soon as each is created, the copyright is automatically yours, no registration required.
'Grossly excessive' punitive judgments were generally prohibited by the Supreme Court in Gore v. BMW as a violation of the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That seems to separate judgments from the Eighth Amendment.
I'm glad you pointed this out. I wasn't aware that KDevelop 4 had finally been released, and I'll have to go have a look at it. I was beginning to think that it, DNF, and OSSTMM3 were in competition for last release date.
That works for the geeks, but the casual user is going to get frustrated that he has to buy a new phone to get all of the things that his friends get merely by updating. HTC makes some excellent phones, but their business model is based on a significant portion of their users buying phones more rapidly than every two years.
While I have been wanting out of California for some time now, I am appreciative of some of the laws in place here that cover, for example, labor and agriculture (I'll only be talking about the latter in this post). Derided in much of the rest of the country as liberal (and sometimes borderline communist, for whatever that's worth), agriculture still does pretty well out here; for all the other products out there such as Wisconsin dairy, Idaho potatoes, Florida oranges, and Iowa corn, California is still the top-producing agricultural state in the nation, and that over an astonishingly wide range of products: citrus, strawberries, almonds, pistachios, apples, and grapes, to name a few.
Getting to the main point of the thread, there are also thriving beef, pork, lamb, and poultry industries despite some of the strictest animal welfare laws in the country. Voters recently passed an initiative, Proposition 2, that would "prohibit the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. The measure deals with three types of confinement: veal crates, battery cages, and sow gestation crates." (Quote from Wikipedia) Some farmers backed some ads against it, saying that they would lose out to competition from other states, but others came out and said they were already complying, and were doing just fine.
The labeling is another issue, I know, and I know that cageless and free-range don't mean that they're out in the open sunlight. Depending on the environment, they may be in stall-less barns or what amount to mesh tents; it's not an ideal life, but it's still better than what goes on in normal egg farms.
One final point: I realized long ago that I can't base most moral decisions solely on what disgusts me. I can watch most surgery, but brain surgery tends to send me from the room. That doesn't mean that if a neurosurgeon recommends it for a brain tumor, I will automatically turn it down. There has to be a careful evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages, and they have to be combined with any moral issues that may be present. Morality may be a deciding -- even overwhelming -- factor but it usually is not the only one worth considering.
I agree wholeheartedly. The idea that we import cattle from South America should be a sign that perhaps we should be eating somewhat less. I primarily eat poultry, though I do love a good burger or steak and I've been experimenting with ways of making Bacon Explosion even more likely to cause a heart attack.
I'm cognizant of the damage done to the environment, and much of it is regrettable. The waste from pork farms can be difficult to deal with, and it's done a great deal of damage to areas around the Appalachians. But with such problems often come ingenuity, and there have been some attempts to tackle the problem, admittedly with mixed success. It's part of the cost, though that doesn't mean that the cost cannot be reduced in that sense.
This exact argument can be applied to defend the hypothesis that other humans do not feel pain.
Only if you ignore the other similarities between us. I brought up those elements because it shows where there are similarities in the responses between plant and animal. A great many animals do clearly feel pain -- the more complex they are, the more likely a pain response is present. The more similar their reactions to ours, the more we can be sure that they experience pain. When the differences are significant, we have to define the terms. It may be something that is elusive, such as the dividing line between human intelligence and that of other apes. Tool use, language, and warfare have all fallen to the wayside as differentiators; a definition of pain may be similarly hard to pin down.
Do you buy your meat from sustainable, small-scale farms?
Not usually, though I do occasionally buy from small-scale specialty outlets when I'm looking for higher quality, and I buy my milk from Alta Dena Dairy because it tastes better and lasts longer. But general slaughterhouse practices as they are conducted today differ significantly from those of a few decades ago. There is bound to be some suffering, I know, but it is reduced significantly from what it was before. I will be among the first to buy vat-grown cloned meat products when they become available, both for the lower environmental impact and for the lack of suffering.
Whether a plant experiences pain and suffering depends on your definition of it. Plants do respond to detrimental contact with defensive reactions, which may include the release of ethylene gas (a signaling agent), generation and use of hormones and infection-blocking chemicals, and emission of paralyzing agents upon attack by certain insects. Animals usually run, cower, or lash out as defensive reactions to detrimental contact, though some also make use of signals (shrieks, yelps, cries, or roars), hormones (adrenaline), and even some paralyzing agents (snakes and scorpions, for example).
I am an omnivore. I am neither proud or ashamed of this; it is a simple fact that humans are omnivores, and their ancestors have been for at least the last few hundred thousand years, perhaps even several million years. We do eat more meat than we used to, and we should probably shift this back the other way some, but that doesn't mean that eating meat is itself unnatural. Should some people choose to eat according to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I am happy to leave them to their choice. I am just as happy when they leave me to my choice. I do like to think that the animals that are slaughtered for my food suffer as little as possible, but I am not so naive as to think that they do not feel any fear or suffering. It's part of the price paid for the convenience of eating meat.
I know they're not rare. That's why I called it a big stretch after I looked up the details of the eggs.
That could be the case, and is probably simpler. Living in California, it's not uncommon to see a Chinese restaurant have a menu 90% identical to other nearby venues, but with one or two specialties as well that aren't as easy to find. Those specialties will often trigger people to pick them out for special occasions.
It's in the process of coming around, actually. China has been hit by problems of other countries providing unskilled labor for lower rates, resulting in an outsourcing of work. This has cost millions of jobs. On top of that, China is under constant pressure from other nations to allow its currency to float freely, something that it refuses to do, instead setting a narrow range of values within which it can float (0.5% above or below a parity rate set by the Bank of China). Right now, the official rate is around 6.80 to the US dollar, while many estimates suggest that it should be closer to 2 or 3 to the dollar.
However, doing so would do a great deal of damage to the Chinese economy, causing exports to plummet as costs rise dramatically. While this provides some stability now, in the long run it is probably damaging the world economy, and creating a false impression of strength of the Chinese economy.
I think the conclusion is that if they serve a rare delicacy, then people from the local R&D department will want to go there to eat, particularly on special occasions. The restaurant could be bugged to overhear details which could be used to replicate research, to find potential spies, or to look for blackmail material.
It's not a completely unreasonable idea, but after looking up the dish in question, it does seem like a big stretch.