A politically-unimportant official falls on his sword over the failure, and the heavy-hitters claim some kind of ephemeral notion of "accountability" with no actual repercussions for anyone's careers.
Ah, a die-hard Republican, I see. "Politically important" has nothing to do with it. Who but the project's CIO is more responsible for IT's successes and failures? When k-mart's web site screws up and sells $500 items for $20 like they did yesterday, who takes the fall, the CEO or the CIO? Usually it isn't even the CIO but someone further down the food chain.
I'm not a "die-hard Republican" - not sure how you got that idea from my post.
You are correct in saying that accountability at the top of organizations is almost always minimal. That was my point. This is how it was always going to turn out. "Politically important" has everything to do with it.
In a supposedly free country? No, of course we shouldn't ban it.
Mandate that any product containing trans fat be labeled as such, and with appropriate health warnings (like they do on tobacco products), but outright bans of things we can only use to harm ourselves is anathema to liberty.
Why do people flip out about these basic tenets of modern civilization? Sorry, most people don't want poison to be sold as food. Go ahead and sell transfats all you want, but don't tell people it's food when it is most certainly not food.
At this point, transfats seem to be harmful food adulterants. Food companies are already banned from putting terrible shit into our food. If you're calling it food, it better be composed primarily of food, not poison. This is not some huge encroachment on the liberty of Americans.
How about we go ahead and ban the transfats (like other things that seem like they might be poison) from the general food supply so nobody accidentally eats it, and then everyone who wants to eat the stuff can get some and put it into their food themselves. I feel this latter group would be a significant minority of the population.
Similar to rat poison, which food producers are not allowed to include in food, but you can buy from the store yourself and put into your own food if you like. This is comparable to the current situation with tobacco products.
It's not the transfats themselves that're at issue here. It's the precedent banning them giving the government yet another inroad on liberty.
No precedent is necessary. Plenty of things are currently banned. In the US, food companies are disallowed from introducing certain adulterants into food. People like this, because it helps the integrity of our food supply. This is an important regulatory function of our government, which allows us to lower the number of people dying from random terrible shit in their food. This is not a leftist idea.
At this point, transfats seem like they might be a harmful food adulterant. To many this justifies their exclusion from our food supply.
I understand this does not follow libertarian principles, (which has been the argument presented ad nauseam in these comments) but that is not a requirement of our governmental functions.
A politically-unimportant official falls on his sword over the failure, and the heavy-hitters claim some kind of ephemeral notion of "accountability" with no actual repercussions for anyone's careers.
They used meth widely before the side effects were properly understood. 70 years isn't that long ago.
They used dextro (which, as you mentioned, differs technically from meth) very recently. I believe it is still in use currently, though probably not for much longer if so.
I suspect there are numerous not-so-above-board governments and extra-governmental groups that still distribute meth to certain personnel even today, since it's easy to make in a pinch and meets their short-term goals. Admittedly I have not done much research into this.
This presupposes that our politicians withhold dollars from this sort of research to help their successors avoid difficult political decisions...these types of breakthroughs would take decades to produce anything even remotely practicable, and it would probably be a century before any imagined longevity vs. retirement age conflict became an issue.
I am pretty cynical when it comes to politics, but that's way out on a limb.
Happy Birthday is the poster child for why copyright is broken. Cultural ubiquity is so high, it should be considered to have lost all copyright.
Well it's probably not under valid copyright anyway, for a number of reasons. A company asserts that it owns a valid copyright to the song, and collects royalties. The royalty amount is probably not high enough to be worth fighting in court, since the situation is pretty complicated, so someone would have to do it on principle. There was a lawsuit along these lines filed earlier this year, but it was dropped in July by the plaintiff for unknown reasons.
Yep and anything which has fallen into the public domain due to the death of the one or all composing parties. Anyone in the present day who releases their work to the public domain is a saint. Alas, we keep listening to the sinners. Amazing what a load of obnoxious and lawyer summoning lot they can be, too.
They were asking for 60%. The judge ruled that the band had to pay 5% of royalties, only going back to 2002 and going forward. Still silly (as Kookaburra was written in 1932) but not really that egregious.
As funny as that is, I have a family member who was treated with EST last year (2012). I was flabbergasted at the time, but evidently it is still used in some cases. The same family member was also treated with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation this year (2013). This was also surprising to me, as I was under the assumption that magnetic therapies were homeopathic.
Also, remember that muscle mass only helps for short-duration exercise. When it comes to extended things, like 50 mile treks through jungle or ultra-marathons, women are just as competitive if not better than men.
This is certainly true. However, we are discussing "one-on-one physical confrontations", in which muscle mass plays a very significant role.
Just considering height alone, in the US women average around 5'4", and men average close to 5'10". This is an average difference of six inches, or almost 10%, with an accompanying difference in potential body mass. Taking into account that men (due to testosterone and other biological factors) are able to build muscle mass much easier, and to a much greater degree, this is a huge biologically enforced dimorphism.
To contrast with your example of ultra-long, endurance-based events, there are virtually no sports in which speed and/or strength play a significant role where women are competitive with men. Of course cultural factors affect participation in these sports and skew the observed results somewhat, but this does not account for the staggering difference in physical capabilities.
BS. Guys just do different types of/more exercise because that's the societal norm. If you asked a female to do the work every time you needed something carried or a jar opened you'd be a wimp too. Sure testosterone plays a role, but almost any woman can get strong if they eat and train right. And by strong I mean sincerely fuck up 99% of the male population. Why? Because most people don't exercise to their potential.
This is very disingenuous. Of course many women could become stronger than the average man if they were involved in an Olympic-class workout/diet regimen, but even a very large, very strong woman will have difficulty matching a man's strength, if he's even doing casual strength-conditioning.
Sexual dimorphism is not caused by "societal norms", it is caused by genetics and specifically testosterone.
most of the net worth of the ultra rich is in stocks, bonds and lots of other paper they would have to sell for cash money. but there is almost not enough cash money to pay for all of their "net worth"
on paper Bill Gates might be worth $30 billion but its all MS stock. if he sold all of it today the value would drop to the point where he might get 1/3 of it. his worth is from the dividends MS pays. not like he has $30 billion in the bank.
same with tim cook and others who get paid hundreds of millions of $$$ on paper but its 95% restricted stock options they can't turn into cash for many years if ever
but if you were to build a space station, the people building it and supplying the materials would want to be paid TODAY. IN CASH. real money. you would have to find people to lend you the money to buy the bonds to pay for this thing at 5% or more in interest which would mean $50 billion per year in interest payments
When the ultra-rich need liquidity, they usually just use credit. When you have 30bn in investments you can get huge amounts of cash on short notice, at very low interest and with extremely favorable repayment terms.
If Bill Gates wanted to just say "screw it I'm out, heading to an orbital space station to swim in dollar bills for the rest of my life peace noobs" or whatever, of course he wouldn't suddenly cash in all his stock and watch the value plummet. He would borrow whatever cash he needed while slowly selling off his stock and other (extensive) investments to pay back the cheap loans.
If the top 100 ultra-rich all got together and wanted to do something like this, they certainly could. These people are experts at handling and moving gargantuan sums of money very efficiently.
As TFS states, it's the implementation that is patented. Not sure which ones belong to blackberry, but google patents has a number of related patents based on a quick cursory search.
Where do you live that it's easy to get a job as a garbage man because nobody wants the job?
Where do you live the McDonald's is always understaffed and just takes anybody that walks in the door?
And where do you live that the homeless aren't obviously seriously mentally ill?
Thisthisthis.
There are plenty of garbage men where I live, they do nice things like pick up my garbage and I am happy to be paying them for it. I don't know how much they get paid, but I hope it's a good living.
And the real, sleeping on the street, eating every-other-day, homeless are almost exclusively mentally ill.
Yes, I would have very little respect for someone who was truly homeless because they refused to take a menial job, but I have literally never heard of this happening in real life.
I'm wondering. Say I look at online photos of some really expensive shower curtain rings, make my own 3D rendering based on those photos, then print some for myself (and maybe for some friends who come over). Am I guilty of pirating? Will lawmakers see that as "stealing"?
Or how about if I copied the design of some really cool & expensive smartphone case and just printed one for myself instead of buying one. Will that be stealing?
Interesting question.
It obviously won't be "stealing" (in the legal sense of "theft") but it could be intellectual property infringement, depending on several factors. If the design is patented (ROUNDED CORNARZ), then you could be infringing on a patent. However, this would be impossible to enforce, unless you widely distributed the designs (say, using the internet) or started selling the items that you produced.
If you started producing items based on copyrighted materials (like if you made a bunch of disney princess figurines, for example) you would also be infringing. Again, unenforceable unless you widely distribute the designs or the items.
In both these cases the designs themselves would be infringing, and illegal to distribute.
So we deal with these assholes but threaten war with the Iranians? Anyone want to explain that?
This has been mentioned several times above, but I'll respond here. I'll try not to be too cynical about it.
"we" (as in, we as a national entity) are more concerned with relative stability and lack of military hostility, than we are with internal human rights issues. IMO this is really as it should be, because as repulsive as some of the things these wackjobs do to their own people are, that's really not something we want to be involved in (unless it gets really out of hand e.g. genocide) and not worth going to war over. We can't (and don't/shouldn't want to) really police everyone's particular laws, systems of government, levels of freedom, etc. With those kinds of things we also risk the whole pot-calling-the-kettle-black scenario, since there's some subjectivity here, and in the opinion of many we occasionally commit abuses of our own (hint: all nations do).
This does not take into account more complicated political and/or economic reasons for various foreign policy decisions.
Basically we end up turning a blind eye toward the actions of morally repugnant nations, until they become too egregious to ignore or start engaging in behavior that endangers our interests. Saudi Arabia imposing cruel and unusual punishment doesn't really affect us at all, but Iran ramping up a nuclear program might.
1) The device could easily feature a cutoff switch to deactivate past a certain battery voltage, saving the battery from draining past the threshold needed to keep it healthy, and crank the car over when needed. 2) The device likely draws 1-2W (unless they are using massive tx power, which without a big ugly antenna is not allowed), and that is quite close to nothing when a 100AH car battery is concerned (83-166mA). Unless it's unhealthy for some other reason, 10AH (10% of the battery) would run the thing for 3-5 days. You would need to be parked a long time to kill a car battery.
yes but the rental cars some times push car maintenance out. So you may end with an car with an old weak battery that in some cases can run it down or lets say one day you use this and at the end of the day return it. It left 2-3 days at the car rental place and when the next user trys to start the car it does not start and you get the bill for a new battery + install + lost of use fee.
This is kindof a silly concern. A battery is a part serviced by normal maintenance, and will wear out regularly. They can't legitimately charge you for this, just because you happened to rent the car right before the battery died. They also can't really bill you for normal tire wear, windshield wiper wear, transmission fluid changes, oil changes, or whatever other wear accompanies the normal operation and use of the motor vehicle.
You do realize they have a robust written and verbal language composed of multitudes of dialects and languages? We also know they have the oldest and longest sustained democracy history has ever seen.
The Iroquois's "greatness" rivals that of the Ancient Greek.
#1 - The Iroquois did not have a written language. Cherokee (which is a southern Iroquois language) has a syllabary developed by Sequoyah in 1821. Other extant Iroquois languages are now written using IPA.
#2 - The Iroquois league was probably formed after 1450. Democracy in ancient Greece supersedes this date by ~2000 years. It is certainly likely that rule by consensus (a form of democracy) was practiced on a local level before this date, though this would be hardly unique.
This is not to take away from what the Iroquois accomplished.
many people have lawns. Lawns are mowed to look nice. Nice looking lawns are not useful for food production. Kill the grass and plant the whole yard with food for your family, and then maybe they won't have to eat bugs.
also if you have a yard, you could parcel off a small bit of it for a chicken coop for not too much money and grow your own eggs / chickens
In most municipalities, you can't really raise chickens. E.g where I live chickens cannot be kept within ~100 feet of a dwelling structure.
Gardening is usually doable though! Unless you are under a super obnoxious HOA, you can usually get away with a food-garden.
Slashdot Mirror
A politically-unimportant official falls on his sword over the failure, and the heavy-hitters claim some kind of ephemeral notion of "accountability" with no actual repercussions for anyone's careers.
Ah, a die-hard Republican, I see. "Politically important" has nothing to do with it. Who but the project's CIO is more responsible for IT's successes and failures? When k-mart's web site screws up and sells $500 items for $20 like they did yesterday, who takes the fall, the CEO or the CIO? Usually it isn't even the CIO but someone further down the food chain.
I'm not a "die-hard Republican" - not sure how you got that idea from my post.
You are correct in saying that accountability at the top of organizations is almost always minimal. That was my point. This is how it was always going to turn out. "Politically important" has everything to do with it.
In a supposedly free country? No, of course we shouldn't ban it.
Mandate that any product containing trans fat be labeled as such, and with appropriate health warnings (like they do on tobacco products), but outright bans of things we can only use to harm ourselves is anathema to liberty.
Why do people flip out about these basic tenets of modern civilization? Sorry, most people don't want poison to be sold as food. Go ahead and sell transfats all you want, but don't tell people it's food when it is most certainly not food.
At this point, transfats seem to be harmful food adulterants. Food companies are already banned from putting terrible shit into our food. If you're calling it food, it better be composed primarily of food, not poison. This is not some huge encroachment on the liberty of Americans.
How about we go ahead and ban the transfats (like other things that seem like they might be poison) from the general food supply so nobody accidentally eats it, and then everyone who wants to eat the stuff can get some and put it into their food themselves. I feel this latter group would be a significant minority of the population.
Similar to rat poison, which food producers are not allowed to include in food, but you can buy from the store yourself and put into your own food if you like. This is comparable to the current situation with tobacco products.
It's not the transfats themselves that're at issue here. It's the precedent banning them giving the government yet another inroad on liberty.
No precedent is necessary. Plenty of things are currently banned. In the US, food companies are disallowed from introducing certain adulterants into food. People like this, because it helps the integrity of our food supply. This is an important regulatory function of our government, which allows us to lower the number of people dying from random terrible shit in their food. This is not a leftist idea.
At this point, transfats seem like they might be a harmful food adulterant. To many this justifies their exclusion from our food supply.
I understand this does not follow libertarian principles, (which has been the argument presented ad nauseam in these comments) but that is not a requirement of our governmental functions.
A politically-unimportant official falls on his sword over the failure, and the heavy-hitters claim some kind of ephemeral notion of "accountability" with no actual repercussions for anyone's careers.
Who is surprised?
They used meth widely before the side effects were properly understood. 70 years isn't that long ago.
They used dextro (which, as you mentioned, differs technically from meth) very recently. I believe it is still in use currently, though probably not for much longer if so.
I suspect there are numerous not-so-above-board governments and extra-governmental groups that still distribute meth to certain personnel even today, since it's easy to make in a pinch and meets their short-term goals. Admittedly I have not done much research into this.
And with the exception of child soldiers, I've yet to see a regular military that has it's soldiers use crank in battle.
You don't seem to know what you're talking about.
This presupposes that our politicians withhold dollars from this sort of research to help their successors avoid difficult political decisions...these types of breakthroughs would take decades to produce anything even remotely practicable, and it would probably be a century before any imagined longevity vs. retirement age conflict became an issue.
I am pretty cynical when it comes to politics, but that's way out on a limb.
Happy Birthday is the poster child for why copyright is broken. Cultural ubiquity is so high, it should be considered to have lost all copyright.
Well it's probably not under valid copyright anyway, for a number of reasons. A company asserts that it owns a valid copyright to the song, and collects royalties. The royalty amount is probably not high enough to be worth fighting in court, since the situation is pretty complicated, so someone would have to do it on principle. There was a lawsuit along these lines filed earlier this year, but it was dropped in July by the plaintiff for unknown reasons.
It's called "Traditional" or "folk music".
Yep and anything which has fallen into the public domain due to the death of the one or all composing parties. Anyone in the present day who releases their work to the public domain is a saint. Alas, we keep listening to the sinners. Amazing what a load of obnoxious and lawyer summoning lot they can be, too.
Look up what transpired over only a fragment of Kookaburra in the song A Land Down Under. 60%?!? For a flute riff?
They were asking for 60%. The judge ruled that the band had to pay 5% of royalties, only going back to 2002 and going forward. Still silly (as Kookaburra was written in 1932) but not really that egregious.
Well, perhaps electroshock therapy isn't totally obsolete...
As funny as that is, I have a family member who was treated with EST last year (2012). I was flabbergasted at the time, but evidently it is still used in some cases. The same family member was also treated with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation this year (2013). This was also surprising to me, as I was under the assumption that magnetic therapies were homeopathic.
Could we do this to Venus, Mars? The moon, perhaps?
You would need a pretty strong magnetosphere. So, short answer: doubtful.
Also, remember that muscle mass only helps for short-duration exercise. When it comes to extended things, like 50 mile treks through jungle or ultra-marathons, women are just as competitive if not better than men.
This is certainly true. However, we are discussing "one-on-one physical confrontations", in which muscle mass plays a very significant role.
Just considering height alone, in the US women average around 5'4", and men average close to 5'10". This is an average difference of six inches, or almost 10%, with an accompanying difference in potential body mass. Taking into account that men (due to testosterone and other biological factors) are able to build muscle mass much easier, and to a much greater degree, this is a huge biologically enforced dimorphism.
To contrast with your example of ultra-long, endurance-based events, there are virtually no sports in which speed and/or strength play a significant role where women are competitive with men. Of course cultural factors affect participation in these sports and skew the observed results somewhat, but this does not account for the staggering difference in physical capabilities.
BS. Guys just do different types of/more exercise because that's the societal norm. If you asked a female to do the work every time you needed something carried or a jar opened you'd be a wimp too. Sure testosterone plays a role, but almost any woman can get strong if they eat and train right. And by strong I mean sincerely fuck up 99% of the male population. Why? Because most people don't exercise to their potential.
This is very disingenuous. Of course many women could become stronger than the average man if they were involved in an Olympic-class workout/diet regimen, but even a very large, very strong woman will have difficulty matching a man's strength, if he's even doing casual strength-conditioning.
Sexual dimorphism is not caused by "societal norms", it is caused by genetics and specifically testosterone.
Having breasts does not make you interesting.
( ) - Strongly Agree
( ) - Agree
( ) - Disagree
(*) - Strongly Disagree
most of this capital is not real money
most of the net worth of the ultra rich is in stocks, bonds and lots of other paper they would have to sell for cash money. but there is almost not enough cash money to pay for all of their "net worth"
on paper Bill Gates might be worth $30 billion but its all MS stock. if he sold all of it today the value would drop to the point where he might get 1/3 of it. his worth is from the dividends MS pays. not like he has $30 billion in the bank.
same with tim cook and others who get paid hundreds of millions of $$$ on paper but its 95% restricted stock options they can't turn into cash for many years if ever
but if you were to build a space station, the people building it and supplying the materials would want to be paid TODAY. IN CASH. real money. you would have to find people to lend you the money to buy the bonds to pay for this thing at 5% or more in interest which would mean $50 billion per year in interest payments
When the ultra-rich need liquidity, they usually just use credit. When you have 30bn in investments you can get huge amounts of cash on short notice, at very low interest and with extremely favorable repayment terms.
If Bill Gates wanted to just say "screw it I'm out, heading to an orbital space station to swim in dollar bills for the rest of my life peace noobs" or whatever, of course he wouldn't suddenly cash in all his stock and watch the value plummet. He would borrow whatever cash he needed while slowly selling off his stock and other (extensive) investments to pay back the cheap loans.
If the top 100 ultra-rich all got together and wanted to do something like this, they certainly could. These people are experts at handling and moving gargantuan sums of money very efficiently.
You can't patent math.
As TFS states, it's the implementation that is patented. Not sure which ones belong to blackberry, but google patents has a number of related patents based on a quick cursory search.
Where do you live that it's easy to get a job as a garbage man because nobody wants the job?
Where do you live the McDonald's is always understaffed and just takes anybody that walks in the door?
And where do you live that the homeless aren't obviously seriously mentally ill?
Thisthisthis.
There are plenty of garbage men where I live, they do nice things like pick up my garbage and I am happy to be paying them for it. I don't know how much they get paid, but I hope it's a good living.
And the real, sleeping on the street, eating every-other-day, homeless are almost exclusively mentally ill.
Yes, I would have very little respect for someone who was truly homeless because they refused to take a menial job, but I have literally never heard of this happening in real life.
I'm wondering. Say I look at online photos of some really expensive shower curtain rings, make my own 3D rendering based on those photos, then print some for myself (and maybe for some friends who come over). Am I guilty of pirating? Will lawmakers see that as "stealing"?
Or how about if I copied the design of some really cool & expensive smartphone case and just printed one for myself instead of buying one. Will that be stealing?
Interesting question.
It obviously won't be "stealing" (in the legal sense of "theft") but it could be intellectual property infringement, depending on several factors. If the design is patented (ROUNDED CORNARZ), then you could be infringing on a patent. However, this would be impossible to enforce, unless you widely distributed the designs (say, using the internet) or started selling the items that you produced.
If you started producing items based on copyrighted materials (like if you made a bunch of disney princess figurines, for example) you would also be infringing. Again, unenforceable unless you widely distribute the designs or the items.
In both these cases the designs themselves would be infringing, and illegal to distribute.
So we deal with these assholes but threaten war with the Iranians? Anyone want to explain that?
This has been mentioned several times above, but I'll respond here. I'll try not to be too cynical about it.
"we" (as in, we as a national entity) are more concerned with relative stability and lack of military hostility, than we are with internal human rights issues. IMO this is really as it should be, because as repulsive as some of the things these wackjobs do to their own people are, that's really not something we want to be involved in (unless it gets really out of hand e.g. genocide) and not worth going to war over. We can't (and don't/shouldn't want to) really police everyone's particular laws, systems of government, levels of freedom, etc. With those kinds of things we also risk the whole pot-calling-the-kettle-black scenario, since there's some subjectivity here, and in the opinion of many we occasionally commit abuses of our own (hint: all nations do).
This does not take into account more complicated political and/or economic reasons for various foreign policy decisions.
Basically we end up turning a blind eye toward the actions of morally repugnant nations, until they become too egregious to ignore or start engaging in behavior that endangers our interests. Saudi Arabia imposing cruel and unusual punishment doesn't really affect us at all, but Iran ramping up a nuclear program might.
1) The device could easily feature a cutoff switch to deactivate past a certain battery voltage, saving the battery from draining past the threshold needed to keep it healthy, and crank the car over when needed. 2) The device likely draws 1-2W (unless they are using massive tx power, which without a big ugly antenna is not allowed), and that is quite close to nothing when a 100AH car battery is concerned (83-166mA). Unless it's unhealthy for some other reason, 10AH (10% of the battery) would run the thing for 3-5 days. You would need to be parked a long time to kill a car battery.
yes but the rental cars some times push car maintenance out. So you may end with an car with an old weak battery that in some cases can run it down or lets say one day you use this and at the end of the day return it. It left 2-3 days at the car rental place and when the next user trys to start the car it does not start and you get the bill for a new battery + install + lost of use fee.
This is kindof a silly concern. A battery is a part serviced by normal maintenance, and will wear out regularly. They can't legitimately charge you for this, just because you happened to rent the car right before the battery died. They also can't really bill you for normal tire wear, windshield wiper wear, transmission fluid changes, oil changes, or whatever other wear accompanies the normal operation and use of the motor vehicle.
You do realize they have a robust written and verbal language composed of multitudes of dialects and languages? We also know they have the oldest and longest sustained democracy history has ever seen.
The Iroquois's "greatness" rivals that of the Ancient Greek.
#1 - The Iroquois did not have a written language. Cherokee (which is a southern Iroquois language) has a syllabary developed by Sequoyah in 1821. Other extant Iroquois languages are now written using IPA.
#2 - The Iroquois league was probably formed after 1450. Democracy in ancient Greece supersedes this date by ~2000 years. It is certainly likely that rule by consensus (a form of democracy) was practiced on a local level before this date, though this would be hardly unique.
This is not to take away from what the Iroquois accomplished.
I mean, 16, what possible excuse is there for that on what is effectively just a news article?
Ads.
Patent '504
Patent '076
These seems very abstract/broad. Not "rounded corners" patents, but almost as bad.
many people have lawns. Lawns are mowed to look nice. Nice looking lawns are not useful for food production. Kill the grass and plant the whole yard with food for your family, and then maybe they won't have to eat bugs.
also if you have a yard, you could parcel off a small bit of it for a chicken coop for not too much money and grow your own eggs / chickens
In most municipalities, you can't really raise chickens. E.g where I live chickens cannot be kept within ~100 feet of a dwelling structure.
Gardening is usually doable though! Unless you are under a super obnoxious HOA, you can usually get away with a food-garden.
Crayfish are commonly raised indoors. Depending on volume, you pretty much just need a tank.