I absolutely refuse to obey any law that forbids me from utilizing information I have. Doesn't mean I couldn't pretend to obey it, thought.
I think it's reasonable. But only in precisely two situations:
One, if you made an agreement prior to getting the information, as a condition for getting it. Then it's fair enough you're held liable for upholding your part of that agreement. Example: If you sign a oath promising not to share medical information you learn of in your work as a doctor, and then share personal stuff you learn in your work with the press, it's perfectly acceptable that you be held liable for it.
Two, if you got the information in a way that you knew, or must know was illegal. If you broke into the doctors office and stole the medical files, it's perfectly acceptable to hold you liable for the damages that ensue if you sell those files to the slander-press.
Other than those two I agree; if you found out legally, and never promised anything I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to do what you want with your knowledge.
Only people that Apple has granted access to that information have access to it, and to do so they have agreed to certain limits, one of which is not to share content that is restricted.
How do you know ? Do you have personal knowledge that Apple did, infact, require each and every person they ever handed this document to to agree to "certain limits" before granting that access ?
That these "limitations" are printed inside the documentation itself is meaningless. I can put "limitations" in this posting, and those have no legal power over you whatsoever -- for the plain and simple reason that you never agreed to my limitations in the first place. Here's one: You are only allowed to read the rest of this comment if you stand on one foot while doing so.
Feel legally obligated to follow that "limitation" ? Would it be different if this was a printed book ? Or if the "limit" had been placed there by a lawyer ?
Whoever leaked that document to somethingawful broke the law.
Which law says you have to do whatever the publisher of a book decides to put into his books ?
I got a very nice "Nelly Nansen" bag in Poland. (Hint, it's 'Helly Hansen')
Everything from design to font in the label was identical to the real thing, as far as I've been able to tell even the quality is comparable to the original. Or atleast it's good enough for me, I've used it literally daily for years, and it's still got all seams intact, all zippers working perfectly, fabric looking like new, and still waterresistant like new.
Something is worth what you can get for it. What someone else once "got" for it at some point in the past is only tangentially interesting.
Swapping equal shares is a no-op in most cases anyway, shares tend not to be numbered anymore, so it's not really possible to swap identical shares and have anyone accept that a trade has taken place.
No. You can't change the display on a screen in such a way that say shortsigthed persons will see it sharp. If that was possible there'd be such an adjustment in every tv and computer-monitor on the planet.
Your eh, uhm, "historical" system of measurement makes such calculations sligthly tricker, but let's see....
1 KWh is simply 1000 W over a period of one hour. (or 3600 seconds) So 1 Kwh is 3,6MJ. This means 77KWh is 277 MJ.
At 12 amps, 110V the power of your household-circuit is 1320W, assuming it's fully loaded. If you do that for 6 hours you've have consumed 6*1.32 = almost 8KW, or 30 MJ.
In other words, in 6 hours of charging at 12 amps, 110V, there's no way you'll be able to get in more energy than the equivalent of 1kg of petrol. In reality worse because batteries loose some energy to heat on charging, so not all energy you input will stay stored in them.
On the other hand electric motors are more efficient than combustion-engines, so 1MJ of input to an electric motor will acomplish a bit (20% or so) more than 1MJ of input to a combustion-engine.
Why does the US, or any other country for that matter, still keep on talking about right, justice, democracy, or any such thing in their rethoric is beyond my understanding.
I have a hunch. Increasingly conflicts are won and lost not on the battlefield, but rather at home.
USA "lost" in Vietnam much more because of forces back home than they did because of anything that actually happened in Vietnam. If Bush is forced to withdraw from Irak or Afghanistan before he really wants to, this will very likely also be because the population back home demands it, not because the locals are putting up such a figth.
No one believes it.
I think you overestimate the general public. Sadly I'm pretty sure tons of people if not literally believe all of it, than atleast they in general terms believe the rhetoric. No one even flinches when CNN or anyone else uses phrases like "the free world", rhetoric that would be laughable in much of Europe. (not that the general public is smarter here, they just got *other* blind spots)
The war about publich opinion at home is also why Bush et al gives a fuck that for example Norway opposed the invasion of Iraq. It makes no difference whatsoever to the chanses of military winning the war. But it *migth* make a bit more of a difference in the war of public opinion.
This is also the main reason I find the reaction of many muslims in the occupied territories so mindbogglingly silly. If they honestly want the Americans to go home as quickly as possible, their best chanse is to win the war of public opinion in the US. Acting like raving lunatics won't achieve that. I wonder if they don't see that. Or if they *do* see it and have a different agenda. Or if they do see it and are just so seriously pissed that they're unable to do what their rational minds tell them they should do. Beats me.
People who silently take anything are the dream employees of many corporations. They can be made to work overtime with no pay, they can be made to give up their vacations, they can be made to work to death - literally - and they never demand a pay rise.
But luckily not of all corporations, nor of all bosses.
Because the thing is, such employees will never ever tell you when your new idea absolutely fucking sucks. And sometimes, just sometimes, your employees do actually know something about the work they perform. Or if they don't, you hired the wrong ones anyway.
A collegue of mine got a raise, explicitly for the reason that he pointed out why an idea of the boss was the (in the words of the boss) absolutely amazingly stupidest idea of the year. And yes, the reason was announced publically, because, again in the words of the boss: When (not if!) I'm being stupid I bloody well want to hear about it from you rather than being told the hard way by the marketplace.
No, I'm assuming that it makes more financial sense to hire a new employee than to give the current one a rise, or deal with whatever his problem is.
Which is frequently a bad assumption.
If there's one person mouthing dissatisfaction, there's probably ten that are dissatisfied.
Hiring a new emoployee, even assuming you could at moments notice get a similarily qualified person for similar conditions, means picking up the bill for training.
Contrary to the believes of some managers, a high turnaround in the work-staff of a company has costs , other than those that show up in the profits for this month.
Not dealing with reasonable dissatisfaction means you're not an attractive employer. Not being an attractive employer means you won't get the best employees. (there's people who have *unreasonable* expectations, that's a different matter.)
Or the employer could simply increase the workload of the remaining employees, not hire anyone, and give the savings to the management as bonuses for work well done.
Again, you're assuming that the work-market is such that the employer gets to do whatever the hell he wants to, and the employees will simply bend over and take it. I'm trying to tell you that's not a natural law. It's *NOT* like that for programmers in Scandinavia now for example. There are literally 3 times the number of jobs free that there are unemployed programmers. (nevermind skilled programmers) In such an environment treating your employees badly is a *very* unhealthy business-move.
No worries, just make the rest of the employees pick up the slack.
You're assuming they will. Essentially you're saying, if you've got 100 workers, don't worry, just fire 99 of them, and the last one will pick up the slack, no problems.
Fact is, with less in numbers, less in skill and less motivated employees less will get done. If it matters to you that things get done, this is a concern. If it doesn't matter to you if things get done or not, you should just close the company.
I have no formal education in any of those things, but I thought myself HTML with W3C's website, PHP with PHP's website, SQL with PostrgreSQL's documentation and various programming languages - Python, Java, C - with their websites kind help (except C, which I learned from Nethack's source code).
Sounds interesting enough to me. I'm not in the *sligthest* kidding. Assuming you would consider a career in Stavanger, pass me a copy of your resume, or contact me in email.
Of course, as a result, my skills have huge holes - I've learned things as I've needed them, without knowing if something is the correct way of doing things. Still don't quite have a handle on C's string manipulation functions, despite doing experimentation on Linux kernel.
The holes I worry about are those that you're convinced aren't there. It's not a problem having limitations, everyone does, and if you're even aware about them and open about them it's even a bonus. I'm skeptical of people who have no answer when I ask what they're particularily bad at.
Then I congratulate you for having a good employer, but the basis of this discussion was having a not-so-good one.
It doesn't depend only on your employer, but also on those surrounding him. If your employer is a dick, and so is every other employer, then the employee has a problem. He needs to relocate or acquire new skills to escape the trap. If your employer is a dick, but there are others that aren't, obviously you should jump ship. I guess what I'm saying is that not only is my employer not a dick. But also he couldn't get away with being one even if he wanted to. People would just walk away.
And it works between countries too. Guess which part of the german population are migrating to less dicky employers in Scandinavia, the more skilled, more motivated, more valuable employees or the unskilled, unmotivated ones ? Guess for which
Everyone knows this, the batteries are the problem.
One kg of diesel holds 66MJ of energy
One kg of petrol holds 44MJ of energy
One kg of Li-ion batteries hold around 0.6 MJ of energy.
One kg of NiMH batteries hold around 0.22 MJ of energy.
The difference is mind-bogglingly big, much much worse than most people imagine. 50kgs of petrol or diesel literally hold 100 times the energy of a similarily sized battery-pack.
The fact that refilling a tank of fuel is 100 times quicker than recharging the battery-pack, and you just add insult to injury.
If a battery for a reasonable price existed that could hold the same amount of energy that a normal petrol-tank does, without being more than say 10 times the size/weigth, and it could be recharged in oh, say, 10 times the time it takes to refill a normal tank. Then petrol-burning cars would be obsolete overnigth.
People would accept a car with say 300 miles range to need half an hour for recharging. It's rare that you need to go more than 300 miles without a half-hour pause for recharging being acceptable. (you could combine this with a meal at some rest-stop anyway)
It's sad sad sad that batteries aren't 10 times poorer than gas-tanks at holding and refilling energy. They're not even 100 times poorer, they're more like 1000 times poorer. (weighing 10 times as much, taking 10 times the space, storing 10% of the energy *AND* needing 100 times the time for recharging.)
Electric motors, on the other hand, rock. Smaller, higher torque (especially where it matters), almost completely silent, fewer moving parts, more dependable, higher efficiency (less waste heat), more compact.
Give me a battery that sucks, and I'll take it tomorrow. The problem is that current batteries doesn't even suck. They are absolutely mindblowingly horribly crapaliscious.
The crappy batteries is also the only reason Hybrids exist at all. Hybrids can use petrol/diesel for energy-storage, which is their only advantage over pure-electric. (but because of the crappy batteries, that advantage is major.)
Not a republic, are you perhaps suggesting Bush has taken on the title of King Bush?
Depends on your criteria.
Bush is elected, sort of. I mean, the other guy got more votes (by anyones count!) and the so-called election-system is basically the least democratic you could come up with even if you tried, and increasingly controlled by private companies that refuse to tell you how they count your votes, and an increasing fraction of Americans are prohibited from voting, for example for stealing a single pair of gloves from a garage.
But still, let's accept he is, atleast nominally, 'democratically' elected.
The Norwegian king plainly ain't democratically elected. But on the other hand, his powers are a *LOT* smaller than those of Bush. His actual power is limited to one thing, and one thing only: He can veto a new law. In which case the law goes back to parliament for reconsideration. If the parliament votes in favour of the law a second time, the law passes, the king can't veto the law a second time.
So, his powers are limited to being able to say: "I demand that you consider this law a second time!"
He hasn't actually done so, ever, as far as I know anyway.
Money ain't everything. I wonder when the general American will understand that.
I live and work as a programmer in Norway. In general the pay for high-paying jobs is lower than US, low-paying jobs are paid better, so the net effect is that there's less of a difference between flipping burgers and say programming.
With a 3-4 year university education, you'll start out as a programmer making something like $65K/year, which I understand is fairly moderate by US standards. And ontop of that you'll probably pay more taxes than you would in the US (probably in the 25-30% range on an income like that, assuming you're single or your partner works too)
But here's the thing;
That university-education was free.
Access to the top-education is determined solely by your results. (i.e you get no credit for having a rich father, nor do you have any disadvantage if you come from a home consisting of a single unemployed mother)
About 1/3rd the living-costs during your studies was paid by the state. The other 2/3rds was given as an interest-free loan that you pay back after you start working (if you become unemployed the loan stays interest-free until you land a job)
There's universal healthcare for everyone staying legally in Norway for more than a year.
Employers have a different (as in better) attitude, the safety nets make people less scared of losing their jobs, which makes them accept less crap, which conditions the employers to not attempt the crap in the first place.
There's more benefits, more than I can count. To me there's no way in hell I'd give that all up in exchange for say $10K more in pay.
I've lived in germany, which is more US-like in these respects, and the work-life there is not in any way shape and form comparable to the one here. I could name 10 different things that employers of friends of me in Germany got away with that here would not even result in a "No.", it'd result in laugther. Followed by resigning the following day unless the braindead boss withdrew the proposal. (the more clueful bosses would understand this and not even consider offering such a proposal)
Oh yeah, there's 4 times more unionised workers in Norway than in Germany. Accident ? You decide. (and if you're a programmer knowing sql, html, dynamic webpages and perhaps even one or more of coldfusion, php, zope or similar web-languages drop me a line at eivind@inbusiness.no and try it out for yourself, we're hiring.)
Better make sure that you have a new job ready before opening such a dialogue - after all, it suggests that things aren't perfect as is, and therefore, that the management might not be perfect. They may not react to such challenge for their ego in a rational manner. Or they might react very rationally, figure out that this employee is growing a spine, and quickly replace him with a new spineless one, easy to exploit for profit.
You are assuming that it's easier for the employer to find a similarily qualified employee than it is for the employee to find a new job. That may or may not be true, it depends a lot on your education, experience and where you work.
It also ignores the fact that *all* employees are less effective the first few months (depending on the job), there's training-issues. In general the employer pays for most of this training.
I started working for my current employer 3 months ago. Theres no doubt that the first 2 months I failed to pull my own weigth. (as do everyone, it's expected) This month will probably be the first one where I actually contribute more than I cost. If I where to quit tomorrow, that would be a much more bad deal for my employer than for me -- afterall *I* got paid for the 3 months.
Furthermore we've been actively looking for new programmers for months (Need to know sql, HTML, programming, bonus if you've got experience with dynamic websites, coldfusion, php or similar), in several countries (Norway, Sweden, Germany mainly) (If this sounds like you and you'd consider working in Stavanger, Norway, seriously, drop a mail to eivind@inbusiness.no). With only limited luck.
Guess what ? We're actually treated like human beings. We're actually involved in decisions that matter to us. We're actually trusted to make our own decisions on technical matters (i.e. a boss that knows his limist, what a concept!).
First, males are generally physically stronger, so they have a better chanse of suceeding in fending off a violent attack.
Secondly, there's a bigger difference between "success" and "failure" for a male than for a female, evolutionary speaking.
A female doesn't need to be hugely "successful" to manage to find someone who will consent to making her pregnant. It's true that a better father for her children will improve the chanse of the children growing up, and the chanse that the children themselves are successful, but a female could be average in a village, and still have basically as many children as her body will allow.
The "top woman" in the village are unlikely to have even twice that many children, though her children will have a somewhat lower chanse of dying, and a somewhat higher chanse of being "successful" themselves.
For males it's different. Genghis Khan had about 800.000 times the reproductive success compared to the average male at his time. (no, this doesn't mean he had 800.000 children, but rather that he had many children, and these children themselves where often successful)
If 90% of the males would die off, it'd affect the species ability to reproduce only very little, and even that mostly as a result of societal norms. It's not as if it's a problem for one male to give 10 females as many children as they want.
Uh, no. Sorry, but the US has the most productive people in the world, along with highest per-capita income among comparable countries (certain middle eastern countries have a higher per-capita for obvious reasons). I don't feel like looking up the stats.
Pity. If you did, you'd discover that your stats are out of date. The countries with the highes GDP/capita are Bermuda, Luxemburg and Norway. (USA is 4th)
But that's a stupid measurement. Because it doesn't take into account the fact that some countries have a very small elite with an insane amount of money and other countries are more uniformly rich.
It's a bit like claiming that the Per-capita income of two 10-million-people states are identical if one has 6 million workers, each earning $40.000/year and the other state has a single person earning 120 trillion and the rest earning $20.000/year.
Statistically seen that migth be correct, but it's not the reality for most of the people living in the countries.
The USA has a small elite earning millions. Norway has less thereof. So while the stats migth say the average norwegian has 1% more money to spend than does the average American (after compensating for differences in prices), the reality is that the *normal* Norwegian has atleast 20% more than the normal American, while the Norwegian super-rich has significantly less money than the US super-rich.
There's not, by the way, significantly more people working their own business or as independent contractors in the US than there is in say Scandinavia.
That's the theory followed by the Norwegian police on minimizing murder. They investigate, then they investigate some more. If that doesn't help, they quadruple the resources and try again. If needed, they keep this level of investigations, with several full-time investigators only investigating this single murder for literally decades.
They get 98.7% of all murders cleared up. Basically, they say, the only chanse of getting away with murder is doing it in such a way that it's never investigated as a "suspicious death" in the first case. How often this is successfully pulled-off noone knows.
But atleast everyone knows: if you kill someone, we will happily spend say 10 million tracking you down. If we need to, we will interview and track the movements of every single one of several thousand tourists visiting say Geiranger that day. We will collect all the photos and all the video taken by all these thousands of tourists. We will work until we know who every single person in every single of these pictures are, and down to the minute when every single picture was taken.
The intended message: You *will* get caugth. (the Geiranger-case is a real one, and yes the murderer was caugth)
You can't get rid of all murders this way. There's a certain portion that is dones essentially in a fit of rage where the perpetrator is not thinking clearly (if at all!) and is basically acting only in rage. You'll always have those.
The USA has like 5.5 murders pro 100.000 inhabitants. For norway, the corresponding number is 1 pro 100.000 capita.
In principle, yes. Child-porn is typically (varies somewhat with jurisdiction but the below is true for Norway and most of it probably also for the us) defined along the lines of "material depicting a minor in a pornographic way".
There's often no exceptions for type of material, age of the owner/producer or if the material is fictious or real.
All of the below migth very well qualify as child-porn and land you for decades in jail; (please note that the age of consent is 16 in Norway, you still qualify as a minor until you're 18 though)
You write down that fantasy you have about the girl in your class in your diary, you're both 17. Posession of that diary may now be (depending on if the text is deemded "pornographic") illegal.
You go nude-swimming with your 16 year old girlfriend.
You download a movie with a girl that's dressed up to look/act as if she's 16. In actual fact she's 20, and it says so in the ending-credits.
You have sex with your girlfriend, you're both 17. Perfectly legal. The next weekend you write her a letter, talking of what you did, and how nice you found it. Posession of that letter is a crime. She better burn it quick!
You are 16. You take a photo of yourself masturbating and keep it, securely locked away in a box under your bed. Posession is illegal.
As a hobby, you draw hentai-cartoons with manga-girls doing pornographic things to tentacled things.
You're 15. The girls in the drawing appears to be around 17. You could still get convicted for posession of child-porn.
It's insane.
Nobody has anything against going after the real abuses. Adults taking advantage of children.
But I have to say something has to be *SERIOUSLY* fucked up when you can, as a 16 year old legally fuck your girlfriend, but you CANNOT legally write in your diary about the same activity.
You're rigth. One needs to prioritize. Even when one wants to claim otherwise.
A human life does not, infact, have infinite value. Sounds fine in speeches, but in the real world it does not work like that.
I'm *not* willing to give up a lot of fundamental liberties in order to have say 90% smaller chance of dying in a terrorist-attack.
The chanse is already down in the noise, 90% reduction sounds like a lot. But if it means my chanses of dying like that fall from 1/1 million to 1/10 million, it doesn't practically improve my expected lifespan by more than about 6 minutes. Thanks, but not thanks, I'll take my 79 years 364 days 23 hour 54 minute free life rather than a 80 year police-state life.
Unfortunately, bring up the idea of telling 2nd-graders about sex organs (even if you aren't talking about sex in any way), and some parents are going to freak the hell out.
It's not about sex-organs, it's much more fundamental. And you're rigth that certain groups go totally bananas when such concepts are raised, because it clashes with their authoritan views on children.
One of the most effective things you can do to decrease the chance that a child or a young person will suffer abuse is to teach them that they don't have to.
Teach them that they are separate individuals, with their own set of rigths that NOONE is allowed to intrude on, no not even mama, papa, the teacher, the priest or any other authority-person you have around.
In particular, your *body* is your own. Noone is allowed to harm it, the only exception being if that is the only way to prevent you harming others, or if you're under 15 (here, migth be different in the US) and it's nessecary to protect your health, and your legal guardian has approved. (example: surgery can be performed on a 13 year old against the childs wish if it's medically beneficial and approved by the parents, but *NOT* on a 16 year old)
Children who have learnt that they "have to" follow the orders of any adult or authority-person are easy victims. To a certain degree they've *learnt* being victims, they've *learnt* that standing up for yourself ain't allowed and is the "wrong" answer. Except it isn't.
Those who insist they have the rigth to hit their children and otherwise physically punish them should not be surprised when the same child later expects that other adults also have the "rigth" to demand things from the child that the child does not want.
It's been hard enough this century to get decent education about safe sex into high schools.
Yeah. Amazing really. Guess you'll just have to live with 5 times the teenage-pregnancy rate compared to more liberal countries where sex-ed is uncontroversial, a lot of teenagers even feel they can talk *gasp* with their parents about such things, contraceptives are readily avialable (frequently for free and anonymous in schools) and the children are basically allowed to get to know what the hell they're doing. (they do it in the US too, they just *know* a lot less about it, and are a lot more *embarassed* about say buying condoms)
Believe it or not, my first serious girlfriend, then 15, (Hi Marianne!) asked her mother to explain to her what a "69" was. Based on later experiences, I would say, the explanation worked. And yes, we used contraceptives. And yes, this was a lot easier because it was not something we needed to hide or be ashamed or embarassed about.
Either you defend everyones freedom or you give up on freedom.
Yes. And it's worse than that really; The only freedoms that really need protection is the freedom to do and say unpopular things.
It'll always everywhere be allowed to do and say popular things. There's no point in spending much energy in the US defending the freedom to publish a normal, nonprovocative novel.
Now, on the other hand, the freedom to do *unpopular* things is under constant attack, and it's a sliding-scale, once the *most* unpopular things are outlawed, the same laws that where erected to say "stop terrorists" or "rapists" are used against people guilty of much lesser crimes, or in some cases of no crime at all.
He is rigth, to a point. Noone is "safe", but that includes the benefits as well as the disadvantages.
In a perfect free market (which has never existed, and never will) every product and every service has multiple suppliers, and every buyer has perfect knowledge of the market, meaning in theory he'll always select the provider that gives the best price/performance ratio.
In principle, this should lead to a "race to the bottom", if *everyone* buys their bread from the baker who sells it at $1, then all the other bakers who currently sell at $1,20 has no other choise than reducing their prices too, or go bankrupt since they sell zero.
In practice it doesn't work like that. There's no perfect markets, only various aproximations. And that's a good thing -- if it wheren't so, then only a single producer could survive in any market, the one with the lowest costs.
And while there's bad effects for the producers, the converse is also true: it's nice to be a *buyer* in a free market; because it means you get stuff and services performed cheaper. In principle as cheap as anyone anywhere can do it. In practice geography, language-barriers, bureaucratic barriers, time-zones, trade-barriers, patriotism, convenience and lots of other stuff work to ensure that gradients exist.
You can infact sell programming-work in the States for prices that would be nuts in India. Price isn't, and will never be, the only thing counting.
That's no good. This puts a very hard cap on what even the top, most "succesful" content creators can earn. When you sell services, you are selling your time. You only have so many hours in a day, and you can only reasonably charge so much for an hour of your time.
Yes, because we both know that if a successful musician could, at best, only hope to earn say $10 million/year doing concerts, and not like now $10 million/year for concerts plus maybe another few millions selling CDs, then obviously noone would bother making music.
Your argument is stupid anyway.
It amounts to: More money for artists, thus good.
That's not the way it works. It's a balance. More money for artists *would* be a good thing, assuming there where no drawbacks, but there are, and they're huge;
Unless you consider it perfectly nonproblematic to erect laws that turn 90% of all young people into criminals, laws that make it illegal to take apart objects you yourself have legally purchased. Laws that make it illegal to give away the old music you're tired of to your little sister who digs the Be Gees, probably because she thinks they're a modern-day boyband.
But I believe the main reason that Americans are familiar with "our" (though I don't personally remember committing any) own human rights violations is that we talk about them.
No more than anyone else. And many of the most egrigious ones have popular support in the USA, which means they really can be seen as violations commited by the american people. Probably the most popular example of USA national (i.e. not foreign-policy) human rigths abuses is the capital punishment, including for minors and mentally underdeveloped people. Yet the capital punishment is fairly popular in the USA. To some degree everyone who's ever voted for a politician in favor of the deathpenalty carries some of the blame.
Perhaps you could set the standard for Europeans everywhere (heh) and utilize some cases we aren't already sick to death of hearing about as your next example?
Part of the problem in Europe is the fragmentation. Most people don't really consider themselves Europeans, the way quite a few in North-America consider themselves Americans. Most people are much more likely to consider themselves Norwegian, Danisch, Italian or German than they are to consider themselves "Europeans".
This, to some degree, makes sense too, especially for those countries in Europe that aren't part of the European Union. A Norwegian voter has no more direct influence on the situation in say Spain than does an American voter.
Remember, people aren't automatically intrinsically gifted with knowledge of each and every world event - one way of gifting us with that knowledge is by letting the knowledge slip casually, thus prompting some of us to go feed the keywords into search engines, and some of us to ask "what" (sans punctuation, of course), thus prompting a +1 Informative copy-and-pasting of the first page ganked from a Googling of the keywords.:-P
I know that. Lots of people outside the USA try very hard to make Americans gaze a little farther than their own belly-button. But the problem exists *inside* of USA too. What is the reason that US news spend less than half the proportion of time on foreign affairs in relation to most European news ?
Part of the problem is geographical. USA is a long way from anywhere, except Mexico and Canada. (Ok, so I'm exxagerating, but you get the idea) I really believe there's no substitute for seeing and experiencing with your own eyes. Yet very few Americans have spent even a half-year living somewhere else than the USA. A quite large group has never even visited other countries, except for maybe Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's reasonable. But only in precisely two situations:
One, if you made an agreement prior to getting the information, as a condition for getting it. Then it's fair enough you're held liable for upholding your part of that agreement. Example: If you sign a oath promising not to share medical information you learn of in your work as a doctor, and then share personal stuff you learn in your work with the press, it's perfectly acceptable that you be held liable for it.
Two, if you got the information in a way that you knew, or must know was illegal. If you broke into the doctors office and stole the medical files, it's perfectly acceptable to hold you liable for the damages that ensue if you sell those files to the slander-press.
Other than those two I agree; if you found out legally, and never promised anything I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to do what you want with your knowledge.
How do you know ? Do you have personal knowledge that Apple did, infact, require each and every person they ever handed this document to to agree to "certain limits" before granting that access ?
That these "limitations" are printed inside the documentation itself is meaningless. I can put "limitations" in this posting, and those have no legal power over you whatsoever -- for the plain and simple reason that you never agreed to my limitations in the first place. Here's one: You are only allowed to read the rest of this comment if you stand on one foot while doing so.
Feel legally obligated to follow that "limitation" ? Would it be different if this was a printed book ? Or if the "limit" had been placed there by a lawyer ?
Whoever leaked that document to somethingawful broke the law.
Which law says you have to do whatever the publisher of a book decides to put into his books ?
Everything from design to font in the label was identical to the real thing, as far as I've been able to tell even the quality is comparable to the original. Or atleast it's good enough for me, I've used it literally daily for years, and it's still got all seams intact, all zippers working perfectly, fabric looking like new, and still waterresistant like new.
Something is worth what you can get for it. What someone else once "got" for it at some point in the past is only tangentially interesting.
Swapping equal shares is a no-op in most cases anyway, shares tend not to be numbered anymore, so it's not really possible to swap identical shares and have anyone accept that a trade has taken place.
True. Good point. If the optics where changeable there could be different optics adapted for short-sigthed people.
No. You can't change the display on a screen in such a way that say shortsigthed persons will see it sharp. If that was possible there'd be such an adjustment in every tv and computer-monitor on the planet.
1 KWh is simply 1000 W over a period of one hour. (or 3600 seconds) So 1 Kwh is 3,6MJ. This means 77KWh is 277 MJ.
At 12 amps, 110V the power of your household-circuit is 1320W, assuming it's fully loaded. If you do that for 6 hours you've have consumed 6*1.32 = almost 8KW, or 30 MJ.
In other words, in 6 hours of charging at 12 amps, 110V, there's no way you'll be able to get in more energy than the equivalent of 1kg of petrol. In reality worse because batteries loose some energy to heat on charging, so not all energy you input will stay stored in them.
On the other hand electric motors are more efficient than combustion-engines, so 1MJ of input to an electric motor will acomplish a bit (20% or so) more than 1MJ of input to a combustion-engine.
I have a hunch. Increasingly conflicts are won and lost not on the battlefield, but rather at home.
USA "lost" in Vietnam much more because of forces back home than they did because of anything that actually happened in Vietnam. If Bush is forced to withdraw from Irak or Afghanistan before he really wants to, this will very likely also be because the population back home demands it, not because the locals are putting up such a figth.
No one believes it.
I think you overestimate the general public. Sadly I'm pretty sure tons of people if not literally believe all of it, than atleast they in general terms believe the rhetoric. No one even flinches when CNN or anyone else uses phrases like "the free world", rhetoric that would be laughable in much of Europe. (not that the general public is smarter here, they just got *other* blind spots)
The war about publich opinion at home is also why Bush et al gives a fuck that for example Norway opposed the invasion of Iraq. It makes no difference whatsoever to the chanses of military winning the war. But it *migth* make a bit more of a difference in the war of public opinion.
This is also the main reason I find the reaction of many muslims in the occupied territories so mindbogglingly silly. If they honestly want the Americans to go home as quickly as possible, their best chanse is to win the war of public opinion in the US. Acting like raving lunatics won't achieve that. I wonder if they don't see that. Or if they *do* see it and have a different agenda. Or if they do see it and are just so seriously pissed that they're unable to do what their rational minds tell them they should do. Beats me.
But luckily not of all corporations, nor of all bosses.
Because the thing is, such employees will never ever tell you when your new idea absolutely fucking sucks. And sometimes, just sometimes, your employees do actually know something about the work they perform. Or if they don't, you hired the wrong ones anyway.
A collegue of mine got a raise, explicitly for the reason that he pointed out why an idea of the boss was the (in the words of the boss) absolutely amazingly stupidest idea of the year. And yes, the reason was announced publically, because, again in the words of the boss: When (not if!) I'm being stupid I bloody well want to hear about it from you rather than being told the hard way by the marketplace.
Which is frequently a bad assumption.
Or the employer could simply increase the workload of the remaining employees, not hire anyone, and give the savings to the management as bonuses for work well done.
Again, you're assuming that the work-market is such that the employer gets to do whatever the hell he wants to, and the employees will simply bend over and take it. I'm trying to tell you that's not a natural law. It's *NOT* like that for programmers in Scandinavia now for example. There are literally 3 times the number of jobs free that there are unemployed programmers. (nevermind skilled programmers) In such an environment treating your employees badly is a *very* unhealthy business-move. No worries, just make the rest of the employees pick up the slack.
You're assuming they will. Essentially you're saying, if you've got 100 workers, don't worry, just fire 99 of them, and the last one will pick up the slack, no problems.
Fact is, with less in numbers, less in skill and less motivated employees less will get done. If it matters to you that things get done, this is a concern. If it doesn't matter to you if things get done or not, you should just close the company.
I have no formal education in any of those things, but I thought myself HTML with W3C's website, PHP with PHP's website, SQL with PostrgreSQL's documentation and various programming languages - Python, Java, C - with their websites kind help (except C, which I learned from Nethack's source code).
Sounds interesting enough to me. I'm not in the *sligthest* kidding. Assuming you would consider a career in Stavanger, pass me a copy of your resume, or contact me in email.
Of course, as a result, my skills have huge holes - I've learned things as I've needed them, without knowing if something is the correct way of doing things. Still don't quite have a handle on C's string manipulation functions, despite doing experimentation on Linux kernel.
The holes I worry about are those that you're convinced aren't there. It's not a problem having limitations, everyone does, and if you're even aware about them and open about them it's even a bonus. I'm skeptical of people who have no answer when I ask what they're particularily bad at. Then I congratulate you for having a good employer, but the basis of this discussion was having a not-so-good one.
It doesn't depend only on your employer, but also on those surrounding him. If your employer is a dick, and so is every other employer, then the employee has a problem. He needs to relocate or acquire new skills to escape the trap. If your employer is a dick, but there are others that aren't, obviously you should jump ship. I guess what I'm saying is that not only is my employer not a dick. But also he couldn't get away with being one even if he wanted to. People would just walk away.
And it works between countries too. Guess which part of the german population are migrating to less dicky employers in Scandinavia, the more skilled, more motivated, more valuable employees or the unskilled, unmotivated ones ? Guess for which
The difference is mind-bogglingly big, much much worse than most people imagine. 50kgs of petrol or diesel literally hold 100 times the energy of a similarily sized battery-pack.
The fact that refilling a tank of fuel is 100 times quicker than recharging the battery-pack, and you just add insult to injury.
If a battery for a reasonable price existed that could hold the same amount of energy that a normal petrol-tank does, without being more than say 10 times the size/weigth, and it could be recharged in oh, say, 10 times the time it takes to refill a normal tank. Then petrol-burning cars would be obsolete overnigth.
People would accept a car with say 300 miles range to need half an hour for recharging. It's rare that you need to go more than 300 miles without a half-hour pause for recharging being acceptable. (you could combine this with a meal at some rest-stop anyway)
It's sad sad sad that batteries aren't 10 times poorer than gas-tanks at holding and refilling energy. They're not even 100 times poorer, they're more like 1000 times poorer. (weighing 10 times as much, taking 10 times the space, storing 10% of the energy *AND* needing 100 times the time for recharging.)
Electric motors, on the other hand, rock. Smaller, higher torque (especially where it matters), almost completely silent, fewer moving parts, more dependable, higher efficiency (less waste heat), more compact.
Give me a battery that sucks, and I'll take it tomorrow. The problem is that current batteries doesn't even suck. They are absolutely mindblowingly horribly crapaliscious.
The crappy batteries is also the only reason Hybrids exist at all. Hybrids can use petrol/diesel for energy-storage, which is their only advantage over pure-electric. (but because of the crappy batteries, that advantage is major.)
Depends on your criteria.
Bush is elected, sort of. I mean, the other guy got more votes (by anyones count!) and the so-called election-system is basically the least democratic you could come up with even if you tried, and increasingly controlled by private companies that refuse to tell you how they count your votes, and an increasing fraction of Americans are prohibited from voting, for example for stealing a single pair of gloves from a garage.
But still, let's accept he is, atleast nominally, 'democratically' elected.
The Norwegian king plainly ain't democratically elected. But on the other hand, his powers are a *LOT* smaller than those of Bush. His actual power is limited to one thing, and one thing only: He can veto a new law. In which case the law goes back to parliament for reconsideration. If the parliament votes in favour of the law a second time, the law passes, the king can't veto the law a second time.
So, his powers are limited to being able to say: "I demand that you consider this law a second time!"
He hasn't actually done so, ever, as far as I know anyway.
Countries never are those things that they claim in their names.
The Peoples Republic of China
I'll concede they're China, but that's it, they're definitely neither a Republic, nor controlled by "the people"
Deutsche Demokratische Republic
Again, they qualify as "Deutsch", but where definitely neither a Republic, nor Democratic.
Try it for yourself. If a country has "republic" or "democratic" in the official name, it's usually a sure sign that they're not.
I live and work as a programmer in Norway. In general the pay for high-paying jobs is lower than US, low-paying jobs are paid better, so the net effect is that there's less of a difference between flipping burgers and say programming.
With a 3-4 year university education, you'll start out as a programmer making something like $65K/year, which I understand is fairly moderate by US standards. And ontop of that you'll probably pay more taxes than you would in the US (probably in the 25-30% range on an income like that, assuming you're single or your partner works too)
But here's the thing;
There's more benefits, more than I can count. To me there's no way in hell I'd give that all up in exchange for say $10K more in pay.
I've lived in germany, which is more US-like in these respects, and the work-life there is not in any way shape and form comparable to the one here. I could name 10 different things that employers of friends of me in Germany got away with that here would not even result in a "No.", it'd result in laugther. Followed by resigning the following day unless the braindead boss withdrew the proposal. (the more clueful bosses would understand this and not even consider offering such a proposal)
Oh yeah, there's 4 times more unionised workers in Norway than in Germany. Accident ? You decide. (and if you're a programmer knowing sql, html, dynamic webpages and perhaps even one or more of coldfusion, php, zope or similar web-languages drop me a line at eivind@inbusiness.no and try it out for yourself, we're hiring.)
You are assuming that it's easier for the employer to find a similarily qualified employee than it is for the employee to find a new job. That may or may not be true, it depends a lot on your education, experience and where you work.
It also ignores the fact that *all* employees are less effective the first few months (depending on the job), there's training-issues. In general the employer pays for most of this training.
I started working for my current employer 3 months ago. Theres no doubt that the first 2 months I failed to pull my own weigth. (as do everyone, it's expected) This month will probably be the first one where I actually contribute more than I cost. If I where to quit tomorrow, that would be a much more bad deal for my employer than for me -- afterall *I* got paid for the 3 months.
Furthermore we've been actively looking for new programmers for months (Need to know sql, HTML, programming, bonus if you've got experience with dynamic websites, coldfusion, php or similar), in several countries (Norway, Sweden, Germany mainly) (If this sounds like you and you'd consider working in Stavanger, Norway, seriously, drop a mail to eivind@inbusiness.no). With only limited luck.
Guess what ? We're actually treated like human beings. We're actually involved in decisions that matter to us. We're actually trusted to make our own decisions on technical matters (i.e. a boss that knows his limist, what a concept!).
First, males are generally physically stronger, so they have a better chanse of suceeding in fending off a violent attack.
Secondly, there's a bigger difference between "success" and "failure" for a male than for a female, evolutionary speaking.
A female doesn't need to be hugely "successful" to manage to find someone who will consent to making her pregnant. It's true that a better father for her children will improve the chanse of the children growing up, and the chanse that the children themselves are successful, but a female could be average in a village, and still have basically as many children as her body will allow.
The "top woman" in the village are unlikely to have even twice that many children, though her children will have a somewhat lower chanse of dying, and a somewhat higher chanse of being "successful" themselves.
For males it's different. Genghis Khan had about 800.000 times the reproductive success compared to the average male at his time. (no, this doesn't mean he had 800.000 children, but rather that he had many children, and these children themselves where often successful)
If 90% of the males would die off, it'd affect the species ability to reproduce only very little, and even that mostly as a result of societal norms. It's not as if it's a problem for one male to give 10 females as many children as they want.
Pity. If you did, you'd discover that your stats are out of date. The countries with the highes GDP/capita are Bermuda, Luxemburg and Norway. (USA is 4th)
But that's a stupid measurement. Because it doesn't take into account the fact that some countries have a very small elite with an insane amount of money and other countries are more uniformly rich.
It's a bit like claiming that the Per-capita income of two 10-million-people states are identical if one has 6 million workers, each earning $40.000/year and the other state has a single person earning 120 trillion and the rest earning $20.000/year.
Statistically seen that migth be correct, but it's not the reality for most of the people living in the countries.
The USA has a small elite earning millions. Norway has less thereof. So while the stats migth say the average norwegian has 1% more money to spend than does the average American (after compensating for differences in prices), the reality is that the *normal* Norwegian has atleast 20% more than the normal American, while the Norwegian super-rich has significantly less money than the US super-rich.
There's not, by the way, significantly more people working their own business or as independent contractors in the US than there is in say Scandinavia.
That's the theory followed by the Norwegian police on minimizing murder. They investigate, then they investigate some more. If that doesn't help, they quadruple the resources and try again. If needed, they keep this level of investigations, with several full-time investigators only investigating this single murder for literally decades.
They get 98.7% of all murders cleared up. Basically, they say, the only chanse of getting away with murder is doing it in such a way that it's never investigated as a "suspicious death" in the first case. How often this is successfully pulled-off noone knows.
But atleast everyone knows: if you kill someone, we will happily spend say 10 million tracking you down. If we need to, we will interview and track the movements of every single one of several thousand tourists visiting say Geiranger that day. We will collect all the photos and all the video taken by all these thousands of tourists. We will work until we know who every single person in every single of these pictures are, and down to the minute when every single picture was taken.
The intended message: You *will* get caugth. (the Geiranger-case is a real one, and yes the murderer was caugth)
You can't get rid of all murders this way. There's a certain portion that is dones essentially in a fit of rage where the perpetrator is not thinking clearly (if at all!) and is basically acting only in rage. You'll always have those.
The USA has like 5.5 murders pro 100.000 inhabitants. For norway, the corresponding number is 1 pro 100.000 capita.
There's often no exceptions for type of material, age of the owner/producer or if the material is fictious or real.
All of the below migth very well qualify as child-porn and land you for decades in jail; (please note that the age of consent is 16 in Norway, you still qualify as a minor until you're 18 though)
It's insane.
Nobody has anything against going after the real abuses. Adults taking advantage of children.
But I have to say something has to be *SERIOUSLY* fucked up when you can, as a 16 year old legally fuck your girlfriend, but you CANNOT legally write in your diary about the same activity.
A human life does not, infact, have infinite value. Sounds fine in speeches, but in the real world it does not work like that.
I'm *not* willing to give up a lot of fundamental liberties in order to have say 90% smaller chance of dying in a terrorist-attack.
The chanse is already down in the noise, 90% reduction sounds like a lot. But if it means my chanses of dying like that fall from 1/1 million to 1/10 million, it doesn't practically improve my expected lifespan by more than about 6 minutes. Thanks, but not thanks, I'll take my 79 years 364 days 23 hour 54 minute free life rather than a 80 year police-state life.
It's not about sex-organs, it's much more fundamental. And you're rigth that certain groups go totally bananas when such concepts are raised, because it clashes with their authoritan views on children.
One of the most effective things you can do to decrease the chance that a child or a young person will suffer abuse is to teach them that they don't have to.
Teach them that they are separate individuals, with their own set of rigths that NOONE is allowed to intrude on, no not even mama, papa, the teacher, the priest or any other authority-person you have around.
In particular, your *body* is your own. Noone is allowed to harm it, the only exception being if that is the only way to prevent you harming others, or if you're under 15 (here, migth be different in the US) and it's nessecary to protect your health, and your legal guardian has approved. (example: surgery can be performed on a 13 year old against the childs wish if it's medically beneficial and approved by the parents, but *NOT* on a 16 year old)
Children who have learnt that they "have to" follow the orders of any adult or authority-person are easy victims. To a certain degree they've *learnt* being victims, they've *learnt* that standing up for yourself ain't allowed and is the "wrong" answer. Except it isn't.
Those who insist they have the rigth to hit their children and otherwise physically punish them should not be surprised when the same child later expects that other adults also have the "rigth" to demand things from the child that the child does not want.
It's been hard enough this century to get decent education about safe sex into high schools.
Yeah. Amazing really. Guess you'll just have to live with 5 times the teenage-pregnancy rate compared to more liberal countries where sex-ed is uncontroversial, a lot of teenagers even feel they can talk *gasp* with their parents about such things, contraceptives are readily avialable (frequently for free and anonymous in schools) and the children are basically allowed to get to know what the hell they're doing. (they do it in the US too, they just *know* a lot less about it, and are a lot more *embarassed* about say buying condoms)
Believe it or not, my first serious girlfriend, then 15, (Hi Marianne!) asked her mother to explain to her what a "69" was. Based on later experiences, I would say, the explanation worked. And yes, we used contraceptives. And yes, this was a lot easier because it was not something we needed to hide or be ashamed or embarassed about.
Yes. And it's worse than that really; The only freedoms that really need protection is the freedom to do and say unpopular things.
It'll always everywhere be allowed to do and say popular things. There's no point in spending much energy in the US defending the freedom to publish a normal, nonprovocative novel.
Now, on the other hand, the freedom to do *unpopular* things is under constant attack, and it's a sliding-scale, once the *most* unpopular things are outlawed, the same laws that where erected to say "stop terrorists" or "rapists" are used against people guilty of much lesser crimes, or in some cases of no crime at all.
In a perfect free market (which has never existed, and never will) every product and every service has multiple suppliers, and every buyer has perfect knowledge of the market, meaning in theory he'll always select the provider that gives the best price/performance ratio.
In principle, this should lead to a "race to the bottom", if *everyone* buys their bread from the baker who sells it at $1, then all the other bakers who currently sell at $1,20 has no other choise than reducing their prices too, or go bankrupt since they sell zero.
In practice it doesn't work like that. There's no perfect markets, only various aproximations. And that's a good thing -- if it wheren't so, then only a single producer could survive in any market, the one with the lowest costs.
And while there's bad effects for the producers, the converse is also true: it's nice to be a *buyer* in a free market; because it means you get stuff and services performed cheaper. In principle as cheap as anyone anywhere can do it. In practice geography, language-barriers, bureaucratic barriers, time-zones, trade-barriers, patriotism, convenience and lots of other stuff work to ensure that gradients exist.
You can infact sell programming-work in the States for prices that would be nuts in India. Price isn't, and will never be, the only thing counting.
Yes, because we both know that if a successful musician could, at best, only hope to earn say $10 million/year doing concerts, and not like now $10 million/year for concerts plus maybe another few millions selling CDs, then obviously noone would bother making music.
Your argument is stupid anyway.
It amounts to: More money for artists, thus good.
That's not the way it works. It's a balance. More money for artists *would* be a good thing, assuming there where no drawbacks, but there are, and they're huge;
Unless you consider it perfectly nonproblematic to erect laws that turn 90% of all young people into criminals, laws that make it illegal to take apart objects you yourself have legally purchased. Laws that make it illegal to give away the old music you're tired of to your little sister who digs the Be Gees, probably because she thinks they're a modern-day boyband.
Perhaps you could set the standard for Europeans everywhere (heh) and utilize some cases we aren't already sick to death of hearing about as your next example?
Part of the problem in Europe is the fragmentation. Most people don't really consider themselves Europeans, the way quite a few in North-America consider themselves Americans. Most people are much more likely to consider themselves Norwegian, Danisch, Italian or German than they are to consider themselves "Europeans".
This, to some degree, makes sense too, especially for those countries in Europe that aren't part of the European Union. A Norwegian voter has no more direct influence on the situation in say Spain than does an American voter.
Remember, people aren't automatically intrinsically gifted with knowledge of each and every world event - one way of gifting us with that knowledge is by letting the knowledge slip casually, thus prompting some of us to go feed the keywords into search engines, and some of us to ask "what" (sans punctuation, of course), thus prompting a +1 Informative copy-and-pasting of the first page ganked from a Googling of the keywords. :-P
I know that. Lots of people outside the USA try very hard to make Americans gaze a little farther than their own belly-button. But the problem exists *inside* of USA too. What is the reason that US news spend less than half the proportion of time on foreign affairs in relation to most European news ?
Part of the problem is geographical. USA is a long way from anywhere, except Mexico and Canada. (Ok, so I'm exxagerating, but you get the idea) I really believe there's no substitute for seeing and experiencing with your own eyes. Yet very few Americans have spent even a half-year living somewhere else than the USA. A quite large group has never even visited other countries, except for maybe Canada.