It's ridicolous fear-mongering to post that we're at so-and-so percentage-level with regard to release of 2 specific radioactive substances, without mentioning that this in no way implies that we're even close to similar in general.
Like you point out, in particular iodine is a short-lived and thus mostly local problem (and even local radiation-levels have been very modest this far). Half-life of 8 days means that it's more than 99% gone in 2 months and 99.99% gone in 4 months and so on. (basically add a 9 every month)
There may yet be larger releases, but -this- far we've got ~20.000 dead due to earthquake and tsunami, and ~0 dead due to radiation released from the powerplants.
Also: today it's possible and practical to buy unencumbered plain music-files with a minimum of hassle. For a long time, the position of the industry essentially was that you're pirates if you copy it, but we'll be damned if we'll actually agree to sell you what you want.
Today I can buy any new Norwegian release for aproximately $10 - in consistent and high quality, with correct tagging, album-art and all the other trimmings. This is actually (imho) reasonable - so I tend to.
In contrast, I've always refused paying a single cent for DRM-encumbered music, and the same thing applies to books and movies (well, I accept DVD, since it's unencumbered in PRACTICE)
We'll see if the Ebook-sellers and movie-sellers wisen up, or not.
It's actually a lot worse than "money we could have made", because actual sale-price, assuming every downloader would ALWAYS buy the song, is on the order of $1/song.
Meanwhile, statutory damages for copyright-infringement is between $750 and $30,000 per infringement, at the discretion of the court, but willfull infringement can be up to $150.000.
These absurd numers is thus the results of claiming up to $150.000 of damages, for a copy that, if legally bought, would have cost a maximum of $1. (and in the real world, offcourse, only a small fraction -would- have bought the same amount of music if copying wasn't possible)
Claiming "money we could have made" would merely be ridicolous. But they're one-upping that - they're claiming damages equal to 150.000 times what they would have made if everyone bought all the music.
True. We've got some natural advantages. But this does not change the overall point -- USA has by far the highest GINI-index of *any* other rich western country (gini measures inequality), and the gap is growing rapidly.
So you can choose to compare with a larger country, if you find that comparison better (and maybe it is!). My point is, in USA a *huge* part of the total resources go to the upper few percent, while everyone elses share has been dropping steadily for decades.
That fails to work. Because absent government intervention, there's many mechanisms in the market that will lead to monopolies. All else being equal, often the bigger company will be able to beat and/or buy the smaller company. Unless you do -something- to limit the power of corporations, the end-result is mega-corps.
Yeah, and that's essentially what I said. Going to either extreme, is almost certainly a bad thing. And while we can debate endlessly about where exactly the optimal balance between capitalism and socialism is, it seems inituitively obvious to me that USA currently errs on the side of capitalism.
I don't actually think that large fractions of the American population *agrees* with the development we've seen the last 30 years where the share of income enjoyed by the top-1% has risen by 120% (i.e. more than doubled) whereas it's risen by 30% for the top-20% and fallen for everyone else.
We do need some system of rewarding people who work hard, or else, evidence shows, people will just slack, and you end up not with everyone equally rich, but instead with everyone equally poor, so to say.
On the flipside, we do also need mechanisms for ensuring that capitalism is a servant of the people - and not it's master.
I tend to think the scandinavian countries hit the balance close to optimal, but offcourse I'm biased, being Norwegian myself. Some people would say we're -too- socialist, while others would say we're not -enough- socialist, to a certain degree it's a matter of personal taste, I guess.
But I think it's fairly clear-cut that capitalism in the USA, needs *more* moderating influence, and that it has gone too far in the direction of giving power to the wealthy.
Nor -will- you ever get that readiness or that infrastructure unless fuel-prices rise significantly.
The very -reason- you're not able to handle it, is that you're not used to it. Perfectly normal gasoline is over $9/gallon here already, and it's causing pretty close to zero problems.
It's not the price that's the problem, it's the sudden and large fluctuation that's problematic, because it takes time to adapt. (for example, at $10/gallon buying certain kinds of cars become less attractive)
I think it's about time you *started* adapting. It's not as if being dependant on the middle-east is going to be a more attractice proposition in the future, and it's not as if the reserves of oil in the ground are growing.
No. I'm saying one of the primary ways we progress, is by investing some of our surplus into creating even larger surplus and so on.
If you've got a kilo of gold saved up (surplus: something you earned, but don't need to survive), then burying it somewhere best-case ensures that in the future, you have the same thing.
In contrast, some people choose to invest part of their surplus in some activity with the potential to create even more surplus. We call this *investing* or *entrepeneurship* or *a business*, and the gist of it is: it has higher risk, you can lose your money, but it has an *expected* return better than unity. i.e. if you invest a certain value now, you'll *probably* have more than that value in the future, because on the average, these things create additional surplus. (if they didn't, we should stop doing it!)
There's many different ways of investing. You could educate yourself. You could give a loan to someone else for educating him/herself. You could build a factory. You could open a shop. You could do *anything*.
Burying the gold is choosing to do nothing. It's choosing to say: breaking even is the BEST I can hope for, so that's what I'm going to aim for.
If everyone says "my aim is to break even", then best-case, humanity as a whole breaks even. Which isn't conductive to progress.
By all means, keep secure those resources you *do* need to support yourself. But if you've got a little more than that ? Invest it. Put the money into something where the expected return is above unity.
So how many normal citizens in USA has this far lost how much of their money due to failed banks ?
Burying gold in your backyard was dumb then, and is dumb now. And yes, I know gold has performed well recently. It's still not *productive*, a kilogram of gold today will still be a kilogram of gold in 20 years, no new value has been produced.
If humanity collectively declined to invest our surplus, or atleast parts of it, we'd still be living in caves.
You have other data you need to back up anyway. The added tedium of needing to backup ~50GB rather than say ~30GB (200 albums), is essentially ignorable. Zero extra effort, and the extra cost is in the "small and dropping" category.
At the moment online backup is around $0.10 pro GB and month, so keeping the 200 albums securely backed up is $25/year - and that's for the first year. (if you think a GB of online storage will cost MORE in a year or three, I've got some prime swampland for you...)
Infact, keeping everything on one place (files!) makes proper care a lot *easier* than having to take care of multiple distinct technologies, such as CDs, DVDs and computer-files as three distinct storage-mediums. (and if you think stacks of CDs and DVDs are zero-maintenance, you obviously ain't moved very often...)
This one is fairly simple. It keeps the last 200K rounds, and then to make a prediction is searches these for occurences where both human and computer has played the same 4 things in sequence. It then predicts the most common choice for the human, and responds based on that.
i.e. if last-4-rounds was human: RPSR and computer SPRR it searches the last 200K rounds to find that precise situation, yielding on the average 781 times before that that *precise* situation has occured. It then predicts what the human most commonly did as next-step.
You can beat this, if you're aware of what humans most commonly do in *some* situations, and deliberately do the opposite thing, while playing randomly (toss dice!) when you -dont- recognize the situation.
Infact you could memorise the veterans response: there's only 256 possible states.
That's also not a problem. What's wrong with saying "no" ?
Seriously, if a relationship is destructive for you, as in the pain is a lot larger than the benefits, why then choose to maintain that relationship at all ?
The 31 page agreement is to use the app-store at *ALL*, not specific to this particular app -- indeed you'd have to agree to the same agreement in order to install a *free* app on your own apple-product.
It's not an outlier. Instead it's common and indeed the norm for things like software, insurance, banking and suchlike to routinely ask users to "agree" to dozens and dozens of terms written in legalese over many many pages.
It's *not* reasonable to expect the average consumer to read and understand it all, indeed it's frequently not possible to be sure what exactly it means even for someone *with* a law-degree and 2 days time to study the agreement in detail.
Even your example link ? "Terms and Conditions" brings up a 580 word summary with a link to "Full Terms and Conditions", this alone is a huge warning-sign: It says: we don't actually expect even those who click "Terms and Conditions" to want to wrestle with the *actual* terms, so we summarised for you.
The *actual* terms and conditions are at http://vodafone.com.au/personal/plans/termsandconditions/index.htm and weigh in at 4055 words and more than 25KB of text. (that's not counting the html-markup - just the plain text) The text has a readability-score that indicates even most college-graduates would be unable to comprehend it in detail. (fog-index of 14 where 7-8 is the level of average people and 10-12 the level of average college-graduates)
Since average reading-speed is about 200wpm (and goes down with more complex text) we're talking a text that would take more than half an hour just to read - nevermind understand.
Is that reasonable for a bog-standard contract for a mobile-phone-subscription ? It's not as far-out as the Appstore, but it's still fairly bad.
There's actually some merit to that - the terms you are asked to read and agree to in order to use the appstore and buy a random $1 app for your ipad is, in the current iteration, 31 pages of legalese.
"Could be avoided by glancing over" does not, infact, come close.
To accurately read the terms, you'd require a minimum of an hour, and to actually feel fairly sure that you understand what they say, you'd need to be legally trained and spend a week studying the terms.
This is not reasonable, for what is literally a $1 purchase.
As a general principle I support peoples right to enter into any contract (any that's without illegal conditions anyway), but in this specific case I also support legislation such as the one we have in Norway that stipulates certain *minimum* requirements for a consumer-sale. The practical consequence is that you *can* ignore the 31 pages of legalese (everyone everywhere generally do anyway!), and be certain that you still have atleast those rights that the law stipulates as *minimum*.
True. But they can break due to freak one-off "accidents", i.e. it's possible for a server to crash, but then upon reboot, run perfectly for a year with no problems exhibited whatsoever.
Offcourse the problem that caused the crash once *can* do so again, but it might not be worth the time to investigate it. Thus it can be quite sensible to go with "once is accidental - twice is suspicious - three times warrants investigation".
Because sometimes "once" really does happen only once, and doesn't repeat itself in the forseeable future, at which point knowing *why* might not be worth the investment in time to find out why.
Pragmatism wins in the real world, and that's not a bad thing. The trick is to find the right balance.
Yeah, true. People *do* forget about serial marriages, and thus when they read that 1000 people got married and 400 divorced, they (falsely) concludes that 40% of all *people* who marry, will also divorce.
The actual rate is lower, and it's even lower if you discount people who're not really serious about marriage to begin with. (I'm sorry, but if someone gives up after 6 months, I'm not willing to believe that they where serious about a life-long comittment to begin with)
If neither you, nor your partner has been married before, and the marriage has already held more than 2 years - then the odds of getting divorced at all are something like 20%.
i.e. aproximately 4 out of 5 marriages that ever really get started at all, last for life. That's not bad at all.
Add in that today it's acceptible, and indeed common, to divorce *without* huge misdoings by either part, but instead just "irreconcilable differences" or "drifted apart", and I tend to think the marriage-stats are downright awesome.
Sure, everyone wants experience. And someone with half a decade of real-world experience is, on the average, probably better qualified than someone with ONLY a college-degree.
However, 5 years later the college-educated has a degree and 5 years of experience.
And *that* will tend to beat 10 years of experience and no formal education.
First, it's not credible that he'd be executed even if he WAS sent to USA. It's true that you're among the few modern states who still have capital punishment, but it's not used for cases such as his, and the image-costs of having him executed would be MUCH higher than any potential benefit.
Second, if there *was* a credible threat of execution in the USA (which there isn't) then Sweden -also- does not extradite prisoners to countries where they risk being executed. (infact they're more careful about it than the UK is, as far as I've been able to ascertain)
CDs have a dynamic range of 96dB, and a frequency-limit of 22Khz - there has been attempts at introducing "superior" formats, such as SACD for example, that offers 120dB of dynamic range and a frequency-limit of 50Khz.
But people near-universally don't care. Either there's no noticeable difference at all, or it's in the "don't care" region.
Infact, people have done the opposite: replaced CD-quality with questionable 128Kbps constant-bitrate mp3-encodings, which *are* noticeably poorer than CDs, because the added convenience matters more to them than the decreased fidelity.
DVDs still outsell Bluerays by a huge margin too, even among households who *have* a blueray-player - we do, but we still buy 20 DVDs for every one blueray. The blueray is better technically, but that doesn't make the movies any better - and if the movie is any good, you're watcinh the *movie* not the technical quality.
(there's a few exceptions, movies where breathtaking imagery is a part of the attraction, but that's not the norm)
social engineering is so very simple, and so very effective, true.
Google a mid-sized company enough to know the name, position and email-adress of an employee, and the name of one of his/her supervisors.
"Hi, it's from [network-provider] - I got a report that you where having some trouble accessing your email, [name-of-supervisor] couldn't get at his at all today - do you have a minute to perform some tests on your account ?"
People will gladly tell you their passwords, if it appears you know what you're doing and you know even a *tiny* bit about their environment, enough to make you seem legit.
That's not -quite- accurate. You're allowed (in Sweden!) to use the force that is necessary - or that you REASONABLY BELIEVE to be necessary. That is, if a person points a gun at you, and you shoot him, you're in the clear, even if it later turns out his gun was not loaded, or was a nonfunctional replica.
The point is that you reasonably -believed- that deadly force was required to ensure your own survival. If this belief was correct or not, is beside the point.
Also, there is no requirement that the force is proportional, that is, self-defence laws can get you off the hook for using deadly force to stop something lesser than a murder. For example, if you reasonably believed that letal force was required to prevent yourself from being raped, that would qualify.
But yeah, attacking an assailant who is -clearly- disabled, will get you convicted. But I'm pretty sure that's not just for Sweden, but *anywhere* basically. It amounts to revenge, afterall. Probably the judge would see the prior assault as mitigating circumstance, so you'd get a shorter sentence, but you'd still be guilty.
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It's ridicolous fear-mongering to post that we're at so-and-so percentage-level with regard to release of 2 specific radioactive substances, without mentioning that this in no way implies that we're even close to similar in general.
Like you point out, in particular iodine is a short-lived and thus mostly local problem (and even local radiation-levels have been very modest this far). Half-life of 8 days means that it's more than 99% gone in 2 months and 99.99% gone in 4 months and so on. (basically add a 9 every month)
There may yet be larger releases, but -this- far we've got ~20.000 dead due to earthquake and tsunami, and ~0 dead due to radiation released from the powerplants.
Also: today it's possible and practical to buy unencumbered plain music-files with a minimum of hassle. For a long time, the position of the industry essentially was that you're pirates if you copy it, but we'll be damned if we'll actually agree to sell you what you want.
Today I can buy any new Norwegian release for aproximately $10 - in consistent and high quality, with correct tagging, album-art and all the other trimmings. This is actually (imho) reasonable - so I tend to.
In contrast, I've always refused paying a single cent for DRM-encumbered music, and the same thing applies to books and movies (well, I accept DVD, since it's unencumbered in PRACTICE)
We'll see if the Ebook-sellers and movie-sellers wisen up, or not.
It's actually a lot worse than "money we could have made", because actual sale-price, assuming every downloader would ALWAYS buy the song, is on the order of $1/song.
Meanwhile, statutory damages for copyright-infringement is between $750 and $30,000 per infringement, at the discretion of the court, but willfull infringement can be up to $150.000.
These absurd numers is thus the results of claiming up to $150.000 of damages, for a copy that, if legally bought, would have cost a maximum of $1. (and in the real world, offcourse, only a small fraction -would- have bought the same amount of music if copying wasn't possible)
Claiming "money we could have made" would merely be ridicolous. But they're one-upping that - they're claiming damages equal to 150.000 times what they would have made if everyone bought all the music.
True. We've got some natural advantages. But this does not change the overall point -- USA has by far the highest GINI-index of *any* other rich western country (gini measures inequality), and the gap is growing rapidly.
So you can choose to compare with a larger country, if you find that comparison better (and maybe it is!). My point is, in USA a *huge* part of the total resources go to the upper few percent, while everyone elses share has been dropping steadily for decades.
And that's not a good trend.
That fails to work. Because absent government intervention, there's many mechanisms in the market that will lead to monopolies. All else being equal, often the bigger company will be able to beat and/or buy the smaller company. Unless you do -something- to limit the power of corporations, the end-result is mega-corps.
Yeah, and that's essentially what I said. Going to either extreme, is almost certainly a bad thing. And while we can debate endlessly about where exactly the optimal balance between capitalism and socialism is, it seems inituitively obvious to me that USA currently errs on the side of capitalism.
I don't actually think that large fractions of the American population *agrees* with the development we've seen the last 30 years where the share of income enjoyed by the top-1% has risen by 120% (i.e. more than doubled) whereas it's risen by 30% for the top-20% and fallen for everyone else.
In short, this: http://assets.motherjones.com/politics/2011/inequality-p25_averagehouseholdincom.png is a bad development, and I do *not* think it reflects voter-will, so when it happens anyway, I'm inclined to believe the main reason is capital has gained influence whereas the voting public has lost influence.
Nah. Somewhere in between is better.
We do need some system of rewarding people who work hard, or else, evidence shows, people will just slack, and you end up not with everyone equally rich, but instead with everyone equally poor, so to say.
On the flipside, we do also need mechanisms for ensuring that capitalism is a servant of the people - and not it's master.
I tend to think the scandinavian countries hit the balance close to optimal, but offcourse I'm biased, being Norwegian myself. Some people would say we're -too- socialist, while others would say we're not -enough- socialist, to a certain degree it's a matter of personal taste, I guess.
But I think it's fairly clear-cut that capitalism in the USA, needs *more* moderating influence, and that it has gone too far in the direction of giving power to the wealthy.
Nor -will- you ever get that readiness or that infrastructure unless fuel-prices rise significantly.
The very -reason- you're not able to handle it, is that you're not used to it. Perfectly normal gasoline is over $9/gallon here already, and it's causing pretty close to zero problems.
It's not the price that's the problem, it's the sudden and large fluctuation that's problematic, because it takes time to adapt. (for example, at $10/gallon buying certain kinds of cars become less attractive)
I think it's about time you *started* adapting. It's not as if being dependant on the middle-east is going to be a more attractice proposition in the future, and it's not as if the reserves of oil in the ground are growing.
Not enough to matter.
VBR *does* save bandwith for equivalent quality, but not a lot of it.
Your 100MB gives you 10 hours of 24kbps of CBR encoded voice, and at a guess, VBR would maybe give you 13-15 hours of voice in the same bandwith.
Certainly trivial, and certainly the answer to this problem is that encrypted voice, should be encoded CBR to make traffic-analysis impossible.
No. I'm saying one of the primary ways we progress, is by investing some of our surplus into creating even larger surplus and so on.
If you've got a kilo of gold saved up (surplus: something you earned, but don't need to survive), then burying it somewhere best-case ensures that in the future, you have the same thing.
In contrast, some people choose to invest part of their surplus in some activity with the potential to create even more surplus. We call this *investing* or *entrepeneurship* or *a business*, and the gist of it is: it has higher risk, you can lose your money, but it has an *expected* return better than unity. i.e. if you invest a certain value now, you'll *probably* have more than that value in the future, because on the average, these things create additional surplus. (if they didn't, we should stop doing it!)
There's many different ways of investing. You could educate yourself. You could give a loan to someone else for educating him/herself. You could build a factory. You could open a shop. You could do *anything*.
Burying the gold is choosing to do nothing. It's choosing to say: breaking even is the BEST I can hope for, so that's what I'm going to aim for.
If everyone says "my aim is to break even", then best-case, humanity as a whole breaks even. Which isn't conductive to progress.
By all means, keep secure those resources you *do* need to support yourself. But if you've got a little more than that ? Invest it. Put the money into something where the expected return is above unity.
So how many normal citizens in USA has this far lost how much of their money due to failed banks ?
Burying gold in your backyard was dumb then, and is dumb now. And yes, I know gold has performed well recently. It's still not *productive*, a kilogram of gold today will still be a kilogram of gold in 20 years, no new value has been produced.
If humanity collectively declined to invest our surplus, or atleast parts of it, we'd still be living in caves.
You have other data you need to back up anyway. The added tedium of needing to backup ~50GB rather than say ~30GB (200 albums), is essentially ignorable. Zero extra effort, and the extra cost is in the "small and dropping" category.
At the moment online backup is around $0.10 pro GB and month, so keeping the 200 albums securely backed up is $25/year - and that's for the first year. (if you think a GB of online storage will cost MORE in a year or three, I've got some prime swampland for you...)
Infact, keeping everything on one place (files!) makes proper care a lot *easier* than having to take care of multiple distinct technologies, such as CDs, DVDs and computer-files as three distinct storage-mediums. (and if you think stacks of CDs and DVDs are zero-maintenance, you obviously ain't moved very often...)
This one is fairly simple. It keeps the last 200K rounds, and then to make a prediction is searches these for occurences where both human and computer has played the same 4 things in sequence. It then predicts the most common choice for the human, and responds based on that.
i.e. if last-4-rounds was human: RPSR and computer SPRR it searches the last 200K rounds to find that precise situation, yielding on the average 781 times before that that *precise* situation has occured. It then predicts what the human most commonly did as next-step.
You can beat this, if you're aware of what humans most commonly do in *some* situations, and deliberately do the opposite thing, while playing randomly (toss dice!) when you -dont- recognize the situation.
Infact you could memorise the veterans response: there's only 256 possible states.
That's also not a problem. What's wrong with saying "no" ?
Seriously, if a relationship is destructive for you, as in the pain is a lot larger than the benefits, why then choose to maintain that relationship at all ?
The 31 page agreement is to use the app-store at *ALL*, not specific to this particular app -- indeed you'd have to agree to the same agreement in order to install a *free* app on your own apple-product.
It's not an outlier. Instead it's common and indeed the norm for things like software, insurance, banking and suchlike to routinely ask users to "agree" to dozens and dozens of terms written in legalese over many many pages.
It's *not* reasonable to expect the average consumer to read and understand it all, indeed it's frequently not possible to be sure what exactly it means even for someone *with* a law-degree and 2 days time to study the agreement in detail.
Even your example link ? "Terms and Conditions" brings up a 580 word summary with a link to "Full Terms and Conditions", this alone is a huge warning-sign: It says: we don't actually expect even those who click "Terms and Conditions" to want to wrestle with the *actual* terms, so we summarised for you.
The *actual* terms and conditions are at http://vodafone.com.au/personal/plans/termsandconditions/index.htm and weigh in at 4055 words and more than 25KB of text. (that's not counting the html-markup - just the plain text) The text has a readability-score that indicates even most college-graduates would be unable to comprehend it in detail. (fog-index of 14 where 7-8 is the level of average people and 10-12 the level of average college-graduates)
Since average reading-speed is about 200wpm (and goes down with more complex text) we're talking a text that would take more than half an hour just to read - nevermind understand.
Is that reasonable for a bog-standard contract for a mobile-phone-subscription ? It's not as far-out as the Appstore, but it's still fairly bad.
There's actually some merit to that - the terms you are asked to read and agree to in order to use the appstore and buy a random $1 app for your ipad is, in the current iteration, 31 pages of legalese.
"Could be avoided by glancing over" does not, infact, come close.
To accurately read the terms, you'd require a minimum of an hour, and to actually feel fairly sure that you understand what they say, you'd need to be legally trained and spend a week studying the terms.
This is not reasonable, for what is literally a $1 purchase.
As a general principle I support peoples right to enter into any contract (any that's without illegal conditions anyway), but in this specific case I also support legislation such as the one we have in Norway that stipulates certain *minimum* requirements for a consumer-sale. The practical consequence is that you *can* ignore the 31 pages of legalese (everyone everywhere generally do anyway!), and be certain that you still have atleast those rights that the law stipulates as *minimum*.
True. But they can break due to freak one-off "accidents", i.e. it's possible for a server to crash, but then upon reboot, run perfectly for a year with no problems exhibited whatsoever.
Offcourse the problem that caused the crash once *can* do so again, but it might not be worth the time to investigate it. Thus it can be quite sensible to go with "once is accidental - twice is suspicious - three times warrants investigation".
Because sometimes "once" really does happen only once, and doesn't repeat itself in the forseeable future, at which point knowing *why* might not be worth the investment in time to find out why.
Pragmatism wins in the real world, and that's not a bad thing. The trick is to find the right balance.
Yeah, true. People *do* forget about serial marriages, and thus when they read that 1000 people got married and 400 divorced, they (falsely) concludes that 40% of all *people* who marry, will also divorce.
The actual rate is lower, and it's even lower if you discount people who're not really serious about marriage to begin with. (I'm sorry, but if someone gives up after 6 months, I'm not willing to believe that they where serious about a life-long comittment to begin with)
If neither you, nor your partner has been married before, and the marriage has already held more than 2 years - then the odds of getting divorced at all are something like 20%.
i.e. aproximately 4 out of 5 marriages that ever really get started at all, last for life. That's not bad at all.
Add in that today it's acceptible, and indeed common, to divorce *without* huge misdoings by either part, but instead just "irreconcilable differences" or "drifted apart", and I tend to think the marriage-stats are downright awesome.
It's basically about short-term versus long-term.
Sure, everyone wants experience. And someone with half a decade of real-world experience is, on the average, probably better qualified than someone with ONLY a college-degree.
However, 5 years later the college-educated has a degree and 5 years of experience.
And *that* will tend to beat 10 years of experience and no formal education.
Yeah. Microsoft (Bing Maps!) even explicitly allowed OpenStreetMap to use their imagery for adding to the OSM-database. Surprised me, but nice !
Yeah. But the claim is doubly-stupid.
First, it's not credible that he'd be executed even if he WAS sent to USA. It's true that you're among the few modern states who still have capital punishment, but it's not used for cases such as his, and the image-costs of having him executed would be MUCH higher than any potential benefit.
Second, if there *was* a credible threat of execution in the USA (which there isn't) then Sweden -also- does not extradite prisoners to countries where they risk being executed. (infact they're more careful about it than the UK is, as far as I've been able to ascertain)
In practice, the opposite is true.
CDs have a dynamic range of 96dB, and a frequency-limit of 22Khz - there has been attempts at introducing "superior" formats, such as SACD for example, that offers 120dB of dynamic range and a frequency-limit of 50Khz.
But people near-universally don't care. Either there's no noticeable difference at all, or it's in the "don't care" region.
Infact, people have done the opposite: replaced CD-quality with questionable 128Kbps constant-bitrate mp3-encodings, which *are* noticeably poorer than CDs, because the added convenience matters more to them than the decreased fidelity.
DVDs still outsell Bluerays by a huge margin too, even among households who *have* a blueray-player - we do, but we still buy 20 DVDs for every one blueray. The blueray is better technically, but that doesn't make the movies any better - and if the movie is any good, you're watcinh the *movie* not the technical quality.
(there's a few exceptions, movies where breathtaking imagery is a part of the attraction, but that's not the norm)
social engineering is so very simple, and so very effective, true.
Google a mid-sized company enough to know the name, position and email-adress of an employee, and the name of one of his/her supervisors.
"Hi, it's from [network-provider] - I got a report that you where having some trouble accessing your email, [name-of-supervisor] couldn't get at his at all today - do you have a minute to perform some tests on your account ?"
People will gladly tell you their passwords, if it appears you know what you're doing and you know even a *tiny* bit about their environment, enough to make you seem legit.
It's not hard.
For real ? I mean, the profits of privately held companies are secret in USA ?
Nuts.
That's not -quite- accurate. You're allowed (in Sweden!) to use the force that is necessary - or that you REASONABLY BELIEVE to be necessary. That is, if a person points a gun at you, and you shoot him, you're in the clear, even if it later turns out his gun was not loaded, or was a nonfunctional replica.
The point is that you reasonably -believed- that deadly force was required to ensure your own survival. If this belief was correct or not, is beside the point.
Also, there is no requirement that the force is proportional, that is, self-defence laws can get you off the hook for using deadly force to stop something lesser than a murder. For example, if you reasonably believed that letal force was required to prevent yourself from being raped, that would qualify.
But yeah, attacking an assailant who is -clearly- disabled, will get you convicted. But I'm pretty sure that's not just for Sweden, but *anywhere* basically. It amounts to revenge, afterall. Probably the judge would see the prior assault as mitigating circumstance, so you'd get a shorter sentence, but you'd still be guilty.