"Obviously the FEC must ensure that money can't overwhelm debate with press saturation, especially on the less- accountable Internet. But their regulations should control their actual jurisdiction: political campaigns, their management and finance."
Well, you are starting from the same premise that the FEC and Congress started, that we should regulate campaigns, so you are going to end up at the same point they did. A campaign is not like a corporation, it is not a well defined legal or financial entity. You cannot say that these regulations apply to only one person and not another they have to apply to everyone equally. So, since these regulations apply to the content of speech, they apply to anyone who is supporting or opposing a candidate. So, you have to choose, either you regulate and restrict everyones' political speech or no one's. If you try to restrict the speech of only certain persons such as the candidates themselves and those they pay directly it will be innefective.
The problem isn't with the execution of campaign finance "reform", the problem is with the goal itself.
"Who decides who gets funded in publicly financed campaigns? The people already in office. Unless you want everyone who decides to run to get several million dollars in advertising. At which point the elections would make the California Gubernatorial process look serious."
Come on, I think we can trust our own elected officials to know what is best for us. I'm sure they will decide fairly and honestly how to regulate candidates so we will only get the best to choose from. How much choice do we really need anyway? What choice do we have now?
"...because it's always gonna be between a giant douche and a turd sandwich..."
They can pry my cold dead fingers from my keyboard if they want to stop me from writing whatever I damn well want to say about whatever damn corrupt stinking politician is running for office.
Re:Let's say what Linus says about QA
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 1
"Funny, but also a damning indictment of OSS.."
Except with closed source the testers have no way of knowing what is causing the problem. It is of great benefit that a knowledgeable person who encounters a problem while testing can look at the code and see exactly where in the code the problem is and even submit a change themselves. With a closed source tester you have to rely on your english skills, describing the problem with enough detail that it makes it clear to the person actually responsible for making the fix where the problem might be. Otherwise you have dozens of complaints about the same strange behavior collecting dust in some bug tracking system until someone actually describes the problem methodically with enough detail to recreate the problem in a consistent way.
"At the end of 2006, the FCC will cut off analog TV broadcasting licenses, requiring all owners of analog TVs to either purchase a set-top ATSC tuner, purchase a new TV, or stop watching terrestrial broadcast TV altogether."
Satellite and cable tv is not directly effected by this deadline and I believe the majority of American homes now have cable or satellite. So, even if the 2006 deadline isn't extended or eliminated people will have potentially years to switch to the newer technology before they lose many channel choices.
"Every single/. article about alternative energy gets posts from people dissing it because it can't do it all. Where did this requirement come from? Is single-sourcing all of our energy even desirable? Is it possible? Where does this stupid meme keep coming from?"
It comes from economics. If you want to keep the entire existing electric distribution and generation system as a "backup" then you are going to have to pay for it.
Recently Boston University looked into generating their own electricity for their new hockey arena, it all looked good until they approached the electric company and told them that they wanted the lines in place to supply the arena with power in case something happened... Well, the electric company was going to charge them almost the same amount of money as they would have to actually supply the power in the first place, so the economics didn't work out.
Sure you could just say that the power company should have been forced to hookup the arena and only charge for the actual power used. But maintaining the ability to provide capacity costs the power companies quite a bit of money which has traditionally been passed along as part of the electric rate, but would quickly become a flat fee if this new kind of economic model, where the grid is just for backup and shuffling around excess capacity, went forward.
So, if we are talking about home generation. Then yes it really does make a big difference in economics if the power source cannot reliably generate all of the home's energy needs. If it can then its costs need to be comprable to today's utility costs, if it can't meet the entire demand then it needs to cost less than the equivalent cost from the utility to be economically competitive.
"Buy this equipment at this price or don't watch TV at all." Do you really think the American sheeple would be willing to do without TV?"
I'm not saying they won't buy, I'm saying they won't value the equipment as much, so that will translate into how much people are willing to pay. People do not need tv, especially a new one, therefore they can delay their purchasing which can drive down prices. I'm saying that if the manufacturers don't realize it yet, then they should realize that the broadcast flag will drive down their profit margins, perhaps even substantially.
"How can you enforce a law that doesn't (for all intents and purposes) exist? And for that matter, how far can that go? If they can enforce an Stasi-like "may I see your papers please?" law without providing any evidence that such law exists, then what else could they theoretically do? And how could your lawyer defend you against a law that the government claims exists, but doesn't make available anywhere?"
Well, the enforcement issue is moot, since the law applies to airlines not people. If the airline's personnel don't check IDs then presumably they get punished with fines and such not the person who didn't show the ID. This is a business regulation. What to do if the person refuses to show an ID might not even be part of the regulation. Of Course, they are denied service since the airline can't meet its mandate to check each passengers id. But that is probably a airline policy to prevent fines, rather than a federal law that says that each passenger must show ID in order to travel.
You see the Federal government has hundreds of years of practice getting around the spirit of the constitution by writing laws and regulations which effect individuals by proxy rather than directly. So that things that the government explicitly couldn't do to people under the consitution, they are allowed to do through corporations via the regulatory powers of the interstate commerce clause.
This is the FAA regulating a business practice of interstate commerce, I bet you don't have to show ID on all airplanes just the big commercial ones. So, the courts could even be shown how people can still have travel choice to fly on smaller chartered planes and not have to show ID. And that presumes that the concept of "papers please" is even still considered unconstitutional by our courts. Given that the courts recently upheld a state law that mandates that people show identification upon police order, I think those of us who don't want to live in a police state need to rethink our strategy a bit here.
I think this goes to show that the cat is already out of the bag when the government starts mandating identification for any common purpose.
"So you want TiVo to be cheaper than you can build it yourself? How do expect that to happen? I mean really there is not that much margin on computer parts that they can make it up on volume. Yea I want a LearJet but I only want to pay $500 for it since I do not fly that often. Oh yea and I want it to get 40mpg as well. If you want Myth TV or Freevo cheaper than a TiVo I suggest you just wait a few months and hit Ebay for parts."
I don't expect cheaper, but this article suggests you can put together a PVR/DVR yourself for around $200.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/video/20030731/
I don't think expecting a manufacturer to put together a nicer package than I could for around the same amount of money is asking too much. Realisticially this could be a couple hours of labor for me, but a manufacturer would likely have a minimally paid people put these together in a couple minutes and I disagree that the margins on computer parts are so low that they couldn't make it up on volume.
Chances are many people reading this have realized that buying a Dell or cheap PC is not much more expensive than putting together the parts yourself. A DVR is just a computer with limited functionality.
"Or, not buy any flag compliant devices, which might ultimately prove to be a very hard thing to do."
People will pay for potential, which explains why people will pay thousands of dollars for a computer, even though they will only actually use it for a small subset of what they could. Who would pay $80k for a porche if it was engineered to run no faster than the speed limit?
If manufacturuers are forced to sell hobbled products, then they will get hobbled prices for those products. People won't refuse to buy these DRM enabled devices, but they will refuse to pay more than they are worth, which will be a lot less once they are forced to disable functionality.
No manufacturer should doubt it, this will impact their bottom line. And content distributers and creators should realize that it will slow adoption of the new technologies which they have already begun investing in. All this will mean that fewer people will be viewing the content as it was meant to be viewed, to the detriment of all.
Copy Right is a legal abstraction not a engineering spec.
"If Tivo got rid of the subscription model, I'd buy a Tivo box right now. While I haven't see any Myth TV linux solutions, I have seen comcast On-Demand with video recorder counterparts. And Tivo feels like a rip off in comparison."
Well, and also make the price reasonable. I'm really not interested at all in Tivo "service". I just want a machine that has video recording with a simple scheduler and playback and can easily store and transfer video data for archival purposes, all for under $250.
As far as I can tell the only thing of value that the "service" povides beyond the machine is a tv program schedule. But I can figure it out myself when my favorite tv show is playing and which channel it is on and set this. I don't think that a program guide is worth hundreds of dollars or any amount of money. It is just not a feature I am interested in paying for. Sure you say, just pay the "lifetime" fee and you don't have to think about it as if you are paying for a service, but once you add that in then the price is too high.
I'm only willing to spend sub $250 for recording, storage and playback functionality that this price provides, even then I consider storage as something that should be seperable, considering people have widely varying storage requirements. So, some sort of netwrok transfer capability or removeable media is good.
I just don't watch enough tv to justify this or any great expense given that at most I would only want to record one or two shows per week. And get along just fine now watching reruns for shows that I miss.
Myth TV or Freevo are options, but these are still too expensive and time consuming to be attractive.
I may be a minority, but I think there are many more like me that only watch a few shows per week and will not budget as much money as tivo requires for what is really a very limited set of functionality in support of entertainment.
thank you for that. Now multiply that by about 50.
Now for those big government types reading this who think that the big companies should be able to handle collecting sales taxes regardless of the complexities, you are right. It is just the small mom and pop businesses that sell rocking chairs and such over the internet that will end up seeing their lives threatened when suddenly they get a fine for not collecting sales tax or just can't take the risk of doing business anymore. Realize that small business makes up the majority of business in this country regardless of your Amazon.coms and Dells of the world, so when you put greater burden on all businesses remember you are not going to be hurting Michael Dell or Jeff Bezos, but rather your neighbors and yourselves.
Complex laws helps big business because they raises the barriers to smaller competitors. It amazes me when anti big business liberals seem to always champion greater and greater legal burdens on business, since it almost always just ends up making big business bigger.
Apple didn't want ANYONE to know about the sub-$500 Mac before Steve Jobs got up on stage at Macworld and announced it, period. Not Think Secret. Not Time.
You don't know that. They could have had select reporters under an NDA, to not release stories until the unveiling, it is a common practice.
Further, your argument about how a web site "can't know" whether it's an intentional leak or not is kind of BS. It's *irrelevant*. Either way, if it's covered by a confidentiality agreement, it's off limits.
Essentially that would mean that any information about a company's products not confirmed by the company's official spokesperson and on the record would be off limits because the reporter should assume it is covered by an NDA. That is too far reaching for my taste, I don't want to live in a world where I am liable for agreements that I am not party to.
Seems like they have a good lawyer who should get this case thrown out:
"Think Secret's reporting is protected by the First Amendment," Gross said. "The Supreme Court has said that a journalist cannot be held liable for publishing information that the journalist obtained lawfully. Think Secret has not used any improper newsgathering techniques. We will be filing a motion asking the Court to dismiss this case immediately on First Amendment grounds under a California statute which weeds out meritless claims that threaten First Amendment rights."
"As soon as I heard the Enterprise opening theme, I knew it was dead."
I'd say the theme song killed the show for a lot of people. I had friends over for the series premiere and I don't know how anyone could enjoy the show after such a sing songy melancholy beginning. They should have changed it as soon as possible.
I stopped watching midway through the first season, have they still not changed it?
How are journalists to know if a company is leaking information on purpose to create a "buzz" or if they are receiving information that the company does not want to release? This isn't about trade secrets, but Apple trying to control which publications get the story first and which don't. This is new marketing which says to control the story by controlling who tells it.
This is the same marketing trend which has now migrated to government and has the whitehouse press room stacked with reporters favorable to the president. The same marketing which makes controlled "leaks" of information to titilate the media and get a story out, but still allows a degree of deniability.
If I were on a jury I would say that any reporter receiving information from an employee of a company can assume that that person is authorized to release the information.
I believe the only available course for apple should be against those that might have leaked the information. That will force them to weigh the real costs of pursuing this and make them more likely to compartmentalize information that they truly want to remain secret.
If some burger joint tells every teenager that works there the recipe to the "secret sauce" and then they find it published on the internet the next day it is their own damn fault. Likewise if Apple has told so many people its "secrets" that they can't come up with a short list of who may have "leaked" the information, then it isn't a secret and no one outside the company should be expected to respect it as such.
The paths weren't uneven, just unpaved. Are concrete or asphalt really better, especially after they start to crack and become uneven after a few years?
"I'm not a business expert by any means, but as far as I understand the idea of business it is to have more income than your expenditure. If increasing prices are the only way of doing this, then so be it."
And the idea of a College or University is to educate students, at no profit. That is why they are non-profit institutions for the most part. The idea of Colleges and Universities becoming ivory palaces of graft and patronage at society's expense, not right. Do everyone a favor and next time your private college comes calling for donations, ask them what they are going to do with the money.
"Nor is wood chips that float away every time it rains, Virginia Tech! (yes, they actually tried that!)"
When i visited DC a few years back I noticed that many of the paths along the mall were not concerete or asphalt, but rather crushed stone on dirt. I thought it was the best thing about the visit, besides a few of the rockets at the air and space museum of course, that the seat of power for the US government didn't pave over its paths. Something symbolic about that as well as practical. I'm guessing some eager beaver has paved over them by now, but hey, at least we made it 200 years walking on solid ground without trying to improve something that should not have been.
"Are you telling me that an animal has to be very intelligent to not tangle its arms? Are you kidding me? It sounds like instinct or common sense, to me.."
"Much as I dislike NASA- they are the experts, they've been down the "safety" path before"
NASA just stops launching people into space everytime a shuttle blows up... no or fewer launches means less risk. I don't think that is the type of safety we want.
"Nah, I don't really think America has to worry about its foreign debt too much...it's 4.4 trillion dollars...like they say, if you owe the bank $1000, you've got a problem...if you owe the bank $1000000, the banks got a problem. People won't stop investing because they're relying on the money coming back to them at some point in the future...so America can happily go on incuring more and more debt because they've gotten to a stage were other countries can't afford not to let them. Smart move when you think of it, building a superpower using other people money."
Good point, it isn't like China can foreclose on the whitehouse. It is essentially unsecured debt.
But the real problem occurs when the debt payments grow faster than the economy. That means that each year more and more tax money would go out of the treasury and into the hands of holders of public treasury notes. So, more and more of your tax money would be going directly to foreign countries, wealthy individuals and corporations.
That is why countries default on their debt or allow inflation to rise at a faster pace. Both seem like they would be possibilities in the future, especially if the US economy were to slow down for any extended period. In the longer term it is of greater benefit to more people to get the debt under control so that more an more money can go towards the common good or towards reducing the tax burden. So, I agree that it may not be a crisis, but that doesn't mean that the old saying isn't still true, that a penny saved is a penny earned.
Slashdot Mirror
"Obviously the FEC must ensure that money can't overwhelm debate with press saturation, especially on the less- accountable Internet. But their regulations should control their actual jurisdiction: political campaigns, their management and finance."
Well, you are starting from the same premise that the FEC and Congress started, that we should regulate campaigns, so you are going to end up at the same point they did. A campaign is not like a corporation, it is not a well defined legal or financial entity. You cannot say that these regulations apply to only one person and not another they have to apply to everyone equally. So, since these regulations apply to the content of speech, they apply to anyone who is supporting or opposing a candidate. So, you have to choose, either you regulate and restrict everyones' political speech or no one's. If you try to restrict the speech of only certain persons such as the candidates themselves and those they pay directly it will be innefective.
The problem isn't with the execution of campaign finance "reform", the problem is with the goal itself.
"Who decides who gets funded in publicly financed campaigns? The people already in office. Unless you want everyone who decides to run to get several million dollars in advertising. At which point the elections would make the California Gubernatorial process look serious."
...because it's always gonna be between a giant douche and a turd sandwich ..."
Come on, I think we can trust our own elected officials to know what is best for us. I'm sure they will decide fairly and honestly how to regulate candidates so we will only get the best to choose from. How much choice do we really need anyway? What choice do we have now?
"
They can pry my cold dead fingers from my keyboard if they want to stop me from writing whatever I damn well want to say about whatever damn corrupt stinking politician is running for office.
"Funny, but also a damning indictment of OSS.."
Except with closed source the testers have no way of knowing what is causing the problem. It is of great benefit that a knowledgeable person who encounters a problem while testing can look at the code and see exactly where in the code the problem is and even submit a change themselves. With a closed source tester you have to rely on your english skills, describing the problem with enough detail that it makes it clear to the person actually responsible for making the fix where the problem might be. Otherwise you have dozens of complaints about the same strange behavior collecting dust in some bug tracking system until someone actually describes the problem methodically with enough detail to recreate the problem in a consistent way.
"At the end of 2006, the FCC will cut off analog TV broadcasting licenses, requiring all owners of analog TVs to either purchase a set-top ATSC tuner, purchase a new TV, or stop watching terrestrial broadcast TV altogether."
Satellite and cable tv is not directly effected by this deadline and I believe the majority of American homes now have cable or satellite. So, even if the 2006 deadline isn't extended or eliminated people will have potentially years to switch to the newer technology before they lose many channel choices.
"Every single /. article about alternative energy gets posts from people dissing it because it can't do it all. Where did this requirement come from? Is single-sourcing all of our energy even desirable? Is it possible? Where does this stupid meme keep coming from?"
It comes from economics. If you want to keep the entire existing electric distribution and generation system as a "backup" then you are going to have to pay for it.
Recently Boston University looked into generating their own electricity for their new hockey arena, it all looked good until they approached the electric company and told them that they wanted the lines in place to supply the arena with power in case something happened... Well, the electric company was going to charge them almost the same amount of money as they would have to actually supply the power in the first place, so the economics didn't work out.
Sure you could just say that the power company should have been forced to hookup the arena and only charge for the actual power used. But maintaining the ability to provide capacity costs the power companies quite a bit of money which has traditionally been passed along as part of the electric rate, but would quickly become a flat fee if this new kind of economic model, where the grid is just for backup and shuffling around excess capacity, went forward.
So, if we are talking about home generation. Then yes it really does make a big difference in economics if the power source cannot reliably generate all of the home's energy needs. If it can then its costs need to be comprable to today's utility costs, if it can't meet the entire demand then it needs to cost less than the equivalent cost from the utility to be economically competitive.
"Buy this equipment at this price or don't watch TV at all." Do you really think the American sheeple would be willing to do without TV?"
I'm not saying they won't buy, I'm saying they won't value the equipment as much, so that will translate into how much people are willing to pay. People do not need tv, especially a new one, therefore they can delay their purchasing which can drive down prices. I'm saying that if the manufacturers don't realize it yet, then they should realize that the broadcast flag will drive down their profit margins, perhaps even substantially.
As a corollary, I'd say that our right to be dangerous to others is the foundation of all our other rights.
"How can you enforce a law that doesn't (for all intents and purposes) exist? And for that matter, how far can that go? If they can enforce an Stasi-like "may I see your papers please?" law without providing any evidence that such law exists, then what else could they theoretically do? And how could your lawyer defend you against a law that the government claims exists, but doesn't make available anywhere?"
Well, the enforcement issue is moot, since the law applies to airlines not people. If the airline's personnel don't check IDs then presumably they get punished with fines and such not the person who didn't show the ID. This is a business regulation. What to do if the person refuses to show an ID might not even be part of the regulation. Of Course, they are denied service since the airline can't meet its mandate to check each passengers id. But that is probably a airline policy to prevent fines, rather than a federal law that says that each passenger must show ID in order to travel.
You see the Federal government has hundreds of years of practice getting around the spirit of the constitution by writing laws and regulations which effect individuals by proxy rather than directly. So that things that the government explicitly couldn't do to people under the consitution, they are allowed to do through corporations via the regulatory powers of the interstate commerce clause.
This is the FAA regulating a business practice of interstate commerce, I bet you don't have to show ID on all airplanes just the big commercial ones. So, the courts could even be shown how people can still have travel choice to fly on smaller chartered planes and not have to show ID. And that presumes that the concept of "papers please" is even still considered unconstitutional by our courts. Given that the courts recently upheld a state law that mandates that people show identification upon police order, I think those of us who don't want to live in a police state need to rethink our strategy a bit here.
I think this goes to show that the cat is already out of the bag when the government starts mandating identification for any common purpose.
"So you want TiVo to be cheaper than you can build it yourself? How do expect that to happen? I mean really there is not that much margin on computer parts that they can make it up on volume. Yea I want a LearJet but I only want to pay $500 for it since I do not fly that often. Oh yea and I want it to get 40mpg as well. If you want Myth TV or Freevo cheaper than a TiVo I suggest you just wait a few months and hit Ebay for parts."
/
I don't expect cheaper, but this article suggests you can put together a PVR/DVR yourself for around $200.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/video/20030731
I don't think expecting a manufacturer to put together a nicer package than I could for around the same amount of money is asking too much. Realisticially this could be a couple hours of labor for me, but a manufacturer would likely have a minimally paid people put these together in a couple minutes and I disagree that the margins on computer parts are so low that they couldn't make it up on volume.
Chances are many people reading this have realized that buying a Dell or cheap PC is not much more expensive than putting together the parts yourself. A DVR is just a computer with limited functionality.
"Or, not buy any flag compliant devices, which might ultimately prove to be a very hard thing to do."
People will pay for potential, which explains why people will pay thousands of dollars for a computer, even though they will only actually use it for a small subset of what they could. Who would pay $80k for a porche if it was engineered to run no faster than the speed limit?
If manufacturuers are forced to sell hobbled products, then they will get hobbled prices for those products. People won't refuse to buy these DRM enabled devices, but they will refuse to pay more than they are worth, which will be a lot less once they are forced to disable functionality.
No manufacturer should doubt it, this will impact their bottom line. And content distributers and creators should realize that it will slow adoption of the new technologies which they have already begun investing in. All this will mean that fewer people will be viewing the content as it was meant to be viewed, to the detriment of all.
Copy Right is a legal abstraction not a engineering spec.
"If Tivo got rid of the subscription model, I'd buy a Tivo box right now. While I haven't see any Myth TV linux solutions, I have seen comcast On-Demand with video recorder counterparts. And Tivo feels like a rip off in comparison."
Well, and also make the price reasonable. I'm really not interested at all in Tivo "service". I just want a machine that has video recording with a simple scheduler and playback and can easily store and transfer video data for archival purposes, all for under $250.
As far as I can tell the only thing of value that the "service" povides beyond the machine is a tv program schedule. But I can figure it out myself when my favorite tv show is playing and which channel it is on and set this. I don't think that a program guide is worth hundreds of dollars or any amount of money. It is just not a feature I am interested in paying for. Sure you say, just pay the "lifetime" fee and you don't have to think about it as if you are paying for a service, but once you add that in then the price is too high.
I'm only willing to spend sub $250 for recording, storage and playback functionality that this price provides, even then I consider storage as something that should be seperable, considering people have widely varying storage requirements. So, some sort of netwrok transfer capability or removeable media is good.
I just don't watch enough tv to justify this or any great expense given that at most I would only want to record one or two shows per week. And get along just fine now watching reruns for shows that I miss.
Myth TV or Freevo are options, but these are still too expensive and time consuming to be attractive.
I may be a minority, but I think there are many more like me that only watch a few shows per week and will not budget as much money as tivo requires for what is really a very limited set of functionality in support of entertainment.
out in July
http://www.emagin.com/3dvisor/
thank you for that. Now multiply that by about 50.
Now for those big government types reading this who think that the big companies should be able to handle collecting sales taxes regardless of the complexities, you are right. It is just the small mom and pop businesses that sell rocking chairs and such over the internet that will end up seeing their lives threatened when suddenly they get a fine for not collecting sales tax or just can't take the risk of doing business anymore. Realize that small business makes up the majority of business in this country regardless of your Amazon.coms and Dells of the world, so when you put greater burden on all businesses remember you are not going to be hurting Michael Dell or Jeff Bezos, but rather your neighbors and yourselves.
Complex laws helps big business because they raises the barriers to smaller competitors. It amazes me when anti big business liberals seem to always champion greater and greater legal burdens on business, since it almost always just ends up making big business bigger.
" How long before every kid in Florida gets an injunction on their parents from installing any monitoring software?"
Well, this ruling only applies to secret recordings, so just tell your kids you are recording their activities and you are all set.
Apple didn't want ANYONE to know about the sub-$500 Mac before Steve Jobs got up on stage at Macworld and announced it, period. Not Think Secret. Not Time.
You don't know that. They could have had select reporters under an NDA, to not release stories until the unveiling, it is a common practice.
Further, your argument about how a web site "can't know" whether it's an intentional leak or not is kind of BS. It's *irrelevant*. Either way, if it's covered by a confidentiality agreement, it's off limits.
Essentially that would mean that any information about a company's products not confirmed by the company's official spokesperson and on the record would be off limits because the reporter should assume it is covered by an NDA. That is too far reaching for my taste, I don't want to live in a world where I am liable for agreements that I am not party to.
Seems like they have a good lawyer who should get this case thrown out:
"Think Secret's reporting is protected by the First Amendment," Gross said. "The Supreme Court has said that a journalist cannot be held liable for publishing information that the journalist obtained lawfully. Think Secret has not used any improper newsgathering techniques. We will be filing a motion asking the Court to dismiss this case immediately on First Amendment grounds under a California statute which weeds out meritless claims that threaten First Amendment rights."
I find your suggestion reprehensible... nobody ever copies another's sacred layout on the web.
Just use this very clean looking search page from Yahoo and just try and find too web pages that look remotely similar: http://search.yahoo.com/
"As soon as I heard the Enterprise opening theme, I knew it was dead."
I'd say the theme song killed the show for a lot of people. I had friends over for the series premiere and I don't know how anyone could enjoy the show after such a sing songy melancholy beginning. They should have changed it as soon as possible.
I stopped watching midway through the first season, have they still not changed it?
How are journalists to know if a company is leaking information on purpose to create a "buzz" or if they are receiving information that the company does not want to release? This isn't about trade secrets, but Apple trying to control which publications get the story first and which don't. This is new marketing which says to control the story by controlling who tells it.
This is the same marketing trend which has now migrated to government and has the whitehouse press room stacked with reporters favorable to the president. The same marketing which makes controlled "leaks" of information to titilate the media and get a story out, but still allows a degree of deniability.
If I were on a jury I would say that any reporter receiving information from an employee of a company can assume that that person is authorized to release the information.
I believe the only available course for apple should be against those that might have leaked the information. That will force them to weigh the real costs of pursuing this and make them more likely to compartmentalize information that they truly want to remain secret.
If some burger joint tells every teenager that works there the recipe to the "secret sauce" and then they find it published on the internet the next day it is their own damn fault. Likewise if Apple has told so many people its "secrets" that they can't come up with a short list of who may have "leaked" the information, then it isn't a secret and no one outside the company should be expected to respect it as such.
The paths weren't uneven, just unpaved. Are concrete or asphalt really better, especially after they start to crack and become uneven after a few years?
"I'm not a business expert by any means, but as far as I understand the idea of business it is to have more income than your expenditure. If increasing prices are the only way of doing this, then so be it."
And the idea of a College or University is to educate students, at no profit. That is why they are non-profit institutions for the most part. The idea of Colleges and Universities becoming ivory palaces of graft and patronage at society's expense, not right. Do everyone a favor and next time your private college comes calling for donations, ask them what they are going to do with the money.
"Nor is wood chips that float away every time it rains, Virginia Tech! (yes, they actually tried that!)"
When i visited DC a few years back I noticed that many of the paths along the mall were not concerete or asphalt, but rather crushed stone on dirt. I thought it was the best thing about the visit, besides a few of the rockets at the air and space museum of course, that the seat of power for the US government didn't pave over its paths. Something symbolic about that as well as practical. I'm guessing some eager beaver has paved over them by now, but hey, at least we made it 200 years walking on solid ground without trying to improve something that should not have been.
"Are you telling me that an animal has to be very intelligent to not tangle its arms? Are you kidding me? It sounds like instinct or common sense, to me.."
That is probably what the octopus was thinking.
"Much as I dislike NASA- they are the experts, they've been down the "safety" path before"
NASA just stops launching people into space everytime a shuttle blows up... no or fewer launches means less risk. I don't think that is the type of safety we want.
"Nah, I don't really think America has to worry about its foreign debt too much...it's 4.4 trillion dollars...like they say, if you owe the bank $1000, you've got a problem...if you owe the bank $1000000, the banks got a problem. People won't stop investing because they're relying on the money coming back to them at some point in the future...so America can happily go on incuring more and more debt because they've gotten to a stage were other countries can't afford not to let them. Smart move when you think of it, building a superpower using other people money."
Good point, it isn't like China can foreclose on the whitehouse. It is essentially unsecured debt.
But the real problem occurs when the debt payments grow faster than the economy. That means that each year more and more tax money would go out of the treasury and into the hands of holders of public treasury notes. So, more and more of your tax money would be going directly to foreign countries, wealthy individuals and corporations.
That is why countries default on their debt or allow inflation to rise at a faster pace. Both seem like they would be possibilities in the future, especially if the US economy were to slow down for any extended period. In the longer term it is of greater benefit to more people to get the debt under control so that more an more money can go towards the common good or towards reducing the tax burden. So, I agree that it may not be a crisis, but that doesn't mean that the old saying isn't still true, that a penny saved is a penny earned.